------------------------------ [excerpt, Fitzgerald] ---------------------------- It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made....
I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace -- or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons -- rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.
Gatsby's house was still empty when I left -- the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. ...
I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive.
One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn't investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn't know that the party was over.
{The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 1925. Charles Scribner's Sons.}
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------------------------------- [excerpt, The Making of the President 1960] ----------------------
Chapter One
WAITING
It was invisible, as always.
They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, as they always do, seven and a half hours before the candidate rose.
His men had canvassed Hart's Location in New Hampshire days before, sending his autographed picture to each of the twelve registered voters in the village.
They knew that they had five votes certain there, that Nixon had five votes certain -- and that two were still undecided.
Yet it was worth the effort, for Hart's Location's results would be the first flash of news on the wires to greet millions of voters as they opened their morning papers over coffee. But from there on it was unpredictable -- invisible.
By the time the candidate left his Boston hotel at 8:30, several million had already voted across the country -- in schools, libraries, churches, stores, post offices. These, too, were invisible, but it was certain that at this hour the vote was overwhelmingly Republican.
On election day America is Republican until five or six in the evening.
It is in the last few hours of the day that working people and their families vote, on their way home from work or after supper; it is then, at evening, that America goes Democratic if it goes Democratic at all.
All of this is invisible, for it is the essence of the act that as it happens it is a mystery in which millions of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together, none of them knowing the shape of the whole.
What results from the fitting together of these secrets is, of course, the most awesome transfer of power in the world....
Heroes and philosophers, brave men and vile, have since Rome and Athens tried to make this particular manner of transfer of power work effectively; no people has succeeded at it better, or over a longer period of time, than the Americans.
{The Making of the President 1960, by Theodore H. White. 1961. Atheneum Publishers}
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Left, photographers waiting for candidate
Center, JFK in West Virginia
Right, Nixon and an aide
1960, Richard Nixon and Veep candidate Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
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She's got everything she needs
She's an artist, she don't look back
She's got everything she needs
She's an artist, she don't look back
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black
You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole
Down upon your knees
She never stumbles
She's got no place to fall
She never stumbles
She's got no place to fall
She's nobody's child
The Law can't touch her at all
She wears an Egyptian ring
That sparkles before she speaks
She wears an Egyptian ring
That sparkles before she speaks
She's a hypnotist collector
You are a walking antique
Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes
Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes
For Halloween give her a trumpet
And for Christmas, buy her a drum
{"She Belongs to Me" - Single by Bob Dylan. (A-side, "Subterranean Homesick Blues") Recorded January 14, 1965, Columbia Recording Studios, New York City. Released, March 22, 1965. Genre: folk rock, blues rock. Producer: Tom Wilson. album: Bringing It All Back Home}
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