Word: picaro
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...missing parts, he is a full-time resister and iconoclast who loudly lacerates the world with mockery. His friend and foil is Rich Bone, a handsome and once successful corporate executive who sees life's flaws so clearly that he has retreated to become a sort of passive picaro. Bone bums around the beaches of Santa Barbara, Calif., lives off a succession of women and wearily hopes that "something will happen. Something will change...
Because Thompson does not believe in straight lines of logic, his thought is often hard to untangle. Yet a theme runs through his work. Edge of History laid the foundations. Initially it seemed to be the first-person adventures of an intellectual picaro charting his disenchantment with Los Angeles, the Esalen Institute, M.I.T., think tanks and other outposts of American culture. But in the final chapter, when Thompson soared into a free-form essay on myth as futurology, his intent became clear: he is a man questing for evidence of man's perfectibility...
...what Harold Rosenberg felicitously called "the shady lyricism of the Sunday supplement." He was blessed (and afterward dogged) by the circumstance of being everyone's idea of the hipster from the Bronx-a mean blade, good with a saxophone or a motorcycle, the flamboyant, randy and infinitely dexterous picaro of Tenth Street. But by the end of the '60s, his virtues had to an extent rebounded on his reputation. His astounding skill as a traditional, realistic draftsman looked vaguely suspect to some critics. The ironical love with which he raided the beaux-arts tradition for such images...