Fact Checking Gonzo Journalism
May 20th, 2005If you want to call someone a thieving pig fucker, you’d better be prepared to produce the pig.
- Hunter S. Thompson
Robert Love, an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an editor-at-large at Playboy, has written a guide to editing Gonzo Journalism based on his personal experiences editing Hunter S. Thompson.
En excerpt:
. . . my intention is to take you through the editing process for gonzo journalism as I knew it - inside the sausage factory. Each piece had its own considerations and contortions, but there were common elements, which in the years since, I have identified and classified. . . .
Hunter’s manuscript pages were themselves manic, bristling works of art designed to turn the long, tedious job of writing, editing, polishing, and retyping a manuscript into a task worth staying up for. They were typed on the IBM Selectric or written longhand in his distinctive, exclamatory script on various kinds of custom letterhead. Never on boring blank pages. Sometimes he used stationery from the Woody Creek Rod and Gun Club (Hunter Stockton Thompson, Executive Director), or the Gonzo Fist. . . .
Then there was his homemade photocopied stationery, which combined lurid photos, tabloid headlines, and other media detritus that struck his fancy. Where they came from I never found out, and I never asked why, but for weeks at a time all the pages arriving at the office were typed under a letterhead that said:
VULTURES ATTACK FUNERAL AND EAT THE CORPSE!
or
CONFIDENTIAL OPEN AT ONCE FROZEN SEMEN
or
MAN SUCKED THROUGH 11-INCH WATER PIPE
or
FORGET THE SHRIMP, HONEY, I’M COMING HOME WITH THE CRABS
What Hunter is justly celebrated for, among his other virtues, is his authorial voice, his truest creation, as powerful and unique a voice as exists in American letters. But this instrument, as his editors knew, existed only on paper. Those poor souls who booked him for public speaking gigs found that out soon enough.
Read it all here and come back to The Locust Fork, where we welcome your comments. (Hit the comments link below).
Tags: Hunter Thompson
