The New Journalism that Tom Wolfe and others developed in the 1960s had several defining characteristics. One of them was listing mundane things in an on-and-on fashion. The sense afforded was of mass society, of the plenitude, if at times the monotony, that marked modern life. For example, in a 1970 non-fiction essay in which Wolfe described the attire of a government bureaucrat, he wrote, “The man’s shirt looks like he bought it at the August end-of-summer sale at the White Front. It is one of those shirts with pockets on both sides. Sticking out of the pockets and running across his chest he has a lineup of penholder tips, penholders and parts thereof, gold pens, combination penholders comprising penholders, pencil, rubber eraser, automatic stamp [and] other attachments…mechanical pencils…, everything. They are lined up across his chest like campaign ribbons.”
Oh Tom, the thing was fantastic, a freaking mind-blower… Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg Tom Wolfe photocredit: © 2015 Bloomberg Finance LP
The Wolfeans among you will recognize that this passage is slightly doctored. In the middle of it, Wolfe did not write, “penholder tips, penholders and parts thereof, gold pens, combination penholders comprising penholders, pencil, rubber eraser, automatic stamp [and] other attachments…mechanical pencils….” He actually wrote, “ball-point pens, felt nibs, lead pencils, wax markers, such as you wouldn’t believe, Paper-mates, Pentels, Scriptos, Eberhard Faber Mongol 482’s, Dri-Marks, Bic PM-29’s…”
The latter excerpt is Tom Wolfe’s writing. The former is verbatim copy from the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act, composed and passed by Congress and signed by the President in 1922.
As reading material, the tariff laws of the United States read like vapidities on end, jokes in all but name. They run, typically, upwards of a hundred pages, and are made up of dense paragraphs of lists. These lists are models of tediousness bordering on hilarity concerning which imports must be dunned at the United States customs house.
“Barks, beans, berries, buds, bulbs, bulbous roots, excrescences, fruits, flowers, dried fibers, dried insects, grains, herbs, leaves, lichens, mosses, roots, stems, vegetables, seeds (aromatic, not garden seeds), seeds of morbid growth, weeds, and all other drugs of vegetable or animal origin….”
“Root of hemlock, digged in the dark.”
That last one was Shakespeare. Previous to it, however, was all Fordney-McCumber.
“Sugar, water, goo, fried fat, droplets, driplets, shreds, bits, lumps, gums, gobs, smears”—Tom Wolfe again—”pop drinks, sweets, and fried food….hot dogs, tacos,…french fries, Eskimo Pies, Awful-Awfuls,…chocolate-covered frozen bananas, malted milks, Yoo-Hoos, berry pies, bubble gums, cotton candy,…boysenberry-cheesecake ice-cream cones,…jelly dougnuts, taffy apples, buttered Karamel Korn, root-beer floats, Hi-C punches, large Cokes, 7-Ups”—still Tom Wolfe….