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Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person

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UnwinBabbas
01/03/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
Gotta love the nattering class of Gawker commenters, oblivious to the fact that their knee-jerk snark is directly descendent from Wolfe's acid wit. But it's too much trouble for haters to craft a single sentence worthy of their target. "I once won an award for parodying Wolfe" but I can't spell. "Terrible, terrible writer." "Non-iterable fourth person." Ah, well, lines of descent always run downhill, don't they?
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Dickdogfood
01/04/09

@UnwinBabbas: Sorry, but we killed our literary fathers inna Children of the Corn stylee and recognize no history beyond 1977 or so. Except that Suetonius guy--he's AWESOME DOOD.
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iplaudius
01/03/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
Wolfe should avoid wearing white, what with so much egg dripping off his face.
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BlinkyMcChuck
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
Oh snap, baby. Alex's response isn't just terse---he guts him like a fish!
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DaveJ
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
Wow, I'm sorry to disagree, but Bonfire or the Vanities was and is brilliant...I guess you had to be there.

I'm not a fan of his politics or his architectural/art views but...I defy anyone to capture the energy and excitement of that era.
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Tart of Darkness
01/03/09

@DaveJ: Bonfire of the Vanities is brilliant. I loved the way that he captured the era through his deeply detailed descriptions of each character's environment and through the dialog.

I like this book so much that I have found parts of Man in Full that I love and (fewer, but still some) parts of I am Charlotte Simmons that really do describe particular American niches. Now, there are many parts of each of these books that are so bad that they make my brain hurt, but still....
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Tart of Darkness
01/03/09

@Tart of Darkness: And I forgot to mention PLENTY of lats and pecs and even "massive sloping trapezii".
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ifstone
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
Which is worse, Tom Wolfe's cartoonishness or Alex Ross's standard-issue classical music critic pretensions? Ross is smart, but his stuffy style is reminiscent of a classical AM radio host in Tuscon. I was surprised to learn a couple of years ago that he wasn't in his seventies.

Of course Wolfe is just nursing a grudge against the New Yorker for the deservedly unflattering reviews of his last two novels. Their review of "A Man in Full" was right on target and written by Wolfe's arch nemesis, John Updike, who is a better writer but not without his foibles, about which Wolfe has been right on target. The New Yorker dismissed Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons," with an unkind "Briefly Noted" item, which was tough but fair.

(I don't think Wolfe is a "terrible writer," but he was mainly an entertainer, and after "Bonfire" no longer entertaining. "A Man in Full" was embarrassing, and I didn't have the stomach to try "Charlotte Simmons.")
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ifstone
01/02/09

@ifstone: And Ross's reply doesn't really address Wolfe's complaints. The New Yorker isn't known for its rigorous fact checking (viz., Malcolm Gladwell on Charles Murray; Ken Auletta on the Microsoft antitrust case; someone on Noam Chomsky).
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Botswana Meat Commission FC
01/02/09

@ifstone:

I generally just skip past Alex Ross's stuff (classical music criticism bores me even more than classical music), but he once wrote a really non-stuffy essay about how he got into classical music as a kid and how he always wanted non-experts to be able to enjoy the art form.

It was a good effort.
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ifstone
01/02/09

@Botswana Meat Commission FC: I'm into classical music and Ross has interesting things to say and embarrasses himself less often than many music critics. But even for aficionados, writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

And Leonard Bernstein had his own cringe-making pretensions that were probably ripe for satire. If you've ever seen his lecture describing 20th century history using musical analogy, you'll have had the urge to tell him to get over himself.
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Baroness
01/02/09

@ifstone: He doesn't address Wolfe's complaints? He bloody nails Wolfe for how petty his complaints are. This here is a truncated version of what appeared on the Letters page. And of course, it's all done with gentlemanly subtlety. Wolfe's portrait of Bernstein was unfair, slanted, with an agenda in "Radical Chic". It was a fleeting moment in Bernstein's amazing life, and all Wolfe has to show for his indignation is Ross's retort that Bernstein's amazing career in music ought not be beholden to Wolfe's withering, mean-spirited portrait of the man, in one fleeting moment in his life. And Wolfe's protesting in the third -damned- person that "Wolfe" never ever has written about politics, is disingenuous in the extreme.

