Imagined Conversations (4.28.14)
A: It’s just that yesterday she had a small crisis. She is recovering from an operation. She doesn’t feel well.
B: Unforgivable behavior… I just assumed it would be all roses. She signed a letter of resignation?
KarstFrom the Print
After the trucks depart, Clint faxes me: How long have you been peeking in our windows? I heard you weeping in the landscaping. You woke her up…
28 April (1816): Lord Byron to Anne Isabella Milbanke
And recollect, that, though it may be an advantage to you to have lost a husband, it is sorrow to her to have the waters now, or the earth hereafter, between her and her brother…
Debate: Are We Producing Too Much Shakespeare?
Are we producing too much Shakespeare? Two Reader editors take sides.
25 April (1934): Arna Bontemps to Langston Hughes
I have now just my transportation in sight—the price of this Ford is killing me—but I read in a paper that you and I are going to write for the movies, and if that is the case, I’ll soon be jingling money…
24 April (1925): Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt
You come straight from the center of your existence to be close to me, and you have become a force that will influence my life forever…
23 April (1961): Italo Calvino to Mario Socrate
I’d be ready to declare myself a follower of the cosmic literary movement for a period of six months, maybe even a year, accepting its directives in a disciplined way (that is to say not only drawing them up but also carrying them out). Not for any longer than that; literary tendencies only count if they are of short duration…
The Lost Art of Memorizing Poetry
Why is poetry these days so hard to remember?
22 April (1962): Romain Gary to James Jones
The Thin Red Line, the line between man and beast, so easily crossed, is a realistic fable, symbolic without symbols, mythological and yet completely factual, a sort of Moby Dick without the white whale, deeply philosophical without any philosophizing whatsoever…
21 April (1919): Robert Frost to Marguerite Ogden Bigelow Wilkinson
I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none. When I saw more than one possible way of saying a thing I knew I was fumbling and turned from writing…