His work has made it to the screen twice before this year, once with Bill Murray offering up a convincing Thompson impression in an otherwise uncertain film called “ Where the Buffalo Roam,” and once with Johnny Depp as Thompson in a suitably nightmarish take on the author’s “ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” But Thompson? His writing inhabited a middle world, a strange, ever-shifting convergence between fact, political satire, tall tales, and personal myth building. Any journalist might benefit from exploring Truman Capote’s and Tom Wolfe’s experiments in writing news using the techniques of ficiton. Thompson was sui generis, and deserves to remain that way. If you’re an editor and you have a writer who displays even a whiff of Thompson influence, fire that writer on the spot. And perhaps the king of that latter category was Hunter S. But there are some writers it is useful to imitate, and some whom you should never imitate. Kerouac and Bangs were terrific, mind you. It’s a puzzling mix of attraction to fame and jealousy of it that causes certain writers to gravitate toward celebrity journalism, but then misbehave toward the celebrities they are interviewing, as though a well-placed insult during an interview levels the playing field. You still see it in writers who interview celebrities. Worse still, Bangs had a belligerent style of interviewing people, one that he insisted was meant to deflate pretension, but one that I think was a neurotic tic. Suddenly they all have license to make themselves the subject of their stories - in particular, their idiosyncratic rock and roll philosophies. This tended not to be good writing.Īnd God help us when aspiring music writers discover Lester Bangs. But there was a while, when I was a boy, when all up-and-coming novelists found their way to the Beats, and to Kerouac, and suddenly wrote grossly oversized sentences mad with jazz rhythms, mad with a rush of amphetamine style, mad with a desire to burn, man, burn. Jack Kerouac, for instance, although I never know how persuasive he is anymore, culturally speaking. The sorts of writing that people who are just learning their craft might do well to steer the hell clear of, because they exert undue influence, and it’s a bad sort of influence. There should probably be a list of bad influences on budding writers.
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