May 2012
36 posts
1 tag
Well, Ms. West.
I facepalm on your behalf, and offer solidarity as someone who recently wrote “the time for words is done” in dead earnest. Clearly neither of us should write letters.
I’ve been obsessed with Letters of Note of late, and this one- Rebecca West! HG Wells!- was all kinds of thrilling #litsoap. You can read all of it on their website, and here are some excerpts. My word, the...
April 2012
13 posts
3 tags
songs I want to sing while writing an avengers...
With things that are rooted, and firm, and deep, Quiet to lie, and dreamless to sleep; With things that are chainless, and tameless, and proud, With the fire in the jagged thunder-cloud, With the wind in its sleep, with the wind in its waking, With the drops that go to the rainbow’s making, Wishing to be with the light leaves shaking, Or stones on some desolate highway breaking; Far up on...
“Dear Sir:
I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude,...”
–
My new favorite job application letter, from 1934. He ended up winning an Oscar for screenwriting!
(via Letters of Note)
We like words too.
(via good)
In which Maugham sums me up.
“I will call him Brown. He was then twenty-six. After leaving Cambridge he was called to the bar, but he had a little money, enough to live on in those inexpensive days, and finding the law distasteful he had made up his mind to devote himself to literature. For twenty years he amused himself with thinking he would write when he really got down to it, and for another twenty with what he...
goodbye to all that
I am reading it, as well as his poems and his myths, and this combines all three.
Lamia in Love.
Need of this man was her ignoble secret: Desperate for love, yet loathing to deserve it She wept pure tears of sorrow when his eyes Betrayed mistrust in her impeccable lies.
"The belly is the belle of his stories, the nose...
His stomach had been his ‘noblest inner organ’- now it was practically gone and devils were dangling from his nostrils. In the months preceding his death he had starved himself so thoroughly that he had destroyed the prodigious capacity his stomach had once been blessed with; for none had sucked in such a number of macaroni or eaten so many cherry pies as this thin little man (one remembers the...
March 2012
3 posts
2 tags
Hunger Games.
Hullo, yous.
I’m not doing the glad-to-be-back bit, cos I’m not sure I am back. I’ve relished offline existence this year, especially the luxury of composing on paper, with words that percolate ever so slowly and become ever so powerful in consequence. Dawdling has been the principle behind my literary life for the past few months, to a degree that would’ve felt farcical to the law student me...
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS: The Lyrical Essay →
lareviewofbooks:
Image © Paul Bausch onfocus.com
John D’Agata’s latest book, The Lifespan of a Fact, has caused quite a fuss. We’ll be running a couple of interesting pieces about the book and the kerfuffle this week: one tomorrow by Creative Nonfiction founder and editor Lee Gutkind, and one the next…
