FPD!Crisis:
I sent the package off. The chief item in it was a 6-pound ham, I figured you could take it to a butcher and get it sliced up so everybody would have some to take home.
But I just noticed on your last invoice it says:”B.Marks.M.Cohen.” Props.
Are they Kosher?I could rush a tongue over.
Advise Please!
Helence Hanff
Sir:
(It feels witless to keep writing “gentlemen” when the same solitary soul is obviously taking care of everything for me.)
Savage Landor arrived safely and promptly fell open to a Roman dialogue where two cities had just been destroied by war and everybodywas being crucified and begging passing Roman soldiers to run them through and end the agnoy.It will be a relief to turn to Aesop and Rhodope where all you have to worry about is a famine. I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenst.The day Hazlitt came he opened to “I hate to read new books,” and I hollered “Comrade!” to whoever owner owned it before me.
i enclose a dollar which Brain says will cover the /8/ I owe you, you forgot to translate it.
Now then. Brain told me you are all rationed to 2 ounces of meat per family per week and one egg per person per month and I am simply appalled. He was a catalogue from a British firm here which files food from Denmark to his mother, so I am sending a small Christmas present to Mark& Co. i hope there will be enough to go round, he says Charling Cross road bookshops are “all quite small”.
I am sending it c/o you, FPD, whoever you are.
Helence Hanff
Dear Miss Hanff:
Your 4 dollors arrived safely and we have credited the 12 cents to your account.
we happen to have in stock Volumn2 of the works & Life of Walter Savage Landor which contains the Greek dialogues including the one mentioned in your letter, as well as the roman dialogues.It is an old edition published in 1876, not very handsome but well bound and a good and clean copy, and we are sending it off to you today with invoice enclosed.
I am sorry we made the mistake with the Latin Bible and will try to find a vulgate for you.Not fogetting Leigh hunt.
Yours FAITHFULLY,
FPD
What kind of a black protestant bible is this?
Kindly inform the Church of England they have loused up the most beautiful prose ever writen, whoever told them to tinker with the Vulgate Latin?they’ll burn for it, you mark my words.
It’s nothing to me, I’m Jewish myself.but I have a Catholic sister-in-law,a Methodist sister-in-law, a whole raft of Presbyterian cousins ( through my Great-Uncle Abraham who converted) and an aunt who’s a christian Science healer, and I like to think none of them would countenance this Anglican Layin Bible if they knew it existed.(As it happens, they don’t know Latin exsited.)
Well, the hell with it.I’ve been using my Latin teacher’s Vulgate, what I inmagine I will do is just not give it back till you find me one of my own.
i enclose $4 to cover $3.88 due you, but yourself a cup of coffee with the 12cents.there’s no post office near here and I am not runningall the way down to Rockefeller Plaza to stand in line for a $3.88 money order.If I wait till i get down there for something else,I won’t have $3.88 any more.I have implicit faith in the US airmail and his Majesty’s postal service.
Have you got a copy of Landor’s Imaginary conversations? I think there are several volums, the one I want is the one with the Greek conversations.If it contains a dialogue between Aesop and Rhodope, that will be the volume I want.
Helence Hanff
It is an overwhelming privilege to have my work in the National Gallery.It is one of my first places I came and experience art as a very young child.
Most of the show is laid out in the gallery’s west Building.There,Puryear’s impressive “Ladder for Booker T.Washington”(1996) reaches 36 feet toward the roof of the centrual rotunda.
This sulpture was made from a single ash sapling,split lengthwise in half, then rejoined with a series of rungs that get progressively smaller toward the top. The ladder plays with perspective,going from 2 feet wide at bottom to 2 inches wide at the top, seeming to recede into a greater distance than it acturally does.
The name for the piece came to Puryear only after he finished it. The way its two sides slowly merge together reminded him of Booker T.Washington and “the whole notion that his idea of progress for the race was along,slow progression.
John O’Rourke guides the new main shaft to the Pierce Mill water wheel while it is lowered into place tuesday morning.As part of onging restoration efforts,the mill is expected to grind wheat by 2010.
It is an unassuming place,.Patches of grass surrounded an oval of dry dirt.during the day, cars park on a sandy strip near thw swimming pool.At night, Stadium-style lights shine in the homes of west end neighbors nearby.
Residents refer to the field as the “dirt ball”,the “dust bowl,”"ugly”and :dangerous”.Everyone agrees that the field- bordered by Rock Creek Park and 25th ,M and N Street-needs help.The question is :Who should help it?
it certainly a gem of a location, but it’s worn down.
francis is a very hard field to use,It’s all torn up.It’s rocky and dangerous.
This always happens.People look at an athiletic field and they don’t have anu kids, and they say,oh,that would make it a nice park.’
The large point here is the change of West End neighborhood.As this becomes more and more of a residential neighborhood,Francis Field also ought to be change.We don’t have a problem with people using the field for recreation or sports.Our objection is it’s beingused be people who don’t live in the neighborhood.
we never saw it as shabby.We saw it as a place where all of us were comfortable in each other’s company.
The green house is like a prisoner on death ow awaiting execution, and we are battling for a reprieve.
