Why Sylvia Plath Still Haunts Us - James Parker. Her name, at this point, is almost onomatopoeic: the elegantly coiled, haute-American Sylvia, poised and serpentine, and then the Germanic exhalation of Plath, its fatal flatness like some ruptured surface resealing itself. Her whole history is in there somehow: the shining prizewinner with a death obsession, the supercharged, comical/terrible talent whose memory is the lid of a sarcophagus.
“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.” That’s the Plath-world, freakishly bleak, exerting its tractor-beam fascination on American culture. Fifty years after she killed herself, we find her vital, nasty, invincible, red-and-white poetry sitting in a region of cultural near-exhaustion. Her short life has been trampled and retrampled under the biographer’s hoof, her opus viewed and skewed through every conceivable lens of interpretation. Out of these elements, endless constructions and conjurations. Not just yet, we can’t. When Diary-Keeping Gets in the Way of Living. "How could I have believed that if I tried hard enough, I could remember everything? " Sarah Manguso is the author of an 800,000-word diary that she’s been writing for more than 25 years.
She’s also the author of the short, 93-page book Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, which comes out on March 3rd. The title is sort of misleading, as the diary hasn’t ended yet—she’s still writing it every day. The book explores how her attitude toward writing the diary changed over time. Early in the book, she portrays the diary as a frenzied attempt to hold onto memories, a way of dealing with mortality: I didn’t want to lose anything.
But halfway through the book, something changes. How could I have believed that if I tried hard enough, I could remember everything?... Below is a lightly edited transcript of my conversation with Manguso about memory and writing, and how they affect thinking about time and life. Julie Beck: When did you start keeping the diary? Beck: How old were you in 1988? Manguso: Yeah. Israeli David Grossman’s “To the End of the Land” In February, 2004, the Israeli writer David Grossman set out to walk half the length of his country, along the Israel Trail, from the Lebanese border, in the north, down to his home, outside Jerusalem. The journey, a fiftieth-birthday present to himself, would provide material for a novel that he had begun the previous May, about a woman, Ora, whose younger son takes part in a major operation at the end of his military service.
Beset with premonitions and unwilling to wait around for bad news, she flees her Jerusalem home and goes north, to the Galilee hills, where she spends days hiking with a long-estranged former lover. Ora believes, or at least hopes, that she can keep her son safe by telling the story of his life to her hiking companion. Like all of Grossman’s major works, the new novel emerged from a feeling of alarm and threat, which he wanted to confront in order to avoid becoming its victim. At 2:40 A.M. on Sunday, August 13th, the doorbell rang at the Grossman house.
J. R. R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing “For Children” By Maria Popova “Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else … may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.” “I do not believe that I have ever written a children’s book,” the great Maurice Sendak once said in an interview.
“I don’t write for children,” he told Colbert. “I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” This sentiment — the idea that designating certain types of literature as “children’s” is a choice entirely arbitrary and entirely made by adults — has since been eloquently echoed by Neil Gaiman, but isn’t, in fact, a new idea. On March 8, 1939, J. J. Tolkien begins at the beginning, by defining what a fairy tale is: A “fairy-story” is one which touches on or uses Faerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy.
Illustration for Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Snow Queen' by Katharine Beverley and Elizabeth Ellender, 1929. Fantasy … is difficult to achieve. Donating = Loving. Ariel Home Page.