The letters also reminded us why the event was part of MoMA's "Modern Poets" reading series. Van Gogh has long been a poet's painter, not just because, like Shelley, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath (whose "The Moon and the Yew Tree" was among the night-themed poems read aloud), and so many other poets, he was suicidally mad, but because he was himself an exceptional writer. His insights into the theory and turbulent practice of art were as eloquently phrased as any ars poetica ever written. Nor did he ever overplay or romanticize his madness; he cut such a poignant figure precisely because he was always struggling for sanity and clarity of the most luminous kind. At his best he succeeded brilliantly, as in our favorite passage in the letters, a grand outburst to his brother Theo:

Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, You can't do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of "you can't" once and for all.

Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, “defiles”—they say. Let them talk, those cold theologians.

I am sad. I am sad because I hate my parents. I am sad because I have never been in love. I am sad because I am still in my early twenties and I can’t bare to think about how much longer I have to live. I am sad because the people around me measure happiness in very different units from me.

I am sad because when I wake in the mornings all I want to do is cry. I am sad because when I leave the house, the safest place that I can think of being is in my bed---and so I retreat back into my little shell, as quickly as I can.

I am sad because my feelings are limited by syntax and grammar. I am sad because I cannot use them to their best effect. I am sad because of the state of our political affairs. I am sad because most of us don’t care or even want to care about what goes on in parliament or Congress. Quite frankly, I am sad because I like living in a world, where crazy conservatives like Sarah Palin exist. I am sad because for better or for worse, I like hating her.  And, I am sad because I don’t actually give a shit what anyone does behind those closed doors of the political arena. Yes, I am sad, yes, I am sad.

I am sad because I don’t want to have to retreat to the modern ills of psychiatry or even the more ancient practices of shock therapy (which I know is still practiced in some parts of the world).

I am sad because I have to be defined by my sexuality, my love for a human being is bound and limited to my sexual organs, desires—that I cannot control, are products of the dysfunctional and poorly placed synapses in my brain.

Writing this, it makes me a bit happier. To share this, means a lot actually. Although, I still feel like a sad that I have had to resort to the least revered form of literature: the online blog. Never having been able to finish a book or script or even a play.

I am sad because People older than me hark: you are still in your twenties; the WORLD, it is your oyster! But what they don’t realise is that living in your twenties is no longer a happy place. It is No longer a happy place for me or for my friends or for anyone that I know for a matter of fact.

Yes, I am sad because I do not know what I want to do today or tomorrow. I am sad because the only things that make me happy are reality TV shows. I am sad because Simon Cowell is my idol and not Barack Obama. I am sad because I live in a time when Noel Edmond’s opinion seems to matter more than that of Nelson Mandella or any other leader for that matter. Yes, I am sad. I am sad. I am sad.

I am sorry that I have to be sad. I never meant to upset anyone with it. But in this day and age, it seems quite frowned upon, despite, the likes of our dearest ambassador, Stephen Fry. Our collective sadness seems to be a talking point for all but a day and than descends, into unconsciousness.

I am sad about a lot of things really. I am sad that Cheryl Cole is so loved by the British nation. Instead, I wish she would go back to beating people up in public toilets. I am sad that Simon hasn’t learned from his X Factor experience and is letting a fourth judge onto American Idol. Yes, I am sad, I am sad, I am sad.

I am sad that I am not a Jew, since all of them seem to love each other so much. I wake up everyday hoping that I’ll fall in love with one. I do, after all, posses a very convincing white man’s fro! This is something that doesn’t make me feel so sad.

But then again, I am sad because I eat so much chocolate cake, especially when I am so ready to admit to the fact that I find chocolate quite unpleasant. Like coffee, I find it loathsome, but somehow I’ll manage to find a way to drink and eat it anyway.

I am sad because I am not cooler than I am. I am sad because I don’t know how to make my sadness seem as hip as Angelina’s or Sylvia’s or Anne’s or anyone of the like.

I am sad because I don’t have a 6-pack or an 8-pack, but a one-pack: A Lurpack.

I am sad because even when my friends tell me I look good, that I always somehow manage to realise that their complement is but a mere fact of relativity. Circumstances would differ if my best buds were: Brad, George and Ben.

I am sad that this fact makes me want to go to the gym tomorrow and that it makes me stop eating for at least twelve hours. I am sad, that after those twelve hours, I will want to eat again with a voracious angst that is hardly justified.

I am sad because I am not allowed to feel sorry for myself because there are starving kids in Africa. I am sad because, despite my best efforts, I can’t really do anything to help those starving kids and so I have to go back to feeling sorry for myself, albeit with an improved sense of worth and a bit more consciousness.

