Tom Wolfe

After Clay Felker passed away Tuesday morning in Manhattan, The Observer spoke to some who knew him well.

 

Robert Benton

The first time I ever screamed “fuck” in front of a room full of women was when I got mad at Clay at the Esquire offices. We were having this argument that went up and down the hall and I reached my wits end; I just said, “You fuck!” It came out of my mouth before I knew what I had said. Clay could drive you crazy, but you never stopped caring for him.

 

Milton Glaser

We were once in Paris.  read more »

Two things we learned from reading Andrew Ross Sorkin's Dealbook column in today's New York Times: 1. Tom Wolfe rides the Hampton Jitney; and 2. He thinks Sherman McCoy, the protagonist of his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities would be sunk in the current economic climate. (Join the club, Sherman!)

As Mr. Wolfe tells Mr. Sorkin: "He would be eating his heart out wanting to run a hedge fund, but he’s not smart enough!" Well, thankfully he's also totally fictional.

In the column, Mr. Wolfe shares his views on the current crisis in late-late capitalism with vague, oracular pronouncements like "It sounds like even the firms that aren't in trouble are in trouble" and "It has always interested me that the word 'credit' comes from the word 'credere,' which means 'to believe'.  read more »

Tom Wolfe responded in this week's Observer to Aby Rosen's allegations of anti-Semitism in Mr. Wolfe's 2006 New York Times op-ed about Mr. Rosen's plans for 980 Madison.

Here was Mr. Rosen in The Observer last week:

I like productive criticism; I try to criticize things all the time, not because I’m so important. … I want equal criticism; it’s just the way you deliver it. It had a nasty undertone that I didn’t care much for. I grew up in Germany postwar as a Jewish child; I did not need an anti-Semitic undertone ...

I’ve seen a lot of anti-Semites who mingle with Jews left and right.  read more »

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A spokesperson for the McCains said that the intern that was supposedly responsible for recipes lifted off of the Food Network site, has been "dealt with swiftly," which we find scary. [AP]  read more »

Let’s give a warm New York welcome to the 10th anniversary edition of Phillip Lopate’s essential Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, $19.95), now in paperback and expanded to include material from the past decade.

We've seen many changes since 1998. The twin towers are gone. Rudy, too. The Yankees have quit winning the World Series. The rich got richer, again. Mr. Lopate detects a vein of anxiety about certain trends: “Some writers have warned that the city’s texture, its very character, is being eroded by a steady stream of luxury condominiums and national chain stores. In this apocalyptic vision, the destruction of New York will come not from terrorist attack but from the slow nibbling away of its soul by greedy, suburbanized blandness.” But browse awhile through this anthology and you’ll recognize that the city’s essence is eternal. Here, for example, is Tom Wolfe writing (writing!) in 1965, from a sweet little ditty called “A Sunday Kind of Love”:  read more »

As reported earlier, Tom Wolfe is working on a new novel set in Miami called Back to Blood, which will be published in 2009 by Little, Brown.

According to a press release, the book would deal with "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition." The overriding theme, though, based on an interview with Mr. Wolfe, will be Miami's immigrant population, which he said includes Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Russians.

"My original subject was just immigration, not from any policy point of view, but just curiosity about what the life of recent immigrants is like, and how they feel when they come up against American culture or Americans in general," Mr. Wolfe said. "As far as I can tell there is no other city in the world [besides Miami] where more than half the population are people who arrived here within the last 50 years."  read more »

Tom Wolfe, who has published all thirteen of his books since 1965 with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is taking his business to Little, Brown for his upcoming novel, Back to Blood.

Why did Mr. Wolfe leave his home? According to FSG editor-in-chief Jonathan Galassi, it was a question only of money.

"We just couldn't agree on the price for the project. That was the only thing," Mr. Galassi said. "We love Tom. He's a big part of the family here. It's sad, but there are certain things that are just determining."

