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.
Notes on spectacular personal journalism - and on writing in general, but the notes are made while studying self-aware reporters like Günter Wallraff, Hunter S. Thompson, Norah Vincent, Barbara Ehrenreich and the rhetoric of their first persons singular.
Friday, November 17, 2006
Not to be
No, photographic immediacy is hard to achieve in writing - so here is how Thompson expanded his ideal idea of gonzo journalism (and this is the purple passage that I had in mind on Monday night; it is located along with the Cartier-Bresson passage in The Great Shark Hunt around page 115):
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