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• Tuesday, October 18, 2005 01:09 PM

  The Long Goddbye

  Mr. O�Hehir writes:

  <<i>All of this is to say that Didion's fans experience her work on an intimate, personal level as well as an intellectual one. (Because of that, her influence on journalism is much more profound than the macho histrionics of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson.) One of the reasons I'm not quoting from "The Year of Magical Thinking" is because you've probably read enough of it by now, if you're interested; another is that your reading of it belongs to you, and mine to me. >

  So, which is it: that Didion universally reaches readers �on an intimate, personal level as well as an intellectual one.�, or that my reading belongs to me and far be it for you to color it with your interpretation? Rare it is to have a writer so completely express his hypocrisy in a single paragraph.

  I for one, a drinking, drugging, male musician with an addiction to the ebb and flow of politics, most certainly experienced Hunter S. Thompson intimately and personally as well as intellectually. Perhaps you�ve forgotten all of your hermeneutics, or maybe you�re one of the �sensitive males� who reflexively regurgitate feminist homilies when confronted with old fashioned masculinity (and yes, it is old fashioned and we should well move beyond it�but it exists and it had, and has, its place). How dare you speak for anyone other than yourself and then claim to be above speaking for anyone else?

  Please.

  —jazztao Read jazztao's other letters
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