tom wolfe-epictetus-frankfurt

[Ralph Dumain]

Maybe Tom Wolfe should be lumped in with the discussion of cynical reason,
assuming we want to take his life-long transparent phoniness that seriously
for even a moment.  I learned to hate this little turd from the moment I
read THE ELECTRIC KOOL-ACID ACID TEST, a revolting book about even more
revolting people.  Wasn't Tom Wolfe the one who dubbed the '70s the "Me
Decade"?  Indeed, for him that's what it was, as every decade before and
since.  If Wolfe decided to poke fun at the in-crowd, isn't it because of a
natural affinity for an empty bullshit existence on his part, bringing to
his reportage an inner emptiness more vacuous than anything he ever mocked?

Misanthropy does not look well on the smug (hear that, Robert Altman?),
because they never earned any of it with personal suffering.

Is it true that Adorno knew enough about the phenomenon of hipness to rebel
against it?  And when?  How closely was he expoosed to same or did he just
proceed on certain presuppositions?  Was there something like this in
German society as well as American?  Maybe he should have joined forces
with James Baldwin, who could not abide white hipsters for a second.  Did
Adorno know of Norman Mailer's execrable "The White Negro"?

At 12:26 AM 05/03/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>>(I should add that I can use this insight at least to make peace with some
>of Adorno's views of music.  I'm not convinced that he disliked, say, jazz
>as a musical form as much as he hated the Jazz Buff and the whole emergent
>hipness industry.  I hope I'm making the obvious point that Adorno not only
>hated commodification of dissent, he particularly hated those who went
>around with reflexive "Commodify Your Dissent" buttons in order to exempt
>themselves from the process. )
>
>Now, this of course is also one of Wolfe's main themes and one of his main
>criticisms of the political and especially "cultural" Left:  the Left as an
>idle consumer commodity, a way for pathetic framing-shop clerks to feel
>like the Conscious Element in History.