“I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.” —
Charlotte Brontë’s answer to her sisters, when they told her it was impossible to make a fictional heroine interesting if you didn’t make her beautiful (via igrewupinbooks)
Precisely why I’m growing fond of Jane Eyre - she is plain as Jane can be (possibly considered to be the origin of the cliche), and Mr Rochester is hardly handsome. But that is exactly why she is attractive.
About more than one-third into Jane Eyre, and it’s been surprisingly pleasant. I thought I’d hate it from the start. But it’s hilarious in parts, especially the conversations with Mr Rochester. Onwards with the reading!
“
MUSHROOMS - SYLVIA PLATH
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.
The Literary Piano: Mushrooms, by Sylvia Plath
I know ‘The Bell Jar’ is the quintessential teenager/twentysomething novel, and she only wrote one book before she went to bake her brains in the oven, but honestly, I’m beginning to like her poetry much more than her prose, and I’m not even a poetry person.
Truth be told, ‘The Bell Jar’ isn’t much of a book rather than an odd number of poetic late-night ruminations strung together with a vague story outline. Really good prose, in my opinion, should suggest and subtly elucidate elements of our reality and the human condition that can only be revealed in fiction, and Plath does this brilliantly in her poetry. Like ‘Mushrooms’ above, suggesting at atomic bombs and the rights of ‘common people’ or women.
Which is more effective - faint suggestion or blatant exposure? I lean more towards the former, but I can see how blatant exposure might work too. (as in the case of ‘The Bell Jar’ read so widely by a large audience, which I will always hold dearly to my heart as a formative reading experience)
“The inability of a man of science to take the poetic view simply shows his mental limitation; as the mental limitation of a poet is shown by his inability to take the scientific view. The broader mind can take both.” — Herbert Spencer (via artandsciencejournal)
(via artandsciencejournal)
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Photograph by Malcolm Browne—AP
On the 50th anniversary of Quang Duc’s self-immolation in 1963, LightBox presents an interview with Malcolm Browne, the Associated Press photographer who captured the now-iconic image
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Meetings
I’M GOING I’M GOING EVERYONE *CRIES*
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