Monday, May 27, 2013

Pain, Parties, Work

This book, by Elizabeth Winder, is what I'm reading right now.
It's inspirational, in the sense that it talks about Sylvia Plath in the heyday of her youth, her guest-editorial-ship at Mademoiselle magazine, along with nineteen other aspiring young women--the dawn of a new generation, the last one before real feminism, before the Pill, as the book blithely points out.

But the book to me, a collection of letters, observations, samples of Plath's original, unconventional journal writing, her stark way of painting letters onto the page, is much more than just a generational snap shot of a long-gone New York, a bygone era. It's a calling to write again, to understand the practice is often the product.





I've been delinquent on the blog for a number of months now.

Life has crowded in, time seems to speed up and up to a faster rate with every passing day.

The days have a rhythm all their own, it often feels like my life is living me.

I read pulpy novels in between stumbling onto a good one like this, and I'm reminded to stay alert, awake, in my own life.

Often, I get home from work, 7:00, 7:30 pm, and just collapse. I reheat a dinner I've already made, I pour a glass of chardonnay, and I often stare at the tv, not even taking in what is on. It's all just 'there'.
Then I motivate myself to make my lunch for the next day and put away the dishes so I can wake up to a clean kitchen, one of my favourite things. And the next morning comes all too soon, and I do it all again, and I miss yoga due to the traffic and I stay at work until the sun is at eye-level, these long May days, and I ruminate about how I live.  And I keep doing it, as we do, to some degree.

One of the chapters in the Pain, Parties, and Work was in the form of a dictionary, all relating to Plath, each letter illustrating something of her life, a minutae.  I loved this format.

I'm going to borrow it for my next post..
A snapshot of the last few months, what I've been up to, what's new, what's not.



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