25 June (1919): James Thurber to Robert and William Thurber
I have about as much interest in [soccer games] as a Russian Wolf Hound evinces in the V shaped motor of the Cadillac engine.
24 June (1845): Margaret Fuller to James Nathan
Now, dear friend, I have told you all the gossip. I wish I could do better, but I cannot. Indeed there are soul-realities. I feel a perfect stream of life beneath all this…
23 June (1919): T.S. Eliot to Ottoline Morrell
I feel completely exhausted and especially depressed by my awareness of having lost contact with Americans and their ways, and by the hopelessness of ever making them understand so many things.
20 June (1945): Dawn Powell to Maxwell Perkins
I caught the language again quickly and the familiar combination of open hearts and closed minds that represents so much of the country except New York, where we have closed hearts first, and minds so open that carrier pigeons can fly straight through without leaving a message…
The Uses of Art: A Dream of Seeing
The painting, in this moment, needs you, exactly you. Nothing less.
19 June (1843): Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford
It was a terrible struggle for me to see him…with the great gulf of these three years between the last time & this now, & such thoughts as would be present—but I was able to cry…
18 June (1804): Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Sara Coleridge
So terribly has fear got the upper hand in my habitual feelings, from my long destitution of hope and joy…
Toward a Poetics of Skateboarding
The gears of capitalism create spaces in which behavior is prescribed and easily accounted for. Skateboarding’s opposition is thus a compositional process, partially of the individual body, which is recomposed against the “intense scopic determinations of modernist space,” and partially of a deeper critique of urban life: “production not as the production of things but of play, desires and actions”…
17 June (1926): Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf
I’ll tell you that I disenjoyed myself extremely; would have exchanged all the champagne in the cellar for a glass of Rodmell water; would have sent everybody flying with a kick…
Life Sentences: Jibber-Jabber of the Sportscaster
Is a ballgame a series of events, disparate parts, or some kind of whole, something to catch or keep? Or is it an ever-changing probability, waiting to resolve into belonging to someone or other?