The Letters of Slyvia Plath, Volume 1, 1940 to 1956 (edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen Kukil, 1456 pages, 2017)

October 27, 1932

February 11, 1963

"Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way clairvoyance and mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them. In her poetry, in other words, she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans and Holymen.” - Ted Hughes

Daddy

BY SYLVIA PLATH

You do not do, you do not do   

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot   

For thirty years, poor and white,   

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   

Ghastly statue with one gray toe   

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   

Where it pours bean green over blue   

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.   

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.   

So I never could tell where you   

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.   

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.   

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,   

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot   

But no less a devil for that, no not   

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.   

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,   

And they stuck me together with glue.   

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.   

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,   

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you   

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Of late I am more and more drawn to the Reading of the deepest poetry I can find.  Maybe I had to become old to respond, I am not sure. Maybe I'm seeking maximum compression and am seeking access to Orphic depths, to wisdom born of deep feeling and pain, to those whose senses are widely open.  For sure I find this in Plath. (I hope no one minds me including her poem in this post, it is found on lots of websites).

The first Volume of The Collected Letters of Sylvia Plath, 1940 to 1956 is very obviously a work of great love, I'm very grateful to have been given a review copy of this magnificent book.  

Most of the letters, from a total of 120 correspondents, have never been seen before.  They include letters from her years at Smith College, her summer internship in New York City, letters telling her mother about the amazing poet whom she has fallen in love with, Ted Hughes.  There are fascinating letters about her tour of Europe.  The most moving and poignant of the letters are about the early years of her marriage to Ted Hughes. (She met Hughes at a party in Cambridge February 25, 1956, they married June 16, 1956.) When I read her gushing letters, mostly to her mother, about Hughes I could not avoid the impact of knowing what was to come.  Sixteen letters from Plath to Hughes from the period when circumstances, making a living, took them apart after their marriage are included.  We seem struggling to make a living while cherishing their art.

There is a splendid introduction, a preface by her daughter Frieda Hughes and a very well done index.  There are twenty Two previously unpublished photographs and several line drawings by Plath.

This collection is essential reading for all who love Plath.  The literary world should be grateful for the hard and brilliant work of the editors.

Coming out in late October, this book would make a great Christmas gift for any of her fans, from readers to scholars.  All libraries who have the budget should acquire this volume.

Mel u

"The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot (1922) - Four Podcasts

Links to podcasts are at bottom of this post 

"The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot (first published 1922) is for sure the most influential English language poem of the 20th century, at 432 lines it exemplified the mood of the post World War One literary world, a waste land in which a senseless war seemingly destroyed all values.  Along with Ulysses, also published in 1922, it is one of the foundational works of modernism.  World War One ended in November of 1918, maybe it took four years for this hideous event to produce great literature, I shudder to think how long it will take for such literature to arise from a World War Three.

For the last few days I have felt much stress over the safety of treasured Reading Life family members in the path of hurricane Irma, thankfully all now safe. Maybe this lead me to explore You Tube for profound poetry read by masters of the spoken word that would help me get through this period.  I read "The Waste Land" about fifty years ago and I was pleased to find four readings.  

Fiona Shaw, best known in popular culture for her portrayal of Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter movies, is a highly gifted multi- award winning actress.  Her reading of The Waste Land is the most infused with feeling of the works.  Using her great theatrical skills, she brilliantly brings to voice the aristocratic woman, Maria.  I felt a fall of a once great culture in her ennui.  This voice is not without a welcome tone of hauteur.  One of my very favorite lines in the poem were spoken by Maria, "I read, much of the evening, and go south in the winter".  I don't think "experts" have felt Maria is based upon an historical figure, for me she is part of a dynasty destroyed by the war, Reading because it can save her.  Part of the poem is devoted to a conversation between two London women, I am guessing they are meant to be cockneys, about how one should anticipate things will now be between her and her husband, just demobilized after four years fighting. There are dramatic entrances in the video for each of the five sections of the poem.  I listened to her reading twice, in between reading I read the poem also twice.  Some may say her reading is overly emotional or forces an interpretation, but I loved her reading.

Jeremey Irons and Eileen Atkins, both highly distinguished British actors also have a reading on Youtube.  The Waste Land makes use of multiple speakers, at least two female and maybe four male.  The two speaker approach they employ highlights this and helps a listener understand the stage like quality of the poem.

Alec Guinness brings his magnificent voice to full power.  Perhaps he is best in the voices of the mythical ancient speakers.

Of Course one must listen to the poet read his work for any hints his inflection or tone may give us.

