Blogcritics Author: Ms. Strega

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Book Review: Lover of Unreason by Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev

Ms. Strega — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 15:48:14 EST

I eagerly anticipated the release of A Lover of Unreason by Israeli journalists Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev, authors of the unique Holocaust narrative When We Were Giants. I’m shamelessly fascinated with books on the life of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, for reasons I can't always pinpoint. I often find myself reveling in tales of their brief time of happiness at Court Green, particularly Diane Wood Middlebrook’s sun-drenched and daffodil-starred descriptions of the property in her Plath-Hughes biography, Her Husband. I always imagine Court Green as a sort of writerly paradise, with a marrow-deep magic that infused the writing of both Hughes and Plath. I want to go back in time and be a guest there, helping Hughes prune the ancient rosebushes or whipping up recipes from The Joy of Cooking with Plath in her kitchen. Perhaps I also identify with the time of Plath’s life in which she was a struggling single mother, ill and surrounded by bad weather, lack of moral support, and small children, for I raised my own children alone in a rural house drenched by storms several months out of the year. As I read various biographies of Plath, I find myself asking certain questions: “What was right in the lives of this couple? What were their mistakes? Could it possibly have ended any differently?”Still, as I read Lover of Unreason, I found myself asking another question: “Why am I reading this book, so full of tragedy and excruciatingly flawed people?” Lover of Unreason explores the cipher in the Plath-Hughes equation, the shadow in the noonday radiance of Court Green: Assia Wevill, Hughes’ mistress, in part responsible for the end of Plath and Hughes’ marriage. Assia’s true role in Hughes’ life seems to have been hinted at for years in Plath biographies. I remember reading about her in Edward Butscher’s rather sensationalistic book about Plath, Method and Madness. Butscher gave Assia the pseudonym of “Olga” and described her as a “Russian beauty” who disguised her zaftig figure with long coats, so that I thought of her as dressing like a character straight out of Dr. Zhivago. In fact, Wevill’s weight and her striking looks seem to be a point of discussion in nearly every biography I have read which includes a description of her. I never hear about Hughes’ weight, or Plath’s, and it is hardly a point of interest to me about any of these people.At any rate, Wevill has been mainly described as a temptress, a veritable serpent in the Garden of Eden that was the Plath-Hughes marriage. I had little idea of Assia’s background until I read the comprehensive study of her in Lover of Unreason. Wevill was the daughter of a Jewish father of Russian extraction and a Lutheran mother of German ancestry.In 1933, when she was a young child, Assia, her sister Celia, and her parents fled Berlin during the Nazis' rise to power. They settled in Tel Aviv, where Assia bloomed into young womanhood. Assia seemed to become a restless soul, and traveled to England, straight into a disastrous first marriage -- and, though married, Assia continued to need and attract as much male attention as she could, and she eventually divorced and remarried three times before she met up with Ted Hughes.Koren and Negev spare no details of how alluring Assia was. Indeed, her pictures show that she resembled the young Elizabeth Taylor, and her fashion sense was quite strong. I was impressed with the fact that Assia had a lucrative career in advertising and made her way in the world up until the very day of her death. Her third husband, David Wevill, was devoted to her. She had money of her own, good looks, a generosity of spirit that nudged her to lavish friends with gifts, even an artistic bent — she seemed to be a fairly competent poet and was proud enough of her own watercolors that she framed and displayed them throughout her house. Why, then, did her life ultimately come tumbling down around her like a fragile house of cards? Plath at least left her stunning writing, a legacy that outlived her; Wevill seemed reduced to a mere ghost after years of systematic erasure from Ted Hughes’ life.Negev and Koren fail to fully answer the question of Assia's self-destructiveness comprehensively in Lover of Unreason, or make some sense of the discordant notes in her personality. They state that marriage suited Assia — if so, then how does one explain her many divorces, her apparent need for infidelities and sexual intrigue, her statement to a work colleague that she was off to “seduce Ted Hughes” when Plath and Hughes invited the Wevills for a weekend at Court Green? Negev and Koren do manage to shed some light on why Hughes and Assia continued their relationship beyond the fling it likely was meant to be, for Plath killed herself a few months after she and Hughes separated. The authors point out that Hughes’ need for someone to help him shoulder the responsibilities of parenting the children Plath left behind probably tethered him prematurely to Assia. Indeed, and I think admirably, she did take to Plath and Hughes’ two children, and eventually bore a child of her own with Hughes, a daughter named Shura.I have seen a rather silly photograph of Sylvia Plath gazing into a crystal ball, as if her psychic powers were beginning to bud along with her poetic