"The New Yorker isn't known for its rigorous fact checking ". Yeah, very funny.
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ifstone
01/02/09

@Baroness: The New Yorker isn't rigorous with fact-checking -- see the examples I cited. They put style over substance (though things have improved since Remnick took over).

A tiresome thing about classical music is its tendency towards excessive worship of composers and maestros. (Even the appellation "maestro" says a lot.) The overreaction when someone dings a figure like Bernstein, around whom a superhuman aura is built, can be ridiculous. Alex Ross seems prone to exactly this kind of hero worship. Bernstein was brilliant and had amazing style, but he was a person as prone to silliness as anyone else and perhaps more so because he was so worshipped.

And it was in Bernstein's own forays into politics where he occasionally made a fool of himself, ala Bono or Sean Penn.
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La Cieca
01/03/09

@ifstone: Well, I write about music (or anyway opera, which is sort of like music) and it's not easy because there is this whole extra layer of musical terminology jargon that tends to get between the experience and the written reaction. Ross's solution is to write in a slightly precious voice, The Borderline Nerdy Gay But Ultimately Not Uncool Professor. It strikes the right balance, I think, between fanboy and musicologist, readable and entertaining in the sense that anything in the New Yorker is readable and entertaining.

It's a tactical mistake, though, to try to pin Wolfe down on facts.
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lululemming
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
There are not many people whom I loathe more than Wolfe. Truly vile, and worse, just a terrible, terrible writer.
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miss_msry
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
Does this mean we can go home again? And ignore him?
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If_I_Had_a_Poodle
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
i remember reading wolfe as a student, before i knew anything about politics, and being dazzled by the prose, and feeling so disappointed when i went back and reread him later and saw all the scaly venomous conservatard crap built up like gutta percha deposits on rocky cliffs between the looping swirling nouns and verbs and subordinate clauses
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HiredGoons
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
What a smug, self-satisfied little son of a...
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Seeräuber Jenny
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
Letters We Never Should Have Started Reading
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DaveJ
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
Please don't say "Anyways" in a post about bad writing...
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allyzay
01/02/09

@DaveJ: YAHHH TRICK YAHHH!!
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Baroness
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
And Ross was right on; Wolfe's piece, classic that it is, managed to trash Bernstein's reputation for a very long time. I'm glad to see someone like Ross looking at Bernstein's amazing accomplishments in music, and standing up to a bully like Wolfe, who denies his conservative leanings so disengenuously, even in this latest letter to the New Yorker.
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emilyanne
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
I once won an award for parodying Tom Wolfe....it was satisfying in a mastorbatory way.
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Pareene
01/02/09

@emilyanne: an AWARD?? who gives out this award??
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BookishLookish
01/02/09

In reply to Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
For 2009, I'd like to see this annoying fop who hasn't written anything remotely interesting or important in a very, very long time ripped apart, and I don't mean that in a journalistic sense. I mean like the crowd scene in The Day of the Locusts.
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Dickdogfood
01/02/09

@BookishLookish: I would like him to be on the receiving end of a custard pie, at the very least. IN PUBLIC, I mean.
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Mediokra
01/02/09

@Dickdogfood: I was trying to think of what "custard pie" was, then it dawned on me that perhaps you weren't alluding to a strange sexual or violent act but in fact an actual custard pie.

Anyway, yeah. Every time I've attempted to read something by Tom Wolfe, I've stopped. Which is a big deal, since I finish nearly every book I start, if only to say with confidence that it sucked.
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MrsConclusion
01/02/09

@BookishLookish: Sorry, I just have to praise you for your reference (but it's Day of the Locust. Not plural).
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Botswana Meat Commission FC
01/02/09

@BookishLookish:

He should live in fear of those of us who were subjected to "Charlotte Simmons."
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BookishLookish
01/02/09

@neurotica91: Thank you, and duly noted.
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BookishLookish
01/02/09

@Botswana Meat Commission FC: Agreed. And we are an angry mob!
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