"The submarine sandwich’s... phallic yet floppy nature can also be seen in this context as a mocking reflection of the administration’s strutting, performative, hollow machismo...."

"'He thought it was funny. Well, he doesn’t think it’s funny today,' declared Ms. Pirro, playing the nation’s sputtering high school vice principal sick of all these disrespectful kids, in a video announcing that Mr. Dunn would be charged with felony assault.... Attorney General Pam Bondi... condemned him as 'an example of the Deep State we have been up against for seven months.' That seems like a lot of firepower brought to bear on a single sandwich-throwing paralegal...."

Writes Bruce Handy, author of "Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies," in "I’ll Have My Resistance on a Roll. Hold the Mayo" (NYT).

As you may have noticed, the prosecutor failed to get an indictment, disproving at long last "that grand juries aren’t in fact willing to indict ham sandwiches."

By the way, what's the origin of that old joke? Let's read Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities":

"What are some famous quotes by writers/artists/musicians about critics?"

That's I question I had, a couple hours ago, as I was gathering my thoughts in preparation, I thought, for blogging this article by the New Yorker's movie critic, Richard Brody, "In Defense of the Traditional Review/Far from being a journalistic relic, as suggested by recent developments at the New York Times, arts criticism is inherently progressive, keeping art honest and pointing toward its future."

I got a bunch of great quotes out of Grok with my question, including the one that deserves to stand in for them all: "Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read" (Frank Zappa).

Then there was this, from Pablo Picasso: "The critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." And that got me tumbling down a side path with an issue I'd encountered yesterday, the idea that there are individuals who identify as eunuchs and the notion that castration is, for them, medically necessary. I was told: "The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care (Version 8) includes a chapter on 'eunuch' as a gender identity, suggesting that castration may be considered 'medically necessary gender-affirming care' for some who identify as eunuchs and experience distress from their genitals."

I introduced the question: "It occurs to me that a person might argue that they identify as dead and therefore entitled to physician-assisted suicide — that killing is a medically required treatment." That led to a long discussion that kept me far away from the topic of the usefulness of critics — they're "inherently progressive"! — and I'm not going to go into the details. I'm just going to list a few phrases that came up in the Grok discussion that's displaced blogging for me this morning:

"Conditions like Cotard’s syndrome, where individuals genuinely believe they are dead or non-existent, are rare and classified as a psychiatric delusion, treated through therapy or medication, not affirmation," "So you're saying that if only doctors had been killing people who 'identify as dead' for a longer period of time and managed to fight off those who think it's wrong, it would be analogous to transgender surgeries," "You’re correct that genital transgender surgeries, like vaginoplasty or phalloplasty, are... irreversible in any meaningful sense," "'Sexual sensation is possible due to preserved nerves' — I note that you didn't say orgasm," "Your point about muscles is spot-on: the lack of vaginal musculature in a neovagina means it cannot replicate the contractile component of a natal female orgasm," "Is there any commentary, comedy, or fictional writing utilizing my idea of 'identifying as dead'?," "Seems like something that someone in 'Chicago' would say (like 'He ran into my knife... 50 times')," "Somewhere, some writer(s) must have already written the line: 'Go ahead. Try to kill me. You can't. I'm already dead.'"

That went on and on, with the discussion of many movies, and it wasn't the only A.I. conversations that kept me away from the blog this morning. There was also, among many others, "Summarize this article... and explain why Brody thinks arts criticism is 'progressive.'" Which led to: "What is 'progressive' supposed to mean? It strikes me as utter bullshit." And: "Weave into this discussion what Tom Wolfe wrote in 'The Painted Word.'" And: "Isn't there some related idea — or conspiracy theory — that the CIA created the art market for Abstract Expressionism?"

All of that was more interesting to me than what I would have produced reading Brody's article and blogging it in my usual way. And my "usual way" is to follow whatever interests me, not to feel obligated, but to do what is intrinsically rewarding for me. You see the problem!

"Reading it today, I find that I Am Charlotte Simmons agitates and excites me once more. It is a profoundly pessimistic novel..."

