letters | letters
Nov.07.2011
She left me a letter on the nightstand; a small piece of fiction that I wish I could recite. It was wrapped in a yellowed envelope, limply sealed with her kiss. It stared me down from the corner of the nightstand, the mahogany resting just beneath its tiny frame. It wasn't sealed with wax,...
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Nov.05.2011
Dearest Bette*,
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
—Rainer Maria Rilke...
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Oct.17.2011
I was fortunate (and exceedingly pleased) many years ago to see an exhibit of Kafka's personal correspondence. I did soooo much desire to have Maxwell's little silver hammer to break through the glass cases and snatch some away. There were letters and post cards (Kafka took many vacations and was a...
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Sep.29.2011
For some reason I see this as a Benny Hill sketch, complete with racy music and a man being chased in fast time by irate authors. Or George Formby singing "When I'm cleaning windows".
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Booker Prize judge has...
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Sep.03.2011
It wasn't an addiction in the beginning. It was an idea.
I had just seen the mini series about John and Abigail Adams and had read some of the background material about their letters, those personal and intimate letters. That is how it began.
There was a little stationery in my cache of goods and...
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Jul.12.2011
This should have been my first post. But then I've never been known for doing things in the accepted order, so I guess it's appropriate that my thoughts about why I've started blogging isn't the first thing that I put up. Here goes...
I miss writing letters. I miss the excitement of going to...
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Jul.05.2011
If you have read VS Naipaul’s recent interview posted in The Guardian, you are aware and likely perplexed, annoyed, outraged or amused by his banal comments regarding women writers, their lack of mastery in the home and in the world of letters, and the sentimental “feminine tosh” they inevitably...
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Jun.20.2011
Queen Elizabeth II. in Finland, may 1976 In 1976 Queen Elizabeth II becomes the first head of State to send an electronic mail message. The History of Email [INFOGRAPHIC]by Jolie O'Dell
Email, you’ve come a long way, baby.
In its 40-year tenure as a form of communication, email has run its...
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Jun.15.2011
The letters that writers write to one another are at least as interesting than the books or stories they write. This is one reason among many for my interest in the epistolary as form. Between my friends and me, the epistolary thrives. Not Literature – but an involvement with it – an immersion in...
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Apr.07.2011
To Ottla
On a rare holiday abroad, Kafka sent a postcard in 1913 to his sister Ottla. In Riva on Lake Garda, he experienced “that sweetness […] in a relationship with a woman one loves” (reported in Diaries, 24 January 1915).
Riva also provided a setting for his story Der Jäger Gracchus (The...
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