Mr. Galassi said he read about 20 pages of Mr. Wolfe's book when Lynn Nesbit--Mr. Wolfe's longtime literary agent--submitted it to him in early December. Ms. Nesbit, who could not be reached for comment, took the book elsewhere when it became clear that an agreement with FSG would not be reached.

Mr. Wolfe's editor at Little, Brown will be Pat Strachan, who worked with him on Bonfire of the Vanities and five other books while she was an editor at FSG during the 1970s and '80s.  read more »

Would Ken Fisher, the former City Councilman-turned-blogger, be able to help a developer get a real-estate project through a gridlocked bureaucracy? City Hall, the monthly published by the folks who bring you Our Town and The West Side Spirit, at one time thought so.

And maybe he could. But more so than a Sandy Lindenbaum or Ross Moskowitz?

The 10-month-old newspaper is about to come out with "The Land Use Power List: 10 People Who Can Make Sure Your Project Gets Built--or Stop It." Mr. Fisher was on an early version of the list that The Real Estate obtained. The others, with The Real Estate's annotations, are below:

Dan Doctoroff (a shoo-in) Amanda Burden (of course) Melinda Katz (if you are Wal-Mart) Robert Tierney (unless you are Tom Wolfe) Avi Schick (maybe in five months) Joshua J. Sirefman (maybe five months ago) Joe Bruno (so long as he stays in office) Eliot Spitzer (time will tell) Sheldon Silver (if your project involves or competes with Madison Square Garden in any way whatsoever, then yes)

Manhattan Media President Tom Allon and City Hall Editor Edward-Isaac Dovere told The Real Estate that the list above is already out of date and will likely change before it is published March 12. Mr. Sirefman--who left the Economic Development Corporation in January--has been cut. Mr. Fisher, a real estate lawyer and lobbyist, may or may not be.

City Hall is still taking suggestions, so feel free to write them in below. You could even nominate yourself and no one would know. Hey, it's the blogosphere! - Matthew Schuerman

LOCATION: The controversy over 980 Madison Avenue has yet to be resolved, but the Landmarks Preserva  read more »

• One can tell critic Martin Fuller doesn't like Tom Wolfe by modest statements like: "From Bauhaus to Our House [is] perhaps the most ill-informed book ever written about architecture." [House + Garden]
• If you fit into the "bonus buyers and moneyed type" category, DUMBO is surely a perfect fit. And a chilly February weekend is surely the perfect time to see the open house of those "once-decrepit warehouses turned luxury lofts." [NY Mag]
• The Mayor has "questions" about Clipper Equities, the new owner of $1.3 billion Starrett City. Why? He tells his listeners out in radio land that Clipper isn't "a reputable landlord." [Real Deal]
• Manhattan Gnudi bars and tapas joints are all the epicurian rage. They'd be even more likeable without names like Degustation and Al Di La. [Gridskipper]
- Max Abelson
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Is author, sartorial superman, and sometime journalist Tom Wolfe milking the Landmarks Preservation Commission for publicity? Some think so, according to the Village Voice. Mr. Wolfe, an Upper East Sider through and through, has made a hobby of late lampooning and lambasting the commission, dubbing it ineffectual and a pawn of powerful mayors. But his opinions might be planted on shaky statistical ground. - Tom Acitelli

On the sleepy last Sunday in November, Tom Wolfe flipped a middle finger at the city’s Landmar  read more »

On the sleepy last Sunday in November, Tom Wolfe flipped a middle finger at the city’s Landmarks P  read more »

• Manhattan Mall, air rights selling for $689 million.
[Crain's]
• Thor buys Coney Island's Astroland Amusement Park.
[AMNY]
• Stroll through the Modern's newest expansion.
[NY Times]
• Hotels whip in-house gyms into shape.
[NY Times]
• Spiff up the lobby, attract new office tenants.
[NY Times]
• Why Reckson-SL Green merger no longer a sure thing.
[NY Times]
• Mack-Cali joins Icahn-Macklowe bid for Reckson.
[WSJ]
• Two Herald Square on the market for $500 million.
[NY Post]
• Commercial hub coming to downtown Jamaica.
[Daily News]
• Construction vacating fewer apartments, city says.
[Daily News]
• Developers scramble for city hospital sites.
[NY Sun]
• What landmarks novella could Tom Wolfe write?
[NY Sun]

Did we miss any New York City real estate news this morning? Please send along tips and links.