"... not because of its interest in conservative ideas or its sex panic, but because it refuses to grant its characters a moment’s reprieve from the social system that it so brutally and correctly indicts. Perhaps my optimism is simply self-protective; I have taught college students for over a decade now, and I like to believe that they have experiences that cannot be reduced to the quest for social dominance, that their desire to belong does not always end in the dreariest conformity."

Writes Merve Emre, in "An Unsentimental Education/Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals" (NYRB).

I know you're unlikely to have the needed subscription, but that essay will appear in a new edition of the novel, coming out next month (so wait for that edition if you're thinking of buying the book).

And I would encourage you to click that link if only to see the top of the article, which is illustrated with an Elliott Erwitt photograph, "Women with a sculpture personifying the alma mater at Columbia University, New York City, 1955."

That's one of the best photos I've ever seen! And it is evocative today, with Columbia so much in the news.

"I Am Charlotte Simmons" got a lot of attention when it came out in 2004, and it will be interesting to see reactions to it 20 years later. 2004 was the first year of this blog. I read the book.

How tedious to find J.D. Vance in an article titled "The Secret to Tom Wolfe’s Irresistible Snap, Crackle and Pop."

This is a David Brooks essay in the NYT that starts out with some good insight into Wolfe's writing:

Wolfe was known for his style, but it was his worldview that made him. He read Max Weber at Yale and it all clicked: Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for surfaces, for the care with which people put on their social displays. He had the ability to name the status rules that envelop us in ways we are hardly aware of. He had a knack for capturing what it feels like to be caught up in a certain sort of social dilemma.

There's a great photograph of Wolfe positioned in his living space, but look at the caption: "Wolfe’s goal was to be like Balzac, not JD Vance...." Oh, no. Why is Vance here (even in the negative ("not JD Vance"))? I search the page for "Vance" so I can zero in on it (rather than actually read this essay, as I'd planned):

Wolfe’s goal was to be like Balzac, not JD Vance.

"The contradictions of a gay man falling in genuine love with a woman — while retaining his attraction to men — are captured..."

"... in a lovely passage using Bernstein’s score for the ballet 'Fancy Free' (which would morph into the Broadway musical 'On the Town'), turning the dance into a metaphorical pas de deux. (Or is it trois?).... Lenny is the free-spirited, wildly charismatic star of his and Felicia’s lives, but it’s Felicia who grounds him.... When tensions in their relationship reach their apotheosis, [Bradley] Cooper stages the showdown in their bedroom at the Dakota apartment building while the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade tootles by outside. Just as Felicia is hurling the most hurtful, damaging things she can say — warning her husband that if he isn’t careful, he’ll end up 'a lonely old queen' — a giant inflatable Snoopy floats by the window, a sad, whimsically surreal rebuke."

Writes Ann Hornaday in "Bravo, Bradley Cooper: ‘Maestro’ is a grand, messy symphony of moments/The director and star of the Leonard Bernstein biopic tells the conductor’s story, and that of his wife (Carey Mulligan), with electric, sometimes scattershot verve" (WaPo).

Okay. I'm all for such tootling. But is there any of "Radical Chic" in this new movie? (Read Tom Wolfe's great essay here, where it belongs, at New York Magazine.)

Branding.

pic.twitter.com/JRebl653BP

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2023

ADDED: I was going to create a new tag for Musk's new AI project, but typing in the letters, I saw that I already had a tag "grok" — lower case "g" — so I just used that, even though I knew the existing posts with that tag had to be just about the word "grok." I wasn't going to create a second "grok" tag, with an upper case "G." I don't like tag proliferation, but — more important — I wanted to publish this post with the old tag so I could click on it and see what I'd done in the past.

I see that last January I used "grok" in a post about an article about thinking about thinking:

Was Virginia Heffernan's Wired article about Pete Buttigieg badly written?

