Given my education, my more academic interests include reading and writing creative non-fiction for personal, commercial, and artistic purposes. Given my decades-long study of the life and work of Hunter S. Thompson, I unabashedly refer to myself as a member of the "Gonzo Community." Recently, I even made a mecca to the author's childhood home of Louisville, KY. While I am no longer an acolyte of Thompson's lifestyle choices, I continue to follow the philosophy of The Gonzo Way. My literary hero took his own life while I was in graduate school.
Hunter S. Thompson was suffering from chronic, trauma-induced, orthopedic pain very similar to my own when he shot himself. At the time, I was deep into my study of his writing and editing methodologies. I was trying to apply the defined and identifiable characteristics of his "gonzo" style to different styles and genres of writing. Arguably, I was attempting to unnecessarily legitimize the author's work to my "less gonzo" peers. I was working to keep myself from following Thompson's self-destructive path. In complete transparency, for some time, my primary field of interest was self-preservation through my education.
Over a decade after Thompson's death, I find myself in an unexpected career as an educator. Not surprisingly, I remain academically gonzo. I am discovering new educational, academic, and pedagogical applications for those literary, theoretical, and esoteric ideas I developed in graduate school and through personal experience. Through this personal and academic evolution, I have created a "Dr. Seuss Literary Criticism" methodology. For the five years I have worked on this project, I have been introduced to a world of teaching techniques, models, and philosophies that have become my new gonzo laboratory. While continuing to grow my interests in reading and writing non-fiction in this now familiar educational milieu, my personal interests and activities in creative non-fiction and gonzo literature have evolved into the development, eventual publication, adapting, and publicizing my "Dr. Seuss Literary Criticism" methodology. Now, my primary interest has become less about self-preservation and more about others' educations.
Defining the Literary "Box" While Discovering Its Contents and What Lies Outside the Literary "Box"
... Jesus! What's happening in this world? What indeed? The bag-boy grinned. The desk clerk grinned. And the cop crowd eyed me nervously. They had just been blown off the track by a style of freak they'd never seen before. I left them there to ponder it, fuming and bitching at the gates of some castle they would never enter.—Hunter S. Thompson (Thompson, A. 17)
~~~
In 2007, when questioned by my thesis director about the creative choices made to switch narrative voice, genre, and motif multiple times in the presentation of my thesis memoir, I responded, "I was attempting to step outside the box of typical memoirs—like Barthes."
"Unlike Roland Barthes, I don't think you know where the [expletive] box is, Rader," commented texts and technology theorist Dr. Mauer.
His words came early in defense of my Master of Fine Arts thesis. The remaining two-plus hours of my afternoon were spent on the description and almost legal defense of my memoir—Nay, my life! In response to Dr. Mauer, I proceeded to explain to my thesis committee where "the box" was, what was in said "box," and the unique way I view those contents.
I wasn't aware of the philosophical metamorphosis I was undergoing at the time. I certainly wasn't aware of the impact the conversational exchange would have on the teaching philosophy I would come to realize almost a decade later.
As a latch-key kid growing up in the 70s and 80s, I have always been a voracious reader. Like Hunter, much of my youth was spent in a small-town library. I learned early in life how literature could be a portal to the world outside of Umatilla, FL. It is a commonly known axiom that "strong writers tend to active readers." As I grew older, I came to discover if I could read and write well, there would be more and more significant opportunities made available to me.
While not yet considering a "teaching philosophy," the personal mantra of, "Read well. Write well. Go far," would afford me professional and personal experiences that kid in the Umatilla trailer park could only read about.
I had embraced elements of a gonzo philosophy decades before I set foot in a classroom as the teacher. Arguably, my embrace of the more psychedelic and legally dubious elements of Hunter S. Thompson's philosophy may have led to my Near Death Experience (NDE) in 1999. It would be in the years following my NDE, during my subsequent rehabilitation, reconstruction, and education, I had bought the ticket and taken the ride. I had been to the edge, just like Thompson preached. Ironically, it would be how I would recover from my NDE which would make me even more gonzo.