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In a conversation on Tuesday with The Real Estate, the developer Aby Rosen did his best to besmirch the knight in a white suit who tried to rescue 980 Madison in the Times this weekend:

Tom Wolfe loves to rant and he's been ranting against the city and the Landmarks [Preservation] Commission and the commissioners left and right. I think the commissioners are doing a fantastic job. They do not need Tom Wolfe telling them what to do. The landmarking issue is worldwide. There is an issue, but he works with the insult factor. I always felt insults were a sign of weakness, not strength. He should stick to writing books. His facts were not great, either. It's easy to write an op-ed piece. You can pick and choose your facts.

Rosen, whom Wolfe described standing outside last month's commission hearing with his "chin up, tummy out," went on to extol all the great parts of 980 Madison Avenue that Charlotte Simmons' alter ego overlooked: the museum, sculpture garden, green technology and a very nice building to boot.  read more »

"I am a respected developer. I would do things right."

- Matthew Schuerman

Dr.  read more »

Dr.  read more »

Who is Eddie Hayes?

If you have to ask, he hasn’t done his job.  read more »

Who is Eddie Hayes?   If you have to ask, he hasn’t done his job.    read more »

I was a high-school and then a college student when the startling literary boom dubbed “The Ne  read more »

I was a high-school and then a college student when the startling literary boom dubbed “The New Jo  read more »

“Obviously, the National Book Award was very gratifying,” Lynn Nesbit said, “but c  read more »

“Obviously, the National Book Award was very gratifying,” Lynn Nesbit said, “but can it possib  read more »

Tom Wolfe’s preservationist friends are taking their “Save 2 Columbus Circle” campaign to the street this Thursday. A lunchtime demonstration is planned to take place outside the Center for Architecture, at 536 LaGuardia Place. The Center for Architecture/AIA New York Chapter will be gathering for a private reception in support of the new Museum of Arts and Design. The protest begins at 11:45, and those who attend get fed. So, even if you have no qualms with changes to the building’s modernist facade, the brown bag lunch should be more than enough reason to drop by. And maybe the man in the white suit will make an appearance. -Michael Calderone  read more »

Another decade, another lengthy Harper's state of the novel essay.

In the October Harper's, Ben Marcus offers a lengthy state-of-the-novel essay, subtly titled Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction, in which he spends 13 pages beating up Jonathan Franzen--snubber of Oprah and William Gaddis alike--and the middlebrow fiction establishment he represents.

Marcus' essay follows Franzen's own Harper's state-of-the-novel essay, Perchance to Dream, from 1996. And Franzen's essay had followed Tom Wolfe's Harper's state-of-the-novel essay, Stalking the Billion-footed Beast, from 1989.

Using time-travel technology, The Media Mob has moved on to the year 2014 to read the next Harper's state-of-the-novel essay: Reading Harry Potter to The Machines: Crisis of Metaphor and Meaning in the Time of Our Robot Overlords by Josh Schwartz.

How do they all stack up?

Thesis

Marcus: Experimental fiction is just as valid as mainstream fiction and deserves to be read despite critics like Franzen who think it a) is insulting and unreadable; and b) makes writers like himself feel dumb.

Franzen: Why isn't anyone reading anymore? Specifically, why isn't anyone reading young writers like Jonathan Franzen? He's good, I tell ya.

