Letters to Guy Davenport | Roy R. Behrens

Blog post from Paris Review (2016)

We were recently delighted to learn that my twenty-plus years of  letters to American scholar, essayist and fiction writer Guy Davenport have been added to the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. They are part of Davenport's papers, acquired in 2005. They will soon be supplemented by my own gift of 231 letters from Guy Davenport to me. A post on the Ransom Center's blog featured one of my letters (with, as I often did back then, an illustrated envelope). It was also featured in a post on the blog of the Paris Review.

Blog post Harry Ransom Center (2016)

Miami Art Deco Postage | Gina Hamer

Gina Hamer © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Gina Hamer (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

•••

Peter De Vries—

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

 

Gina Hamer © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Bailey Higgins

Block of stamps © Bailey Higgins 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Bailey Higgins (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp (one of several variations) from which the final block was made.

•••

Ralph C. Wood, The Comedy of Redemption (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988, p. 230—

[American comic novelist] Peter De Vries is so funny a writer that it may seem inappropriate to take him seriously. His puns are unabashed. Like the cleaning lady, he says, we all come to dust. The mere thought of cremation turns one of his characters ashen. De Vries's aphorisms are no less outrageous. The American home, we are told, is an invasion of privacy. Never put off until tomorrow, we are advised, what you can put off indefinitely. What is an arsonist, we are asked, but someone who has failed to set the world on fire? De Vries's vignettes are even more discerningly surreal. A chiropractor attending a patient throws out his own back. A husband who demands that his wife explain why she bought a mink coat is told that she was cold. Another wife sues her husband's mistress for alienation of his affections, and asks for $65 in damages.

Art Deco Stamp © Bailey Higgins 2014

 

Miami Art Deco Postage | Kat Bartlett

Miami Art Deco Stamp © Kat Bartlett

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Kat Bartlett (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

•••

Alec Guinness, My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997), p. 46—

During one Christmas holiday in London I was taken to a fancy dress ball at the Town Hall in Kensington and I went as a candle and candlestick. I was sixteen. I fashioned a white tubular arrangement out of cardboard to go on my head, and from crepe paper a yellow and blue candle flame; also a wide white cardboard collar. I won the first prize, which was a large, brown, fiber suitcase. But it was a humiliating experience as so many people flicked their cigarettes into my collar and then said, "Sorry, thought you were an ashtray."

Miami Art Deco Stamp © Kat Bartlett

Miami Art Deco Postage | Andrew Girod

Andrew Girod © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Andrew Girod (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

•••
 
Dard Hunter, American Arts and Crafts-era designer and papermaker, My Life with Paper: An Autobiography. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958—

A newspaper composing stick held about two inches of type—fifteen or sixteen lines. My father would always refer to the length of an editorial or any set matter as so many “sticks.” At noonday lunch I have often heard my mother ask about articles that were to appear in the paper that evening. For instance, my mother would say: “Did they have a large funeral for old Joe Basler?” and my father would answer: “One of the largest this year, about eight and a half sticks” (p. 10).

•••

[On a visit to Hammersmith, England, in 1912] I was only a few blocks from [Kelmscott Manor] where the famous modern edition of Chaucer had been printed, but the irregular streets had misled me. Upon inquiring the way to the old workshop of William Morris, I was surprised to be told by the young real estate agent that he did not know where William Morris had lived. He had never heard of Morris, and asked me if he had previously been the proprietor of a low rooming house for mendicants (p. 56).

Andrew Girod © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Shane Rumpza

Shane Rumpza © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Shane Rumpza (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp (one of several variations) from which the final block was made.

•••

William L. Shirer, 20th Century Journey : A Memoir of a Life and the Times (Vol 1). Boston: Little Brown, 1976, p. 193—

We stage-struck youngsters (sometimes I would work as an extra stagehand, moving scenery and props between acts [at Green's Opera House in Cedar Rapids IA], when a great star I wanted to see at close hand came to town) grew up in Cedar Rapids on a strange legend about Sarah Bernhardt. It was that she had been born Sarah King in the village of Rochester [IA], twenty-five miles down the Cedar River from us, that her mother had died when she was five, that she had run away soon afterward, entered a French convent at St Paul [MN], and, having learned the new language, set off to Paris, where she began her fabulous career in the theater. The legend grew when in 1905 it was reported that a veiled but elegantly dressed woman had stopped off briefly at Rochester to lay a bouquet of roses on the grave of the elder Mrs. King. When reporters noted that Sarah Bernhardt had played an engagement at nearby Iowa City the previous evening, they put two and two together, as reporters sometimes are tempted to do, and concluded that it was the great Parisian actress who had made the mysterious visit to the grave of one who must have been her mother. Ergo! The great Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous French actress of our time, was an Iowa girl!

