We went to see Capote a couple of weeks ago with some friends. It didn’t really impress me, mostly ’cause I’m a goddamn grump, but it did make me want to read In Cold Blood (which I also picked up in Portsmouth over the weekend).

I actually do owe Truman Capote the whole “RealFake” thing. The whole idea got planted when I saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s a couple of months after college, which includes this little clip (3MB, .mov ).

As a youth, I was like Holden Caulfield, and couldn’t stand the phonies. And then as a late-youth I thought that people who couldn’t stand phonies were all adolescents or folk singers. When I heard Holly Golightly described as a “real phoney” something clicked and I understood that there could be a third way where artifice and necessity were fused into an atomic whole and the whole dialectic didn’t matter. Or at least that such a thing could be strived for.

Funny thing is, now I think Holly is pretty much just a plain old phoney, albeit for good reasons. But the phrase still has magic properties for me.

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