In Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," the main character, a lawyer, described the line of prisoners going into the back of the courthouse as "chow," as in chow for the system. I'll never forget that.

Also, for anyone who grew up in Atl, Wolfe's book "A Man In Full" drips with the kind of delicious look-in-the-mirror satire home grown Southerners love.

At this point I say, "Get your elbow out of my ribs. I'm not laughing because I don't get, I'm not laughing because it isn't that great."

According to some USAF colonel whose stuff has been linked on HN, Wolfe got Yeager's crash wrong. According to those who inspected the capsule, Wolfe got Grissom's Mercury exit wrong. Is HN impressed by his take on Chomsky or Darwin?

[edit] On the other hand Ken Kesey spoke well of him.

I love Tom Wolfe; I’d not connected his out-of-vougeness to the recent preference for ‘truthiness’ in reporting the reviewer identifies.

I remember reading him at ~13 - my dad gave me a copy of ‘The Pump House Gang’, and told me something to the effect of: “try to write like this - don’t ever try to sound like this.”

We live in Didion times - clean lines and clean sentences - and though maximalism on the page (or in any design) is hard to achieve, especially when written from reality, I think we have room for a few more.

Or at the very least, I think Wolfe deserves to be thought of better by the zeitgeist. He’s so much fun!

One time he came to talk at my school, and he spent the whole hour talking about sports.

He demanded that we pay the cost for a private jet to transport him, as well as his hotel costs.

Some of his better books in my opinion:

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kandy-Kolored_Tangerine-Fl...

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pump_House_Gang

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Word

How do I read anything? I don't know what to click on. (And this is my alma mater!)

I know negativity isn't encouraged on HN but man I do not like those covers (doesn't capture the world of Wolfe at all).

Ms Cooperman has disdain for the "inverted pyramid" in the context of journalism -- which is fine -- but I sure wish more people would keep it in mind when they are engaged in back-and-forth conversation. Nothing screams arrogance more than making your interlocutors suffer through a long preamble before finally revealing what your point is.

Why would you be worried? I've got The Right Stuff.

>On the other hand, when someone demanded, “How could you know what he was thinking?” I always had a simple answer: “I asked.” If someone had grilled Wolfe about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, they would have learned that everything he reported he had either seen or heard himself, found recorded elsewhere, or learned from people who were there.

Relevant: TIL why Tom Wolfe wore a white suit. The pioneer of 'New Journalism' said that the unusual clothing caused others to see him as "a man from Mars, the man who didn't know anything and was eager to know", so talked freely to him. The white suit became Wolfe's trademark from 1962 to his death. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1inpsa5/til_w...>

>During Donald Trump’s first term as president, The Washington Post calculated that he had lied 30,573 times. Yet somehow it was the media who lost the trust of half the nation.

The author isn't stupid. She answered the implied question above earlier in her essay, but can't outright say so, so has readers put two and two together with bits like:

>There is a sameness in our silos now; I find myself over-careful when I voice any idea that does not conform to the slightly-left-of-center canon where I generally feel most at home.

On the other hand, we get stuff like

>“You know who’s in charge of Voice of America now?” Wolfe’s purported editor might snap. “Keri Lake, a right-wing election denier who called journalists ‘monsters’ and promised to be our ‘worst nightmare’ back when she ran for governor of Arizona. Trump posted her mandate on social: to ‘ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.’”

Besides the misspelling of Lake's first name, no mention of her having been a broadcast journalist herself for three decades. If Lake calls her colleagues "monsters", maybe she has some basis for said description?

[dead]

[flagged]