Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-...ai-ai-ai-reeeeeeeeeeeee!

Wow, that Tom Wolfe really knows his way with words!

I'm sitting at my desk, quite dizzy after reading The Voices of Village Square. The essay starts with the onomatopoeia above and goes on like this:

O dear, sweet Harry, with your French gangster-movie bangs, your Ski Shop turtleneck sweater and your Army-Navy Store blue denim shirt over it, with your Bloomsbury corduroy pants you saw in the Manchester Guardian airmail edition and sent away for and your sly intellectual pigeon-toed libido roaming in Greenwich Village - that siren call really for you?
"Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-reeeeeeeeeeee!"

(So that's what the sound was! I wasn't sure if it was an animal, an ambulance or a human being...) And the story isn't even about Harry.

And know I have to write about this on my blog, or I'll have a chapter in my thesis with too much language-exploring going on. You can't hand in a thesis with cocky Cause after you have read Wolfe, you just wanna play with words. The sky is the limit. No, even the sky is no limit!

OK, OK, perhaps I'm being too enthusiastic here. Or, at least, I'm giving myself away as a New Journalism-virgin who sits back in awe, thinking "So THAT's what all the fuss is about it!"

The Voices... is one of the non-fiction texts I have chosen for my thesis. That means I'm reading the text, doing a rhetorical analysis of it and writing a manual on how to teach the text. Then, hopefully, some of my colleagues will test the text and whether rhetorical analysis is any good in their opinion. (Not surprisingly, I'm hoping for a YES!)

I genuinely think this text can shake the ground under my pupils; they expect non-fiction to be dull, fact-loaded and probably about obesity in America or other we-are-fed-up-with-this-topic topics. With Wolfe, they too can see that language can obscure things in two ways: The bad way (which is usually caused by a writer's lack of writing skills) and the cool way (which is caused by the writer's notorious urge to Do something with words, to rock your world). And as I have written in the teacher's manual, the text demands a great deal of its reader, but it gives you loads back again.


The feeling I get from reading Tom Wolfe is somewhat the core of my project: I want the students to think "wow, he could really do it!" or "Ooops, he really didn't succeed in convincing us about the importance of reducing the global warming, did he?!" instead of thinking "Oh, so there is global warming? Big surprise...But sure, yeah, it's bad."

My dear professor at the English department at Copenhagen University, Charles Lock, told me how one of his students had reacted to Charles' way of reading texts (which, in all humility, is quite close to mine): "Before, I hated reading poetry, but loved rap. You've turned it all into rap."

I want to be that kind of teacher, too. Will you help me, Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-reeeeeeeeee?