Rio, March 9th, 1964
Dear May:
I’m beginning to feel like that bell in the desert that rings & rings and no one hears it —
so it really DOESN’T make any sound.– I did send you a card and a letter, I think (& maybe more),
about how we got the grater, how I used the grater, how superb it is.–how
Lota, the grater–
spectator (only), was so pleased, etc, etc…But aparently
you didn’t get any of thse messages. I suppose there will come a point, if the Brazilian Post Office
goes on the way it’s going, at which I’ll give up.– At present I feel I shd keep on
trying —but what good that’s going to do I can’t
imagine, Lota’s nephew even tells me, gaily,
about a surrealist kind of poet he knows who works for the P O — has his
patio stuffed with letters, above which he sways dreamily in his hammock — A jazz expert — host to
Horace Silver
during carnival. — The nephew finds this all awfully funny and endearing and I feel like something out of
Grant Wood – or perhaps vaguely
FacistFascist. — Should
one expect letters to arrive?
Is it awfully bourgeois
e? Won’t even the proletariat, come Utopia, want to get their letters?
Or does that
veryneed cease? Well, tell me — (Now that I think of it
— that’s one thing I have never read about Russia
— have you? — the Post Office Dept.
Do they get letters? —
Do they bother to write them? — Most Brazilians
m I know gave up a hundred years ago and seem to feel now that any
letter–writing — [that is,
mthe reading–&–writing class feel ]
is a sure sign of
aneurosis…
I do hope you got the N B W — (I also wrote you this, on a card, two or three weeks ago —
but did you get it?) —
and but
I don’t know whether you got it or not. I heard you were awfully close. March 10th
on
tomorrow — well, it won’t be in the
papers here, so please do let me know. And now I think it’s money as well as a gold plaque,
so you’ll be richer
& richer
r and richer, May! — I do hope you get it!
Just then Mrs The
Xodorides called & said there was a 500–piece puzzle there
from you and could she please
borrow it when we are through with it? Thank you again, & I do think I should pay you for that,
even if you are rich, because I know they are expensive. She’s going to bring it around tomorrow,
along with her pair of Bic
ros de Lacre —
because her 86 year–old mother is sick in the hospital, and when sh’e with her mother
she worries all the
time (since it’s mid–summer here) whether the birds’ water–dish is dry or
not…So you see how Life is here now.
The Bic
ros de Lacre are as adorable as ever — so tiny, taking baths
constantly in this hear, and then retiring to
their filthy little nest to lay another egg —which never hatches —
Ye gods, May ! — D
do you have a copy of
"The Experience of Poetry in
thea Scientific Age"
to send me? I feel
it’s probably just the tonic I need these hot days. —
If the radio were working better I might even get you
a short–wave. — T
tell me when? Or have I missed it?
Mary Morse has one of those complicated international
long–wave, short–wave machines up in the country. —
w We
sometimes get Voice of America or the BBC, etc. —
w Would
you read it yourself? But I do admire you, honestly, for being able to
take the reading–business–I can’t, you
know, –and seems so stupid when it is a perfectly simple and honest way of earning money —
Thank you for the puzzle — and please don’t send the mathematical one…picture puzzles are fun — but mathematical braintwisters aren’t, really.
At least they aren’t for me. I just get tired of reading once in a while — or the lights
get weak and we
can’t play records — and puzzles are something visual and sociable and you can even talk at
the same time —
But these are all for social pleasure. —
I try mathematics and crystallography and crystal–growing
and other
such hobbies here once in a while – have a fine growth of alum in the cupboard now — can
write you the formula.
— BUT Lota, poor dear,
doesn’t even know the multiplication table, you know!
— the result
s of high–class convents —
I like the poem about the plane very much — just the way one feels — ALL THAT TIME I like — it is certainly bet ter than anything else on that paageyou enclosed — but — I hope you won‘ think I’m being impolite or perhaps even dumb — perhaps you wanted to say that? — I can’t BEAR the word "like" used instead of "as if." But perhaps you have decided in favor of that use of it? — In which case there’s nothing much I can say, because it is a possibility — But PLEASE look at Fowler, page 325 — I just hate it –
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