Читать книгу Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America - Bill Kauffman - Страница 40

Counterpunch, 2003

Burr and Lincoln by Gore Vidal—America, by a true patriot and our greatest living man of letters.

The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey—An anarchist Western. In the film version (Lonely are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas’s jaw), screenwriter Dalton Trumbo shamefully changed the hero’s crime from rescuing a draft-resister to harboring a family of adorable illegal immigrants. Abbey: Brave. Trumbo: Coward!

The Octopus by Frank Norris, Giants in the Earth by Ole Rølvaag, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck—The great American novel: take your pick.

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis—A regionalist dystopia by a Minnesota Firster. George Babbitt is a fool not because he is provincial but because he has bought into the lie of mass culture. If you drink at Starbucks and watch Sex and the City, you’re Babbitt.

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington—You’ve seen Welles’s butchered movie; now read the superior novel.

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry—The finest book ever written about a barber. Berry is the exemplary American agrarian.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury—Just lovely. My daughter and I read the opening pages (about the first day of summer) every summer solstice. Yeah, I know, dandelions yellow the yard in May, not June, but maybe things were different in Ray’s Waukegan.

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe and On the Road by Jack Kerouac—I loved these books when I was twenty-three, and I apologize for nothing!

The Adventures of Wesley Jackson by William Saroyan—An Armenian-American pacifist confronts The Good War and loses his career. Saroyan was a soldier when he wrote this charming story of a nineteen-year-old draftee who discovers that “our own army was the enemy.” Office of War Information commissar Herbert Agar—a turncoat bastard who had been a Kentucky distributist before going proto-Ashcroft—threatened him with a court martial and tried to kill the book. Saroyan nailed the chickenhawks but good: “when everybody else got shipped overseas they were still writing scenarios for films encouraging everybody else to face death like a scenario writer.”

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson—Inspired an aptly bleak album by one of my all-time favorite bands, Green on Red.

Raintree County by Ross Lockridge, Jr.—Indiana golden boy writes 1,000-page Whitmanesque novel, then kills self. No one has read this book for fifty years, but I love it.

Crazy Legs McBain by Joe Archibald—Hey, it’s my list. Every fall I read this 1961 boys book about an unlikely college football star, a gawky kid who runs punts back ninety yards, makes one-handed catches, and piledrives the pretty boy-rich kid quarterback’s face into the turf. Go Bobcats!