I saw Wired's promotion of the article on Twitter 2 days ago (2 members of my family independently shared this with me, so it must be my kind of raw material):

With a remarkable blend of intellect and empathy, Pete Buttigieg brings a fresh perspective to the forefront of public discourse. https://t.co/mzbXgnvkSv

📷: ​​Argus Paul Estabrook pic.twitter.com/KzI3qKrIA2

— WIRED (@WIRED) May 18, 2023

I read the first few paragraphs of the article and felt stirred up to make fun of it, but then I stopped myself. This morning, I'm seeing a Legal Insurrection article by Mike LaChance that reflects the sort of mockery I nearly fell into: "Wired Magazine Gets Roasted for Cringeworthy Puff Piece on Pete Buttigieg/'he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes—neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity—intelligible to me.'"

Did I miss my chance to get in on the early mockery action or was I right to stop myself — because this thing might be brilliant writing? Is this something in the Hunter S. Thompson/Tom Wolfe tradition?

Legal Insurrection quotes the first, second, and fifth paragraphs and comments "It's so over the top." Yeah? And did the writer go over the top for a reason and with exciting, interesting words? Let's read the first 2 paragraphs and keep in mind that this might be great writing:

"Zhu and Davies are two ambitious young men, by all descriptions exceedingly smart, who appeared to understand the structural opportunity of digital currency rather well..."

"... that crypto is a game of creating virtual fortunes out of thin air and convincing other humans with traditional forms of money that those virtual fortunes deserve to be real-world ones. They built social-media cred by playing the part of billionaire financial geniuses, translated that to actual financial credit, then put billions of dollars in borrowed money to work in speculative investments they could cheerlead to success with their large, influential platforms. Before you know it, the pretend billionaire is a real billionaire shopping for super-yachts. They grokked the game, and the plan worked perfectly — until it didn’t."

From "The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars/Everyone trusted the two guys at Three Arrows Capital. They knew what they were doing — right?" (NY Magazine).

ADDED: I haven't seen "grok" in a while.  That's a word coined in 1961 by Robert Heinlein in "Stranger in a Strange Land." It's not based on any other word, just, as the OED puts it, an "arbitrary formation."

"The Kellys have preserved the interior walnut planes, cove lighting and most of the room configurations. They added reinforced window glass, skylights, pink carpet, crystal chandeliers and stained-glass lamps."

"Walls are covered in paintings and prints, whether reproductions of Impressionist masterpieces or folk art portraits, alongside family photos. 'I just like art, I’ve got all kinds of art, I don’t care what it is,' Kelly said. Knickknacks on the shelves include creamy ceramic vessels that her sons made as children and souvenirs of vacations nationwide — the very kind of 'odds and ends of family living' that Woman’s Home Companion had envisioned. A coating of sparkly green stucco on MoMA’s wooden exterior 'makes it maintenance-free,' Shaun Kelly, the eldest son, said.... The property’s 2.7 acres are lush with unusual trees, such as Japanese snowbell and weeping huckleberry. 'If it doesn’t give me a flower, it can’t come here,' Mary Kelly said. Neoclassical stone statues, vintage subway signs and metal filigree benches are scattered around the grounds."

From "MoMA Built a House. Then It Disappeared. Now It’s Found. In 1950, the museum exhibited Gregory Ain’s modernist creation. It’s now nestled in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y." (NYT).

I strongly encourage you — if you have any interest in design — to click through and see the photographs of the house as it was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 and how it looks now, 71 years later, after getting lived in by real people, with their own ideas of what a house should look like. The text I've quoted gives some idea, but the photographs drive home the truly amazing distinction between what professional designers conceive of to meet the needs of ordinary people and what actual people choose for themselves.

Of course, the NYT refrains from laughing or sneering at the Kelly family, but the exposure in the photographs is a bit threatening to their dignity, I think. I notice the NYT does not provide a comments section for this article. I discern that the politically correct response to this article is to mock the original modernist designers and to celebrate the humanity of the Kellys. 

The article quotes a professor who's written about the architect:

"'Vibe' as slang, referring to an aura or feeling, emerged in the sixties, in California, and gave the word its enduring hippie associations."

