04 October 2008

apocryphal wolfe

I'm reading the Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, a collection of Tom Wolfe's journalism. I thought I had successfully unearthed a good example of Harold Bloom's idea of the anxiety of influence in the title of said work.  Bloom's theory, simplified, is a writer imitating another writer out of admiration, but changing it sufficiently so that he would "make it his own," so to speak. So I poked around, looking for what I thought would be the work that Wolfe was imitating (to make sure that it actually predated the work in question, making influence a possibility), and I found out not only that it was written after the work in question, but it was written in fact by Wolfe himself, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, and not Ken Keasy, who the work was about, and not by. So much for catching Wolfe red-handed.

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