Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life

“... The exception is Sylvia Plath, who, with her perfect blond pageboy, wide smile and cinched-waist dresses, looked less like a proper poet and more like Doris Day. ... In the intervening decades she has become a protean figure, an emblem of different things to different people, depending upon their viewpoint — a visionary, a victim, a martyr, a feminist icon, a schizophrenic, a virago, a prisoner of gender — or, perhaps, a genius, as both Plath and Hughes maintained during her lifetime. ... One would think there is little to be added, if only because of the avalanche of books — biographies, meta-biographies, pathographies (to borrow Joyce Carol Oates’s term), memoirs, critical studies, letters, journals, novels — that have been published about Plath since her suicide (which, for some people, is the only thing they know about her). In the last few years alone, two fat volumes of her correspondence have been published and parsed by a whole raft of reviewers (including me). ...”

NY Times

LitHub: What We Don’t Know About Sylvia Plath

NY Times: Who Bought Sylvia Plath’s Stuff?

LitHub: A Tale of Two Sylvias: On the Letters Cover Controversy

Guardian: Unseen Sylvia Plath letters claim domestic abuse by Ted Hughes

amazom: Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956 – 1963

2008 February: Sylvia Plath, 2011 May: "Daddy" (Video), 2017 July: Ariel (1965), 2018 April: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956, 2018 January: Against Completism: On Sylvia Plath’s New Short Story
 

Notable Literary Deaths in 2020

“The year is at an end, and I think I speak for pretty much everyone when I say: good riddance. (While we don’t have any guarantee that 2021 will be an improvement, it seems like it would have to be.) Among the many unhappinesses of this year, we lost what seems like an unusually large number of members of the literary community, from poets to novelists to editors to critics to publishers to booksellers. To them, we say a last thank you, and goodbye. They will be missed. ...”

LitHub

Diego Maradona, anti-imperial symbol

“Even in death, Diego Maradona continued to torment the peculiar empire-nostalgic milieu that is conservative England. The scars of Mexico ’86 have clearly still not healed. The Times painted a portrait of a ‘self-obsessed’ and ‘self-destructive’ figure whose ‘rare gifts were ruined by self-indulgence,’ with paternalism dripping from the page: ‘That such a supreme talent could be so undisciplined, that he felt he needed to cheat … was perhaps a pointer to the unhappy times ahead.’ The Telegraph obituary could wait no longer than the end of the first sentence to denounce him ‘a liar, a cheat and an egomaniac,’ concluding that whatever about his talents, ‘ultimately Maradona remained a boy from the barrios.’ This was not meant as a compliment, and the snobbish tones were nothing new to British media depictions of Maradona. ...”

Africa Is a Country

Flexi disc

 “The flexi disc (also known as a phonosheet, Sonosheet or Soundsheet, a trademark) is a phonograph record made of a thin, flexible vinyl sheet with a molded-in spiral stylus groove, and is designed to be playable on a normal phonograph turntable.  Flexible records were commercially introduced as the Eva-tone Soundsheet  in 1962, and were very popular among children and teenagers and mass-produced by the state publisher in the Soviet government. Before the advent of the compact disc, flexi discs were sometimes used as a means to include sound with printed material such as magazines and music instruction books. A flexi disc could be moulded with speech or music and bound into the text with a perforated seam, at very little cost and without any requirement for a hard binding. One problem with using the thinner vinyl was that the stylus's weight, combined with the flexi disc's low mass, would sometimes cause the disc to stop spinning on the turntable and become held in place by the stylus.  ...”

