Elvis

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

“[Once at] Palm Springs, one of the regular girls decided to bring a friend of hers that was visiting to the house one evening. She wasn’t the most attractive gal — quite large, looking much older than she probably was. Some of the boys started making rather unkind remarks to her, which I won’t repeat. After a few minutes of this, Elvis got up out of his chair, walked over to the girl, who by this time was sitting on the couch looking miserable and out of place, and he asked her if she’d like something to drink and she nodded. He went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of lemonade for her. When she finished it, he took her hand and asked, ‘Would you like me to show you around?’ He proceeded to walk out of the living room, through the dining room to head into the back yard, but he looked over his shoulders and shot daggers at those who were unkind to her. Needless to say, by the time he came back into the living room with her no one said another nasty word. He handled a lot of situations in that same manner — didn’t say much; just acted. He could say more with a look than words at times.”

-- Sandi Miller, Elvis’s friend

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

( Read more... )

Sylvia

We have one more shot from Terry Castle on the Plath legend.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

It will come as no surprise that I’m one of those who will always be turning away from Plath. Or trying to. I find her tasteless, grisly—unbearable, in fact—precisely because, even five decades after her suicide, she and her corpse-infested verses hold on with such ghoulish tenacity. She seems never to tire of creating tragic inhuman mischief from beyond the grave. That the infant “Nick” addressed in those final poems from Devon, the very poems cited as “nature poems” by the kindly Boland, hanged himself in 2009 seems only the latest malignant turn of the Plathian screw. A respected fisheries biologist—he taught at a university in Alaska—Nicholas Hughes had apparently done everything possible to distance himself geographically and psychically from his parents’ cursed history. (Most of the people who worked with him knew nothing of his family story.) Yet Lady Lazarus caught up with him at last. He was said afterward to have been “lonely” much of his life and depressed by his failure to find love. His mother was by then long dead—he had never had any memory of her—yet even so I couldn’t help wanting to kill her.

-- Terry Castle at The New York Review of Books

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

93. Pop

An unwelcome surprise. Pop cuts his weekend away short and makes it back home a day early. At least I managed to clean my toilet while he was gone.

I wish he liked being at Kay’s place and conjured reasons to go and stay longer. Instead he tries to cajole her to come here all the time, and he apparently looks for excuses to leave early. He says that he was feeling ill, yet he immediately welcomes Lorie here.

Lorie apparently won’t have sex with Pop, but she is still louder than Kay, and, like Pop, she enjoys staying up till the small hours of the morning. I cannot even go to the big room to escape their drunken merrymaking. Worse yet, with Lorie there is a good chance that Pop will claim the big room early.

Countee Cullen

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

I think an impulse stronger than my mind
May some day grasp a knife, unloose a vial,
Or with a little leaden ball unbind
The cords that tie me to the rank and file.
My hands grow quarrelsome with bitterness,
And darkly bent upon the final fray;
Night with its stars upon a grave seems less
Indecent than the too complacent day.

God knows I would be kind, let live, speak fair,
Requite an honest debt with more than just,
And love for Christ’s dear sake these shapes that wear
A pride that had its genesis in dust,–
The meek are promised much in a book I know
But one grows weary turning cheek to blow.

-- "Mood" by Countee Cullen

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>