 |
This must
have been shortly before Charlotte’s first visit to
Minneapolis... she stayed at a motel complex (now long gone)
near the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and a record store
called The Electric Fetus (which is still there)... she writes
about my sculpture, especially an early piece of a Sphinx & Poet
of which I have always been fond ( the woman who purchased
it allowed her cat to climb and shatter it to the ground)...
her post script has references to people I wrote about in
Minneapolis, whom I really don’t remember, and obviously
a major character from her books... one can assume this was
1982.
|
Thursday, June 24
Dear Mr. Guttke (and company),
I take typewriter in hand (not very easily, it being a rather large one) to
inform your that I like your work tremendously and am eager to see more of
it... also to meet the character who posed for the sphinx. The others are
more like a memory of my own art school days, except that the male models
then had to wear bathing trunks, which miffed us nasty little women’s
libbers (suffragettes, I suspect we’d have been called in those days!)
Except that I never could draw anything like that well, which is why I took
to a life of crime.
I am about to set wing (taking a feather
from your sphinx) for Great Britain and things are more
than a bit scrambled
this morning so will only say briefly that I think I’ll
plan to come early (as early as possible, that is) on Sunday
Sept. 12 and stay until Wednesday noontime or there about,
at which time I have to go to Denver. I think I will make
separate arrangements as to lodgings if your sense of hospitality
will not be offended (you
may feel free to regale me with tea and cakes while I pat
the cats ad lib) I am a poor sleeper with a back problem,
for one thing.
|
|
Also, I am a great deal older than you and
your friends (well, it will seem to you like a great deal...
to me it is but a moment in eternity, or so I keep telling
myself) and might inhibit your midnight revels as I donned
my nightcap and bedsocks and turned in with my cup of Ovaltine
at half-past nine (I mean I might inhibit them before they
got properly-or improperly started) I will speak to my
travel agent about the place next to the Electric Fetus
(no, don’t tell me... I’m not sure I want to
know).
And now I really must fly, as Peter said to Wendy,
so more anon.
Yr. Resp’f’l & obdt, svt.,
Charlotte
PS. Let’s have a Boston Tea Party! How come I wasn’t
invited to your friend’s wedding- and hard luck for
the pregnant lady- if she paid more attention to Sieglinde
Severson, it would never have happened- so who says my
books aren’t relevant to today’s problems?
|
|
