Carl Hiassen

[mbuttons]

Poor Telebob wrote --- "Who or what is Carl Hiassen [SIC]?"

Poor Carl Hiaasen, nobody ever spells his name right.

South Florida native Carl Hiaasen was/is The Miami Herald's insightful,
witty, acid and politically fearless columnist ... who has also written a
string of adored only-in-South-Florida mysteries.

He's a must-read if you're at all interested in this bizarre place.

love
m-a





 on 11/09/2001 11:08 AM, telebob x at telebob98@hotmail.com wrote:

> 
> http://www.miami.com/herald/content/opinion/columnists/hiaasen/index.htm
> 
>> From: "Wayne Johnson" <cadaobh2@brgnet.com>
>> To: "telebob x" <telebob98@hotmail.com>
>> Subject: RE: Carl Hiassen
>> Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 10:59:08 -0500
>> 
>> Who are what is a Carl Hiassen?  Never heard of him/it?
>> 
>> Wayne
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: austin-ghetto-list-admin@pairlist.net
>> [mailto:austin-ghetto-list-admin@pairlist.net]On Behalf Of telebob x
>> Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2001 8:18 PM
>> To: austin-ghetto-list@pairlist.net
>> Subject: Re: Carl Hiassen
>> 
>> 
>> By Todd Leopold
>> CNN
>> 
>> (CNN) -- A city official known as "Mayor Loco." A con artist who performs
>> plastic surgery on several patients before being unmasked. An extortionist
>> who threatens housepets. A commissioner who sees pornography in a photo of
>> vegetables.
>> 
>> Sound like characters from a Carl Hiassen novel?
>> 
>> Try characters from Carl Hiassen's real life.
>> 
>> These people -- and assorted real estate developers, convicted felons,
>> government officials, Bible thumpers, and theme-park executives, some of
>> whom are difficult to tell apart from the others -- make up the cast of
>> characters in "Paradise Screwed" (Putnam), a collection of Hiassen's Miami
>> Herald columns. Southern California may have a reputation as the flake
>> capital of the United States, but based on Hiassen's work, the swampy
>> flatlands of Florida seems to have oozed past the Golden State when it
>> comes
>> to offering a slough of greed, corruption, chicanery, and flat-out bizarre
>> behavior.
>> 
>> What is it about a state that attracts such a motley crew?
>> 
>> "I can't explain it," the 48-year-old author of "Sick Puppy" and "Strip
>> Tease" says in a phone interview from his home in the Florida Keys. "I
>> think
>> in the old days, the nexus of weirdness ran through Southern California,
>> and
>> to a degree New York City. I think it's changed so that every bizarre story
>> in the country now has a Florida connection. I don't know why, except it
>> must be some inversion of magnetic poles or something. It's very, very
>> strange."
>> 
>> A voice of 'reasonable and proper disgust'
>> That strangeness has been good for Hiassen. He seldom has to work hard to
>> come up with ideas for columns -- or novels, for that matter. Granted,
>> there
>> are those rare mornings when there are no indictments, no dead voters, and
>> south Florida looks like "a normal place."
>> 
>> Most of the time, though, goofy events abound, and "It's like shooting fish
>> in a barrel."
>> 
>> 
>> His take on the Sunshine State: "All paths of slime and disreputability
>> seem
>> to lead here."
>> 
>> Hiassen says the line with an overlay of jokiness, but underneath, he's
>> dead
>> serious. A Florida native, he's genuinely upset about the depletion and
>> abuse of the state's natural resources, and has taken on Disney -- a bete
>> noire he blames for a host of ills -- in both his columns and a book-length
>> essay, "Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World."
>> 
>> Hiassen makes no apologies for his aggressive tone.
>> 
>> "By and large, (the topics are) something that has now gotten the attention
>> of the general media down here, but nobody is coming out and saying the
>> obvious thing -- (like) 'the guy's a crook,'" he says. "That's where I come
>> in. You have to have some voice of reasonable and proper disgust over these
>> things. ... That's the great thing about having your own column. You can be
>> irreverent when everyone else is trying to be Peter Jennings."
>> 
>> He credits luminaries such as Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko and Murray Kempton
>> as influences. From them, he learned not to be afraid and to say exactly
>> what he's thinking, Hiassen says.
>> 
>> "When you're given a newspaper column, you're not being paid to sit on a
>> fence and scratch your chin and say 'On the one hand this' and 'On the
>> other
>> hand that,'" he says. "You're getting paid for your opinion. So don't be a
>> candy-ass about it: What do you think?"
>> 
>> An 'honor and privilege'
>> Hiassen still writes two columns a week for the Herald. The rest of the
>> time, he's working on a book, he says.
>> 
>> He had help going through the 15 years' worth that make up "Paradise
>> Screwed." A friend at the University of Florida, Diane Stevenson -- she'd
>> edited a previous collection of Hiassen's work -- did the initial culling,
>> and then the two of them selected the 200 or so pieces for the book.
>> 
>> Re-reading the columns was enlightening, he says.
>> 
>> "Some of the lowlifes (I wrote about) are still skulking around. They're
>> just as sleazy as I predicted," Hiassen says, noting that he once worried
>> that he was too harsh on some people. No longer. "I should have drop-kicked
>> some of these people another 10 yards."
>> 
>> In some cases, he gets that chance in his novels. His new one, "Basket
>> Case," is due in January, and this time he takes on the hand that feeds him
>> -- corporate media. "I won't be making any friends in the corporate
>> suites,"
>> he says.
>> 
>> By now, Hiassen could easily retire from newspapers and write his novels.
>> Most of his works have been bestsellers, and Hollywood has snapped up a
>> couple, too.
>> 
>> Sure, Hiassen says, he's pondered giving up the life of an ink-stained
>> wretch, but that's all.
>> 
>> "Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that
>> there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed," he says. "And what
>> better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom,
>> because you're on the front lines. ... (I) have this tremendous honor and
>> privilege and this forum of writing a column, and I'm pretty lucky because
>> I
>> work for a darn good newspaper, and by and large they leave me alone.
>> 
>> "When that day comes (that it's time to go), I'll be happy to step aside,"
>> he adds. "But right now, I still get off a good one now and then, and
>> there's so much that needs to be written about."
>> 
>> 
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-- Mary Ann Wilson
mbuttons@gate.net