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At 20-years-old, Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious wrote out a list extolling the finest qualities of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The note, scrawled in messy handwriting, seems so normal for a young person in love for the first time, making the couple's inevitable fate all the more heartbreaking. More »
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A rare correspondence from Virginia Woolf to her nephew Julian has surfaced, and in it, Woolf takes a critical eye to his poetry: "My dear Julian. I like the poem very much. It still wants CURRENCY I think. When did you write it?" The letter most likely dates back to 1929. [The Paris Review] More »
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You date a guy for two months; it's okay. When he abruptly cuts off contact, after a week you send him a 3-line email ending things. Ah, but he has to have the last word. And what last words. More »
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My last post of the year, titled Fuck You, 2010, elicited over one thousand comments, which can be read at the link. But I also received dozens of emails. More »
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Letters to Juliet is obviously awful. But what about the story that inspired it? More »
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A week ago, a French newspaper reported that President Nicolas Sarkozy had hand-delivered a letter from Roman Polanski asking for leniency to Obama. The White House has flatly denied this story. "It did not happen," said an official. [CBS] More »
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Last week, Pat Robertson told viewers on his Christian Broadcasting Network that the earthquake in Haiti was caused by a pact made with the devil. On Thursday, the devil himself reached out in order to clear something up. More »
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Since 1944, through 6 wars, Chicago's Barbara Spanier has been writing to any soldier who needs a friend. "I feel like they're my sons...I only have four girls and I feel like they were my sons." [UPI] More »
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8-year-old Meagan Bilodeau was on vacation with her family near Bermuda where she sealed a message in a bottle addressed to her future pen-pal. A few days later, the bottle washed ashore in Massachusetts, 15 miles from Meagan's home. [CNN] More »
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In the article "Touchy-Feely 'Mad Men'? My Mom's Love Letters Show a Softer '50s Male," this writer explored a cache of his mother's old love letters and learned that men of the 50s were not, in fact-2D. More »
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A cache of hundreds of Roald Dahl's letters have come to light - but from where? Says the author's biographer, "The guy who owns the letters is old and very keen to stay out of the limelight." Mystery! [Telegraph] More »
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Remember when Constance Billard puts on The Age of Innocence for its senior play? Is it mere coincidence that Edith Wharton's teenage correspondence should just have come to light after decades of secrecy? Okay, probably. More »
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Moral outrage in Chattanooga! A tipster sent us an exchange from her local paper that contains more disturbing crazy than an "I Saw Your Nanny" public diapering thread! Slut-shaming! Rage! Sin! "Rolls of fat galore!" More »
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Fifty-four love letters from Edith Piaf to French cycling champion Louis Gerardin are going up for auction. Writes the little sparrow, "You have pulled me up just in time... I prayed in church that if you came to me, I would never again touch another glass of alcohol." [Yahoo] More »
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Why is the internet so much better for breakups? More »
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John Updike, the prolific, Pulitzer-winning writer, has died at 76. The cause was lung cancer. More »
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Two years after Kurt Vonnegut's death, academic Loree Rackstraw is revealing the details of their four decade relationship in an "intimate biography." Says Rackstraw, "It was a friendship unlike any I've had with anyone." [Telegraph] More »
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It's easy to vilify Ted Hughes as the callous philanderer who broke Sylvia Plath's heart, had a suspiciously high number of suicidal wives, and went on write increasingly bombastic poetry. A somewhat different picture of Hughes, who died ten years ago, emerges from The Letters of Ted Hughes, which was just published. Papercuts runs the letter Hughes wrote to Plath's mother, Aurelia, after Sylvia's suicide, and its heartbreak has none of his poetry's remoteness. "Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her, and certainly no living American." Yes, "woman poet" and the dig at Americans, - he couldn't help it! - but still - you'll cry. It's always a revelation, too, to be reminded of what a loss letter-writing was for emotional expression! [NY Times] More »
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Poetry fans and voyeurs alike may want to check out Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, reviewed in The New Republic. Lowell was both prolific and bipolar, the scion of an old Boston family. Bishop came from money too, but her mother was institutionalized when she was young, and Bishop struggled with alcoholism as an adult. Lowell was in love with her, but Bishop was in love mostly with other women, and Lowell could never bring himself to propose. He later wrote, "asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had." [TNR] More »
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A pair of pen pals — Thelma Symonds, 85, and Chauncey Christofferson, 96, wed Tuesday at the Kimberley Hall nursing home in Windsor, Connecticut. The pair began their courtship "the old-fashioned way" by writing one another for seven months before ever meeting in person. Their correspondence began when Christofferson responded to an article that Symonds wrote in a military magazine about her late husband. After the epistolary courtship, Christofferson decided to meet Symonds in person and arrived at her room at Kimberley Hall unannounced. Regarding wedding nerves, Symonds said, "I just feel plain excited." [UPI] More »
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