IndyFindsOut_Cowboys - The Monday Morning Memo

Arlene, not knowing how to answer your question, I found a 1965 photograph of John Wayne and walked into it and said,

Mr. Wayne, what do you think cowboys will learn from you when they look back at your movies 50 years from now?”

He said,

If you choose the right name, the right facial expressions, the right clothing, headwear and footwear, and learn the right way of standing and walking, you can transform a run-of-the-mill, injured athlete named Marion Morrison into ‘John Wayne – America’s first good-guy badass.’

Cute kids, by the way. They seem to have the hang of it.

John Wayne personified for millions the nation’s frontier heritage. Eighty-three of his movies were Westerns, and in them he played cowboys, cavalrymen, and unconquerable loners extracted from the Republic’s central creation myth.”

– Ronald L. Davis (2012)
Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne
University of Oklahoma Press. p. 6

“‘The regular ways of looking at Frost’s poetry,’ the poet Randall Jarrell wrote in 1953, ‘are grotesque simplifications, distortions, falsifications.’ In 1959, at the poet’s 85th birthday dinner, Lionel Trilling described Frost as ‘terrifying’ — ‘my Frost is not the Frost I seem to perceive existing in the minds of so many of his admirers.’ Their Frost, he claimed, was a voice of ‘democratic simplicity.’

There is a kind of a crystalline simplicity to much of Frost’s work. ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’ which he wrote in 1923 and later named as his own favorite poem, has a glowing, pristine quality, a snow-globe perfection… Yet it’s also, like so many holiday poems that aren’t explicitly for children, quite melancholy.

Those, like Trilling, who hold that their Frost is terrifying will have no trouble finding something to fear in it, in the cold dark forest that beckons as death might. Some were offended by Trilling’s remarks, but Frost wasn’t. ‘No sweeter music can come to my ears,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘than the clash of arms over my dead body,’ suggesting he wished to be misunderstood — or that there was no correct understanding of his work, because he had no stable intention.”

- Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, Dec 12, 2022 (NOTE: having studied Robert Frost for 51 years, I can attest that, "there was no correct understanding of his work, because he had no stable intention." If you'd like to dive to the bottom of that deep well, read about the true nature of parables in Amy-Jill Levine's amazing book, "Short Stories by Jesus.") – Roy H. Williams

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