 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
||||||||
 |
|
|
Yes, Tom Wolfe — pioneering New Journalist in publications like Esquire, definer of a decade with Bonfire of the Vanities, seventy-four-year-old chronicler of eras and epochs and moods — has gone back to college and written a book about hot, sweaty fucking. Well, not all about fucking. There's a lot of drinking too. And some vintage Wolfeian observations on the tyranny of white people. But to read the reviews, this is the book in which Wolfe! Goes! Wild! And who are we to resist a cultural preoccupation? I Am Charlotte Simmons evolved from an essay in Wolfe's 2001 collection Hooking Up. It follows the titular character, a cash-poor freshman, as she attempts to infiltrate the wealthy, stratified Dupont University. In the process, she is introduced to predatory sex, omnipresent alcohol and mild class warfare. She is also subjected to a two-page deflowering scene that is more thoroughly, anatomically described than any deflowering scene in recent memory. Charlotte is Wolfe's first female protagonist; he has said she is his most autobiographical. Learn more below. Oh, and about the sex being hot — scratch that; he'll explain. — Michael Martin Some might look at this book — which is the most explicit thing you've ever done — and suggest you've become preoccupied with sex in your later years. True? I swear on a stack of Bibles that I do think about other things during the day. The book is definitely preoccupied with sex, I'll say that much. In fact, the book begins with a thick quotation from the Dictionary of Nobel Laureates, which doesn't exist by the way. It's a quote from a fictional Nobel laureate about "para-social stimuli" and how a sexually saturated atmosphere affected cats in one experiment. But I'm talking about college boys and girls. What interested you about that sexual dynamic? Well, the idea of such a novel came to me back in the '90s, when I was struggling with A Man in Full, which took so long, I don't even like to think about it. At one point I was going to put that book aside, I was having such a hard time. I wanted to do a book about college. I had been hearing in the air, occasionally, statistical studies about what was going on in college life. The things I kept hearing about were sex, drink, and to a lesser extent, drugs and political correctness. It seemed to me that nothing was being written about the undergraduate experience, from the undergraduate point of view. I was just curious about what goes on — what is the life of a student like? So when I had finally finished A Man in Full, I decided that I would go to the campuses and see what was going on, beyond the titillating possibilities of sex and drink. Universities have replaced the church as the font of change in moral values. One of the best examples is feminism. It matured in universities, and the idea spread without benefit of any debate. I do not ever recall a political debate, until long, long after with the Equal Rights Amendment, but that was way down the line. There was no debate over, let's say, gay rights. It was an idea that, again, built up in the universities and achieved remarkable results. When you did your research on an actual campus, what did you find that shocked you, that you truly didn't know? On the mild level, I had no idea that college students across the country would routinely stay up 'til two or three in the morning. Sometimes students would have a night out drinking and then go to the library at midnight, try to knock off homework. An 8:30 class is probably extinct. At the first place I went, Stanford, one of the classes I went to was at 7 p.m., because the teacher had given up on anything before noon. I was surprised by the pressure sexual license puts on women. It's also put on men, but women especially. They quickly get the idea that first you come across, and then you get to know the guy. You might even learn his name. But everything is expected to be done backward. First the dessert, and then, maybe, if you're really lucky, you get back to the appetizer. I knew that there was, to put it mildly, sexual freedom, but I was surprised that it was an atmosphere that hit everybody. In the book, one of the main characters is a senior, and he's a virgin. So I'm not saying everybody's out there like dogs in the park, banging. They're not. But the pressure is there. I was interested to discover that hooking up with somebody in your own dorm was considered to be lame and was called — I picked this up at Stanford — dormcest. And that seemed to be fairly pervasive. Had I not been doing this as a reporter, there were things that would have shocked me. If you're in a reporting mode, nothing is good or bad at that moment. It's either usable or isn't. Right. Sometimes the more shocking something is, the better it is for you as a journalist. But let's say I just had come into it. I, personally, would have been shocked by coed bathrooms. Coed dorms would have shocked me. I wouldn't have wanted that inevitable element of tension in my daily life, but I'm a lot older than the people I was talking to. That's just the way I grew up. Use of the word "asshole" was surprising. To me, being my age, it's still a very vulgar expression. In ten years, it will have passed into the language without its original meaning. There are a lot of words like that. For example: everybody, including myself, will go around saying, "Boy, I really screwed that up" or "He really got screwed." Likewise, anything that's not going really well "sucks." Nobody remembers where that word came from. I sometimes will say to my children, "you know, that really s-u-x," and that's as close as I'm going to get to using the word with them. "Hooking up" is one of those expressions. I guess you're right, it was. When somebody my age says, "Well, I'll hook up with you later," it has a funny ring to it. They neutered it of its origins. The day that "asshole" achieves that, we'll mark it a definite change. What did you observe about drinking? As far as drink goes, there is no more and no less than there has been for 150 years. There was exactly as much when I went to college at Washington and Lee as there is anywhere today. It seems to be a constant factor. They might as well lower the legal drinking age, at least on college campuses, because as it stands now everybody is committing, I think, a felony. Were you worried about the accuracy of your reporting? Students might not necessarily reveal all; you couldn't exactly go undercover. I didn't show up wearing a white suit. That would really be showboating. I would wear a blue blazer, generally, and flannel pants. I always wore a necktie. I was maybe sixty-nine or seventy when I started; I didn't exactly disappear into the woodwork at a fraternity party. But I felt that I was getting fairly accurate information. I talked to a lot of students, and I feel like they got used to me fairly quickly. I was able to just hang around through parties, as long as parties lasted. If people allow you to stay where they are, they lose that sense of wariness after several hours. It becomes a pain in the neck to stay wary for hours on end. In the old Playboy interviews — I don't know if they still do them — those things go on for sometimes ten, twelve