The Gonz Twitter Compromise

By BlindChristian

Yesterday, I put out a request for ideas on how Gonz Blinko should behave on Twitter. More than a few people had been confused as to where the fictional Gonz ended and where he strayed into reality.

There's an interesting book of literary criticism called, "The Gang that Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, thompson, Didion and the New Journalism" (author name not remembered but it is available on bookshare.org). It starts with the New York Tribune in the fifties which may have had the greatest writing team in US journalism history. The Trib had Tome Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin and many more who would create the "new" journalism.

This "new" journalism searched for truth and not facts (read Gore Vidal's criticism of John Hersey's "Hiroshima") for an explanation of how facts can ruin truth.

After the Trib went bust, the gang started New York magazine and had most of the Trib gang plus people like Gale Sherry and others. It was in New York magazine where Wolfe would publish his now legendary "Radical Chic" article exposing the limousine liberals for all of their silliness. It was in NY where Thompson would first publish an article about the Hell's Angels which would lead to the really long pieces in The Nation which, in turn, would turn into the book that really launched his career.

Gonz Blinko is mostly based on a cross between Thompson and me. I would blend fact and fiction and add lots of absurd twists as Thompson did throughout his career. This worked pretty well in the blog format as it had enough space to make the absurdity of it all quite obvious (excepting to the truly humor impaired like FS's CEO Lee Hamilton). In the 140 character mode, sliding in and out of fact and fiction is much less obvious. Yesterday, I contemplated killing Twitter Gonz until a friend of mine suggested that we try to recruit other people to Twitter as fictional characters and play around purely in the absurd and silly and fictitious side of our worlds.

We will also look back at Gonz blog posts over history and use the fake names I used to describe companies, Freeman Scientology == Freedom Scientific as seen through the lens of real weird alternative universe play. We have names for real world human inspired characters as well and use them in appropriate context.

So, Gonz Blinko will be posting more absurd, flashback inspired tweets and BlindChristian will actually take the world mostly seriously. Readers should assume Gonz has gone over the top at all times and that BC may have fun now and then but will be far closer to the realm of reality.

Afterward

This transfer from Gonz to BC for real items will take place over the next few days. You can follow Gonz at www.twitter.com/gonz_blinko and BlindChristian at www.twitter.com/BlindChristian.

If you would like to have a fictitious character in the Gonz world, crate one and introduce yourself to Gonz so we know who is real or not as letting us guess may be fun as well. If you want to take on one of the characters already known from the blog, please write to me as they all have certain parameters.

-- End