Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up.
Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe, 2000
Recently in reviewing a couple of the early, influential, and culturally insightful works of the journalist/novelist Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby I made the following comments that justly applied to those works but also provided a portent to future literary problems:
“The subject of “Gonzo journalism”, a journalistic literary trend started in the 1960s, and its most well-known practitioner, the late Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, has received much ink in this space over the past several years. The gist of this journalistic literary trend is that the writer gets “down and dirty” with whatever he or she is writing about and becomes an aspect of the story, one way or another. Now this notion set the traditionalists who worked under the so-called objectivist theory, “nothing but the facts, Jack” back on their heels. Of course, we all knew, and know, that this traditional approach was honored in the breech more than the observance and that old Hunter was merely rubbing everyone’s face in it. However, Hunter Thompson was not the only one trying to got to “edge city” in his writing in what now has become, academically translated, called the “new journalism”. The writer under review, Tom Wolfe, also tried in a less zany way to break out of the traditional mold as well.
While Thompson was more than happy to tweak “edge city” Brother Wolfe, by his whole social existence, and by something deep down in his training never really got all the way there. He never really pressed the issue of his own involvement in the story, nor would it perhaps have worked for him, but surely off of this early work he is on to something different from the run of the mill “straight” journalism of those days. Heck, even Hunter Thompson, argued, and argued strenuously, that most of his attempts at "gonzo” didn’t work either. Here some of Wolfe’s entries are brilliant, some much less so but that seems par for the course when one is experimenting with new forms…”
Well, that was then (back in the 1960s) and now is now and we are confronted in Hooking Up, a potpourri of essays, some from back in the days and some “fresh”, with the limitation of Tom Wolfe’s version of the now old, very old “new journalism” that has become something of the standard fare in the 24/7 journalistic world. Here is the ”skinny”: one of the best essay in the book , Tiny Mummies is a beautiful send-up of The New Yorker, its then chief editor, William Shawn, and the whole pretentious New York literary magazine culture. But that effort dates from back in the 1960s. His title essay on the other hand, is a rather oddball and not particularly enlightening look at where the millennium is heading, or not heading. Most of piece does not stand up very well ten years later.
But then it only gets worst. Why? Old Tom has in that barren period since about The Right Stuff gotten cranky and crotchety as he joins the “death of communism” crowd with an offering of a “deadly” skewering of American elite college campuses and the equally “deadly” influence of “academic” Marxists, deconstructionists, and whatever else is going on in those “politically correct” precincts. Hardly tough work, although tedious I am sure. There are a couple of other good pieces here beside that New Yorker send-up but they are not “think” pieces, the thing that I admired about Wolfe when he was taking quirky risks to write off-the-beaten path stuff. One is Two Young Men Go West about the remnant of the Protestant ethnic that drove the men who drove the early computer revolution. The other is a novella, Ambush At Fort Bragg an sketch on the ”inside” of the celebrity- making new media, both of the fifteen minutes of famers and the star news anchors.
Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe, 2000
Recently in reviewing a couple of the early, influential, and culturally insightful works of the journalist/novelist Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby I made the following comments that justly applied to those works but also provided a portent to future literary problems:
“The subject of “Gonzo journalism”, a journalistic literary trend started in the 1960s, and its most well-known practitioner, the late Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, has received much ink in this space over the past several years. The gist of this journalistic literary trend is that the writer gets “down and dirty” with whatever he or she is writing about and becomes an aspect of the story, one way or another. Now this notion set the traditionalists who worked under the so-called objectivist theory, “nothing but the facts, Jack” back on their heels. Of course, we all knew, and know, that this traditional approach was honored in the breech more than the observance and that old Hunter was merely rubbing everyone’s face in it. However, Hunter Thompson was not the only one trying to got to “edge city” in his writing in what now has become, academically translated, called the “new journalism”. The writer under review, Tom Wolfe, also tried in a less zany way to break out of the traditional mold as well.
While Thompson was more than happy to tweak “edge city” Brother Wolfe, by his whole social existence, and by something deep down in his training never really got all the way there. He never really pressed the issue of his own involvement in the story, nor would it perhaps have worked for him, but surely off of this early work he is on to something different from the run of the mill “straight” journalism of those days. Heck, even Hunter Thompson, argued, and argued strenuously, that most of his attempts at "gonzo” didn’t work either. Here some of Wolfe’s entries are brilliant, some much less so but that seems par for the course when one is experimenting with new forms…”
Well, that was then (back in the 1960s) and now is now and we are confronted in Hooking Up, a potpourri of essays, some from back in the days and some “fresh”, with the limitation of Tom Wolfe’s version of the now old, very old “new journalism” that has become something of the standard fare in the 24/7 journalistic world. Here is the ”skinny”: one of the best essay in the book , Tiny Mummies is a beautiful send-up of The New Yorker, its then chief editor, William Shawn, and the whole pretentious New York literary magazine culture. But that effort dates from back in the 1960s. His title essay on the other hand, is a rather oddball and not particularly enlightening look at where the millennium is heading, or not heading. Most of piece does not stand up very well ten years later.
But then it only gets worst. Why? Old Tom has in that barren period since about The Right Stuff gotten cranky and crotchety as he joins the “death of communism” crowd with an offering of a “deadly” skewering of American elite college campuses and the equally “deadly” influence of “academic” Marxists, deconstructionists, and whatever else is going on in those “politically correct” precincts. Hardly tough work, although tedious I am sure. There are a couple of other good pieces here beside that New Yorker send-up but they are not “think” pieces, the thing that I admired about Wolfe when he was taking quirky risks to write off-the-beaten path stuff. One is Two Young Men Go West about the remnant of the Protestant ethnic that drove the men who drove the early computer revolution. The other is a novella, Ambush At Fort Bragg an sketch on the ”inside” of the celebrity- making new media, both of the fifteen minutes of famers and the star news anchors.
