What is Gonzo journalism?
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One of my favorite examples is from Hunter S Thompson:
>My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . .
He could easily be talking about the events of objectively a single night: this one time, this one particular time, that he stayed out late after a concert and drove across the bridge to another part of the metropolis. In fact despite his protestations that it might have been “five or maybe forty nights” it really kind of sounds like that he just went once, and got lost like you do the first time, but had fun anyway.
If you put it that way, it sounds lame. Or at least, it becomes another kind of writing. A kind of understated, I’m-a-sad-sack David Sedaris kind of style.
But Thompson is trying to also get you to understand what it felt like to be him back then, in San Francisco in the middle 1960s. What “no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories” could adequately convey. So instead he starts to write wildly, unreliably, vaguely. Because only by blurring it can he represent it truthfully.
At least… that’s the idea.
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