I use it for peace of mind.you go there and you have something to look forward to.there ’s just little things for everybody there,i guess.there is nothing that I could think of that i would make a destination like that.
what they have done is fail to include the enviroment as akey factor in all social justice missions.i am asking that they parctice what they preach.
it is not the Cathedral’s mission to lay off people and not have the green space,there were some new programs that were tested in the past few years and out of someof these tests, it was determinded that there were some of the programs that we were good at.With the finite resouces and the Cathedral greenhouse really cost Cathedral money,it jut go to the point that it wasn’t ecconomically viable.
Anything that would be considered and talked about would take longer than a couple of weeks to accomplish.
However solitary a major writer is by vocation, he or she trends to find a closest friend in a contemporary literary artist.Perhaps rivals attract:shakespear aand Ben johnson,Byron and Shelly,Hawthorne and Melville,Hemingway and Scott Fizgerald,Eliot and Pound,Hart Crane and Allen Tate are just few pairings, to stay within Anglo-american tradition. Yet the tendency is everywhere: Goethe and Schille,Wordsworth and colerige,swift and Pope, Tolstory and Chkhov,Herry James and Edith wharton, and many more, too numberous to list. the locales waver: Hemingway and Fizgerald in Paris,Byron and shelly in Italy extile together, Eliot and Pound in London. There are giant expections: Cervantes,Milton,Victor Hugo,Emily dickson,Joyce and Bekette (through only after their early association).
Cities are the essential requistie for literary relationships, including those dominated by a father fighre, The London assemblage of the Sons of Ben Johnson: Carew,Lovelace,Herick,Suckling,Randoph and many more, or Dr.Samuel Johnson and his club of Boswell,Goldsmith,burke, among others, or Mallame and his disciples, including Valery, who was to surpass his master. Modernist London always calls up Bloomsbury, with Virginia Woolf as its Luminous figure, the ornament of a group that in its own idiosyncratic mode saw E.W.forster as its patriarch.
Even in the computer screen, proximity is essential for literary fellowship.but so far I have considered city as literary place only regard to writers.As subject, indeed as the given of literature, the city is a larger matter. The movement from garden to city as literary focus is powerful clear in the hebrew Bible,when Yahweh movs his abode from Mount Sinai to mount zion,and thus to solomen’sTemple.As the mountain of the Covenant,sinai stands at the origin, but surprisingly Ezekiel locates “Eden, the garden of God” as a plateau on zion, both cosmological mountain and paradise. When Yahweh takes upm residence in the Temple, his Eden is close by, yet nevertheless the transition from garden to city has been accomplished.this is the holy city, but to the literary imagination all the great cities are scared: Paris,London,dublin,Petersburg,Rome,and New york are also sanctified, whatever suffering and inequity transpire in them.
4.
in the United states the national capital,washington D.C, is scarcely a city of the mind, not only when contrasted to New York City, but also to boston,chicago,San Francisco.Paris,London,Rome are at once capitals and literary centers, but WashingtonD.C. has harbored few major American writers and has provided sbujects only for political novelists,like Henry Adams and gore Vidal. The great american Novel perpetually remains to be written,despite such earlier splendors as The Scarlet Letter,Moby-Dick,Huckleberry finn, and the Potrait of a lady, and a handfull of later masterpieces from As I Lay Dying and The sound and The Fury,The Sun also Rises and The Great Gatsby, on to Gravity’s Rainbow,Sabbath’Theater,Underworld, and Blood Meridian.I rather doubt that it will take Washington,D.C. as subject,or be composed by an inhabitant thereof.
The industrialization of the great cities in the nineteenth century gave us the novels of Victor Hugo,dickens,Zola which produced a realism totally phantasmagic, now probably no longer available to us. computer urbanism does not seem likely to stimulate imaginative literature. visual overdetermination overwhelms the inward eye and abandons us to narative or the formal splendors of poetry and drama.there is something haunting elegiac about fresh evocations of literary places, here and now in the early years of the twenty-first century.
(<Bloom’s Literature Places,London> )
In a literary place, by pragmatic definition, a city? Pastoral, like all other literary forms, was an urban invention. The Hebrew bible, reacted in Babylonian excile, has as its core in geness,Exodus,and Numbers, the Yahwist’s narrative composed at Solomon’s highly sophisticated court in Jerusalem. We can’t locate the inception of what became Iliad and Odyssey,but the greece thaey taught centreed at Athens and Tebes. Florence extiled Dante and Gacalanti, yet shared all further vernacular literary development with Rome and milan. If Montaigne tended to isolate himself from embattled Paris, he knew his readers remained there. Elizabenthan-Jacobean literatureis virtually all fixated upon London, and centres upon Shakespeare’s Globe theater.If American renassance emannates out of Concord of Emerson, thoreau, Hawthorne, it is equally at home in the New york city of Whitman, Melville, and the burning James family.through Faulkner kept, as much as he could , to Oxford, Mississippi, and Wallace Stevens to Hartford, if I had to nominate the ultimate classic of the United States in the twentieth centry, unhesitatingly I would choose the poetry of Hart Cane, Whitman’s legitimate heir as the bard of New York City.Kenneth burke, when never I saw him from 1975 on, would assure me again that Whitman’s” Crossing brooklin Ferry” and Hart Crane’s The Bridge were the two greatest icon poems.
Our best living novelist-Philip Roth ,Pynchon, Delillo-have become inseparable from the ethos of the New York city. Only the elusive Cormac Mccarthy, seer of Blood Meridian, keeps far away from the city-of-cities, which has displaced London and Paris as the world’s imaginative capital.
