Tom Wolfe Writes a Letter to The New Yorker In the Third Person
Well, partly in the third person. The famous youth culture expert wrote to complain about critic Alex Ross.
Ross wrote a little thing on Leonard Bernstein, the famous composer, and he mentioned the famous Tom Wolfe story about Lenny's fundraiser for the Black Panthers. That story is of course one of the most famous pieces New York ever ran, and it also basically marks the point at which Wolfe became completely insufferable. Anyways Ross points out that Wolfe maybe exaggerated some things, like Bernstein's adoption of "jive talk," and this dismissal of Wolfe's famous story upset him so much he wrote this letter. Let's watch him deftly and inexplicably switch from the first to the third-person:
I know Alex Ross to be a music critic so sublime that he should be spared from irksome toil. A random example: his sensitive reassessment of Leonard Bernstein’s career says that the journalist Tom Wolfe attended the now legendary party for the Black Panthers in Bernstein’s Park Avenue penthouse and wrote an article about it, “Radical Chic,” for New York (A Critic at Large, December 15th).
It goes on from there, with similarly flowery nonsense (the New Yorker presumably, and thankfully, edited out all the ellipses and italics). And then Ross responds, tersely. And then Daily Intel weighs in, which isn't fair, because they totally have a dog in that fight.
That is today's Amusing Letters To the Editor news.