Hunter S. Thompson Books

He wrote to the Church of Scientology regarding Tom Cruise’s ass sweat. Ask yourself, is this someone you want to get to know? I guess it depends on what he wanted to do with Tom’s exudation. Better he keeps that to himself.

Edaurdo Jones, a strange chap who writes, or maybe a strange writer who happens to be a chap. He is a regular contributer to D.S. Wills’ Beatdom and that was enough to grab my interest. Wills doesn’t print just whatever comes his way, he’s a stickler for the readable and interesting.

Edaurdo will be representing Beatdom at this years Whitman and the Beats conference in NYC. D.S. Wills wrote a paper on Whitman that appeared in issue 1 of Beatdom, he was invited to go and read the piece at the conference but due to a schedule conflict he could not make it so he asked Edaurdo to go in his place. A high honor for Mr Jones. I’ll be looking out for that on youtube.

I have read most of Jones’ work, he refers to himself as The Voice of the Doomed. He told me.. “That voice of the doomed thing actually came from this guy named Fin I met at at a bar I used to be a regular at, we had struck up a conversation about writing and I showed him my stuff, he in turn read it and said Jesus you’re the fucking voice of the doomed telling this horrible story’s about people who are heading to straight to hell in a hand basket. I liked it and used it.”

At first glance at his work you’d probably say he is the voice of the doomed. There is more to him than that though. Caustic tone and rotten language aside there is a passion there. I get a feeling of sentiment in his words, he will not agree with this but hey, I dont know what to tell him.

He mentioned to me before that Hunter Thompson was a huge influence. His thoughts on this are particularly relevant here considering the Gonzo Journalism emulation piece posted a couple of weeks ago.  He told me..

Hunter is a huge inspiration to me more than any other author. He taught me how to say fuck the rules and write what you feel. The first time I ever picked up his stuff I couldn’t put it down. No one ever made me hang on every word the way he does. Before I found him I never realized you could write about things from your point of view and not in a non bias manner. It’s very obvious my style is heavily HST based but I feel I’ve made it my own. I consider it a sin for Gonzo to die with him, but I also consider it a sin to just out right bite it the way a lot of people do. Styles are meant to progress like Picasso said “bad artists copy Great artists steal.”

You can make up your own mind about his work, by hitting Beatdom and getting the fine magazine here. Also head for his Facebook fan page .

He agreed to do quick Q+A with me. I had planned to get more out of him but due to time constraints on my side I had to keep it to a moderate amount of questions. I do hope to revisit this when he comes back from the Whitman conference.               Beware: Some rotten language follows.

MF. It is clear by your writing that Hunter S. Thompson is an influence. Clearly though you have a turn of phrase that is your own. If you had never read anything by HST do you think your writing style would be any different?

EJ. This is a good question. Yes it is clear the good Doctor has had quite the impact on me. If I’d never read anything by him my style might have turned out a little differently. Content wise it would be the same though. The drugs the madness etc etc. I started out first connecting with Mark Twain at a young age. I think I read Huckleberry Finn about five times cover to cover in the fifth grade. Which in return caused me to run away from home about five times. Not for any reason in particular. My life wasn’t bad at home or anything, I just wanted that adventure. Once High School rolled around I was forced to read the Great Gatsby. I didn’t exactly fall in love with that one the way Hunter did at the time, but I can appreciate it’s rhythms now. I’ve since read it as an adult during a stay I did at Rikers Island in NYC. I appreciated it much more as an adult than I did as teen. The year after I read Gatsby the required reading was Hemmingway, then Kerouac. So I think I started out down the same path influence wise as HST did. Hunter just showed me more than any one else rules are made to broken. Tossing your self right into the thick of things, my love of the run on sentence and so forth. I write in my own voice. So much in fact the people who actually know me who read my stuff are always like Jesus I swear to God I can hear you telling this story in my head as I read this. I think that’s the biggest relation I have to HST when it comes to my writing. The use of my own voice. So I guess if I never found Hunter I may not have realized you could actually write the way you talk. My stuff would probably be a little more boring and not as much from the heart otherwise.

MF. Do you have a routine for writing or is it a case of when and where you can?

EJ. A routine, Jesus no that’s the part that’s a curse I just get ideas and then try and get them down as quick as I can. I used to just carry around scraps of paper with me and was known as the crazy guy always pulling wads of paper out of his pockets and jaunting down notes. I couldn’t really be carrying around a pocket recorder in the line of work I was in. I’d probably have ended up dead out of suspicion I was an informant. So when things come I just write. It’s actually quite horrible because it keep me awake most nights I can’t sleep until it’s all out of me. So I average between 3-5 hours a night.

MF. I have found for the most part that fans of the good Doctor remember their first experience of how they came to read his work. What was yours?

