Chamblee54

Truman Capote was a phenomenon of the TV talk show era. If he hadn’t existed, someone would have had to invent him. He was known as much for his sissy voice as his writing. Becoming famous in the late forties for “Other Voices, Other Rooms”, he worked on a screenplay for “Beat the Devil”. When he met the men accused of killing the Clutter family in Kansas, he impressed one by telling him he worked on a movie with Humphrey Bogart. These chats led to the book “In Cold Blood”, which was probably his biggest triumph. “Breakfast at Tiffanys” became a movie starring Audrey Hepburn.
He was on the Dick Cavett Show the same night as Georgia Governor Lester Maddox. After Maddox got offended and walked off the show, Mr.Capote remembered the time he ate at Maddox’s Pickrick restaurant. “All I can say is that it wasn’t finger licking good”.
Mr. Capote was the darling of certain New York socialites. They unwisely told him some stories about their lives. In 1975 Esquire magazine published “La Côte Basque 1965”. It was a chapter from “Answered Prayers”, the book he received a large advance for and took his time writing. (It was finally published three years after his death) .The chapter published told some sordid tales about his jet set friends, who immediately ostracized him. It was a stepping stone on his road to ruin.
One chapter of “Answered Prayers” involves a dinner party in New York. Three of the guests were Dorothy Parker, Tallulah Bankhead, and Montgomery Clift. The evening never got past the cocktail hour, much to the distress of the hostess. At one point, Miss Parker was tenderly touching the face of Mr. Clift. She purred “He’s so beautiful,sensitive. So finely made. The most beautiful young man I have ever seen. What a pity he’s a cocksucker. Oh Oh, dear, have I said something wrong. I mean, he is a cocksucker, isn’t he Tallulah? Miss Bankhead replied ” Well d-d-darling, I r-r-really wouldn’t know. He’s never sucked my cock.”
In the spring of 1976, Mr. Capote gave a speech at the University of Georgia. At the time, there was a comic strip called “Don Q”, which has long been forgotten. It showed people in medieval clothes making comments on current affairs. On the day of the speech, the comic featured two characters. One was Richard Nixon. The other was as lisping little man, apparently based on Truman Capote.
The scene that evening was magic. The lecture was given on the steps of Memorial Hall, with the audience in the quadrangle in front of Reed Hall. Mr. Capote’s contract specified a pink spotlight, and a wicker chair behind the podium. Mr. Capote spoke for a while, and read a section out of “A Christmas Memory”. After a break, he returned to answer questions. The questions were written on file cards, and read by a student. The last one, and the one the reader said best typified the attitude of the evening, was “What does Johnny Carson look like in person?”
After this, Mr. Capote asked for questions from the crowd. PG raised my hand, and Mr. Capote pointed to him. “Mr. Capote, did you see the comic strip Don Q this morning?” “No, what was it about?” ” It was about you, and Richard Nixon” “I don’t know who Don Q is, and I am beginning to not know who Richard Nixon is.”
Mr. Capote went downhill from this point on. He did a series of profiles for “Interview” magazine, which formed the basis of his last book ” Music for Chameleons”. His drinking and drug taking, always a problem, got worse. He became an embarrassment to those who once flocked to his side.
Truman Capote died in 1984.

Whenever you discuss Jack Kerouac, there is a quote by Truman Capote that gets mentioned. “That’s not writing, that’s typing”. PG thought a trip to Google city would help to show a bit of context on that quote. The first page of results, only, rule will be enforced here. The context of the original remains a mystery. ( Hey, maybe someone else made it up, and said that Capote said it. The ladies who lunch are not that clever, but Capote had big ears.)
There is a review of Going Rogue with the title, “That’s not writing, that’s someone else typing”. The nit picker has the audacity to say that the P lady gave a ghostwriter some tapes, and went off to hunt endangered species. A commenter observes “at some point in her book tour, someone will ask her a question that she won’t be able to answer because she won’t be familiar with what’s in her own book.” This post advertises downloading audio books, and copping grant money.
The Chicago Reader advertises teeth whitening chemicals with the post “That’s Not Writing, It’s Typing” It seems that someone is trashing today’s internet generation, with it’s tweets and blogs that say nothing, by comparing them to the product of Jack Kerouac. The money quote: “Kerouac survives because he (allegedly) wrote great works; the insufferable logorrhea the Beats inspired biodegrades in niche bookstores because, sensibly, nobody reads it. The Web makes things worse only in the sense that it democratically preserves the crap alongside the genius. Even more so than libraries!”
You probably know what is coming next. Yes, there is a blog titled That’s Not Writing, That’s Typing . It is written in Australia, and last had a post in 2007. The next to last post was about a trip to Dubai, and has a picture of a large hookah.
The results are a bit better at Writingortyping . It has been updated in 2011, and the lady knows how to write. Here is an example: “Overheard at our house, French steampunk edition… September 30, 2010 By Jill… Me: “So remember that trailer of that French steampunk film I showed you earlier this year?” John: “Yeah – I think so.” Me: “Well, apparently it was only in theatres on limited release and isn’t on DVD in the States at all.” John: “So, New York and L.A. basically.” Me: “Yeah probably.” John: “And Northern Maine.”
There are two sites for Truman Capote quotes They do not provide any more information about this quote, other than to repeat it. Mr. Capote was a clever man, who would be a challenge for Mr. Kerouac in a drinking contest. Mr. Capote also said “Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.” Brainy quotes sells digital speed plans and blackberries. There are links to quotes from “your favorite authors”, including Marilyn Monroe, Buddha, and Muhammad Ali.
The top result for *the phrase* is perhaps the most true to the style of Mr. Kerouac. It was written 27 days before 911 by Jonah Goldberg, of all people. He is trying to make it to a wedding, where he will play the underrated role of groom. He wants to get his dress shoes before he leaves town, because asking for “black loafers” in a Montana truck stop might lead to unexpected adventure. Being a thoughtful conservative, he makes the case that government intervention makes poor people poorer. The piece is written in a deadline driven frenzy, with jokes about black loafers and Truman Capote. The header ad is for Grove City College, and the Wall Street Journal.
This is a repost. Pictures are from The Library of Congress

