hunter
Hunter S Thompson was an all around outstanding journalist and author. I've not read a lot of his books, but I do remember reading parts of the one about Hell's Angels and Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail (Did you see Apocalypse Now? Do you remember Dennis Hopper playing the zany journalist? it just occurred to me it could be he was modeled on Hunter Thompson_ gonzo!~) . In his later years he became an alcoholic like us but he never was able to recover. I remember hearing he had taken his own life. I was sad then and was not sure why__ but later realized it was because he was such a larger than life figure. He represented something to me which I wasn't even aware of. Freedom of thought and writing maybe or that independent spirit of anarchism, or egalitarianism , and writing. I didn't know much of his personal life really and was surprised finding he had taken his own life. The Wikipedia article about him strikes me as pretty good.
I can think of
all kinds of books to recommend but I'm not sure which area of
philosophy to pick. You know in school they start way back with Plato
and a good anthology of his work would give you a view of his ideas. But
he's really not the only one, and there were others before him and at
the same time . So instead of being academic about it, which I'm not
anyway, I'll just suggest to you what I did. I just read all kinds of
books of philosophy and kept going through them until I found the ones
which I liked. Then I'd read all of, (not always but often) the work of
theirs I could get a hold of. And I'd go along like for a while until I
found other thinkers. And I'd be making connections of their ideas and
my own and my own experience.
For all
sorts of reasons I started reading Jean Paul Sartre who was the great
French atheist thinker of the 20th century __existentialism His life
long partner Simone DeBeauvoir was also an author; her most famous
book is the Second Sex and that had a massive effect on
feminism. From those two I branched out to other thinkers and I was
also reading poetry of all kinds.He also wrote fiction his most well
known being Nausea. His most famous book of philosophy is Being and Nothingness. I
was just reading some of it today. I rely on translations for such
dense ideas! And the translation by Hazel Barnes is widely respected. Germain Greer's Female Ennuch
was important to me_ she later wrote books on Culture, Shakespeare and
the body,... there were other feminists authors whose names escape me.
More recently there is Camille Paglia who I love because really she's a literary thinker, eclectic and follows her own drummer! her own path fearlessly! (Sexual Personae is
her best known bk) I don't think there is anyone who ever speaks
faster than her. Virginia Woolf was not a philosopher but she is one of
the greatest novelists of the 20th century and she is going to be
around (in her books) I think for a long time! I also love Marjorie
Perloff one of the smartest most sensitive American literary critics,
she has more often than many and most, her fingers on the pulse of what
is happening with poetry. Helen Vendler is another great American
critic but I am not as familiar her work. Many of her lectures and
Perloff's are on youtube. She's lovely and
warm and loves poetry. Which I
love so I love her. I also read tons of R.D. Laing the Scottish thinker
and psychiatrist, esp. The Politics of Experience which made him famous
.
I also spent years, I'd say, with
painters of one sort and another and their world and their thinking had a
big impact on my way of seeing things...
I
love all of the Beat writers, women and men. Diana Deprima just died
last fall I think and she was nearly a 100. Aweek ago Lawrence
Ferlinghetti died at 101. He was a poet and publisher. City Lights
Bookstore.
Ive spent more time talking about literary criticism and theory(than philosophy ) and of course reading poetry and fiction.
(I went to university just after 10 years of being sober .Eventually
and some years later after stops and starts...I became a doctoral
student and wrote my ph.d thesis about 2 poems Paradise Lost and The Waste Land)
. So all of the poets from Sappho to Loy to Eliot to Keats, Bronte, George Eliot, Woolf, to Homer
to Sexton, Joyce Beckett, Pound, Atwood,To Birney to Gwedolyn MacEwen
to almost anyone known or unknown.... A to Z and in any language I can
read and or have read translations. All of it is good even the bad! To
me it's a great living, breathing, vibrating community of the living
and dead of writers famous poor and or rich middle and lower class, any
color creed or gender any race even from another planet! I can hardly
wait! spanning across all time and the universe... Literature was my higher power Bridget
(I had amazing dreams, dreams about being inducted into the-land of
poetry and I knew they were true and it was my destiny, a destiny of
love and more and many sided ___ this was years before I came to AA)
and to a large extent it still is.. Literature and Art..... when I say
Higher Power, I mean it's something I love which is obviously larger
and greater than me but which I am a part of and feel I belong in...I
belong to it, and am of it, it is my home Because if nothing else
it's about creating. There are hundreds, no thousands of poets in your
country. The United States has more poetry and poets I think than any
country in the world! Some would say it's a function of population yes,
fair enough but there's more to it than that. it's because the country
has a poetic existence! it goes back to Whitman and Emily Dickinson and
earlier and through the songs and to Dylan, Baez, Mitchell, Guthrie,
and others the music the heritage is very rich.. Greil Marcus has
written about this..and .. and music. Do you know that on the internet
the last that I checked there about 500 million poems! That's half a
billion. That's a good chunk of the population of the earth! The world
is producing more poetry and thought than ever! So why is it so fucked
up? Well we can talk about that in another letter. But yes the ISMS! I
call them aliens from another planet !hahhahah
Back
to philosophers.... At one point I read nearly all of Nietzsche and
that
shook me up for a good long while his ideas haunted me for years and
until Iwas
able to make them my own and leave the rest aside.... But Sartre
aside, the thinkers who influenced my thinking, my sobriety and my work,
are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I read them always and have
about 6 blogs dedicated to their work in one form or another. When I did
my ph.d their ideas were what I used to frame my own intuitions. I was
writing about Paradise Lost(John Milton) and The Waste Land(Eliot) and
did a comparison between these two very different poems. Their ideas
anchored my own. I can't even begin to explain their ideas or this email
will become a book! If you want to read any of their books, I recommend One Thousand Plateaus. It's massive and wonderful. There are so many more things to say, but Ill stop for now!
And you, what you are planning to write? I gathered you are interested in writing of one kind or another.
Anyhow, have a good day and I wish lots of sobriety to go your way
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