"Anecdotes of NEA grantee superciliousness are as numerous as grains of sand in the seashore. For our purposes, one will suffice: when George Plimpton paid Aram Saroyan $1,500 for a poem consisting of the single misspelled word 'lighght,' an Iowa congressional aid dared ask the dilettantish Plimpton what the poem meant.
"'You are from the Midwest. You are culturally deprived, so you would not understand it anyway,' replied the New Yorker Plimpton, whose enduring contribution to American letters is a football book."
Bill Kauffman, Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists.
