Just surviving, just doing

James Wood says Fitzgerald “proceeds with utmost confidence that she will be heard and that we will listen, even to her reticence. Her fictions sit on the page with the well-rubbed assurance of fact, as if their details were calmly agreed upon, and long established.” I think maybe the how of what she does springs from the sort of certainty that comes from just surviving—the knowledge that sometimes, just doing, just being, is all that’s left.

 Lynn Steger Strong sobre a companhia que Penelope Fitzgerald lhe faz todos os dias, aqui.

Mas terá havido quem não tenha censurado o que ela escreveu?

Publication of a complete edition of Plath’s letters has been long overdue. Until now, apart from fleeting quotations in biographies and critical studies of Plath, the only letters available to readers outside of archives appear in Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975). Edited by Plath’s mother as a corrective to the negative portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship in The Bell Jar(U.S. publication 1971), Letters Home is terribly flawed. Consisting primarily of letters from Plath to her mother, the book offers fascinating glimpses of Plath’s daily life but a cartoonish view of her as a person. Ellipses pepper every page, and, as comparison to the originals in The Letters of Sylvia Plath shows, Aurelia Plath made extreme cuts throughout, rarely reprinting full versions of anything but postcards (and she often severely redacted those, too). The book perplexed readers, for neither the letters, in which Plath strives to maintain a pose of peppy optimism, nor Aurelia Plath’s often defensive editorial commentary, reflected the Plath readers thought they knew from the poetry and fiction. Gone were the barbed emotions, the volatile wit, the interior darkness. Instead, Plath appears as the ambitious Smith “all-around” girl, rewarded for her hard work with prizes, publications, and a dream-come-true marriage—with only a few negative blips along the way to mar her fighting spirit and positive attitude, even after her marriage crumbles. 

Accurately foreseeing the book’s mixed reviews, Ted Hughes wrote to Aurelia after reading the manuscript and urged her to rethink her approach, not for the sake of protecting him, he claimed, but because “all these letters exist within a single relationship, and this entails, eventually, beyond a certain critical mass of text, a feeling of monotony and narrowness,” which he attributed to Plath’s “constant and growing and very understandable need to reassure you that the life she had chosen was not a mistake, that writing was succeeding financially etc.” He also suggested cutting “the repetitiousness of mood and response” in Plath’s depiction of life at Smith, and the overabundance of enthusiasm throughout the letters that, he warned, while characteristic of Plath, so suffuses them that “the book begins to produce the opposite effect to what I’m sure you must have hoped. So even much of this evidence of her good spirits must be cut” (16 July 1974, Selected Letters of Ted Hughes). 

It’s hard to know how much of this advice Mrs. Plath took. But the points Hughes makes about Letters Home also ring true for large swathes of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. Reading through the letters to her mother, which Plath wrote at great length and with great frequency, is a slog, due to the monotony of cheerful affect and the obsessive recount­ing of what she did when, where, and how. Frank O’Hara’s wry appraisal of his poetry—“I do this, I do that”—applies equally well here—except that O’Hara’s poems are inherently interesting because they happen in New York City, whereas Plath’s letters, until she moves to Cambridge, England, reflect her teen and collegiate life in suburban America. But the difference in reading Letters Home and The Letters of Sylvia Plath, whose first half is dominated by letters to mom, is that the unabridged versions reveal not only how Aurelia’s editing flattens Plath into a caricature of the “all-American girl,” but also how Plath herself carefully curated her experiences to pose as such a girl in order to please her mother. 

Some readers may question Steinberg and Kukil’s decision to publish all extant letters. Although Plath kept journals from age eleven onward, The Unabridged Journals (also edited by Kukil) begins the summer before Plath matriculated at Smith. And, whereas Letters Home starts with Plath’s first letter from college, The Letters of Sylvia Plath takes 172 pages to get there. The pre-high school letters, many sent from Girl Scout camp, are especially tedious. Yet they reveal aspects of Plath’s character and style that carry over into adulthood: her healthy appetite (and sensuous interest in food and cooking), her love of nature (and skill in describing it), and her hyper-organization (evident early on in letters about her stamp collection, and remarkably present throughout the volume in the editors’ footnotes referencing her calendar to corroborate activities she mentions). Plath begins enclosing poems in letters at age ten, and by thirteen is already coolly ranking them, a habit she would continue into adulthood when compiling book manuscripts. In November 1945, she confides to a friend, “speaking of poetry I just began a notebook of my poems and already have about 5 real ones, and have about 5 medium and 5 jingles.” She also sketched throughout her life and liberally illustrated her letters with drawings. The editors reproduce a few illustrated letters as plates and take care in the text to describe any drawings Plath added to letters or envelopes. The book opens with gaily decorated letters to her parents and concludes, in the penultimate letter, with news she sends to Aurelia that the Christian Science Monitor has published her article, with four pen-and-ink sketches, about Benidorm, Spain, where she honeymooned with Hughes. 

