There’s a friend of mine, a very successful artist, who I admire very much. I met him twenty years ago when we were working together in a dirty nightclub in South Melbourne; he was collecting glasses and I was bouncing. We both aspired to art, and he hit critical pay-dirt much earlier than I (who am I fooling – I still haven’t got there).
Continue readingArchive for The Bell Jar
‘Art With Values’.
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory, Reading, Real Men, trauma with tags Ajax, Ancient Greece, Bryan Dorries, Drama, Navy SEAL, Sophocles, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, The Rolling Stones, Theater of War, trauma on December 22, 2020 by Jarrod BoyleSuicidal Thoughts
Posted in poetry, Reading, Real Men with tags Esther Greenwood, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar on September 24, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle4.
‘Wrapping my coat around me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and began taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one.
At first nothing happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue lights began to flash before my eyes. The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down.
The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of the vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.’
p.163 Continue reading
Suicidal Thoughts
Posted in poetry, Reading, Real Men with tags Buddy Willard, Esther Greenwood, Simone De Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, The Karate Kid, The Second Sex on September 13, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle2.
“A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.”
– The Bell Jar Page 90.
Simone De Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex that because men are encouraged to fight, they come to trust themselves and their ability to grapple with the world and its challenges. Continue reading
Suicidal Thoughts
Posted in poetry, Reading, Real Men with tags Ariel, Colossus, Rodney Hall, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar on September 3, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle1.
‘There’s two acts of creation at work in the novel: the writer’s, and the reader’s.’
– Rodney Hall.
Some books, you read them and they go right through you like a glass of water. Other books seem to take up residence and become a part of who you are, like marrow, or muscle fibre.
I recently read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar for the second time.
Sylvia Plath: Godmother of Punk Rock?
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory, Real Men with tags Ariel, Black Flag, Buddy Willard, Catcher in the Rye, Colossus, Esther Greenwood, Henry Rollins, punk, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar on August 6, 2019 by Jarrod BoyleIf you google Sylvia Plath, it’s hard to find her described in any terms other than the superlative. ‘One of the finest lyric poets of the twentieth century,’ is pretty close to the general assessment. Continue reading