as delivered at SFPL Koret Jan.28, Writers Remembered. by Kate Braverman.

In this city littered with poets and artists, their transmissions glittering through fog like post-millennial hieroglyphics, we are fluid, run in spasms and currents. We are a port town, built by the fever of raw fingers in rock, desperate for gold and the infrastructure that by accidental necessity arose. Whiskey and saloons, brothels, opium, fishermen, artisans, musicians, immigrants, priests, renegades and visionaries.
Trade route cities have the texture and scent of intrigue, contraband, delusion and revelation. It ’s an invisible configuration, a certain sting and suggestion of flame you sense loitering above the boulevards and alleys of Prague, Istanbul, and Bangkok.
In San Francisco, we are the American capital of a conceptual region. It’s a terrain of sensibility, drawing the restless, agitated, eccentric and explosively creative. We are the city of yes, and pirates and storytellers, from Jack London through Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs, they all moored here. Our legacy is an assemblage of writers who were not born in this geography and often did not stay, but rather passed through. The tide comes and goes as it always does. In San Francisco, we are ten thousand votives each with a dozen devotees like bouquets of long stemmed red roses and it’s always Valentine’s Day.
But February is also a brutal month for artists. Now that one year has passed since Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide near Aspen last February, enough dust has settled, been scattered by winds, fallen into cargo holds, become some indefinable grit drifting to Singapore or Thailand, that a preliminary examination of his writing, his seminal contributions to the evolving collective literary fabric may be offered.
As a feminist with a profound loathing for corporate sponsored celebrity, I refuse to be diverted by autobiographical details. Historically, it is in the personal elements of women’s lives that their work, their poetry, fiction, essays and novels, are routinely derided and dismissed. When men etch lives of disturbing chaos, abandon children, collect divorces and felonies, run red lights drunk, accumulating excesses with extravagant appetite and ambition, we admire them. Men are absolved by the intensity of their passion. They are the heroic embodiment of the mythic tormented artist. Their emotional deformations and the ensuing collateral damage of their activities are rendered insignificant.
Of course, when women exhibit similar behaviors, engage in risky endeavors, respond to the lure of pharmacologically fueled consciousness dissection, we call them mentally ill. Once labeled psychotic, they can be disposed of. Should a woman dare to caress intoxication and the criminal, we call them promiscuous, alcoholic, neglectful mothers. Women are not given inviolate protection by the fact of text. For a male, risk and deviation are war wounds one receives metaphorical purple hearts for. Women, on the other hand, are locked in institutions for this.
I have no interest in Hunter Thompson, the media persona. But Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a true child of the 60’s, and the San Francisco sensibility, which is and has traditionally been mobile and portable, was an utterly original and brilliantly dazzling writer.
If history claims Raymond Carver reinvigorated the American short story, then we must recognize Hunter Thompson saved nonfiction from moribund irrelevance. He dragged the sodden thing from storm waters and gave it CPR and mouth-to-mouth. The officially endorsed version of our contemporary narrative states that no writing came out of the 60’s, as if the experience with experimentation was so de facto sordid it resisted the mouths of people who spoke grammatically correct English, the sort only residents of cities on Eastern Standard Time know.
In truth, the great works of the 60’s appeared throughout the early and mid-70’s. It’s increasingly obvious that corporate America wants that era to not exist, and in Orwellian mode, erases and disposes of the monumental figures of the decade entirely.
The early 70’s was a literary fire zone. The Beat pulse spawned and evolved into Ken Kesey. It entered the highways of an America winding in strands like helixes in a magic bus. The roads were the cobalt and irradiated lavender of Watson and Crick on heroin. Sylvia Plath kept chanting from the grave, body buried but still burning with fever, though we didn’t hear her until the 70’s. Tom McGuane and Robert Stone, Stanford Stegner students, were brilliant. McGuane’s 92 in the Shade and Stone’s Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise are literary milestones, glowing like radium buoys in the bay 30 years later. Garcia Marquez appeared in translation, embroidering Columbian air into hallucinatory dynasties. The palette of colors and scent of strange spices blew like a newborn and hungry wind. Anne Sexton still breathed booze and Thorazine. Joan Didion, commuting between Maui and Malibu, engaged in reconnaissance missions between manicures.
