Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist 1968-1976
Hunter S. Thompson with Douglas Brinkley
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000

I file Hunter S. Thompson under the "formative influences" category. In 1994 when I was writing for the notorious La Trobe University student newspaper Rabelais, I read a dog-eared copy of his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (New York: Warner Books, 1971). The sequel Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 (San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1973) was a riveting deconstruction of political journalism that portrayed the McGovern-Nixon election as a war-zone. My copy of E. Jean Carroll's Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson (New York: Penguin Books, 1993) was passed around the editorial team. Hunter was not just a role-model, he was a mentor who changed my life.

Many people fell in love with Hunter because of his Sadeian adventures with sex and drugs, yet I always suspected that this was a carefully constructed image. He had applied the Method of Konstantin Stanislavski to reportage, and built an appealing persona of depravity around this shell.

This construct enabled him to get away with some daring criticism, such as linking Ed Muskie with Ibogaine, whilst pretending to be a "wasted" Rolling Stone Magazine reporter. The art lay in the concealing of the art.

Fear and Loathing in America, the second volume of Hunter's letters, confirmed these suspicions. This book chronicles the major incidents in the Hunter legend, from running for Aspen's sheriff and the Los Angeles road-trip to Hunter's psychological warfare with one Richard Milhous Nixon. The letters counter-point The Great Shark Hunt (New York: Summit Books, 1979), a collection of Rolling Stone articles and book excerpts from the same period.

Hunter paid meticulous attention to detail in learning his craft. The evolution of his social reportage is evident in letters to fans and literati (Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe). So is his debt to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Fear and Loathing in America describes how fame's allure changed Hunter's life, after he exposed the dark lining of the American Dream. It is also a guidebook for personal reinvention.

"You can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back," Hunter wrote in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Except that it never did roll back completely. After Votescam 2K in Florida, Hunter is relevant. Hopefully Fear and Loathing in America will instruct a new generation in the methods and surreal vices of "gonzo" journalism.

House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
New York: Pantheon Books, 2000

Danielewski probably created the literary phenomena of the year with House of Leaves, an ambitious project that began as a Web site and morphed into an acclaimed book. If you read Artbyte or Utne Reader magazines, you were susceptible to Danielewski's masterful spell.

The success of House of Leaves signals several things. Faux-academese, like lengthy footnotes, lists, poems and editorial meta-commentaries, are in. The World Wide Web has created a market for nonlinear writing and typographic experiments. PoMo has deconstructed the linguistic experience: Danielewski forces the reader to decipher codes, mirror-passages and dazzling wordplay.

Another perspective is that Danielewski has revitalized the Magical Diary that practitioners, from Aleister Crowley to Ken Wilber have mastered. This subtext becomes obvious when editor Johnny Truant warns, "For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how."

The secret, of course, is in Danielewski's pace-and-leading of the human nervous system through manipulating symbols. The result Readers had bipolar reactions to House of Leaves: they either loved or loathed the book. Danielewski has hopefully created a space so that experimentalists like Mark Amerika can finally receive the recognition that they deserve.

Super-Cannes
J.G. Ballard
London: Flamingo Books, 2000

Free Agent mini-nations that become adrift in moral depravity. High-tech business communes that are torn apart by group infighting. Institutionalized racism, perverse sexuality and random violence.

These are Ballard's targets in Super-Cannes, a powerful novel that is an extension of the themes explored in Cocaine Nights (London: Flamingo, 1996), and that alludes to the barricaded apartments in High-Rise (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975).

Ballard's novel is set in Eden-Olympia, "a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future . . . an ideas laboratory for the new millennium," reportedly based on Sophia Antipolis, a French science park.

The park's resident psychologist, Wilder Penrose, voices Ballard's concerns about the erosion of personal morality by the speed of transnational capitalism. "A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us 'buying'? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world."

In a provocative interview with Spike Magazine's Chris Hall, Ballard observed that the decline of religious belief and the end of many political ideologies, together with the explosion of the Internet and consumerism, has created a social climate of receptiveness to benign psychopathologies.