W - Flexi disc

NPR: It's Thin, It's Plastic, It's Back: Flexi Discs Find New Fans (Audio/Video)

Bend But Dont Break: The Resilience Of The Flexi Disc

The Wacky, Wiggly, Razor-Thin World of the Flexi Disc (Video)

Discogs

YouTube: Records: The Flexi Disc or Sound Sheet, Another Beatles Christmas Record (1964), National Geographic - Songs of the Humpback Whale 33 1/3 (1979)

The Radical Legacy of Erroll Garner

“If jazz polls don’t become collateral damage of COVID-19, Erroll Garner: The Octave Remastered Series (Mack Avenue) is the odds-on favorite for best reissue of 2020. It’s a 12-CD release, one for each LP that the Pittsburgh-born pianist (1921-1977) and his manager Martha Glaser (1921-2014) co-produced on their own Octave Records between 1959 and 1973. ... He debuted that megahit on a 1954 Mercury session, and would interpret it in practically every set he played for the rest of his life, usually before SRO audiences (his contract mandated that they be racially integrated) in concert halls and upscale nightclubs, where both “civilians” and cognoscenti honed into Garner’s instantly identifiable sound—melody-centric, ever-swinging—and highly developed technique. ...”

Jazz Times

W - Erroll Garner

You Tube: Erroll Garner live 63' & 64' 1:03:03

Your Year In Maps

Emily Erdos/Bloomberg CityLab

“How were the landscapes of our lives reshaped by 2020? At the close of a year unlike any other, we asked CityLab readers to create their own maps that show what their worlds look like after coronavirus and its coinciding economic, environmental and social sea changes. This marked a continuation of a project we started in April, as the first wave of stay-at-home orders and shutdowns swept hundreds of countries around the globe. Like the maps we received earlier this year, the sample below is a remarkable tour of Covid-19’s reach, representing stories from four continents and many walks of life. ...”

Bloomberg CityLab

How Did Madagascar Become the World’s Biggest Producer of Vanilla?

 

Armed guards look after a pile of vanilla pods in Bemalamatra, Madagascar.

“It’s pretty likely that there is exactly one product from Madagascar in your home right now—no more, no less. That product is vanilla, and Madagascar is at the moment the world’s leading producer of this ubiquitous natural flavor—despite the fact that Madagascar is a very strange country to be the world’s leading producer of vanilla.Vanilla, at least the vanilla we eat, is not native to Madagascar; it originated some 10,000 miles away. Madagascar is also a chaotic place to do business, as an article in The Economist’s 1843 Magazine showed in 2019. The modern vanilla industry in Madagascar involves crushing poverty, splurge-producing wealth, theft, murder, and money laundering—in addition to natural disasters and the leveling of pristine forests.

Atlas Obscura

W - Vanilla

YouTube: Madagascar: Vanilla farmers

 

Drawing of the Vanilla plant from the Florentine Codex (c. 1580) and description of its use and properties written in the Nahuatl language

The Lenox Hill carriage houses from a fairytale

 

“There’s nothing like walking through Manhattan during Christmastime and coming upon a row of elfin former carriage houses that look like they were made out of gingerbread and belong in a holiday fairytale. This ‘stable row,’ as it was known in the late 19th century, is on East 69th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues. The north side of the street is home to several conjoined carriage houses of different architectural styles and sizes—but all with the traditional arched entryway to fit not just horses but the tall carriages they pulled. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Peering Into Soccer’s Future

 

The world’s best clubs are already getting a competitive edge through psychology, data and nutrition. The next frontier? Better set pieces.

“Occasionally, back in the days when we had things like parties and social lives, someone would find out, no matter how hard I tried to avoid telling them, that I was a journalist, and ask a question to which there is no answer: How do you decide what to write about? The first problem is that the reality of journalism — asking people questions and then writing down what they say — is frequently much less creative than it is in the popular (and the journalist’s) imagination. At times it can feel like a craft, the act of mining and polishing the raw material of information, rather than the more writerly art of conjuring it from the depths of your imagination.The second is that articles arise in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes, you decide to write about something because you are told to write about something. ...” Rory Smith

NY Times

Not all of soccer’s innovations make sense in the test phase.

