time magazine doesn't know from good novels

Hi kids. It's me, The Haiku Master, taking a break from my in-development Big Vegas Caper to bring your attention to a very disheartening development: TIME Magazine's highly suspect list of the All-Time 100 Novels!

How Does One Compile An All-Time 100 Novels List Without Finding Room For Hunter Thompson's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (Shown), Amongst Others?

Picked by "TIME Critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo" -- a.k.a. two guys the Sultan of Syllables has never heard of -- this so-called list pretends to pinpoint "the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present." And while I'll admit there are some good choices amongst the many white elephants, it should be noted that a large section of that crop's cream got left on the cutting room floor!

At any rate, and using the same criteria as TIME, here are 19 novels and three "graphic novels" (a fancy word for comic book, and included to complement TIME's Watchmen endorsement) we at Haiku International feel should have been included, presented in alphabetical order. I've only read the comics, but H.I.'s Minister of Information claims to have read the real books and assures me they are the bee's knees.

So without further adieu, here's H.I.'s All-Time 22 Novels That Should Have Made TIME's List Of All-Time 100 Novels:

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
• Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
• The Collector, John Fowles
• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy O'Toole
• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
• A Feast of Snakes, Harry Crews
• Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
• The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
• The Godfather, Mario Puzo
• Grendel, John Gardner
• Ham on Rye, Charles Bukowski
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
• The Invisibles, Grant Morrison & Various
• Libra, Don DeLillo
• Misery, Stephen King
• Preacher, Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon
• Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
• Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis & Darick Robertson
• The Wanderers, Richard Price
• Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor

Some may argue, but they are wrong. So sayeth I... The Haiku Master!!!

Best,

goodbye, you weird #$%@er

Welcome back, friends. It's me, The Haiku Master, with my final thoughts on the untimely death of the infamous, nefarious, pirate king of gonzo journalism, Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson.

Two Dead Men: Hunter S. Thompson (Left) and Oscar Zeta Acosta, Circa 1971

Based on the latest round of follow-up reports, the leading wisdom has it that H.S.T. blew his own head off in reaction to his rapidly declining health, which was preventing him from living the kind of life he preferred to live: Wild. Rambunctious. Kinetic. These traits don't come easy to a 67-year-old man who had undergone hip replacement surgery and a broken leg over a year's time. But would that alone be enough to drive a warrior like Thompson to suicide? Were there other thoughts in play?

In 1964, Thompson wrote an article for The National Observer entitled "What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?" (The article is reprinted in Thompson's The Great Shark Hunt.) In 1961, another honored American writer, Ernest Hemingway, also committed suicide, only with a shotgun. A year earlier, Hemingway had relocated to a very small, out of the way town in Idaho called Ketchum. Thompson's piece, obviously, was an exploration of what had brought "Papa" there, and ultimately to his death.

There are more than a few interesting passages in it:

"'That poor old man. [Hemingway] used to walk out there on the road in the evenings. He was so frail and thin and old-looking that it was embarrassing to see him. I was always afraid a car would hit him, and that would have been an awful way for him to go.'"

And:

"'We do not have great writers,' [Hemingway] explains to the Austrian in Green Hills of Africa. 'Something happens to our good writers at a certain age....You see we make our writers into something very strange....We destroy them in many ways.' But Hemingway himself never seemed to discover in what way he was being 'destroyed,' and so he never understood how to avoid it."

And:

"'Well,' said Hemingway, 'there's only one thing I live by -- that's having the power of conviction [in your writing] and knowing what to leave out.' He had said the same thing before, but whether he still believed it in the winter of his years is another matter. There is good evidence that he was not always sure what to leave out, and very little evidence to show that his power of conviction survived the war."

And finally:

"Perhaps [Hemingway] found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn't. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him -- not even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun."

If you've followed H.S.T.'s career as closely as the one true Sultan of Syllables, you'll no doubt see reflections of his elder incarnation in the words he wrote for Papa. I think he was an old man, afraid of becoming increasingly fragile, and probably more than a little embarrassed by the fact that, try as he might, he could no longer summon the old fire magic as forcefully and accurately as he had in his youth.

So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a 45-caliber handgun.

So goodbye and good riddance, you weird #$%@er; this world will not know your kind again. No matter how weak your reasons for leaving, you'll always be missed. Remembered. Honored. You did indeed stomp terra, and I have no doubt you're now doing the same in Valhalla.

And if you have any trouble, you can always send a telegram to the Right People. You know. Explaining your Position. Some asshole wrote a poem about that once, from what I understand.

But enough of this maudlin bullshit -- we'll be back to the usual dumb soon enough. In the meantime, go read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas if you haven't already; the Power of 'Ku commands you!

Best,

hunter better have a good goddamn explanation for this

Hello, readers. It's me again -- The Haiku Master -- still extremely distraught over the apparent suicide of one of America's great literary treasures, Hunter Stockton* Thompson.

It just doesn't make sense. H.S.T. was a legendary warrior, possessed of an indomitable free spirit and unbreakable iron will. He relished his own weirdness too much to remove it from the picture prematurely -- hell, he was the man who coined the phrase, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Which really only leaves three explanations:

Nobody This Weird Kills Himself Without Good Reason

1) The government finally had him dead to rights, and was about to put him in prison for his remaining days;

2) He had recently been diagnosed with some kind of incurable, inoperable medical condition; or,

3) He has posthumously revealed himself to be the biggest bullshit writer of the 20th century.

Given that Thompson wouldn't have killed himself over Reason 1 until after a trial, that only leaves Reason 2. Because Reason 3 is just completely unacceptable, and will no doubt find him confined to a cage in Hell where a legion of betrayed, angry, former fans will beat him on the kidneys with branches 'til he pisses blood all day, every day, for the rest of time.

I'm sure it's Reason 2, though, or some variation of it. Come on -- this is Hunter Stockton Thompson we're talking about, after all. As his son, Juan, said in the official family statement to the Aspen Daily News, "He stomped terra."

Amen and selah to that.

Best,


----------------------
* Stockton, not "Stocton," as the widely reprinted AP report had it. Frikkin' amateur journalists.

r.i.p., h.s.t.

The infamous outlaw prince of gonzo journalism, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, is dead, and our world is exponentially poorer for it.

Hunter Stockton Thompson, 1937-2005

I could usually give two tugs of a dead dog's cock when a celebrity dies, but this, given the nature of his death...this is horrible.

Words fail. The books written by the man pictured above have been ingrained in my psyche since high school, and I wouldn't want to imagine a world where those books hadn't been written. If you've never read his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you owe it to yourself to do so. (And no, watching the movie doesn't count.)

After all, you don't think a dumb guy like me came up with a slick phrase like "two tugs of a dead dog's cock" on his own, do you? That's all the good Doctor.

At least one Justo Juez santaria candle will burn in your honor tonight, Doc. Wherever you are or aren't, as the case may be.