Category Archives: Intelligence

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.

Pravda Pities the US, And With Good Reason

Barack Obama, Elections, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Russia, Socialism, Taxation

Writing against Barack Obama in Pravda, Xavier Lerma offered his assessment of Obama and the people that reelected him. To capture the gist of Mr. Lerma’s (somewhat unartful but truthful) article, here’s a riff on an old joke: These days, if you send your son to Moscow he will return an anti-Communist; send him to Washington and he will return a Communist. (Your daughter will probably lean left wherever she goes. “Sisters love Uncle Sam.”)

Doff of the hat to Lou Dobbs and The Examiner for the Lerma link:.

….Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society and he is ready to continue his lies of less taxes while he raises them. He gives speeches of peace and love in the world while he promotes wars as he did in Egypt, Libya and Syria. He plans his next war is with Iran as he fires or demotes his generals who get in the way. …
…O’bomber even keeps the war going along the Mexican border with projects like “fast and furious” and there is still no sign of ending it. He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia. Obama’s fools and Stalin’s fools share the same drink of illusion.

The Examiner provides an example (one among tens of millions) of the Idiocracy that elected Obama. He is Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx, who said this “on a previously recorded broadcast of the Soul Train Awards on Black Entertainment Television (BET) Sunday:

‘Give an honor to God and our lord and savior Barack Obama. Barack Obama.’”

UPDATED: Orgasmic And Idiotic For Obama (Brave Boeremeisies)

Africa, Ann Coulter, Constitution, Democracy, Elections, Feminism, Gender, Intelligence, Private Property, South-Africa

Way back (in 02.13.08), I mentioned a very old suggestion I had made on a discussion list of unconventional individualists. It was this: “I’d give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.” (Also here, under “Feminism & Feminization.”)

Now, don’t get confused. From the fact that one acknowledges that most women should not have the vote—it doesn’t follow that certain individual ladies are not blessed with great intelligence and should be respected for it. (This is the error of some ultra-conservatives in conceptualizing about certain women.)

On the topic of vaginas voting, the highly intelligent Ann Coulter counseled the same, during a riveting TV segment with the “retarded” and insufferably pompous Piers Morgan. (At one point, Ms. Coulter just glared at this idiot, who refused to talk about anything other than one of her tweets, and who, whenever she spoke, stopped the conversation to demand why she could not be as reasonable all the time, as if cerebrally compromised liberals like himself could detect reason.)

What prompted Ms. coulter’s comment on female suffrage (how we suffer for it) was the Hos for O commercial, in which a representative of the pox of a cohort known as young women (Lena Dunham) likened voting for Obama to her first sexual experience. (Do you allow your daughters to carry on like this?)

The whole thing is repulsive down to the exaggerated, affectatious hand movements (what’s with that bit of bad breeding?).

Watch:

To the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the vote, add the 26th Amendment. It was smuggled into the Constitution by statute, and it artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, youngsters get to vote for dibs on the livelihood of those who do.

Naturally, CNN, which employes an army of “Harpies Hot For Big Daddy O,” went and axed a segment that offered up evidence that hormones sway female voting patterns. Hormones and a propensity for sentimentality sway most decisions women make. And this proclivity is encouraged in a culture that equates whimsy, capriciousness and silliness with creativity and individualism.

UPDATE (Oct. 28): In response to a fascinating thread on Facebook (stimulated by Brian James Smith’s comments).

BJS: Sigh.. big sigh…. I’m glad I don’t live there anymore. Rather the uncertainty of Africa then the completely plasticized construct of american political/social thought and action. We have no leadership and a pate’ -brained populace, so it seems.
IM: BJS: Perceptive points you make. Thanks. I must say that I understand what you say when I listen to your average SA little (black) girl speak about her future, usually in good English and with the sweet innocence our kids have lost (thanks to their parents and pedagogues).

AND, checkout the brave Boeremeisie (Afrikaner lass).

UPDATE II: Winning A Battle Of Wits With A Half-Wit (The Vicarious Pleasure Principle)

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Democrats, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Journalism, Liberty, Republicans, The State

The current column, now on WND, is “Winning A Battle Of Wits With A Half Wit.” An excerpt:

“It was hard not to feel sorry for President Barack Obama during what was the first of three presidential debates. The dejected demeanor and the perpetually lowered gaze conjured an unprepared student peppered by a pedantic teacher with questions he could not possibly answer.

The president’s pose spoke to the beating he was receiving at the hands of his opponent, Gov. Mitt Romney.

Obama campaigner Chris Matthews—a proxy for this president, who cloaks himself in the raiment of a newsman—demanded to know: Why was Obama staring down at his “notes” and scribbling? What was he waiting for?

To describe what Gov. Romney had done in the course of the 90-minute debate, Matthews, who possesses a nimble intelligence his candidate is without, reached for wild man Charlie Sheen’s zinger: ‘What was Romney doing? Winning!’

Moderator Jim Lehrer is an old-school newsman who has never in the course of a long and distinguished career revealed his own political bias. Now the pack men of the media were piling on the PBS anchor for not controlling the debate’s outcome, and for allowing a free to-and-fro between the men.

And since Mitt won hands down; the moderator must have been bad. Or so goes the loser’s lackluster logic. Never mind that reasoning backward is an error in logic. So how does post hoc ergo propter hoc work? Had Obama won the debate under the same emcee’s minimal intervention, Lehrer would have been lauded. …

… Also at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow provided the ultimate rationalization which her co-hosts on the network and elsewhere quickly embraced. ‘The presidency spoils your ability to be a good debater.’

‘In psychology and logic, rationalization (also known as making excuses) is an unconscious defense mechanism,’ writes Wikipedia. It is intended to shield the fragile ego from reality.

Like Maddow, presidential hagiographer Douglas Brinkley took cover from real life on Fox News’ ‘Cavuto.’ The yang to Lincoln idolator Doris Kearns Goodwin’s yin, Brinkley diminished Romney’s intellectual victory by applying that most stringent historical test to the governor’s performance: It was without a Reaganesque zinger. Obama, however, had not damaged his brand, claimed Brinkley. He was still a gifted ‘retail politician.’ (Read community organizer.) …

… Make no mistake; should he succeed in vanquishing Obama, come Nov. 6, Romney’s brand of “repeal-and-replace statism”—not to mention maniacal militarism and Sinophobia—will be no victory for liberty. …

Read the complete column, “Winning A Battle Of Wits With A Half Wit,” on WND.

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UPDATED I: The Vicarious Pleasure Principle. Even if you dislike the philosophy of both men (which exists on the same illiberal continuum), there is some vicarious pleasure in watching the one who has caused you such unhappiness whipped good and proper.

UPDATE II: IN HIS excellent column about Romney’s creaming of Obama, Pat Buchanan also draws on the boxing and school teacher metaphors.

Pat calls Obama’s “performance one of the worst in debate history,” and Romney’s “the finest debate performance of any candidate of either party in the 52 years since Richard Nixon faced John F. Kennedy, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan’s demolition of Jimmy Carter in 1980.”