The Gideons
Hello. (I’m on my mac again with no links and bizarre layout. sorry)..
Instead of gluing ourselves to the TV and video of the gushing Oil Disaster, several of us went up to Maroon Bells today for a hike and picnic. The impending Doom from the Gulf made us realize just how lucky we are, for now. Going to the Gulf coast and making ourselves useful is the next logical step. But not sure of exactly how to proceed or where to go. Not sure if it helped or not, I opened Generation of Swine and opened it to one of Hunter’s travel/hotel pages.
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Here is a passage from Hunter’s “Generation of Swine” where he explains how often he wrote from hotel rooms crazy travel but still needed to find inspiration. When you’re on the road, the books that you might really want, like H.L. Mencken, or Mark Twain. Sometimes Maria or David McCumber would “pull a rabbit like Nathanael West’s “Cool Million” out of his hat…”
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“But not often. Fast and total recall of things like page 101 from “Snowblind” or Marlowe’s final judgment to Lord Jim , or what Richard Nixon said to Henry Kissinger when they were both on their knees in front of Abe Lincoln’s portrait in the White House on some crazed Thursday night in July of 1974 are just about impossible to locate after midnight on the road, or even at noon.
. It simply takes too much time, and if they’ve been sending bottles of Chivas up to your room for the past three days, they get nervous when you start demanding things they’ve never heard of. .
.That is when I start bouncing around the room and ripping drawers out of the nightstand and bed boxes and those flimsy little desks with bent green blotters that they provide for traveling salesmen — looking for a Gideon Bible, which I know will be there somewhere, and with any luck at all it will be a King James Version, and the Book of Revelation will be intact at the end. .
If there is a God, I want to thank Him for the Gideons, whoever they are. I have dealt with some of his other messengers and found them utterly useless. But not the Gideons…
— Hunter S. Thompson, “Generation of Swine.”
Goodnight! your friend back at home with a full library, including a Gideon Bible somewhere, but not at the coast yet.
Anita Thompson
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