Nice post, thanks, Wolfe used to be a personal hero of sorts.
>>>>”Frederick Hart, who did the colossal deep relief called Ex Nihilo.”<<<<
I think Hart also did the Vietnam Memorial sculpture next to The Wall.
A friend of mine represented him for a bit, sold a few of his pieces.
TCS: Some of your readers think that the answer to that is it's a rebuttal to some of the crazy leftism that has gotten into our arts.TOM WOLFE: Well, I can't stand the fact that party lines are created all the time in the arts. And in the days of communism, they used talk about the party line. Well, this is not the days of communism. But there's still a party line and I just can't resist trying to pop the bubbles.
The Communists are still there, and a part of the reason that 2-story mural was a "non-story" to them.
Orwell was deeply repulsed by concepts of "thoughtcrime", party line, and political correctness that he had observed as a socialist. It is WHY the work that he stood by was deeply political. He just couldn't shrug it off.
I've read some Wolfe in my day (the non-fiction works, not the fiction). What I say here is not an indictment of his writing or any agenda.
TOM WOLFE: New Journalism as I understood it is using the techniques that had hitherto been confined to fiction, such as telling a story scene-by-scene. And also the careful notation of status details. To me, that is the most important thing to spot in any situation you're writing about. What is the status line-up? What are the rankings within the group?That's why my book The Right Stuff about the Mercury Seven astronauts is not a book about space. It's about this hierarchy that I knew nothing about when I approached the subject - this pyramid of accomplishment that they won't even name -- I'm talking about the pilots now, they were all military pilots.
It's a code and I had to give it a name, so I called it "The Code of the Right Stuff". When I do reporting, I love to find something like that -- a whole concept that I knew nothing about.
The events of both The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests and The Right Stuff were heavily documented (filmed and recorded firsthand) and the participants were quite well and alive when he put pen to paper. I'm curious just how deep his research went into these archives when he wrote these texts.
Ken Kesey spent his earnings from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest on film and recording equipment. The films were processed but have only really begun to come out in any sort of an edited and narrated sense. A few hours of I believe at least 50 hours of footage.
Wolfe does manage a good sense of time and place even where he was not present. And he didn't feel motivated by his subject matter to "cross over" into participation.
Can't a guy just write because he writes?
I mean, if some guy in chelsea wants to put chicken guts on a canvas, nobody says to him, "oh, you're so left wing."
But if a guy writes about common sense and the undeniability of truths that transcend the current f*cking fashion, he's considered "a right winger."
Ugh. No matter where you turn, the imbecils are waiting to infect you.
It ain't easy, I'll tell ya.
Very interesting. Tom Wolfe is quite a character.
“Jousting with Sam and Charlie”; one of Wolf’s best essays on carrier pilots during the Vietnam War.
My husband and I listened to the audio version during a long car trip. The actor who read the book is very good, and in some parts of the book hysterically funny. We enjoyed the book very much.
My only fault with the book was Wolfe's failure to examine the character Charlotte's religious experiences on campus. Surely, there must have been various religious groups, Christian and non-Christian, vying for members. Also, I feel certain her mother and father and minister would have urged her to become active in a local church. Doing so would have saved her a great deal of heart ache.
Thanks for this post. Tom Wolfe is just about our greatest living writer and I have read eveything he’s done, nonfiction and fiction.
FYI..... National Review Online had an series of interviews with Wolfe posted on their web site a couple of weeks ago. Great series. Check it out if you’re interested.
Thanks for the post. I have been addicted to Tom Wolfe since my freshman year (1969) when I attended a lecture of his where he explained (paraphrased) that a bachelor’s degree is the middle-class’ invention for training their kids to be able to carry on a conversation at cocktail parties.
As he said above, he “...just can’t resist trying to pop the bubbles.”
And I hope he continues for a very long time.
This is kind of weird, interviewing authors. We do it, sure, but only in the hope they will divulge the SECRET all authors know but they never do.