Popular perceptions of Sylvia Plath tend to dwell on a deeply troubled version of the young poet due to her well-documented difficulties with depression and the morbid imagery found in some of her poetry. So the idea that nature inspired her writing may come as a surprise.
This despairing Plath is a far cry from the poet I have come to know and admire – a poet who writes about the simple beauty of meadows and the tenacity of fungi as well as the splendours of rugged wilderness.
Of course, it’s one thing to say that Frake-Waterfield is acting within his rights. It’s another to say that what he’s doing has value. To see why it does, you first have to understand the various anti-democratic and anti-creative forces that are arrayed against his project and others like it.
But the construction of this stone salute to the Revolutionary War hero and “father of our country” was far from straightforward. It took nearly four decades to build the enormous monument in the mid-19th century, during which time it was occupied by a political fringe group, beset by controversy, and stalled by a lack of funds.
In November 1880, just three years before his death, Karl Marx wrote a letter to his friend Friedrich Adolph Sorge, a German émigré and labor organizer who had recently helped found the first socialist political party in the United States. After commenting at length on various developments in Russia, France and Germany, Marx added a postscript: “I should be very much pleased if you could find me something good (meaty) on economic conditions in California, of course at my expense. California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.”
The aging Marx’s interest in California was certainly not incidental. As readers will discover in the opening chapters of Malcolm Harris’ newly published Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World—which includes Marx’s letter as an epigraph—the region was a crucible of modern capitalism long before it became synonymous with the likes of semiconductors, microchips or artificial intelligence. In the popular imagination, Silicon Valley today is known as the global center of technological innovation—a feverish, futuristic El Dorado in which grit, intellect and risk commingle to produce disruptive new inventions and bountiful wealth along with them. It’s an alluring mythos and, by extension, a blinding one, too: The region’s foundational narrative of boundless progress and Promethean genius often more closely resembles fable than actual history.