4 June (1858): William Makepeace Thackeray to Adelaide Anne Procter
We can’t help what we write though; an unknown Something works within us and makes us write so & so…
3 June (1940): John Fante to Pascal Covici
I’ll write a book that will make any of Steinbeck appear like small peanuts. You keep this letter. You wait. You reread this letter in two years. You’ll see…
Micro-review: On Kate Durbin’s “E! Entertainment”
Enter into the arena Kate Durbin, whose latest book, E! Entertainment has just been published by Wonder Books, demonstrating seven years of atomically precise attention paid to the linguistic ecosystem of reality television. Deliciously designed in the prettiest of pink pages by Joseph Kaplan, E! Entertainment arranges, annotates, reports, and represents our favorite national pastime…
Life Sentences: The Pleasure of teh Typo
This seems more likely, but wouldn’t this acknowledgement of superiority bring a kind of joy? If you are using your education to enforce class boundaries though grammar, then appreciate the chance to do so! That Ivy League school tuaght you to catch errors like these!
2 June (1924): F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins
As a matter of fact the American peasant as “real” material scarcely exists…
What We’re Watching: Eileen Myles on Spoilage and Ruination of Other Kinds
As part of PEN’s World Voices Festival, poet Eileen Myles participated in the Obsession series at the Standard, East Village. Myles’ topic was “Spoilage”…
Ask Katharine: First-Date Nerves, Unemployment
Wear a wedding dress. That says, I care so little about this date that I’m willing to destroy any possibility of a future for us. Deranged behavior is the new effortlessness—are you following me?
30 May (1870): Louisa May Alcott to the Alcott Family
We are now reveling in big strawberries, green peas, early potatoes, and other nice things, on which we shall grow fat as pigs.
WashingtonFrom the Print
… Erasing, blurring
and blowing. We’re marking
forever. Get this.
I am recording you.
I will keep you in my gut.
the cars are stalled.
Zounds the trucks. Litter and
it will hurt.
29 May (1967): Allen Ginsberg to the General Public
Almost all official persons concerned seem subject to nineteenth century fainting spells, the official kind that our Eastern grandmothers complained of…