List No. 072
CONTEMPT FOR:
walker evans and James Agee
December 26th, 1937
In 1936, famed photographer Walker Evans collaborated with writer and close friend James Agee to produce what would eventually become, five years later, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – a powerful, well-received book that documented the lives of three farming families in Depression-era America. Their original intention, however, had been to write and shoot an article for Fortune magazine. Fortune had other ideas and rejected their hard work in 1937. With nothing to show for the past year’s work but an unwanted article, Evans and Agee were left feeling tired and angry. On December 26th they both sat down and wrote lists of the things they hated the most.
James Agee’s list
Contempt or hatred for:
The Anglo Saxon tristesse
the Anglo Saxon optimism
Anglo Saxon men in relation to their women
Anglo Saxon women
English girls
female athletes
intellectual women
most women who say fuck, shit, fart, etc
most women who do not
all women who like dirty jokes
most women who do not
the liking for dirty jokes
limited editions, especially when signed
literary pornography
handsome volumes
slim volumes
zest
gusto
Rabelaisianism
book reviewers
sex education
literature
moving picture versions of Shakespeare, famous novels, and the lives of famous people
famous people
fame
English slang
the Americanisms of Englishmen
the Anglicisms of Americans
the Anglicisms of Englishmen
the professional American
“smart” women
“smart” people
those who live in the Barbizon Plaza
doctors
plays about doctors
The Group Theatre
Orson Welles’s lighting
Archibald MacLeish’s courage
whatever was responsible for my maternal grandmother, for Mrs. Saunders, for my mother, for my stepfather, for my sister’s trouble, for sexual pain, for the pain of sexual love.
every conception of motherhoods functions
those who bring forth, and up, children
those who despise them
those who say that things are slowly working themselves out towards the best
everything about William Shakespeare expect William Shakespeare and his own writing
" " Christ except himself as I presume him, Dostoevsky, Blake, Kafka.
those who say, ‘if only everyone would love one another’
the Van Gogh show at the Museum of Modern Art
the Surrealist show at same
those who saw these shows
everything about Salvador Dali except a few of his paintings
Tchelitchev
Julien Levy
Film Groups, Guilds, Societés, etc.,
theatres which show the best foreign films
the word film
the word shot
the words cinema, swing, stuff, reactionary, swell, modest, contact, sexual intercourse, coitus, classical historical objective, act of kind, conventional, unconventional, poet, art, cultivated, mind, integrity, love, God, cozy, cunning, sweet, etc etc; such as, angle.
Walter Winchell
Bohemians
Lucius Beebe
pedantic wit
those who use no effort not to have their lives and thinking governed by their feelings
those who are not sceptical of their own premises
all self-confessed mystics and mahatmas who permit even one disciple
sensitive young men
unconsciousness of the self-betrayal of spoken language
peasant art in other than peasant contexts
old furniture
period interiors
the distortions which every falsehood imposes on every truth
most whose feelings get hurt
those who carry off unpleasant incidents with laughter
pipes and pipe smokers
the libraries of clergy men
Alice in Wonderland
dog-lovers
the words pooch and mutt
the words prostie, bordello, etc.
the elaborate oaths of prep school boys
dictionaries of slang
the New Republic
Josef Stalin
Leon Trotsky
Karl Marx
Jane Austen
Paul Rotha
all books on movies
women through whose crotch you can see daylight when their knees are together
any creased droop under the breast
social crediters
American children who speak French
Every confusion of friendship and business
the face of Max Eastman
Walt Disney’s human beings
most of the public of Disney and of Clair
publishers
journalists who like their jobs