Whenever someone writes a book about religion, the writer pays tribute to mammon. Interviews are given, TED talks are given, and the printed donkey flogged within an inch of its life. The book of the moment is Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion. The author is Alain de Botton. A chat on blogginheadstv provided background noise for a productive 53 minutes of photo editing. Thank you Library of Congress. This is a repost.
The idea is that atheists can learn a thing or two from the believers. Mr. de Botton also gave a TED Talk about this concept. TED provides a transcript, which makes the bloggers endeavor a bit easier. Quotes below,from the transcript, are in blue. Editorial comments, by the house, are in green.
One of the most common ways of dividing the world is into those who believe and those who don’t — into the religious and the atheists. And for the last decade or so, it’s been quite clear what being an atheist means. There have been some very vocal atheists who’ve pointed out, not just that religion is wrong, but that it’s ridiculous. These people, many of whom have lived in North Oxford, have argued — they’ve argued that believing in G-d is akin to believing in fairies and essentially that the whole thing is a childish game.
We may as well began by questioning the entire belief paradigm. Christians believe G-d exists, and a few other things. Atheists do not believe G-d exists. What no one seems to be questioning is whether belief is the best way to go about the G-d issue. The word gnosis (the root of agnostic) refers to having a knowledge of G-d… to feeling her presence in your soul. There are some who say that man and G-d are one and the same. When all you have is a belief… a strongly felt thought… you just might be missing most of the picture.
Christianity is a religion based on beliefs. One of the central beliefs is the notion that having the correct beliefs will cause you to be “saved”… to go to heaven when you die, instead of hell. This is a big deal to Christians, who find it difficult to deal with someone who is not as fascinated by this belief as they are.
Atheism seems to be a reaction to Christianity. If they Christians did not tell them about G-d, how would they know what not to believe in?
“they’ve argued that believing in G-d is akin to believing in fairies and essentially that the whole thing is a childish game.” Oh my, what a terrible thing to say about faeries. Maybe faeries are not something to believe in either. Just wear the fabulous fashions, and don’t worry about that silly religion business.
Mr. de Botton laments the lack of community is atheism, and he may have a point. PG has often envied the sense of extended family that churches seem to offer. If only those pesky beliefs didn’t get in the way. Does religion fulfill a tribal need for conformity, rather than spiritual fulfillment?
“Now religions start from a very different place indeed. All religions, all major religions, at various points call us children. And like children, they believe that we are in severe need of assistance. We’re only just holding it together. Perhaps this is just me, maybe you. But anyway, we’re only just holding it together. And we need help. Of course, we need help. And we need guidance and we need learning.”
It is a common rule of public speaking… you treat children as though they were adults, and adults as though they were children. The concept of being “born again”, of having a second childhood… these are very appealing notions. Can an atheist church offer these good times? Or would it spoil the fun by treating “worshipers” as adults?
Another point about education: we tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they’ll remember it. Sit them in a classroom, tell them about Plato at the age of 20, send them out for a career in management consultancy for 40 years, and that lesson will stick with them. Religions go, “Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it.” That’s what all religions tell us: “Get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day.” Otherwise our minds are like sieves.
So religions are cultures of repetition. They circle the great truths again and again and again. We associate repetition with boredom. “Give us the new,” we’re always saying. “The new is better than the old.” If I said to you, “Okay, we’re not going to have new TED. We’re just going to run through all the old ones and watch them five times because they’re so true. We’re going to watch Elizabeth Gilbert five times because what she says is so clever,” you’d feel cheated.
PG listened to the embedded TED talk twice, the second time taking notes in the transcript. The idea of listening to this lecture three more times is horrific.
The other thing that religions are really aware of is: speak well — I’m not doing a very good job of this here — but oratory, oratory is absolutely key to religions. In the secular world, you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker and still have a great career. But the religious world doesn’t think that way. What you’re saying needs to be backed up by a convincing way of saying it.
So if you go to an African American Pentecostalist church in the American South and you listen to how they talk, my goodness, they talk well. After every convincing point, people will go, “Amen, amen, amen.” At the end of a really rousing paragraph, they’ll all stand up, and they’ll go, “Thank you Jesus, thank you Christ, thank you Savior.” If we were doing it like they do it — let’s not do it, but if we were to do it — I would tell you something like, “Culture should replace scripture.” And you would go, “Amen, amen, amen.” And at the end of my talk, you would all stand up and you would go, “Thank you Plato, thank you Shakespeare, thank you Jane Austen.” And we’d know that we had a real rhythm going. All right, all right. We’re getting there. We’re getting there.
This is one issue where PG has a big, big problem. Jesus worship is an emotional affair. Powerful feelings are stirred up. This power, and fury, can be a terrifying thing if it is used against you.
In 1999, PG was working with an aggressive Jesus worshiper. One day, PG came out of the bathroom, and heard something on a radio the preacher was playing. What he heard disturbed PG. When he asked the preacher to turn his radio down, hell broke loose. The preacher turned loose the power of Jesus against PG, in righteous anger, because he wanted to play a religious radio station at work. An experience like that will give you a sense of what George Zimmerman is facing today.
This use of Jesus driven emotions is an issue in American politics today. The force and thunder of a screaming Jesus worshiper, leading his flock of angry sheep, is a terrible thing to have used against you. It is hoped that an Atheist church would be more “humanistic”.
No, we need to be polite about differences. Politeness is a much-overlooked virtue. It’s seen as hypocrisy. But we need to get to a stage when you’re an atheist and someone says, “Well you know, I did pray the other day,” you politely ignore it. You move on. Because you’ve agreed on 90 percent of things, because you have a shared view on so many things, and you politely differ… That’s what the religious wars of late have ignored. They’ve ignored the possibility of harmonious disagreement.
Two wrongs do not make a right. Jesus worshipers are notorious for interrupting you if something is said they do not like. Perhaps this is another function of the belief based religion. When you believe something, and do not understand why someone does not share your belief, you don’t have time to listen. This rudeness does not speak well for Jesus. Hopefully, atheists can be a bit better.