Future Days (Remastered) - Can (2014)

“Damo Suzuki's last album with Can is a definite highpoint from the band's incredible ouvre. All the elements that make the band so timelss and radical sounding even now are here in abundance: experimentation with all manner of electronic and organic sound textures and atmospherics pinned down by Jaki Liebezeit's jawdropping rhythms and augmented by an advanced melodic sensibility. Future Days is for me the best album I made with Can," vocalist Damo Suzuki has said. ... Indeed, the four tracks on the German experimental rockers' fifth studio album synthesize everything they did weirdly well. Can could strip back for three minutes of skewered psychedelic pop (’Moonshake’) or split the difference between Miles Davis's Bitches Brew and Isaac Hayes's Hot Buttered Soul (’Spray’), or find new craters on the moon for ‘Bel Air,’ a lounge suite dizzying up the entire second side of the record. All of it is Can, and none of it is commonplace. -R.F. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Future Days [Full Album] 41:07

2011 September: Can, 2011 February: Plight & Premonition, 2011 June: Persian Love, 2013 October: Flux + Mutability - David Sylvian and Holger Czukay (1989) , 2014 June: Holger Czukay - Der Osten Ist Rot, Rome Remains Rome (1984/7), 2012 June: The Lost Tapes, 2016 March: Invaders Of The Heart - Jah Wobble (1982), 2017 April: Jah Wobble, The Edge, Holger Czukay - Snake Charmer (1983), 2017 June: The Legend Lives On… Jah Wobble In Betrayal (1980), 2017 July: Can - The Singles (2017), 2017 September: Holger Czukay (1938-2017), 2019 September: Holger Czukay - Cinema (2018)

The world’s most mysterious silver cups

 

A detail portrays a scene where Livia and her infant son Tiberius escape a forest fire

“Rome, 1604: Pietro Aldobrandini, an aristocratic Italian cardinal and patron of the arts, is hosting a grand meal at his private residence. Surveying the dining room, one of his guests, Fabio Masetti, ambassador to the Duke of Modena and Reggio, is impressed by the awe-inspiring collection of silver on display, glittering in the candlelight. The following day, Masetti writes to his boss, singling out a set of monumental silver objects that caught his eye: ‘I observed 12 [large serving dishes] with the 12 Caesars, and within sculpted all their triumphs and famous accomplishments, valued at 2,000 scudi.’ His words describe the so-called 'Silver Caesars' – a set of 12 silver-gilt 'standing cups' that together comprise a stunning example of Renaissance silverware, arguably the most important suite of silver to have survived from the period. ...”

BBC

W - Warren Cup

                                                            Warren Cup, side A

The Artists Who Redesigned a War-Shattered Europe

 

For the dust jacket of the book “Ten Years Without Lenin” (1934), the designer Mikhail Razulevich montaged the Soviet revolutionary into a panorama of housing blocks, factories, and army detachments.

“... That’s the conclusion of ‘Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented,’ a momentous new show that papers the walls of the Museum of Modern Art with posters, magazines, advertisements and brochures from an earlier age of upheaval. Exactly a century ago, a cross-section of artists from Moscow to Amsterdam opened their eyes in a continent reshaped by war and revolution. Rapid advances in media technology made their old academic training feel useless. They were living through a political and social earthquake. And when the earthquake hit, what did these artists do? They rethought everything. They disclaimed the autonomy that modern art usually assigned to itself. They plunged their work into dialogue with politics, economics, transport, commerce. Nothing was automatic for these artistic pioneers, who took it upon themselves to recast painting, photography and design as a kind of public works job. ...”

NY Times

The designers Elena Semenova and Lydia Naumova collaborated on a suite of informational posters for trade unions, such as this one from 1929. The headline to Stalin’s right reads: “Every worker must keep a keen eye on how the net cost of production is lowered at their workplace.”

