The Coast Watcher

It’s not hard for me to recall my life as a college freshman. When I was a young and impressionable writer, I fell under the spell of Hunter S. Thompson.

It was the early 1970s and after reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and his presidential campaign coverage in Rolling Stone, I became a committed fan.

I worked for a small daily newspaper in the Midwest then, and we passed around the newsroom a tattered and disintegrating Fear and Loathing paperback and spoke of it as Holy Writ.

I once tried to write like him. I went to Naked City, Indiana, one of the Midwest’s largest nudist colonies, to cover the Mister and Miss Nude America contests.

It was a disturbing and weird day, ripe for the gonzo-journalism treatment, with pantsless grannies and nudist master sergeants wearing of the voyeuristic mobs that came to watch strippers strut and body builders romp naked.

But after two long Saturdays struggling with the story, I came to this important conclusion: only one person could write like Hunter S. Thompson. And it wasn’t me.

As I said, I was young (17) and impressionable. I’m glad I figured that out then, rather than wasting a few years of this short life imitating someone else.

Since becoming a teacher, I’ve faced the same problem from the other side of the table. Young people, enamored of Thompson (or Vonnegut or Foster Wallace or Didion . . . fill in the blank) say they want to write like their hero. “You want to write gonzo?” I ask the Thompson fans. “Sure, go right ahead.” When they fail miserably, I tell them, “See, only one person could write like that and he’s dead.” Pause. “But only one person can write like you.”

Hunter S. Thompson may be the best friend a writing teacher can have. He gives us an example of writing with wit, grace and a unique style. And those who try to imitate that style soon learn how much work went into creation of those masterpieces of non-fiction writing. Through trying and failing to write gonzo, students learn how to unmark their own (pardon the redundancy) style.
So don’t write gonzo. Write what you write.

In another context and speaking of another great artist, Johnny Cash once wrote this:

There are those who do not imitate,
Who cannot imitate
But then there are those who emulate
At times, to expand further the light
Of an original glow.
Knowing that to imitate the living
Is mockery
And to imitate the dead
Is robbery

There are those
Who are beings complete unto themselves
Whole, undaunted, — a source
As leaves of grass, as stars
As mountains, alike, alike, alike,
Yet unalike
Each is complete and contained
And as each unalike star shines
Each ray of light is forever gone
To leave way for a new ray

Johnny was writing about Bob Dylan for the liner notes for , but these words might just as well have been written about Hunter.

(This was written at the request of Irish writer Martin Flynn, who maintains the site www.hstbooks.org. Check it out.)

Unless you’re a police officer, you can only imagine what it’s like having a partner.

We see it portrayed in books and films, and I gather it’s something like a marriage. So when you’re starting out together – when you get assigned a new partner – it’s sort of like an arranged marriage. There’s a sniffing period, a getting-to-know-you time, and then finally, there’s a bond formed.

Or not. Sometimes it doesn’t work out.

And that’s one of the reasons we love crime fiction . . . detective novels . . . police procedurals. By any name, they always smell as sweet. We’ve been in love with these books since Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. These books are not just about bad guys and good guys. They’re also about people and relationships and how human beings learn to love each other, or hate each other.

This is particularly good time for those of us who love these books. Go to your favorite local bookstore and these two will be on the front table, inviting you to read them:

• Hollywood Moon (Little, Brown, $26.99) by Joseph Wambaugh
• Nine Dragons (Little, Brown, $27.99) by Michael Connelly

Wambaugh did much to invent the modern version of this kind of novel and Connelly is one of the form’s greatest practitioners, a worthy inheritor of the traditions and grace of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Considering the terrible cold we’ve suffered lately, I advise you to cuddle up with these books. (Trust me. I’m a doctor.)

Let’s talk about Wambaugh first. Hollywood Moon is the third installment in his series on Hollywood Station, but the first two are not required reading before picking up the latest book. Though the books share the same cast of characters – including surfer cops Flotsam and Jetsam and frustrated actor Hollywood Nate – it doesn’t matter in what order they are read.

CONNELLY

These novels all have a narrative arc, but the stories are told as a series of vignettes, glimpses into the alternating monotony and frenzy that is police life. During the sniffing period, two new partners sit side by side and tell each other their resumes. One turns to her partner and says, “I love your stories.”

And that’s how we feel about Wambaugh. He is so comfortable with the form that his books appear to be effortless, the supreme compliment for a writer. He makes it look easy, which means it was anything but. Wambaugh’s been publishing great crime fiction for 40 years now and seems to be peaking – in my view, at least – with the Hollywood series. And that’s something, considering he wrote The Choirboys and The Blue Knight. (Wambaugh is also gifted with non-fiction. Check out The Onion Field sometime.)

