Just to record that I finished reading this book, finally. All 413 pages. Maybe I’ll write about it or quote from it another time. The last time I mentioned the book was in this post.
And also that I bought two pairs of shoes two days ago, on Monday 20 Nov 06. Let’s see how long they’ll last.
Ah, finally. My friend Chris has a blog. Check it out here. You can expect some to find some of the best writing on the internet. Chloe and I both think very highly of his writing.
Haha, I saw myself in two of his posts!
Improvising over the song Embraceable You
Autumn Leaves
Joe Diorio Blues
All the Things You Are
Check out this 10 page interview of Ted Greene (pdf format). Includes stories, anecdotes and opinions of Wes Montgomery, George Van Eps, Roy Buchanan, Danny Gatton, John Pisano, Jimmy Bruno and Joe Pass.
Ted made a deal with himself that seems reasonable and wise to me, a deal that perhaps I should also make with myself:
“Ted, you’re slow, so you can’t learn everything and you can’t be great at everything, so make your highest priority stuff, your stuff, and just live on the sidelines with your hands clapping for the rest.”
Full video of an excerpt I previously posted here.
Rare. Good. Check it out.
More Ted Green videos here. Even more Ted Greene materials, e.g. audio, lessons can be found by exploring the Ted Greene Forum.
The Associated Press
Published: October 30, 2006
RICHMOND, Virginia An unpublished sonnet that Sylvia Plath wrote in college while pondering themes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” will appear Wednesday in an online literary journal.
Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, wrote “Ennui” in 1955 in her senior year at Smith College, said Anna Journey, a graduate student in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. Journey discovered the sonnet while researching Plath archives at Indiana University.
The poem will be featured in Blackbird, published online by VCU’s English department and New Virginia Review.
In her personal copy of Fitzgerald’s book, Journey said, Plath wrote the phrase “le ennui” — boredom — next to a passage in which Jay Gatsby’s love interest, Daisy Buchanan, complains that “I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
“She was observing; her notes were creative, metaphorical reactions,” she said of Plath. “She was riffing off of Fitzgerald’s passages.”
The 14-line Petrarchan sonnet opens:
“Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur.”
The ironic poem pokes fun at people who consult tea leaves or psychics, hoping they will foretell impending disasters, but says that real life is seldom as dramatic or romantic as a fairy tale, said Gregory Donovan, a VCU English professor and Blackbird co-editor.
It was notable that a woman who suffered dramatic depression and marital difficulties had examined the concept of boredom as a college student, Donovan said. But what is more illuminating was that the poem is another example of how hard Plath worked at her craft at a young age.
“That’s what made it possible to write such amazing poems later in life,” he said. “Poets don’t just come out of an overwhelming emotional experience. They come out of study and hard work.”
Linda Wagner-Martin, author of “Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life,” thinks there still might be more early, unpublished works by the prolific writer.
When Plath’s widower, British poet Ted Hughes, put together a collection of Plath’s poetry in 1981, “he didn’t pay much attention to her earlier poems,” said Wagner-Martin, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina. “He had the audacity to say, ‘Plath’s career started when she met me.’”
But what makes the discovery of any unpublished Plath poem noteworthy, Wagner-Martin said, is the groundbreaking expression of humor and anger by a female writer, and her works’ lasting impact.
“These were not voices you would hear in the ’60s in women writers,” she said. Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” which is considered by many as the first American feminist novel, was published in 1963 and was a precursor to decades of feminist writing. But Wagner-Martin said Plath never saw women adopt contemporary attitudes — she killed herself two weeks after the book was published.
UNDER A CERTAIN LITTLE STAR WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity in case I’m mistaken. May happiness not be angry if I take it for my own. May the dead forgive me that their memory’s but a flicker. My apologies to time for the multiplicity of the world overlooked each second. My apologies to an old love for treating the new one as the first. Forgive me far-off wars for taking my flowers home. Forgive me open wounds for pricking my finger. My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss. My apologies to those in railway stations for sleeping comfortably at five in the morning. Pardon me hounded hope for laughing sometimes. Pardon me deserts for not rushing in with a spoonful of water. And you O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage, forever still and staring at the same spot, absolve me even if you happened to be stuffed. My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs. My apologies to large questions for small answers. Truth, do not pay me too much attention. Solemnity, be magnanimous to me. Endure, O mystery of being that I might pull threads from your veil.
Soul, don’t blame me that I’ve got you so seldom. My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere. My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman. I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me, because I myself am my own obstacle. Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and then labor to make them light.
