The Wolfe in the White Suit (w/ Osita Nwanevu)
Added 2024-01-01 19:54:58 +0000 UTCWriter Osita Nwanevu joins for a rip-roaring conversation about legendary prose stylist, "new journalist," and novelist Tom Wolfe. Reviewing a new documentary about Wolfe ("Radical Wolfe" on Netflix), Osita writes, "Behind the ellipses and exclamation points and between the lines of his prose, a lively though often lazy conservative mind was at work, making sense of the half-century that birthed our garish and dismal present, Trump and all."
Answered herein: is Tom Wolfe a good writer? What kind of conservative is he? How does his approach compare to other "new journalists" like Joan Didion and Garry Wills? And what's the deal with the white suit?
Further Reading:
Osita Nwanevu, "The Electric Kool-Aid Conservative," The New Republic, Jan 5, 2023
Tom Wolfe, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," Esquire, Nov 1963.
— "The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report," New York Magazine, Feb 1972.
— "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s," New York Magazine, June 1972
— The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)
— A Man in Full (1998)
— The Kingdom of Speech (2016)
Peter Augustine Lawler, "What is Southern Stoicism? An Interview with Professor Peter Lawler," Daily Stoic, March 2017
Comments
joined the patreon for this! love osita
DongleDog
2024-03-24 04:17:16 +0000 UTCLate to this, but fantastic ep! Osita is such a great guest.
Joel
2024-03-07 02:56:52 +0000 UTCYes! I also want a David Foster Wallace episode. But I don’t get the impression that the hosts are all that concerned with the interests of their audience. Or our ability to understand much of what they are talking about. There are podcasts where, if a guest uses some jargon or makes a reference to something many listeners might not get, actually stops and says something like “did you mean…?”
Don McCormick
2024-02-27 00:58:38 +0000 UTCAs a WL grad this 100% true and seems so basic I can’t believe a documentary would miss it.
Ann
2024-02-26 22:09:12 +0000 UTCGreat point! At this point with 89 podcasts, it’s time for an intro podcast or even better a YouTube video with a whiteboard and visuals to ground new listeners and people who immigrated to the US post college. I point a lot of VERY smart people to the podcast and they are quickly lost esp my immigrant friends. I found the podcast early enough that I started from the beginning.
Ann
2024-02-26 22:08:12 +0000 UTCComing back to this, there was a new hitchens anthology released with the first article reviewing a Tom Wolfe collection. “…the three things that go to make up the Tom Wolfe effect. One, a glibness that is designed for speed-reading. Two, a facility with rapidly cross-cut images and references: a show of learning. Three, a strongly marked conservatism. It is the third of these features, Wolfe’s subliminal advertising for the New Right, that has had the least attention. But in this collection of his favorite journalism the artifice and the foppery are not sufficient to conceal it…”
David Wells
2024-02-07 00:25:26 +0000 UTCAlways love the culture episodes! When's the DFW ep? There's a great podcast on the flop of the Bonfire of the Vanities film for De Palma https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-plot-thickens/id1504732282?i=1000527217497
Jenny Gunn
2024-01-25 16:46:43 +0000 UTCConcerning the continuity thing, I'm a little surprised that no-one has seemed to discuss The Spotlight, an incredible source of anti-semitism and conspiracy mongering that basically flourished until right before 9/11. Just full of profoundly weird stories that Q-Anon seemed to recapitulate. Just an incredibly rich text; think Twin Peaks as written by Pat Buchanan on 'shrooms. I hope Ganz in his new book covers it at least in passing. But certainly an interesting source for you guys to delve into.
pixlaw
2024-01-25 01:24:54 +0000 UTCDoes anyone else have the response of appreciating a conservative thinkers insight then pausing and remembering, oh, he’s against civil rights and feminism? The argument that Wolfe has that the postwar affluence came with a cost is insightful. This episode combined with the last on Bomb Power makes me think about how much maintaining America’s unprecedented abundance actually has cost and how much it will continue to cost if politics is about a return to this “golden” era.
