When Raoul Duke has escaped his hotel bill and is pulling his fireapple-red shark convertible into the parking lot of a cafe on the fringe of Las Vegas, he hears a roar overhead and looks up "to see a big silver smoke-trailing DC-8 taking off". He is wondering whether his colleagues are on board the plane; his colleagues who were in Las Vegas in order to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race just like himself: "Did they have all the photos they needed? All the facts? Had they fulfilled their responsibilities?"
Duke himself has been famously distracted by drugs and by Las Vegas itself and has covered all these weird and spectacular circumstances in stead. As a matter of fact, he doesn't even know who won the race and here's were another notion of self-coverage comes in:
I wanted to plug this gap in my knowledge at the earliest opportunity: Pick up the L. A. Times and scour the sports section for a Mint 400 story. Get the details. Cover myself. Even on the Run, in the grip of serious Fear. . .
This may seem like a rather coarse demonstration of Hunter S. Thompson's attitude towards traditional journalism. Just as coarsely demonstrative as the recent booklength adventure of Morten Sabroe did seem at first. The word went that Sabroe had gone to New York to write a book about Hillary Clinton, but ended up writing a book about himself. Naughty fans giggled in anticipation while tired non-fans wrote letters to the editor saying, oh, surprise, surprise! How long can Sabroe be allowed to go on like this?
As it happens, Sabroe's book is very good. Hostile readers might like it very much too. It's mainly about Sabroe's mother Who Art in Heaven (and about himself). And about Hillary Clinton too, but not much. I had the book handed over late at night on the day of its publication, read the first half before going to sleep, the other half on the train the next morning and didn't want to put it back in my bag after finishing it, but rather, well, advertise it, let it glow as I carried it along through the hallways to my office. I wasn't exactly among the hostile readers to begin with, of course, but still I wonder why the sense of identification is that strong. More later.
