You are welcome here

This may or may not be of interest to anyone but me, but I thought I would post some metrics for the calendar year 2010 for this blog and my Plath website.

The country and city stats show just how far reaching interest in Plath is. The keyword stats show how powerful search engines really are.

Visitors to the Sylvia Plath Info Blog came from 132 countries/territories. The top countries were USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden, France, India, Italy and Macedonia. The top cities were London, Sydney, New York, Seattle, Hagersten, Berlin, Chicago, Cambridge (Eng), Atlanta, and Adelaide.

There were 10,358 keywords typed into search engines that brought people to the site. The top keyword searches were: "plath info blog", "sylvia plath blog", "sylvia plath info", "plath blog", "sylvia plath blogspot", "plath flur", "did sylvia plath have an affair with a man named ralph?", "sylvia plath", "plath profiles" and "sylviaplathinfo".

There were some strange keyword searches, too. I include them not to embarrass anyone - because I have no way of knowing who keyed them in - but because I find them fascinating, humorous, etc. Some of these are: "peanut munching crowd", "214 Old Brompton Road", "sylvia stain", "video porno jully silvia", "where to get passports stamped after transatlantic cruise", and "who was the ouija board poetess". Of course there were many more...

For my Plath website, A celebration, this is, visitors came from 151 countries/territories. The top countries were USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Sweden, India, Italy, Germany, Ireland, and France. The top cities were London, New York, Sydney, Chicago, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Dublin, Brisbane, San Francisco, and Saint Leonard.

There were 13,335 keywords typed into search engines that brought people to the site. The top keyword searches were: "sylvia plath biography", "sylvia plath", "a celebration, this is", "sylvia plath biography you're, morning song", "the bell jar", "sylvia plath info", "otto plath biography", "sylvia plath a celebration", "sylviaplath.info", and "stars over the dordogne by sylvia plath analysis".

There were some strange keywords, too... "did sylvia plath teach at florida state university", "1950s life magazine story about poor boy taken in by rich family, wanted to go home", "prety weman by german illustrators", "suze rendell- foto silvia saint", and "why does esther bleed in the bell jar". Of course there were many more...

The strangest keyword search of the year 2010, however, yielded a hit on Plath Profiles: "concealed penis filetype:pdf". Wow.

Anyway, no matter how you find this blog - even if it's an accident - you are welcome here.

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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