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Rereading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Just as sarcastic as I remember it being, but a little less entertaining 20 years on with half of my sense of humour replaced by cynicism.
Recently finished a reread of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The movie's extremely faithful to the book, and yet the experience is very different: the book is a ramble through half-true stories (some being stories from other parts of his life merely mishmashed together into a vaguely coherent narrative) while the film is an authentic and clever exploration of the drugs involved. When watching it recently under the influence, I realised that it wasn't just the obvious scenes that had their influence in them - the body language and the speech of almost every character in the film doesn't really add up, even in the mundane scenes. In the end I think that while Thompson's biggest intentional purpose to the book was a farewall to the exact counter-culture of the 60s and a jaded reflection on those that burnt out naively chasing it by means of losing their minds, my own takeaway was: when you're completely twisted, when your mind is altered, can you tell what's reality? To what extent are you aware of your own actions? And if that's the nature of the mind on drugs, to what extent does that apply in the usual human state - when we're emotional or stressed?
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What are you currently reading?, Or recently read. And how is/was it?
Dec 27 2021, 10:22
