Posted on 05/16/2018 7:01:08 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It's couched in oh so delicate terms, as pretty much everyone mourns the death of the great Tom Wolfe: Tom Wolfe was a reporter, Tom Wolfe was an observer. Tom Wolfe eyed status-seeking. Tom Wolfe skewered the establishment. And through his incredible mastery of words, he entertained the hell out of us.
Yes, true enough. But somehow he never got a Nobel prize in literature, despite vastly outranking almost everyone else who has.
So I guess I am corrupting things a little when I state the obvious about Wolfe: He did write, he did observe, he did skewer, and by gosh it all added up to making the left look stupid, particularly the cultural left, because it is the establishment. There is no other way a writer this honest could not find them. And because he was a ferocious believer and chronicler of American exceptionalism, he got them good.
Oh, he made the left look stupid. It's why reading his work is such a delicious pleasure.
I read through the long, awesome piece in Vanity Fair by Michael Lewis, called 'How Tom Wolfe Became Tom Wolfe' to make sure I didn't miss any clues, and though it took me an hour to read, it was extremely useful.
Turns out Wolfe got his start in red country, the genteel world of Richmond, Virginia, and was close to his conservative father. He never abandoned that world, which meant he stayed an outsider, a 'deplorable' all his life. Of course he was bemused by President Trump and seemed to like the man - read this short passage of his thoughts in this American Spectator here, a very incisive, original, analysis from Wolfe about Trump.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Tom Wolf did to the new Left liberals what George Orwell did to the old Left communists.
Although the movie is great in it's own right as a flag waver, the book is different enough to be a totally separate experience.
sfl
Great writer! Everyone should read Bonfire of the Vanities.
When I worked in restaurants in the early 80s, he was an excellent tipper as well.
Something I find interesting is usually the left calls Republican Presidents “stupid,” like they did with Reagan and George W. Bush. But with Trump I don’t hear that. They mostly call him a liar.
Just . . . interesting.
Wolfe’s exposure of the phoniness of the Art world was terrific.
I loved the movie; it’s one of my favorites. The book, well, to say it needed a good editor is being kind. The guy’s paragraphs are longer than Ayn Rand’s! Give me the movie any day.
Incidentally, I watched a TCM documentary on Alan Ladd Jr., whose studio produced “The Right Stuff.” He said he’d never watched it and hated the fact that he ordered it cut to a shorter running time and director Phil Kaufman refused. Ladd was wrong, in my never humble opinion, but we all err at times.
cheers
Jim
And “I Am Charlotte Simmons” offended the Sexual Revolution elites ... but now maybe that book should make him a #MeToo hero.
I saw the movie as a sneak preview in San Diego. I was an engineer working for Convair, manufacturer of the Atlas. The pinging sounds in the theater were the buttons popping off my shirt at the end of that movie.
bump
All this and not a word about his spot-on criticism of Jane Fonda’s Vietnam memorial wall?
I thought the film version of The Right Stuff was one of the rare occasions in which an author's literary style was captured cinematically. Often, something Wolfe described as "what it felt like" was depicted as actually happening in the movie. A good example was when LBJ appeared with the astronauts at the event at the end of the movie. When LBJ introduced the astronauts, Wolfe wrote that "it was as if LBJ was standing on the stage and saying 'lookee here what I've brought you!". In the film, that is precisely the way Kaufman filmed it with LBJ actually saying that.
It's been a long time since I have read it, but the "rook weevil" comment Yeager makes about the press in the film may have originated in the book, and Kaufman mixes the photographers' camera shutters with a chomping insect sound.
They ARE stupid.
Bkmrk.
The left does a fine job of making itself look stupid; Wolfe only documented it.
The opening chapter of the book was pretty graphic in describing Pete Conrad's on scene crash investigation. I guess in the 1980's that was still "too much" even though now, we routinely see it on prime time TV. The early part of the book also detailed how the phrase "The Right Stuff" originated.
Also early in the book, Wolfe created a lot deeper background about the flight test pilots at Edwards and how most of the big names of early jet and supersonic flight either chose not to be astronauts or were edged out by the system. The movie just had them mocking the astronauts as "span in a can".
The true nature of the progress of the X-1 program was really distorted in the movie implying the Gen Yeager took the job one day and busted mach 1 a day or two later.
I think the spaceflight part of the movie was much truer to the book with some allowances made to keep the graphics and plot interesting.
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