Posts Tagged ‘Sylvia Plath’
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes”*…
Scene 3: whoops!
In an earlier post, I laid out a history of “banana peel” (and orange peel) humor, extending back to the early 1800s. Orange peel-slipping humor dates to at least 1817 and banana peel jokes to 1858. Banana peel jokes were told on stage in 1890, and Vaudeville performers may have performed banana-slipping gags on stage in the early 1900s.
When I wrote the earlier post, the earliest banana slipping gag on film that I found was from 1913. As it turns out, however, the banana slipping gag was already so old and tired by 1912, that advice for aspiring screenwriters cautioned against using it for cheap laughs…
The history of the banana peel gag, at “Peels in Film, Song and Poetry.”
* Ludwig Wittgenstein
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As we watch our steps, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956, at a party in Cambridge, England, that Fulbright Scholar Sylvia Plath met poet Ted Hughes.
…the one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge… I screamed in myself, thinking, Oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.
Her wish was granted; they were married later that same year. Plath killed herself, in London, in 1963, several weeks after The Bell Jar came out; in 1981 her Collected Poems (edited by Hughes, who oversaw her posthumous publications) won the Pulitzer Prize.
Synesthesia…
British designer Christophe Gowans put himself to the task of imagining “if best-selling albums had been books instead”…
Many more pulpy pleasures at “The Record Books.”
[TotH to Paris Review]
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As we head for the library, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956, at a party in Cambridge, England, that Fulbright Scholar Sylvia Plath met poet Ted Hughes.
…the one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge… I screamed in myself, thinking, Oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.
Her wish was granted; they were married later that same year. They didn’t make beautiful music together, but did each create a stream of powerfully-important books: Plath killed herself, in London, in 1963, several weeks after The Bell Jar came out; in 1981 her Collected Poems (edited by Hughes, who oversaw her posthumous publications) won the Pulitzer Prize. Hughes was himself a great success as a poet (and children’s writer). Critics regularly rank him as one of the best poets of his generation; he served as Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998.
Examining the text closely. Very closely…
From “Ryan,” B to the F, a Tumbler in which he examines– very closely examines– the novelization of the first of the three Back to the Future films, which was published in advance of the release of the movie…
PAGE ONE
If you were writing the first words of a novel version of Back to the Future, how would you do it? Maybe you’d introduce the concept of time being important, like the film did with all them crazy clocks. Maybe instead you’d introduce Marty and Doc, show who they are and what their relationship is. Well, anyway, you’re totally wrong!
The correct answer is to KILL EVERYBODY…
Read along– it gets even better– at B to the F… [TotH to the always-illuminating Pop Loser]
As we explore the frontiers of editorial license, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956, at a party in Cambridge, England, that Fulbright Scholar Sylvia Plath met poet Ted Hughes.
…the one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge… I screamed in myself, thinking, Oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.
Her wish was granted; they were married later that same year. Plath killed herself, in London, in 1963, several weeks after The Bell Jar came out; in 1981 her Collected Poems (edited by Hughes, who oversaw her posthumous publications) won the Pulitzer Prize.
Special Summer Cheesecake Edition…
From Flavorwire, “Vintage Photos of Rock Stars In Their Bathing Suits.”
(Special Seasonal Bonus: from Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton to Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, “Take a Dip: Literary Greats In Their Bathing Suits.”)
As we reach for the Coppertone, we might might wish a soulful Happy Birthday to musician Isaac Hayes; he was born on this date in 1942. An early stalwart at legendary Stax Records (e.g., Hayes co-wrote and played on the Sam and Dave hits “Soul Man” and “Hold On, I’m Coming”), Hayes began to come into his own after the untimely demise of Stax’s headliner, Otis Redding. First with his album Hot Buttered Soul, then with the score– including most famously the theme– for Shaft, Hayes became a star, and a pillar of the more engaged Black music scene of the 70s. Hayes remained a pop culture force (e.g., as the voice of Chef on South Park) until his death in 2008. (Note: some sources give Hayes birth date as August 20; but county records in Covington, KY, his birthplace suggest that it was the 6th.)
Your correspondent is headed for his ancestral seat, and for the annual parole check-in and head-lice inspection that does double duty as a family reunion. Connectivity in that remote location being the challenged proposition that it is, these missives are likely to be in abeyance for the duration. Regular service should resume on or about August 16.
Meantime, lest readers be bored, a little something to ponder:
Depending who you ask, there’s a 20 to 50 percent chance that you’re living in a computer simulation. Not like The Matrix, exactly – the virtual people in that movie had real bodies, albeit suspended in weird, pod-like things and plugged into a supercomputer. Imagine instead a super-advanced version of The Sims, running on a machine with more processing power than all the minds on Earth. Intelligent design? Not necessarily. The Creator in this scenario could be a future fourth-grader working on a science project.
Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that we may very well all be Sims. This possibility rests on three developments: (1) the aforementioned megacomputer. (2) The survival and evolution of the human race to a “posthuman” stage. (3) A decision by these posthumans to research their own evolutionary history, or simply amuse themselves, by creating us – virtual simulacra of their ancestors, with independent consciousnesses…
Read the full story– complete with a consideration of the more-immediate (and less-existentially-challenging) implications of “virtualization”– and watch the accompanying videos at Big Think… and channel your inner-Phillip K. Dick…
Y’all be good…
Doodle-doodle-do…
Sometimes in moments of distraction; sometimes, idleness… we all do it: doodle. Lest one feel at all self-conscious about it, our friends at Flavorwire have collected “Idle Doodles by Famous Authors“…
Notes on tango, Jorge Luis Borges (via Notre Dame University)
Borges’ self-portrait (after he went blind)
Readers can find the casual jottings of Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabakov, David Foster Wallace, and others at “Idle Doodles by Famous Authors.”
As we refill our pens, we might recall that it was on this date in 1888 that Walt Whitman put marginalia to a different use: he sent a sheet of inked emendations to the editors of The Riverside Literature Series No. 32 calling attention to mistakes in their recently-printed version of his poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” “Somehow you have got a couple of bad perversions in ‘O Captain,'” he wrote. “I send you a corrected sheet.”
source: Library of Congress
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