[quote]forkknifespoon wrote:
[quote]hipsr4runnin wrote:
I like Chuck. Fight CLub was a game changer for me, personally but I was like 13 when it was written. He is a bizarre individual who has some crazy rumors that float about him. During Fight CLubs upcoming he was interviewed and as he greated the reporter outside his door he started beating the shit out of himself and they finished the interview in the hospital (I remember reading). A like that a lot of his stuff is “based on actual events.”
I dig his trivia, and yes, he has storage spaces where he keeps facts he collects in filing cabinets. Some times the authors become more intriguing than the stories they write. Hunter is a good example. [/quote]
I also read Fight Club at a young age, and really loved it. With a few friends we formed our own club and tried to kick the shit out of each other, luckily we were too young to really hurt each other seriously. But ooh those split lips really sting…
I think Chuck is (like you said) a pretty simple case of the myth becoming larger than the man. My issue is with his writing and not him. This is the only context in which your Thompson analogy is valid. Thompson would often complain in his old age that too many people wanted to meet Thompson the character and not the man. I believe that was a small contributing factor to him offing himself. But he could write well, really well in fact. I think we are totally in agreement though.
For me it boils down to Chuck P. having too few tricks in his very tired bag. The fact that much of his writing is ‘based on…’ doesn’t make it good, and while it may make it more interesting (for me it does, I like non-fiction/memoir) I too often find myself wondering just how ‘based on…’ it really is. The trivia thing is a totally different matter. I think that’s just poor lazy naive writing that coming from a Portlandier can’t help but come off as pretentious. There are good ways and bad ways to include very interesting stuff into stories. Honestly, I have a bias against him just for being from Portlandia. For the same reason that I left the twin cities, and for the same reason that I left the quad cities, and for the same reason that I’m now regretting living in Colorado the home state of the Kerouac school of writing. After being on the editing staff for a non-fiction arts and lit journal it’s funny how every wanna-be memoir starts to sound a lot like every other wanna-be memoir, and who was going around 20 some years ago telling every kid that they will need to write down all their dumbass stories so they can try to publish them when they grow up even though their life will otherwise be totally insignificant???
/end rant[/quote]
Hey man, not to take this thread off course but…you wouldn’t by any chance have any connections in the publishing end of things would you? I’m from Colorado myself, and I hope to one day turn it away from that Kerouac/Ginsberg free living paradigm with my own brand of “disturbing literature.”