Dwight Garner

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“It Must Have Been A Gas”

December 16, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

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If he hadn’t been in his prime in the 1960s, Terry Southern couldn’t have quite been Terry Southern as we know him. The era allowed him to stretch and bend, and he did what he could to warp it in return. The cultural explosion of those years and his own personality (perceptive, not protean) made it possible for the author to co-write with Kubrick and cover a political convention with Genet and Burroughs. Southern’s literary fantasia continued for decades, never betraying the unique time when his personal narrative began to be writ large. 

In a New York Times book review, Dwight Garner finds Yours in Haste and Adoration: Selected Letters of Terry Southern to be largely lacking, unable to capture what made the man and his milieu so special. The opening:

It must have been a gas, to borrow one of his favorite terms, to get a letter from Terry Southern. Each was its own little acid trip, streaked with innuendo and poached in a satirical kind of intellectual flop sweat. He used thin, expensive paper and sealed some of his letters with wax. People were said to read them aloud to whoever was in the room.

It must further have been a groove, to use another of his favorite terms, to get a letter from Southern (1924-95) because he seemed to know everyone, from George Plimpton and Lenny Bruce to Ringo Starr and Dennis Hopper and had stories to tell.

It’s hard to sum up how brightly Southern’s star burned in the mid-1960s. A countercultural Zelig, he was nowhere and everywhere. Tom Wolfe credited Southern’s article “Twirling at Ole Miss,” published in Esquire in 1963, with jump-starting the New Journalism. Southern helped write the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), injecting the software (wit) into the hardware (dread).•

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“Iceberg Slim’s Prose Was, And Is, As Ecstatic And Original As A Chuck Berry Guitar Solo”

August 5, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I know it sounds unlikely, but I once asked Snoop Dogg what it was he liked about pimping, that disgraceful thing, when he was a child. He answered in the most consumerist terms: the clothes, the cars, the hair–the style that only money could buy. It was the closest thing to capitalism that young Calvin Broadus could imagine his.

I don’t know if the late and infamous pimp Iceberg Slim (born Robert Beck) was what Malcolm X would have been had he never been politicized, but he certainly was the template for Don King, Dr. Dre and other African-American males who wanted into the capitalist system in the worst way–and got there by those means. The way they looked at it, their hands weren’t any dirtier than anyone else’s, just darker. 

A new biography of Slim encourages us to consider him for his literary talent, not just his outsize persona. Dwight Garner of the New York Times, who writes beautifully on any topic, has a review. The opening:

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, if you wanted a book by Iceberg Slim, the best-selling black writer in America, you didn’t go to a bookstore. You went to a black-owned barbershop or liquor store or gas station. Maybe you found a copy on a corner table down the block, or being passed around in prison.

The first and finest of his books was a memoir, Pimp: The Story of My Life, published in 1967. This was street literature, marketed as pulp. The New York Times didn’t merely not review Pimp, Justin Gifford notes in Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim. Given the title, this newspaper wouldn’t even print an ad for it.

Pimp related stories from Iceberg Slim’s 25 years on the streets of Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit and other cities. It was dark. The author learned to mistreat women with a chilly élan. It was dirty, so filled with raw language and vividly described sex acts that, nearly 50 years later, the book still makes your eyeballs leap out of your skull, as if you were at the bottom of a bungee jump.

Yet Iceberg Slim’s prose was, and is, as ecstatic and original as a Chuck Berry guitar solo. Mark Twain meets Malcolm X in his sentences. When he was caught with an underage girl by her father, for example, the author didn’t just run. “I vaulted over the back fence,” he wrote, “and torpedoed down the alley.”

Pimp is a different sort of American coming-of-age story, the tale of a determined young man who connived to take what society would not give. It’s a subversive classic.•

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A masked Slim meets Joe Pyne in the 1960s.

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“He Rents Castles And Sumo Wrestlers For His Parties”

May 13, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Like myself, Elon Musk rents sumo wrestlers for his parties. I, however, also employ former astronauts to serve drinks. You can put your cigarette out on Buzz Aldrin’s forehead, and he will accept it with quiet resignation. 

Seriously, Elon Musk is a super-wealthy, highly driven and somewhat odd guy, which we already know, but in Dwight Garner’s NYT review of Ashlee Vance’s new Musk bio, his features are given some definition. An excerpt:

Other eye-popping details, not all of them previously reported, are flecked atop this book like sea salt. His five children don’t merely have nannies but have had a nanny manager. He worries that Google is building a fleet of robots that may accidentally destroy mankind. He rents castles and sumo wrestlers for his parties. At one of them, a knife thrower aimed at a balloon between the blindfolded Mr. Musk’s legs.

The best thing Mr. Vance does in this book, though, is tell Mr. Musk’s story simply and well. It’s the story of an intelligent man, for sure. But more so it is the story of a determined one. Mr. Musk’s work ethic has always been intense. One observer says about him early on, “We all worked 20 hour days, and he worked 23 hours.”

Mr. Musk was born in 1971 and grew up in Pretoria. His father was an engineer; his mother, whose family had roots in the United States and Canada, was a model and dietitian. There are indications his father was brutal, and that Mr. Musk is a tortured soul trying to make up for a wrecked childhood. But no one will speak specifically about any such events.•

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“What Can We Learn Of Moral Value From The Ants?”

October 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Dwight Garner’s lively New York Times Book Review piece about the latest volume, a career summation of sorts, by Edward O. Wilson, a biologist who has watched his aunts ants have sex:

“The best natural scientists, when they aren’t busy filling us with awe, are busy reminding us how small and pointless we are.’Stephen Hawking has called humankind ‘just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.’ The biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book, which is modestly titled The Meaning of Human Existence, puts our pygmy planet in a different context.

‘Let me offer a metaphor,’ he says. ‘Earth relates to the universe as the second segment of the left antenna of an aphid sitting on a flower petal in a garden in Teaneck, N.J., for a few hours this afternoon.’ The Jersey aspect of that put-down really drives in the nail.

Mr. Wilson’s slim new book is a valedictory work. The author, now 85 and retired from Harvard for nearly two decades, chews over issues that have long concentrated his mind: the environment; the biological basis of our behavior; the necessity of science and humanities finding common cause; the way religion poisons almost everything; and the things we can learn from ants, about which Mr. Wilson is the world’s leading expert.

Mr. Wilson remains very clever on ants. Among the questions he is most asked, he says, is: ‘What can we learn of moral value from the ants?’ His response is pretty direct: ‘Nothing. Nothing at all can be learned from ants that our species should even consider imitating.’

He explains that while female ants do all the work, the pitiful males are merely ‘robot flying sexual missiles’ with huge genitalia. (This is not worth imitating?) During battle, they eat their injured. ‘Where we send our young men to war,’ Mr. Wilson writes, ‘ants send their old ladies.’ Ants: moral idiots.

The sections about ants remind you what a lively writer Mr. Wilson can be. This two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction stands above the crowd of biology writers the way John le Carré stands above spy writers. He’s wise, learned, wicked, vivid, oracular.”

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