I am sad that this isn’t really a poem or a work of art or anything of substance.

I am sad that this may be deemed by some as post-modern.

I am sad because I am still awake…after all these years.

I am waiting for this sadness to turn into anger, but it doesn’t.

Relevant Background

Early Life
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston USA. She grew up in a well-off middle class home on the coast. Sylvia's early years were influenced by her living near the ocean. ‘I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.' Her experiences of family life caused her to feel inner conflicts and pain. Her father Otto died when she was eight. His Polish-German origins and unnecessary early death from a leg problem troubled her later in life. In addition, depression was widespread in her father's family.

Influences
Due to her mother's influence, Sylvia tried to live up to an old fashioned feminine ideal of perfection and purity. While keeping up this front as an adult, Sylvia rebelled against the conservative role she was expected to play. The consequent inner conflicts are revealed in her poetry and letters. Plath hid her lack of confidence behind a mask of strident energy and brilliant achievement. Though she was an outstanding student, Plath never fulfilled the very high expectations she set for herself. She experienced self-doubt and depression. However, to the world she presented a carefree, offhand attitude. She pushed herself relentlessly at work. Much of Plath's poetry reveals her struggle against herself and the world.

College
Plath suffered a nervous breakdown in Smith College, Boston, after intense overwork in 1953. She was given bi-polar electro-convulsive shock treatments; a horror alluded to in the poem ‘Elm' of 1962. This treatment further damaged her sanity, and she attempted suicide. Six months in a private hospital set her on her feet again, but she never fully recovered. Depression and the threat of insanity remained a problem. Plath also went to university in Cambridge, England after she won a  scholarship in 1955. Her writings outside the syllabus showed she was angry about double-standard behaviour in society. Plath claimed for herself the right to as much sexual freedom as men had in the repressed and smug 1950s society. She declared she was in favour both an erotic and intellectual lifestyle.

Ted
When she met Ted Hughes, a Cambridge poet, she felt that life with him would be ideal in a physical and aesthetic sense. The two were married in London on Bloomsday 16 June 1956. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes returned to Boston in 1957. Sylvia worked for one unhappy year as a lecturer in the cold arid atmosphere of Smith College. Despite her self-criticism, others regarded her as a successful teacher. For a while after her marriage, Sylvia focused so much Hughes' poetic work that she found it difficult to develop her own poetry. She was recognised for being the wife of Hughes rather than for her own poetry. During this early part of her marriage, she wrote such poems as the satirical ‘The Times are Tidy' and the philosophical  ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather'. Sylvia was beginning to have doubts about Hughes' love for her. She needed constantly to be reassured. Sylvia turned to part-time work as a secretary in a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, copying out patients' histories, which often included dreams. She also secretly resumed therapy with the woman psychiatrist who had helped her after her earlier breakdown in 1953. This influenced her poetic writing. At this time, 1959, Plath and Hughes concentrated intensely on helping each other's poetic writing.

Mental Illness
Plath's poetry became more confessional in style after she attended a seminar run by the American poet Robert Lowell. From 1959, her poetry began to evoke her intensifying mental illness. Under Hughes' influence, they moved to England in December 1959 at a time when Sylvia was writing good poetry-she had written the material for The Colossus and Other Poems which she got published in October 1960 in England. This book was well received. When they left Boston Sylvia was five months pregnant with her first child, Frieda. During her pregnancy with Frieda in 1960, Plath devoted much physical energy to home making in her London flat. Privately, she felt fatigued and barely able to keep on living. She was reluctant to reveal her distress. Plath's writing became both an escape and a burden. In February 1961 a new pregnancy ended in a miscarriage that left Sylvia feeling depressed. At this time she wrote the poem ‘Morning Song'. Plath and her husband moved to a medieval farmhouse in Devon, in the South of England, in the autumn of 1961. At that time she composed ‘Finisterre', based on a memory of a holiday in France and ‘Mirror'. Personal jealousies, differences between British and American views of gender roles, rural isolation and a return of Sylvia's depression created complications in her marriage. After her son Nicholas's birth in January 1962, Plath began to realise Hughes was unfaithful; she expressed herself through increasingly angry-and powerful-poems. It was during the following April that Plath wrote  ‘Pheasant' in opposition to her husband's game shooting and ‘Elm', which dealt with his infidelity and other subjects. In June 1962 Plath started beekeeping and was briefly overjoyed with it. Her father had been a beekeeper and had written two books about bees. In July 1962, Sylvia confirmed Ted's affair. That month she began ‘Poppies in July'. Sylvia and Ted separated in October 1962 despite sharing a visit to Ireland that September where they met a number of prominent Irish poets.

