Academic

MY EARLIER POST ABOUT ?KAELIAN SURPRISE? regarding the Van Jones debacle led reader Glenn Kenny to e?

By Glenn Reynolds

MY EARLIER POST ABOUT “KAELIAN SURPRISE” regarding the Van Jones debacle led reader Glenn Kenny to email that the Pauline Kael story isn’t really true. He sends this link:

She never said it, and she was irked by the fact that it was so often attributed to her. Apparently a reporter, or somebody, asked her to comment on Nixon’s election, and she replied that she couldn’t because she didn’t even know anyone who had voted for Nixon. And the story got garbled.

Of course, the post in question also criticizes “Repugs,” so make of that what you will. Kenny adds: “I think one reason the story has the legs it does is because, contra Rubio, ‘Don’t look at me; nobody I know voted for Nixon’ or some such sounds like something Kael WOULD say, in her most imperious, shoot-from-the-hip mode of discourse (as when she famously told Otto Preminger to his face that ‘Hurry Sundown’ was a ‘piece of shit’). But as there really is NO official record of her saying that?the much-referred-to Wall Street Journal article has never surfaced,?she really ought not be tarred with it. There are many, I suppose, who would argue that her quote about Nixon voters being ‘outside her ken’ amounts to the same thing, but I really do not think it does.”

Okay, but I’m still proud of “Kaelian Surprise,” even if — heck, who am I kidding, because — it sounds like the title to a Star Trek episode.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on September 15, 2009 (boomark / email).