I would come to embrace the lesser-known, less bombastic, more academic elements of Dr. Thompson's gonzo philosophy. Gonzo is not just about drug-fueled rants, fast cars, and guns. Ironically, there is a great deal of craft and preparation in a gonzo narrative to make it appear so spontaneous and stream-of-consciousness. Through my academic study of Thompson's work, I would discover the secret to gonzo philosophy—improvisation actually means secret preparation. In retrospect, this idea almost seems like the natural evolution of the personal literacy philosophy of my youth since I began teaching while in grad school. This revelation would immediately affect my nascent teaching philosophy.
Graduate school not only taught me more about my favorite author and his methods, but I was also exposed to the worlds of hermeneutics, semiotics, phenomenology, and text deconstruction, but it also provided me with my earliest teaching experience. As I was learning about Barthes and Derrida while taking deep dives into Nietzsche and Kafka, I was also being exposed to a more ethnically diverse population of authors and poets like Hughes, Packer, Neruda, Marquez et al. Once again in my life, literature was introducing me to new people, places, and, most importantly, ideas. As I began to embrace greater diversity in my personal and literary lives, I recognized and addressed a need for greater diversity in my teaching curricula.
My graduate education had provided me with the more esoteric tools to enrich my relationship with literature, but how would I translate my synthesis into a unique educational experience for my students? It is this conundrum that leads back to my opening quote from Hunter S. Thompson and its description as a metaphor for my teaching philosophy.
~~~
Living with chronic, sometimes crippling, pain, one of my most significant personal challenges is not to approach all my relationships phenomenologically. It is the unconscious tendency to view and discuss "conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first-person point of view," that enables and partially defines my teaching philosophy (Smith). Similarly, one of the defining characteristics of Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo journalism is the author's insertion of themselves into the narrative (Thompson, H.), a habit I encourage in my students as
I introduce them to literary criticism. And, my students and I afforded these opportunities thanks to Roland Barthes placing the importance of the language over the intent of the author (Howard 2).
Given that literary authority, I contemplate the theme and message of my opening quote almost daily with a similar intensity and seriousness with which Jules Winnfield examines Ezekial 25:17 in the diner of Pulp Fiction. Am I the grinning bagboy looking to put everything in its proper place? Am I the grinning desk clerk looking to complete some sort of transactional relationship? Or, am I the crowd-eyeing cop looking to maintain order? Many of my family, co-workers, and friends might argue I am a style of freak they have never seen before. I would argue I am the antithesis of the narrator in the gonzo snapshot, and that fact best encapsulates my nearly 20 years-in-the-making, teaching philosophy.
I may very well be a style of freak my students have never seen before entering my classroom. I recognize my students as being as diverse crowd as the bagboy, desk clerk, and the policeman. In what may be my defining gonzo characteristic, I have flown in the face of Thompson's gonzo actions. Instead of choosing to leave people "standing and fuming at the gates of some castle they would never enter," I have opted to help: the desk clerk realize not all relationships are transactional; the bagboy understand how things are unpacked just well as they are packaged; and the cop, perhaps, that law and order isn't always altruistic (Thompson, A. 17). This realization, and many others, can be achieved through improved reading and writing skills. I have opted to teach people how to gain entrance to Thompson's "castle," and I have discovered, like myself, it is not that far "out of the box."
Howard, Richard, trans. "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes. UbuWeb. 2011. http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes. Accessed 01 November 2019.
Smith, David Woodruff. "Phenomenology." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 16 December. 2013, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/. Accessed 01 November 2019.
Thompson, Anita. The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Fulcrum Publishing, 2007.
Thompson, Hunter S. The Great Shark Hunt: Fear and Loathing on the '72 Campaign Trail. Penguin Press, 1990.
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