Evident also from early on are Plath’s all-out efforts to please mom. Describing piano practice, she writes with pride to Aurelia, “I kept saying to myself, ‘This is what mother would want me to do’” (January 1943). Hyperbole abounds—“Today in my opinion is the most beautiful day I spent at camp” (8 July 1945); in subsequent letters, summer after summer, year after year, new “most wonderful” days replace the old. The happiness reverberates through high school and crescendos during Plath’s first three undergraduate years. Thus, a summer job at the shore as a mother’s helper (doing nonstop cooking, laundry, housecleaning and watching three children) sounds like summer camp: “Yesterday was just about the most wonderful yet. . . . Nauset is the most beautiful place on the Cape. . . . I don’t know when I’ve had such a wonderful time in all my life. . . . I left her [fiction writer Val Gendron] at 12:30 after 5 of the most wonderful hours I have ever spent” (19–21 August 1952). Three days later, the wonder never ceases: “I don’t know when I’ve had so much work and fun combined! Really, I feel so much richer, older, and wiser after this summer. Never have I gotten along so well with such an amazing diversity of people!” (24 August 1952). Such exuberant over-insistence is hard to tolerate in either edition of Plath’s letters. The problem with Letters Home, however, is that it proposes—or, really, insists—that this saccharine version reflects the “real” Sylvia Plath. 

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, in contrast, complicates Plath through showing how meticulously she designed letters—and different versions of herself—for a diversity of recipients. The correspondence with Aurelia so weights the book’s first half that letters to others arise as welcome relief: sudden flarings of a different Plath, more thoughtful and often more caustic, than the happy “Sivvy” of the letters home. In letters to women friends, Plath unleashes her snark about social double standards and the tedium of playing nice girl. For example, after enduring a bad date, she quips, “[he] was supposedly the best-looking boy in his dorm—& he was attractive in a weak-dark hair-tonic sort of way. He was one of those fool Americans who thinks of girls as a clotheshorse with convenient openings and curved structures for their own naïve pleasure” (3 February 1951). She also casts a cold eye on her era’s reverence for female propriety: “After Class Day it was a two hour tea at the headmaster’s house, and I got so damn sick of making small talk with mothers of boys and fiancées and young wives that I thought my sweet girlish smile had frozen to my face. I felt like drowning myself in the iced tea bowl, in a flurry of mint leaves” (12 June 1951). Along with mockery of social conventions, the letters to friends also record her left-leaning, humanistic politics. Her exchanges, beginning in high school with a German pen pal, register Plath’s pacifism, her curiosity about postwar life in Germany, and consciousness of how their generation bears the existential burden of growing up in the atomic age. Occasionally, in letters to Aurelia, Plath breaks good-girl character and gets sarcastic or political—sometimes simultaneously, “No news may be good news from Warren [Plath’s brother], but that doesn’t mean that no news means I’m on my deathbed. If I were, I’d at least have time to drop you a postcard.” Busy with midterms, Plath had last written to mom only two days earlier. She concludes, “It is lovely weather and I am as yet fine. If I live till after March 12 I can face the atombomb with complete equanimity” (3 March 1951). Aurelia did not reprint this postcard in Letters Home, nor did she reprint the passionate, articulate paragraphs from Fall 1952 letters in which Plath opposes McCarthyism, advocates for Civil Rights, and longs to be old enough to vote for Adlai Stevenson (Aurelia supported Eisenhower). In its inclusion of letters to friends, as well as to family, and in restoring all of the passages Aurelia suppressed in Letters Home, The Letters of Sylvia Plath resuscitates Plath’s political consciousness and her snark, including her capacity for self-satire.

O texto integral sobre a publicação recente do primeiro volume das Cartas de Sylvia Plath está aqui. 

Da influência improvável

David Hockney está a braços com o estudo da perspectiva, interessa-lhe sobretudo a possibilidade da perspectiva reversa. Um colaborador vai à net, esse mundo de quando em vez admirável, e a busca leva-o a um pequeno ensaio de um padre moscovita, com obra até em crítica de arte. 

