It’s getting near that time for buying presents and shit. The one present I’ll certainly be adding to my holiday wish list of hoped-for Christmas goodies is a Ken Russell T-shirt from Hirsute History.

The l’enfant terrible genius of British cinema, Unkle Ken—the man responsible for such classic movies as Women in Love, The Music Lovers, The Devils, Tommy and Altered States—is just one of the many hirsute heroes to be found on a range of colorful clothing available from Hirsute History at Amphorphia Apparel. Here he joins Sylvia Plath, John Waters, Susan Sontag, Jerry Garcia, Ada Lovelace and a whole bunch of other artists, scientists, ideas and stars that’ll look good on your body.

So, if you fancy wearing a Ken Russell or an Ada Lovelace, then hop over to the site or get a retina burn from the selection below.
 

Ken Russell.
 

Sylvia Plath.
 

Groucho Marx.
 
More fab T-shirts, after the jump….
 

 
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes discuss their work and life together in this interview for the BBC radio program Two of a Kind: Poets in Partnership, from January 18th, 1961. The interviewer is Owen Leeming, who asked about their first meeting at a party in February 1956:

Plath: I happened to be at Cambridge. I was sent there by the [US] government on a government grant. And I’d read some of Ted’s poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that’s actually where we met… Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later… We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.

Hughes: The poems haven’t really survived, the marriage, it took a hold. [Laughs]

Plath spotted her “big, dark, hunky boy” across a crowded room, and later danced, drank, and discussed poetry before Hughes kissed her “bang smash on the mouth.” Plath then bit him “long and hard” on the cheek, which he wore as a badge over the following weeks. Four months later, Plath and Hughes married on June 16th, 1956.

Plath published her first volume of poetry Colossus and Other Poems in October 1960, while Hughes had already published two volumes of poetry, including his award-winning debut The Hawk in the Rain in 1957. When asked if their relationship as partners and poets was in “parallel” or “conflict”, Hughes replied:

Hughes: We’re very alike — we like the same things, live at the same tempo, have the same sort of rhythm in almost every way. But obviously this is a very fortunate covering for temperaments that are extremely different. But they lead secret lives, you see — they content themselves in an imaginative world, so they never really come into open conflict.

He later discussed the processes by which they wrote:

Hughes: What she writes out needn’t be at all the contents of her own mind — it needn’t be anything she knows — but it’s something that somebody in the room knows, or somebody that she’s very close to knows. And, in this way, two people who are sympathetic to each other and who are right, who are compatible in this sort of spiritual way, in fact make up one person — they make up one source of power, which you both use and you can draw out material in incredible detail from the single shared mind. … It’s not that you choose the same things to write about, necessarily, and you certainly don’t write about them in the same way — it’s that you draw on an experience, it’s as though you knew more about something than you, from your own life, have ever really learned. . .

It’s a complicated idea to get across, because you’ve first of all to believe in this sort of telepathic union exists between two sympathetic people.

Plath also talked about her childhood, and how her writing developed:

Plath: I think I was happy up to the age of about nine — very carefree — and I believed in magic, which influenced me a great bit. And then, at nine, I was rather disillusioned — I stopped believing in elves and Santa Claus and all these little beneficent powers — and became more realistic and depressed, I think, and then, gradually, became a bit more adjusted about the age of sixteen or seventeen. But I certainly didn’t have a happy adolescence — and, perhaps, that’s partly why I turned specially to writing — I wrote diaries, stories, and so forth. I was quite introverted during those early years.

Between this interview and her tragic, early death in February 1963, Plath was to write her novel The Bell Jar, and the poems that were collected and published posthumously as Ariel in 1965.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Sylvia Plath’s pen and ink drawings exhibited for the first time
 
With thanks to Alan Shields, via Brainpickings

 
Sylvia Plath reads 15 poems from her final collection Ariel. The poems have been arranged in chronological order of composition, from recordings made on October 30th, 1962.

Hearing Plath’s voice brings a direct connection with her poetry that decades of biographical and academic debate has lost. This is quite wonderful.

Sylvia Plath reads from Ariel

01. “The Rabbit Catcher”
02. “A Birthday Present”
03. “A Secret”
04. “The Applicant”
05. “Daddy”
 

 
06. “Medusa”
07. “Stopped Dead”
08. “Fever 103°”
09. “Amnesiac”
10. “Cut”
 

 
11. “Ariel
12. “Poppies In October”
13. “Nick And The Candlestick”
14. “Purdah”
15. “Lady Lazarus”
 

 
Via Open Culture
 

Black is the earth-globe, one inch under,
An egg of blackness
Where sun and moon alternate their weathers

To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
over emptiness

By the time Ted Hughes published his great and terrible Crow, he was trailing more ghouls than Paulie Walnuts. Assia Wevill had very recently killed herself and their child, and in the same manner (gas) that Sylvia Plath had killed herself six years previously. The figure of Crow is cut from just such black cloth. Hughes described the poems in the following way for the limited edition Crow LP released in 1973:

Finding the right speech for Crow involved me in inventing a longish series of episodes, beginning, in traditional fashion, in heaven, where Crow is created, as part of a wager, by the mysterious, powerful, invisible prisoner of the being men call God. This particular God, of course, is the man-created, broken-down, corrupt despot of a ramshackle religion, who bears about the same relationship to the Creator as, say, ordinary English does to reality.

