Imagined Conversations (7.22.14)
A: I don’t have fangs.
B: I’m a porcupine.
A: I’m a—what’s the fish that blows up?
C: “I’m a blowfish.”
22 July (1963): William Maxwell to Eudora Welty
Emmy shook her head in wonder at it, and Mr. [William] Shawn stopped me in the hall to ask if I had talked to you and I said, “Yes, four times,” and he said, “Does she know how good it is?” I expect you do, somewhere, if not exactly on top of your mind…
The Geography of Melancholy
To walk in the country is to walk in and among life. That which is growing is growing of its own accord; there is a dynamic force—what the Romantic poets called Nature naturans—that suffuses the natural existence. A single blade of grass may be impermanent; a field of grass is not. But to walk in a city is to walk among ghosts, the narratives of onetime denizens building up like layers of clay shards…
21 July (1952): Kurt Vonnegut to Knox Burger
I guess the jacket is pretty dead. I was on it originally, but was taken off because the green made me look like death warmed over. That’s what they said…
Life Sentences: The Strange Power of the Subtweet
In a way, apostrophe is the most relevant poetic trope of the digital age. As we become more and more surrounded by language both real and virtual, we develop a familiarity with texts meant for other eyes and ears.
18 July (1937): Thornton Wilder to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
And in answer to Paul Valery’s question as to how the masterpieces of the future will be paid for in an age when there are no patrons, no elite and so on, I rush in with a garbled account of the doctrine that there never has been any relation between the moment of creation and the element of audience and I deduce some of the practical implications…
Review: On Lydia Davis’ “Can’t and Won’t”From the Print
This removed, and slightly veiled, narrative condescension is a trademark of Ms. Davis’ writing in Can’t and Won’t, a collection which takes empty, circular bourgeois life as its subject, and then immediately seems to resent having done so. Ms. Davis writes as if she were forced to take on this subject, as if it were an assignment, and so many of her stories here read like transcriptions of (elegant) tantrums.
17 July (1950): Graham Greene to Evelyn Waugh
I can’t think of anyone in England who would have the faintest idea what Brideshead is about.
Imagined Conversations (7.16.14)
A: Please don’t eat me.
B: Listen, even after you’ve become a cadaver, you’re still retrievable. God is within us and he has different ways of showing it in our lives, and this is just one way of showing it.
A: Don’t eat—
B: —My friend sent you to me, assuring me that I can use you freely…
16 July (1955): Anne Morrow Lindbergh to Constance Morgan
Most doctors try to dynamite all the bridges between the unconscious and the conscious because they are afraid of the unconscious (shock treatment, drugs, etc.). Rosen is afraid of the unconscious too, but fascinated by it. He tries to (1) keep the bridge open, even the most tenuous bridge—make more bridges, (2) be more permissive than most doctors about schizophrenic behavior…