•••

William L. Shirer, ibid, p. 18—

[The American novelist] Sinclair Lewis had worked as a telegraph editor and editorial writer on the [Waterloo IA] Daily Courier in 1908, the year after he graduated from Yale. He was fired after ten weeks, the editor informing him, Lewis told me once, "Young man, you'll never make it as a newspaperman. You can't write."

Shane Rumpza © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Cassandra Beadle

Cassandra Beadle © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Cassandra Beadle (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

•••

William James, The Principles of Psychology—

In the meaningless French words “pas de lieu Rhone que nous,” who can recognize immediately the English “paddle your own canoe”?

 H.G. Wells, as quoted by Simon Nowell-Smith, compiler, The Legend of the Master (London, Constable, 1947), p. 149—

•••

I once saw [Henry] James quarreling with his brother William James, the psychologist. He had lost his calm; he was terribly unnerved, He appealed to me, to me of all people, to adjudicate on what was and what was not permissible behavior in England…I had come to Rye with a car to fetch William James and his daughter to my home at Sandgate. William had none of Henry’s passionate regard for the polish upon the surfaces of life and he was immensely excited by the fact that in the little Rye inn, which had its garden just over the high brick wall of the garden of Lamb House [Henry’s residence], G.K. Chesterton was staying. William James had corresponded with our vast contemporary and he sorely wanted to see him. So with a scandalous directness he had put the gardener’s ladder against that ripe red wall and clambered up and peeped over! Henry had caught him at it.

Cassandra Beadle © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Kaisee Wiesmueller

Kaisee Wiesmueller © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Kaisee Wiesmueller (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp (one of several variations) from which the final block was made.

 •••

Audrey Flack, Art & Soul: Notes on Creating (New York: Penguin Arkana Books, 1991), p. 118—

When I was a student at Yale, [American painter] Stuart Davis came as a visiting artist. He walked into my studio and looked for a long time at my paintings and then began to speak. As he spoke, his cigarette never left his lips. It wobbled up and down at the corner of his mouth. I watched as the ash got longer and longer and finally flopped onto his shirt. As the cigarette burned down and got shorter and shorter, I realized that I hadn't heard a word he'd said. I was afraid that the cigarette would burn his lips, which had already turned brown from years of tobacco—life process interfering with art.

Kaisee Wiesmueller © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Evan Seuren

Miami Art Deco stamps © Evan Seuren (2013)

Above Block of hypothetical postage stamps by graphic design student Evan Seuren (2013), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp (one of two variations) from which the final block was made.

••

Richard Critchfield, Those Days: An American Album. New York: Dell, 1986, pp. 375-376—

The dining table [in the family's house] was round and solid oak, an extension table  Jim bought when he was in medical school. The extra leaves hadn't come with it, so Jim sawed boards to fit, which we used when we needed to expand it for company. This gave the table considerable personality—you couldn't lean on the middle leaves with your elbows, or the other end came up like a teeter-totter and you got your dinner in your lap. The table was always in use. Here we ate on Sundays and holidays, brooded over jigsaw puzzles and chess sets, Monopoly games, Old Maid and ouija boards, built model airplanes, spread out magazines and newspapers, colored pictures with crayons, modeled with clay, wrote to Aunt Mary and Uncle Burke, puzzled over algebra problems, set sacks of groceries, piled up books or just sat and drank coffee and talked. At the height of the Depression there was a spell when everybody who was without work used to come over and spend hours sitting around our dining room table, decorating paper plates. Billy fringed a plate with tiny red diamonds he painstakingly cut  from an old pack of cards; he put the Queen of Diamonds in the center. Jimmy cut out characters from "Boots and Her Buddies" and "Thimble Theater" in the funny papers and painted on "Pappy," his nickname for Pat, in gold letters. A friend of Betty's named Elaine dropped in out of the blue and did an exotic ram's-head design. After she'd gone, Billy said, "Elaine always looks like she's been up all night." Betty's comeback: "Probably has."
 

Miami Art Deco stamp © Evan Seuren (2013)

In one corner of the dining room, by the hot-air register, was a big old Morris chair, where Betty, when she still worked at the bakery, would sit and fall asleep, she was so tired. Billy used to say, "Betty's spent half her waking life in a pink chenille robe." The stairwell to the attic was always loaded with things left there by somebody intending to take them up later: books, clothes, tennis rackets, skates, Tinker Toys, little trucks that always seemed to have a wheel missing. Like the road to hell, the stairs were paved with good intentions. 

Mail Art | Collage

Roy R. Behrens © Mail Art Collage (1980)

Back in the pre-computer days in the 1970s and 80s, it was common to complete a letter by making a collage on the envelope, using rubber stamps, labels, transfer type, hand-colored image fragments, or whatever. We mailed the best ones to ourselves, in the hope that the post office workers would contribute to it through multiple cancellations.