Writer discusses what separates men from Wolfes

Tom Wolfe's, GRD '57, favorite song of the year 2000 was "Bad Touch" by the Bloodhound Gang. On Wed., Oct. 11, in the Law School Auditorium, clad in a white checkered suit jacket, white dress pants, and black and white spats, he explained, "The key words, `you and me baby ain't nothing but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.'"

KATIE ALDRICH/YH Thomas Wolfe, GRD '57, gave a talk on Wed., Oct. 11 about his years at Yale and 'Hooking Up,' his upcoming book.

Wolfe's talk, entitled, "Maggie, a Girl of the Stacks: Confessions of a Yale Graduate Student" is the first of five lectures in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences' Tercentennial Lecture Series, "In the Company of Scholars."

The author of such acclaimed works as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities, and most recently, A Man in Full, Wolfe is considered one of the most important social commentators of our time. His new book, Hooking Up, which will be released Tues., Oct. 31, chronicles the phenomenon of "hooking up" among teenagers.

Wolfe spoke about his days at Yale Graduate School, where he earned a Ph.D in American Studies. His lecture related his own experiences as a student at Yale to what he is writing about now—today's students.

"Of my five years at Yale, I remember most keenly being in the stacks of Sterling Memorial Library," Wolfe remembered. "My only glances of the outside world were seen through a small window. All I could see was a rectangle of dazzling blue sky and the shoots of a tree branch, bursting with procreative energy—and so was I. I was 22!"

The only noises were the sounds of the slippers of the girls who put the books back on the shelves," he continued. "We called them townies; I used to fantasize about Maggie, a girl of the stacks."

When he arrived at Yale, Wolfe had a liberal arts student's disdain of the social sciences. But this view changed after he took sociology, which was required for his degree. "Sociology should be the monochrome of all the sciences," he said.

Wolfe recounted the traumas caused by his oral exams at Yale. "I told people that I was taking them a week later so that if I failed I could vanish, or at least leave New Haven, and they would never see me again," he said.

Years after successfully passing his orals, Wolfe realized that "Yale Graduate School had been a turning point in my ambitions as a writer. Graduate school makes one think conceptually."

Shifting conversational gears away from his days as a Yalie, Wolfe went on to speak about neuroscience, genetics, Nietzsche, and Darwinism. He touched on the mechanics of the brain, the fact that women are genetically programmed to fall for rich men, Nietzsche's famed phrase, "God is dead," and the recent assault on the theory of evolution.

Wolfe ended his speech by returning to his earlier point about his formative years at Yale. "I feel sure that wherever the questions of evolution go, whatever conclusions we come to, they will be reached at a setting just like this—in the company of scholars at universities like Yale," he said.

John Levin, DC '04, was fascinated by Wolfe's talk. "I enjoyed his amusing and witty anecdotes at the beginning of the speech and then how he switched over to a deep discussion on philosophy and biology," he said. "I really want to go read his books now."

Most of the audience, though, consisted of graduate students, since Wolfe's talk was primarily advertised within the Graduate School. Among the ranks of bitterly disappointed undergraduates unaware of the lecture was Caitlin Purcell, ES '04, a longtime fan of Wolfe's. "Tom Wolfe spoke at Yale? I can't believe I missed it!" she said. While he didn't give many details about his new book,

Wolfe told the Herald after the lecture that his inspiration for "Hooking Up"came from research he was doing for his other upcoming book about college students. "While researching college life," he explained, "I kept hearing the phrase `hooking up.' This term interested me, so I started asking around about it."

Wolfe said that he thinks of the 1970s as the "Me Decade," the 1980s as the decade of "Money Fever" and the 1990s as the decade of "Moral Fever." The 2000s, said Wolfe, should be dubbed the "`hooking up' decade." After all, his observations suggest that the most apt way to describe the year 2000 to date is as a "sexual carnival."

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