synreads444

[synreads444]

Highsmith, P. (1952) Carol

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Read: 18/09/23 - 04/10/23

#highsmith #book #carol #october

[synreads444]

Murakami, H. (2001). Norweigan Wood. London: Vintage Classics. Originally released in 1987.

“When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki.

Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.”

“Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed.” - Times Literary Supplement

“Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility.” - Guardian

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Read: 06/09/23 - 12/09/23

#murakami #book #norweigan wood #september

[synreads444]

Canto 3

Through me you go to the grief-wracked city. Through me to everlasting pain you go. Through me you go and pass among lost souls. Justice inspired my exalted Creator. I am a creature of the Holiest Power, of Wisdom in the Highest and of Primal Love. Nothing till I was made was made, only eternal beings. And I endure eternally. Surrender as you enter every hope you have.

Dante

#dante #inferno #p.12

[synreads444]

Alighieri, D. (2013). Inferno. London: Penguin Classics. Originally written in 1321.

"Through me you go to the grief-racked city. Through me to everlasting pain you go..."

"Depicting one man's horrifying journey into the depths of Hell, Inferno, the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy, is a soaring spiritual epic that continues to echo through the centuries with its moving portrayal of human sin and the tragedy of those condemned to eternal damnation."

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Read: In Progress

#dante #inferno #september

[synreads444]

Paralytic

It happens. Will it go on? —— My mind a rock, No fingers to grip, no tongue, My god the iron lung

That loves me, pumps My two Dust bags in and out, Will not

Let me relapse While the day outside glides by like ticker tape. The night brings violets, Tapestries of eyes,

Lights, The soft anonymous Talkers: 'You all right?' The starched, inaccessible breast.

Dead egg, I lie Whole On a whole world I cannot touch, At the white, tight

Drum of my sleeping couch Photographs visit me- My wife, dead and flat, in 1920 furs, Mouth full of pearls,

Two girls As flat as she, who whisper 'We're your daughters.' The still waters Wrap my lips,

Eyes, nose and ears, A clear Cellophane I cannot crack. On my bare back

I smile, a buddha, all Wants, desire Falling from me like rings Hugging their lights.

The claw Of the magnolia, Drunk on its own scents, Asks nothing of life.

Sylvia Plath

#sylvia plath #ariel #p.73-4

[synreads444]

Fever 103

Pure? What does it mean? The tongues of hell Are dull, dull as the triple Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin. The tinder cries. The indelible smell Of a snuffed candle! Love, love, the low smokes roll From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel. Such yellow sullen smokes Make their own element.They will not rise, But trundle round the globe Choking the aged and the meek, The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib, The ghastly orchid Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard! Radiation turned it white And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers Like Hiroshima ash and eating in. The sin. The sin. Darling, all night I have been flickering, off, on, off, on. The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.

Three days. Three nights. Lemon water, chicken Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone. Your body Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern ---

My head a moon Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light. All by myself I am a huge camellia Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up, I think I may rise --- The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene Virgin Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim, By whatever these pink things mean. Not you, nor him. Not him, nor him (My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) --- To Paradise.

Sylvia Plath

#sylvia plath #ariel #p.52-4

[synreads444]

Medusa

Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs, Eyes rolled by white sticks, Ears cupping the sea's incoherences, You house your unnerving head—God-ball, Lens of mercies,

Your stooges Plying their wild cells in my keel's shadow, Pushing by like hearts, Red stigmata at the very center, Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure,

Dragging their Jesus hair. Did I escape, I wonder? My mind winds to you Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable, Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.

In any case, you are always there, Tremulous breath at the end of my line, Curve of water upleaping To my water rod, dazzling and grateful, Touching and sucking.