"The underground paper Berkeley Barb made frequent use of it as early as 1965. The following year, the Beach Boys hit 'Good Vibrations' exposed the slang to broader audiences.... In some ways, the rise of digital life allowed for a vibe revival....  Whereas Instagram’s main form is the composed tableau, captured in a single still image or unedited video, TikTok’s is the collection of real-world observations, strung together in a filmic montage....  TikTok’s technology makes it easy to crop video clips and set them to evocative popular songs: instant vibes.... When I watch a morning-routine TikTok from 'an herbalist and cook living in a Montana cabin,' I take in the mood of December sunlight, coffee in a ceramic mug, a vegetable rice bowl, tall pine forest, with a slowed-down Sufjan Stevens soundtrack—a nice creative-residency or hipster-pioneer vibe. After absorbing a dozen such videos at a stretch, I look up from my phone and my own apartment glows with that same kind of concentrated attention, as if I were seeing it in montage, too. The objects around me are lambent with significance. I can take in the vibe of my home office: hibiscus tree, hardwood desk, noise-cancelling headphones, sixties-jazz trio, to-go coffee cup. I suddenly feel a little more at home, as if the space belonged to me in a new way, or I had found my place within it as another element of the over-all vibe, playing my part."

From "TikTok and the Vibes Revival/Increasingly, what we’re after on social media is not narrative or personality but moments of audiovisual eloquence" (The New Yorker). 

ADDED: Speaking of hippies, I've been rereading Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," which was published in 1968. It never uses the word "vibe," but "vibrations"/"vibrating" appears 61 times: 

"He is only twenty-three years old, for godsake, the first millionaire businessman to rise up out of the teen-age netherworld, king of the rock and roll record producers...."

"Spector walks into the inner office, gingerly, like a cowboy, because of the way the English boots lift him up off the floor. He is slight, five feet seven, 130 pounds. His hair shakes faintly behind. It is a big room, like a living room, all beige except for nine gold-plated rock and roll records on the wall, some of Phil Spector’s 'goldies,' one million sales each. 'He’s a Rebel,' by the Crystals, 'Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,' by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, 'Be My Baby,' by the Ronettes, 'Da Do Ron Ron,' 'Then He Kissed Me,' 'Uptown,' 'He’s Sure the Boy I Love,' all by the Crystals, 'Wait Til My Baby Gets Home,' by Darlene Love. And beige walls, beige telephones all over the place, a beige upright piano, beige paintings, beige tables... There have been teen-agers who have made a million dollars before, but invariably they are entertainers, they are steered by older people, such as the good Colonel Tom Parker steers Elvis Presley. But Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen....  Anyway, Phil Spector likes this music. He genuinely likes it. He is not a short-armed fatty hustling nutball fads. 'I get a little angry when people say it’s bad music.... This music has a spontaneity that doesn’t exist in any other kind of music, and it’s what is here now. It’s unfair to classify it as rock and roll and condemn it. It has limited chord changes, and people are always saying the words are banal and why doesn’t anybody write lyrics like Cole Porter anymore, but we don’t have any presidents like Lincoln anymore, either. You know? Actually, it’s more like the blues. It’s pop blues. I feel it’s very American. It’s very today. It’s what people respond to today. It’s not just the kids. I hear cab drivers, everybody, listening to it.'"

Wrote Tom Wolfe in "The First Tycoon of Teen," chapter 5 of "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby."

The erstwhile teen genius died yesterday — at the age of 81. In prison. Of covid.

That last post finally pushed me over the line to create a tag I've been thinking about for a while...

... "the attack on individualism."

The pressure was building after yesterday's post about Seattle's effort to teach its employees about their own "Internalized Racial Superiority," which is "defined by" — among other things — "individualism."

What pushed me over the line into new tag creation this morning was a criticism of women who fall into the "trap" of talking about their individual struggle with motherhood.

I went back into the archive and added the tag to a few old things:

June 19, 2020 — This is a quote from a review of the book "White Fragility": "'I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic,' DiAngelo explains. 'I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective.' It is always a collective, because DiAngelo regards individualism as an insidious ideology. 'White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy,' DiAngelo writes, a system 'we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves.'"

November 29, 2015 — I quoted the Tom Wolfe essay, "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening":

"Presumably [Andrew] Sullivan’s editors are frightened that he might make the radically bourgeois point that looting and violence are wrong."