We could also say that Connelly is at some kind of peak, but we seem to say that with every new book. Like Wambaugh, he explores the mean streets of LA, where he worked for a decade as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Times. (Connelly is a Floridian, however, and had the good sense to come back home a decade ago. He lives in the Tampa Bay area.)Connelly’s been publishing for nearly 20 years now.

He started at a high level with The Black Echo and just kept soaring. His usual protagonist has been police detective Harry Bosch, a modern equivalent of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Connelly seems to take us deeper into Bosch’s soul with each new book and despite the action that propels readers through Nine Dragons – and there are at least three oh my God! moments – it’s also a great character study. We’ve known Harry for two decades, but each time Connelly gives us a Bosch novel, we find out exactly how complex this guy is.

Don’t get the idea, though, that it’s just some meditation on a man’s character and commitment. It is that, but it also features murders, kidnappings, flights to Hong Kong, and a battle with a gun-shy partner.

Connelly’s developed several other continuing characters. Mickey Haller (from The Lincoln Lawyer) was center stage for The Brass Verdict 18 months back and reporter Jack McEvoy (from The Poet) made a return appearance last year in Connelly’s masterful Scarecrow. Bosch made cameo appearances in those books – we love the cast of characters floating between his novels – but this is the first sustained look at Bosch in a couple of years.

We feel greedy, but the character is so fascinating that we always want more. Critics love Connelly’s books, but there was an odd rap on him in the New York Times last year: these books are great, the critic said, but they’re coming too fast and furious.

Huh? What the hell is wrong with that? This is one good thing of which we can’t get enough

‘Tis the season for many things, and I bet one of them is over-eating.

If you’re going to be a glutton, do it right – and get some food for thought while you’re at it.  Feast on some great food books.

Some are cookbooks and some are books about food. Stay tuned to the end of this column and you will get a recipe for a dish that will change the world as we know it. It is my holiday gift to you.

As a teacher, I get all kinds of excuses. My favorite one was “I couldn’t make it to class because a transmission fell on my head.” And it was true.

I thought I’d have to use the classic dog-ate-my-review-copy excuse when my pooch wolfed down most of the UPS parcel containing Love Soup (W.W. Norton, $22.95) by Anna Thomas.

In vegetarian cookbook circles, Anna Thomas is the Shakespeare of the form.  EvenAlanis Morissette, who once played God in a movie, hangs with Thomas. Here’s an online cooking experience courtesy of the Huffington Post.

But as an animal-flesh-eating swine, I didn’t see myself as the ideal person to review the book, since I’m not part of the target audience. So I gave the gnawed-up copy to my friendAngela, a vegetarian whose commitment is beyond reproach. The publisher kindly provided me with a non-chewed copy and I passed that on to Angela as well, so she could work on the recipes she missed because the dog ate them.

I have nothing but praise to report from the Bill’s Book Blog test kitchen. Angela is a tough, discriminating audience, but she thinks Love Soup is one of the best cookbooks she’s used. Angela is a gourmet and an engineer, so you know her endorsement means a lot. Weight Watchers Inc. has also given Love Soup its seal of approval.

As Dear Ol’ Mom used to say, “If you can read, you can cook.” Even those of you who are intuitivelittle-of-this-little-of-that cooks might enjoy trying something new.

One of my favorite smells in the world is baking bread, so I was naturally attracted to My Bread (W.W. Norton, $29.95) byJim Lahey.  I’m proud of my cooking (don’t forget the life-altering recipe at the end of this column), but have done little baking, other than the occasional birthday cake. This book has been fun to mess with because there are so many things to try – carrot bread, apple bread, beer bread – that this can get you through the winter with a different recipe a day. No reruns.

My Bread is a selection of the Gourmet Cookbook Club and it reminds me of two things – how sad it is that Gourmet no longer exists as a magazine (it’s going to stay around and some sort of Internet “brand”) and that its great editor, Ruth Reichel, wrote a wonderful memoir of life in the world of food,Garlic and Sapphires (Penguin, $16). I once did a piece on Memphis barbecue that required me to eat ribs four meals a day for four days in a row. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Reichel’s book is hilarious with a lot of good inside baseball. It’s a good stocking stuffer for the foodie in your life.

If you have a big-ass stocking, I suggest stuffing it with Secret Ingredients (The Modern Library, $18), David Remnick’s wonderful, wonderful (think Johnny Mathis) collection of food writing fromThe New Yorker.

