Salon.com > John Glassie

Hunter S. Thompson

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 23:10:00 +0000

He calls himself "an elderly dope fiend living out in the wilderness," but Hunter S. Thompson will also be found this week on the New York Times bestseller list with a new memoir, "Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century."

Listening to his ragged voice, there is some sense that Thompson, now 65, has reined in his outlaw ways, gotten a little softer, perhaps a little more gracious now that he's reached retirement age. "I've found you can deal with the system a lot easier if you use their rules," he says. "I talk to a lot of lawyers."

But do not be deceived. In "Kingdom of Fear" and in a telephone interview with Salon from his compound in Aspen, Colo., Thompson did what he's always done: speak the truth about American society as he sees it, without worrying much about decorum. "Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads?" he writes, referring to the people currently occupying the White House. "They are the racists and hate mongers among us -- they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis."

The man from Neen

Thu, 21 Mar 2002 20:00:00 +0000

During the last month or so, artist Miltos Manetas publicized his big plans for the Whitney Biennial exhibition, which opened March 7 -- plans that included Flash animation and 23 U-Haul trucks. This was really going to be something, observers of art said, especially considering that Manetas wasn't actually selected for inclusion in the show and that his idea was lightheartedly subversive of the contemporary art exhibition. At the Biennial's opening gala on March 5, however, Manetas' desire for attention was revealed to be far greater than most people had ever imagined.

The Greek-born Manetas and his cohorts had claimed to be getting 23 U-Hauls ready to display Flash animation pieces by 200 young designers, programmers and assorted digital artists. On the night of the Whitney's party, the trucks were to drive around and around the museum (which takes up a block on the Upper East Side of Manhattan), diverting the attention of the invitation-only guests.

Flesh, robots and God

Mon, 25 Feb 2002 20:00:00 +0000

Rodney Brooks built his first artificially intelligent machine when he was just 12 years old, in his boyhood home in South Australia. He recalls in his new book, "Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us," that this homemade computer of his "could play tic-tac-toe flawlessly."

Not surprisingly, as a grown-up, Brooks is now one of the world's leading roboticists. Director of MIT's 230-person Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and founder and chairman of his own robotics company, Brooks has presided over some of the most important developments in the field that fascinates and perhaps frightens everyone who has ever seen "2001: A Space Odyssey." Indeed, among other things, his company iRobot developed the Sojourner technology used to take samples and capture images from Mars in 1997. "The first mobile ambassador from Earth to another planet," he points out, was "a creature constructed of silicon and steel."

Oldest living surrealist tells all

Mon, 11 Feb 2002 20:00:00 +0000

Dorothea Tanning's paintings and sculpture are featured in "Surrealism: Desire Unbound," a major exhibition that opened Feb. 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She is one of the only surviving members of the movement that, more than 60 years ago, turned the perceived world -- as well as the art world -- on its ear.

"As for still being here," says Tanning, 91, "I can only apologize." And as for surrealism, maybe the movement itself should apologize to Tanning for casting such a long shadow over her subsequent efforts as a painter, sculptor and printmaker, and more recently, as a writer and poet.

Today, she still paints and draws, and attends exhibitions of her work from the last few decades -- images that almost always evoke the female human form. But mainly she has been building a literary career for herself enviable to any young writer.

Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including the New Republic, the Yale Review, Partisan Review and the Paris Review. Last year, she was selected for inclusion in "The Best American Poetry 2000." And last fall, Tanning published "Between Lives: An Artist and Her World," a memoir of her long, heady and, one must say, romantically bohemian time on Earth.

E.O. Wilson

Mon, 14 Jan 2002 20:00:00 +0000

E.O. Wilson is one of America's most prominent scientists and the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, "On Human Nature" and "The Ants," as well as other groundbreaking books such as "Naturalist," "Sociobiology" and "Consilience." A professor of biology at Harvard from 1955 until 1997, Wilson has received many of the world's leading prizes in science and conservation.

His work in sociobiology forms the foundation of current evolutionary psychology study. His research on insect societies has informed the work of contemporary complexity theorists who are looking at complex natural systems. In his most recent book, "The Future of Life," Wilson focuses on the state of the natural environment, analyzing the threat to our biosphere and offering a set of recommendations for the protection of life on Earth.

What's life going to be like in 100 years?

If present trends continue, the result will be irreversible impoverishment of species. At the current rate, we will lose half the plant and animal species on Earth by the end of the century.

If we lose half, we'll still have millions left, won't we?

Angela's Ashes

Mon, 23 Sep 1996 19:00:00 +0000

why is this dark memoir, from a previously unpublished 66-year-old retired high-school teacher, generating so much buzz in publishing circles? It probably helps that Frank McCourt, a committed New York pub-crawler, has made a lot of influential lit-world friends while nursing pints of beer over the decades. But here's a less cynical answer: It's largely because "Angela's Ashes" relates McCourt's miserable, bruising Irish Catholic childhood in language that is as flinty and compelling as the story itself. He's soaked up some real literary ability along with the suds.

Born in the U.S. at the start of the Depression to Irish immigrant parents, McCourt suffered early and often at the hands of his father -- a man who rarely got work and when he did, drank his meager wages away. When the family decided to move back to Ireland, things went from very bad to much worse. They settled in a Limerick slum and went on the dole, which was "just enough for all of us to starve on." (Indeed, neither of McCourt's two young twin brothers lived much beyond their second birthdays.) Barely old enough himself to go to school, McCourt helped his mother Angela scrounge for "bits of coal that drop from lorries" so they could at least have a fire for tea. He gathered "everything that burns, coal, wood, cardboard, paper."