June 5th, 2008 → 10:09 am @ Seth Mnookin
The University of Mississippi Press has just released Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson, which is not, as it might seem, a series of interviews but a collection of 30 articles about HST written over the last forty some odd years. The table of contents is impressively eclectic: there’s a Doug Brinkley piece from The Paris Review, a Craig Vetter article from Playboy, and — no joke — a old Ron Rosenbaum story that first ran in High Times. (If you’re wondering: yes, that’s the same Ron Rosenbaum who wrote Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars.) (There are also, predictably a pair of articles titled “Still Gonzo After All These Years.”) (Triple parens alert. The book is also co-edited by someone with one of the all-time great handles: Beef Torrey. I’ve spoken with him, and that’s his honest-to-goodness, god-given name. His parents, I assume, were not vegetarians.)
All of that should more than enough to recommend the book. There is also an essay I wrote back in 2000, when I first met Hunter during a couple of all-night editing sessions at his ranch in Owl Creek. I hadn’t read the piece, titled “Fear and Writing,” in a good five or so years, and it made me both sad and proud: I miss that old fuck, and the piece is actually pretty good. And since it ran in the now-defunct Brill’s Content, this the only place you’ll ever get to read it.
Post Categories: homophobia & Red Sox Nation & Ron Gant & Ugueth Urbina
June 21st, 2006 → 5:39 pm @ Seth Mnookin
After White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen called Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti a “piece of shit” and a “fucking fag,” Guillen justified his use of the homophobic slur to Greg Couch this way: “I don’t have anything against those people. In my country, you can call someone something like that and it is not the same as it is in this country.”
It’s true: apparently the rules for how to behave in polite society are different in Venezuala. Like the time Guillen’s friend Ugueth Urbina was charged with attempted murder after purportedly attacking some of his farmhands with a machete and dousing them with gasoline. Guillen explained that incident by saying, “Ugie’s reputation is he overreacts a little, not only in the United States, but also in Venezuela.”
Post Categories: homophobia & Ozzie Guillen & Sports Reporters & Ugueth Urbina