This contains classics of gastronomical journalism, including Calvin Trillin’s  history of the Buffalo chicken wing and John McPhee’s journeys with Euell Gibbons to find something to eat in the forest. My favorite is “A Really Big Lunch,” Jim Harrison ’s tale of mid-day gluttony.

This book is a feast of good stories. Here are just a few contributors: Woody Allen, Nora Ephron, John Cheever, M.F.K. Fisher, S.J. Perelman, Steve Martin, Malcolm Gladwell, A.J. Liebling, Don DeLillo, Susan Orlean, and so many others.

And don’t forget the cartoons. Some of them date from the magazine’s James Thurber and E.B. White era. All are hilarious.

Secret Ingredients is not just the best book about food I’ve ever seen; it’s also a model anthology. It’s still available in hardcover, but depending on budget, this Modern Library paperback might be the wisest $16 you spend this holiday season.

Another good food book without recipes is The Gastronomy of Marriage (Random House,  $15) byMichelle Maisto. I’ve always thought it would be interesting to write an autobiography through the prism of cars that we’ve owned.

This looks at life and marriage through a series of meal memoirs as a couple falls in love across the dining table, gets married and enjoys the musical feast of a shared life.

A classic “food book” (and much more) for all Floridians: Oranges (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $14) byJohn McPhee.

And when the holidays are over, You: On a Diet (The Free Press, $25) by Michael Roizen andMehmet Oz, with the invaluable collaboration of my talented University of Florida colleague Ted Spiker.

OK, as promised (drum roll!), my holiday gift to you:

My Nuclear Green-Bean Casserole

Get four big-ass cans of green beans. Get the regular American cut. Squared off. None of this tapered-off French-cut shit. Don’t even think about fresh beans. They’d be wasted.

You will also need about two mahonga cans of fried onions, two curds of sour cream, 4-6 cans of cream of mushroom soup (depends on your taste) and about six cups of sprinkle cheese. (I suggest medium, but if you want it sharp, suit yourself.)

Set aside one of those cans of onions. Drain the green beans and throw the rest of the crap into a disposable aluminum pan. Trust me: You don’t want to cook this bitch in anything you’re going to have to clean.

So mess the stuff up. Use a wooden spoon and poke that shit all around together. Get it together in a mixture the approximate shade of the wall paint in military housing, circa 1964. Try to avoid surprising pockets of sour cream or cheese here and there. Mix it up good. To make sure that you spend the appropriate amount of time mixing this shit, allow yourself to consume one beer as you mix. DO NOT SLAM THE BEER. Take your time. Sip it. So no Mad Dog 64 for this. Needs to be a sipping beer, like Bass Ale. If you spill a bit into the casserole dish, don’t freak. It adds to the flavor.

Smooth it out. Use the back of the wooden spoon like a paint brush. The casserole dish is now your palette. Go all Van Gogh on the motherfucker.

Once this is done, spread the last can of fried onions on top. Bake it at 350 degrees for an hour, or until you start to smell the onions burning. A few burned onions are OK, but it’d suck if you had a kitchen fire on account of this. I disavow all knowledge of this recipe in case of lawsuits.

This will change your life.

Happy holidays and bon appetit, dudes and dudettes!

It’s an adage about writing: “See the war through the eye of the single soldier.”

I use that line when I talk to students about storytelling. Great writers draw us in to big issues by telling the story through one person’s eyes.

As E.B. White used to say, “Don’t write about Man. Write about a man.”

Few writers did this better than Ernie Pyle, but even the great ones have to do a lot of on-the-job training.

Pyle became American’s most beloved correspondent in the Second World War. He was a college dropout who later drove around the country with his wife, writing columns about all of the interesting people he met on the nation’s blue highways.

However, Mrs. Pyle did not enjoy those trips and had to be institutionalized. That was in 1940 and partly to escape the hell of his personal life, Pyle went to Europe, arriving just before the Battle of Britain in 1940.

In one of his first dispatches to American readers — he wrote for the Scripps Newspapers, and his columns got nationwide play — Pyle told about going down into the subway stations (the “tube,” as the Brits called it), and seeing families sprawled on the tiles, huddled in fear of the explosions above. As he beholds the scene, Pyle speaks in only vague terms and at one point, if memory serves, he actually writes, “Oh, the humanity!”

