Journalism, setting things on fire, fencing, logic, pollinators, wingtips, watershed management, pinup girls, compost, vengeance, filthy limericks, Lord Ganesh, ballroom dancing, upstate New York, the true, the good and the beautiful.
My great-grandmother, Ruthie Harris. I'd like to have a couple of screwdrivers and play some poker with her, and give her hell for flying the Jolly Roger upside-down from the roof of her ranch house in suburban Connecticut THIRTY YEARS AGO. Because now if I do it I'm a poser.
Banjos are hot.
If Americans still talked like Jimmy Stewart I'd like them better.
Fuck your television.
I have read way too many Neal Stephenson novels for anybody to take me seriously in the literature department. But Mark Helprin, I love you, even if you did used to write speeches for Bob Dole. Frankly, I miss Bob Dole. I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
Tom Post, Gay Talese, Dorothy Parker, Alcibiades, the Tuskegee Airmen, farmers.