Beginning of the End
Consequently, Plath became very depressed and became addicted to sleeping pills. In the following month of October 1962, Plath wrote at least 26 of the Ariel poems. She wrote about her beekeeping in the poem ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box'. That poem referred to her brief time as a beekeeper but was also an expression of her unhappy inner thoughts and feelings. The magazines to which she sent many of these poems refused them, adding further to her depression. Caring for her children and friendships with other women became increasingly important to Plath. In December 1962, Sylvia Plath left Devon, took the children with her to London and moved into an apartment once occupied by WB Yeats. As Plath tried to make a new life for herself, very bad winter weather added to her depression. She hated being without a telephone, had bouts of illness and had the hassle of caring for her two infants. As she became increasingly depressed, she composed the poem ‘Child' in January 1963. She committed suicide by sleeping pills and gas inhalation on 11 February 1963. Most of the poems dealing with her mental trauma were published after her suicide in 1963 in the volumes Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees. These comments shed further light on the Plath: She was a bright, intelligent, and determined young woman with a need to succeed; she had a burning desire to write. She dreamed of the comfort of a home of her own where she could belong and be loved for herself. She worked very hard, pushing herself relentlessly, whether in her studies, her teaching, in her relationships or her writing. In its blend of amusing self-criticism and potent rage, her work anticipated the feminist writing that appeared in the later 1960s and the 1970s. But her work also transcended feminism. Her work often reveals a harsh, demonic, devastating inner-self. Plath was a self-revealing poet, but do not ignore her craft. Don't pay too  much attention to her personal history or legend while you ignore her art.

"Yeah," I say. "I know."

Devon scratches at a mosquito bite and blows cigarette smoke into the air. She is curled up against the brick wall of the local high school, our favorite nightly hiding spot, behind a row of bushes. It is cool and quiet. Her railthin limbs are curled up around her torso. She looks like that blonde girl from that movie last night. What was that movie?

"If I could only count on one hand how many people have wished that time would stop. Or what is it? If I could like have a nickel or some shit like that? I'd be rich? Is that how it goes? Well, I would be."

The Land of Women. That was the movie. With Meg Ryan.

"You want to know what's fucking fantastic?"

"I do, actually."

"Just thinking about all of it." Her thumb grinds the cigarette into the concrete. For a second, I picture it as a living thing, a small toxic creton or creature, pushed head first into the cool solid ground. I can see its death, the blood pumping through Devon's skinny talented fingers, dripping, oozing. I'm fascinated by deaths.

"How do you mean?" I say.

"I don't really know. I really don't. It's just... everything is always moving." She wipes her mouth. I don't know why. Do her own words make her sick? Mine do.

"I think about that sometimes, too. We are sitting against this wall in this city in this state in this country in this continent on this planet. And our planet is making its own circles, small, day-making circles. And while it's making the day-making small circles, it makes the big year-making circles around the sun. And then the entire galaxy is spinning, spinning..."

"Everything spinning. Exactly." Her head rests against the wall. There are bags beneath her eyes. There is a leaf in her hair. I leave it there. It fits, for some reason. It fits. "Exactly," she breathes into the cold night's air. "It's enough to make anyone crazy. The insignificance. How small we are. I'm small. You're small. Tiny. If I disappeared, how many people would notice? Five? Ten? Out of billions."

I don't know what to say to this. It sounds hauntingly familiar.

"You going to judge me for all of this shit?"

"What shit?"

"The shit I'm saying." Devon smiles. "You going to be a bitch and make assumptions that I'm a lunatic?"

"You know I don't do that," is my response.

But I called her this morning anyway, just to make sure she wasn't dead.

("To Eva Descending the Stair," Sylvia Plath)

In her latest book, How to (un)cage a girl, Francesca has collected 120 pages of poetry about being a teen girl. Her style is confessional, raw, and at times racy, but ultimately her work is refreshing. The title is figurative, and the text, according to the author, is about becoming free, whatever that means to you. Anyone who has ever been a teenage girl (myself included) will find something that speaks to her. Current teenage girls will certainly find this tome a treat, as it was written just for them.

This isn't Francesca's first book of poetry either. One of my favorite volumes of her work is Psyche in a Dress, a novel-in-verse that, through figures in Greek mythology, follows the journey of a young Hollywood starlet as she becomes enamored and then disenfranchised with her career, falls in and out of love, and eventually finds solace in a way she never thought she could.

For further reading, if you like FLB, you should try Sylvia Plath. Her poetry is similarly confessional, wrought with raw emotion, dramatic, and similarly accessible. Ariel, one of her more well-known collections, is certain to please, and can be found in the adult poetry section in BookPeople.

And so it came pass that we spoke of suicide, warmed to the bone by little more than breadcrumbs and the corpses of mice. Such things surely the begging for attention, supplication for a reason to live. We would like to think so.