Even masters were once apprentices. That dispatch wasn’t typical of Pyle. Soon he attached himself to a military division and followed them through training in England, through deployment to Africa and finally to the invasion of Europe. He said he wrote from “the worm’s eye view,” and he eloquently told the stories of the common infantry soldiers, the “dogfaces,” who fought that war. Along the way, in 750-word dispatches, he created a literature of war reporting.

Read his articles today (“The Story of Captain Waskow” is perhaps his most widely anthologized) and they provide a model of literary journalism. It’s amazing to think that three or four times a week, he could find and write such great stories.

But he did, all because of that seeing-the-war-through-the-eye-of-the-single-soldier stuff.

Today, we’d call that approach a no-brainer. But what’s funny — funny, as in tragic — is that so few writers have followed the Pyle example.

Writing about the Vietnam War, both John Sack (in M) and Michael Herr (in Dispatches) matched Pyle in storytelling power and precision. Now and then I have my students read Herr’s Dispatches. “It’s giving me a headache,” they whine. I just smile. “That’s the idea,” I say.

Herr follows the Faulknerian approach to punctuation, rarely using commas, so readers never have a moment of rest. He’s constantly filling your head with Hendrix and the Doors and he seems obsessed with smells, especially the body odor of others. In short, he engages all of your senses. He tries to make the reader feel what it feels like to be in the middle of war.

You read Herr or Sack or Pyle and you don’t need a writer to tell you how to feel. You read it, you shut your eyes and you say, “Christ… the humanity.”

I tell you all this because few people have written more eloquently about war than Pyle, Sack and Herr.

And David Finkel.

Add his name to that short list. Finkel is a graduate of the University of Florida, a reporter who built his portfolio at the St. Petersburg Times before heading to the Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Middle East.

Now he has published The Good Soldiers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), the best book on war in a quarter century.

The daily reporting on the War on Terror, wherever it’s been fought — in Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere — is a litany of faceless numbers, body bags, roadside bombs and an enemy for whom death is not a fear but a reward.

Scan the headlines, read a couple of paragraphs, and then most people probably shake their heads and turn to the sports section.

Finkel puts a face on this war, and you can’t turn away from it. To write The Good Soldiers (just named one of the 10 best books of 2009 by the New York Times), he spent a year at Baghdad’s Camp Rustamiyah. He saw the war from the worm’s-eye view, and that was on a good day. The book contains vivid, in-your-face accounts about the day-to-day life of the kids in the army, and what they deal with. And many of them are kids. Last year, he mowed your lawn. This year, he takes his life into his hands every time he gets in his Humvee.

One of the most telling early scenes in The Good Soldiers comes when Battalion 2-16 ends up taking over an abandoned building and must deal with the body of the decapitated enemy soldier floating in the open cesspool out of the new building that is now “home” to the soldiers. It’s revolting, stomach-turning and heart-breaking all at once. Though he was the enemy, and loathsome though it will be to retrieve the body, the soldiers decide that every one of God’s creatures deserves a burial.

Vivid, as I say. When the 2-16 suffers its first death — a young soldier named Jay Cajimat is incinerated in a roadside bombing, his hands and feet seared off — we feel the real loss behind those numbers we read in the newspapers every day.

“I’ve never come across a story with the potential of this one,” Finkel told a fellow journalist. “It’s pretty horrible there. There’s never a pure, easy moment. You have to be alert all the time — even when there’s nothing going on, the smart thing to do is to always anticipate.”

Finkel writes with the voice of authority. In The Good Soldiers, the “surge” that we read about becomes real.

The soldiers of the 2-16 and Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlaurich were part of that effort, and Finkel marched with them.

“I learned that I can stick with a story for a year,” Finkel said. “It’s the most essential story of my lifetime.”

We live in a very weird world. If you’re in front of me in line at Publix and I commit the offense of talking to you (“Hey, that wheat germ looks right tasty”), you’re likely to call the cops.

But if I go online and friend you on Facebook, you’ll tell me all about yourself – what movies you like, what turns you on, what music is on your iPod. I  can learn your e-mail name (“GatorBootyGal”) and, if I’m lucky, see pictures of you puking your guts out  during some ill-advised bar crawl.

It’s strange not only what we share but how compulsive we have become about sharing. And it goes beyond sharing. In person, we can be private, almost secretive. Behind one of these keyboards, we’re eager to tell you our most intimate secrets.

Maybe this is driven by loneliness. Maybe it’s the modern way we’ve come to deal with lives of quiet desperation. Part of it might have to do with the delirious pursuit of fame. People want to become famous not by actually doing anything noteworthy. They just want to be famous, as if fame is a birthright.