March 25 is Waffle Day. This is a good day to tell about a lucky accident. The first Waffle House opened on East College Avenue, in Avondale Estates GA, in 1955. One of the partners in the venture was Albert House. The original plan was for the restaurant to be called “House Waffles.”
The person who made the first bright yellow sign was a bit hard of hearing. When the sign arrived at the site, it said Waffle House, instead of House Waffles. The restaurant was opening the next day, and it was too late to change. It opened as Waffle House, and was so successful they kept the name.
This story is a whimsical account of what might have been, and is not based on actual history. The pictures, from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”, are real.

Spencer Tracy’s rule for acting, number two, is don’t trip over the props. This might be a problem for Jon Hamm. In a bit of slow news day genius, his show leaked the information that the actor has been requested to wear underwear on the set. A rep for Mr. Hamm said: “It is ridiculous and not really funny at all. I’d appreciate you taking the high road and not resorting to something childish like this that’s been blogged about 1,000 times.”
This was an issue when Tallulah Bankhead was making “Lifeboat”. Other performers complained about the thespian not wearing panties. Director Alfred Hitchcock wondered if this was a matter for wardrobe, or a matter for hairdressing.
This concern about foundation garments, conveniently arising during the pre-easter shopping season, made PG wonder when men started to wear drawers. Could this be the result of manufacturers inventing demand for a product? Wikipedia says the loincloth is thousands of years old. A footnote, about the invention of the jockstrap, led to an English article, A brief history of pants: Why men’s smalls have always been a subject of concern.
“In 1935, the first Jockey briefs went on sale in Chicago. Designed by an “apparel engineer” called Arthur Kneibler (working at the time for Coopers Inc), the arrival of the first underpants denuded of any legs and featuring a Y-shaped opening has been compared with the 1913 invention of the bra, or the 1959 debut of tights. In three months, 30,000 were sold. Coopers, now known as Jockey International, sent its “Mascul-line” plane to make special deliveries of “masculine support” briefs to retailers across the United States. When the Jockeys arrived in Britain in 1938, they sold at the rate of 3,000 per week.”
One popular brand of underwear is the BVD. This was originally made by Bradley, Voorhees & Day, hence the name. They are not named for Bovine Viral Diarrhea. Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.

