Book Signing This Friday! You’re Invited…
NYC: This Friday at 7pm, Anita Thompson will be reading from “The Gonzo Way” at McNally Robinson on Prince Street. She will be answering your questions regarding Hunter, the upcoming Johnny Depp movies based on “The Rum Diary” , "Going Going Gonzo," and other import projects, including her decision not to participate in the upcoming book edited by Jann Wenner. She will also be answering questions about the exciting future of Owl Farm, the Gonzo legacy and any other questions you would like to ask, but never had the chance! She and the staff look forward to seeing you this Friday at 7pm…
For your HST daily wisdom fix, Anita would like to post from Shark Hunt… About Gonzo Journalism:
– Hunter S. Thompson The Great Shark Hunt…Gonzo Journalism. It is a style of “reporting” based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than journalism – and the best journalists have always known this.
Which is not to say that Fiction is necessarily “more true” than Journalism – or vice versa – but that both “fiction” and “journalism” are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end. This is getting pretty heavy… so I should cut back and explain, at some point, the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication – without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive – but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. No alterations in the dark-room, no cutting or cropping, no spotting…no editing.
But this is a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism. True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he’s writing it – or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a minor character.