Book Review: The Rum Diary

I’m glad I finished it because I almost didn’t. It didn’t demand my attention the way other Hunter S. Thompson books have done, but on the other hand the subject matter was a bit richer than I gave it credit for while reading it. The storyline, without much deviation and outlined in the first ten pages, follows a fictional Thompson to Puerto Rico to work for a dysfunctional newspaper with a horrible crew. It’s not meant to be a humorous setup and it’s not about workplace antics or cartooned bad employees. It describes, in one way or another, almost every workplace I’ve been in. It talks about being just a suckerfish in society, “trying to find the shark with the biggest stomach and smallest mouth” and never really being anything but that. It talks about “The Fear”, the fear that back home there’s just nothing for you. The same Fear that catapults clueless Puerto Ricans to New York City and drunkard writers to San Juan.

The story is mellow and plot twists expected. You can see why it took almost 40 years to be published. But I liked it. In the end, I couldn’t help but making two comparisons. First, who was I in that story of trying to find luck in a foreign land? Though I didn’t strongly identify with any one character, I think I fit the editor/manager archetype - the only one who takes the gig seriously, one of the few actually concerned about the future of the company and willing to put the time, heart, and money into making it something bigger and better despite the odds. What I wasn’t, in any case, were the free-willing shiftless drunks personified and maybe a little glorified by Thompson and the other main characters - running from The Fear further and further, paycheck to paycheck, one mediocre workplace to another, and drink to drink. In the end, the only thing that separated Thompson from the rest of the pack was his razor-sharp wit matched with a rock star charisma and attitude that sold a lot of Rolling Stones back in the day.

The second comparison, or question, I kept running through my head was why Thompson wasn’t part of the Beat Generation – that clique of pre-hippy bohemian artsy types that dominated the counter-culture scene of the 50’s, when Thompson was in his 20’s and getting his start as a writer. The simple answer, I think, is that by that time Thompson wasn’t part of any counter-culture. He wasn’t trying to create an alternate definition of morals or aesthetics. Though disgruntled, he was mostly dealt with those sentiments alone and not part of some bigger picture of collective discontent. He was just an intelligent drunk. He was still trying to fit into American society. He was still trying to sucker up to the man, in his own words, and get his fair share. He was still trying to find his place and despite his pessimism hadn’t fully given up hope that there was room for people like him in the big picture.

Perhaps that’s why I like Thompson a bit more than the Beatnik-types. He finally managed to force his own style into the system and actually made a lasting contribution to journalism. He worked inside the system as much as he could – preferring to submit “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” to mainstream magazines and later writing for Rolling Stone – instead of writing in the ‘zines of the day, like Northern Lights out of San Francisco. In the end, he won, and I like that.

Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

A minor drama storm has been weathering our small outpost in Shenzhen over the past few days. Two girls who came together to China decided to go back home. While I have lucked out on almost everything related to my job, they were running into bad luck every step of the way and blamed it all on the company.

An echo chamber of bad vibes and griping erupted. Previously frustrated teachers became incensed as they trades stories back and forth and complained. I pitched in a few of my annoyances [which I had corrected today], I also offered wisdom from the good doctor: "buy the ticket, take the ride." Were here. We signed up for a year, ride out the year and make things work.

I remembered reading it in a Thompson book and being reminded of it when Steve Sykes explained why he plucked a fishing hook out of a sharks mouth instead of just cutting the line. It's something I've reminded myself every time things get a bit too Chinese for me. This is what I signed up for, this is what I get.

I had to eat those words today. Buy the ticket, take the ride, right? Here I literally had a ticket in my hand and there, right there in front of me, were very real and very literal rides - metaphor be damned.

The teachers were originally scheduled to have a tour of the city, but somehow that got turned into a tour of an amusement park. Four teachers show up along with a former teachers girlfriend and two of her friends. Two teachers bolt when they see the price of admission, but I go...

Happy Valley - gotta love the subtly in that name - is a small Busch Gardens. I hate amusement parks. Hate, hate, hate. I hate the lines, I had the crowdedness, and I hate the rides. Yes, your fearless writer who plunges into the eye of hurricanes for a good story and some photos hates roller coasters and machinations of that ilk.

USA Trey would have gone home even though I spent the money. American Trey would have called it a day and opted out. China Trey did no such thing. I got in line with everyone else and we spun around on one of those weird 180 degree under-arch spinner things and you know what?

It was fun!