Surely one of the greatest volumes of English poetry of the last century or so, Crow is terrible and compelling and brilliant, and Hughes makes a fine selection for the following 1996 recording, right through to the relatively gentle coda of “How Water Began to Play” and “Littleblood.”
 

 
Some people like to write notes in the pages of their favorite books. Graham Greene liked to annotate the columns of the novels he was reading with notes, criticisms, and small, personal observations. They formed part of a resource for his future work.

Sylvia Plath also liked to annotate the pages of her favorite books. Here is a page from her copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool - that’s the best thing a girl can be in the world, a beautiful little fool.’

“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so -nthe most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.” Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated - God, I’m sophisticated!”

Plath underlined the first paragraph, and marked the second with a line, and the word L’Ennui.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Sylvia Plath’s pen and ink drawings exhibited for the first time

 
Via Julia Fierro
 

 
It’s around this time that the enthusiasm started almost a month ago begins to wane, and the pages of the diary remain blank, as days dissolve into weeks. Keeping a diary is hard work, but it is rewarding work. If you’ve started a diary and want a little encouragement to keep going, or even just to start writing, then here is a personal selection of diary and journal writers, who may inspire.
 
Sylvia Plath kept a diary throughout her life, which reveals a world beyond her poetry. Here is Sylvia setting out on her adventures as a writer, from November 13th 1949.

As of today I have decided to keep a diary again - just a place where I can write my thoughts and opinions when I have a moment. Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen. Every day is so precious I feel infinitely sad at the thought of all this time melting farther and farther away from me as I grow older. Now, now is the perfect time of my life.

In reflecting back upon these last sixteen years, I can see tragedies and happiness, all relative - all unimportant now - fit only to smile upon a bit mistily.

I still do not know myself. Perhaps I never will. But I feel free – unbound by responsibility, I still can come up to my own private room, with my drawings hanging on the walls…and pictures pinned up over my bureau. It is a room suited to me – tailored, uncluttered and peaceful…I love the quiet lines of the furniture, the two bookcases filled with poetry books and fairy tales saved from childhood.
At the present moment I am very happy, sitting at my desk, looking out at the bare trees around the house across the street… Always want to be an observer. I want to be affected by life deeply, but never so blinded that I cannot see my share of existence in a wry, humorous light and mock myself as I mock others.

 
Playwright Joe Orton filled his diaries with his sexual escapades, and vignettes of the strangeness of the world, from January 18th 1967.

On the bus going home I heard a most fascinating conversation between an old man and woman. “What a thing, though,” the old woman said. “You’d hardly credit it.” “She’s always made a fuss of the whole family, but never me,” the old man said. “Does she have a fire when the young people go to see her?” “Fire?” “She won’t get people seeing her without warmth.” “I know why she’s doing it. Don’t think I don’t,” the old man said. “My sister she said to me, ‘I wish I had your easy life.’ Now that upset me. I was upset by the way she phrased herself. ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ I said. ‘I’ve only got to get on the phone and ring a certain number,’ I said, ‘to have you stopped.’” “Yes,” the old woman said, “And you can, can’t you?” “Were they always the same?” she said. “When you was a child? Can you throw yourself back? How was they years ago?” “The same,” the old man said. “Wicked, isn’t it?” the old woman said. “Take care, now” she said, as the old man left her. He didn’t say a word but got off the bus looking disgruntled.

 
More diaries from Jack Kerouac, Emily Carr, John Cheever, and Andy Warhol, after the jump…
 

 
For the first time, an exhibition of 44 pen and ink drawings by writer and poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) are to be shown at the Mayor Gallery in London, from 2 November to 16 December 2011. The exhibition contains drawings made in Paris, Benidorm, Cambridge in England, and Wisconsin. The show reveals Plath’s abiding love for her “deepest source of inspiration”, art.

For details of Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings and Dadamaino: Volumes at the Mayor Gallery, check here.

A selection of pictures can be viewed at the Telegraph.
 

 

 

 
More drawings by Sylvia Plath, after the jump…
 
Via the Daily Telegraph
 

 
A poem by Ted Hughes, considered lost, was published today in The New Statesman magazine after being discovered in the British Museum among his papers. In it, Hughes addresses the painful suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath. The poem, written in the 70s, would seem to be the “missing link” from Hughes’ 1998 book about his marriage to Plath, Birthday Letters, as none of the poems in that book discuss the circumstances of her death.

Carolyn Kellog, writing at the Los Angeles Times, Jacket Copy blog:

Actor Jonathan Pryce read part of the poem for the [BBC4 Radio] broadcast, reading:

Late afternoon Friday
my last sight of you alive
burning your letter to me
in the ashtray
with that strange smile

Sylvia Plath, who today is best-known as the author of the autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar,” was a young poet living in England when she met Ted Hughes, then also a young poet. The two married in 1956, moved to the U.S. for three years, and then returned to England. They had two children together.

Plath was 30 when she killed herself by inhaling the fumes from an unlit oven. Hughes went on to become one of the significant British poets of the 20th century, serving as British poet laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998.

The poem includes how Hughes learned of Plath’s death, in its final lines.

And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.