Steven Ngo
2024-01-09 21:22:47 +0000 UTC“Let’s bear in mind that human artifice is as organic as any natural masterpiece, which, if we are to believe our naturalists, is also a product of tremendous selection.” ~Joseph Brodsky
Benjamin Pletcher
2024-01-07 23:59:46 +0000 UTCLove the foray into Wolfe’s ‘left’ influences. He’s not the only conservative with fond attachment to Zola and the naturalists. Post-apostasy, Hitchens devotes many pages in ‘Letters to a Young Contrarian’ to Zola in the Dreyfus Affair. Naturalist writers like Zola, Hauptmann etc aren’t just depicting a preference for proletarian history after all. ‘Germinal’ is among many things a great tragedy, from which a more pessimistic diagnosis of class struggle in history emerges. One which maps onto Wolfe’s anti-ideology (ideology) like a glove.
Benjamin Pletcher
2024-01-07 18:39:34 +0000 UTCYes! Would love for you to have Shaul Magid on to discuss Kahane.
Benjamin Pletcher
2024-01-07 18:29:53 +0000 UTCAnd that part about needing to write to someone you love in order to write anthing at all, so interesting, that really resonates with me!
Kevin Spicer
2024-01-06 15:11:08 +0000 UTCThis was a fascinating conversation! That bit about selfhood and the unmooring of the self reminds me of Wendell Berry's anxiety's about the unsettling of america. It sounds like Tom Wolf and WB do a similar kind of material and spiritual interweaving that kind of meanders around for a while and aren't totally sure where it lands all the time. WB was a big influence on my life through my 20's, honestly for a similar reason, kind of something familiar to hold onto in a world that made my head spin. But yeah his political thoughts are kind of disappointing, but anytime he doesn't write about politics its usually pretty good.
Kevin Spicer
2024-01-06 05:32:43 +0000 UTCHa! As a South Carolinian, W&L immediately locates him for me. A good SUTHUN’ man.
Blackford Oakes
2024-01-06 00:34:47 +0000 UTCthey did already did an episode on Bloom
Erik Wirfs-Brock
2024-01-05 23:32:20 +0000 UTCSurely time for a Roger Scruton deep dive?
Francis Bond
2024-01-05 01:17:43 +0000 UTCThe discussion of Wolf's radical chic made me think of the contrasting early-1970s images of Lenny Bernstein with the Panthers and Meir Kahane scandalizing the NYC's Jewish establishment. Kahane's The Story of JDL might be worth KYE's attention. JDL used/aped the new left and black power repertoire of protest to launch a right-wing Jewish/American movement surfing on the reactive outrage of liberal Jews. An early instance of new-ish right?
Michael Young
2024-01-04 01:53:45 +0000 UTCFor what it’s worth, chomskyian linguistics is largely bullshit
Samuel Lieberman
2024-01-03 21:47:42 +0000 UTC1. Could you do an episode on Dinesh D'Souza and one on Allan Bloom? 2. Could you have mercy on your audience? I do not get your references to a good 25% to 50% of the books and people you refer to. I know that I am not the only one who has this experience. You have a case of what cognitive scientists call “the curse of knowledge.” That is the inability of an expert to put themselves in the shoes of people who are new to their area of expertise. As a result, the expert uses terms and references that the newby does not understand without realizing it. As a result, they don’t explain these terms and references, and the newby doesn’t understand what the expert is trying to communicate.
Don McCormick
2024-01-03 03:29:05 +0000 UTCMore! More! More Tom Wolfe! This episode didn’t even mention some of his most influential books—The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House. I’d love to hear you discuss them. I grew up in a town (Downey, CA) that Tom Wolfe visited to write his essay, “The Hair Boys.” It was about Harvey’s Drive-In, which was the headquarters of the subculture that eventually became the lowriders. Wolfe wrote that it “is creating the most radical change in men’s fashions since the disappearance of doublets, breeches and stockings in the early nineteenth century. Harvey’s is the Dior, the Balenciaga, the Chanel of the new wave.” Rereading it a few years ago, I was struck by how wildly wrong Wolfe’s conclusion was. I would like to hear more from you about when you think he was right and when you think he was wrong—especially with regards to The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House. Also, Wolfe did make a good point when he was making a presentation and said he wasn’t exactly sure why some people called him a conservative. He said something along the lines of, ‘Didn’t any of those people read “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”?
