Tom Wolfe: Our Strange Reality

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Tom Wolfe Our Strange Reality
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There is nothing more interesting than a wall
behind which something is happening.

• Victor Hugo

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The New Journalism?

• Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy
  or theory that goes under a name with New in it
  is just begging for trouble. The garbage barge
  of history is already full of them
• It was no movement. There were no manifestos,
  clubs, salons, cliquesin the mid-Sixties, one
  was aware only that all of a sudden there was
  some sort of artistic excitement in journalism,
  and that was a new thing in itself.
• --Tom Wolfe, 1973

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Tom Wolfe

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A Brief History

• Born Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. Richmond,
  Virginia, 1931
• Father, Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Sr., was a
  journalist and author, as well as director of a
  co-operative apple farm
• Mother, Helen Hughes Wolfe, taught him arts and
  dance
• Graduated from an Episcopalian day school in
  1947, turned down Princeton to attend all-male
  Washington and Lee University in Lexington,
  Virginia.
• Tried out for the New York Giants in 1952, cut in
  third round.
• Enrolled in a Ph.D. program in American Studies
  at Yale Universityin New Haven, Connecticut.

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Newspaper Man

• First newspaper job was in Springfield,
  Massachusetts, at the Springfield Union
• The Washington Post, 1959
• The New York Herald-Tribune, wrote for Sunday
  supplement magazine, New York, 1962
• Four-month strike at the New York Herald-Tribune,
  wrote for Esquire magazine--"There Goes (Varoom!
  Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake
  Streamline Baby" made him famous, 1963
• "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," about Ken
  Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, 1966
• "Radical Chic Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers"
  about the liberal Left and art society, 1970
• Started to work for Rolling Stone and Harper's.
   Rolling Stone sent him to cover the last launch
  of the Apollo space program, December 7, 1972
• Published "The New Journalism, 1973

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Book Writer

• The Painted Word, criticized architecture in
  America, 1975
• "The Right Stuff," 1983
• Wrote novel in serial form for Rolling Stone
  became famous social realism novel about New York
  Citys classes The Bonfire of the Vanities,
  1987
• Heart attack, 1996
• Ambush at Fort Bragg, 1997, about the fight
  between the US Army and the American media
• Mauve Gloves Madmen and Clutter Vine, 1999
• I am Charlotte Simmons, 2005

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The Sixties The Crux of Change

• "Manners and morals were the history of the
  Sixties.  One hundred years from now when
  historians write about the 1960s in America, they
  won't write about it as the decade of war in Viet
  Nam or of spaceexploration or of political
  assassinationbut as the decade when manners and
  morals, styles of living, attitudes towards the
  worldchanged the country more crucially than any
  political events."  

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The Disjointed States of America
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The American Mind Recoils and Reshapes Itself

• By the mid-1960s the conviction was not merely
  that the realistic novel was no longer possible
  but that American life itself no longer deserved
  the term real... American life was chaotic,
  fragmented, random, discontinuous in a word
  absurd.
• Stalking the Billion-footed Beast, 1989

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Is New Journalism New?

• HistoryHemingway, Twain, London, Dreiser, Crane
• Literature had renaissance, then became very
  prominent
• Nobody was writing the great social novel
• Writing like Gustave Flaubert and Henry
  Jamesself-enclosed world of art.

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Whats a Borges? Bore-hez
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Thus Spaketh Borges

• Time is the substance from which I am made. Time
  is a river which carries me along, but I am the
  river it is a tiger that devours me, but I am
  the tiger it is a fire that consumes me, but I
  am the fire.
• Reality is not always probable, or likely.

