Why I read something this blurry.

I'd just watched "What a Way to Go" — the Criterion Channel is featuring Shirley MacLaine movies — and checking Rotten Tomatoes, I saw that Joan Didion wrote a review in the May 1964 issue of Vogue. I could subscribe to Vogue just to read that paragraph, but I found that by calming down and believing in myself, I could read it. It's not much different from reading without one's reading glasses. It's an apt and pithy review. "What a Way to Go" was a big movie in its day, so it deserves the bad reviews it got, but 60 years later, it's fun to look at the stars and the costumes and the sets. The Hollywood that produced it no longer exists. Nothing to get mad at now. Here's a sentence from the contemporaneous NYT review by Bosley Crowther:

Inspired by a Gwen Davis story, which has not swum into my ken, so I cannot tell you how fairly or fouly it has been used, the team of musical-comedy writers is making kookie jokes about a girl whose sad fate it is to marry a succession of burgeoning millionaires.

The "girl" hates money, loves Henry David Thoreau, and only wants to live the simple life, but the movie seems to have been made on the theory that the way to make good art is by spending as much money as possible.

Also, the girl's idea of what to do with fabulous wealth that hasn't brought happiness is to donate it all to the IRS... even though Thoreau refused to pay even a tax that he owed.

From "It’s Tax Day. Don’t Forget to Read Thoreau" by Sarah Vowell:

Henry David Thoreau delivered a lecture on “resistance to civil government” that would acquire the post-mortem title “Civil Disobedience.” He wonders: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

Thoreau, a committed abolitionist and conductor on the Underground Railroad, denounced the American government’s tolerance of the institution of slavery, as well as “the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.”

For abolitionists, slavery and the Mexican-American War were not unrelated; they worried the mammoth new territory acquired from Mexico at gunpoint — the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Utah, California and Nevada and parts of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wyoming — would spread slavery to the Pacific....

To protest, for six years Thoreau did not pay his taxes. He asks, “When I meet a government which says to me, ‘Your money or your life,’ why should I be in haste to give it my money?” And so he went to jail — for a single night. “For some one” — probably his aunt — “interfered, and paid that tax.”

ADDED: "What a Way to Go" is a big Cinemascope film, but you can get a look at the whole thing on YouTube, here. You need a big theater to really see it. But this post is about not seeing clearly. And the picture originally envisioned was never to be seen: The Shirley MacLaine role was intended for Marilyn Monroe. Ironically, it's a movie about abrupt, untimely death. It was also intended to be hilarious. It wasn't.