Florensky, born in 1882 in Azerbaijan the scion of secular Westernizing parents (his father a Russian railway engineer, his mother the cultured product of ancient Armenian nobility), proved a mathematical prodigy from his earliest years and went on to do pathbreaking work in non-Euclidean mathematics while also pouring himself into wider scientific studies more generally. But apparently, after a visit to Tolstoy in 1899, Florensky fell into a growing spiritual crisis in which he came to doubt the primacy of the scientific positivism that had guided his studies thus far. Following graduation from Moscow State University in 1904, he declined the offer of a teaching position in mathematics, instead repairing to the nearby holy city of Sergiev Posad (site of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, the most important monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church), where his theological studies culminated in his being ordained as a priest in 1911 (though he married and would have five children). Although he wrote widely on philosophy and theology (his essays on the idea of the Divine Sophia would later become central to the concerns of feminist theologians), he nevertheless continued his equally far-flung scientific investigations, all the while trying to meld the two vocations. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, and even though the Communists shut down many of his most beloved Orthodox institutions, he threw himself into technical work, particularly on behalf of the electrification of rural Soviets, under the sponsorship of Trotsky himself (notwithstanding his insistence on wearing clerical robes all the while). By 1932, however, Trotsky was gone, and Stalin, finding the charismatic and querulous cleric an increasing nuisance, had him exiled to Siberia, where he launched into investigations on the nature and properties of permafrost, further path-breaking research that has become increasingly relevant in recent years with the rise of global warming. Meanwhile, in 1937, at the height of his Red Terror, Stalin had Florensky brought back to St. Petersburg and, following a brief trial, summarily executed—that being the very year, as it happens, of the birth of David Hockney in Bradford, England. 

(...) His reverse perspective essay, in particular, dates from a moment in 1920 when Bolsheviks were busily imputing the value of the medieval Orthodox icons they were tearing off the walls of museums and monasteries, dismissing them as hopelessly primitive for their allegedly clumsy handling of modeling and perspective (the way, for instance, a nose might be seen to be going one direction while the lips went another and the eyes a third—not in any way, at any rate, as in real life). But Florensky fired back, marshaling tremendous erudition to argue that if, as far back as Babylonian and Egyptian times, artists and craftsmen continually made similar errors, it was not because they didn’t know about rigorous one-point perspective (they would have had to call on such knowledge to be able to build pyramids and the like) but because they sensed there was something wrong with its practice when it actually came to the depiction of real life in all its timely and timeless vivacity—and they chose not to use it. Florensky showed how conventionally one-point perspectival tricks first began being deployed on theater sets in ancient Greece and Rome with the express intent of deceiving audiences, such illusionistic effects being likewise prized on the walls of decadent villas, say, in Pompeii, even though they really only registered as accurate from one specific location, completely falling apart from any other point of viewing. Over and over again, Florensky marshaled arguments that Hockney himself would start deploying more than sixty years later (...)

E tudo ganha forma e perspectiva. Pode ler-se na íntegra aqui. 

De outras Joanas -21

(...) one feels as though “something important is hidden” in Murray’s work and that “repeated readings may not reveal it, but the mere act of reading Murray’s poetry always seems to be pushing one closer to the brink of a momentous discovery.”

A vida e pós-vida incríveis de Joan Murray, aqui. 

Mary Beard

One reason Beard is so widely beloved is that her interventions in public life – whether one agrees with her or not – offer an alternative mode of discourse, one that people are hungry for: a position that is serious and tough in argument, but friendly and humorous in manner, and one that, at a time when disagreements quickly become shrill or abusive, insists on dialogue. Still, it is these precise qualities that can, equally, land her in deep water. The point of her notorious 9/11 article was that one could simultaneously deplore the terrorists’ murderous violence, and try to understand their position. After the deluge of angry emails arrived, she tried to reply to most of them, even making a couple of friends along the way. When I asked her if she would countenance taking Isis’s ideology seriously, she said: “That’s the wrong question. There is no argument that I won’t take seriously. Thinking through how you look to your enemies is helpful. That doesn’t mean that your ideology is wrong and theirs is right, but maybe you have to recognise that they have one – and that it may be logically coherent. Which may be uncomfortable.” Few would think it worth arguing with Arron Banks, the Ukip donor, when he said the Roman empire had collapsed because of immigration. Beard pulled him up on Twitter, suggesting he might like to read a bit more classical history – and then went out to lunch with him.

