The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while making her poems. That life, those mornings, is never to be pitied. Asked what she found most surprising about Plath as she worked, Clark responded: ‘Her force.’ This in turn surprised me, since I thought that was all there was of her. I had come to her differently. I read the poems in childhood and have a memory of reciting ‘Daddy’ aloud to my father as he tried not to laugh. Next came The Bell Jar, then the unabridged journals, published in 2000 and edited by Karen Kukil, who in the acknowledgments thanks her acupuncturist for keeping her healthy.
The chronology at the beginning of Plath’s Collected Prose attempts to raise her into a three-dimensional space where bare facts are set next to intangible desires, ambitions and influences. She is born in 1932 to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father dies in 1940 of an embolus in the lung after his leg was amputated due to gangrene; she begins a journal, ascends into a kind of golden American girlhood; she’s published in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle contest for her story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’; she attends Smith, meets her benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty; she breaks her leg skiing, works at Mademoiselle as a guest editor, breaks down and attempts suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas.
Moving to Paris made my cheeks hurt. After a decade since I’d last worked in France, I found myself back in the land of one of my ancestors’ other colonizers. My Broca’s area could still conjure the language easily enough. But the fast-twitch fibers in my orbicularis oris had atrophied, making the physical production of French’s extra vowels sounds more labored and slower than I was trying to talk.
Not far from one of Milan’s last remaining medieval gates is a tiny shop door, sandwiched between shuttered storefronts. Cross the threshold, and you’ll enter a gilded world of esoteric symbols: stars, skeletons and fools. This is Il Meneghello, the workshop of some of Italy’s last known great tarot artisans.
Inside, on the register, is a portrait of its original owner, Osvaldo Menegazzi. While tarot may be a game or hobby for many, for Menegazzi, it was always first and foremost about the art. Before his death in 2021, he had become world-famous for his painstaking, hand-painted reproductions of some of the world’s most ancient and storied tarot decks. His desk, a mess of paints and materials, is just as he left it.
The summer of 2023 was all about tomatoes, but not in the way you probably envisioned. Tomatoes became more than just a seasonal cooking staple — they became an aesthetic, an online trend and a way of life. Tomato Girl Summer paved the path for the eponymous Tomato Girl, a young woman who dons flowy dresses and silk headscarves à la Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe while embodying a picture-perfect lifestyle filled with scenic walks along the Amalfi coast and afternoon feasts of antipasti. Red is a core color of the Tomato Girl’s wardrobe, but certainly not a requirement. Her overall aura is bright and blushing with ripeness, much like the juicy produce.
A year after its inception, the “tomato girl” enjoyed a resurgence, this time with literal tomatoes.
Rigorous yet casual, funny and fierce, intimate and formidable, Pause the Document invokes the documentary impulse and turns it back on itself in ways that are seriously playful and deeply enjoyable.
“You can’t actually see the Great Wall of China from space,” Dalrymple begins, “but the border wall dividing India from Pakistan is unmistakable.” Stretching more than 3,000km and flanked by floodlights, thermal vision sensors and landmines, this is more a physical scar left by the hurried dismantling of British India than a traditional geopolitical divide. What might now seem like natural frontiers were shaped by five key events: Burma’s exit from the empire in 1937; the separation of Aden that same year, and of the Gulf protectorates in 1947; the division of India and Pakistan, also in 1947; the absorption of more than 550 princely states; and, in 1971, the secession of East Pakistan. Neither ancient nor inevitable, these lines were hastily drawn in committee rooms, colonial offices and war cabinets.
What makes Shattered Lands remarkable is not just the breadth of its archival reach or the linguistic range of its interviews (from Bengali to Burmese, Urdu to Konyak), but the way it reframes south Asia’s history through the lens of disintegration.
When I first heard Britney Spears, I was five years old, escaping interminable reruns of the Twin Towers collapsing to dance to “I’m a Slave 4 U” with my sister in her bedroom. She was 11 years my senior; it had not occurred to me until then that she was anything other than a babysitter, much less a dance partner, a friend, someone with whom I could share a cultural touchpoint. Waiting similarly bridges this gap. Maybe things are worse now, or at least the charade of promise has disintegrated, but isn’t clarity the first step toward change? When the dust from the car chases and the haze from weed settle, we find Jeff with his own marquee, trumpeting a simple truth: not much is different, but everything could be.