Wolfe: Fiction writers need to leave their comfort zone and do some reporting if they want to salvage the novel from preciousness.

Schwartz: These robots we built that control all aspects of our lives just don't get fiction.

Frighteningly Overwrought Metaphor

Marcus: "As a writer of sometimes abstract, so-called experimental fiction that can take a more active attention to read, I would say that my ideal reader's Wernicke's area [of the brain] is staffed by an army of jumpsuited code-breakers, working a barn-size space that is strung about the rafters with a mathematically intricate lattice of rope and steel, and maybe gusseted by a synthetic coil that is stronger and more sensitive than either, like guitar strings made from an unraveled spinal cord, each strand tuned to different tensions. The conduits of language that flow past in liquid-cooled bone-hollows could trigger unique vibrations that resonate into an original symphony when my ideal reader scanned a new sentence."

Franzen: "The library America in which I found myself after I published The Twenty-Seventh City bore a strange resemblance to the St. Louis I'd grown up in: a once-great city that had been gutted and drained by white flight and superhighways. Ringing the depressed urban core of serious fiction were prosperous new suburbs of mass entertainments. Much of the inner city's remaining vitality was concentrated in the black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, and women's communities that had taken over the structures vacated by fleeing straight white males."

Wolfe: There's no such thing as a billion-footed beast, OK?

Schwartz: "0100000111110000011110000100010000010010100011001111011100001010111100001 110000010101010010011001100001100100001001000100100001000010001000010000101010101 0100000001000000100000010100000000000001100101011110101010101010111110101101111 0111100100111111110010011110101111010101010110111101011100010010011110111010111110 10111010101010001010110100011100111110001111110111101111110111111001111100111011100 1001100011100111101110011001101010." (The essay, such as it is, is written in binary code and hard-wired onto a ROM chip.)

Negative Impact on the Culture

Marcus: Numerous citations by bloggers, most of whom only read the excerpt online.

Franzen: The continuing existence of Jonathan Franzen.

Wolfe: Melanie Griffith's accent in Bonfire of the Vanities; The thoroughbred sex scene in Man in Full; I Am Charlotte Simmons.  read more »

Schwartz: Robots punished mankind with a mandatory curfew; Destruction of Harvard's Widener Library.

—Matt Haber

Mo Rocca and Tom Wolfe enjoyed the flight they shared from SFO to JFK the other day. "Mo Rocca went out of his way to be a fawning little fan girl," says one of their co-travellers. Well, it's hard not to admire a man who travels in white. And? "Both inexplicably chose ranch dressing." Yes, yes, of course they did.  read more »

"Ladies and gentlemen of the commission, I hope somewhere, wherever you are, that your ears are itching to what has been said today," exclaimed white-clad author and 2 Columbus Circle enthusiast Tom Wolfe.

Of course, the ladies and gentlemen of the Landmarks Preservation Commission were nowhere to be found. Yet, each commissioner's name was scrawled on eleven empty chairs at today's "People's Hearing" on the fate of architect Edward Durell Stone's iconic building. Several community and preservation groups are fighting proposed changes to the structure's marble façade.

Around 150 people sat in the spectacular General Society for Mechanics and Tradesmen Library, and listened to speakers give their reasons (both historical and personal), as to why a hearing is necessary.

"I happened to be working for the New York Herald Tribune when Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art was opening. I was sent there to cover it," said Mr. Wolfe, who mentioned speaking to the 98-year-old Mr. Hartford earlier this morning. "When I arrived, I saw a graceful, elegant, white marble monolith."

Other speakers shared Mr. Wolfe's enthusiasm, including architect and Yale dean Robert A. M. Stern, who called the commission's decision not to hold a hearing "inexplicable."

[The] city's great buildings will not be vulnerable to the politics of the moment," said Mr. Stern about the need for historical preservation.

New York Assembly Member Richard Gottfried called the meeting to order, and historian Francis Morrone offered an (admittedly biased) research report.