Mais sobre o incrível trajecto da classicista da moda, aqui.

Repensar o conhecimento e a historiografia

Within the discipline of history, new studies have shown that the most successful revolution to spring from the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity was in Haiti rather than in France. The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the ideas of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–1803) paved the way for the state’s independence, new constitution, and the abolition of slavery in 1804. The historian Laurent Dubois concludes in Avengers of the New World (2004) that the events in Haiti were ‘the most concrete expression of the idea that the rights proclaimed in France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were indeed universal’.

A vida e obra incríveis de dois filósofos africanos, Yacob e Amo, obrigam a recuar no tempo, recentrar a análise e repensar a história das ideias e a filosofia. Aqui.

The Childs

Paul Child/The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Julia on the telephone. Aubazine, France, 1952.

The Childs met while serving in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, leading them to various postings around Europe. But it was Paris, where they arrived in 1948, that captured their hearts. 

“Apart from our official lives — cooking and government — the other things we do fall into fairly repetitive categories whose two main divisions are, being entertained and entertaining others,” Mr. Child wrote to his twin brother, Charlie. “Sometimes when we’re being entertained it isn’t people, but just Paris herself who acts as hostess.”

 Os fãs de Meryl Streep conhecem a história - viram o filme -, os outros podem lê-la aqui. 

Todos merecem o livro este Natal.

The picture tells you. You don't tell it.

Didion likewise connected her openness to experience to her refusal of received ideas. In an essay titled “Why I Write,” she traced her preference for the concrete over the abstract to her student days at the University of California, Berkeley. She could never stay focused on the intricacies of Marxist dialectics, or on any other great system of thought, she recalled. Instead her attention would inevitably turn to something like “a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor.” If she meditates on these images for long enough, they reveal their own unique “grammar.” She insists on taking the word “grammar” literally:

All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. … The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement.

With our master narratives, we attempt to impose order on our ever-shifting perceptions of an ever-shifting world (petals falling to the floor, snow falling in the Sierras). Didion wants to write in the exact opposite way: “Nota bene. [The picture] tells you. You don’t tell it.”

 Paul Gleason, The Picture in Her Mind.

Era uma vez uma ama

As Palavras e a Vida (2)

I was 20 when I got my hands on the newly published Unabridged Journals—a rep for Random House snuck me a free copy in my mailbox at Brookline Booksmith, the hip independent bookstore where I worked part-time while I studied literature and creative writing at Emerson College, downtown. I felt like I’d been given a bacon cheeseburger after a Lenten fast: 1982’s abridged journals were one-third the size of this chunky tome, with its chrome-tinted photograph of Plath at her Smith College graduation, smiling, looking off-camera, being handed a white carnation by a disembodied, feminine hand. Plath, the Real Plath, always elusive, was in here, I felt. So familiar was I with the abridged edition that I immediately knew where to look, based on the dates, to discover sections that had been mercilessly cut in the previous edition—to the point that many passages had made no sense at all. Why, for instance, did Plath meet Hughes one night at a party, bite him on the cheek when he kissed her, flee to Paris to see another boyfriend with barely a mention of Hughes’s name, and then marry him with no further commentary three months later? What had happened in between?

Emily Van Duyne, sublinhando o perturbador apagamento da vida de Sylvia Plath, aqui.

What goes around

comes around.

Envy is a monster

"As much as McCarthy and Arendt are retroactively lodged within this circle of men who explain things (the “boys,” in the vernacular of the women’s correspondence), they both understood a more complex reality. They saw that the men’s admiration for them, such as it was, was laced with hostility. To be fair, they didn’t have much good to say about most of the men, either."

Ask the dust

Do dia - 94

Marie Spartali Stillman, Santa Bárbara, s/d.  

De outras Joanas - 17

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jane Morris (The Blue Silk Dress), 1868. 

