Marilyn

According to Porter’s narrative, Marilyn was getting tired of being ignored by the older Kennedy brothers, and she started to play with fire.

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Late one night, she placed a call to Lawford. She revealed the evidence she’d accumulated on Bobby, both in her tapes and in her diary.

That phone call would mark the first of several threats she’d make about organizing a press conference and announcing her affairs with Bobby and the President. She discreetly left out her latest involvement with Teddy. “Fuck both Bobby and Jack,” she told Lawford. “I’ll show them. I’ll tell the word.”

She would continue to make those threats up until her death, although Lawford repeatedly tried to assuage her.

“Don’t threaten Bobby Kennedy,” Slatzer warned her. “He’s too powerful. He could have yo wiped off the map with just one phone call.” [...]

Before Slatzer left her that night, she told him, “I’m not afraid of them. They’re just overgrown boys.”

-- Darwin Porter, “Marilyn at Rainbow’s End”

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shortened my walk this morning

I shortened my walk this morning. After my last walk, when it was a rather warm morning, I became too bold. I didn't put on my heavy pull-over shirt, and althought the sun was starting to shine as I set out, it quickly got lost behind a mass of clouds. The chill carries too sharp a bite for me. I did not mind being able to put in more of my morning on my blogging rounds, while still getting in a good hour of reading. I might do this more often, particularly when I don't have any food for the ducks anyway.

Taylor Swift

I guess even hot celebrity babes need more confidence sometimes.

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'What I worry about is that I never want to end up kind of a self-centred, vain human being.

'My fears circle around me making the wrong choices and messing this up for myself. I don’t wanna end up being awful and intolerable. Alone. Laying in a marble bathtub by myself, like sad, with a glass of wine just complaining that my life ended up alone because I pushed everyone away because I thought I was too good to hang out with anybody.

'The typical Hollywood sad cliché of the poor lonely starlet with no one because she put up all these walls and didn’t trust anyone.

'That’s my fear. And that’s why I live my life the way I live my life because I’d so much rather feel everything than end up like that.'

-- Taylor Swift

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Poor baby, you can always cry on my shoulder.

Dick Cheney

“If I had to do it over again. I’d do it over in a minute.... I don’t lie awake at night thinking, gee, what are they going to say about me?”

-- Dick Cheney

Maureen Dowd retorts, "They’re going to say you were a misguided powermonger who, in a paranoid spasm, led this nation into an unthinkable calamity. Sleep on that."

Ten years later, a lot of people have been looking back at the invasion and takeover of Iraq. Americans are not looking upon it as one of our more prideful moments. Although there has to be a certain redeeming quality in taking out Saddam Hussein, it is hardly clear that that bit of good makes up for all the loss and cost. For all of his petty villainy, Saddam just really was not that much of a threat to the security of America and the West. As far as the general war on terrorism is concerned, one would like to think that our aggressive action at least put a chill on the forces of jihad, but it is not clear whether we ended up hurting ourselves worse in Iraq.

How Inegalitarian is America?

How can the Republicans remain unpilloried when they say that the wealthy are taxed too much and that we need to cut programs that benefit the lower 80% of Americans?

Sylvia

Some interesting Sylvia Plath discussion. An interview with her biographer, Peter Steinberg. I was particularly surprised that her novel came out just weeks before she committed suicide, and that it was written under a pseudonym.

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So Sylvia Plath died right after the first-edition publication of The Bell Jar.

It's a fascinating timeline. The Bell Jar was published in England on January 14, 1963, so about 28 days before she died. It was published under the name Victoria Lucas.

There were a handful of reviews for it, before she died. Most of them were kind. They weren't glowing. She wasn't going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars off of it. She would have seen the reviews that were published up until the time she died, and I'm pretty sure she would have read them. And I think she got nervous about its reception. Afraid that people might recognize the story, even though it was less likely that people would recognize the story in England than had it somehow filtered into the United States at that time.

So Plath died while critics were still reviewing her book—morbidly enough. How did her suicide affect the critical reception of The Bell Jar?

The poet Anne Sexton called it a good career move. (Laughs) But it wasn't immediate. It wasn't like when Kurt Cobain died [when Nirvana albums rocketed up the Billboard charts after his body was found]. I think it helped book sales when her Ariel poems finally came out [two years after her death, in 1965], but I think that might have had just as much to do with the poems as it was the fact that she was dead. I'd like to give [the benefit of the doubt] that people were buying the book because of the poems, but there was probably a little bit of both. People wanted to see what these poems were like. Were they worth dying for?

-- Ashley Fetters interviewing Peter K. Steinberg at The Atlantic

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It is tempting to speculate on the relationship between the reception of "Bell Jar" and her suicide, whether she felt that she was too limited to make it as a writer, but I suppose we can only guess.