3 July (1959): Jessica Mitford to Barbara and Ephraim Kahn
Life here is even-keelish to say the least. It’s the sort of hotel where Fr. bourgeois gentility reigns supreme…
Review: Robert Wilson directs Daniil Kharms’ “The Old Woman” at BAM
Why sad here? Why happy there? Wouldn’t it feel the same if they were switched?
2 July (1844): Edgar Allan Poe to James Russell Lowell
I, now and then feel stirred up to excel a fool, merely because I hate to let a fool imagine that he may excel me. Beyond this I feel nothing of ambition. I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate—the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility…
1 July (1876): Anton Chekhov to Mihail Chekhov
You recognize your insignificance?…Recognize it before God; perhaps, too, in the presence of beauty, intelligence, nature, but not before men. Among men you must be conscious of your dignity.
Imagined Conversations (6.30.14)
A: I want a beautiful life but I’m stuck in this Garbage World with you people.
B: You’re the one who decided to leave three lanes closed during rush hour.
A: It was interesting giving my dark side the keys to the car. I went joyriding…
Life Sentences: The Genius of the, Um, Filler Word
But isn’t there always an unspoken “I mean” before anything you say? Before every argument, every sentence, every word? You simply draw attention to your own attempt to communicate meaning. Props to you for speaking the unspoken, for meaning what you say, and saying that you mean.
30 June (1923): Sherwood Anderson to Alfred Stieglitz
The central notion is that one’s fanciful life is of as much significance as one’s real flesh-and-blood life and that one cannot tell where the one cuts off and the other begins. This thing I have thought has as much physical existence as the stupid physical act I yesterday did.
27 June (1928): Harold Ross to Ralph Barton
I am not competent to manage more space than this. I would be if I were a fairy. Fairies are the happiest people there are. All editors ought to be fairies. I fuss around with commas, semi-colons, dictionaries, and wordings, and it drives me crazy. I am too virile…
26 June (1939): Jean-Paul Sartre to Simon de Beauvoir
You must be having a sad time, my poor dearest, and more than once I’ve found myself very moved as I imagined your fragile little iron-willed self on wet roads, completely stubborn and completely soaked…
Spaced Out: 2014, or The Year of Maritime Muddles
GPS gives one an easier sense of location, but its power to do so depends on a network of moving satellites, determining location as they orbit with the earth. Whatever the illusions our iPhones, Garmins, and airplane screens provide, we are all seafarers now.