I also did a miniature tower-of-terror thing where the shoot a line of seats up and then drop it straight down and all those shenanigans. I did it. I enjoyed it. I even got to play high speed Chinese laser bumper cars and got my driving fix in [I miss my Miata and driving more than I miss any food right now]. I also met some really cool new Chinese friends. I'll write up about some of our conversations on national identity and religion a bit later... I really needed to get a post out.

Photos from Happy Valley amusement park.


Happy Valley with Shenzhen and hills in the background.




Meet Diamond Geezer [geezer is cockney slang for a street-type guy] and his friend Boozy Baby. Have I told you there's a toothpaste brand who's logo is a black guy with a top hat and pearly whites? Politically correct what? I should mention our Chinese friends saw nothing offensive in this at all and picked them up to giggle at their bobbling heads.



On that note, here is the line of tourist waiting to have their photo taken with Adrian. He's black! Get a picture! You think I'm kidding...




Lisa, Ting [1], me, and Ting [2]



E.v.i.l.

Off the Rails

There's a freedom living abroad that's difficult to describe. One is not judged the same as you are back home. Locals tend to attribute almost all our behavior - better or worse - as just being something foreigners do. The minor guilts that haunt everyday life are absent and true personalities shine. You begin acting on your own conscious without second thoughts instead of having to consider what other people think. That freedom is exponential in somewhere like Cambodia, an impoverished nation putting itself back together after wholesale slaughter during decades of civil war. There's an allure to the anarchy that draws many colorful characters.

It's also the subject of Amita Gilbao's Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja. Unfortunately, it was horrific in every imaginable way. To begin with the writing was sloppy. There was no narrative arch, no story to unfold, and he simply doesn't have a writers hand at description. Three times in one paragraph he described Cambodian music as somber. He invents words - something I'm not opposed to - but sticks with the duds throughout the book. One of the words in his last sentence was "tragicomic." No one says this. Your last sentence is supposed to be poignant, reflective... tragicomic is what you come up with? It's almost as bad as him stopping to add "shopping arcade" in parenthesis to let us know that's his clever term for strip malls.

So we've got down that he's a bad writer... so what does he pick as the subject of his book? Whoring druggie pedophile expats. He delivers almost 200 pages about men running around in Southeast Asia snorting heroin before their English classes and renting teenaged peasant girls sold into sexual bondage.

He throws out his cards early by having someone describe his work as a being " Like a Gonzo rant from Hunter S. Thompson" on the cover but then falls on his face emulating the unedited stream of consciousness style that only a select few can pull off. There's also little tension between the writer and over-the-deep-end friends like Thompson had with Oscar Acosta. Thompson uses his lawyer almost as a proving point of his own sanity and keeps Acosta at a safe distance when he's is at his worse, you really get a feeling that Gilbao deeply admires the men he writes about. He wishes he could be brave enough to sleep with a $2 illiterate 14 year old prostitute too.

It's so disappointing because the subject matter is so rich. Gilbao brings up the Josef Conrad link early saying that there's a reason Kurtz goes crazy in Cambodia in Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Copalla's re-imagining of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness is about a good man gone mad without any of the routine social factors keeping us sane. Deep in the jungle, far removed from civilization, morals and ethics bend beyond recognition. Gilbao makes the connection in the first chapter, but then does nothing more with it.

This would have been an excellent approach to the book instead of the self-important diary entries. Gilbao touches on it briefly, when he visits a brothel and leaves before anything happens, afraid that there was no turning back afterwards. It is precisely that moment, when heavy moral questions about actions disappear after trial, that is worth writing an entire book on. The depravity in and of itself is not interesting. It's the mental slide into an entirely different world where the values and norms you grow up with vanish without notice that holds literary weight.





Tags:Off the Rails Phnom Penh Cambodia Amit Gilboa Gonzo Thompson Hunter S. travel writing expat lifestyle Asia Treyopia

The Next Gonzo

Excellent read for anyone else who knew they wanted to be a writer as a kid when everyone else wanted to be fireman. Actually, I wanted to be a fireman-jet pilot-writer/photographer. I've grown substantially since then. Today I want to be a writer/photographer-international teacherman. See?

Anyways, from the snobs guys at Pitchfork:

Get That Out of Your Mouth #27

Chris Dahlen tries answering the question of why there aren't any "great" culture writers, like Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs, today.

"... as we spend more of our lives online, more of our experience of the world takes place entirely in our own heads-- and our imagination is being rewired by computers... we have to strip away the geekery, the gadgetry, and the consumerism, and instead of explaining why this brave new freakshow interests us, we have to understand what it's doing to us. And whoever does that, wins the title of 'the next...' "

Tags: Treyopia Gonzo Writing Pitchfork Chris Dahlen Pitchfork Technology