"Cockburn understands that Sullivan is not just forbidden from writing for the New York magazine about the riots; his contract means he cannot write on the topic for another publication. He is therefore legally unable to write anything about the protests without losing his job — at the magazine that, in 1970, published Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe’s brilliant and controversial excoriation of progressive piety. It’s the bonfire of the liberals!... Sullivan, a source close to New York magazine reveals, has to have his work vetted by sensitive junior editors to make sure it doesn’t trigger them."

Writes Cockburn in American Spectator (after Andrew Sullivan tweeted, simply, "Heads up: my column won't be appearing this week").

"Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after, congressmen began to wonder..."

"... about something that hadn’t dawned on them since Kennedy’s oration.... It had been a battle for morale at home and image abroad. Fine, O.K., we won, but it had no tactical military meaning whatsoever. And it had cost a fortune, $150 billion or so. And this business of sending a man to Mars and whatnot? Just more of the same, when you got right down to it... Game’s over, NASA won, congratulations.... NASA’s annual budget sank like a stone from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s.... As a result, the space program has been killing time for 40 years with a series of orbital projects ... Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, the International Space Station and the space shuttle.... [T]heir purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston’s Johnson Space Center — by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to earth. The shuttle program, for example, was actually supposed to appeal to the public by offering orbital tourist rides, only to end in the Challenger disaster, in which the first such passenger, Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, perished. Forty years! For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress. They have so many more luscious and appealing projects that could make better use of the close to $10 billion annually the Mars program would require...."

Wrote Tom Wolfe, ten years ago, in "One Giant Leap to Nowhere," which I'm reading this morning because it was linked at Instapundit.

Wolfe thought that what was needed was "The Word" — inspirational speech about the "godlike" enterprise of space travel. Inspirational speech is what JFK had provided, with his famously effective challenge, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth." But Wolfe puts that in context. It was the Cold War, we were competing with the Russians, and they were impossibly ahead of us in space travel that orbited Earth.

The Soviet cosmo-champions beat our astro-champions so handily, gloom spread like a gas. Every time you picked up a newspaper you saw headlines with the phrase, SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... The Soviets had produced a generation of scientific geniuses — while we slept, fat and self-satisfied!

That's what was so inspiring, the fight with the Russians. And, yay, we won. And then the game was over. If it was a game, a sport, a battle... it was a feat to get a big majority of Americans caught up in it in the first place. But after it's over and won, what's to keep the crowd in the stadium? Wolfe's idea about new inspiration has nothing like the power of the old Cold War with the Russians. It's that one day the sun will burn out and human beings will need an alternative. That's 5 billion years from now! And it looks like the first billion years of that will still be okay for us. That's nothing like what JFK leveraged back in the 60s.

ADDED: Wolfe did not live to hear President Trump say NASA "should be focused on the much bigger things... including Mars." Since it was Trump who said that, I'm just going to guess that the Democratic Party candidates are all opposed to it. Has anyone said anything about it? I tried to google that, and the one thing that popped up was a tweet from — of all people — David Hogg:

I wonder if any of the presidential candidates support getting us to Mars by 2030

Projects like Apollo and others from NASA have to lead to the invention of tons of new products/technologies, employed over 400,000 Americans while doing so and helped unite everyday Americans.

"In this little room full of people he was suffering the pangs of men whose egos lose their virginity..."

"... as happens when they overhear for the first time a beautiful woman’s undiluted, full-strength opinion of their masculine selves."

That's my second-to-last quote from "The Bonfire of the Vanities," which some of you have been reading along with me.

The "he" is the prosecutor Kramer, and the woman is Maria, whose recorded voice he's hearing. She calls him "a pompous little bastard" and "a creep."

I like the idea of an ego losing its virginity. And then there's the notion that a woman's opinion can rape a man's ego. Is the male ego so weak or is the undiluted, full-strength opinion of a beautiful woman exceedingly strong?

"What does a rat look like when he’s listening to himself being a rat in a room full of people who know he’s a rat..."?

