RIP Tom Wolfe

SamScribble · May 17, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/...onfiction-writer-and-novelist-dies-at-88.html

He even influenced people who didn't realise that they had been influenced.

ElectricBlue · May 18, 2018

I read The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test when I was sixteen - spellbinding writing, and an essential record of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

"Further"

Sara2000Z · May 18, 2018

electricblue66 said:
I read The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test when I was sixteen - spellbinding writing, and an essential record of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

"Further"

Oh - such sad news, this is. I so loved his writing - his vocabulary. His description of a terrible hangover in Bonfire of the Vanities set my spine on fire. And Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was one of the books of my late teens. Someone who could move so well from non-fiction to fiction and back again - a great author.

trysail · May 18, 2018

The Right Stuff is an absolute classic. More than any other work, it brought home the notion that these guys were a "different breed of cat." This was American exceptionalism at its finest. If you don't think Chuck Yeager was a one-off, you haven't read the book.

"Shut up and die like an aviator."

Radical Chic will forever define the nearly incredible but inherent gullibility and credulity of Upper East Side liberals who were and are completely and utterly divorced from reality. Leonard Bernstein and his present day ilk were and are demonstrably clueless of how the world works.

KarissaTsevi · May 18, 2018

A legend.

SamScribble · May 18, 2018

trysail said:
The Right Stuff is an absolute classic. More than any other work, it brought home the notion that these guys were a "different breed of cat." This was American exceptionalism at its finest. If you don't think Chuck Yeager was a one-off, you haven't read the book.

And to this day, you find it difficult to hear an airline pilot saying: 'Ah ... good afternoon ... ah ... ladies and gentlemen ... this is your ... ah ... captain speaking ...' without thinking of Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1

SimonDoom · May 18, 2018

trysail said:
The Right Stuff is an absolute classic. More than any other work, it brought home the notion that these guys were a "different breed of cat." This was American exceptionalism at its finest. If you don't think Chuck Yeager was a one-off, you haven't read the book.

Here's the quote from the end of The Right Stufff after Yeager had to bail out of his F-104 on a test flight, and got burned badly in the process and parachuted down to the desert, where a young guy in a car found him:

“Are you all right!”
The look on the kid’s face! Christalmighty!”
“I was in my car! I saw you coming down!
“Listen,” says Yeager. The pain in his finger is terrific. “Listen… you got a knife?”

The kid digs into his pocket and pulls out a penknife. Yeager starts cutting the glove off his left hand. He can’t bear it anymore. The kid stands there hypnotized and horrified. From the look on the kid’s face, Yeager can begin to see himself. His neck, the whole left side of his head, his ear, his cheek, his eye must be burned up. His eye socket is slashed, swollen, caked shut, and covered with a crust of burned blood, and half his hair is burned away. The whole mess and the rest of his face and nostrils and his lips are smeared with the sludge of the burning rubber. And he’s standing there in the middle of the desert in a pressure suit with his head cocked, squinting out of one eye, working on his glove with a penknife… The knife cuts through the glove an it cuts the meat of his finger… You can’t tell any longer… It’s all run together… The goddamned finger looks like it’s melted… He’s got to get the glove off. That’s all there is to it. It hurts too goddamned much. He pulls off the glove and a big hunk of melted meat from the finger comes off with it… it’s like fried suet…

Badass guy, Yeager. Wolfe captured that really well.

ElectricBlue · May 19, 2018

SimonDoom said:
Badass guy, Yeager. Wolfe captured that really well.

Didn't he fly the Bell X-1 through the sound barrier with a broken arm splinted with a busted off broom handle, because he'd fallen of a horse the night before? And then told the doctors, afterwards. Or have I picked up urban myth from somewhere?

Hypoxia · May 19, 2018

electricblue66 said:
"Furthur"

Corrected.

ElectricBlue · May 19, 2018

Hypoxia said:
Corrected.

Not according to the photos I found - Further is on the front of the bus.

RIP Tom Wolfe

SamScribble

Yeah, still just a guru

ElectricBlue

Connoisseur

Sara2000Z

Experienced

trysail

Catch Me Who Can

KarissaTsevi

Really Experienced

SamScribble

Yeah, still just a guru

SimonDoom

Kink Lord

ElectricBlue

Connoisseur

Hypoxia

doesn't watch television

ElectricBlue

Connoisseur

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