Links, reviews, etc. - Week ending 6 September 2008

Welcome to the end of another week!

I have no idea when my website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is will be back up. The files are where they need to be, but the content doesn't appear to be live. Fingers crossed it is soon. For any teachers, students, or frequent visitors, please accept my deepest apologies for any inconvenience this down time may be causing. As a stopgap, you can always view the cached page, to get some of the content.
Event: From 11 September - 13 September 2008, in Philadelphia, The Ophelia Project is "a poetic journey into the worlds and writing of Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath." The performance is 60 minutes, and will be held at the Media Bureau (MBN) Studios725 N 4th St, Philadelphia. If anyone down there makes it, please post a comment! The work is the creation of Rachel Bowditch, anyone seeking more information on her should click here.
Plath is discussed in Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature by John Mullan. The book was recently reviewed in the Wall Street Journal (September 4, 2008, page A17). John Gross is the reviewer. The book discusses anonymously or pseudonymously published books. Just to think, had Plath not wanted to publish The Bell Jar under the name Victoria Lucas, she might have missed making this book.
Andrian Mourby spent some time recently in Yorkshire.
Event: On a similar note, from 22-28 October, there will be a Ted Hughes Festival in Mytholmroyd, the town where Hughes was born. This year, 2008, marks the tenth anniversary of Hughes's death. For more information on the festival, please visit The Elmet Trust. Anyone going please feel free to send me impressions, reviews, etc. and I'll post them on the blog.
Lastly, this week I made a small, interesting Plath-related discovery at the Woodberry Poetry Room. Stay tuned, as I'll write more about it in a separate blog post in the coming week(s).

Have a nice weekend. Remember to read Plath Profiles. From an anonymous review (not in Mullan's book), "Hours of interesting reading."

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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