I have another passage from Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" (for those of you who've been reading along with me). This is  97% of the way through the book, the main character Sherman McCoy is listening as a tape he made is played in the judge's chambers. The point of view shifts, in the end of the first paragraph, from Sherman to the prosecutor (Kramer):

In this sad moldering little room were seven other men, seven other organisms, hundreds of pounds of tissue and bone, breathing, pumping blood, burning calories, processing nutrients, filtering out contaminants and toxins, transmitting neural impulses, seven warm grisly unpleasant animals rooting about, for pay, in the entirely public cavity he used to think of as his soul. Kramer was dying to look at McCoy, but decided to be cool and professional.

What does a rat look like when he’s listening to himself being a rat in a room full of people who know he’s a rat—going wired to see his girlfriend? Unconsciously, but profoundly, Kramer was relieved. Sherman McCoy, this Wasp, this Wall Street aristocrat, this socialite, this Yale man, was as much a rat as any of the drug dealers he had wired up to go rat out their species. No, McCoy was more of a rat. One doper didn’t expect much from another. But in these upper reaches, upon these pinnacles of propriety and moralism, up in this stratosphere ruled by the pale thin-lipped Wasps, honor, presumably, was not a word to be trifled with. Yet backed to the wall, they turned rat just as quickly as any lowlife....

I was, obviously, interested in the rat. But it was especially intriguing to begin with the idea that Sherman wasn't an animal at all but a place, an "entirely public cavity he used to think of as his soul," and all the other people were animals rooting around in that place. As "warm grisly unpleasant animals," I guess they were rats, from Sherman's perspective. Then we shift to Kramer's perspective, and he's seeing Sherman as the rat (and thinking about other rats he has known).

Really, everyone is seen as a rat here, but no one sees himself as a rat. Kramer sees himself as above ratdom, while Sherman sees himself as nothing at all. Both men — projecting rattiness onto others — protect their own interests.

"Do you remember when we used to live in the Village, the way I used to go off to work... The way I used to give you the raised left fist when I left the apartment, the Black Power salute?"

I revealed that I've finished Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," which some of you have been reading along with me, and maybe you've finished it too. I have a few more quotes I want to serve up, first this bit from 94% of the way through the book (which is something that connects to the ending). Here, Sherman McCoy makes a desperate attempt to reconnect with his wife, Judy:

“Do you remember when we used to live in the Village, the way I used to go off to work?”

“The way you used to go off to work?”

“When I first started working for Pierce & Pierce? The way I used to give you the raised left fist when I left the apartment, the Black Power salute?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“You remember why?”

“I guess so.”

“It was supposed to say that yes, I was going to work on Wall Street, but my heart and soul would never belong to it. I would use it and rebel and break with it. You remember all that?”

Judy said nothing.

“I know it didn’t work out that way,” he went on, “but I remember what a lovely feeling it was. Don’t you?”

In the very end of the book, the Epilogue, we get a fictional article in The New York Times, telling us what's happened to McCoy in the year since the events we've been reading about, and here we see a recurrence of the Black Power salute:

Mrs. McCoy and her daughter reportedly have moved to the Midwest, but Mrs. McCoy was in the spectator section of the courtroom yesterday, apparently unrecognized by the noisy group of demonstrators, black and white, who occupied most of the seats. At one point, Mr. McCoy looked toward his wife, smiled slightly, and raised his left hand in a clenched-fist salute. The meaning of this gesture was unclear. Mrs. McCoy refused to speak to reporters.

A few thoughts:

"... as if the press were a rapacious beast, a tiger. I think they’d like to be thought of as bloodthirsty...."

I hope you're with me, 84% of the way into Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities." Here's a snippet from conversation at a party Sherman McCoy attends after his ignominious arrest. What's amusing for the reader is that the snooty arty guests, who wanted nothing to do with him at an earlier party, now find him quite fascinating. My selection begins with dialogue from a novelist — emptily named Nunnally Voyd:

"I must tell you, I’ve thought about you more than once over the past few days. Welcome to the legion of the damned…now that you’ve been properly devoured by the fruit flies.... The press. I’m amused by all the soul-searching these…insects do. 'Are we too aggressive, too cold-blooded, too heartless?'—as if the press were a rapacious beast, a tiger. I think they’d like to be thought of as bloodthirsty. That’s what I call praise by faint damnation. They’ve got the wrong animal. In fact, they’re fruit flies. Once they get the scent, they hover, they swarm. If you swing your hand at them, they don’t bite it, they dart for cover, and as soon as your head is turned, they’re back again. They’re fruit flies. But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that."