Rediscovering the Mystic Beauty of UK Psych-Folk Outfit Trees

“... The group was one of many British artists in that era who were fusing the traditional folk music of their home country with the psychedelic rock that was being baked to perfection on the West Coast of the United States. Like Costa’s home, the music of Trees stood at the musical midway point between England’s mystical, pagan past and the electric sounds celebrated at Glastonbury.Though Trees were part of a scene that included luminaries like Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and the Incredible String Band, their two lush, incandescent albums—1970’s The Garden of Jane Delawney and 1971’s On The Shore—never achieved widespread acclaim. In the five decades since their inception, the group’s legacy has been kept alive through the efforts of dedicated fans like Danger Mouse, who built the title track for Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere on a sample of Trees’ version of the traditional ballad ‘Geordie.’ ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Reissue CDs Weekly: Trees - 50th Anniversary box set

W - Trees

Discogs

YouTube: Trees (50th Anniversary Edition) 37 videos

Pure Sonic Foam

“The pure sonic foam of this Ambalek video, ‘The Hidden Path,’ can, like much great quiet music, appear unassuming at first. Dispense, please, with the sense as a listener that something this quiet must be played quiet, as if there is some cultural balance to be maintained, to be adhered to. ... This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music. Video originally posted at the YouTube channel of Ambalek. More from Ambalek, who is based in London, at soundcloud.com/ambalek and instagram.com/_ambalek.”

disquiet (Video)

2020 November: Cross-Device Ambient

Winter wonderland

 

Winter Landscape - Hendrick Avercamp (about 1630). “Winter was fun in the 1630s to judge from this painting by a Dutch artist who specialised in snowy scenes. They had no central heating or modern thermal clothes, bubonic plague remained rife and famine was a threat – but the people in this picture couldn’t care less. They’re too busy enjoying the ice, whose vast expanse is crowded with fun-seekers. There’s even a game of ice-golf. Avercamp sets it all in a mysterious pale world of frozen whites and misty yellows. His art of winter reflects the period known as the Little Ice Age when temperatures plummeted in Europe and scenes like this also occurred on the River Thames.” National Galleries of Scotland

 

Frosty Morning - JMW Turner (1813). “A man and girl stop to watch workers on a frozen roadside while another figure comes up the cold lane towards them. The earth is a hard glistening mystery. Morning’s light reveals a terrible chill in the atmosphere. Turner makes us see the beauty and bitterness of the countryside in winter.” Tate

 Lavacourt Under Snow -  Claude Monet (1878-81). “Winter really is a wonderland in Monet’s scintillated eyes. Alive to the fleeting impressions of light, he joys in the blue snowy foreground giving way to the golden glitter of an icy sky.” The National Gallery 

 Massacre of the Innocents - Pieter Bruegel the Elder (circa 1565-67). “The first artist to show the wonder of winter was Bruegel – but there’s not much skating going on in this snowbound village where soldiers have arrived to slaughter newborns at the behest of King Herod. Rudolf II, who owned this, had much of the violence painted out – perhaps so he could sit back and enjoy the snow.” The Royal Collection Trust, Wikipedia, The Royal Collection Trust: Surprising Revelations

Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein (1914)

“Tender Buttons is a 1914 book by American writer Gertrude Stein consisting of three sections titled ‘Objects’, ‘Food’, and ‘Rooms’. While the short book consists of multiple poems covering the everyday mundane, Stein's experimental use of language renders the poems unorthodox and their subjects unfamiliar. Stein began composition of the book in 1912 with multiple short prose poems in an effort to ‘create a word relationship between the word and the things seen’ using a ‘realist’ perspective. She then published it in three sections as her second book in 1914. Tender Buttons has provoked divided critical responses since its publication. It is renowned for its Modernist approach to portraying the everyday object and has been lauded as a ‘masterpiece of verbal Cubism‘. Its first poem, ‘A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass’, is arguably its most famous, and is often cited as one of the quintessential works of Cubist literature. The book has also been, however, criticized as ‘a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax’. ...”

