Lola at the Coffee House, Cafe 101

"There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word
nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the
metallic ones who are blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to
disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde
who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who
straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who
gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers
and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take
her home ...

"There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't
care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as
long as it is the Starlight Room and there is plenty of dry
champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal
and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common
sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck
driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence
out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale,
pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She
is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of
nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first
place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading
'The Waste Land' or Dante in the original, or Kafka or
Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the
New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which
one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat late. I
hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them ..."

Primarily it was McCarthyism which aroused the fear that the critical mind was at a ruinous discount in this country. Of course, intellectuals were not the only targets of McCarthy's constant detonations - he was after bigger game - but intellectuals were in the line of fire, and it seemed to give special rejoicing to his followers when they were hit...

To quote Mr. Capote, "I've been stiffed by better sailors than you, fella."

"Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" Richard Hofstadter, Vintage Books1962 (available new in paperback for $12 via amazon)

]Stop moaning. The man is not a snob and he is a very fine writer indeed. Here's a teeny bit of paragraph two from the first chapter...

Quote:

Primarily it was McCarthyism which aroused the fear that the critical mind was at a ruinous discount in this country. Of course, intellectuals were not the only targets of McCarthy's constant detonations - he was after bigger game - but intellectuals were in the line of fire, and it seemed to give special rejoicing to his followers when they were hit...

<note to self, do not reflect on dead friends while searching for memorial stones to honour other dead friends while walking two dogs who are in very giddy moods because they're at the beach>

"ameliorative tactile denouement".