If you’ve never had a reason to rifle through the online archive of Hanna Arendt’s papers at the Library of Congress – rifle is just the term for the activity – let me recommend that you spend an afternoon at it. There is endless treasure, from her syllabi (“This course will be beset by difficulties [...]
“We inhabit a democracy of desire, which, in both its almost total unavailability for fulfillment, and the often remorseless means by which we would attain it, is as psychologically oppressive as a totalitarian regime:” Maybe Jim Cullen is right and maybe he’s not, but is he really getting all this just from watching Brüno? When [...]
Our series on handwriting resumes, this time with a love letter – sort of – from icon James Brown, written on Delta Airlines Stationary and auctioned at Christie’s last year. Where was he flying to? Where was he flying from? It’s all shrouded in mystery. I don’t have a date either. From what I can [...]
More handwriting for our ongoing collection: a 1940 letter from folk singer Woody Guthrie to musicologist Alan Lomax. The Library of Congress has put it online for us. In the letter, Guthrie mentions that DuPont has commissioned a ballad from him about Wild Bill Hickok for their historical program Cavalcade of America, a show that [...]
A letter from the mathematician Norbert Wiener to his sister Bertha, dated July 27, 1925, in which Wiener recounts running into Albert Einstein on a train leaving Frankfurt. Can’t you just picture it? Twenty years after Einstein proposed his theory of special relativity, twenty years before Wiener pioneered cybernetics, two mathematicians sitting in a third [...]
So this is my 100th post, folks. Huzzah! Writing duckanddrakes has been a rewarding pastime over the last year. During the next few weeks, I’ll be giving some thought to this blog and its future. For the time being, here’s an index to a few posts that exhibit what I’ve been trying to do here. [...]
More handwriting: a gracious note from novelist Agatha Christie to filmmaker Billy Wilder. Christie praises Wilder’s successful adaptation of Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, probably the strongest film version of her work that we’ll ever see. You can buy the letter at this bookstore, if you’re in Baltimore and can spare $6,000.
More handwriting, this time from the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian. A 1930 letter from American realist painter George Luks to Samuel Ross Ballin, the “dean” of New York bakruptcy lawyers. At the time, Ballin was helping to assemble property to create Rockefeller Center, one of the largest privately-financed building projects of the [...]
I’ve been neglecting my series on handwriting – along with this whole blog, really – as I’ve just been finishing my Ph.D. dissertation. It’s done now, so here’s something special: It’s a set of notes about vacuum-tube radio technology by Lee De Forest, whose earlier invention of the audion made it possible to build radio [...]
The earliest known existing letter written by Oscar Wilde, dated September 15, 1868, thanking his mother for a new hamper. James McWilliams of Southwest Texas State University found it by accident at a dinner party, stuck inside a copy of Historiae Romanae that he happened upon at a friend’s home in Houston. Apologies for the [...]
A letter dated August 9, 1759 from Hannah Waterman King to Benedict Arnold, the only one of her sons to survive the yellow fever. At the time of this letter, Arnold was fighting in the French and Indian War. Before the year was out, Hannah would pass away. Still a teenager, Arnold took over caring [...]
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is hosting an exhibition entitled “On the Road with the Beats.” To live up to the billing, the show includes one of the most valuable literary manuscripts in the United States: the famous 120-foot scroll draft of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a delicate [...]
When I started this blog a few months back, I decided to stick to short essays on language, writing, rhetoric and arguments, in the spirit of George Orwell’s old hypothesis that there is a meaningful correlation between writing, thinking and politics. However, I also figured that I’d need some kind of imagery to break up [...]
The DaD series on handwriting continues with a big brassy love letter from anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman to her longtime lover, the physician Ben Reitman, the “Hobo Doctor” known for treating venereal diseases among the poor in the early decades of the 20th century. Written August 15, 1909, the letter is archived in the Reitman [...]
Another illustrated letter from the Smithsonian’s archive of same for the continuing DaD series on handwriting. This time, a note from sculptor Alexander Calder to Agnes Rindge Claflin, director of the Vassar Art Gallery, June 6, 1939. That year, Claflin was completing the catalog for art collection at Vassar and hiring German refugees, while Calder [...]
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