Mad Girl’s Love Song, Happier at Home, the Cultural Cold War and a new review of Unexplained Fevers
- At July 16, 2013
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
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Ironic reading pairings? Try the bio of Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted
, and self-helpish happiness study book by an upper-East side millionaire, Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life
. I’m really enjoying this particular bio of Plath, and trying to kind of tease out the subtext, something about how to capture Plath’s infectious ambition without going up in flames. Happier at Home is kind of a weird, how-to-be-a-millionaire-happy-housewife throwback guide for women who have enough money and time that “how to arrange my photos” becomes their biggest problem (I have to admit I was hoping for something different, some sort of modern women’s guide to balancing housework and marriage and money and a creative career, perhaps). Thinking about the repressive atmosphere for women in the 1950s and how there’s sort of a throw-back repression thing going to today in American culture. But I think there’s something interesting in both books about how women can put so much energy and effort into a perfect, happiness-filled home, this idea that women are responsible for the hearth, this primitive urge to divert creative energy into that. I’ve been noticing myself latey that my writing energy can easily be distracted by decorating and tidying up and researching recipes…
The other odd pair of books I’m reading is on the CIA’s involvement in literary and visual art culture during the Cold War era – The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
and Cold War Culture. Last night, to further a theme, I was reading about a 1950’s era book, written by a woman, about a suburban housewife outside NYC who learns to survive a nuclear apocalypse, called “Shadow on the Hearth,” a fictional call-to-arms for American women. Fascinating! I also found out that many “great” artists, literary magazines, and critics were propped up by government funding in an attempt to somehow fight Communism through artistic means. Tim Green posted this link on my Facebook discussion of the subject if you’re interested in further reading: http://web.archive.org/web/20060616213245/http://cia.gov/csi/studies/95unclass/Warner.html. I’ve lately been interested in Cold War culture, what with growing up in America’s Secret City (Oak Ridge, Tennessee) in the seventies with “men in black” hanging around the house, that I’m fairly interested to see the way that the government has tried (and for all I know, is trying now) to control things like art and poetry. (And PS, that big literary or art star might be a government construct! Now everything makes sense!)
Thanks to Collin Kelley for this mini-review of Unexplained Fevers
at his blog, here: http://collinkelley.blogspot.com/2013/07/read-this-poetry-by-erica-wright.html
A nice review can make the sting of rejections a little better. I’ll try to remember that when I’m complaining about writing my next review!
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
