Word pictures

Sunday, April 20, 2008

“Mr. F. expatiated on the traditions of Mr. F.; on the quality of Mr. F.’s eggs; on the celerity of Mr. F.’s service; on the splendor of Mr. F.’s taste—on the privilege that was ours of living in Mr. F.’s hotel.”
--Dalton Trumbo, “Letter #16 to William Hunt, the Franklin Hotel, Rochester, Minnesota-Los Angeles, California, Dec. 9, 1958.”

Extreme writing from a vintage cartoonist, a Hollywood screenwriter, and the incomparable Borges.

Brave New Worlds

Sunday, April 13, 2008

“America to me should be shouting all the time — a bunch of shouting voices. Most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please! Not just one, droning, glamorous, reasonable voice.”
- George Saunders, “My Flamboyant Grandson”

A stranger in the New World; a strange creature in another world; and our world in the very near future — in a 1940s memoir and two fantasy tales.

The lives of women in fiction and fact

Sunday, April 06, 2008

“Begin, then, with the ice cream dishes, carried from the dining room into the narrow kitchen on a Sunday night…the clearing of the ice cream dishes was hers alone.”
- Alice McDermott, “Enough”
Two live recalled, one sensuous, one sensational, in a fiction by Alice McDermott and a memoir by Jane Fonda.