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True Art from True Reporting

• Really stylish reporting was something no one
  knew how to deal with, since no one was used to
  thinking of reporting as having an aesthetic
  dimensions.
• The New Journalism (1973)

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Wolfe Reports on Culture

• The first American astronauts and the changes
  they brought to media and family structure
• The hippie generation and drug use, social strife
• New York Citys class warfare and eccentricities
• Nudist colonies
• The Black Power movement
• Models, The Rolling Stones, the Hip cats
• Combat pilots in Viet Nam
• Me-generation reaction to Viet Nam horrors

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Tom Wolfe Style

• Uses a mix of the voices of his subjects and an
  ironic all-knowing narrator (Dickens)
• Broad usage of irony
• Repeats odd and exciting phrases almost to a
  point of mania
• Uses short, hyper-accurate, descriptions of
  factual elements
• Embellishes on the social implications, essay-ish
  
• Long sentences with breaks into cutting short
  clips
• Jazzy, poetic has an ear for the memorable
  phrase
• Class critique (clothes and speaking styles)

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How To Tackle The Topics

• Try the writing of American beat poets, known for
  their
• Embellishments
• Paradoxes
• Long-windednesses
• Confusing and colorfulbut stimulatingphraseses

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The Girl of the Year

• "Bangs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps
  butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy
  sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue
  jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew
  bottoms éclair shanks elf boots
• "Girls are reeling this way and that way in the
  aisle and through their huge black decal eyes,
  sagging with Tiger Tongue Lick Me brush-on
  eyelashes and black appliqués, sagging like
  display window Christmas trees, they keep staring
  atherBaby Janeon the aisle. What the hell is
  this?  She is gorgeous in the most outrageous
  way.

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Allen Ginsberg Poet Americana

• Section from Howl
• yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering
  facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball
  kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and
  wars,who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey
  leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of
  Atlantic City Hall,suffering Eastern sweats and
  Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China
  under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished
  room,who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars
  boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome
  farms in grandfather night,

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Wolfe on LSD on Ken Kesey

• But don't you see?--can you remember when you
  were a child watching someone put a
• pencil to a sheet of paper for the first time,
  to draw a picture . . .

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Wolfe on LSD on Ken Kesey

• and the line begins to grow--into a nose! and it
  is not just a pattern of graphite line on a sheet
  of paper but the very miracle of creation itself
  and your own dreams flowed into that magical . .
  . 

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Wolfe on LSD on Ken Kesey

• growing . . . line, and it was not a picture but
  a miracle . . . an experience ... and now that
  you're soaring on LSD that feeling is coming on
  again--only now the creation is of the entire
  universe!

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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

• My happiness did indeed arise from the same
  secret as the happiness in dreams it arose from
  the freedom to experience everything imaginable
  simultaneously, to exchange outward and inward
  easily...as we conquered the war-shattered world
  by our faith and transformed it into paradise, we
  creatively brought the past, the future and the
  fictitious into the present moment. The present
  moment! Now!

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Master of Irony The Dickens of 1983

• Wolfe reports on the extensive first-person
  interviews with Gus Grissom first"Once they
  got over the carrier Randolph, Grissom calmed
  down a bit. The same sort of awed faces that had
  welcomed Alan Shepard were craning up at the
  helicopter. But Grissom hardly noticed them.  His
  head was in a very dark cloud.When he went
  below deck, he was still shaking.  He kept
  saying, "Ididn't do anything.  The damned thing
  just blew.
• Within an hour they had started the preliminary
  debriefing, andGrissom kept saying, "I didn't do
  anything, I was just lyingthere---and it just
  blew."
• Grissom, only the second American to be launched
  into space, is glorified by the masses but
  scrutinized by engineers, who think he messed up
  a vital part of the re-entry process.

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Engineers AKA Pangloss

• "Nobody was about to accuse Gus of anything, but
  the engineers kept rolling their eyes at each
  other. The explosive hatch was new to the Mercury
  capsule, but explosive hatches had been in use on
  jet fighters since the early 1950sOf course,
  any apparatus rigged up with explosive charges
  had the potential of exploding at the wrong time.
   Later on, NASA put a hatch assembly through
  every test the engineers could dream up to try to
  make the hatch blow without hitting the detonator
  button.They subjected it to trial by water,
  trial by heat  they shook it pounded it,
  dropped it on concrete from a height of one
  hundred feetand it never just blew."

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What Is Wolfe Doing?

