Tom Wolfe and White Suits

I thought that article was really well balanced, in that by describing how he got information from both sides by fitting in as one of the "townsfolk", cigar in mouth etc, and then as one of the hippies (not shaving for a few days, telling them he writes for ROLLING STONE!!) he manages to paint a picture of the pettiness and prejudice of both sides, even if he does paint himself as a fairly suave dude at the same time.

was he the JE who wrote 'basic instinct' etc?

BTW Tracer Hand - Thanks for your post.

the philosophical foundation behind the great press associations which today form the bedrock of "hard news" and all the rhetoric of objectivity was laid down by mr. reuter (after it became clear that electric wires and not pigeons were going to make his fortune): to write about scandals which involved famous people, any spectacular event in which a lot of people died, and then down the list (i can't find the orig. charter admonition just now but it is even more lurid than that)

-- Pleasant Plains

Did you see that Harper's anniversary cover? He looked like such a schmuck next to Mark Twain.

The first and last lines are brazenly drawn from the common well, while the middle lines had to have been dispatched straight from the unconscious. The song's atmosphere is breezy and menacing; the first and last lines of each verse supply the breeziness, the middle two the menace. The printed lyrics do not, of course, account for Dylan's vocal performance, which, of a piece with the white suits and riverboat-gambler hats he has been affecting lately, renders uncannily credible the grandiose rhetoric of the middle lines; nor do they convey the insouciant creepiness of Augie Meyers's roller-rink organ. Treating Dylan as merely a writer is like judging a movie on its screenplay alone. (from "I is Someone Else" by Luc Sante. The New York Review of Books 52(4).)

[This is half relevant. I see that Duane recommends Hunter S. T.'s Angels above.]

New novel:

http://www.amazon.com/Back-Blood-Novel-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0316036315

A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now.

As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay-with officer Nestor Camacho on board-Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night-until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the 'hoods, "de-skilled" conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, "spectators" at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night's orgy, yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an "Active Adult" condo, and a nest of shady Russians. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous bestselling novels, BACK TO BLOOD is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

Thomas Pynchon you aren't.

crack dealers in the 'hoods

rmde

camacho...cuban...black...anglo...latina...light-skinned...haiti...creole...black-gang-banger...'hoods...yenta...shady russians

God this guy is a terrible novelist.

Eh, terrible fake rap lyrics aside, I enjoyed I Am Charlotte Simmons more than Inherent Vice.

ken kesey had some pretty scathing things to say about him IIRC.

http://books.google.com/books?id=o-YDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA12#v=onepage&q&f=false

i will read this when i have time, but man '80s magazine design was...a thing, wasn't it.

yeah like being grainy text heavy hard-to read was a leftist virtue. nobody could mistake mother jones for a "glossy"

in honor of the new novel. i think this is especially effective because hitchens acknowledges wolfe's strengths albeit back-handedly

He can be funny, too, and his bullshit detector, though deaf in the right ear, is still acute. Where he falls down is in trying to be a social anthropologist.
This is a well-known money-spinner, often employed by conservative behaviorists down on their luck. You begin to babble about orgasm as a sacrament, or about denims as a social uniform. From being a modest miniaturist, you become a pundit and then a full-dress blowhard and cultural censor.

one could argue that hitch became a bit of blowhard himself but whatever his sins he was never a miniaturist or modest

It is a bit rich to read Hitch complaining about Wolfe's conservatism, but this was almost twenty years before Hitchens joined the Bush bandwagon.

Trying to read even the first couple of paragraphs defeated me

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/01/04/eunuchs-of-the-universe-tom-wolfe-on-wall-street-today.html

my favorite part of that hitch thing is all the extraneous bile directed at elaine's

new harpers has a 16,000-word excerpt from his forthcoming book on language acquisition

my god he is an awful writer

Skimmed it but I'm avoiding reading it because I don't want to get a headache internally arguing with his dilettantish knowledge of linguistics and his usual reactionary bullshit.

Plus I'm just pirahã'd out. Other hacky pseudo-whorfian journos have already bled this subject dry.

i have fond memories of reading his '60s journalism but dunno if i want to revisit, every time i've looked at something of his from the past few decades it comes off as pretty hacky and forced

Epic takedown of Wolfe's piece of shit article in Harpers and the book it comes from:

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tom-wolfes-reflections-language/

Btw who the hell is E.J. Spode? A pseudonym I presume..?

RIP and all. So who gets the suits?

hm rip, id been reading hooking up recently... the title essay is bad obv but great as kitsch; the ft bragg story is readable but also p bad

Plenty of stuff to not like about him, but at his best what a writer. I had read this just a few weeks ago:

http://nymag.com/news/media/47353/

The Electric Gin-and-Tonic Acid Test.

RIP Tom Wolfe, whom I met only once.

I was dressed as a WWI soldier and we rode a golf cart together through the Connecticut twilight. And then Bill Buckley walked by with Big Bird.

I swear to god this was a 100% true story.

— Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) May 15, 2018

All his books after The Right Stuff were very ignorable, but for about a decade he put out some very good and readable material that said interesting things about how people lived in the USA. Then he tried to become an Important Thinker and lost his mojo.

the haughty, vicious interchanges between Wolfe and Mailer are classic

RIP

Vanities was when I got off the bus, but he was on fire for much of the 1960s

rip -- i could never get much out of his later books but his classic stuff was great to discover as a teen. rick perlstein dismissed him on twitter as "the jordan peterson of the 70s," which kinda surprised me b/c i see a lot of echoes of wolfe's style in nixonland.

He definitely calcified early and kept on calcifying. No use for his fiction. But his heyday stuff is fun to read.

Mentioned upthread:

https://frinkiac.com/video/S12E03/IbdT3oyCmI4lj2Dbx5884F6AeGo=.gif

didn't believe in evolution!

I did like this recent essay on how the 2008 financial crisis let Wall Street gracefully retire a generation of traders and executives whose testosterone was no longer as valuable in the age of quants.

Just starting on this:

https://newrepublic.com/article/177571/tom-wolfe-electric-kool-aid-conservative