Comments on: Tom Wolfe

By: tl

tl — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 16:55:45 +0000

I ran into Tom Wolfe (sans the white suit) the other day in Richmond. Like yourself, I was intrigued by the dichotomy between The Man in White and The Man in Black.

Cash’s work is personal, spiritual, autobiographical, almost confessional. Tales of love, god, and murder. His best stuff is typically 1st person: “I fell in to a burning ring of fire”…”Why me Lord?”……”I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”…it’s typically sparse, minimalistic, conveying only the essential truth of any scenario.
Wolfe, on the other hand is a journalist, an observer, a poetic ethnographer, providing elaborate portraits of systems and the individuals who attempt to influence them. Ego, greed, sex, and power. Dressed in white, but highlighting the decadence and the debauchery of modern life.
I’d love to hear more thoughts on Cash vs. Wolfe…

By: Northern Observer

Northern Observer — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 22:44:24 +0000

I prefer Johnny Cash – the man in black over Tom Wolfe – the man in the White Suit. For all the assorted reasons Cash attached to his clothes and ditto for Wolfe.

By: Johnny

Johnny — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 08:56:08 +0000

Interesting post Mr. McCracken. However I had always thought of Mr. Wolfe to be the modern epicenter of Elitist Euridite Indignation (with a polished exterior of studied calm poise).

I once called him the twentieth centuries most likely to be forgotten author. I’m not even completely sure that he exists. There comes a point when one polishes ones exterior that the interior disappears, being wholly subsumed. Tom Wolfe reached that point some time ago.

By: Auto

Auto — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 12:16:54 +0000

The trouble with Wolke’s argument is that he uses it to justify his claim that he’s a better writer than he really is.

Wolfe’s a good social critic/observer. When he’s firing on all cylinders, he’s terrific. His 60s stuff on class/status still reads well.

But as a novelist, he’s shit. He’s unable to create characters who feel like real people. Rather they’re stick figures upon which he hangs sociological insights. Which means his novels are finally flat and listless.

But that doesn’t stop him from comparing himself to Dickens and Zola and pissing on writers who are simply better than he is.

More and more, Wolfe is becoming a crank and a bore. His insights and criticisms don’t go much beyond his yelling at everyone, “Look at me, look at me, I’m a great writer. Really, I am.”

Give it up, Tom. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up as the next Gore Vidal, the other American writer who wants desperately to be respected for his fiction, not his criticism, and who, in his dotage, is becoming seriously unhinged.

By: Hy Mariampolski

Hy Mariampolski — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 18:12:54 +0000

Bravo, Grant – even though you have let some of the academic sociologists off the hook too easily by focusing on anthropology as the fountain of indignation. Yes, sociology, where veneration of outsider/provocateur patron saints like C. Wright Mills and Edward Said continues to be passed off as serious scholarship and praxis.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 12:21:25 +0000

Of course, much of the fuss that Wolfe and others create about the alleged decline of the novel seems to privilege the word over the image. Movies and TV provide more than enough connection with our reality, so who cares whether novels also do.

By: Guy

Guy — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 09:09:05 +0000

Interesting comments by yourself, and Wolfe. And very reminiscent of John Raulston Saul’s arguement in Voltaire’s Bastards that the late twentieth-century novel(ist) has become a specialist who no longer connects to the society in which (s)he lives. Indeed, Saul quotes Wolfe as an exception to the rule, a man who used “non-fiction” to tell a socially-relevant tale or two. Not that Saul was/is particularly hopeful that memory will be found again by society…

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 08:51:25 +0000

“But as long as the economists continue to ask the wrong questions and anthropologists to supply the wrong answers . . .”

To add to this, I think that the majority of economists tackle their (wrong) questions with the wrong methods. Renegade Chicago economist- turned-argumentation-theorist, Deidre McCloskey defined an academic discipline as a pair: (agreed scope, agreed methods). Mainstream economists have both a narrow definition of the scope of the discipline (ignoring, for example, much relevant social phenomena, at least until recently) and a narrow definition of the appropriate methods for studying this scope (dismissing, for example, ethnographic methods).

On both these dimensions, your typical anthropologist is much more broad-minded than your typical economist. So much so, in fact, that there is even a branch of the social sciences called the sociology of economics, which has explored, for example, the performative and possibly self-fulfilling nature of economic theorizing, as an activity which itself alters the world. I can give you references if you want, Grant.

By: Robert Nanders

Robert Nanders — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 02:56:53 +0000

Interesting post – I’d like to note that my undergraduate anthro course was hardly filled with indignation. A healthy value of self-critique and quite a lot of humor at the expense of earlier theorist, but not much indignation. What am I missing?

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 23:42:49 +0000

Netbx? That’s my favorite Gedanken Design of the day. Damn. It just comes across so naturally that I had to go check and see if that was a real thing. I buy books, but I have no way to manage my out of whack priorities for reading this!

BTW, I was just talking about Tom Wolfe today and suggesting that Karim Rashid had supplanted him (among certain culture vultures) as the de facto man in a white suit.