Did you know that Ted Hughes left Sylvia Plath with two little kids when he walked out? I guess most people who care about Sylvia Plath would know that. But I don’t care about Sylvia Plath, so it was news to me. Jesus Christ, Hughes was a fucking douche. You’d have to be to make me sympathize with the spindizzy who wrote The Bell Jar.
In other news, their son just killed himself “forty-six years after the suicide of his mother.” Oh, the sad harmonies of time. He was a marine biologist at the fucking University of Alaska but had quit, or taken a leave of absence or something, “to make pottery in his home studio.” He was really depressed, apparently. I can’t say I blame him, considering his fucking mother killed herself in the next room when he was two or something.
Hughes’s next wife, the one he left Plath for, also gassed herself. Instead of just leaving a couple of little kids without parents in a cold London winter, she took that extra step and actually killed her little daughter while killing herself.
Here’s what Plath wrote about her little boy at some point before offing herself: “You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn.” Well, Jesus. If my mom said that about me, I’d slap her face. But she’s got class and a sense of responsibility. I’m lucky to have her, taken all in all.
Fuck, how much does it take not to be some kind of poetic fucking asshole?
UPDATE: And my mom tells me she thinks Sylvia Plath was actually a good poet. Score one for human complexity.
Perhaps the “douche” here is yourself. You might want to review your tone when writing about a subject this sensitive …
Tom, this is like the third or forth time I’ve noticed you expressing a desire to hit someone for the crime of annoying you. Just pointing it out…
Oh for goodness sake. Tom is 100% right; talking about your child in that way in a poem is egregious. Contemporary poetry is a loathsome cesspit precisely because it encourages people to write and indeed think the way we see Plath thinking in that poem.
Calling out deadbeat dads is also righteous. They get way too much sympathy in general. As a Dad myself, I say fuck them all.
Aaron, there’s a fairly big difference between expressing the desire to hit someone and actually hitting them. The first is, as far as I’m concerned, just about morally neutral. Especially if it’s done as entertainingly as Tom does it.
Tom, anytime you want to write about slugging a contemporary poet, I’m with you. (Unless it’s me, I guess.)
Well, I would like to hit people who annoy me. It’s too bad I can’t, but that’s life.
As for you, Anonymous, if that is your real name, what are you, Ted Hughes’s agent? Go find something to do.
Allow me to subscribe my sentiments as being 100% in agreement with those of Aaron White. And yes, I am the “anonymous” who began this thread, and no, it is not my real name — as I suspect you must know. Your pretense of ignorance does not speak well of your intentions.
I have never had the honor of being Ted Hughes’ agent, lucrative and estimable as that function must be. I am simply one who takes note of human complexities however they manifest themselves. Very rarely can these complexities be rendered by terms such as “douche,” “fucking” or the rest of the cardboard repertoire you employ in your attempt at edge.
As for having something to do, I might observe that you are the one who scavenged the Internet for a chance to uncork a few one-liners …
You end one more sentence with those dots and I will string them thru your colon …
“I am simply one who takes note of human complexities however they manifest themselves.”
Is that what you are? From the cheap seats, it looks like you’re just another boring human being the world would be better off without.
I hope you get cancer, and I believe the numbers for that are still 1 in 3, so there’s a relatively good chance you will.
This has been pretty entertaining…but before things get completely out of hand…. (oh, wait, now I’m afraid to use ellipses…argh! There they go again!)
Where was I? Right; the anonymous provacateur has communicated with me and has voluntarily laid down his keyboard and retired from the field. So I believe that’s that.
Watch for the trolls, ladies and gents.
I don’t think I was expressing any sentiments for Anonymous to agree with, so I’m not sure what Anonymous is agreeing with.
Ann Loraine and Aaron White, is this a deal where two people living together share a computer and log on and off without noticing which name is operative? Because otherwise you’d have to be both an actor and a professor of biology and also spend a lot of time on the Internet.
And Tucker, thanks for backing me up.
Oopsie. Sorry ’bout that.