Every writer about Hunter Thompson craves the Estate's seal of approval. Not long ago I asked for a blurb, and very graciously this just came back. Happy days:
“Margaret Harrell’s Keep This Quiet offers an illuminating look at Hunter S. Thompson in full throttle trying to make it as a Top Notch prose-stylist. Harrell fills in many important biographical gaps. A welcome addition to what is becoming the HST cottage industry. Read it.”
Douglas Brinkley is editor of The Proud Highway and F...
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HST for Beginners
I recently learned about this second site of Martin Flynn, HST for Beginners: A Learning Curve. I highly recommend it. In fact, I will be adding a contribution to it soon. It's filled with very interesting material.
The site explains: "the idea of this series is aimed firstly at anyone new to the Hunter S. Thompson world. A plus side is that any seasoned HST campaigners will find the contributors’ views just as interesting. I felt it was important that we heard from some people that knew Hunter...
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Keep This Quiet! Notes
Jan. 18, 2015
These Notes are getting so long I will probably switch over to blogging. So look for updates mostly in the blog. However, one observation. I just saw the Gonzo fist in the most unlikely - or likely - place. In the Paris freedom parade. The fist was carrying a pen.
The 2014 Gonzo Fest Louisville
It's May 2, 2014. I've been remiss. Below are some photos from the Gonzo Fest in Louisville:
...
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Mark Strand
Mark Strand is the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, author of Blizzard of One and other books. Wikipedia says: "He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. Since 2005, he has been a professor of English at Columbia University." He has just let me know he likes Keep This Quiet! What a fantastic bit of news.
Mark Strand is also a world traveler. I met him once, in a Leuven, Belgium / Sibiu, Romania poetry festival in 1994. No contact since. Yet I found his ...
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Gonzo Journalism
Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
Asked to give someone advice on what to do with his life, Hunter replied: "To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal - to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction - is something only a fool would take upon himself."
But since an answer was requested: "As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we d...
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Robert Morgan
Robert Morgan is a best-selling author of an Oprah book selection and has many awards. He's also a professor at Cornell. The New York Times wrote about Gap Creek: "You begin to feel, as you sometimes do when reading Cormac McCarthy's or Harry Crew's early novels, that the author has been typing with blood on his hands and a good deal of it has rubbed off onto your shirtsleeves."
The only time I'm seen him is at a NC Writers Conference several years back, where I chose him to critique a f...
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Hunter at Owl Farm
This is 1991, Owl Farm. Hunter at home in his natural setting, to which he invited me in. That meeting concludes Keep THIS Quiet Too! A dramatic episode.
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Ron Whitehead’s Review
Ron Whitehead sent me a "short review" of Keep This Quiet! Every word, I would like to frame. For whoever is interested, I posted it in the Keep This Quiet website! here.
There are many ways many paths open to us.
But truth is actually a pathless land - Ron Whitehead
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Confessions – Paul Krassner
Paul Krassner is putting what he calls, in quotes, "our story" into his reissue of his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in Counterculture – New Expanded Edition. This is quite funny. I love the effect of being a "character" in a book stepping off the pages, or maybe just pretending to step onto them in the first place. It makes me wonder how Hunter would have responded to my memoir, suppose I had published it while he was alive - which never crossed my mi...
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