But then the paradox of the internet's impact is that, while it is possible to 'meet' a much wider number of people than would have been the case before, this very possibility decreases the need to actually go out into the world and make thyself heard. Especially if the world at large is a place that feels you with terrors, rational and irrational - a place that makes you want to hide under the nearest table, or even call upon armageddon.

All of which would be made easier if you could believe that each and every person alive today would leave some significant mark upon the world should they peg it in the night. The truth is that most people won't. The best we can hope for is to be remembered well by small groups of people, who will nevertheless forget, with time, and in time will die themselves. Another notch on the sad bedpost of life.

Suicide or no, it seems that the most talented amongst us go young. And this has surely helped their legend. Poor souls. I wish to live to walk upon the Sussex shore, my own arcadia, my sacred grove.

The following morning was the last one before our arrival at Uni (what everyone calls college here). The trip went really fast, but the days felt like weeks--probably because of jet lag and having to lug around huge suitcases and crap despite accomplishing a lot. Nothing had been planned for this day, so we just started walking. We spent between and hour and two hours walking through Hyde Park, which is unbelievably pretty. The park has a playground with a real pirate ship, but it's for kids only (Princess Diana's Memorial Playground). There are also several incredible gardens, and the famous Kensington Palace. Afterwords we went to Regent's park, really just a short walk from Hyde park, and also pretty splendid. The parks are perfectly attended to and the landscaped bushes are so well cut that its quite surreal. We also had the chance to see the parks on an espceically bright, warm, sunny day--which made it that much more relaxing. Queen Mary's Garden at Regent's park was definitely my favorite section. It's filled with hundreds of varieties of roses, each of which has it's own specific name and associative smell. Some of my favorites included: ice cream, thinking of you, and nostalgia (actually these are the only ones I can remember).

After a long walk we found ourselves at a breakfast place for lunch. The English breakfast is super savory. I had the vegetarian option, which was almost exactly like the non-vegetarian option. It featured: a poached egg, tons of toast, hash browns, fresh cut tomato, baked beans, and a veggie sausage. It's delicious, but super heavy if actually eatin for breakfast, but great for lunch or dinner. The English also have a special brown sauce which they serve at a lot of restraunts. This sauce is sweet and gingery in flavor, and I would say almost taste's like something you might find at an Americanized Asian restraunt. I still have no idea what it's specifically for, but I imagine its for sausage. Accross the street was the Sherlock Holmes museum, as well as the Beatles and the Elvis stores, respectively. We finished our English tea and watched other tourists wear a floppy flannel hat and suck on a pipe (how many people have mouthed that thing?) while getting their picture taken. At the restraunt they also played lot's of American music. It's true that America rules the world. American media is consumed by everyone in the modern (marketed) world, or with the internet (hence you see Swedish, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and even Croatian subtitles when you download a cam of an American movie still in theaters). It's not just the U.K., Kent University has a 25% international student population and I have yet to talk to one of them who hasn't seen a wealth of American TV shows or movies at some point; wheras, I imagine most American students have to take a class to see more than one or two movies with foreign subtitles. But I digress, it was time for a trip to the British Library.

You can get guest passes at the British library to see a wealth of rare books, though I didn't have time. Instead I visited the special (tourist) room full of some of the coolest historical documents behind temperature controlled and wired cases. I only had about 30 minutes to look around the room, but I saw letters to and from important scientists like Darwin and Newton, notes by Leonardo Da Vinci, original works in handwriting from Sylvia Plath, Virginia Wolfe, and Shakespeare, and of course the Magna Carta--though this makes up only am incredibly small fraction of what all is there. I really would have liked to spend more time looking around, but we only had about an hour and a half to get our luggage and make our way to the Victoria Bus Station to catch ours--and we weren't paying for a taxi (I.E. we took it all on the Underground...again).

At Canterbury we made it to our final couch surfing host's flat. Tom was his name, and he was in some sort of social science, though I can't remember just which one. He made us a delicious meal of potatoes and lentils and we talked for at least two hours about politics and government from a subversive disposition. He'd been to some sort of squatters convention to do research for a paper he was writing. At these conventions the police try really hard to break it up by flying helicopters really low and banging on tents (despite it, apparently, being legal to squat in this country under certain circumstances). It sounded really interesting, learning to live off the grid and such, and writing critical papers about the community you are participating and belive in. Regardless, the next morning I did the dishes and I headed into the University of Kent to pick up my key and get settled.

Alas, the people I know having said crises are all female. Myself included.