ones. I wonder how it might have been for Sylvia, had she been able to see the future after her death, to know that Assia Wevill, the mistress she despised, would literally live in Plath’s London flat, sleep in Plath’s bed (and make love with Hughes there), read her journals freely, use her clothing and household utensils, even ransack dresser drawers at Court Green for Plath’s hair ribbons and combs. Lover of Unreason skillfully highlights how Assia literally wallowed in Plath’s life, probably at great cost to her own emotional well-being. This may have been a bit inevitable, as Hughes moved into Plath’s flat to give his children some security and not uproot them, but I found it odd that they didn’t eventually refurbish the flat to make it their own. One of the strengths of this book is the description of how heartbreakingly sad life must have been for Assia. Hughes was unable to really commit to a relationship, so she and her daughter lived only sporadically with him, first in a remote, rented house in Ireland, and then at Court Green (along with Hughes’ parents; his father snubbed Assia and wouldn’t even look at her when she entered a room). Despite the fact that he was the father of their daughter, Hughes did not support Assia financially; the small amounts of money he gave her were meticulously recorded loans that had to be paid back quickly. Assia’s relationship with Hughes seemed chaotic overall, and, though he loved Shura, Assia must have been deeply and painfully aware that her daughter would never gain the same status in Hughes’ mind as his son and daughter by Plath. A disturbing incident, described by Fay Weldon (Assia’s friend and colleague) describes Hughes giving Shura, still a very small child, wine to drink and then laughing as the child became intoxicated and danced around wildly until she fell asleep — something Weldon observed he would never do with his other children. Lover of Unreason also discusses the idea that Hughes could not really let go of Plath and accept Assia’s unique differences; he drafted a list of somewhat daunting house rules at one point which commanded Assia to be out of bed by eight, bake her own bread, put more variety in her cooking, and introduce a new recipe each week, tasks Plath had once pulled off with verve and accomplishment. There seemed to be no rules in this "draft constitution" for Hughes to follow. Finally, there came a time when Assia, ordered out of Court Green by Hughes, suddenly found herself on her own, caring for Shura in a London flat during a dreary and cold English springtime, reminiscent of Plath’s desperate London winter years before. There is no question in my mind that Assia loved her daughter Shura, but she also seemed entangled with her daughter, unable to see her as separate - she made no distinction between what she called her "self" and "her little self." Assia continued to be tormented by her on-again, off-again relationship with Hughes (he rejected her emotionally and physically at this time, yet occasionally went house-hunting with her for a place they could potentially live in together). She fell into an intractable depression and began to make a will, even to hint not-so-broadly that she felt suicidal. Absolutely no one heard her very obvious cries for help. Lover of Unreason gives haunting descriptions of the bitter cold and lingering ice on the ground around Assia's house as winter refused to release its grip, a metaphor for the fragmented, seared landscape of Assia’s emotional state. After a bitter argument with Hughes over the phone, her hopes crushed, Assia took advantage of her live-in nanny’s absence, picked up the sleeping Shura (it is not clear whether she drugged the child), and lay down with her on a pallet she had prepared in the kitchen, made from an eiderdown quilt and pillows. In a horrifying echo of Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Assia sealed the room, took a handful of sleeping pills with gulps of whiskey, then turned the oven's gas taps wide open. Shura was only five years old when she and her mother died together.Lover of Unreason elucidates the many painful missteps taken both before and after the tragic death of this mother and daughter. Assia wanted to be buried, like Plath, in a rural English churchyard, her tombstone carved with the epitaph, “Here lies a lover of unreason, and an exile.” Instead, Assia and Shura remained unburied for years, their ashes stored at Court Green (and even misplaced for a short time) until Hughes eventually scattered them to the four winds. The authors do an excellent job of describing Hughes’ devastation after their deaths, his terrible sense that he was toxic to anyone he loved, and his soul-searing guilt over not preventing both Assia and Sylvia’s suicides. One wonders, for all his flaws, how he summoned the strength to pick up his life afterwards. The Assia Wevill-Ted Hughes equation seems an incomprehensible snarl of passions, depressions, betrayals, and warring demons which left, at the end, three senseless deaths.Lover of Unreason helped me understand and know Assia Wevill a bit better. Despite her destructive role in Plath's life, I certainly felt a measure of sympathy for Assia and her daughter, though I became somewhat sorry that I read this work in the gray middle of winter. It is an unsparing look at overwhelmingly tragic circumstances, so much so that I think Lover of Unreason is best read in the middle of spring and summer, so that one can step out for a bit of light and fresh air after steeping in the shadowy griefs of this book.

