Sherry Chandler

That infamous Gonzo Kentuckian, Hunter S. Thompson, has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, appropriate perhaps to his love of guns. Oddly enough, he got his start in journalism writing about sports for an air force newspaper. Like ZAP comics and peyote-induced mysticism, Thompson took the counterculture to places my inner farm girl couldn’t go. (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the only movie Johnny Depp ever made that I couldn’t watch.) I was once told, back in the halcyon 70s, that I was entirely too sane. Not praise, perhaps, for an aspiring poet. Nevertheless, I mark the passing of this “counterculture icon” with regret.

Dewy-eyed Sondra Dee also died this last weekend. The two icons of American media share the current NYTimes obituary page. You know, I’m not even sure that they are opposites.

Update: Well, perhaps it wasn’t so odd that Thompson started as a sports writer for the Air Force – he currently had a column for ESPN, which shows what I know. Anyway, Beatrice has some nice Thompson links if you’d like to read more.

Update 2: Just found this nice eulogy over at Have Coffee, Will Write. Fellow Green River Writer Jeff Hess is obviously much better qualified to appreciate Thompson than am I.

The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education.

The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else. In order tomove up, you have got to move on.
      from Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter

Not fair to hold an author responsible for the musings of his characters, especially Hannah Coulter who is grieving for her lost children. And yet this attitude turns up other places in Wendell Berry’s writings. Jayber Crow, for example, rejects upward mobility, the city, and the university in such a panic that he braves the 1937 flood in order to get back to Port William. Once there, he becomes a sort of barber priest for the “membership’s” white male farmers. Eventually he lives a Harlan Hubbard existence in a primitive cabin on the Kentucky River, with barbering as his art instead of landscape painting. The happiest people in Hannah Coulter are the Branches, who view schooling as an inconvenience and education as learning how to cobble together farm equipment, to makedo, and subsist. The most miserable is Hannah’s son, who makes a fortune in Silicon Valley but loses his soul.

I have trouble differentiating this anti-modernism from that of people who take their kids out of public school so they don’t have to learn about evolution. Or sex. I spend a lot of time arguing when I read Wendell Berry, and I usually fight myself to a draw.

Meanwhile, Chris Offutt has remarked (and I paraphrase because I can’t remember where I saw the quote, maybe in Ace magazine) that I-64 was supposed to bring the world to the mountains, but in fact, has emptied the mountaineers out into the world. I think most of them are living in housing projects in Scott County and working for Toyota. A better place?

The Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice is having its annual peace fair and dinner on Saturday, February 26. Nikki Finney is the featured speaker. Click here to view the PDF for details.