Gonzo Political Blogging

I don’t think it helps us or anyone who comes to the blog to find a list of 100 blogs that we like, so I think we need to figure out some criteria for what will be blogrolled. IMO we should have 3 separate blogrolls: Culture and Politics blogs, blogs about Youth Politics, and blogs by young people. The last of these might be waaaaaaay too big, so maybe we should just focus on the first two?

I’ll put forth these two for my first two choices:

Young Philly Politics. Yes, I helped create this site (mostly on the technical side) and I host it, but it has become the political blog for my City of Brotherly Love, and it is very much focused on youth related issues as well as a view of politics from a young perspective.

For Our Future. This blog is written by another person who has helped to build YPP, Ben Waxman, and it very often focuses on youth political involvement .

Stoller does what I recognize as Gonzo journalism, and it can be quite good, but he’s no HST. Nobody really is at this stage, because all the people who have gotten the direct experience and access necessary to do real Gonzo/participant journalism are far too square and carrerist to carry that mantle.

I like the Chugging Bleach blogger. One wonders what would happen if he were dropped into the middle of some of the real world events…

Anyway, as to the practical question of what we should do to highlight bloggers we like, I think a blogroll is fine, but it’s far more effective to have a place were we all post links and quotes to specific things that we like, Atrios/Instapundit-style. We could design it up as a sidebar element even (ala MyDD’s “breaking blue”).

I just happened to crack open my copy of Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, and here’s what I found… In a letter to Tom Wolfe, 4/20/1971, this is in reference to the experience of writing Fear and Loathing:

The first draft to Part One, for instance, was written by hand on Mint Hotel stationary during and all-night drink/drug frenzy while I waited for dawn to come up so I could flee without paying. I typed the section you have in a motel in Pasadena, but hardly changed anything from the original crazed draft…

So in terms of Gonzo Journalism (pure), Part One is the only chunk that qualifies — although even the final version is slightly bastardized. What I was trying to et at in this was [the] mind-warp/photo technique of instant journalism: One draft, written on the spot at top speed and basically un-revised, edited, chopped, larded, etc. for publication. Ideally, I’d like to walk away from a scene and mail my notebook to the editor, who will then carry it, un-touched, to the printer.

But I think that will take a while to hash out.

The marriage of blogging with actual field-experience is where the hot action is. And, for balance, here’s an earlier (March 3rd) letter to Wolfe in response to his description of being on a lecture tour in Italy:

Dear Tom…

You worthless scumsucking bastard. I just got your letter of Feb 25 from Le Grande Hotel in Roma, you swine! Here you are running around fucking Italy in that filthy white suit at a thousand bucks a day laying all kinds of stone gibberish & honky bullshit on those poor wops who can’t tell the difference… while I’m out ehre in the middle of these goddamn frozen mountains in a death-battle with the taxman & nursing cheap wine while my dogs go hungry & my cars explode and a legion of nazi lawyers makes my life a goddamn Wobbly nightmare…

You decadent pig. Where the fuck do you get the nerve to go around telling those wops that I’m crazy? You worthless cocksucker. My Italian tour is already arranged for next spring & I’m going to do the whole goddamn trip wearing a bright red field marshal’s uniform & accompanied by six speed-freak bodyguards bristling with Mace bombs & when I start talking about American writers & the name Tom Wolfe comes up, by god, you’re going to wish you were born a fucking iguana!

And there’s plenty more where that came from.