Shortie Sorties: little fly-by items needing a blog

Looks like today is about relationships, correlations, memberships and belonging.  Hmm.

Reversible

Okay, color me stupid, but I don’t get this.  Maybe I just don’t get the whole self-promotion thing by way of circular references.  Anybody want to explain this to the rest of us who don’t get Reversible?

Name their social class in one drink

Eewww, my mother-in-law is proletarian…damn!  And my hubby swings from upper to middle during the course of the evening!  What’s up with that??

Which table did you sit at in the high school cafeteria?

Paul Graham sat at the D table and apparently has a theory as to why he was there in Nerdville.  (Me?  I didn’t have a table, although I was clearly not welcome at tables A or E…)

3:52:49 PM    comment []

I got Plath-tered…

Not a particularly good blogger yesterday, was I?  I didn’t post much at all.  Did you catch the Salon interview with Kate Moses about her book on Sylvia Plath?  I confess: I got lost in reading some of Plath’s work and the work of her contemporaries.  I’ve read her work before, but in a vacuum; knowing little of the timeline of her life or her personal story made it difficult to put her work into context.

What an incredible talent!  And what a mind-draining, soul-sapping talent at that.  There was nothing left in my own head after reading about Plath, her life and marriage, her death, her work.

It was a struggle reading her work, knowing that Plath most likely suffered from mental illness (biochemical imbalance, whatever) and that much of her work may have been observations from that perspective.  I was prevented from completely engaging in her work by questions that ran through my mind.  Was I reading something viewed from a skewed and unnatural window, or was I reading something with a clarity only given to those unfettered by the detritus of so-called normalcy?

Or was it both at once, clarity, skewed?

Three years ago I had the chance to see a collection of Van Gogh’s works on exhibit.  Brutal, incredibly, primally raw.  Lush, in contrast to his means; obscene in the way that every part of humanity could be exposed and yet no excess of flesh revealed in the expression.  Even the most casual sketches were redolent with this savage talent.  Another artist who most likely suffered from mental illness, whose work may reflect that unique perspective qualified by his condition.   

Both of them, Plath and Van Gogh, savage, fierce.  Yet somehow uncorrupted, gifted with a purity, a clarity of vision.  Each of them in their thirties snuffing out the pain that fueled their lives.

One can only wonder if they’d lived today if we’d be able to save them, if they’d remain as prolific and gifted given the treatments available today.  Would their talents remain as savage and pure?  Or would they be crushed anyhow, as they were in 1962 and 1890?

10:23:15 AM    comment []