Entertainment
It’s Been a Book Boy Summer Summer readings on psychedelic peril, the limitations of freedom and drunken, billion dollar heirs. By Joel Vaughn Well, summer is drawing to a close and so too is my extra reading time. To me, summer is characterized by what seems like an abundance of time till it starts passing. My aspirations started with getting more than 600 hundred pages into “Infinite Jest,” attempting to annotate Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” getting around to “Notes from Underground,” and other English majoree goals. Instead, I wasted seemingly unlimited time on old favorites and newer works.
Book Cover: (Random House/Ralph Steadman)
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” There’s no way I’m the first one to recommend Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” It’s a trope for everyone from critics of americana, would-be journalist, and narcotics enthusiast to have some amount of admiration for Thompson’s take on the American dream. In case you’ve been out of the loop though, “Fear and Loathing” is a dubiously autobiographical account of Thompson’s (alias Raul Duke, doctor of journalism) and his sidekick/lawyer Dr. Gonzo’s, search for the American dream in ether-drenched road trips, acid fried casinos and Las Vegas hotel bars pulsing under adrenochrome. While Fear and Loathing has some semblance
16
of a plot, it basically consists of a looselyassembled series of events starting with the trek from LA to Las Vegas, our two protagonists flaying about the strip in psychotropic paranoia and ending with amyls to come down and bear a flight out of Vegas. Of course, it’s impossible to discuss “Fear and Loathing” without touching on it’s 1971 setting and the escalating war on drugs. One image that sticks for me is near the beginning as Raul and Dr. Gonzo speed past a billboard listing the minimum sentencing for marijuana possession being 20 years and life for intent to sale in Nevada. It’s a striking contrast to our present where only a dozen states fully criminalize weed, our president sings the praises of a ketamine-derived drug (esketamine) and psilocybin mushrooms being decriminalized in Oakland and Denver. But we have to ask whether our attitudes towards narcotics have changed since the Thompson’s hazily documented ‘71 or simply shifted and been co-opted by the center of power.
