The Art of Facts

I found The Earl of Louisiana by A. J. Liebling to be detailed. I enjoyed his flow of words in structure and description. I like how he wrote to embed himself within. It was easy to read. I liked his comedy and character choices. He knew how to rope in the audience with his style. He doesn't leave any information out to confuse the reader. It was a fun read and I wanted to read more. I liked the Governor and his speech. He spoke with broken English but was simple to understand. I liked when Liebling inched forward and made eye contact with Earl and the way the Governor responded. The Governor's story, with the mechanical brain and the 'blam-blams' was attractive and funny. I liked Uncle Earl's qualities and the written recount by Liebling.

I didn't enjoy the excerpt from The Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer. He wrote in third person, which confuses me and other readers. I don't know why a reporter would be comfortable in that voice, but it doesn't feel right to me. I also noticed his long sentences which look more like paragraphs. The long drawn out descriptions confuse me. Mailer might have used this method of description to draw out his reader's interest. But the way he had to them sum up his thoughts confused me. Here is an example:

"Mailer would not have known what to do with such young ladies-he had spent the first forty-four years of his life in an intimate dialogue, a veritable dialectic with the swoops, spooks, starts, the masks and snarls, the calm lucid abilities of sin, sin was his favorite fellow, his tonic, his jailer, his horse, his sword, say he was not inclined to flirt for an hour with one bright seventeen-year-old or another when they conceived of lust as no more than the gymnasium of love." THAT IS ONE SENTENCE. Oh man. Then right after is this short sentence. "Mailer had a diatribe against LSD, hippies, and the generation of love, but he was keeping to himself..."

I just wrote that out and still have no idea what it meant. I found this whole excerpt to be just a jumble of words and adjectives.

I am in love with Hunter S. Thompson's ability to write. He exposes all details he can. Halfway through this excerpt I realized that Hunter S. Thompson is played by Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That movie still terrifies me. About this excerpt, from The Scum Also Rises, Thompson

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