Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe? | Hacker News Reader

Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe?

commonreader.wustl.edu

93 pointslermontov26 comments

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.

Can confirm. Grew up in suburban Atlanta during the period depicted, including getting caught in the first big Freaknic blowout he describes. It’s so dead-on it made me homesick.

the most dead-on part of the latter is when the main character is feeling a bit out of place at some meeting/hunting retreat in south Georgia and suddenly he remembers the cheat code: just talk about college football!

My dad taught me this at an early age and it was 100% correct. If you pay attention to enough college football to hold a conversation, you can talk to just about any man in the southeast US.

It's the American version of "Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"!!! [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWJIQm9qH-w

The other kind of football at the world cup level works globally.

Maybe outside the US. I’ve met 2 people in the last 20 years that follow it around here.

My guess is people in mainland China don't care either, but in normal countries people are crazy about soccer. It was on my mind because I was in a hackathon [1] last weekend and before I started a bunch of international students were watching the highlight reel for the last world cup.

Soccer is picking up in interest in the US, slowly but surely. MLS games are worth going to and I enjoy a lot of soccer games.

(My own soccer story was that I had a terrible fight with a recommendation engine I built to convince it that I liked the NFL but didn't like the Premier League. I started thinking about feature engineering for sports and that got me reading soccer articles closely and I'd just read incredible things like games that went 7-0 or 1-0 and it was an own goal and such and next thing I know I am one of those people who wakes up at 9am on Saturday to watch soccer...)

[1] we won! (not because of my strength as a coder but because of my mvp obsession and demo/presentation skills from startup land)

so what percentage of these men can be talked to because, while not liking football, they pay enough attention to college football in order to be able to hold a conversation with just about any man in the southeast US?

Netflix did a fine rendition of this, I enjoyed the turns of speech and intrigue.

I can't find this, are you referring to the 1990 movie?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_in_Full_(miniseries) https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/a-man-in-full

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.

Grissom's Mercury exit was in line with what NASA thought before they recovered the capsule. It's tough to blame a journalist for being no more wrong than NASA about the results of a space mission.

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.

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!

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).

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test first ed. has a beautiful cover.

https://i.etsystatic.com/22376946/r/il/968f38/2238228249/il_...

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

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?

Wikipedia describes Lake as having been an "evening anchor" for most of three decades. Doesn't that mean that she largely read news gathered by somebody else? (And yes, I do apply the same criteria to Dan Rather and his predecessors.)

> Wikipedia describes Lake as having been an "evening anchor" for most of three decades. Doesn't that mean that she largely read news gathered by somebody else? (And yes, I do apply the same criteria to Dan Rather and his predecessors.)

No; the UK "newsreader" has never really had a US equivalent, because the US has never had in-vision continuity which is where UK newsreaders typically came from. Anyone on camera on US television news has in-field reporting/production experience.

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