/lit/ - Literature

"Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative."

-wikipedia

Is there any other gonzo that isn't HST? I mean, like, good, so please don't say vice.

>>6685098

is Vice even Gonzo at this point?

if Vice is Gonzo then most modern journalism is Gonzo

is journalism something that is still pursuable in this day and age?
in the way that hst did it I mean
I feel like it's so clean and vapid nowadays

>>6685098
Fictional, but Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis is definitely gonzo.

>>6685121

no it isn't
it's just a story someone wrote then

>>6685121
the protagonist is surely Totally Not HST but other than that...

>>6685123
>It chronicles the battles of Spider Jerusalem, infamous renegade gonzo journalist of the future,[2] an homage to gonzo journalism founder Hunter S. Thompson.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan

How about fuck you.

>>6685129

fuck off
what makes gonzo journalism different from anything else

Is there any hope for someone like me who wants to write in the style of gonzo journalism

>>6685169
yes, laptops are way easier to carry than typewriters

GG is dead because there are no significant domestic issues with massive overarching narratives

>>6685177

>implying

>>6685072
The first post here with the wikipedia quote is spot on. My own addendum is that the gonzo journalist arrives on the scene and uses his own actions to direct the story in a direction that suits him.

>>6685410
typewriters are fucking heavy son

>>6685446

when would gonzo journalism be an inappropriate approach?

>>6685508

how weak are you

>>6685127

literally just HST
ellis is a hack

What's the point of reading? Should I read for my own entertainment or for my own enlightenment? Can you have one without having the other?

". . . and this qualifier is the essence of what, for no particular reason, I've decided to call Gonzo Journalism. It is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of 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 this point, that Fear & 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 darkroom, 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 main character.

The American print media are not ready for this kind of thing, yet. Rolling Stone was probably the only magazine in America where I could get the Vegas book published. I sent Sports Illustrated 2500 words -- instead of the 250 they asked for -- and my manuscript was aggressively rejected. They refused to even pay my minimum expenses. . .

But to hell with all that. I seem to be drifting away from the point -- that Fear & Loathing is not what I thought it would be. I began writing it during a week of hard typewriter nights in a room at the Ramada Inn -- in a place called Arcadia, California -- up the road from Pasadena & right across the street from the Santa Anita racetrack. I was there during the first week of the Spring Racing -- and the rooms all around me were jammed with people I couldn't quite believe. . . "

>>6687405
". . .So now, six months later, the ugly bastard is finished. And I like it -- despite the fact that I failed at what I was trying to do. As true Gonzo Journalism, this doesn't work at all -- and even if it did, I couldn't possibly admit it. Only a goddamn lunatic would write a thing like this and then admit it. Only a goddamn lunatic would write a thing like this and then claim it was true.

The main point I want to make about Fear & Loathing is that although it's not what I meant it to be, it's still so complex in its failure that I feel I can take the risk of defending it as a first, gimped effort in a direction that what Tom Wolfe calls "The New Journalism" has been flirting with for almost a decade.

Wolfe's problem is that he's too crusty to participate in his stories. The people he feels comfortable with are dull as stale dogshit, and the people who seem to fascinate him as a writer are so weird that they make him nervous. The only thing new and unusual about Wolfe's journalism is that he's an abnormally good reporter; he has a fine sense of echo and at least a peripheral understanding of what John Keats was talking about when he said that thing about Truth & Beauty. The only reason Wolfe seems "new" is because William Randolph Hearst bent the spine of American journalism very badly when it was just getting started.

The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that's rare -- for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.

Nothing is fun when you have to do it -- over & over, again & again -- or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old. So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuckaround from start to finish. . . and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of maniac gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls.

So maybe there's hope. Or maybe I'm going mad. These are not easy things to be sure of, either way. . . and in the meantime we have this failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism, the certain truth of which will never be established. That much is definite. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas will have to be chalked off as a frenzied experiment, a fine idea that went crazy about halfway through. . . a victim of its own conceptual schizophrenia, caught & finally crippled in that vain, academic limbo between "journalism" & "fiction." And then hoist on its own petard of multiple felonies and enough flat-put crime to put anybody who'd admit to this kind of stinking behavior in the Nevada State Prison until 1984.

Hunter Thompson

>>6685104
It depends the series/the reporter. Anderson/World News is objective while Fringes or Douche's Pharmacopea is clearly Gonzo.

>>6687437
but vice is shit anyway

all Gonzo that isn't HST is utter dribble

>>6687405
>>6687423
I'm always surprised when I'm reminded that at times Thompson was a smart and collected person.
Do you have a source on that so I can read the full thing?

>>6687861

hunter s thompson was a prodigial genial senential semitic lad back in hisday

>>6688675
hot as fuck, too

>>6688707
man age can really wreck a person huh?
i don't look half as good as he did then now
not looking forward to how ill look at his age now

>>6685156
it doesn't establish its fiction, which leads some people to believe it's true.

>>6688839

but it IS true
that's the point

read slouching towards bethlehem

joan didion

must read for anyone trying to be a gonzo journalist

Watch a documentary by Louis Theroux. He is quintessentially gonzo. He goes somewhere, asks lots of questions, tries stuff out himself.