hours. The subject's wariness wears out, and you get those great quotes like Jimmy Carter's "There's lust in my heart." According to your Times magazine profile, you intended the sex in this book to be "non-erotic." Why? I didn't want anybody to think I was putting sex in to make the book lively. I wanted people to notice it has a reality. Not to say that was a stretch. "Erotic" doesn't necessarily include the idea of romance, but if your concept of "erotic" includes anything above the waist, that's so often lacking in college sex. The classic hookup ends with, "No, don't call me in the morning. I got what I wanted." And that's a girl talking! How do you go about writing a sex scene? I must say it was a tour de force. It may have failed, but it was a tour de force to write an extended account of the seduction of an innocent. That's really something you couldn't very well report about. Nobody would get down to those details. The sex scenes were my imagination at work within boundaries. So much of sex in college is closely tied in with drink. I think most hookups are influenced by alcohol. I don't think many women are going around just jumping into bed with some available guy, just because he's cool or an athlete. I'm sure it happens, but that's the common medium. What is the purpose of putting a word like "otorhinolaryngological" in a sex scene? That's called showing off. I had just learned that word. I went to a doctor last year for some sinus problems, and he had this certificate on the wall and it had that word on it. I think, if you don't overdo it, readers are flattered if you throw a word like that at them. I don't do that kind of thing many times. It's juvenile, frankly. I used to love to go through the dictionary and find these words and feel superior because I knew them. How did you approach writing sex from a woman's point of view? Were you daunted? Yes. To this moment, I have no idea whether I pulled it off. Sooner or later somebody will let me know, I think. I just tried to propel my central nervous system into that of a woman. One of the features of the book, which does or does not work, is to tie sexual activity almost at every turn in with status considerations: Everything from "Am I doing it right?" to "Is this the boy or is this the girl that I want to be known as hooking up with?" The sexual act is so socially determined, I think, that you can't separate sex and status. Well, I guess sometimes with men, there is a pure sexual emotion. Their brains drop down below their belts, and they can no longer think. But even in the case of a male, there can be status considerations. What is the best sex scene you have ever read? One rather good one is in Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh. The hero is Catholic, and he has divorced his first wife. They meet up in London and he re-seduces her, gets her up into a hotel room. You feel just as drawn to him as he does to her. It's a great, great scene. They have their romp in the bed, and suddenly she says, "Wait a minute. I know what you're doing. Under the strict law of the church, we were never divorced, because the church does not recognize civil divorce, and you only did this to me, the seduction, because you wouldn't be breaking the rules of your beloved church if it was me." The combination of the scene itself and the sex, the love, with this cold shower at the end — I've always remembered that. So, atmosphere and motivation is more interesting to you than the description of the actual act? You know, for one thing, the act itself is one of the clumsiest things any animal can do. I don't care which version you're practicing. It's so different from the buildup, which is smooth, tenderness, affection. Then it happens, and it's grotesque if you're looking at it. I think it's usually grotesque if you're describing it. There was a wonderful play that was on Broadway, and it was only wonderful for this reason. It was Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. The play begins in semi-darkness and you see the silhouette of a man on top of a woman lying on the bed. This man's buttocks are going up and down, up and down, violently and you hear both of them going "Uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh!" and "Heh heh heh heh heh!" That's it. That's the sexual act. I had a long scene in A Man in Full of a stallion being mated with a mare, which is something I witnessed. You hear about mating and it seems like a technicality, but it's the equivalent of two 1,500-pound humans going at it. You feel the earth shake. It's very unpretty. Suddenly this beautiful horse is this helpless, spastic creature. That is the downside of accurately describing sex. I think people who try to make it seem like a beautiful physical experience by describing emotions, or what's going on, always fail. That's almost ludicrous when you think about what's actually happening. That's why steamy novels get everybody undressed, but as far as banging away . . . . they just kind of give up. Did you use the internet to research the book? Not much. I'm still a bit illiterate when it comes to using the internet, to tell you God's honest truth. Although I wish I'd known there was a website called Rate my Vomit. You can look it up; it's pro-binge drinking. I wish I'd been familiar enough with the internet to use it. There's a lot of stuff that is just fabulous from the point of view of getting material. Do you look at a copy of Esquire now, with, say, Angelina Jolie on the cover as the world's sexiest woman — or do you look at Maxim and its microarticles — and think about whether New Journalism fulfilled its promise? I don't regularly see the laddie magazines. Esquire, I frankly don't even think about any longer as possibly having any titillating content. Take it out of the context of men's magazines, then. Do you believe New Journalism fulfilled its promise? In many respects, it did. It at least opened up the field. There's much less of it now, but I think most young writers know what it is, and they're perfectly capable of doing it. It's no longer a mystery. There's actually a shortage of magazines and a dearth of newspapers that want to run it. Of course, not many people have that much talent. I think a hell of a lot more could be done in that vein. It's almost fatal to name anything "new." The "new conservatism" goes back to about 1912; there have been about eight conservatisms since then. But I'm just as happy that writers aren't self-conscious about it now. If they want to use it, they know how. I'm strongly tempted to do a book of new journalism, a book of non-fiction, as my next book, but I have no idea what it might be. I can think of some topics that would be good. Like all of the religious revival movements — anything from New Age to Ecstatic Episcopalianism. I don't know if I'll do it, but I think that's a subject that's out there, just waiting to be covered. n°
©2004 Michael Martin and hooksexup.com.
|
|
|||||
| featured personal | ||||||||||||||||||||
| partner links | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
| sponsored links | ||||||||||||||||||||
| EDUN LIVE Ethical tees. 10% off with code AFRICA Advertisers, click here to get listed! |
||||||||||||||||||||
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