This has been much on my mind lately because of The Peep Diaries (City Lights Books, $17.95) by Hal Niedzviecki (above). This book has preoccupied me since it came out in the summer and I’m wondering if it might end up being one of those prescient, influential books like David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd.

As everyone else starts the December look back at the year, this is my dark-horse nominee for most significant book of 2009.

Niedzviecki looks around at all elements of what he calls Peep Culture. We have self-obsessed bloggers pontificating into the night. We have video diarists masturbating for strangers on Webcams. We have millions of  people willing to humiliate  themselves before other millions for a chance to be on reality television.

Just since the book was published, we’ve had masterpieces of assholery to further underscore Niedzviecki’s points – the Colorado morons with the balloon-boy son and the egocentric douchebags who crashed a White House state dinner. In both of those cases, all they wanted was undeserved fame.

Of course, I’d feel differently about them if they could cure cancer or feed the hungry. Then I’d have their pictures tattooed on my ass. But for now, they are publicity seeking imbeciles.

Midway through the book, Niedzviecki gives a case history of a family that did one of those wife-swap TV shows. The family was Jewish, lived in the country on a farm with seven horses, and all had a pretty good sense of humor. They were to swap wives with an urban family. They figured the entertainment would be in the city-and-country culture clash.

Instead, the television producers clearly misrepresented both families. Scenes were taken out of context and a religious conflict was invented. The whole week was falsified . . . invented . . . and yet was called “reality television.”

How did the Jewish family feel when the mother was portrayed as intolerant of her adopted Christian family?

They didn’t care. They just liked the rock-star treatment they got from the network and the flicker of fame that came with their brief moment in the sun. Truth and humiliation didn’t matter. Fame did.

Of course, beyond all of these factors, Niedzviecki recognizes the insidious uses of this knowledge we so freely divulge and the hundreds of breaches of privacy we endure each day.

The Peep Diaries is an important, deeply thoughtful book that deserves a wide audience.

Our measuring stick for suspense is Alfred Hitchcock. No doubt the late English filmmaker altered the bathing habits of millions with Psycho (I know that I gave up showers for baths for a year after seeing it) and because of The Birds, we don’t look at our fine, feathered friends in quite the same way.

Still, great as those films are, the best Hitchcock films were the ones that followed the pattern of the innocent-person-caught-in-a-nightmare.

Think North by Northwest, where Cary Grant is mistaken for a spy. Or The Wrong Man, when Henry Fonda is jailed for a crime he didn’t commit. Or Strangers on a Train, when a chance encounter with nutty Robert Walker sets a murder into motion.

It’s that sweaty-palmed paranoia, in which real fear rises from the vapor and grips you around the throat. That, to me, is the source of the modifier “Hitchcockian.”

So when I tell you that Liz Balmaseda’s new book Sweet Mary (Atria Books, $24.95) is a Hitchcockian thriller, think that sort of story.

Because the heroine of the book, Dulce Maria Guevera, is just that: an innocent caught up in a horrible case of mistaken identity. Or maybe not.

Balmaseda keeps you guessing.

As a journalist, Balmaseda was all about answers, Any good reporter or columnist knows that the point of journalist is to serve the public . . . to give people what they need to know . . . to answer questions, not ask them.

She was so good at the job she won a Pulitzer Prize for stories about immigration and shared a second Pulitzer with her Miami Herald colleagues for the Elian Gonzalez story.

She’s a product of the same newsroom that gave the world such gifted writers as Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, Edna Buchanan and Fabiola Santiago.

So you might think that her first novel might be about a journalist or at least involve journalism in some way.

Nope.

The heroine here, Mary, is a real-estate agent. In fact, the novel opens with a long scene showing Mary at work. She’s immediately likeable, interesting, vivacious, a single mother, trying to sell a huge and decrepit house to a wealthy out-of-towner. She’s someone we want to know.

Of course, there are allusions to problems: the ex-husband, the mother and father who won’t let her irresponsible little brother grow up (he’s a doltish adult now), and her inability to refuse to help when asked. This Mary – she has a big heart.

And then the SWAT team shows up at the door.

Mary is hauled to jail and her son Max is taken by the Department of Children and Families. In a nightmare of mistakes and ineptitude, Mary is charged with being a drug smuggler.

It’s obviously a mistake, but proving she is not the woman in question is hard. There are too many accidents of similiarity

When the SWAT team comes knocking, Mary’s support system is gone. Her parents are off on a cruise and her worthless little brother is incapable of help. Luckily, Mary has a friend who hooks her up with a high-powered attorney.

