From a 10/18/65 letter from Norman Mailer to William F. Buck­ley, in last week’s New Yorker:

What the hell does emu­nc­tory* mean? You have here gone to far, sir, even for Buck­ley. I even heard one Roman turn over dis­tinctly in his grave as the word went by and whis­per to his neigh­bor, ‘Does that ‘emunctory’ come from the Greek?’

And a few more gems from the stack…

…from a 1/87 letter to Richard Stratton:

There is one dif­fer­ence between Rus­sians and Amer­i­cans that is cru­cial: in Amer­ica we keep run­ning ahead of our guilt. We stay ahead of it by tech­nique, by every trendy step. We’re ana­lyzed, tran­quil­ized, and roboti­cized, nov­elle cuisine-​ized, yup­pi­fied, we stay ahead of our anx­i­ety and our great guilt and are able to avoid the issue. The Rus­sians aren’t.

…from a 4/11/68 letter to Marvin Gorson:

I may have to come out for legal­iza­tion of mar­i­juana. I may have to come out for legal­iza­tion if the police keep harass­ing people and arrest­ing them unnec­es­sar­ily, but with all that I prefer it to be ille­gal for it gives a touch of spice to the smok­ing and saves us from the cor­po­ra­tion being able to put vit­a­mins in the hydro­pon­i­cally grown and hybrid hyped mar­i­juana with fil­ters. Not to men­tion all the psy­che­delic com­mer­cials we’ll be spared.

…from a 10/23/61 letter to Eiichi Yamanishi:

In Amer­ica it is not that sur­plus value is extorted from us so much as that we are spir­i­tu­ally exploited and denied the oppor­tu­nity to find our true growth. This is no doubt the high­est stage of capitalism.

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* For what­ever it’s worth, the name of this web­site was pinched from Beckett.