Plath

Nicholas Plath, the son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, killed himself this week. Sad stuff. Reading the story nudged me into looking up Plath again - I haven't read anything by her since my first year of university. I can't remember ever being much of a fan, although I guess there was a reason I elected to study her when I could only pick five or six 20th century authors to focus on. So I'm re-reading and really enjoying. Maybe it's that I've matured, or feel closer to her now I'm almost the age she was when she died. Maybe I find the direct, confessional style a little less awkward than I used to. And of course you can't read Plath without her biographical tragedy floating just above the surface of the page. Her poem to her child, written not long before she stuck her head in the oven, is an incredibly sweet, incredibly sad apology for her failure to be the parent she wants to be:

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose names you meditate ---
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

My favorite line in her work is from 'The moon and the yew tree': "I simply cannot see where there is to get to." She was best when she kept it simple.

I'm reading a lot of Flannery O'Connor at the moment. I can't think of another writer who manages to deliver both depressing and funny to the same brilliant levels. A line from The Violent Bear It Away: "She had only to let out her breath slowly as if she were releasing the last patience on earth..."

The Pied Piper

Dan continues with his interpretations of creepy fairy tales. This is surely one of the creepiest. I had been occupied with another writing project, but now that's done I think I'll elevate the fairy tale book with Dan into second place behind One Two Three.

BBC Top 100 Books

The BBC just published a list of the top 100 books of all time. It's based on a public vote, which is why it's so completely WRONG AND SHIT (yes, The Da Vinci Code and Bridget Jones's Diary are better than Moby Dick and Hamlet, you monstrous idiots), and why there are so many unforgivable oversights, I can't even begin to list them. I've read the vast majority of these only because they're the books you're most likely to study in childhood, high school and/or university in the UK (that's, sadly, the only reason there are a number of Thomas Hardy novels here). So with a couple of exceptions, I'd read all of the italicized books by the time I was 21.

Additionally: isn't there something just hilarious about the idea that this list says, essentially, "Yeah, that Bible's alright, but it's no Harry Potter, is it?"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (multiple attempts)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Away

I've been in California for work, hence the lack of posting. I'm back in NYC now, at least for a few weeks. Blank space in my brain where there should be an anecdote or observation. Will post photos soon.

We Feel Fine

Try not to spend 3 hours on this website, clicking around. It scans blogs for the words "I feel" or "I am feeling" and plucks out the sentences, which float around represented by pixels you click on at random. You could write a song or poem or start a story using the fragments. My favorites so far:

“i’m going to admit something i feel is sort of horrible on par with saying i kick puppies for fun but i find daffodils sort of awful.”

"I know how to take the horrible out of people and show them it and make them feel bad about themselves."

"i cannot do this myself i find it difficult in my humanity to fathom that what i feel is not real."

"i feel both very lost and very small."

"i feel like the change in your purse."

Grainy photos

I'm kind of delighted with these. They look old and nostalgia-filled already, like photos from a childhood holiday. And I forgot how exciting it is to have to wait for photos rather than the instant check-and-re-take routine with digital.

Everything in Mexico is full of light and color:

There was a hammock strung across my bathroom which had a floor-to-ceiling window so you could swing back and forth while looking out over the city from the 22nd floor.

The little green cabs look very picturesque, especially in front of beautiful cathedrals:

They are very small inside - the driver swings open the passenger door (there is no front passenger seat), you hop in, then he swings it closed by pulling on a rope. Here you can see the Angel of Independence:

There is art everywhere, including an outdoor exhibit using the little taxis:

The past is a grotesque animal and in its eyes you see how completely wrong you can be

You'll have to download the song from iTunes because it's over 11 minutes long.

The past is a grotesque animal and in its eyes you see
How completely wrong you can be
The sun is out it melts the snow that fell yesterday makes you wonder why it bothered
I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met who could appreciate George Bataille
Standing at a Swedish festival discussing The Story of the Eye
It's so embarrassing to need someone like I do you
How can I explain I need you here and not here too
I'm flunking out I'm gone I'm just gone but at least I author my own disaster
Performance breakdown and I don't want to hear it
I'm just not available things could be different but they're not
The mousy girl screams violence violence she gets hysterical
Cause they're both so mean and it's my favorite scene
But the cruelty's so predictable it makes you sad on the stage
Though our love project has so much potential but it's like we weren't made for this world
Though I wouldn't really want to meet someone who was
Do I have to scream in your face?
I've been dodging lamps and vegetables
Throw it all in my face I don't care
Let's just have some fun
Let's tear this shit apart
Let's tear the fucking house apart
Let's tear our fucking bodies apart but let's just have some fun
Somehow you've red rovered the gestapo circling my heart
And nothing can defeat you no death no ugly world
You've lived so brightly you've altered everything
I find myself searching for oldselves
While speeding forward through the plate glass of maturing cells
I've played the unraveler the perihelion
But even Apocalypse is fleeting
There's no death no ugly world
Sometimes I wonder if you're mythologizing me like I do you
We want our film to be beautiful not realistic
Perceive me in the radiance of terror dreams
And you can betray me but teach me something wonderful
Crown my head crowd my head with your lilting effects
Project your fears onto me
I need to view them
See there's nothing to them
I promise you there's nothing to them
I'm so touched by your goodness you make me feel so criminal
How do you keep it together? I'm all all unraveled
But you know no matter where we are
We're always touching by underground wires
I've explored you with the detachment of an analyst
But most nights we've raided the same kingdoms
And none of our secrets are physical now.

Oh no

No no no no no no no.

Mexico = excellent

I got back from Mexico this evening. I was sent there for work. I'm lucky to go to these places, to be put up in amazing hotels and eat pretty much wherever I like and gallivant around in cars, all on the company dollar; I do appreciate this. Mexico has never been very high on my must-visit list but it is one of the best places I've ever been and I will definitely return. I was thrilled by it from the moment I got in the taxi at the airport. It's so colorful and it has the same kind of vibe as Spain (which makes sense), in that it's loud and buzzy but it's also very chilled out and when you've walked around for half an hour you feel happy and peaceful. And the weather was glorious - I tend to be a big lover of gray, miserable weather, but have to admit my depressive tendencies are powerless in the face of so much glowy yellow.

My incredibly expensive digital camera broke about one hour into the trip so I had to rely on disposables. I'll have them developed over the weekend and if any of the photos are not unbelievably shit (unlikely) I'll post them.