Tom Wolfe's Been Annoying the Hell out of Me Lately

I read A Man in Full in about thirty minutes, it felt like, after arriving in Atlanta; and I foolishly thought beforehand that Wolfe would be over the phrenosomatical obsession with muscles and personality I remembered being irritated by when I read Bonfire. From the reviews I’ve read of Charlotte Simmons, it’s only gotten worse.

His obituary on Hunter S. Thompson, however, only has one stray comment about “rawboned” and “rangy” men being prone to manic outbursts. It almost prompted me to write a poem called “Anecdote of the Marine Distress Signalling Device.”