Things are getting back on track. Mary’s bigtime lawyer is able to sell this as a case of mistaken identify. But by then, the son is with Mary’s ex-husband and his brittle blonde wife and wresting him back is the real problem. After all, Mary had been accused to being a drug smuggler and where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

It’s a nightmare, a true Hitchcockian nightmare. And just when you think this will turn into some revenge fantasy, with Mary going all Rambo on the ass of some pencil pusher in a DCF office, Balamseda throws us another curve.

Gee, maybe Mary isn’t as innocent as she seems.

With a sudden plot turn, we begin to doubt a lot of what we think we know about Mary. Again we’re reminded that people can be total, unpredictable ciphers.

Many skilled journalists bobble the ball when they turn to writing fiction. But Balmaseda balances this story deftly.

She left the Herald and has been working as a Palm Beach Post columnist. Before Sweet Mary, she’s done a couple of as-told-to books, but we hope with this excellent book, she will begin producing novels at a Hiaasen-like rate.

And by the way, check out her Web site, www.lizbalmaseda.com. She has a recipe for Sweet Mary’s official drink, the Mango Sour Happy Hour.

As a public service, we present the recipe below:

§ 1 ½ ounce rum (Bacardi Gold recommended)

§ 2 oz fresh mango puree

§ ½ oz of sour mix

§ ½ oz fresh lime juice

Serve frozen or over crushed

This interview with Irish writer Martin Flynn was conducted for Beatscene magazine. It appears on Flynn’s Web site, http://hstbooks.org.)

(This was written at the request of Martin Flynn, proprietor of the site Hunter S. Thompson Books http://hstbooks.org. Martin asked me to write about where Hunter S. Thompson stopped and Raoul Duke began. Please check Martin’s site for other musings on the topic.)

I was a reporter and anyone who’s worked in that lonely trade knows the frustration. You know a story. You know what needs to be said. You just can’t find anyone to say it.

You can’t make up a quote. Given the rules of journalism, you can’t do that shit. So you struggle and sometimes your story falls short.

However, in Gonzo journalism the rules – such as they are – are quite different.

Raoul Duke began appearing in Hunter S. Thompson’s writing back in the days when he was the sports editor of the Command Courier, the official newspaper of Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. It was the late fifties and when Hunter couldn’t find a bystander or a source or an expert to say what he wanted, he quoted “Raoul Duke.”

Hunter, of course, was Raoul Duke.

Looking back on Hunter’s stories, you see quotes from people Duke and Bloor and Squane, and they are all Hunter Thompson. He invented these people to say the things that needed to be said. It turned parts of his journalism into fiction, but he was fond of reminding his readers that there was often greater truth to be found in fiction.

Raoul Duke has a special place in this pantheon on phantoms. It was the name Hunter plucked from his past to use as his nom de plume when he wrote “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” for Rolling Stone. The work was serialized as the work of Duke in two issues in November 1971. Hard to believe that that magnificent bit of prose is nearly forty years old.

As a young reader, I was confused. Who was this Duke guy and why did he have his messages sent – as reported midway through one of the episodes – care of someone named Hunter S. Thompson?

The confusion continued with regard to Duke and Hunter. Where did one stop and the other begin?

All these years later, we know much more about Hunter and Duke and Las Vegas. Hunter was compulsive about documenting his life, in photographs and on tape. Now that selections from his personal tape recordings have been made available to the public – in a handsome boxed set edition called The Gonzo Tapes – it’s possible to hear his dictated observations and comments as he lives the experience that became “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

He certainly doesn’t sound like a foaming-at-the-mouth madman running amuck in Las Vegas. If anything, he is the opposite – lucid, inquisitive, thoughtful, observant.
But in the writing, he took himself and amped up the madness lurking in his brain. And that’s when Duke emerged.

What happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas. But Hunter took those events – and his personality – and heightened the reality. He once told me, “I warped a few things. It was an incredible feat of balance more than literature.” When published in book form, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was credited to “Hunter S. Thompson,” not Raoul Duke.

Problem was, readers thought the exaggerated caricature called Raoul Duke was Hunter S. Thompson. Though they shared the same DNA, they were not identical twins.

The Duke caricature followed him the rest of his life. It was a role that the real man could easily adopt and play, pleasing his fans. On signal, he could perform as Duke. But he was not the same without an audience.

And so he was caught in the duality. He had created the Duke character, one of the great literary inventions of his time. It was a brilliant achievement. And it was also a burden. It might have been a trap. If he cast off the Duke persona, would his readers follow him? Or would it be like slitting the throat of the golden goose?