The readings are about twenty four minutes.  In order to experience more fully the poem I read it after each recording, the reading time is maybe twelve minutes.

Later on I'm planning to make use of a scholarly edition to help me unravel all the references.  

Mel u

A Reading by Fiona Shaw

Read by Jeremy Irins and Eileen Atkins

"The City Grown Great" - A Short Story by N. K. Jemisin, two time Hugo Award Winner (2017)

Website of N.K. Jemisin

My thoughts and prayers go out to the people of South Florida, one of the most culturally rich places in the world.  I will continue posting as Irma threatens treasured members of the Reading Life family in the path of Irma.  My posts will be brief in this dark period but blogging is what I do and it shows my belief in the future.  This post is dedicated to Florida loving writers like Marjorie Rawlings, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Andersen and Elizabeth Bishop.

  

"This is the lesson: Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.".

Duh, right? Everyone who’s visited a real city feels that, one way or another. All those rural people who hate cities are afraid of something legit; cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like . . . like black holes, maybe. Yeah. (I go to museums sometimes. They’re cool inside, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is hot.) As more and more people come in and deposit their strangeness and leave and get replaced by others, the tear widens. Eventually it gets so deep that it forms a pocket, connected only by the thinnest thread of . . . something to . . . something. Whatever cities are made of.

But the separation starts a process, and in that pocket the many parts of the city begin to multiply and differentiate. Its sewers extend into places where there is no need for water. Its slums grow teeth; its art centers, claws. Ordinary things within it, traffic and construction and stuff like that, start to have a rhythm like a heartbeat, if you record their sounds and play them back fast. The city . . . quickens.

Not all cities make it this far. There used to be a couple of great cities on this continent, but that was before Columbus fucked the Indians’ shit up, so we had to start over. New Orleans failed, like Paulo said, but it survived, and that’s something. It can try again. Mexico City’s well on its way. But New York is the first American city to reach this point."

Long ago read a good bit of science fiction/fantasy literature.  Then I quit for forty years or so.  Recently I have been slowly getting back into this genre. Not really surprisingly, a lot has happened in my forty or so year reading hiatus. I knew that winning a Hugo Award means you are a very skilled imaginative artist.  N. K. Jemisin won back to back Hugo awards in 2016 and 2017 for best novel, unprecedented as far as I know.  Today I will post on a brand new short story by Jemisin that I greatly enjoyed.  I read it three times, it can be read online.

At first I thought the narrator of the story was a young man, a street artist, living from his wits in New York City.  He is African American and is hustling a gay man, Paulo, who has grandiose ideas about the coming death of the city but we discover the narrator is really an old man, now rich and living in Los Angeles.  There is a fifty year gap and we know nothing about how he got rich, maybe it was his art.  We follow him as he transverses the city, a city in decay.  We are not sure if the city is really a living organism or if this is the fantasy of the narrator, kicked out by his mother and abused by her boyfriend.  

"The City Born Great" is a wonderful work of art, as far as it might be from anything Frank O'Connor might have imagined when he taught us that the best short stories were often about marginalized persons, it exemplifies his thesis.  The narrator is tough, a survivor, seeing through the detritus of the culture of New York City.  I loved the ending, for sure you are left wanting more.

I hope to read N. K. Jemisin' two Hugo Award Winning novels soon.

Image by Laura Hanifin

N(ora). K. Jemisin is an author of speculative fiction short stories and novels who lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been multiply nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award; shortlisted for the Crawford, the Gemmell Morningstar, and the Tiptree; and she has won a Locus Award for Best First Novel as well as several Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Awards.  In 2016, she became the first black person to win the Best Novel Hugo for The Fifth Season.

Her short fiction has been published in pro markets such as Clarkesworld, Postscripts, Strange Horizons, and Baen’s Universe; semipro markets such as Ideomancer and Abyss & Apex; and podcast markets (mostly Escape Artists) and print anthologies.

Her first seven novels, a novella, and a short story collection are out now from Orbit Books. (Samples available in the Books section; see top navigation buttons.) Her novels are represented by Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency.

She is currently a member of the Altered Fluid writing group. In addition to writing, she has been a counseling psychologist and educator (specializing in career counseling and student development), a sometime hiker and biker, and a political/feminist/anti-racist blogger. She currently writes a New York Times book review column named Otherworldly, in which she covers the latest in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish (576 pages, 2017)

This post will be brief.  I am very worried over numerous u family members in the path of Irma.  I blog on because it is what I do.

As The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish opens an historian has been called, to a built in the 17th century house in London to inspect a collection of very old documents the house owners have discovered, with an eye to determining their origins and possible scholarly and historical value.  Helen Watts, nearing retirement age has been sent out by the history department of her university.  It turns out the documents are related to the household of a 17th London Rabbi, moved there from Amsterdam.  