Dear Patriot, We just returned from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and we’ve got so much to report! Each year, the most influential conservatives in America gather at CPAC to lay out the next steps in our movement. And this year, Tea Party Patriots was instrumental in charting a course for the future! Our chief goal was to target young activists – the essential ingredient for our movement’s long-term success.
We unveiled a new video entitled “A Movement on Fire,” which presented our struggle for freedom to younger audiences through the lens of the popular Hunger Games movie. Salon.com dubbed our short film CPAC’s “first viral hit”! We followed that up with a Hunger Games-themed party that attracted hundreds of young conservatives to our organization! We provided 30 hours of grassroots training to scores of new activists over the course of the three-day event, and we met with thousands more.
And Jenny Beth Martin, our National Coordinator, topped it all off with a rousing keynote address denouncing the nanny-state oppression of ObamaCare. In short, in three days at CPAC, our profile grew exponentially, the ranks of young Tea Party conservatives multiplied, and the number of trained Tea Party activists continued to increase!
And this fabulous conference was only the beginning! With CPAC now behind us, our movement is rejuvenated. Our ranks have grown. The younger generation is ready to join us. But now, we must resource and coordinate them. Will you make a generous contribution to Tea Party Patriots today to support the next chapter in our citizen-led movement?
All of this outreach will mean nothing if we are unable to provide materials, direction and guidance to the hundreds of newly activated Tea Party conservatives that have just joined us. We need to provide manuals, advanced grassroots training, and hands-on guidance to these new, young activists looking to make a difference in their communities and states. Tea Party Patriots relies on the generosity of conservatives like you to propel this citizen-led revolution forward.
Please make a much-needed contribution today to help us resource and coordinate these patriots. Thank you so much for your dedication to the cause of freedom! Tea Party Patriots, Inc. operates as a social welfare organization organized under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to Tea Party Patriots, Inc. are not deductible as charitable contributions for income tax purposes.

Have you ever wondered why your ancestors owned other human beings? How can you justify something this cruel? In an NPR interview to promote a new book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, Adam Goodheart has an answer.
It was economics. “But I think we think of it differently when we realize that the value of slave property, some $4 billion, enormous amount of money in 1861, represented actually more money than the value of all of the industry and all of the railroads in the entire United States combined. So for Southern planters to simply one day liberate all of that property would have been like asking people today to simply overnight give up their stock portfolios, give up their IRAs.”
Mr. Goodheart compares it to the situation today with fossil fuels. “many of us recognize that in burning fossil fuels we’re doing something terrible for the planet, we’re doing something terrible for future generations. And yet in order to give this up would mean sort of unraveling so much of the fabric of our daily lives, sacrificing so much, becoming these sort of radical eccentrics riding bicycles everywhere, that we continue somewhat guiltily to participate in the system. And that’s something that I use as a comparison to slavery, that many Americans in the North, and even I believe sort of secretly in the South, felt a sense of guilt, felt a sense of shame, that knew that the slave system was wrong but were simply addicted to slavery and couldn’t give it up. “
When the economic pressure is there, people will find a way to justify their actions. Slavery was justified in a number of ways. Today, there are people who deny the ill effects of using fossil fuels, and they have an eager audience. The payback for the environmental horror is in the future. This is similar to the way people today are paying … with racial turmoil … for slavery.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost.

About this time a year ago was super tuesday . This is a presidential primary thing. When you live in a non-swing state, this is the only time you get to make a choice.
By the time ST arrived, the field of contenders had thinned down. No one knows what the rejects were doing. The rumors of a Herman Cain – Michele Bachmann liaison are too gruesome to contemplate.
Among the choices was the incumbent, BHO. He has to juggle running the country, preventing war, getting reelected, and being the father of teenage girls.
This commentary will be in alphabetical order.
Newt Gingrich used to represent Georgia in Congress. He has stage presence. He still has all his hair, and does not dye it. Callista Gingrich has great hair. The daughter of Mr. Gingrich defended him, regarding his divorce from wife number one.
Barack Obama has killed more men with beards than any Republican.
Ron Paul is the only candidate to have served in the military. He is opposed to the promiscuous use of US military power. Bruno thinks Dr. Paul is much cuter than Enrique Iglesias.
Mitt Romney has the most money of any candidate.
Rick Santorum has the most children of any candidate.
The voting will take place at Ashford Park Elementary School. PG was a student there. There is a sepia picture of Dr. Thomas, who was the Principal. Seeing an antique looking picture, and realizing that you knew the person, makes you feel old. The voting is sometimes held in the cafetorium. It is not the only time PG has held his nose in that facility.
The so called real election took place in November. America had to juggle the chores of sorting out the hype, keeping the economy going, and buying the latest consumer products. Swing state voters had the additional duty of choosing the POTUS.