Let's see...I have been dyeing my hair since I was 19, have a new Outback that financially I could have done without and was not my choice to buy, and I have enough trouble trying to figure out what the hell makes my husband happy without taking on a mistress...um, mister...(?) I have a great kid, rent a big home, make some money here or there, have great friends, vacation plans. I even sing with a rock and roll band. So, you might say, what IS the problem?

I suppose I could blame my dad. I have these nagging thoughts lately...

I have no health insurance. I went to an expensive college, and yet have never held an actual JOB job. I have no retirement fund, no will, own no home. This never used to bother me, but lately weird things bother me. Why haven't I lived up to my potential? Why are there no pictures of me now when I'm older when I had so many of me taken when I was younger (although I shudder when I look in the mirror and see myself these days...when my mom was my age I was in high school!). Then things like, I am WAY out of shape, I'm running out of time to do things like get famous or write the great American novel, let alone get the carpet in the living room clean. And all the life that has passed before me seems oddly staggering...if there is a heaven, are all my dead pets waiting for me up there, thinking about me when they but rarely pass through my thoughts? And the dead people increase slowly but ever steadily in number...and this is suddenly cause for fresh depression: I always wanted to be on a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but it seems pointless now because my dad won't be around to see it. Of course, sensible me knows it's generally cold on the day of the parade and I wonder about bathroom breaks, but...many of my friends have genuine, pressing problems...paying two mortgages, having no money, having no partner and running out of time to have children, dying parents. Wanting my life to have more genuine meaning seems silly and selfish.

I went to a funeral in the not too distant past. They said: "He enjoyed accounting." Can you imagine? I sure hope they have more to say about me at that point than that I "enjoyed accounting." I see my grandmother in the nursing home with dementia and can't imagine how empty her life must feel, day to day, what her regrets were. I don't WANT to regret things when I die, but there keep being all those missed opportunities. I feel like Sylvia Plath, afraid to pick one of the plums off the tree for fear that all the plums that she missed will be better. 

Sigh. Gotta start working on those 80's songs for band practice.

I just yesterday returned from a weekend trip to Madison to partake in the inaugural Forward Music Festival and visit with friends. The festival was mostly enjoyable, effectively satiating my craving for live music, and was a thrifty deal, at $25 for a weekend pass. Tsk tsk to festival organizers for switching the Saturday schedule at the last minute and causing me to miss the performance of The Dials, a Chicago-based band -- this was not the only changed or grossly off-schedule occurrence that happened during the festival. That said, Neko Case, Leslie and the LY's and Flosstradamus alone were worth the price of admission, not to mention the bits and scraps of many other talented performers that I was able to catch over the course of the weekend. And I'm hoping to catch Thao Nguyen (whose set I also, unfortunately, missed at FMF) at the Hotel Cafe stop in Madison later this fall.

For those of you unaware of the grandeur that is Ames, Iowa-bred, gem sweater-wearing Leslie Hall, feast your eyes post haste:

Just a few weeks prior, I was fortunate enough to catch another of my favorite live musicians in a free outdoor show downtown, when Andrew Bird played the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park. The selection of songs was spectacular -- from the many newly-penned songs played to the glorious 'Fake Palindromes', which inspired a mass audience migration to the stage -- and were enhanced by both the picturesque backdrop of the park's scenery and the bottle of merlot that my roommate and I split. The next time this man comes into your town, do not hesitate to clear your calendar and check him out.

My occupation at this moment would technically be "freelance writer," though this is hardly full-time, nor is it paying the bills, which has made a profound impact on the amount of time I've been able to devote to this blog, in addition to my choices of entertainment. If you're interested in reading some of my work, spotlighting talented queer Chicagoans, check out my recent articles from EDGE Chicago, featuring the co-founders of the Bare Boned Theatre company and singer-songwriter Ian Wilson.

Beyond that, my other work as a writer: (a) Angry insomnia-induced blog rants on a certain hockey mother, (b) Dozens upon dozens of cover letters, (c) The beginnings of a manuscript -- yes, a manuscript, tentatively titled Adventures in Wonderland.

The manuscript is turning out to be based very much on my own life, drawing inspiration from everything ranging from Sylvia Plath poetry to subway performance artists. It is about the adventures of a young gay man new to a large urban setting in a world of vigilant social networking, intrusive advertising, online dating sites, divisive and a wilting economy. It's about disappointment, fear and naivety coming head to head with hope, optimism and love. Wandering lost through the world at the very time when you're expected to be found. Keep your eyes out for a preview to be released on this blog before Halloween.

