Quote time
Jun. 29th, 2004 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakFirstly, for all the molasse-like speed in recent days, lj is a fine and lovely world with splendid pleople who create icons on request. See above.
Secondly, I father that there is a stories-featuring-kisses challenge making the rounds. No. Not for me. I already did my share. I mean, check it out: The Haunting, Hunted Kind? Ends with a kiss. Truth or Dare? Ends with a kiss. For Joss' sake, even Five Things Which Never Happened to Warren ends with a kiss. (Figures that this wouldn't have... never mind.) So I think I already contributed enough kisses to wreck my reputation as a merciless provider of angst.
However. Being presented with not one but two desired icons points out to me one has to contribute, so I decided it was time for quotes of the literary kind. One of the most memorable first kiss descriptions, to me, is Sylvia Plath's diary entry on her first meeting with Ted Hughes. Imagine them on that Cambridge party (dozens of biographers afterwards certainly did, and never managed to recreate Plath's energy when describing the event), both in their early twenties. February 26, 1955.
Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard into my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: 'most dear unscratchable diamond' and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, 'You like?' and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into next room past the smug shining blub face of dear Bert, looking as if he had delivered at least nine or ten babies, and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.
We shouted as if in a high wind, about the review, and he saying Dan knew I was beautiful, he wouldn't have written it about a cripple, and my yelling protest in which the words 'sleep with the editor' occurred with startling frequency. And then it came to the fact I was all there, wasn't I, and I stamped and screamed yes, and he had obligations in the next room, and he was working in London, earning ten pounds a week so he could later earn twelve pounds a week, and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my nick I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.
His poem 'I did it, I.' The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chuncks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you. The one man since I've lived who could blast Richard. (...)
I shall never see him again, and the thorny limitations of the day crowd in like the spikes on the gates at Queens last night: I could never sleep with him anyway, with all his friends here and his close relation to them, laughing, talking, I should be th eworld's whore, as well as Roget's strumpet. I shall never see him, he will never look for me. He said my name, Sylvia, and banged a black grinning look into my eyes, and I would like to try just this once, my force against his. But he will never come, and the blonde one, pure and smug and favored, looks, is it with projected pity and disgust? at this drunken amorphic slut.
As I copy these lines, the thought occurs to me that Sylvia Plath, today, would be one of nature's bloggers. Presumably involved in many a flame war, too. But I'm not sure whether she would have presented herself in the same way she did in her written diary. Yes, she knew it would be read after her death - she herself read Virginia Woolf's journals, and she was convinced of her own status as a poet. However, the various selves she constructed and which differ from each other (just compare the voice in the letters to her mother with the voice of the journal writer and marvel) lead me to suspect she would have created yet another self for a livejournal, too.
One always feels slightly guilty at sharing the entire voyeuristic fascination with the Plath-Hughes saga, but there it is. It's also captivating to compare and contrast this entry, written the day after the event occured, with Hughes' own take, written decades later, as an old man, and published only shortly before his death, in one of the Birthday Letters poems:
First sight. First snapshot isolated
Unalterable, stilled in the camera's glare.
Taller
Then ever you were again. Swaying so slender
It seemed your long, perfect, American legs
Simply went on up. That flaring hand,
Those long, balletic, monkey-elegant fingers.
And the face - a tight ball of joy.
I see you there, clearer, more real
Than in any of the years in its shadow -
As if I saw you that once, then never again.
The loose fall of hair - that floppy curtain
Over your face, over your scar. And your face
A rubbery ball of joy
Round the African-lipped, laughing, thickly
Crimson-painted mouth. And your eyes
Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds,
Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears
That might have been tears of joy, a squeeze of joy.
You meant to knock me out with your vivacity. I remember
Little from the rest of that evening.
I slid away with my girl-friend. Nothing
Except her hissing rage in a doorway
And my stupefied interrogation
Of your blue headscarf in my pocket
And the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks
That was to brand my face for the next month.
The me benath it for good.
Secondly, I father that there is a stories-featuring-kisses challenge making the rounds. No. Not for me. I already did my share. I mean, check it out: The Haunting, Hunted Kind? Ends with a kiss. Truth or Dare? Ends with a kiss. For Joss' sake, even Five Things Which Never Happened to Warren ends with a kiss. (Figures that this wouldn't have... never mind.) So I think I already contributed enough kisses to wreck my reputation as a merciless provider of angst.
However. Being presented with not one but two desired icons points out to me one has to contribute, so I decided it was time for quotes of the literary kind. One of the most memorable first kiss descriptions, to me, is Sylvia Plath's diary entry on her first meeting with Ted Hughes. Imagine them on that Cambridge party (dozens of biographers afterwards certainly did, and never managed to recreate Plath's energy when describing the event), both in their early twenties. February 26, 1955.
Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard into my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: 'most dear unscratchable diamond' and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, 'You like?' and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into next room past the smug shining blub face of dear Bert, looking as if he had delivered at least nine or ten babies, and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.
We shouted as if in a high wind, about the review, and he saying Dan knew I was beautiful, he wouldn't have written it about a cripple, and my yelling protest in which the words 'sleep with the editor' occurred with startling frequency. And then it came to the fact I was all there, wasn't I, and I stamped and screamed yes, and he had obligations in the next room, and he was working in London, earning ten pounds a week so he could later earn twelve pounds a week, and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my nick I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.
His poem 'I did it, I.' The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chuncks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you. The one man since I've lived who could blast Richard. (...)
I shall never see him again, and the thorny limitations of the day crowd in like the spikes on the gates at Queens last night: I could never sleep with him anyway, with all his friends here and his close relation to them, laughing, talking, I should be th eworld's whore, as well as Roget's strumpet. I shall never see him, he will never look for me. He said my name, Sylvia, and banged a black grinning look into my eyes, and I would like to try just this once, my force against his. But he will never come, and the blonde one, pure and smug and favored, looks, is it with projected pity and disgust? at this drunken amorphic slut.
As I copy these lines, the thought occurs to me that Sylvia Plath, today, would be one of nature's bloggers. Presumably involved in many a flame war, too. But I'm not sure whether she would have presented herself in the same way she did in her written diary. Yes, she knew it would be read after her death - she herself read Virginia Woolf's journals, and she was convinced of her own status as a poet. However, the various selves she constructed and which differ from each other (just compare the voice in the letters to her mother with the voice of the journal writer and marvel) lead me to suspect she would have created yet another self for a livejournal, too.
One always feels slightly guilty at sharing the entire voyeuristic fascination with the Plath-Hughes saga, but there it is. It's also captivating to compare and contrast this entry, written the day after the event occured, with Hughes' own take, written decades later, as an old man, and published only shortly before his death, in one of the Birthday Letters poems:
First sight. First snapshot isolated
Unalterable, stilled in the camera's glare.
Taller
Then ever you were again. Swaying so slender
It seemed your long, perfect, American legs
Simply went on up. That flaring hand,
Those long, balletic, monkey-elegant fingers.
And the face - a tight ball of joy.
I see you there, clearer, more real
Than in any of the years in its shadow -
As if I saw you that once, then never again.
The loose fall of hair - that floppy curtain
Over your face, over your scar. And your face
A rubbery ball of joy
Round the African-lipped, laughing, thickly
Crimson-painted mouth. And your eyes
Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds,
Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears
That might have been tears of joy, a squeeze of joy.
You meant to knock me out with your vivacity. I remember
Little from the rest of that evening.
I slid away with my girl-friend. Nothing
Except her hissing rage in a doorway
And my stupefied interrogation
Of your blue headscarf in my pocket
And the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks
That was to brand my face for the next month.
The me benath it for good.