I didn't call you. I didn't call you at all. Nevertheless, nevertheless You steamed to me over the sea, Fat and red, a placenta

Paralyzing the kicking lovers. Cobra light Squeezing the breath from the blood bells Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath, Dead and moneyless,

Overexposed, like an X-ray. Who do you think you are? A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary? I shall take no bite of your body, Bottle in which I live,

Ghastly Vatican. I am sick to death of hot salt. Green as eunuchs, your wishes Hiss at my sins. Off, off, eely tentacle!

There is nothing between us.

Sylvia Plath

#sylvia plath #ariel #p.38-9

[synreads444]

Lady Lazarus

I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it—

A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot

A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify?—

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me

And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot— The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident.

The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut

As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout:

'A miracle!' That knocks me out. There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart— It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash— You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.

Sylvia Plath

#sylvia plath #ariel #p.8-11

[synreads444]

Plath, S. (2001) Ariel. London: Faber and Faber. First published in 1965.

"The poems in this book, including many of her best known, such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy' and 'Fever 103' were all written between the publication in 1960 of Sylvia Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963."

"The great appeal of Ariel and its constellated lyrics is the feeling of irresistible given-ness. There inheres in this poetry a sense of surprised arrival, of astonished being... [The poems] are, in Lowell's words, events rather than the records of events, and as such represent the triumph of Sylvia Plath's romantic ambition to bring expressive power and fully achieved selfhood into congruence." - Seamus Heaney

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Read: 03/09/23

#sylvia plath #ariel #September

[synreads444]

Cut

What a thrill - My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin, A flap like a hat, Dead white. Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim, The Indian's axed your scalp. Your turkey wattle Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart. I step on it, Clutching my bottle Of pink fizz.  A celebration, this is. Out of a gap A million soldiers run, Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on? O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill

The thin Papery feeling. Saboteur, Kamikaze man -

The stain on your Gauze Ku Klux Klan Babushka Darkens and tarnishes and when The balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence

How you jump - Trepanned veteran, Dirty girl, Thumb stump.

Sylvia Plath

#sylvia plath #selected poems #p.66

[synreads444]

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful - The eye of a little god, four-cornered. Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers. Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is. Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. I am important to her. She comes and goes. Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath

#sylvia plath #selected poems #p.42

[synreads444]

The Stones

This is the city where men are mended. I lie on a great anvil. The flat blue sky-circle Flew off like the hat of a doll When I fell out of the light. I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard. The mother of pestles diminished me. I became a still pebble. The stones of the belly were peaceable, The head-stone quiet, jostled by nothing. Only the mouth-hole piped out, Importunate cricket In a quarry of silences. The people of the city heard it. They hunted the stones, taciturn and separate, The mouth-hole crying their locations. Drunk as a foetus I suck at the paps of darkness. The food tubes embrace me. Sponges kiss my lichens away. The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry Open one stone eye. This is the after-hell: I see the light. A wind unstoppers the chamber Of the ear, old worrier. Water mollifies the flint lip, And daylight lays its sameness on the wall. The grafters are cheerful, Heating the pincers, hoisting the delicate hammers. A current agitates the wires Volt upon volt. Catgut stitches my fissures. A workman walks by carrying a pink torso. The storerooms are full of hearts. This is the city of spare parts. My swaddled legs and arms smell sweet as rubber. Here they can doctor heads, or any limb. On Fridays the little children come To trade their hooks for hands. Dead men leave eyes for others. Love is the uniform of my bald nurse. Love is the bone and sinew of my curse. The vase, reconstructed, houses The elusive rose. Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows. My mendings itch. There is nothing to do. I shall be good as new.

Sylvia Plath

#sylvia plath #selected poems #p.24-5

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Plath, S. (1985). Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.

"When Sylvia Plath's Ariel was published posthumously, A. Alvarez in the Observer wrote: 'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hard minded... They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity... the book is a major literary event.' This selection made by Ted Hughes from all her work shows that Sylvia Plath is clearly a major poet of the twentieth century, a rare example of the egotistical sublime."

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Read: 03/09/23

#sylvia plath #selected poems #poetry #september