>>6685098
Mencken was the original gonzo.

And he's better than HST

>>6688850

>implying anyone can be a gonzo journalist
not in this society
if you don't work for some shitty tabloid nobody wants it

>>6688855
toop kep

>>6688850
not in the habit of reading GARBAGE

>>6689317
you read 4chan posts

>>6689325

so do you m8ln

>>6685072
2 questions.
1.) How is Thompson as a journalist
2.) How is Thompson as a novelist (i.e. was the 4 dollars I spent shipping that elegant edition to my doorstep well spent?)
Right now I'm about 30 pages into Hell's Angels an enjoying it so far. Thompson hasn't established himself as a character in the narrative yet (I assume he does at some point) but he writes well and knows his audience. That being said I don't know much of the man's career outside of these two works and am set to become a doctor of journalism so I figure I should learn a bit more about the guy. And who better to ask than /lit/.

>>6689317
are you just trollin'? or are you genuinely serious?

usually people read works before they dismiss them outright

>>6689878

whoa can you tell me what made you go down this road
not even thompson was a literal doctor of journalism
I'm interested in journalism as well, specifically thompson's style, do you have any experience in the job?
sorry i just don't run into many PhD candidates/humanities advocates on 4chan

anyway
Fear and Loathing n Las Vegas is his most prolific work
arguably his magnum opus

1. Thompson was seriously on the side of the counter-culture of the time, hated of authority, drugs,alcohol, he advocated for the legalization of weed until he died. Before Hell's Angels his style was pretty much the norm, but spending that year with them must have seriously affected him.
2.Thompson was a pretty creative novelist, what was fiction in his brand of journalism was only there to serve as a part of a larger metaphor of the time/event he was reporting on
Thompson blended journalism/novel literature very well, it's accused of being pure and utter fiction by a lot of ignorant undergrads but it can be surprisingly autobiographical

this is just my two cents

>>6690092
There's no such thing as a Doctor of Journalism, so I googled. As for why I'm getting a degree, partly because I enjoyed my high school paper (ranked second in NY, that plaque says) and partly because it combines my two favorite things; the written language and a nice lack of ennui. Plus I'm used to buying my books at thrift stores anyways.

>>6685599
Gonzo journalism is inappropriate for any audience expecting a "just the facts" coverage of an event. A better response is that there is always a place for formal journalism, but Gonzo is a matter of taste and relationship between audience and author. Gonzo is literary writing (there are often fictional elements) because it doesn't just relay the facts an audience will be most informed by, but rather by portraying the world through the writer's chosen lens, making a case for seeing it that way.

>>6690250
have fun makin no money idiot
shoulda done STEM
>>6690346
no journalist paper does gonzo or wants it
hell, journalism is dying anyway

>>6690414
fuck off

>>6690092
>Thompson was seriously on the side of the counter-culture of the time
He absolutely hated hippies.

"The next question i asked her was “Do you ever pray?” “Oh yes,” she said. “I pray in the morning sun. It nourishes me with its energy so I can spread my love and beauty and nourish others. I never pray for anything; I don’t need anything. Whatever turns me on is a sacrament: LSD, sex, my bells, my colors…. That’s the holy communion, you dig?” That’s about the most definitive comment anybody’s ever going to get from a practicing hippie. Unlike beatniks, many of whom were writing poems and novels with the idea of becoming second-wave Kerouacs or Allen Ginsbergs, the hippie opinion makers have cultivated among their followers a strong distrust of the written word. Journalists are mocked, and writers are called “type freaks.” Because of this stylized ignorance, few hippies are really articulate. They prefer to communicate by dancing, or touching, or extrasensory perception (ESP). They talk, among themselves, about “love waves” and “vibrations” (“vibes”) that come from other people. That leaves a lot of room for subjective interpretation, and therein lies the key to the hippies’ widespread appeal. . . Many so-called hippies shout “love” as a cynical password and use it as a smokescreen to obscure their own greed, hypocrisy, or mental deformities.

"New Left writers and critics at first commended the hippies for their frankness and originality. But it soon became obvious that few hippies cared at all for the difference between political left and right, much less between the New Left and the Old Left. “Flower Power” (their term for the power of love), they said, was nonpolitical. And the New Left quickly responded with charges that hippies were “intellectually flabby,” that they lacked “energy” and “stability,” that they were actually “nihilists” whose concept of love was “so generalized and impersonal as to be meaningless.”

"And it was all true. Most hippies are too drug oriented to feel any sense of urgency beyond the moment. Their slogan is “Now,” and that means instantly. Unlike political activists of any stripe, hippies have no coherent vision of the future which might or might not exist. The hippies are afflicted by an enervating sort of fatalism that is, in fact, deplorable. And the New Left critics are heroic, in their fashion, for railing at it."

-- Hunter S. Thompson, 'The Hippies'.

>>6691993
It's a shame he never got to write his opinion on hipsters.

>>6691993
but the hippies sure did love him

>>6692073
GOIN GONE!