Wikipedia

Jacket2: Twenty-two on 'Tender Buttons'

Jacket2: .The making of 'Tender Buttons'

amazon

2007 November: Gertrude Stein, 2011 July: The making of "Tender Buttons", 2012 March: The Steins Collect, 2012 May: Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the record straight, 2014 November: Lost Generation, 2015 January: The Making of an American by Edward White, May 2020: Seeing Robert Wilson plain

Literary Paper Dolls: Clarissa By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik Image

“There is a sound made by a room full of people at a party. It’s a radio between stations with a stretch and pop and one voice coming into focus and certain stories turning up like bingo balls from the collective burble. I love this sound.I throw parties for The Paris Review. ... Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about the rich interior life of humans in a metropolis, the minds of people inevitably tangled with each other. The mind we enter most often is that of a woman just past fifty on a day she throws a party in London in June of 1923. ... Virginia Woolf herself is famous in part for escaping, and drawing attention to, this fate. Clarissa excels then with what she has: parties, memories, loyalties, ‘a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly,’ the florist ‘who thought her kind,’ and her servants, who respect her so much that, when taking her parasol, they ‘handled it like a sacred weapon.’ ...”

The Paris Review: Clarissa

PR - Literary Paper Dolls: Cassandra, Clarissa, Sula, Franny, Rebecca, etc.

A Love I Can Feel (John Holt, Freddie McGregor, Johnny Clarke, Leroy Smart, Cornell Campbell)

“DJ Algoriddim: A Love I Can Feel: John Holt, Candid Eye: Cedric Im Brooks & David Madden [left channel], Dub You Can Feel: Dub Specialist [right channel], A Love I Can Feel: Dennis Alcapone, When I'm Ready: Freddie McGregor, When I'm Ready Version, Jacklyn: Lone Ranger, Proud As I Am: B.B. Seaton [left channel], Proud As I Am Version: Sound Dimension [right channel] Love You Still: George Whiteman [left channel], Love You Still Version: Sound Dimension [right channel], Rhythm Of My Heart: Carl Dawkins [left channel], Rhythm Of My Heart Version: Sound Dimension [right channel], Wicked Intention: Maureen Thomas, Original Rhythm: Jim Nastic [left channel], Ramona: Unknown [right channel], Ebony Goddess: Devon Green, ...”

YouTube: A Love I Can Feel (John Holt, Freddie McGregor, Johnny Clarke, Leroy Smart, Cornell Campbell)

Ebo Taylor: The Lost Tapes

“In 1980, Ebo Taylor recorded an album in Lagos, mixing his signature highlife style with afrobeat and a political fervour not always present in his previous recordings. Against a backdrop of Jerry Rawlings’ military rule at home, and an oil boom abroad, the five-track album – titled Palaver and recorded at Tabansi Records’ studios – spoke of the social and political upheaval Taylor experienced in Ghana. Leaving Nigeria at short notice, he never saw the tapes again.Earlier this year, BBE records embarked on an extensive reissue campaign with Tabansi, among which were the rumoured ‘lost tapes’, discovered at the label’s Lagos warehouse, almost forty years since they were recorded. ...”

The Vinyl Factory (Video)

2020 June: Dance Time, across the Diaspora

Shutdown of Charlotte-Essex ferry raises outcry on both sides of lake

The ferry Grand Isle arrives in Charlotte from Essex last Thursday.

“Commuters and town officials are protesting plans to suspend ferry service between Charlotte and Essex, New York, which many use daily to cross Lake Champlain. Lake Champlain Transportation Co. announced last week that the route will close indefinitely on Jan. 4, attributing the suspension to dwindling ridership numbers due to the pandemic.The suspension will whittle the company’s ferry routes across Lake Champlain down to just one, between Plattsburgh and Grand Isle. The popular Burlington/Port Kent crossing remains closed ‘for the moment,’ Lake Champlain Transportation says, and no timeline has been set for reopening. ...”

VTDigger

The ferry Grand Isle arrives in Charlotte after crossing Lake Champlain from Essex, New York, last Thursday.

