July 24th, 2018 THE K PAOLETTER “There has never been anything quite like Boston as a creation of the American imagination.” So wrote the great critic Elizabeth Hardwick in 1959 in her assessment of a city once “felt to have… a pure and special nature, absurd no doubt, but somehow valuable.” Hardwick was hardly impressed with the Boston of her age, however, bemoaning its lack of the “wild, eccentric beauty of New York” and describing it instead as “a specially organized small creature with its small creature's temperature, balance, and distribution of fat.” It was a place where “the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. The cows come home; the chickens go to roost; the meadow is dark.”
K Paoletter 9: Dirty Old Town
K Paoletter 9: Dirty Old Town
K Paoletter 9: Dirty Old Town
July 24th, 2018 THE K PAOLETTER “There has never been anything quite like Boston as a creation of the American imagination.” So wrote the great critic Elizabeth Hardwick in 1959 in her assessment of a city once “felt to have… a pure and special nature, absurd no doubt, but somehow valuable.” Hardwick was hardly impressed with the Boston of her age, however, bemoaning its lack of the “wild, eccentric beauty of New York” and describing it instead as “a specially organized small creature with its small creature's temperature, balance, and distribution of fat.” It was a place where “the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. The cows come home; the chickens go to roost; the meadow is dark.”