Category Archives: Celebrity

Tom Wolfe’s Big, Bad Book

America, Celebrity, English, Intelligence, Literature, Sex

A careful guardian of the English language Tom Wolfe is not. The infelicities of style and substance in the novelist’s latest book are summed up by Stephen Abell, in the Times Literary Supplement’s November 9, 2012 issue. Abell’s verdict about the door-stopper, Back to Blood: “While it is big, it is not particularly clever”:

…as we struggle through his fourth blockbuster, Back to Blood, we begin to reflect that size, in literature as in life, is not everything. We can at least confidently point to some of the products of Wolfe’s recent cramming …

… [Wolfe] direct[‘s] much of our attention beneath the sheets. Not that sex in Back to Blood goes on merely in the bedroom. In one ill-conceived set-piece, Norman and Magdalena attend a regatta, which becomes a floating orgy with pornography being displayed on the giant sails of some of the boats (complete with rather startling “labia majorae three times as big as the entrance to the Miami Convention Center”).

Sex unquestionably brings out some of the flaws in Wolfe’s prose. For example, its effortfully mimetic approach, where the writing enacts the sounds it is describing. This is from a superfluous trip to the “Honey Pot” (an unimaginative strip club), where Wolfe wants to leave us in no doubt about the pole-straddling gyrations of the woman on stage: “BEAT thung CROTCH thung TAIL thung CRACK thung PERI thung NEUM thung”. Or its obsession with transcribing sounds to needless effect (which creates sentences that make it look as if the author has fallen asleep against his keyboard): “unhh, ahhh ahhh, ooom-muh, ennngh ohhhhunh”. There is crass imagery (“his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle”) and glib alliteration (“lascivious looks of men lifting the lust in the loins”). And there is the relentlessly anatomical categorization: “pectoral glories”, “mons pubis”, “their montes veneris”.

…The corollary is, needless to say, a simplistic attitude towards men, and manliness. Men in Back to Blood are judged by the quality of “not being a pussy”, and by their muscularity (an area where Wolfe has an almost fetishistic eye): …

… The notion of an anatomical approach is also crucial to understanding Wolfe’s writing style more generally. He is a founding father of what might called “List lit”, in which constituent aspects of life are broken down into a catalogue of parts. So, for example, when a character sits before a desk, we are immediately presented “with its Art Deco kidney shape, its gallery, its sharkskin writing surface, the delicately tapered shin guards on its legs, its ivory dentils running about the entire rim, its vertical strings of ivory running through the macassar ebony”.

At the basic level of sentence structure, this often means that Wolfe’s descriptions (and the descriptions are unquestionably his; they do not vary with the characters on whose perceptions they are apparently based) are filled with minor variation, as if he wishes to create an effect of mass multiplication simply by using near-synonyms: “they looked prissy, dinky, finicky, fussy, and gussied up”; “he could insult people to their faces, humiliate them, break their spirits . . . make them cry, sob, blubber, boohoo”.

The result is a novel which is bright and busy, and full of information rather than imagination.

MORE.

Bottoms Up,* Kate Middleton

Aesthetics, Britain, Celebrity, Ethics, Etiquette, Free Speech, Private Property

She’s a gorgeous girl. She’s also stabler than her late mother-in-law (which, I guess, is not saying much, considering that the dodo Diana was a manipulative neurotic, given to histrionics).

In any event, Kate Middleton, aka The Duchess of Cambridge, will get over the fact that images of her bare breasts and bum are already in circulation, snapped in order to feed the voyeuristic fetish of the average consumer.

Certainly demand-driven, unethical, ugly and maybe even immoral: Hounding this girl wherever she goes is all of the above. But surely only trespassing on private property renders the action of the offending photographer illicit in natural law?!

The topless images of Kate were snapped from “the side of the road between trees, around half a mile away from a chateau,” in the south of France.

Was the photographer trespassing on private property? No report seems to specify. “Invasion of privacy” laws seem to belong to a broadly defined area of law, one that has little to do with the always unmentionable rights of private property.

(Bottoms up* means “here’s to you.”)

Suffering From Stockholm Syndrome

Celebrity, Conservatism, Glenn Beck, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Reason

Anderson Cooper demonstrated recently that when the spirit moves him, he can perform the job of journalism passably, if not brilliantly.

Conservatives are elated, overjoyed. They got down on their knees and paid homage to little Lord Vanderbilt, AKA Anderson Cooper, because, just this once (OK, maybe twice), Cooper had challenged one of the many lies Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida) tells with a straight face. Wasserman Schultz is a popular participant on cable TV shout-fests. This blond has been putting her velvety voice and forceful personality to use in promoting Obama’s statist schemes.

Glenn Beck could not contain himself, writing that, “Anderson Cooper has always been one of Glenn’s favorite people and last night he showed why. When he sees BS he will pounce…”

Cooper is a pioneer of the Oprah school of journalism, whose method is to follow feelings, and not facts, and promote “awareness” of The Issues. He is very bad for journalism.

Am I surprised that Cooper veered this once from his usual postmodern mind-set? Sure. Ordinarily, Cooper would have told Wasserman Schultz that although his reality differed from hers, he nevertheless respected “the place she was coming from.”

But am I grateful the little so-and-so did what he is supposed to do? Hell no.

There’s a name for what Glenn Beck is experiencing with respect to the left-liberal media: Stockholm Syndrome.

CNN Moves Into Campaign Mode

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Military

Have you noticed how desperate the Obama heads on CNN are becoming, as the election approaches? Although not quite as blatant as MSNBC, CNN’s John King, Jessica Yellin, Dona Lemon, Anderson Cooper, Soledad O’Brien, Piers Morgan, are, nevertheless, sounding positively shrill.

Expect the BHO “bitch pitch,” coming from likes of CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux and her colleague Jessica Yellin, to crescendo in the coming weeks. The women folk are especially devoted to distribution and soft militarism (“nation building,” massacre mediation, etc).

I hear Big Daddy sexual overtones when these females talk about Their Man (perverts all).

Especially noticeable is the way CNN is attempting to shape the GOP message, for what that message is worth.

It does so by presenting to the public regular Republican commentators who’re left-liberals in all but name.

In addition to being a plain idiot, Ana Navarro, for example, is a Republican identity politics activist, who would have liked BHO to have delivered on his immigration promises. Known for siring —and surrounding himself with—stupid women, John McCain had once employed the gaseous Navaro as his consultant.

Another liberal Republican, who’s part of the CNN task force entrusted with moving the GOP “forward,” is John Avlon, “chief speechwriter for former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.”

A Rockefeller Republican though he may be, David Frum does not deserve to be lumped with these boorish bores. But if he fails to veer even more to the Left, especially on immigration, I expect him to go the way of Bay Buchanan (an establishment Republican, in my opinion) who no longer appears on CNN.

CNN is being extremely crafty about crafting the meta-message.