Pessoa

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Literature - which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality - seems to me the end towards which all human efforts would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.

-- Fernando Pessoa, “The Book of Disquiet”

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China

We have an interesting look into Chinese prison life for political prisoners. Liao Yiwu used to be a happy-go-lucky writer, but he was motivated by the massacre at Tiananmen Square and wrote poems that were critical of the government. Mr. Liao has now written a book on that experience, "For a Song and a Hundred Songs".

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Worst Prize-Winning American Novels?

10 worst prize-winning American novels of all time

Sylvia

Fifty years after Sylvia's suicide, Terry Castle offers a rather harsh assessment of the poet's art and life.

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What to make of it all after half a century? From one angle Plath had only herself to blame for the rhetorical excess she provoked—and still does provoke—in readers. She was crazy, after all. Even fifty years on, the gruesome mental suffering that she wrote about continues to pierce and frighten and exasperate.

In her defense: Plath used the pain as best she could. Though attempts over the decades to see her as a protofeminist oracle fail to convince, it has to be said that Plath’s writing captured the central and most disturbing psychic component in the lives of conventional middle-class American heterosexual women of the 1950s and early 1960s: a toxic, typically unconscious longing—sadomasochistic in structure—to be both adored and degraded, cherished and abjected, by a powerful man resembling one’s father. The fantasy contaminates (and sickens) any number of now-canonical Plath poems: “Electra on the Azalea Path,” “Two Views of a Cadaver Room,” “Medusa,” “Cut,” “Daddy,” “The Jailer,” “Lady Lazarus”—all those kitsch near-masterpieces that make the poet a sensation still (sometimes) among bulimic female undergraduates. Plath exposed, as no one had before, the quintessential “nice girl” sex-anguish of her time: a mode of female desiring as incoherent, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, and self-canceling as it was misogynistic, daddy-obsessed, and morbidly heterosexual.

But one shrinks at the ugliness and hysteria of the vision. Most off-putting, to my mind, is the way Plath made a repugnant and meticulously curated longing for death feel sexy and sublime. At least, that is, for a minute or two. Like Sylvia and Ted colliding at St. Botolph’s, Eros and Thanatos not only lock eyes in Plath’s poems, they’re already so far gone—so mad and humpy with crazy love—that we know they’ll end up killing each other. One doesn’t wish to remain too long in close proximity.

-- Terry Castle at The New York Review of Books

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90. The Fourth of July

Pop comes home from his rounds with charcoal and hot dog buns. He says, "It's the fourth of July! We're going to have hot dogs!" Since I don't eat hot dogs, I guess when he says ‘we’ he means he and his guests that will likely be coming over tomorrow. I don't recall him celebrating the fourth before, at least not since childhood and our own little fireworks extravaganzas, but he seems intent on getting more out of life in what must be his last active years. I can respect that.

Whatever headaches lay in store for me tomorrow, Pop made nice tonight, and in addition to offering to pick up some dessert tonight, he also took me out to eat. It was Jim's again. Chicken fried steak. It's not as nice as Furr’s, but it beats the sandwiches I was going to make tonight.

Courtney Stodden

{ONTD}

Daily Fun

Random Pictures

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