"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

Dud: Sylvia Plath reading her poetry. Never ever listen to her recordings. She's got this obnoxious-as-fuck haughtiness which is almost totally at odds to the brutally mordant tone of the poems.

Julianne Moore...interesting comparison. Let me dwell on it and the novel a bit more. I have now completed it -- it's a quick read, but certainly one that provides much food for thought. The edition I read was the 1996 one with a brief introduction and biography that shed some interesting light on how she herself saw the book, its roman-a-clef nature and how she saw it as a bit of a 'pot-boiler,' to use her own terminology. I am intrigued by the sudden, choppy nature of its progression -- how certain scenes seem to just start then end (the conclusion of the book being the final touch in that regard). Hmm...more thoughts tomorrow, I think!

I love The Bell Jar. No one ever described the experience of a breakdown - the weird blankness of feeling, the growing paranoia, the almost casual attitude toward suicide - better than Plath. I reread it last year and thought it was even better the second time around. The New York chapters are probably my favorite, especially the early bit where she orders the vodka.

I must have overdosed on her poetry back when I did my Plath report in high school, though, since I can't get into it at all anymore. It's technically brilliant - shows Hughes up for the tame, workmanlike poet he was - but it just doesn't grab me anymore. Except for "Daddy," which remains as queasy and disturbing as ever. Part of the appeal of Plath is she doesn't seem to know when she's going OTT, with the Nazi symbolism and all. Maybe that's a flaw but it makes it seem all the more compelling.

So I'm asking myself why I feel so full of loathing as I re-read the bell jar and the poetry, and it occurs to me that all I see in it is a spineless, narcissistic obsession with human weakness.

it also occurs to me that maybe I am not separating the author from the narrator the way I would for a (male) author like Nabokov, but then again, isn't the predicate of all Plath's work a sort of adolescent melodramatic grandstanding that deliberately confuses the two?

these are not rhetorical questions. I've never been able to fully articulate why I loathe her work so much, and I would love to be persuaded differently by someone here, but with my knee now in full jerking mode is there anything in her work other than histrionic self pity plus clumsy gothy imagery and metaphors (the black telephone's off at the root / the voices just can't worm through) oooh look she's going crazy. And don't even start me on the whole Nazi thing.

If Christina Ricci hadnt gotten a boob job, she would have been on the way, she could have been her as a girl. It has to be someone less pop. *thinks*

I (less than fairly) dismiss The Bell Jar and Catcher in the Rye because I associate both books with some of their...overly earnest fans. It's been more than a decade since I read The Bell Jar; I probably ought to pick up that 1996 edition someone mentioned.

I'm curious: Did 'The Bell Jar" ever become a play? I may be remembering it wrong, but I think it was!

Altough I've read it isn't very good.