But Hunter Thompson, like Sylvia Plath, another February suicide, went further. Hunter Thompson was a structural anarchist of astonishing technical skill. In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, he obliterated the patrician demarcations between reportage and fiction. He demolished the concept of objectivity in journalism and revealed it as a fraudulent relic of an already decaying obsolete system. He revolutionized point of view, and as an egalitarian stylist, he invented the post-modern personal essay and memoir. He cast a titanium net of ambiguity across American culture and our most revered national events, abolishing certainty and exerting the premise that our country’s purported agenda was open to suspicion and assault.
A significant component of powerful innovators is a luminescent prescience. The artists we hold dear present us with visions that seem designed on another planet in a future that we unexpectedly immediately recognize as our true and present condition. It is for this juncture that we read, for this sudden spiral into a star-strewn vertigo. If Hunter Thompson didn’t birth spin, he saw the potentialities of the trajectory and perfected it. Hunter Thompson was a quintessentially far left coast confessional writer. In this city we dare to feel and share our inspirations, intuitions, wild guesses and curious juxtapositions, our deviations, defects, wins and losses. We’re still digging for gold here, though the search may reside only within the infinite complexity of the electron fires of our synapses and consciousness.
Drugs as a tool for self-examination, discovery and directed personal psychological evolution were the foundation of the Beat’s and the entire 60’s aesthetic. That such excursions have been dismissed from our politically correct daisy bomb dropping despot rulers, that drug use has been relegated to déclassé status and outlawed, while antidepressants are routinely dispensed, is a national scandal that needs to be addressed.
Hunter Thompson engaged in guerilla acts of genre demolition, fearlessly collaging farce, profound interior monologue and emotional outrage. Hunter Thompson wasn’t publishing blogs, either. His seminal contributions are authentic to the unique requirements of the page, which is a kingdom unto itself, like a continent, vast, mysterious and eccentrically indigenous.
Like Plath, Hunter Thompson will undoubtedly be labeled pathologically infantile by the corporate/entertainment/literary complex. His subject matter will be incrementally removed from the collective consensual apparatus which is fully operational and already defining the morphology of our future while simultaneously denuding the insurrectionary pulse of Vietnam era America.
That is why we must confine ourselves to the books themselves. The history, drama, emotional struggle, rage and brutalities remain untarnished on the unrevised page. Deleting an artist on the basis of subject matter is the most convenient and effective traditional path of cultural exile. In our millennial capital, we practice alternative strategies.
While revisionists claim Sylvia Plath and Hunter Thompson wrote about matters considered immature and banal, we must remember that both Plath and Thompson transcended their material. They heard the rumored beasts of antiquity howl like women or dogs strangling on razored garbage. Then they orchestrated and domesticated this garish noise in acts of unprecedented alchemy.
In all eras, charlatans are in vogue, there are few adepts and the exceptionally rare are invariably unrecognized. Consider the 19 years that passed between Plath’s suicide and her posthumous Pulitzer Prize. I sense in Plath’s journals from the 50’s, when she wonders drunk through Europe, writes in jazz clubs and beds strangers, that had she survived that London February of squalling infants and blizzards, she might have journeyed to our far left coast and put a flower in her hair and a joint in her mouth.
In San Francisco we pay homage to our fallen comrades, to the writers who bled their brains onto the page, and in these red glyphs carved the borders of our sensibility like cartographers using their neural networks for pens. Though we were just a port they passed, often briefly, the cargo they left us is indelible and untainted. We reflect and remember. Hunter Thompson was a brother in the struggle to expose the canon as an oppressive vestige of privilege like straw amulets from a cargo cult.
As America squanders its accidental empire, consigns its most fearless stylists to marketplace burial, and engineers a conspiracy of cultural selective amnesia, San Francisco is the city that remembers. As this nation stalls like a mast-ripped ship, passengers succumbing to manufactured official fictions of delusionary proportion,
the drowned wash in and we greet them by name. See us on the wharf, with our candles lit, our torches? We are gypsy tribes holding votives in our ringed and tattooed fingers. We are individual lighthouses. We are the spasm of exhilarating yellow that glitters like a beacon of absolute and purified yes.
Yes, we remember the names of our dead. And we will never forget the eras they represent, the distinct decades of vivid and unlimited promise, the roads that could have been taken, but weren’t, even at the juncture where body bags and caskets filled fields like rows of April hyacinths.
In this city we don’t say amen. We say yes.

      
  
  

Copyright 2005-2006, Kate Braverman.