It was a problem he wrestled with, apparently without resolution, until the end of his life.

Every now and then in class, I mention “the library” and look out to see rows of blank faces. Time to explain myself again.

“It’s like the Internet, only it’s printed out,” I tell my students. “It’s this big building across campus . . . surely you’ve seen it? Has a million or so books?”

Blank stares again. “Books! You know, sort of like a blog that’s been printed out?”

There are a couple of Florida writers, longtime bloggers, whose work has now been preserved the old fashioned way: in books. It’s probably not much different than the old days when writers serialized their work in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s.

But for a semi-old fashioned guy like me, it’s so much handier – and more handsome – to tote around books, rather than carrying a laptop. Because this is the kind of writing you want to read aloud to friends and a book is a lot easier than saying, “Hey, hang on. As soon as I open my laptop and link to the network and type in the URL, I got some really funny shit for you.”

In this case, the really funny shit comes from two Florida writers, both in their early 40s: Lance Carbuncle from Tampa and Patrick Hughes (below) from Gainesville.

Let’s start with Hughes, because his wonderful book, Diary of Indignities (MPress Books, $14.95) has been out for some time.

It’s basically his life story, from his blog, Bad News Hughes. He’s since put that blog into hibernation and now maintains The Domesticated Shithead. The change reflects Hughes’s life, so hisDiary is sort of like Pat Hughes: The Early Years. Indeed, from the cover —  a disturbing photobooth portrait of Hughes at 8 (an estimate) — we see the whole catastrophe of his life laid bare.

So we march through the intertwined lives of a bunch of funseekers who happen to be linked by law and thinning genses. It’s such a great, endearingly odd family that we wonder why HBO hasn’t picked up the option for a series. The Hughes family kicks the piss out of those wimpy “True Blood” vampires. The intricate relationships make the polygamous clan of “Big Love” look like exiles from Mayberry. And these people are so dark, they make the funeral-home Fisher family of “Six Feet Under”  into “Leave it to Beaver” innocents. These people are seriously weird.

Hughes’s gift has always been in finding the most uncomfortable life moments and writing about them, in cringing detail — in painfully honest, soul-searching, microscopic detail.

Despite that, he’s funny. Whether writing about another drunken Jell-O shot Christmas, the intra-family squabbles that dwarf the Middle East political negotiations, or the minutiae of his rectal problems, Hughes is always funny. I’ve been reading him for 20 years, since he was a college newspaper columnist, and his work never fails to entertain.

As I said, Diary of Indignities has been out for a while and we can hope that something is in the works for his Domesticated Shithead writings – you know, another one of this things like a blog, only printed out.

Lance Carbuncle developed a following with his blog and produced Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed (self-published, $12.50) in 2007. He’s followed that with his new novel, Grundish and Askew (Vicious Books, $12.50).

Like Hughes, Carbuncle has a strong and untempered voice. Smashed, Squashed, Etc. was told largely from a dog’s point of view, but Grundish and Askew is the story of a couple of Florida ne’er-do-wells on the run. In fact, if the Florida Ne’er-Do-Well Association has its way, a cease and desist order wil be issued against Carbuncle. These losers defame the good name of those hard-working ne’er-do-wells out there.

Think of those grungy, maggoty knuckle-dragging villains in Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey novels. Those morons are fucking Osmond family teasippers compared to the crew Carbuncle has created.

And then there is this paragraph, which is bound to be quoted in upcoming Chamber of Commerce literature from Bartow, Fla.:

“Florida is sometimes referred to as the nation’s genitals. In the center of the nation’s dong is a largish, ruptured varicose vein known as Polk County. Sitting right smack in the middle of this burst vein is an infected carbuncle, a little pus-filled town by the name of Bartow.”

Both Hughes and Carbuncle used their blogs to find their identities and perfect their voices. That explains why these books are written with such staggering confidence. It’s unlikely we’d find such consistent and toxic points of view in the catalogs of major mainstream publishers.

But maybe things are changing. He’s not from Florida, but we include Atlanta resident Joe Peacock here because his upcoming (November) Mentally Incontinent (Gotham Books, $15) reminds me of the books of Hughes and Carbuncle. Peacock’s voice is another one honed on the Internet and now ready for prime time. Mentally Incontinent is hilarious from start to finish as he deals with a mother who wonders if Peacock and his friend are “you know, gay together” to the thrilling conclusion, when he goes to work for Wal-Mart because, as a future writer, he felt that he needed to “indulge in something truly dark and evil” in the name of that experience all writers yearn to have,

You can have your Dan Brown novels. Give me something fun, original and twisted instead.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to nominate the University Press of Florida for the state’s highest public service award.

