homo superior

Only Richard Hell, propositioned by Allen Ginsberg, the older poet one day while working a construction crew, would be reminded of “Walt Whitman admiring the sweat-sheened torsos of laborers.” And only Hell would turn Ginsberg down, not because he wasn’t gay—though he wasn’t—but because he didn’t think much of Ginsberg’s poetry.

The best way to teach capitalist virtues, of course, is to pretend that one is teaching history.

The dealers in money have always been the dangerous class,” Cooper wrote in the last year of his life. “There may, at some future day, be a whirlwind precipitated upon the moneyed men of this country.