Links, reviews, etc. - Week ending 3 May 2008

This is the round-up on goings-on this week!

Recently found book titled An homage to Sylvia Plath by Jean Elizabeth Ward on Amazon.com. The book is published by Lulu.com, and came out on 22 February 2008. The price is $22.50 and the ISBN is 143570309X. Books by lulu.com appear to be self-published and/or print-on-demand.
Seven Stories Press recently published Live through this: On creativity and self-destruction, edited by Sabrina Chapadjiev. The book features an essay on Sylvia Plath by Daphne Gottlieb. I have it, but have yet to read it. Soon, soon...

Beautiful posters and notecards from the Symposium and for sale through the Mortimer Rare Book Room's website.

On 24 April, The Smith College Sophian, a Smith College newspaper, also ran a story on the Plath Symposium. Hopefully the link stays active.
On Tuesday 29 April, the Boston Globe ran a story on the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at Smith, highlighting the attendance of Julia Stiles for the purpose of research for the forthcoming Bell Jar adaptation. The article appeared in the City & Region section, page B8 (you sunk my battleship). The text of the article follows:

Studying up on Sylvia Plath
"If the movie based on Sylvia Plath's book "The Bell Jar" is bad, it won't be because the star was unprepared. Julia Stiles is doing some serious homework as she prepares to play the tragic heroine of Plath's one and only novel. Over the weekend, the actress attended a symposium at Smith College commemorating the writer's would-be 75th birthday. (Plath, a Smith alum, committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30.) We're told Stiles attended every talk of the symposium, taking notes and asking questions of the high-powered panel of Plath scholars. During a discussion with the poet's onetime roommate Marcia Brown Stern, former boyfriend Philip McCurdy, and classmate Elinor Friedman Klein, the actress inquired how the poet "carried herself." In response, McCurdy recalled Plath's "long legs." Stiles, who is producing the movie version of Plath's book, also took a tour of Northampton's Academy of Music Theatre, where, we're told, she may premiere "The Bell Jar." The actress said she'll be back on campus soon to look at a gown once worn by Plath."

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...

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