Skip to main content

Last Night's Sylvia Plath event with Heather Clark

Last night I was privileged to have a conversation with Heather Clark, author of the imminently published (in the US) Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath hosted by Washington D.C. independent bookstore Politics and Prose

The event was recorded and broadcast live on YouTube and is available now for consumption. Hope that you enjoy the hour long program. I really lovely every moment of it. I did not have the chance (or concentration ability) to see the full list of attendees but thank you to all who attended, and, as well, to all who watch it now.

Buy the book from Politics and Prose!

One of the topics we discussed was the Harriet Rosenstein archive which is held by Emory University. You may remember in January and February this blog featured a lot of posts about the recently opened collection. Between then and maybe the summer, sometime, Emory was digitizing the audio cassette tapes that came with it. Due to the times, with a lot of places being closed or with limited abilities, Emory is offering online access to these recordings. Contact the Rose Library for access instructions. 

The medium of the cassette tape is fairly stable, but the quality of the recordings takes some getting used to what with muffled voices, background noises, dogs, tea cups, cars honking, etc. In fact the recording of Al Alvarez appears to be literally have been conducted in the flight path of Heathrow Airport. One of the more amazing things about this is hearing the younger voices of Plath's friends and acquaintances like Elizabeth Sigmund, Winifred Davies, Nancy Axworthy, Lorna and David Secker-Walker, Elinor Klein, Perry Norton, Marcia Stern, and many, many more.

I have listened to most of the tapes at this point and have sent a list of corrections---which I am sure is annoying---to Emory that I hope they make to the finding aid. There are about 76 hours or so.

If you do take advantage of this opportunity, I recommend considering sending Emory's Rose Library a financial donation of appreciation.  

All links accessed 24 October 2020.


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

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