{"id":7492,"date":"2018-08-03T10:29:24","date_gmt":"2018-08-03T10:29:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/?p=7492"},"modified":"2018-08-03T10:29:24","modified_gmt":"2018-08-03T10:29:24","slug":"the-anthony-bourdain-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/2018\/08\/03\/the-anthony-bourdain-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anthony Bourdain Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bourdain wrote about suicidal despair twice, to my knowledge. The first time was in his second crime novel,\u00a0Gone Bamboo<\/em>\u00a0(1997) in which the philosopher-hit man Henry Denard finds himself in deep trouble with the mob, who\u2019ve caught up with him on the island of Saint Martin.<\/p>\n

Leaving the Mariner\u2019s Club, he took the mountain route back to the pond, the scooter handling differently without Frances holding on in the rear\u2026 A few hundred yards ahead, the road took a steep drop down the other side of the mountain to the sea. The road was ungraded and unbanked; one could easily fly right off the side of that mountain, and Henry considered that option, toyed with the idea as if playing with himself, not serious, just to see how bad things were\u2026
\nBad manners to kill yourself. Realizing how drunk he really was, Henry started up the scooter and drove cautiously home.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Curiously, he wrote the same scene a second time, in a memoir, the 2010\u00a0Medium Raw<\/em>; it had really happened. But the memoir relates the scene happening about eight years after the novel was published\u2014in 2005 or 2006, after the crash of his first marriage to Nancy Putkoski, the high school sweetheart whom he\u2019d followed to Vassar.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where I was in my life: driving drunk and way too fast, across a not very well lit Caribbean island. Every night. The roads were notoriously badly maintained, twisting and poorly graded. Other drivers\u2026 were, to put it charitably, as likely to be just as drunk as I was\u2026 I would follow the road until it began to twist alongside the cliffs\u2019 edges approaching the French side. Here, I\u2019d really step on the gas\u2026 depending entirely on what song came on the radio next, I\u2019d decide to either jerk the wheel at the appropriate moment, continuing, however recklessly, to careen homeward\u2014or simply straighten the fucker out and shoot over the edge and into the sea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bad manners!? His manners were\u00a0immaculate<\/em>.
\nBourdain was a very private man but there were things about him that could be intimated from his work. One of these things being that the real person, the man underneath, was troubled in some secret way, and that he needed to hide that trouble, to dress it up for public consumption.
\nI wonder whether this is not just one more bad thing about exceptionalism, the thing we are in fact not really getting away from. Parachuting in to enjoy the hole in the wall is still parachuting in. What if you still end up in the good hotel, the big house, the apartment on the 60th<\/sup>\u00a0floor? Maybe it\u2019s the exceptional, special people with no faults, the people who have to perform \u201cauthenticity\u201d flawlessly, all the time, for everyone, who are, who must be, the most troubled of all.
\nDid anyone ever ask him what that moment meant, or when it really happened? I wanted to, but I felt constrained, like it would be intrusive and rude to ask: Did you really almost drive off the edge of an unbanked road in Saint Martin? When? Why? How many times did you think about killing yourself? I think maybe your real friends knew something about that, but maybe not enough.
\nEven now with all I knew and have learned, I could believe anything about this gifted, passionate man\u2019s death. Outrageous stories of every description came out after the reports of his suicide in an Alsatian hotel, and I could believe any one of them. I could believe that he was taken out by a hostile government or by some political enemy. That he just judged himself very hard one night and chose deliberately to end it. That he had a wild moment of uncontrollable panic. That he had a broken heart. Any of these things, or none of them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Source: The Anthony Bourdain Interview<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bourdain wrote about suicidal despair twice, to my knowledge. The first time was in his second crime novel,\u00a0Gone Bamboo\u00a0(1997) in which the philosopher-hit man Henry Denard finds himself in deep trouble with the mob, who\u2019ve caught up with him on the island of Saint Martin. Leaving the Mariner\u2019s Club, he took the mountain route back … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Anthony Bourdain Interview”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-angol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}