Commonly compared now to Possession by A. S. Byatt 

there are two narrative threads, one focusing on a 17th century Jewish woman and one on the lives of Helen Watt and her doctoral student helper.  The treatment of the pettiness of academic infighting was just so spot on I loved it.  I was delighted to see Spinoza playing an important part in the story, and glad my reading him fifty years ago has now become a fashionable activity.  

The Weight of Ink is a delightful book. The characters are very well developed and I felt I knew them.  The descriptions of London during the plague were marvelous and I learned a good bit about Jewish life in the mid-1700s in this meticulously researched book.

author

Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story, as well as the novella I Was Here. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Ploughshares, and Tin House, and has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and elsewhere.

She has been a fiction fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, has received the John Gardner Fiction Award and the Koret Foundation's Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award, and was a writer-in-residence at Stanford University.

She lives outside Boston and teaches in Lesley University's MFA Program in Creative Writing.  - from Rachelkadish.com

Mel u

"Why Were They Throwing Bricks?" - A Short Story by Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart (2017)

Website of Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart

"MY GRANDMOTHER CAME BACK two years later. I was in middle school, and my pathetic puberty struck like a flash of lightning in the middle of the night — I suddenly saw all my surroundings for what they were: hideous and threatening. I had no friends, social life, interests, talents, breasts, straight teeth, likability, normal clothes, or charm, and every day I came home weighed down with dread. I started to fake illnesses so I could stay home with my 2-year-old brother. I followed him around everywhere, crawling when he crawled and walking on my knees when he learned to walk so that we were the same height.

When my grandmother moved in for the second time, she told us that this time she wasn’t leaving. She was going to apply for a green card and raise my brother until he was old enough to be on his own — 18, maybe 19.

“We’ll see about that,” my father said in Chinese, and then to me and my mother in English, “Let Grandma believe what she wants to believe. My gut says we’ll be back at the travel agency in March, or my name is not Daddy, problem solver of this house.” From "Why Were They Throwing Bricks" by Jenny Zhang

Jenny Zhang's debut collection of linked short stories centering on young women from Shanghai recently immigrated to America, Sour Heart, is being raved about all over the literary press.  I was delighted to find on her beautiful website a short story narrated by a young female immigrant from Shanghai living in New York City area with her parents and younger brother, over several years of her life, centering around her relationship with her grandmother.

I'm very much suggesting all lovers of the short story read "Why Were They Throwing Bricks" (you will find the story on her website linked above) so I will just keep this post mercifully brief. This story is included in her collection.

The narrator and her grandmother are very close, as a very young girl in Shanghai, she slept in her grandmother's bed.  The grandmother moves to America four separate times.  On one occasion she reluctantly returns to China to stay with her husband while he dies from cancer, this taking two years.  We feel the very closeness of the bond between the girl and her grandmother.  As is usual, the girl is perfectly adopted to her new country, speaking like a native while the older generations struggle.  Zhang provides us numerous brilliant telling small details showing how immigrants are treated.  The grandmother has a job in a factory on Long Island, making wontons for Chinese restaurants, she is paid by how many she completes.  She is able to make twice as many as average, begins to show other workers how to make more so the bosses say her work is defective and disallow half her completed wontons.  Welcome to America.  

This is a wonderful story.  There are two more stories linked on her webpage.  I will for sure read them soon and if the book blog Gods are willing I will read her full collection.

Jenny Zhang, 33, was born in Shanghai and raised in New York. She is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction. She has two published collections of poetry, Hags and Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, for which Zhang was compared to “a 21st-century Whitman, only female, Chinese, and profoundly scatological”. Sour Heart, a collection of short stories about New York’s Chinese American community largely told from the point of view of young girls, is the first book published by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s Lenny imprint at Random House in the US. - from The publisher.

Mrs. Osmond by John Banville (384 pages, forthcoming 2017)

"Henry James is the greatest novelist of all times" - John Banville 

Mrs. Osmond by John Banville is being marketed as a sequal to The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James.   It takes up the life of Isabel Archer where Portrait of a Lady Ends.

We follow Isabel on the continent and England as she attempts to use her inherited money to free her self from the grasp of her deceitful husband, who married her to control her fortune.  

Much of the intellectual enjoyment of this novel is seeing how skillfully Banville picks up the story, artistically a bold move, following Isabel as she slowly achieves independence.

I throughly enjoyed reading this book.   

JOHN BANVILLE, the author of sixteen novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin.

Mel u