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Yes, I guess. It was a Fresh Air interview, IIR, and he was responding to the criticisms about the movie, and defending it that way. People thought it was miscast, etc. I think he just missed a little on the movie. I do think Griffiths got the "Shurmun" pronunciation right though.Quote:
it is a satirical black comedy, no?
Oh, I agree that the movie was subpar, unlike the book, which will almost certainly survive the test of time.
Twenty or so years ago I happened to catch Wolfe giving a talk at a university. Couldn't recall much from that other than an anecdote he shared, the punch line of which elicited much laughter from the highbrow crowd. (Me too, although I felt more like I was laughing with them, so to speak.) Anyway, I was joking around with a friend this morning and it reminded me of Wolfe's funny little bit, and to my surprise I was able to find it online. (Thanks, Google!)
The whole lecture is kinda interesting; the anecdote (included below) is contained in the "Lecture Text" section near the bottom of this web page...
https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jef...olfe-biography
Tom Wolfe - The Human Beast - Jefferson Lecture 2006
Not all status groups are either as competitive as capital-S Society's and the military's or as hostile as the bohemians'. Some are comprised of much broader populations from much larger geographic areas. My special favorites are the Good Ol' Boys, as I eventually called them. I happened upon them while working on an article about stock car racing. Good ol' boys are rural Southerners and Midwesterners seldom educated beyond high school or community college, sometimes owners of small farms but more likely working for wages in factories, warehouses, and service companies. They are mainly but by no means exclusively Scots-Irish Protestants in background and are Born Fighting, to use the title of a brilliant recent work of ethnography by James Webb. They have been the backbone of American combat forces ever since the Revolution, including, as it turns out, both armies during the Civil War. They love hunting, they love their guns, and they believe, probably correctly, that the only way to train a boy to kill Homines loquaces in battle someday is to take him hunting to learn to kill animals, starting with rabbits and squirrels and graduating to beasts as big or bigger than Homo loquax, such as the deer and the bear. Good ol' boys look down on social pretension of any sort. They place a premium on common sense and are skeptical of people with theories they don't put to the test themselves.
I offer an illustration provided to me by a gentleman who is in this audience tonight and who witnessed the following: It was the mid-1940s, during the second World War, and a bunch of good ol' boys too old for military service were sitting around in a general store in Scotland County, North Carolina, waiting for a representative of a cattleman's association. They fell to discussing the war.
One of them said, "Seems to me this whole war's on account of one man, Adolph Hitler. 'Stead a sending all these supply ships to England and whatnot and getting'm sunk out in the Atlantic Ocean by U-boats, why don't we just go ov'ere and shoot him?"
"Whatcha mean, 'just go ov'ere and shoot him'?"
"Just go to where he lives and shoot the sonofabitch."
"I 'speck it ain't that easy. He's probably got a wall around his house."
"Maybe he does. But you git me a boat to git me ov'ere and I'll do it myself."
"How?"
"I'll wait'il it's night time . . . see . . . and then I'll go around to the back of the house and climb the wall and hide behind a tree. I'll stay there all night, and then in the morning, when he comes out in the yard to pee, I'll shoot him."
Quite in addition to the Good Ol' Boy's level of sophistication, that story reveals four things: a disdain for the futility of government and its cumbersome ways of approaching problems, a faith in common sense, reliance on the inner discipline of the individual--and guns.
I went to school with one of Norman Mailer's kids, and they once said that their pops thought Wolfe was a puss for never taking LSD but putting out the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.
Finally, at a distance from the charismatic Kesey, Wolfe downed 125 micrograms of LSD to learn from the inside what the fuss was all about. His trip was unpleasant, but necessary. “It was like tying yourself to the railroad track and seeing how big the train is, which is rather big,” Wolfe said in 1983.
https://www.cjr.org/from_the_archives/tom-wolfe.php
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture...d-acid-627881/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/wh...too-dangerous/
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I guess we all tell ourselves stories in order to live/write/make a living/etc. Sometimes those stories change over time, regardless of the truth. Whatever that is.
Actually the hardest thing for me to believe is that that dandy Wolfe spent any amount of time around Kesey's gang without getting dosed. LoL
P.S. I like Wolfe a lot, and think Bonfire, (the book, not the movie - ugh), was a masterpiece. I read it as a much younger guy when it first came out, and my takeaway was a great story about someone's eyes being opened, learning about empathy, caring, and kindness. I guess it's time to give it another go and see how it strikes me this far down the road.