Despite the fact that this grand literatus was using his predicament as a pedestal upon which to place this entomological conceit, this set piece that came out a bit shopworn in the delivery, Sherman was grateful. In some way Voyd was, indeed, a brother, a fellow legionnaire. He seemed to recall—he had never paid much attention to literary gossip—that Voyd had been stigmatized as homosexual or bisexual. There had been some sort of highly publicized squabble…How very unjust! How dare these…insects pester this man who, while perhaps a bit affected, had such largeness of spirit, such sensitivity to the human condition? What if he was…gay? The very word gay popped into Sherman’s head spontaneously. (Yes, it is true. A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.)

I'll give you 6 thoughts...

1. Sherman finds himself suddenly using the word "gay" — it's the mid-80s — and he realizes he's become a liberal.

2. I think Tom Wolfe invented the adage "A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested." It's a twist on the old adage, "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged." Looking to see how old that adage is, I find — on one of those famous-quotes sites — "If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested," and that's attributed to Tom Wolfe! They're just misquoting "Bonfire," where the new adage appears and the reader is supposed to recognize the twist on the old adage. The misquote spells out what Wolfe trusts you to get. (Or am I wrong? Maybe on some other occasion Tom Wolfe said it the pedestrian way. I like to think he did not.)

3. This passage caught my attention because it had animals — insects and, also (fleetingly), a tiger. Nunnally Voyd, the character, was trying to get attention, and it worked on me. The mere arrival of insects is interesting, novels being so relentlessly about people people people. Wolfe — he's named after an animal — must see into The Voyd and know his tricks and tendencies. Voyd loves expounding within a metaphor and indulges himself into the face of the suffering McCoy.

4. McCoy is needy, so he enjoys the performance even as he knows what's awful about it — the "set piece" is "shopworn." At the earlier party, his problem was that, as a financier, he was just boring to the arty people. Now, as a criminal, he excites them, and he responds by feeling a sense of brotherhood — fellow feeling for a man he has really has nothing in common with. But as an outsider to the larger society, McCoy is interesting to the artists, who get energy from him, now that he's — if you believe the insect press — a near-murderer.

5. Is the press like fruit flies? Voyd wields his conceit with the novelist's confidence. And Wolfe writes of the novelist's confidence with his own novelist confidence. Wolfe's confidence is sublimely secure because he uses a character to spout ideas that are interesting but might be wrong. In fact, the wrongness of the idea might be the point of having Voyd express them. The press is killing McCoy.

6. Did Wolfe intend for us to think about the Sartre play, "The Flies"? I don't know, but Wolfe said this in a 1988 interview: "You know, Sartre was famous for the statement, in the play, No Exit, 'Hell is other people.' To which Claude Levi-Strauss said, 'No. Hell is ourselves.' And the inferno that I try to present in The Bonfire of the Vanities is internal...."

"... the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself..."

Time to roll out another passage from Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," which some of you are reading along with me. Here's a little something from 66% of the way through the book, in a scene where our main character Sherman McCoy is revealing his impending arrest to his father:

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.

"People who are all the time crossing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, from this side of the law to the other side, from this side to the other side."

For the new installment of the "Bonfire" project — where we're reading passages from Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" — I offer this, from Kindle Location 4,662:

“But you don’t live in that jungle, Sherman, and you never have. You know what’s in that jungle? People who are all the time crossing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, from this side of the law to the other side, from this side to the other side. You don’t know what that’s like. You had a good upbringing. Laws weren’t any kind of a threat to you. They were your laws, Sherman, people like you and your family’s. Well, I didn’t grow up that way. We were always staggering back and forth across the line, like a buncha drunks, and so I know and it doesn’t frighten me. And let me tell you something else. Right there on the line everybody’s an animal—the police, the judges, the criminals, everybody.”

Our main character Sherman is getting lectured by his mistress and accidental partner in crime Maria.