Author of the (still being birthed) book on my Italian-American family, The Strega's Story. Numerous poems published in such magazines as Poetry, ONTHEBUS, Saranac Review, Chattahoochee Review, Oyez Review, and Quarry West. Mother of four marvelous children, now blooming into their adult lives. Life is a magnificent journey, a shifting maze, a labyrinth to the very heart of what we need to know.

Tillie Olsen, In Memory, 1912-2007

Ms. Strega — Fri, 5 Jan 2007 06:06:14 EST

Writer and activist Tillie Lerner Olsen died on January 1, 2007. She was the author of Tell Me a Riddle, Silences, and the Feminist Press daybook, Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother. Many fine tributes have been written, detailing Olsen's life and achievements. Instead of expounding on these, I would like to recount a memory of her. I am priviledged to live in Santa Cruz, California, where Olsen's daughter lives, and was honored to actually meet Tillie Olsen in 1984. Her writing greatly influenced the direction of my own work as a poet and memoirist.I became pregnant with my first child at a very young age, 22, and I feel that the tremendous, life-changing journey of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising a precious son enhanced my vision of the world and opened up a deeper vein of poetry for me. I became aware of both my child's vulnerability and the fragility of the earth itself, and felt that there were meanings beyond the everyday surface of things. There was a great deal happening in my life that I did not have the spiritual or emotional vocabulary to name. My mother was trapped in an abusive relationship, paralyzed by her fear of abandonment; her life had been a series of losses and eddies around the same whirlpool for many years. I did not know how my life would be different from hers; I only knew that poetry, as it has been for decades now, was the cord binding my sanity to this life. That which encroached on my mental, spiritual, and physical lives cannot be named in this public forum, but they were beginning to bud and would one day reach a state of terrible flowering. And in my heart of hearts, I knew what was to come, though I pushed these thoughts away each day.I used to type on the kitchen floor past midnight, not wanting to wake the father of my baby, hoping the sound would be more muffled than if the typewriter sat on a table. I did not always know what to write about; I had been told in the course of my bachelor's degree that topics such as menstruation, childbirth, and other "women's concerns" were not fit subjects for poetry. Yet this is what I worked towards those long nights as the baby grew in my womb and my heart yearned for the day I would hold him in my arms.During those nights, with darkness pressing against the windows all around me, I wrote - poems, journal entries, even a few short stories I have recently unearthed from a pile of old papers, even though I was told in college that poets like me shouldn't try to write prose. I began to go to readings, and may have even held my first poetry reading at that time. I felt I had, in Santa Cruz, found a place where my writing could flourish.In the winter of 1984, pregnant with my eldest daughter, I sat in Cabrillo College's auditorium, listening to a group of writers -- among them Ellen Bass, Maude Meehan, and Tillie Olsen -- read from Tillie Olsen's newly published reader from The Feminist Press, entitled Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother. Arranged like a daybook, it contains poems, stories, epigraphs, fragments not unlike a patchwork quilt. This small volume of wisdom spoke very deeply to my heart as a young woman trying to find my place in the world. I cried openly at that reading, thinking of my own mother locked in the prison of her life, fearing that she was being harmed at that very moment, feeling the grief of losing other significant women in my life. I had a battered copy of Tillie Olsen's Tell Me A Riddle at home, one of the few books I had ever read that spoke to both the pain and magnificence of being a mother.I had no money to buy the daybook at that time, though I did purchase it later. I took my program up to the writers at the end and politely waited in line for Tillie Olsen. Everyone else had the daybook for her to sign; I had only the program for the reading in my hand, and told her I had a well-worn copy of Tell Me a Riddle at home, but I had forgotten it. Tillie took my face in her hands and gave me a smooch on the cheek, signed my program, and put a note on it: "paste this in your well-worn copy of Tell Me a Riddle." Her moment of attention meant everything to me.If someone had told me I would climb the emotional and spiritual equivalent of Mount Everest to reach the place where I am today as a writer and a mother, I probably would have balked like a blind horse. Yet Tillie's writing was part of the rope that kept me tethered to sanity and strength. My copy of Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother is stained, drawn on by children, the edges brown and dogeared, the cover wrinkled and torn. It has, for many years, been a heart's guidebook; like a guidebook taken on a lifelong journey, it shows its age and use.So this is a word of love and farewell to Tillie Olsen, a farewell full of gratitude for a life generously and abundantly lived. I'd like to finish by quoting the very last bit of a story she published in her daybook about the passing of her own mother, entitled Dream-Vision:She who had no worldly goods to leave, yet left to me an inexhaustible legacy. Inherent in it, this heritage of summoning resources to make -- out of song, food, warmth, expressions of human love -- courage, hope, resistance, belief; this vision of universality, before the lessenings, harms, divisions of the world are visited upon it.She sheltered and carried that belief, that wisdom -- as she sheltered and carried us, and others -- throughout a lifetime lived in a world whose season was, as still it is, a time of winter.

