Perhaps among the bees, peaceful and well-organized social creatures that they are, American confessional poet Sylvia Plath found a solid sense of community, support, and connection that she was missing on the home front. Add to that the affective element of hereditary nostalgia—Plath’s late father, Otto Plath, was a respected biologist who published a book in 1934 on the habits of bumblebees—and what was produced was a series of poems that are notably more grounded and less volatile than anything she ever wrote about her father’s early death from diabetes or the abysmal health care she received for her lifelong mental illness.
Sylvia Plath’s healthy relationship with bees and their impact on her work in times of debilitating writer’s block could even be described as that of a genius and their muse. She was a beekeeper herself and likely composed poems in her head while interacting with her bees and absorbing their conflict-free productivity. Pun fully intended, they gave her a much-needed buzz.
The Milky Way is twisted, and astronomers may finally know why. They're laying the blame on a football-shaped, tilted halo of dark matter that envelopes our galaxy.
Philip Notman, the history professor protagonist of Rupert Thomson’s 14th novel, “Dartmouth Park,” is, by his own estimation, an essentially anonymous man, disguised by his education, Christianity, whiteness, heterosexuality and middle age. Long stuck in his ways, he isn’t expecting to have his life upended while returning to London from an academic conference in Norway, even after spending an unexpectedly memorable few days roving about with an enthralling younger sociologist from Cádiz named Inés Vaquero de Ayala. But an upending is exactly what happens to Philip when, on the way home, he experiences what he later calls his “Damascene moment” — a woman near him taps a travel card to get on the airport tram, and the mundane beep the card reader makes sends him into a brief but visceral fugue, wherein “his head began to float sideways and backward,” and he feels a sensation akin to a hand wrapping around his brain and squeezing, leaving him momentarily unable to think or react.
Staring into the mirror, on a Tuesday morning, you decide that your self needs all the help it can get. But where to turn? You were reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” and doing well until you spilled half a bottle of Knob Creek over the last sixty pages. Now you’ll never know how it ends. You tried listening to David Goggins’s “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,” on Audible, in your car, but so thrilling was Goggins’s prose style that you stomped on the gas and rear-ended a Tesla. Do not despair, though. Succor is at hand. Roosting on Amazon’s best-seller list is “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier,” by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (Portfolio).
At this point, your conscience rebels. By buying a book on Amazon, you tell yourself, you will be directly funding a new angora lining for Jeff Bezos’s monogrammed slippers in the master bedroom of his private yacht—not the main one but the backup vessel currently moored off Patmos. Quivering with righteousness, you close your laptop and stride to your nearest bookstore, only to bump into a dilemma: whereabouts in the store, exactly, can “Build the Life You Want” be found?
Readers may find the lack of neurosis and anguish surprising for the genre, but McAllister’s account of his life as a ballet dancer and director is frank and entertaining, a kind of behind-the-scenes guide to ballet for people who are curious.