22 October (1851): Charles Dickens to Thomas Robert Eeles
List of Imitation Book-Backs: Five Minutes in China. 3 vols., Forty Winks at the Pyramids. 2 vols., Abernethy on the Constitution. 2 vols., Mr. Green’s Overland Mail. 2 vols…
Self-Consuming Cinema: On "Last Year at Marienbad"
But rather than a work that is resistant to interpretation, “Marienbad” actively invites it: “Marienbad” leads the viewer through a number of interpretive stages, each one as unsatisfying as the last…
21 October (1908): Ezra Pound to William Carlos Williams
Then again you must remember I don’t try to write for the public. I can’t. I haven’t that kind of intelligence. ‘To such as love this same beauty that I love somewhat after mine own fashion.’
18 October (1916): Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer
Today I went around all morning very pensive and in a haze, continually worrying about the burned-out van in which it is highly probably that your Monday letter with your description of the outing perished in the flames…
Long MeadowFrom the Print
I love retrieving stray balls Kierkegaard / longed to be useful he didn’t feel all that useful in his room thinking / about Christianity and would walk the streets wanting to open doors / [voices] and I feel splendid returning balls to groups of friends or / bounded fields
17 October (1976): John Cheever to Tanya Litvinov
Since you are an old, old friend you might like to know that the horse, to whom I feed apples, is well and comely and that Flora, our oldest Labrador, died on Wednesday night. She had hoped to outlive me.
16 October (1879): George Eliot to John Cross
Though dost not know anything of verbs in Hiphil and Hophal or the history of metaphysics or the position of Kepler in science, but thou knowest best things of another sort, such as belong to the manly heart—secrets of lovingness and rectitude.
15 October (1958): Ernest Hemingway to Archibald MacLeish
You dope. Did you think I had forgotten Rue de Bac, juan les Pins, Zaragoza, Chartres, that place of Peter Hamiltons you lived, our bicycles, Ada and the Six Jours [bike races], rue Froidevaux, and a million things Gstaad,—don’t ask me to name them all…
11 October (1917): Katherine Mansfield to Dorothy Brett
When you paint apples do you feel that your breasts and your knees become apples, too? Or do you think this is the greatest nonsense. I don’t. I am sure it is not.
10 October (1869): Lewis Carroll to Georgina Watson
I had just time to look into the kitchen, and saw your birthday feast getting ready, a nice dish of crusts, bones, pills, cotton-bobbins, and rhubarb and magnesia…