I got talking with Bill Temple and another guy, and what do you suppose they were gnashing their teeth about? The awfulness of being a married writer with wives and kids who don’t understand that Daddy’s writing is important!
There is a maniac here (really a surgeon) with a yard full of bushes which he erects canvas tents over and heats all night by gas heaters inside, one each—an ideal place for drawing tramps, I should think, and I am a little envious of tramps that could come in out of the cold to a nice warm tent and a stove to heat coffee over and a Pink Perfection to curl up under for the evening, imagine waking up and finding that you’re in bloom…
I share your doubts as to the validity of opinions professed by persons who without said opinions would suffer material loss. But you will agree with me that such opinions may nevertheless be sound. Sound as well as unsound opinions can be bought.
BRINGING FABULOUS FRACTURED FIBULA NO PAIN JUST TRICKY TO MANIPULATE WHILE CHARLESTONING. ANYTHING TO PROLONG VACATION.
You see by the dates on the poems in this book that they were written in a furious haste and published as soon as they were written. They are, with a few exceptions, considered as poetry, faulty and unpolished; and whatever the final verdict of our generation or the next may be upon me as a poet, there are already, I know quite well, thousands of people, true lovers of pure poetry, and who have—for I am humbly proud of this and feel no arrogance in saying so—in past years thought very highly of mine, who will, no matter what I may write in the future, never forgive me for writing this book.
If you have anything to say, please write, for you are and always will remain the only person who has a seat and a vote in the council of my many and various thoughts. Write vigorously—and legibly—and quickly—
We’re living in a golden decade for rural escapist fare: the latest, most extreme iteration of a cultural construct that effectively removes people living there from society’s list of concerns. The effect of these savvy new Westerns is, in some ways, even more insidious than their progenitors’, since they incorporate the countryside’s decline into the genre’s standard narrative, and, in so doing, effectively ignore that decline by aestheticizing it. Now the cowboys aren’t discovering the west, they’re preserving it, this parallel society living alongside ours, all unknown and neglected folkways and byways, comfortingly unchanged in the face of global hyperactivity…
Now she reached her fingers sleepily over the side of the bed, grabbed the first of Eli’s small thrashing arms that she encountered, held it for a moment as a type of greeting. What time was it?
All I mean is that it seems to me merely another instance of American self-consciousness when confronted by one’s oddness, when the oddness is what makes value.
The great shock is to find himself alone in life—with no contact—not even with that sweet but silly little wretch Ophelia. Horatio a heart-of-oak dumbbell. Laertes a boring soldier. Polonius a blow-fly. The Queen a toad. Then, realizing that he should really turn away from these fakes to his real self, he feels the pressure of society suddenly on him…