The coal company helped the city survive winter

“Stuart Davis was a New York artist of the 20th century best known for his playful Modernist paintings filled with bright colors and geometric shapes. But early in his career, he was influenced by the Ashcan School—and he stuck with the social realist style with this 1912 piece, Consumer Coal Company. It’s a powerful painting that invites viewers to feel the sharp snap of snow whipping around a low-rise block somewhere in New York City. (I’m guessing Lower Manhattan, see the Federal-style houses with the dormer windows.) Forced to work in the blustery weather, the men from the coal company shovel a load into a sidewalk coal hole, where it can be transferred to the furnace to keep residents from freezing to death. ...”

Ephemeral New York

2017 June: Stuart Davis: In Full Swing

The Weeping Meadow - Eleni Karaindrou (2004)

“Film and orchestral music composer Eleni Karaindrou has made a beautiful and moving statement with THE WEEPING MEADOW. A native of Greece, Karaindrou's influences are decidedly European, and within the music, one can hear the stamp of impressionistic composers like Erik Satie, avant garde innovators like Bartok, as well as Greek and Balkan folk forms. Karaindrou's music also traffics in 20th-century minimalism, creating tense, atmospheric spaces that feel empty and dense at once (one of the composer's frequently used motifs involves 'patterns' that recall the tingling, polyphonic gestures of Phillip Glass). Although several themes are reprised throughout the album, the combination of ambient textures, folk phrasing (accordions, guitars, and violins figure prominently into several pieces), and lush orchestral work keep the music consistently interesting. The pieces are often set in a minor key, so a somber, melancholic mood prevails yet never feels forced or melodramatic, and the spacious, tasteful arrangements are in keeping with the ECM aesthetic.  ...”

allmusic

W - Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow

Eleni Karaindrou: The Weeping Meadow (ECM New Series 1885)

amazon

YouTube: The Weeping Meadow, Eleni Karaindrou - The Waltz Of Hope - Tous Des Oiseaux (Live), "The Weeping Meadow" Accordion Audition, Eternity And a Day

2008 June: Eleni Karaindrou, 2012 October: Ulysses' Gaze

Form and Function: On the Object Lessons of Summer Hours

“By 2008, Olivier Assayas was perhaps best known as a director of fraught, emotionally intense, experimentally structured thrillers such as Irma Vep (1996), demonlover (2002), and Boarding Gate (2007), so the contemplative quiet of the feature he released that year, Summer Hours, may have come as something of a surprise. Nonetheless, the movie showed Assayas as a fully mature filmmaker, developing his themes from the physicality of the setting as well as the extraordinary performances of his cast. On a fundamental level, the story concerns the three adult Marly siblings, who are faced with the process of breaking up the estate of their uncle, artist Paul Berthier, upon the death of their mother, Hélène (performed by Edith Scob), with whom Berthier had a long, secret affair. Many of the estate’s various objects are also objets d’art. The viewer watches as vases, glassware, and furniture are transformed from their utilitarian, private functions in the home to their more austere but nonetheless public presentation in the Musée d’Orsay. ...”

Criterion (Video)

2017 June: Summer Hours (2009)

Live Cassette Loop Jam

“This rough-textured live ambient cassette loop jam noted the Sonars account on YouTube hitting the 1,000-follower milestone. It’s lush, with echoes of Gavin Bryars’ work, suggesting a sepia-toned version of a damaged old document, the aural equivalent of a photograph altered by time and the elements, changes both cultural and elemental. While listening, get lost in the nostalgia-tinged atmosphere. Also keep an eye (and ear) out the moment, just after the two-minute point, when the pitch, and attendant pace, are slowed markedly. This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music. Video originally posted on YouTube. Sonars is a self-described electro-psych duo from the United Kingdom and Italy. More from them at sonars.bandcamp.com and instagram.com/sonarsmusic.”

disquiet (Video)