Wednesday
Some more great passages from Kauffman's Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America: Writings, 1986-2014:
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his wife, “I want nothing to do with politicians–they are not men; they cease to be men, in becoming politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies.”
Prostitution is legal in Nevada but mandatory in D.C.
Kerouac subscribed to and avidly read National Review and once appeared on William F. Buckley, Jr.'s “Firing Line,” where he drunkenly uttered the immortal words, “Flat-foot Floogie with the floy floy!” He painted pictures of the Virgin Mary and Pope Paul; he disliked the Vietnam War as well as its protesters: “I'm pro-American and the radical political involvements seem to tend elsewhere. . . . This country gave my Canadian family a good break, and we see no reason to demean said country.”
Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine (1957) [is] the finest evocation of a boyhood summer I have read.
Like H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, Ernest Hemingway, and other original Americans, Bradbury “had the advantage,” wrote Russell Kirk, “of never attending college,” which “constricts people,” in Bradbury's words.
Fire Captain Beatty explains to the late-blooming rebel Montag: “Heredity and environment are funny things. You can't rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle.” (Not that the well-meaning advocates of mandatory preschool have any such thing in mind . . . )
Was there ever a more startling film debut than Robert Duvall's turn as Boo Radley?
After enduring the Bolshoi Ballet, [John F. Kennedy] told an aide, “I don't want my picture taken shaking hands with all those Russian fairies.”
