Coming soon: On the Gurlesque

We keep promising, but we're so busy. This time, really, it's coming soon. Like hopefully part 1 this weekend.

In the meantime, a few things we've noticed elsewhere:

"But he just continued on his way. She had to say, 'That's her book' three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless--for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we've never really stopped."

From "Men Explain Things to Me"
by Rebecca Solnit at TomDispatch.com

"Margaret Drabble's booklet on Plath and Nicholas Wroe's article on the entire series both emphasised Plath's importance aside from her 'suicide' poems... by invoking the cliché of redemptive motherhood: '... the vivid colours of giving birth, the pleasures of breast-feeding and the "power and mystery of the maternal bond."' Phew. It's a good thing she had kids. Otherwise what could be said about the work!

Drabble describes Plath's 'appalling - and 'exhilarating' - poetry as the kind from the 'heart' rather than the head, in this way minimising that poet's formal dexterity and finesse. Apparently, it's radical to attribute her fame to the usual criteria: an exceptional feel for language, outstanding technical skills, a powerful vision and mastery of form."

From "How to Trivialize Women's Poetry"
by Eva Salzman at the Guardian Online book blog