EJ. Ah, The first time. I was rummaging through my stepfathers belongings in my mothers attic looking for Playboys which is kind of ironic I think, but it wasn’t in Playboy that I found him. He very well have may have been in one up there but I’ve never read Playboy for the articles. It was in this box of books he had. I found the Campaign trail, along with 1984, Animal Farm, Catch 22, A scanner Darkly, and On The Road. After reading every other book in the box I read the Campaign Trail out of sheer boredom and needing something to read since I was grounded and couldn’t leave the house for entire semester because of poor grades. I chose to read it last because the Goddamn font in that book is so small. I’ve always been a political junky since a young age so I just fell in love with his stuff. The Rum Diary is what really did it though. I’d been out on a meth and LSD filled bender and had no where to go early one morning in Columbus Ohio and decided I needed to get out of the cold so I went in a local library and figured I’d just read for a few hours it was right after the Vegas film came out, so I intended on reading that but all they had was the Rum Diary. I remember reading the line and forgive me if I miss quote it but, “I’d been living off my wits and balls alone for nearly ten years now.” I just felt an instant connection after that I just sought out by hook or by crook every thing he ever wrote.

MF. You were born and raised in Kerouac country. Any influence on your work from Kerouac?

EJ. Kerouac- Good old Jack. I think I have a little bit of Jack in me. Don’t ever tell Wills this but I find Kerouac a tad bit boring. He’s a phenomenal writer, but very long winded. It’s like reading poetry one long stream of conscious thought. You can tell he was a speed freak just by reading his stuff. I tend to do that here and there sometimes I can be flowery and poetic like Jack and I suppose it’s him I get it from.

MF. You write for Beatdom, how did that come about?

EJ. How did I end up writing for that rag? Well I’d have to thank Hunter S. Thompson for that. I met David S. Wills in the HST group on Myspace. After some heated debates with other members on the discussion boards we made a kind of strange friendship. I had no clue what the hell Beatdom was exactly at first I just thought it was his screen name. But after some messages back and forth we both discovered that the other was a writer and he asked to see some of my stuff so I sent him Sushi along with Terrorist Performance Art, and a couple other things and well the rest is history.

MF. One of the great things about being a writer is the freedom it offers RE multiple jobs . As other opportunities arise will you continue to write for Beatdom?

EJ.  That fucking asshole Wills can take that rag of his and stuff it straight up his ass! All joking aside I’ll write for Beatdom as long as it’s in existence. It’s where I got my start. Plus Wills puts so much passion and energy into, and he does it for all the right reasons. He just really wants to show the world some of the best writers in the world are people you never heard of and not the giants of what I’d like to call “POP” literature.

MF. I have said somewhere before (I cant remember where) that Beatdom will become a huge force in the literary community. Do you agree and why?

EJ. You mean it’s already not? I think Beatdom could change the world. It’s letting people hear voices they never may have gotten the chance to hear if not for Beatdom. For instance Joshua Chase is a name to remember for future reference. This guy writes about life in this great style I like to call blue collar poetry. No flowery soliloquies or metaphors so deep you’d need to have a masters in English to decipher. Just great really raw stuff straight from the gut. Honestly I don’t no where Wills finds a lot of these people or how he even has time to write anything of his own with how much of his time he puts into just gathering the best voices he can find for every issue. So as far as it becoming a huge force, I’d like to coin a phrase from you and say “I see it becoming the proverbial Juggernaut of the new literary world.”

MF. That is right, I did say that. Now I remember.

MF. I believe the Beat Generation and its ilk is slowly changing (all be it small changes) with the times. Do you agree and is it a good thing?

EJ. Changing no, I’d like to say evolving. You see,and Beatdom is a prime example of this. Styles are made to progress. Just like Twain influenced Hemingway and he did Kerouac and then it went on to Thompson an individual style is built on firm foundation of something. There is no greater master than the one whose students surpass them. Like Picasso said Bad artists copy, While great artists steal. So every great stole something from the previous generation and then put their twist on it to make it their own. It’s an art just like painting techniques are all the same it’s just how you apply them differently than the next man is what makes great art. So I just think the torch is now being handed down to the next generations voices that could shape the world. After all words are the instrument in which worlds are shaped and destroyed.

MF. Tell me about The Green Monstar radio show. Are you part of it? What is it about?

EJ. Well Green Monstar is an upcoming force in the music industry in the United States. He also happens to be a childhood friend of mine. He came up rough and after some involvement with gangs drugs and the prison system he decided to put all his energy into his passion which is music and use his life as an example to show people the ills of that life style and to promote change. He’s a very talented guy and he’s getting his own show on musicfeen.com. So he asked me to be the shows head writer. Basically I’m an idea man like for sketches and bits and stuff. It’s going to basically be the Hip Hop cultures version of shock radio. It’s videotaped and broadcast via the web so you can see what’s going on during the show. We’re planning on really pushing the envelope with this.

MF. Did you really write to The Church of Scientology RE Tom Cruise’s ass sweat?

EJ. Yes I did write that letter they still haven’t got back to me. Nor have the people at Hasbro about the adult line of transformers. Although the people at General Mills did write a fabulous reply in response to my request for the Cap’n's naval records.

MF. Have you a novel or a book of any sort brewing inside you?

EJ. Yes I’ve had one brewing forever. Actually everything I’ve had published in Beatdom is from a collection of short stories I’ve been working on since about 2006. So the stuff in Beatdom is about four years old. But my issue six piece is brand new and I think I’ve evolved i style much more and it’s now truly my own. So this piece is going to be something really special for me to share. So yeah, I’m trying to talk that prick Wills into picking up a collection of shorts for City Of Recovery Press to publish in the near future.