the very notion of jackson heights

“Flitting along the beds, Miss Hancock reached a patch, as yet practically unravished, before which a couple of dames were discussing a forthcoming divorce – an obstinate wife, it seemed, that refused to reside in Jackson Heights. . . . ‘my dear, she swears nothing on God’s earth will make her mount there; she quite hates the neighbourhood; the very notion of Jackson Heights makes her dizzy!’ ”

(Ronald Firbank, The New Rythum and Other Pieces, p. 100.)

firbank’s juvenilia

From a fragment of a short story written at the age of about twelve:

Mrs Keston put the dog in its basket, tidid her hair before a mirror, langwidley sat down and calved a chicken.

[A girl at a boarding school told to eat up the underdone beef she had left on her plate replies:]
‘I have quite enough blood in my family without going to a bullock for more.’ ”

(Ronald Firbank, The New Rythum and Other Pieces, p. 115.)

noted

  • Louis Adamic’s article on the founding of Black Mountain College can be found in the April 1936 issue of Harper’s (w/ rebuttal by Bernard DeVoto in the same issue).
  • Portraits of students and faculty at Black Mountain College by Hazel Larsen Archer (at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center).
  • At the California Literary Review, an interview with Paul Collins on, among other things, the past, present, and future relationship of publishing and the marketplace.
  • Marjorie Welish on “In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976” at the New York Observer.