Jay to Bee - Janet Frame

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       Excuse my stupidity today.

       Love from moron J

      a Illustration based on a parlour game that involved several participants drawing on a folded sheet of paper.

      b James K. Baxter

      c Brand name of an American glue

      d George Wilder was not a murderer; he was a burglar.

      e lines by Emily Dickinson

      FEBRUARY

      26. Yaddo February

      Unrestrained letter.

       O Western Bee

       So Far Far Away

       ‘Gilt-Surcingled, Burnished’

       —I’m Faint

       with Incense of Absence!

       Would I Were

       in thy Home Clover

       Furnished

       with thy Comb Honey—

       Yours Blue Jay

       (who’s taken Over

       the mad Correspondence

       of the Late Fly.)

       (Bee,

       Ignore that Rhyme.

       Fly is alive and Well

       Buzzing to Tell

       of Time

       and Eternity

       —Yours, Emily

       As for Blue Jay—A Crow

       in a Blue Overcoat

       a Bone in Her Throat

       a Cry like a Hornblast

       the Vanity to Know

       that a million Blue Jays

       are the Blue Light Cast

       by Falling Snow.

       Believe me,

       Bee,

       Yours from the Grave,

       Emily.)

       Meals at Yaddo

       – Director Granville Hicks—

       Chocolate Cream Puff—

       the Overthrow

       of the Politics

       of Enough—

       Anarchic Appetite—

       Diet Dethroned—

       Seize the Bright

       Gobful Life-Prop

       – Stomach Moaned—

       Miserable—Stop!

       (Bee,

       (by the Way)

       how’s the Hive today?

       Does Paul still paint

       the Creation of the Butterfly?

       Ned Blossom (bean-pretence)

       in the Pine Tree?)

      J.

      How’s that for lack of (paper) restraint?

      Applications invited for PeeDauntal Scholarships.

      Canine, feline, leonine, bovine, humine applicants welcome.

      27. Yaddo February 5

      The Coordinator,

      Non- and Sub-Think Feelies,

      Santa Barbara

      Dear Coordinator,

      How pleased—ah more than pleased I was to receive your recent letter which was delayed in the Midwest while it was scrutinised by C.I.A. I am eager to join your group and have only a few business ends to tie up (space for lewd drawing) before I fly westward (??) It is now February 5th. I prepare to leave the Super-Think-Tank, just in time forsooth because pshaw! pshaw! the edirot of Commentary has suggested we have reading sessions in the evening . . . of our works.

      To be fair and charitable, I’ll say that last evening was enjoyable (how could it not have been as I had received your prospectus?), with Kenneth Burke reading, soberly, his talk on Creativity which he is giving at the end of this month in Yakema (sp?) Washington State (he returns to Yaddo then to spend a few more months here); a brilliant talk full of brilliant ideas and passion. Unfortunately his audience now consisted of two critics who at question-time needled him rather and did not have the sense to see he was tired—he’d been working hard all day—; after he left, the discussion continued and I did find it interesting—I like good high-class-high-think talk (though I can’t participate myself) especially if what is said reveals the speaker as a thinkie on the surface, by force of circumstance, habit, inclination, but an out-and-out feelie underneath. Besides, I always find it a pleasure to listen to articulate people because I am the most unverbal person.

      That is why, sir, I hasten to join the Feelies, and sub-thinkies. Thinking for me is something completely internal; sometimes I wonder how I ever became a (socalled) writer; again that is why I, an inveterate subthinkie, cannot wait to be welcomed into your exclusive society; and how happy I am to realise that butterflies and cats and mountain lions and even plants and trees are quite naturally a part of that society. Watch Ned and see all the internal thinking that’s going on and not a messy word spoken.

      When I was a child I once had a dress with that pattern; blue;

      I was quite horrified at the idea of the destruction of the paintings. You could have photographed yourself and called the result an avant garde work of art: fire and knife-works instead of earth-works. I thought of Dorian Gray which I read when I was very young as my father had just happened to have bought all O.W.’s books at an auction where he really went to buy a diningroom clock which chimed the quarter-hours.

      Alas, sir, the Peedauntal model as illustratedaa has no sex appeal whatsoever, unless of course the buckles fastening it to the leg are diamond or snakeskin. I had in mind something less like an attached bagpipe—though this of course could

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