Mr. Wolfe-—who penned two lengthy op-ed pieces in the New York Times in 2003-—hammered home his points regarding Mr. Stone's decisive break from the modernist style that was in vogue at the time.

"[Stone] decided that it was folly to have an architecture in New York, or the United States generally—the great battle line of capitalism—based on a work of art or sculpturist movement of the 1920's in which all bourgeois elements were to be removed, including easy chairs. Easy chairs were anathema to International Style."  read more »

And what good is any ivory tower theory that deprives the Lumpenproletariat the modest comfort of an easy chair?

- Michael Calderone

Landmark West (which is hereby on notice that we're not using the exclamation point that is a part of their name! the people have spoken!) is holding a "people's hearing" this Thursday, starting at 1 p.m. at the General Society for Mechanics and Tradesmen Library (20 West 44th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues).

The group has been taking the Landmarks Preservation Commission to task lately for the commission's refusal to schedule public hearings about the future of 2 Columbus Circle, the imposing and odd, yet strangely beautiful, Edward Durell Stone-designed building that, frankly, is super-cool and should be left the fuck alone (ahem ... back to journalistic impartiality).

Landmark West! is trying to preserve the building's facade from being modernized, and the organization wants to you to show up and testify, whether you're for or against the Museum of Arts and Design's proposed renovations.

And Tom Wolfe (writer, white-suit advocate) is scheduled to give a little speech about the L.P.C.'s lack of the right stuff (get it?). Power to the people!  read more »

- Matthew Grace

Grand Nan Kempner. Now there was a woman who knew how to live.

“Here,  read more »

The Transom has forgotten to direct your attention to items of interest in today's paper:

Tom Wolfe, in remembering Nan Kempner in today's Transom, said: "She loved to say that she was the basis of my creature in The Bonfire of the Vanities known as the ‘social X-ray.' In fact, she wasn't. But she loved that so much that I was more than willing to cede it to her."

This The Transom did not know.

Following our fond recollections of Ms. Kempner is a monstrous report from the 4th of July festivities in and around the Hamptons. It features a few of our newest obsessions, who may become recurring characters. But please don't miss the moment in which a Mr. Spielberg orders a tome from Book Hampton.  read more »

Elsewhere in the paper: Lizzy Ratner welcomes us all to Murray Hell, the Manhattan retirement community for the 20-something college graduate. The Transom has actually never set foot in this neighborhood, and it is sickened to hear about these goings-on. Elsewhere, Jennifer Weiner caps on some chick writers. And Jon Stewart has stopped showing his 4-million-dollar West Village home. It is not, unfortunately, because he is letting The Transom snuggle with him all day long. —Choire Sicha

Does New York need another library?  read more »

I am Charlotte Simmons , by Tom Wolfe.  read more »

The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel , by James Wood.  read more »

It was only a small headline, buried deep in the Metro section of The New York Times on April 8-"Min  read more »

Can Venerable TrattoriaClaim Title as the City's Best?  read more »

On the morning of Saturday, Feb. 1, Tom Wolfe got a phone call from NBC's Today show.  read more »

Shortly after I separated from my husband six years ago, I was inducted into the Unofficial Man Hate  read more »

It was a fitting night for a Prankster's wake.  read more »

Dog Bites Man: City Shocked!  read more »

Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe.  read more »

There may not be much new material in Tom Wolfe's latest collection, Hooking Up , perhaps accounting  read more »

Even though much of the loss has been erased, the stock market debacle of Friday, April 14 offers a  read more »

David Kuhn, the new editor in chief of Steven Brill's Brill's Content magazine and editorial directo  read more »

IN NOVEMBER 1998, John Updike oh so quietly killed A Man in Full .It was a clean kill.  read more »

Turn of the Century , by Kurt Andersen.  read more »

Greenwich Village  read more »

The Extra Man , by Jonathan Ames.  read more »