In addition to writing, I've been spending some time volunteering, which has been a total blast. Two weekends ago -- during that freakish flood of the city -- I had the treat of participating in the fabulously ornate Aware Affair: Superheroes fundraiser, hosted at the MCA Loft by the Test Positive Aware Network (TPAN). My duty? Wander the glamorous space with a clipboard in one hand and a drink (compliments of the open bar) in the other with my very own personal male-model-hero, as pictured below, in the green briefs at center, at my side:

This boy -- who was STRAIGHT, who knew!? -- was just one of many models who showed up for the gig as eye candy for the predominantly male guests. I had to laugh when he expressed concern over the amount of attention that he was receiving from some of the older men at the event -- did he not realize that he was covered only in tiny briefs, glitter and body paint? I'm not sure what the expectation was, but I'm thankful that I was paired with this particular heterosexual male model-musician-student instead of the Republican in the red briefs who spent ten minutes explaining to me why John McCain's military experience alone should be reason enough to secure any vote, regardless of any lacking in the Palin department.

'Til next time, I'm outzo.

You naturally begin reading a book like this with a diverting little game of spot-the-allusion. Oh, look: 'Then last night, in a dream, I returned to Beckfield again.' And look, this poor American heroine is also working as a companion to a Mrs Van Hopper! This contemporary heroine, however, isn't completely resourceless - she has published a short story collection, and is desperately trying to work on her first novel. What follows is a story about literary reputations, literary myth-making, literary jealousies, and how all these collide with real people's real lives. Rebecca Slaughter-Midwinter was a glamorous poet and feminist icon: in the narrator's words, she 'spoke to our generation as Sylvia Plath had to the generation before'. Add the troubled Max Midwinter, 'the man who turned his lovely wife from a minor literary light to an international martyr by inducing her to take her own life', and you have more than faint echoes of Plath and Ted Hughes.

Max and the heroine meet at the holiday resort and are united by their sorrows, as the latter's first husband also died; the whirlwind romance leads to a surprise engagement, and they return to England to Max's weird, snobbish, feuding family, and to a press furore over an ongoing court case. The family includes the meddlesome Aunt Bea (who turns out to be even more meddlesome than you'd think), Rebecca's two unhappy young children, and the coterie of Max's brother, affectionately known as Jonathan Junkie - among a cast of many others. (This is where the novel gets a little bit hard to follow; I'm not sure if it was my fault or the book's, but it took me a while to begin to keep track of who was who. Then again, if the meaning was to make me feel as disoriented as the heroine, it worked.) As for the court case, Rebecca's cousin has written a biography of her, accusing Max of murdering his wife, only to be sued by the Midwinters for libel. Max has an unfortunate tendency to drown his stress in drink and womanising, and the heroine - at first isolated and miserable; eventually pregnant and even more isolated and miserable - finds that her own life is beginning to resemble Rebecca's famous last book, The Marriage Hearse. Aided by the eccentric Danny, Rebecca's friend now editing her letters, she finds out more about Rebecca's work, her drug addiction, and what really might have happened to her.

At first, this American heroine seems less of a shrinking violet than Du Maurier's Mrs De Winter, but it turns out her - and her earlier name(less)sake's - real tragedy isn't that she'll never measure up to Rebecca, but that she comes to terms with this and still can't step out of the shadow. I can't say anything less cryptic without giving away the plot, which has twists and turns galore - and the best of these can be summed up by this quote from the first chapter:

[. . .] there's nothing worse than living inside someone else's story. Let them talk you out of believing your own story, and you might as well bury yourself alive. Here's how I found out: I fell in love with a man, only to find myself in a book written by another woman.

Who the 'other woman' really is, whose story this really is, is the question: the Rebecca story jostles with the Sylvia Plath-Ted Hughes story, both of which jostle with The Marriage Hearse and the heroine's attempts to control her life (and write her own novel), both of which jostle with the many different version of the story by the various Midwinters, all of which jostle with the things you'd expect from a feminist interpretation of Rebecca but don't turn out quite as you'd expect . . . All of this may sound awfully pretentious, but I can't put it any other way: the tension between what is familiar and what isn't, what you'd expect and what the book delivers, is the story. As soon as I thought I had The Other Rebecca pegged, it grinned and tweaked my nose again. Nothing in this novel is as it seems.

I think the book deserves to be much better known than it is (or at least appears to be: I'd never heard of it, myself, before Ariadne's review inspired me to look into it) but its playful intelligence might just be its biggest problem. The cover quote calls The Other Rebecca a 'gripping, romantic thriller': gripping it is, but as far as romance goes, it rather shows what a nightmare living with a brooding, unpredictable, selfish, secretive, self-pitying man like Max De Winter/Midwinter would actually be. (Echoes of Moira's Rochester post here. . .) The novel does have the page-turning quality of a good thriller, but as a thriller it fails because of its lack of focus: instead of having one overarching central mystery, a succession of mysteries replace each other, just like the plots and allusions jostle and overlie each other. Some puzzles go unanswered; the narrator-heroine ends on a puzzled note herself, and challenges the reader to answer the questions. None of this matters, because the book is really a big question mark laced with dark comedy, only pretending (with tongue in cheek) to be a thriller - but if it was originally marketed as a 'romantic thriller', I think that made The Other Rebecca a huge disservice. Don't read it if you're looking for the same thrills that Du Maurier's Rebecca gave you, only wrapped in a new package. Read it because it's clever, insightful, and fun in a different, mischievous way.

