The Fluminian Raider & His Lupine Friend Get Representative

I've been listening to Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up, and am enjoying his snide yet deliciously understated style (the reason I'm using that flowery phrase is that I want someone to use it to describe me one day). He is the first writer one doesn't peg as a "Christian writer" I've heard use phrases like the Darwinian story or the Freudian story to describe unifying theories. That's exactly what they are, of course, but their devotees wouldn't choose to say so. Refreshing stuff, for me. And taking me back into waters I haven't sailed through in a while. Because of the own preponderances, and the wife I got me, I've spent some time in the Artsy Avant-Garde Sea, although that time wasn't spent so much in an exploratory mode as it was spent Viking-style (by that I mean both that I raided and plundered, and that I generally stuck close to shore, or sailed up rivers). I think I might have to get me Wolfe's The Painted Word. See what he's got to say. It appears I've got a new hobby. Two weeks ago I read Bonfire of the Vanities, probably will get around soon to A Man In Full, but I've really enjoyed The Right Stuff (which I fuzzily remember enjoying in my teenage years) and this Hooking Up so much more than the novel...I think I like his non-fiction stories better than his fiction stories. And they are stories, well composed, multiple-stringed, and harmonized.



Speaking o' the Sargasso Art Sea, here's an artist of some mild renown who I think people should get into: Mark Tansey. Check out particularly (since he's on my mind) Derrida Queries de Man., or Action Painting II. One of my favorites of his is a takeoff of Domenico Veneziano's St. John the Baptist in the Desert, but I can't find it anywhere online. Sorry.



I think I'd like Tansey's stuff much more if I'd ever dared sail away from the shore and ventured into the Artsy Sea, but I'm not sure I want to...too many of Tansey's colleagues are huge bores, and chances are I'd get caught in the doldrums soon enough.

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