Imagined Conversations (7.30.14)
D: We are giving people larger derrières.
Dr. C: They want more ethnicity.
D: If Martha Stewart can do it, anyone can do it.
A and B overhearing.
A. Can you believe that guy! I will seize my own day. Carpe penis!
30 July (1845): Emily Brontë to Ellen Nussey
I must hurry off now to my taming and ironing I have plenty of work on hands and writing and am altogether full of business with best wishes for the whole House…
Spaced Out: The Lower Depths
There is a strange word that appears in Ancient Greek literature, a verb that describes a mental process: bussodomeuō. We could translate it as “to inhabit the base” or, more succinctly, as “depth-dwelling.” Such a gloss might be the best we can do.
29 July (1971): E.B. White to William Maxwell
My birds are shedding now, and I’m enclosing two feathers from the young gander; you can make them into pens for Kate and Brookie so they will grow up to be writers.
The Uses of Art: Little Beasts
Even when you’re in the right place and time, participatory art fails because art fails: too often nothing actually happens between a work and its viewer. We are so many strangers walking the streets of the city, hardly glancing at one another.
28 July (1949): John Steinbeck to Elaine Scott
I am going to make my world-shaking macaroni for dinner and the kids are wild with joy because it means there will be tomato sauce all over the kitchen and all over me. My dinners are not only food. They are decorations also…
25 July (1909): Rupert Brooke to Noël Olivier
But when one, beginning to bathe, throws off one’s two garments, — then all is surprisingly well. You no longer feel disliked, an outsider. (It’s always a question of clothes, you see). You become, part of it all; and bathe…
“I’ll No Longer Be Born Today” & Other PoemsFrom the Print
We wanted to make Mama’s insides beautiful,
to make her more beautiful,
to show slides—
so we installed an overhead projector there
(you can’t imagine how we managed)
and endeavored to project the world on her insides.
24 July (1950): Kenneth Rexroth to James Laughlin
It is these activities which have made contemporary poetry in bulk what it is, scared, bled out, punch drunk and synthetic…
23 July (1923): P.G. Wodehouse to William Townend
Error, I think, ever to have your villain manhandled by a minor character. Just imagine Doctor Moriarty punched by Watson…