I already took care of the presents haul yesterday.
So, that's done.
No party this year, but we already had the big family shindig the weekend after the 4th of July for the 4th of July.
I had to chore-monkey as much as last year, but I didn't mind for some reason.
Dunno why I was so grumpy last year.
Go figure *shrug*.
6 years away from 50 now.
Makes me reflective of the direction of my life, and if my writing/cartooning dreams are ever going to happen.
Well, Hyla threw in the towel, and has accepted a normal life, and drawing is only his hobby now.
It's why he tore down his blog, Facebook, and Deviantart profile.
Glad that makes him happy, but I just can't go out like that.
Now that I see what that looks like, I'm like "nope!".
I'll try until I die.
This has been the meaning of my whole goddamned life.
And if I never become the next J.K. Rowling, fuck it, I made people laugh online, and made friends with that skill, so that's good enough.
I'd like it to be the source of my bread though.
It doesn't even have to be millions.
Tom Wolfe got started at 38, and his best stuff was in his 60's.
Margaret Atwood just took her first crack at comics at 78.
It's literally not the end until you're dead.
America is age-ist as fuck, you gotta fight against that tide, but I think I'm up to it.
So, that's 44.
Hope the rest of the year is misery free.
So far, so good.
Previous years.
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7 comments:
"America is ageist as f***" - We do have some of that problem BUT I do also feel that 70 now is like what maybe 57 used to be and plenty of people just keep on keeping on into their old age....people don't act as crotchety and helpless in their old age now as they used to, I don't think.
You have made people happy so there's that.
Tom Wolfe at 38...uh, are we talking about *Tom* Wolfe or *Thomas* Wolfe?
*Thomas* Wolfe was the Southern writer of the 20s/30s/40s who wrote "Look Homeward, Angel" and "You Can't Go Home Again." He was an influence on Kerouac, I suppose.
*Tom* Wolfe as in the father of New Journalism (e.g. Hunter S. Thompson, Wolfe, Norman Mailer, etc.?) in the 60s and 70s and who wrote "Bonfire Of The Vanities"? He was in his early 30s, not 38, when he wrote his first articles, like "The Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" which was from 1965. He became a star at 37 with "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" and he was commenting on a generation mostly younger than he was by that point. He did keep going until the very end, "The Kingdom Of Speech" was a couple years ago, before he died last year.
I've read pretty much everything Wolfe ever wrote, so be advised that as he got older he grew more and more conservative, so you might not like the guy. He was a George W. Bush supporter who pretty much despised and satirized trendy/rich limousine liberal types and (especially) artists and intellectuals throughout his entire career. ("The Kingdom Of Speech" was an attack on Darwinism, and don't forget that he thought people were self absorbed pigs and he coined the term "Me Decade" back in the 70s.)
I hope you didn't get the wrong impression from "Bonfire Of The Vanities" which was, yes, an attack on the rich Wall Street types in part, but also an attack on the entirety of 80s New York City culture (and Wolfe didn't attack Wall Street types for being conservative, he attacked them for being cosmopolitan and materialistic.). It's about Sherman McCoy who is a yuppie trader scumbag who sort of accidentally runs over a black kid in the South Bronx because he took a wrong turn, but Wolfe (unlike what a liberal would have done) never made it clear whether he intentionally ran over the black kid, or whether the black kid actually attacked him and his girlfriend; the whole point was the scandal causes everyone in New York City to come after Sherman like animals sniffing after raw meat, to take what he has, or to get publicity, or to use the scandal to run for public office, etc. etc.
The guy did write for Rolling Stone but you gotta know this: he was conservative. He is ABSOLUTELY the forefather of South Park Republicanism, and I seem to be the only person on Earth making this point.
Uh, I guess you were just commenting on his age. But I bet if you read his books there's a strong chance you might not like them, or him, very much at all. (I like some of them but detest others--he was a satirist and since I don't have any love in particular for modern architecture my favorite book of his was the relatively short 1981 parody "From Bauhaus To Our House" which was a flat-out bash of rich people who thought European-style "glass box" architecture should take hold in America.) His 700 page-long 2004 book "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (about a poor redneck conservative farm girl who goes to school at a sex-crazed Duke-style university would be the worst book I've ever read if it weren't for "Atlas Shrugged."
Happy 44th!!
"Uh, I guess you were just commenting on his age".
Heh, yep!
I heard someone on some show say "Tom Wolfe did his best stuff in his 60's!", and then the thing about Atwood popped up on my Facebook feed, and I wrote 'em down on a notepad to say for my birthday.
That's about as deep as my research went.
I have no desire to read any Tom Wolfe.
Your overview reaffirmed this.
"Happy 44th!!".
Thanks!
Wolfe was in his mid 50s when "The Bonfire Of The Vanities" was being serialized in "Rolling Stone." He would have been in his 60s when the followup, "A Man In Full," from 1998--which was an even more conservative-friendly book than Bonfire--also became a huge, huge bestseller, but it was so preachy and morally stacked that I didn't like it anywhere near as much as Bonfire.
I do *like* "Bonfire Of The Vanities," mind you--a pretty fascinating tear-up of 1980s New York. Despite his rather ugly viewpoint Wolfe did do an impressive job of using his journalistic skills to capture that time and place and an astonishing amount of material about it. I wouldn't necessarily dissuade you from reading it.
Or if you don't want to read his novels you can read "The Right Stuff" or something like that.
In one of the more amusing "watch writers be dicks" moments in recent history, Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving all expressed dismay that "A Man In Full" became such a huge bestseller, claiming that Wolfe writes like a hyperactive political cartoonist (which is a completely valid accusation--he's a pretty obnoxious "writer"); Wolfe responded in an essay "My Three Stooges" by pointing out that Mailer, Updike and Irving weren't selling books very much anymore because they were writing about New Yorker magazine subjects that nobody cares about. Wolfe was a pretty nasty art critic and pretty much hated intellectuals and intellectualism altogether; it always tended to rub me the wrong way. He also liked to whine about young people a lot, even though in "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" he DESPERATELY wanted to hang out with those hippies.
Six years later, Wolfe was savaged for "I Am Charlotte Simmons."
Atwood's a mixed bag. "Handmaid's Tale" remains pretty good though.
Wolfe-
Yeah, hating intellectuals is par for the course with conservatives.
Reality has a liberal bias, so they don't like reality so much.
Atwood-
Good thing about being a mixed bag, is if you can just be prolific enough, and manage to live long enough, they only remember your greatest hits, which ends up being a sizable stack.
See also Stephen King.
Atwood - I guess if you want, you can read her "MaddAddam" trilogy (2003-2009-2014) which is a future trainwreck just like "Handmaid's Tale" (and begins with a similar eerie quiet opening before flashing back to what caused the trainwreck) but which deals with consequences of genetic engineering. The books are all fairly bloated and the whole thing just sort of turns into a gigantic chase by the end, but the beginning of "Oryx & Crake," the first book, is alright.
Don't read "The Blind Assassin," from 2000. That's one of her most acclaimed books but gawd does it ever go on forever.
Damn, for all the reading you do, you ought to toss up a book review blog.
I do reviews in monthly-or-so posts over at Music Babble but those posts have increasingly drawn cricket noises.
From a prose standpoint, "Handmaid's Tale" is probably a better *written* book (not necessarily a better book, but more gracefully styled) than "1984" (blunt, journalistic) or "Brave New World" (good book but very dated and eggheaded--Huxley was an important writer, but not exactly Mr. Storyteller!)
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