Book Review: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Ms. Strega — Mon, 6 Feb 2006 05:33:44 EST

Between the ages of seven and ten, my son Matt used to describe himself as "the REAL Calvin". He insisted, for the most part, on wearing striped shirts and dark pants, and had a stuffed tiger named (of course) Hobbes. Though my other children read Calvin and Hobbes books, Matt's DNA seemed to be bathed in an infusion of them: he would talk excitedly for long periods of time about "The Killer Monster Snow Goons", "The Transmogrifier"(a version of which was attempted, using a discarded refrigerator box),"Miss Wormwood", and "dinosaurs in F-14s". Matt and I also had a few interesting (albeit one-sided) discussions concerning his theories surrounding "The Noodle Incident" (the true nature of which has never been revealed by Bill Watterson). Our many Calvin and Hobbes books took on a well-loved, Velveteen Rabbit aspect: lost covers, curled-up edges, warping, and green stains from being taken out to the woods around our house.Matt turned sixteen this year on Christmas day, and so I decided to get him The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. For those of you who haven't seen this, it is a large, hardbound, three-volume set (similar to Gary Larson's Far Side collection that came out a couple of years ago). I'd seen it in Costco, but, once Christmastime rolled around, all the sets were gone. So, my partner (known as Mr. Strega) and I found ourselves on Christmas Eve, like FBI agents, scouting bookstore after bookstore until we found the very last one in town, on a shelf at the local Borders (which had marked it down significantly). In my "peace-full" town of Santa Cruz, Borders is considered the less politically correct bookstore to browse in, but I bless it forever for that lone remaining C&H.The present was duly unwrapped and put on a shelf downstairs; there it remained untouched for days. I thought I had made a mistake on the level of all the breadmakers, ThighMasters, and foot saunas that have made their way to the Island of Misfit Gifts. I figured I'd made a silly and somewhat expensive attempt to hang onto my youngest son's childhood just a little -- until I decided to write this review for Blogcritics. I went to the shelf and discovered that all the volumes in the case were GONE--each volume in a separate kid's room, all opened to various pages. This collection may be a bit prohibitive in price (at $150), but for the diehard Calvin and Hobbes fan, it's more than worth it. Bill Watterson's introduction is wonderfully written, and shows an early incarnation of Calvin's "Spaceman Spiff " character, spouting German (Watterson created this for his high school German class). The book is a combination of the weekly and Sunday strips (the latter are in full color), arranged chronologically. Some of the longer "poetic" sequences (such as "A Nauseous Nocturne") take up quite a few pages and are bright and well rendered. If you want to lose yourself in the entire Calvin and Hobbes universe, from the first "tiger trap baited with a tuna fish sandwich" to the very last "it's a magical world" moment, this book is worth giving up a few lattes. The volumes are beautifully printed and put together; they deserve an honored place on a bookshelf, but I find myself not wanting to discourage the young people in my household from taking them into their rooms and reading themselves to sleep (there's a whole lot worse things that a bunch of teenagers could be doing). Just as long as The Complete Calvin and Hobbes doesn't end up in the woods, it's perfectly fine by me.