Bloomsbury  1997  paperback  279 pp.  ISBN: 0747531668

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Sylvia Plath.

Sylvia Plath reads one of her poems, "The Applicant". Pay attention to her enunciation and the auditory devices used and their effects.

I barely have time to write let alone even have the inspiration to write about anything, so here is a poem by Sylvia Plath that I like and actually understand. Somehing about Sylvia Plath gives me the shivers--her writing is mysteriously haunting and spiritual as if her soul were reaching out to me and tickling my senses, yet they are so human and alive, so of the present that enables me to look at the banality of simple things in life with a renewed perspective.

(Which I guess are the effects of all poems, but I am poem-illiterate, and my knowledge in poetry is severely limited. Actually, I am illiterate--period).

Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

So far, the ORDEAL is over. Which means that :

1. I no longer need to  apply rubbing alcohol on my lips and scrape off the pus and feel the sting of it on my wounds, every 12 hours. I counted about fourteen lesions and a few blisters on my lips.

2. I can sleep soundly without feeling like wanting to die.

3. I can cry if I want to without the threat of me choking/being asphyxiated on my own snot.

4. I can open my mouth, chew and swallow, drink and TALK without feeling like it's pure torture.  (I am not kidding, imagine having the corners of your lips sewed up, plus lesions in strategic places on your lips!)

5. I am more sociable. When I get extremely sick, I have complete apathy for people. Even if they are concerned about me, being sick makes me selfish and want to hide away from living beings.

I still need to go back to the doctor for follow-up and my temperament has almost stabilized. In other news, I have finished reading this:

Some people would find this depressing to read but I think it's not. Maybe I should be troubled because I can identify with Esther Greenwood's feelings, on the contrary I felt it comforting to know that these thoughts are not just my own but in other women they are altered but run parallel. I was able to finish it in five hours stopping to eat and pray etc... And I like the fact that her voice is so clear, so precise and I didn't need to rest every now and then because the words were too big for me.

Definitely recommended to readers with an open mind about depression and psychological disorders/treatment.

Or kill me instead.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

So wrote Dylan Thomas, thereby immotalising the death of his father. There is a longstanding association between the personal melancholia of artists and their creative fascination with death, whether seen through the lens of longing, fear, ambivalence, courage, despair, relief or some more complex commingling, with poetry acting as a powerful meidum for such thoughts. Frequently, however it is death in the form of suicide which prevails: Anne Sexton, like her friend and contemporary, Sylvia Plath, was prolific on the subject of suicide (which, eventually, they both committed). Eloquent and sharp, her poem Wanting to Die makes this observation:

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

By this logic, the need for death is obvious, predetermined: it goes without saying. But human beings are fragile, pain-filled creatures. There are few pleasant ways for us to die, and fewer still by our own hand. In the days of ancient Rome, suicide was a socially accepted practice, particularly when, as was often the case, staying alive would only provoke one mad emperor or another to kill you in a far more unpleasantly creative manner than slitting your wrists in a warm bath. Classic literature even romanticises the concept - Romeo and Juliet is the obvious example, but particularly in feudal Japan, love-suidice pacts were a tragic staple of Yoshiwara society. More recently, George Orwell's 1984 created a whole new horror from the concept: a violent, inescapably totalitarian world in which even the freedom to die has been effectively withdrawn, forcing the populace to endure a life of brutality and fear. 

Historically, the human reaction to suicide has been mixed. Judeo-Christian believers tend to respond in the negative, on the grounds that the act falls squarely within the definition of murder, which is a sin. Others view it as a human right or individual freedom, drawing a moral distinction between how we treat ourselves and how we should treat others. Either way, the concept of a situation in which anyone would want to die tends, rightly, to make us uncomfortable. 

Which leads us to the problem of euthenasia, and what it means. Despite longstanding anecdotal evidence and social speculation, keeping a positive attitude makes no medical difference in fighting cancer, which, though true, undercuts an extremely powerful (and useful) instinct for suvival. Because human beings, though mortal, do not like to confront their own mortality. Implausible hope has a place in our universal pantheon: if nothing else, it keeps us sane, gives us strength and can, on occasion, help us hang on long enough for the cavalry to arrive. But it's not a panacea, and at times, the easier, braver, more honest path is to accept the inevitable, the better to meet it gracefully. This latter point is held by euthenasia advocates, because once you have acknowledged that a painful death can't be averted, unless you believe in the innate sinfulness of removing yourself from the world, there is a certain logic to ending matters peacefully, on your own terms.