After all, the publisher has brought Carl Hiaasen’s two collections of newspaper columns  back into print in handsome trade paperbacks. Check out Kick Ass and Paradise Screwed (both University Press of Florida, $24.95 apiece).

Hiaasen has always said that if he isn’t pissing people off, he isn’t doing his job. Will somebody please give this man a raise?

There’s something in these books to offend just about everybody – particularly morally challenged shitheels ass-raping Florida’s environment and destroying the fragile beauty of this magnificent and wacky state.

And if you don’t fall into that category, Hiaasen will probably still make you pretty mad. He might get you so angry you’ll get out of your chair and do something to stop the ecological and ethical erosion of the Sunshine State.

Lots of people know Hiaasen the novelist.  His marvelous satirical books – Tourist Season, Strip Tease, Nature Girl and Lucky You among them – have sold truckloads of copies. He’s become a monster in young-adult fiction, with Hoot, Flush and Scat. And he is the Patron Saint of Golfers-Gone-To-Seed in his latest nonfiction best-seller, The Downhill Lie.

But a lot of his loyal fans don’t realize that despite his success, Hiaasen keeps his day job as a Miami Herald columnist. This probably saves him a lot of trouble. He doesn’t have to go looking for weirdness to put into his novels; all he has to do is page through the local section of his newspaper.

So he holds onto the newspaper job as a sort of reality check – or, since this is Miami, a surreality check.

These are books for Florida. Unlike his novels,these might not travel well. Hiaasen takes the “local columnist” thing seriously, and these pieces are specific to his beloved and vulnerable home state.

They are also well reported. Again, fans of his novels might not realize it, but Hiaasen was part of the Herald’s investigative team before he became a columnist in 1985. Unlike a lot of snoremonger columnists  — who read the work of real reporters, then ruminate and deign to tell us what it all means — Hiaasen still does his legwork. He doesn’t sit on his can and comment on things he’s only read about. This guy never stopped reporting.

His column isn’t syndicated much out of Florida and Hiaasen seems to have no interest in being a fixture of the Anytown Gazette, like his pal Dave Barry. To go for mass acceptance would mean watering down his message and betraying his audience. The book is dedicated to “all those who care about Florida,” and the profits will benefit the Carl A. Hiaasen Scholarship Fund at his alma mater, the University of Florida College of Journalism and  Communications.

Of course, the columns share with the novels that uncanny ability of Hiaasen’s – to blend the comic and tragic, to horrify readers and make them laugh at the same time.

Kick Ass (the title is drawn from Hiaasen’s self-composed job description) is, among other things, a history of South Florida from the dawn of the Reagan Era to the middle of the Clinton Years. Paradise Screwed picks things up from there.

The columns are freckled with corrupt politicians (a redundancy in Hiaasenland), immoral developers and mouth-breathing geeks who, for example, ignore posted “no swimming” signs on the beaches when the waters are contaminated with feces. “You can almost hear Darwin’s ghost,” Hiaasen writes. “Surely these morons aren’t going swimming in THAT crap! Not with their kids! Not with a warning sign right in front of their face! Wrong, Charlie Baby.”

Hiaasen pokes fun at it all – the inane tourist slogans, the ineffective drug war, the unchecked growth and, of course, the madcap politicians. While watching Cardinals pitcher Joaquin Andujar throw a fit during the 1985 World Series – he chased umpires, foamed at the mouth and destroyed a dugout toilet with a baseball bat, all on live TV – Hiaasen realized he might be the perfect candidate for mayor of Miami: “In no time Andujar would mop up the City Commission,” Hiaasen wrote. “Forget diplomacy – we’re talking a 93-mile-an-hour brushback pitch. It’s not such a bad idea, when you review this year’s crop of political hopefuls, a veritable slag-heap of mediocrity.”

Aw, don’t hold back, Carl. What do you really think of them?

Like Hiaasen’s novels, this book is filled with great one-liners. And, as always, he walks so well that terribly fine line between comedy and tragedy. He horrifies you with his stories of life’s insanities, but he makes you laugh about them too. But unlike his novels, where the weirdnesses are products of imagination, all this stuff actually happened.

This is real; this is journalism. Truth can be stranger than fiction and that’s why fiction can be such a comfort.

(By the way, this entry from Bill McKeen’s Book Blog in Tampa Bay’s Creative Loafing magazine features comments  drawn from my earlier reviews of Kick Ass from the St. Petersburg Times and Communigator magazine.)