The Dagley Dagley Daily

By Janet Dagley Dagley
Covering the world from the waterfront in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

ISSN 1544-9114

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Gefilte THIS, the Queen’s ace in the hole, and candles in the wind

When Tom Wolfe — as opposed to Thomas Wolfe — was about halfway through his first novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, he had to go on a somewhat inconvenient book tour to promote his first foray into fiction, which was then being serialized in Rolling Stone magazine. It was inconvenient because Wolfe, a veteran journalist used to working on deadline, was still writing the novel and was just weeks, sometimes only days ahead of his readers. "I really don't know what's going to happen next," he told me over lunch at Chapman University in Orange, California, and he seemed a bit stressed over that.

"Was this a challenge you set up for yourself?" I asked him. "Why not just write the whole thing and then serialize it?

Wolfe's answer was the same one Charles Dickens surely gave to the reporters of his day when they asked about his serialized novels.

"I have bills to pay," Wolfe said.

Although he was wound up to talk about his current project, I asked him about another of his experiments, one that was already 14 years out of print back then (1987): an anthology of nonfiction writing that was far more exciting than its somewhat boring title, The New Journalism. Wolfe used the work of such writers as Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Eszterhas, Joan Didion, , Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Truman Capote and others to demonstrate that nonfiction writing could be every bit as literary as fiction.

So why, then, had Wolfe gone over to the other side years later with Bonfire of the Vanities? Turns out it was partly a challenge he set up for himself, and partly those ubiquitous bills. And it was partly because even though Wolfe had earned widespread acclaim and success with his nonfiction, and even though he'd made his case so well with "The New Journalism," somewhere inside even he still felt incomplete as a writer if he hadn't created a story from scratch, characters, setting, plot, and all. So he did just that, and before the book was even finished, a real-life character similar to his protagonist started making headlines in a story that bore a family resemblance to Wolfe's fictional tale. So even as he wrote fiction, Wolfe found himself not only following current events, but trying to outrun them. Whether or not journalism can outdo fiction, real life certainly can.

That is to say, you can't make this stuff up, and why would you want to?

In a small town just north of New York City, a fishmonger and his assistant were busy turning live carp into gefilte fish a few weeks ago when one of the fish started talking. Actually, the head fishmonger was in his office on the phone when the fish spoke up. The assistant, a Catholic, could not understand what the fish was saying. He ran to get the boss, a Hasidic Jew, who listened to the fish and did understand, because the fish was speaking Hebrew. The New York Times reports that the fish said "`Tzaruch shemirah' and `Hasof bah,' ... "which essentially means that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is near."

OK, so what would you do if you were one of those two guys? Well, if you were one of these guys, you would do exactly what your job description called for, period. After listening to what the fish had to say, the boss went back to trying to turn it into gefilte fish. He lifted his hatchet, but by the time it came down the fish had squirmed out of the way. Unfortunately the boss's thumb ended up in the way. After the ambulance came to take him to the hospital, the assistant finished off the fish.

In a related development, an Israeli newspaper reports that a gefilte fish, speaking from its jar, has called for Saddam Hussein to disarm.

The fish didn't say "or else," but George W. Bush did, and as you might have noticed, he's a-rarin to go. His loyal sidekick Tony Blair, however, can't join in without first asking permission from the Queen to send Her Majesty's troops into battle. Elizabeth II had been planning a trip to Belgium this week, but Blair asked her to cancel it, just in case he needs to ask her permission. Or maybe he just didn't think it was a good time for the Queen to be visiting the birthplace of french fries. If I were the Pope (and I'm neither male nor Catholic), I would be on the phone right now to urge the British monarch to use her veto power.

If I thought she'd take my calls, I might suggest that strategy myself. Or maybe...I wonder if Her Majesty might be having fish for dinner sometime soon?

Rather than cursing the darkness of war, last night Michael and I decided to light a couple of candles and join some of our neighbors for a candlelight peace vigil, one of more than 6,000 such vigils worldwide. As more than 100 of us stood there in the park with our candles, nobody was really sure what else we should be doing, and some of the more senior candle-holders tried to get the crowd to sing along with some songs from their youth. Maybe it would have worked better if the people leading the singing knew the lyrics. Or maybe it was hard for most of us to see what "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" has to do with any of this.

posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @6:05 PM

17.3.03