Don McCormick
2024-01-03 03:17:29 +0000 UTCIf you're looking for a through-line from *Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test* to Peter Thiel, Fred Turner's *From Counterculture to Cyberculture* is pretty revealing. The post-New Left communalists would constantly make references to becoming cowboys or Native Americans, which in their mind were interchangeable signifiers for a kind of self-sufficient Adamic ideal (similar, I think, to how Wolfe's Stoicism is described). These ideals, in turn, led fairly directly into the techno-libertarianism that characterized a lot of early Internet culture, and I think is foundational to the worldviews of Thiel, Musk, and most of the other tech entrepreneurs who made their fortune in 90s.
iucounu
2024-01-02 20:57:03 +0000 UTCcan you guys please do carl schmitt and/or foucault
Gabriel Slidders
2024-01-02 19:06:51 +0000 UTCI'm excited about this one!! I've been hoping you all would discuss Tom Wolfe!
Elias Ponvert
2024-01-02 18:55:42 +0000 UTCBrilliant episode - my thanks to all of you for this great start to the year!
Ted Westervelt
2024-01-02 17:25:48 +0000 UTCIt admittedly seems unlikely that this will ever be a topic for a future episode, but I would 100% be on board with Sam and Matt covering Gene Wolfe. I feel he’s a bit harder to pin down politically than most of the show’s subjects, but there’s definitely a conservative streak to his writing. But wherever you place him ideologically there’s also a commitment to values that I think would resonate with most people on the left (for example his frequent thematic focus on the lives of characters in various states of imprisonment is something that I as a leftist find quite moving). There’s also, as with figures like Garry Wills, a Catholicism that you get the sense is somewhat heterodox, and when you read any of his nonfiction you realize that he was honestly also just a massive weirdo à la Bob Dylan (another parallel being that his best, most fascinating writing is often that which is the most superficially incomprehensible). And the quality of his writing was genuinely really good; I believe Le Guin referred to him at one point as the Melville of speculative fiction. Yeah, Gene Wolfe is great.
C
2024-01-02 15:32:24 +0000 UTCIn my first years in New York I happened to see Wolfe once or twice in his costume; the presentation was not very different from that of Lenny Kravitz, whom I saw around the same time, dripping scarves and rings all over his leather pants.
Adam Lewis
2024-01-02 13:05:35 +0000 UTC"Resisting it out of fear" made me think of this bit from Ellen Willis's 1977 essay: "The continuing inability of someone as intelligent and perceptive as Tom Wolfe to confront unpleasant political realities in any serious way -- even to admit that, like it or not, they exist -- strikes me as not just obtuse but neurotic. It comes, I think, from Wolfe's failure to resolve the contradiction between his populist faith in human possibility and his essentially conservative political instincts."
David Glenn
2024-01-02 10:47:21 +0000 UTCThe continued Hunter S. Thompson erasure will not be tolerated.
Garett Smith
2024-01-02 02:42:43 +0000 UTComgggg dream episode
Jack Wolfe
2024-01-02 01:04:45 +0000 UTCWhen Wolfe disclosed his clinical depression diagnosis during the I Am Charlotte Simmons press tour I wondered if he experienced undiagnosed sub clinical episodes during other parts of his career. He seemed very capable of novelist’s interiority but maybe resisting it out of fear of what was inside him under that pessimism, the loss of control the hosts talked about. (I’m sure he would’ve had something sharp to say about therapeutic something or other in response.) Was also surprised episode didn’t discuss Celine, but I thought it was great overall, as was previous episode about Wills.
momilli
2024-01-01 21:58:47 +0000 UTCThat editor’s trick—“Just tell me what you’re trying to *do*”— also works with first-year students! It’s amazing
Phil Christman
2024-01-01 21:13:10 +0000 UTCI always confuse tom Wolfe with Tobias Wolfe
Nico Villarreal
2024-01-01 20:47:38 +0000 UTCOh man, oh man, oh man--this is going to be great!
Russell Arben Fox
2024-01-01 20:08:02 +0000 UTCThought this was going to be a gene Wolfe episode. A little out of the podcasts wheelhouse but I think it would be great lol
Kevin Price
2024-01-01 19:57:55 +0000 UTC
