Fun with awards
Can it be coincidence that these two awards were announced on the same day last week? Tom Wolfe won the Bad Sex in Literature Award, while the Washington Post won something I might call the Laziness in Journalism Award. (The prizegiver, here, calls it the Mouthpiece for Power award, though I found the discussion here more entertaining.)
Could it be that Tom Wolfe, who prides himself on basing his fiction on a great deal of reporting, simply hadn't done enough reporting to write his sex scenes?
By the way, I usually admire Wolfe for precisely that quality: his reporting and storytelling skills are so great that he doesn't have to get overtly political. But he does have political points (is there a more damning document on the '60s than "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"?). And while I have not read "I Am Charlotte Simmons" I found Lance Mannion's discussion of its politics very persuasive.
Join the discussion at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/johnclaytonoutreach/
Could it be that Tom Wolfe, who prides himself on basing his fiction on a great deal of reporting, simply hadn't done enough reporting to write his sex scenes?
By the way, I usually admire Wolfe for precisely that quality: his reporting and storytelling skills are so great that he doesn't have to get overtly political. But he does have political points (is there a more damning document on the '60s than "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"?). And while I have not read "I Am Charlotte Simmons" I found Lance Mannion's discussion of its politics very persuasive.
Join the discussion at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/johnclaytonoutreach/