• Italics are Wolfe's italics 
• Writes from the Pangloss Engineers point of
  view, inside their collective head, not afar  
• What seems a "logical" reporting of events is
  quite artistic, a taking-on of roles  
• Reader taken from dulled and shamed incredulity
  of Grissom to careful and wise skepticism of the
  NASA engineers 
• Makes Grissom and the engineers a part of a
  narrative of ironic omniscience

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Edwards Test Pilots

• "In flight test, if you did something that
  stupid, if you destroyed a major prototype
  through some lame-brain mistake such as hitting
  the wrong buttonyou were through!  You'd be
  lucky to end up in Flight Engineering.  Oh, it
  was obvious to everybody at Edwards that Grissom
  had just fucked it, screwed the pooch, that was
  allMaybe the poor bastard just wanted out,
  andbango!he punched the button."'I was lying
  there, and it just blew'oh, that was rich.  And
  then the brethren sat back and waited for the
  Mercury astronaut to get his, the way anyone of
  them would have gotten his, had a comparable
  fuckup occurred at Edwards."

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But Irony Prevails, a la Dickens

• "Andnothing happened."

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Result Precise Reporting on Ideas/Society/Culture

• Wolfe brings it back to Grissom, the person
  starring in a behind-the-scenes theme of the new
  Astronaut Americana, but not by quoting him, by
  referring to him ironically
• Astronautsa program that would land a man on
  moon  
• Wolfe gives the psychology of these characters,
  but keeps us close to a theme 
• Careful reporting of interior motives, failures,
  mistakes and nuances of human action creates a
  drama that is just as newsworthy as new
  information
• He finds deeper meaning and reports it through a
  willing character, a la Grissom

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Mastery of Observation and Voice

• Within five minutes, or ten minutes, no more
  than that, three of the others had called her on
  the telephone to ask her if she had heard that
  something had happened out there.Jane, this is
  Alice. Listen, I just got a call from Betty, and
  she said she heard something's happened out
  there. Have you heard anything?" That was the way
  they phrased it, call after call. She picked up
  the telephone and began relaying this same
  message to some of the others."Connie, this is
  Jane Conrad. Alice just called me, and she says
  something's happened . . ."
• The Right Stuff, 1983, Tom Wolfe
• Is this news??? It is made to be news. Nobody
  knew how astronauts wives dealt with death or
  hardship. How do you love an icon?

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New Journalism Breaking A Moldy Mold

• "Most non-fiction writers, without knowing it,
  wrote in a century-old British tradition in which
  it was understood that the narrator shall assume
  a calm, cultivated and, in fact, genteel voice.

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Revealing Real America

• "I was feigning the tones of an Ingle Hollow
  moon-shiner, in order to create the illusion of
  seeing the action through the eyes of someone who
  was actually on the scene and involved in it,
  rather than a beige narrator.  I began to think
  of this device as the downstage voice, as if
  characters downstage of the protagonist himself
  were talking.
• On the driver in The Kandy-Kolored
  Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

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The Way We Live

• "By the Sixties talented novelists had
  abandoned the richest terrain of the novel
   namely society, the social tableau, manners and
  morals, the whole business of 'the way we live
  now.'"

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Dys-topia

• "And the cop, all he can see is a bunch of
  crazies in screaming orange and green costumes,
  masks, boys and girls, men and women, twelve or
  fourteen of them, lying in the grass and making
  hideously crazy soundschrist almighty, why the
  hell does he have to contend withSo he wheels
  around and says, What are you, uhshow
  people?"That's right officer," Kesey says.
   "We're show people.  It's been a long row to
  hoe, I can tell you, and it's gonna be along row
  to hoe, but that's the business."

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What a feast

• We were alive in the first moment since the dawn
  of time in which man was able at last to break
  the bonds of Earths gravity and explore the rest
  of the universe

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The Feast

• a New-Fabulists or a Minimalists electrician
  or air conditioner mechanicmight very well be in
  Saint Kittswearing a Harry Belafonte cane-cutter
  shirt, open to the sternum, the better to reveal
  the gold chains twinkling in his chest hair,
  while he and his third wife sit on the terrace
  and have a little designer water

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The Feast

• What a feast was spread out before every writer
  in America! How could any writer resist plunging
  into it? I couldnt.

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The Feast