Author Spotlight
Influences 5: Sasha Fletcher
Here is the fifth response to my influences post. The respondent is Sasha Fletcher.
Prompts:
1) Pick one of the pieces you chose and describe the thing about it that seems particularly innovative about it.
2) Tell me what changed about your writing because of that innovation.
Answers after the jump:
in tenth grade i was given both fear and loathing in las vegas and the story lost in the funhouse. what seemed innovative (at the time, and even now, i’d probably use the term ‘mindblowing’). that isn’t how i think i want this to go. i don’t really think that innovative is what made them important at the time. up until them, i was under the impression that stories were to be told a certain way. that the sentences that were in my head were not the way sentences were supposed to be written. that a story had to follow an arc and it had to go somewhere and do something and only by following the arc could it do that. that everything should be straightforward. that this was how things were told. and then suddenly i found out that this wasn’t the case and things could really be done however it was that they made the most sense to you.
i also feel that i should mention actual air. if i hadn’t read actual air i doubt i would have kept writing poetry. granted, i don’t know much about poetry, and i knew even less when i started, but for me poetry was some strange idea. it was something that always seemed one step removed from my life and everything i knew. actual air made poetry seem like something that was human and that anyone could have. that i could have. it made poetry seem like something real and every day and fucking important. it made me write all sorts of david berman ripoffs for a good year or so. that would be probably the most direct influence on my writing. but if i hadn’t read that book i probably would never have really given a shit about poetry. or maybe i would have at some point. but actual air is the book that made me give a shit about poetry. that made me really fucking care about it.
An often repeated—and, frankly, brilliant—section of Fear and Loathing:
“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run…but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. …
“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. …
“And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. …
“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Tags: influences, Sasha Fletcher
Nice. Fear and Loathing is Thompson’s second best book (The Great Shark Hunt is the best). I totally get what you’re saying here.
Nice. Fear and Loathing is Thompson’s second best book (The Great Shark Hunt is the best). I totally get what you’re saying here.
Yep, this is the one that gave me the bug as well, along with On the Road (me and a million others, gawd). I also dig his book Rum Diary as an interesting attempt at pre-Gonzo, heavily Hemingway and Fitzgerald influenced straight fiction (mostly). Not the best. But a fun read. (Plus an example of writing about cruel, hard, unsympathetic characters before M. Amis and others made it acceptable).
Great Shark Hunt is a great read also but isn’t really comparable to Vegas since it’s just a collection of his articles from the ’70s. Hell’s Angel’s, that’s a good book on the level of Vegas — at least showing the kind of direction he would eventually go in as he discovered his subject, themes, so on.
Yep, this is the one that gave me the bug as well, along with On the Road (me and a million others, gawd). I also dig his book Rum Diary as an interesting attempt at pre-Gonzo, heavily Hemingway and Fitzgerald influenced straight fiction (mostly). Not the best. But a fun read. (Plus an example of writing about cruel, hard, unsympathetic characters before M. Amis and others made it acceptable).
Great Shark Hunt is a great read also but isn’t really comparable to Vegas since it’s just a collection of his articles from the ’70s. Hell’s Angel’s, that’s a good book on the level of Vegas — at least showing the kind of direction he would eventually go in as he discovered his subject, themes, so on.
sasha i really like your drawings of your apartment man
http://anicecoldcocacola.blogspot.com/2009/03/well-shit.html
sasha i really like your drawings of your apartment man
http://anicecoldcocacola.blogspot.com/2009/03/well-shit.html
http://www.ikea.com/PIAimages/38296_PE130209_S4.jpg
i’m doing research on your life
http://www.ikea.com/PIAimages/38296_PE130209_S4.jpg
i’m doing research on your life
thanks jimmy!
thanks jimmy!
no great shark hunt is the best. but it didn’t sort of crack things open for me the way reading fear and loathing for the fist time did. and certainly not the way lost in the funhouse did.
the last things i read that did that, that sort of blew my mind open, where the battlefield where the moon says i love you by frank stanford and the numbered stories in i will unfold you with my hairy hands. they made me feel like i could do anything. like i was fucking invincible. i don’t know if i’m conveying this properly.
no great shark hunt is the best. but it didn’t sort of crack things open for me the way reading fear and loathing for the fist time did. and certainly not the way lost in the funhouse did.
the last things i read that did that, that sort of blew my mind open, where the battlefield where the moon says i love you by frank stanford and the numbered stories in i will unfold you with my hairy hands. they made me feel like i could do anything. like i was fucking invincible. i don’t know if i’m conveying this properly.
I didn’t mean to suggest that Shark Hunt was comparable to Vegas, but merely to say that (despite the genius of Vegas) I thought Shark Hunt was a better book. It has a larger scope (obviously) and makes a better introduction to HST. Still, Vegas is massive. It’s absolute genius and a must read. Steadmans’ illustartions don’t get the credit they deserve (just going off on a tangent here) and rarely seem to be mentioned. I always find that sad.
I didn’t mean to suggest that Shark Hunt was comparable to Vegas, but merely to say that (despite the genius of Vegas) I thought Shark Hunt was a better book. It has a larger scope (obviously) and makes a better introduction to HST. Still, Vegas is massive. It’s absolute genius and a must read. Steadmans’ illustartions don’t get the credit they deserve (just going off on a tangent here) and rarely seem to be mentioned. I always find that sad.
I like this post a lot. I think theres a lot of inverted snobbery around HST. If you tell people that you think he was a great writer (I do) then they always go “oh he pissed it all away” or ‘”he was a character, but not a writer”
Its like with Bukowski – there are so many piss poor Bukowski or Thompson impersonators, that people have started to deny that they were any good, because they dont want to get too readily identified with those writers. But I love HST, and I will defend his later books too. One of my favorite political books of the Bush era was KINGDOM OF FEAR, and the critics savaged that one…
I like this post a lot. I think theres a lot of inverted snobbery around HST. If you tell people that you think he was a great writer (I do) then they always go “oh he pissed it all away” or ‘”he was a character, but not a writer”
Its like with Bukowski – there are so many piss poor Bukowski or Thompson impersonators, that people have started to deny that they were any good, because they dont want to get too readily identified with those writers. But I love HST, and I will defend his later books too. One of my favorite political books of the Bush era was KINGDOM OF FEAR, and the critics savaged that one…