Word: plath
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Sylvia Plath killed herself early on the morning of Feb. 11, 1963, she left behind two children, an estranged, adulterous husband, a note for the baby sitter and a neat black binder containing 40 poems. The contents of that binder would become Ariel, one of the most devastatingly moving and universally beloved books of poetry published in the 20th century. But the contents of that binder and what we know as Ariel are not quite the same thing...
...After Plath died, her manuscript passed to Ted Hughes, who was legally still her husband. Hughes reordered the poems and dropped about a third of them; he also added a few poems that Plath had left out. That in itself is hardly a crime--even a genius needs a good editor once in a while--but Ariel contains a great deal of pain and sorrow and rage directed at Hughes. He was an exceptionally gifted poet himself--he would later become England's poet laureate--but if you're looking for a selfless, disinterested editor to reshape somebody's work...
...good, really convincingly jaded, dressed in vintage clothing, eyebrow arched, drinking our coffee black? Hadn’t we founded a half-assed arts collective in our common room? Didn’t we know kind of a lot of punk songs? Couldn’t we quote Sylvia Plath to each other in flat voices—“Every woman adores a Fascist/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you”? Didn’t we construe practically everything ironically? Weren’t we post-angst, post-emotion...
Jack and Miles are ideal opposites. Miles is nerdy and needy, analyzing every sip of wine, fretting over every impulse, convinced that he's too insignificant a writer even to kill himself: "Hemingway, Sexton, Plath, Woolf--you can't commit suicide until you're published." Jack, whose fluorescent grin almost distracts from his fading good looks, still believes he has It. ("I get chicks lookin' at me all the time, all ages. Dudes too.") With a true actor's magnificent focus and minute attention span, he's so in the moment than he can convince himself of anything, including that...
Laughs were notably absent from Beck's last album, Sea Change, which was full of the kind of beautiful breakup melodies and brutal words normally associated with Gordon Lightfoot and Sylvia Plath. Beck promises a touch of sincerity but adds, "There's definitely a lot more jokes and kicking cardboard boxes and rattling chains and playing slide guitar. This album is full of raggediness." Contributing to the raggediness are song titles like Guero, E-Pro and Brazilica, as well as a guest appearance by Jack White of the White Stripes. Beck appeared in a White Stripes video last year...