Gente gira - 19

S/a, Nellie Bly, s/d

In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice,she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 24,899-mile journey. 
She brought with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold in total as well as some American currency) in a bag tied around her neck. The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan sponsored its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time of both Phileas Fogg and Bly. 
Bisland would travel the opposite way around the world. To sustain interest in the story, the World organized a “Nellie Bly Guessing Match” in which readers were asked to estimate Bly’s arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of (only) a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip. On her travels around the world, Bly went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the electric telegraph allowed Bly to send short progress reports, though longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and were thus often delayed by several weeks. Bly travelled using steamships and the existing railroad systems,[17] which caused occasional setbacks, particularly on the Asian leg of her race. During these stops, she visited a leper colony in China and she bought a monkey in Singapore.
As a result of rough weather on her Pacific crossing, she arrived in San Francisco on the White Star Line ship Oceanic on January 21, two days behind schedule. However, World owner Pulitzer chartered a private train to bring her home, and she arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, at 3:51 p.m.
"Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken departure" Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the globe almost unchaperoned. At the time, Bisland was still going around the world. Like Bly, she had missed a connection and had to board a slow, old ship (the Bothina) in the place of a fast ship (Etruria). Bly's journey was a world record, though it was bettered a few months later by George Francis Train, who completed the journey in 67 days. By 1913, Andre Jaeger-Schmidt, Henry Frederick and John Henry Mears had improved on the record, the latter completing the journey in less than 36 days.

(...)

Caridosa, pura e sábia.

Zurbarán, Santa Doroteia, 1648. 

Gente gira - 16

Judy Linn, Patti Smith, s/d 

To prey upon stillness, to suffer dawn
To bow before God, to administer grace
To unveil space, to be spirited away
To lift a child
      into the reigning air
      where the voice of heaven
      chirps like a bird

 - Patti Smith, The meaning of life

Gente gira - 14

Cecil Beaton. Teresa Jungman, 1941.

She was known as Teresa "Baby" Jungman, a beauty among the bohemian "bright young things" of 1920s English society, whose high-class hedonism inspired Evelyn Waugh to write Vile Bodies. She was also the unrequited love of Waugh's life, and the recipient of a huge number of letters from the author which, seven years after her death at the age of 102, are finally to be published.(...)

Jungman was the younger of two sisters for whom life was one prolonged party, with treasure hunts and pranks, that delighted the gossip diarists of the day. On one notorious occasion she posed as a Russian émigrée, telling a distinguished general and his wife that she would never forget the night she spent with him in Paris. When the general insisted that his only night in the French capital had been during the war, Jungman replied: "That was the night."

The Jungman girls posed regularly for celebrated society photographer Cecil Beaton, who was struck by Baby's "Devonshire cream pallor and limpid mauve eyes", along with "her hair, spun of the flimsiest canary-bird silkiness", which she would throw back "with a beguiling shrug of the head".

Her father was an Anglo-Dutch artist who married into a devout Catholic Birmingham family. After her parents' divorce, Jungman's mother married into the Guinness family.

Baby's wealth and beauty ensured a string of admirers, including the seventh Earl of Longford, who noted her devout Catholic faith, likening her to "a very friendly and fascinating nun". But her faith would have made any romantic interest in Waugh impossible, since as a divorcé he was ineligible for marriage in the church. In Brideshead Revisited, a similar obstacle prevents Lady Julia Flyte, of the aristocratic, Catholic Marchmain family, from marrying Charles Ryder. Jungman rejected Waugh's advances, but they remained friends.(...)

Alexander Waugh, who describes himself as an obsessive researcher, acknowledged that his family name probably influenced Jungman's decision to offer him his grandfather's most private letters. He said: "She appears in the Evelyn Waugh biographies, but not nearly as importantly as she should do because she refused to be interviewed. I interviewed her. It was the first time she'd ever talked about Evelyn Waugh.

"I was about to ask her, 'You don't by any chance …' She interrupted: '…have any letters?' I said, 'Yes, I was going to ask that.' She said, 'My bedroom next door. There's a basket.' There was a huge hoard of letters that had never been seen before – very interesting, intimate letters."

He added: "The tragic thing is she never really loved him. He loved her and wanted it to go further. She always held him at a distance. I [asked] 'why didn't you marry [him]?' She just said: 'Not exactly my type.' It was between the breakdown of his first marriage and his second marriage, to my grandmother."(...)

The letters date primarily from the early 1930s. In 1932 Waugh wrote to Jungman as he set sail for British Guiana: "My Darling Tess, Thank you so much for coming to see me off … Just feeling so low-spirited. I could have cried at any moment. I wanted very much to kiss you goodbye."

The following year he proposed to Jungman, only to be rejected. His grandson said Waugh was so depressed he fled to Morocco, where he wrote another classic, A Handful of Dust, a savage depiction of amorality.(...)

Daqui.

Diz que é uma espécie de Artémis - 10