Consider, then, the heart-wrenching case of Angelique Flowers, who died - violently, vomiting fecal matter - at the age of 31. Having suffered Crohne's Disease for half her life, she was then diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer. She didn't fear dying, but only the pain it would, inevitably, cause her. Before she died, Angelique devoted much of her time to exploring the possibility of euthenasia, which isn't legal in Australia, and although she fultimately obtained a drug which would've allowed her to die peacefully, she chose not to use it: either through fear of repercussions for her family or a final change of heart, we'll never know. But for me, the point of legalising euthenasia is choice: one which allows a greater scope for both dignity and courage. We do not jail those who attempt suicide and fail; neither should we punish the dying by demanding that they expire in a prolonged, painful fashion.

Because mercy is not always the same as a happy ending. Sometimes, it just means a lessened measure of grief.

*I don't have a five year plan; I do not believe I am capable of planning beyond about five months ahead of myself at the best of times. Five years ago, my five year plan had me in a coffin circa-2006.

Speaking of journalism, it is not often that I come down on the side of the Labour party, but I actually applauded Siobhan McDonagh MP's call for a Labour leadership challenge. She was interviewed tonight on Channel Four News and I thought she - for one thing - had a good argument (that Brown was not elected, and because of that, he has not had to lay out his policies; so people - including his own MPs - do not know exactly what those policies are) and - for a second - was able to hold her own in the face of a very tough interview. I felt that Samira Ahmed was needlessly argumentative in her interview, since Ms McDonagh was giving frank and concise answers to difficult questions. I do not agree with the standard, aggressive-interviewer journalism that is all over television. Even when "grilling" very biased types such as politicians, there is no need to bound into an interview, teeth exposed and clenched. I hate watching Paxman-style interviewers, who seem to be more interested in bravado than answers; in showing up an interviewee as weak and "below" the interviewer than actually hearing their side of the story. I understand that perhaps some people do tune-in to televised news in the hope of seeing an argument; but I think this is just more evidence that news broadcasts are being needlessly dumbed down. I read an interesting comment piece in this week's Sunday Herald, where Joanna Blythman attributes the Guardian's huge interview last week with Alistair Darling (where, to paraphrase, the Chancellor of the Exchequer claimed that the economy was doomed and that we are all fucked) to good interview techniques. None of this all-out, I'm-better-than-you bravado; Darling was relaxed by the journalist and felt at ease to be candid and truthful.

Actually, I also applauded Darling's honesty during the Guardian interview. It is strange that people complain that politicians do nothing but lie, then when one does tell the truth, people complain about that instead. How very British of us! That is, however, two applauds for Labour in one week. They're obviously going up in my estimation!

At present, I am reading a combination of books which are making an interesting collage-of-concepts in my head. The death, despair, deceit, disorientation and derangement of Dostoevsky's The Idiot is mingling with Sheila Weller's half-cocked decision to write a triple biography of Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon in Girls Like Us. The latter is a very good biography of all three women, however it is laced with feminist thought and strung together with the could-or-could-not-be idea that these three women are somehow linked beyond having fucked James Taylor. The former is a masterpiece that has changed my opinion on organised religion. Strange to read them at the same time, I tell you! Add to that Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Sylvia Plath's The Colossus and snippets from the middle chapters of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and the odd page-long revelation from Lloyd Whitesell's The Music of Joni Mitchell*, and you've got yourself a headache worthy of Prince Myshkin himself!

*I refuse to start actually reading the latter two books before I've finished the others; otherwise I will never finish any of them. I always get into this mess. I'm physically unable to read one book at a time. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

In any case, I am now ready for uni, what with my crazy conspiracy theories; angry left wing rants; an abundance of up-their-own-arse books; the ability to type; and anything else that seems requisite that has been mentioned in this blog, then subsequently forgotten during the outro. I also have a swish new Manbag that makes me look less tranny-more man; and a new haircut which makes me look less student-more downy; since I did it myself during what can only be termed an epiphany at five in the morning, using a pair of old scissors and two mirrors used in tandem. Long live DIY!

Daddy by: Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time--

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- 

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not 

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I'm finally through.

The black telephone's off at the root,

The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Tulips by: Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too excitable, its is winter here. 

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,

They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,

Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,

So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage

My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;

Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat

Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.

Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books

Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free -

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.

They concentrate my attention, that was happy

Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.