Skip to main content

Seven Days of Sylvia Plath Gifts: Day 3

Day 3 - The Journals of Sylvia Plath edited by Karen V. Kukil

On the third day of Plathzaa my true love gave to me
A 732 page book

Published in 2000, The (Unabridged) Journals of Sylvia Plath is the book to read if you are interested in Sylvia Plath. Within its pages both a life and ideas are captured. The editing is superb and the notes in the back are truly a valuable resource. In addition to recording events from her life, Plath's journals are a place where she drafted poems and stories and letters, using it, too, to sketch and to document important historical events such as the D.H. Lawrence obscenity trial in London, which she attended on her birthday in 1960. As well, Plath's journals were kept to record a dossier of information on her neighbors for use, mostly likely, in future stories and novels. That is, unless Sylvia Plath was an undercover CIA agent? We know that the CIA liked Smith College women (eg. Julia Child). Just sayin... nothing like starting a rumor for the holidays...
Labels:

Comments

  1. Julia Gordon-Bramer10 December, 2012 10:25

    OK, you've covered Christmas, Hannukah, and Kwanzaa. Is there anything left? I think Ramadan has passed. ;-)

    Tell Maeve that the Collected Poems is forever on my desk for the same reason she gave: it's all in one place.

    I'm hoping that Eye Rhymes will make one of the Sylvia Plath Gift Days. Or maybe her book of drawings from the Mayor Gallery museum collection. Or...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Peter K Steinberg10 December, 2012 11:37

    Julia!

    Hi there. The rest of the days are mapped out & written, so time will tell publicly what the rest of the gift ideas are!

    Thanks for your comment!

    pks

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
2 comments
Read more

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business.  Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known.  However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images.  There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's  Stendhal-c...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
22 comments
Read more