Extra Credits
Published on 15 May 2018Writer-turned-famous-editor of Astounding Stories, John W. Campbell helped usher in the golden age of science fiction, driven by a new authorial understanding of real science and real psychology.
May 17, 2018
John W. Campbell Reshapes Sci-Fi – Pulp! Astounding Stories – Extra Sci Fi
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Tom Wolfe “would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal”
In the National Post Colby Cosh explains why Tom Wolfe was so significant in the literary world almost from his first published work:
… Tom Wolfe was an educated man: unlike any of the macho novelists he was sparring with, he was entitled to adjoin an honest-to-God PhD to his byline. In the end, he could not escape the prejudices imprinted on him in youth. It is a truth universally acknowledged: a prose artist must excrete a novel to demonstrate his true mettle.
Wolfe described it this way himself in a 2008 interview. “Originally, I was only going to write one novel, to prove to myself and any random doubters that I could do it.” “Random doubters” sounds so dismissive and calm until you remember the amount of work Wolfe was proposing to undertake in order to impress them. He continued: “But that novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was such an astounding success… I’m afraid I got swept away.”
Wolfe, I suppose, was too well-raised to utter the word “money” in front of an interviewer. (The explicit subject of all his work, his journalism and fiction, is social status: but social status and money do travel together mighty closely.) Bonfire (1987) became one of the publishing events of the epoch, and he would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal. The dabbler in the novel had proved too much: he had proved that the novel really is still in a class by itself as a social phenomenon.
More novels in the vein of Bonfire — deeply researched, socially prescient, full of truculent conservative squareness — followed. I myself would not trade The Right Stuff, Wolfe’s 1979 nonfiction book about the Mercury astronauts, for the whole pile, Bonfire included. (And I say this knowing full well that there is some quantum of sheer bull in The Right Stuff.)
Wolfe continued to insist, returning to the interview already mentioned, that “Nonfiction remains the most important literary genre in American literature of the past 60 years.” He still, 20 years on from Bonfire, felt the need to half-apologize for abandoning non-fiction. My instinct is that it was indeed a mistake, but I am only a consumer of Wolfe, looking back at the corpus from without: none of us readers had to meet Wolfe’s dry-cleaning bills.
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Dire Straits – “Sultans Of Swing” Gayageum ver. by Luna
Luna Lee
Published on Aug 17, 2016
H/T to uDiscover Music for the link.
We’re indebted to the Open Culture website for bringing to our attention the work of the Korean musician Luna Lee. She performs Western music on the gayageum, a traditional 12-stringed instrument from Korea that’s something like a zither. Dating from the 6th century, it’s from the same family as the guzheng from China and the koto from Japan. One of her remakes will be particularly fascinating to Dire Straits fans.
Luna’s clip of her performance of the band’s early, classic Mark Knopfler composition “Sultans Of Swing”, nimbly performed on the aforementioned gayageum, already has some two million views. It may be hard to imagine a Korean-Greek-sounding instrumental version of this enduring tune, but here it is
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