Poor Sylvia

There’s no way to avoid the truth about Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963). She was a depressed American female poet and proved it by writing several classics of depressing female literature, including the poetry collections Ariel and The Colossus and the novel The Bell Jar.

Since her suicide at the tender age of 30, Plath has grown to become a feminist icon; often perceived as a female genius who struggled within a patriarchy who dismissed her literary expression and sought to demean her as a sex object. She was also a hot mess.

Plath was born, quite aptly, during the Great Depression. As she said in her poem The Suicide Cloud: "for me, the Great Depression never ended". Her mother taught English, while her father was an apiarist who made his name by writing two books about bees. Apparently he couldn't say everything he wanted to with just one book about bees. Plath's parents were clearly huge influences on her for the rest of her life, and from a very young age she became dedicated to poetry – poetry that contained a baffling number of references to bees.

Unfortunately, her father died while Sylvia was still a youngster. Without a male authority figure around to tell her to "pull yourself together!", little Sylvia sank into despondency. Never again would she trust men, or bees. "Daddy gone, daddy gone, I wonder if I will be a lesbian?" (Depressed Girl on the Moon, 1961). Fortunately, Plath didn't have the chutzpah for lesbianism; she chickened out at the last minute and became a feminist instead.

Plath attended Smith College in 1950, where she generally experienced failure. While her peers socialized, had sex with each other and experimented with drugs, Plath wasted her time studying, writing her thesis and even doing extracurricular activities. She was awarded a post editing the college magazine, but this was little comfort for the fact that she didn't kiss a single boy the whole time she was there. "The girls' dorms are blue, bloodless veins, the hockey team rape the other girls, they won't even grope me" (Oblivion in the Showers, 1957).

Plath matriculated; likely due to the fact that students are not graded on the social side of higher education. However, the ordeal left Sylvia feeling lower than ever. After arriving home from her third year of school, she was sent to electro-convulsive therapy for depression.

Her first suicide attempt was at the age of 20 when she crawled under her mother's house after taking a handful of sleeping pills. She was found three days later, waking to these comforting words from her mother: "your poems aren't that bad darling!". Plath was exhausted, which was ironic considering the amount of sleeping pills she'd taken, and was checked into an asylum until she could stop writing poems and find a husband.

After her stay at McLean Hospital, Plath met British poet Ted Hughes and they fell in love. Hughes wrote her love poems, and, in return, Plath wrote him poems about death and bees. By some remarkable coincidence Hughes was a beekeeper, so he actually quite liked them.

The two were married in 1956, but their relationship was a rocky one. Plath became more focused in her writing and started work on her confessional, half-biographical novel The Bell Jar, which naturally upset everyone who knew her. Hughes' bees were also a point of contention, as exemplified in Plath's poetry from the period: "Bees, bees, bees. My father kept bees. My husband kept bees. Men, men, men. I am so depressed" (Bees bees bees, 1958). She also suffered a miscarriage around this time, which only worsened her rampant feminism.

Perhaps because Plath was such a whiny, man-hating, bee-hating bitch, Hughes had an affair in 1961, which naturally caused further strain on the marriage, ultimately leading to a separation, another suicide attempt, and a bunch of new poems about death and bees.

Beginning in October of 1962, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and wrote most of the poems on which her reputation now rests, writing at least 26 of the poems of her posthumous collection Ariel during this time. In February of 1963 she sealed herself in the kitchen using wet towels and cloths, and placed her head in the oven, with the gas on. She was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning later that day. She was 30, and still pretty hot.

There has been much speculation as to whether or not Plath truly intended to kill herself. The sheer effort she went to, sealing herself in to save her children from the gas, seems to suggest it was a carefully planned, if irrational, act. It has also been alleged, however, that she left a note reading "call Dr. Horder", including the doctor's phone number. Therefore, it has been argued that Plath hoped to be rescued, making this nothing more than a wussy emo feminist cry for help. Others say she was trying to get a tan and got stuck. Yet another theory is that Plath had gone insane and thought she was a beef stew, and tried to bake herself.

Plath's gravestone, in Heptonstall, Yorkshire, bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her: "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted", which he chose over Plath's actual last words, which were: "Bees! Fucking bees!"

Only two volumes of poetry were completed by Plath during her lifetime, and one of these, Ariel, was not published until after her death. Many thought the collection would win a Nobel Prize for Literature but it did not.

Plath is possibly best remembered for The Bell Jar, an embarrassingly confessional novel which fictionalizes her depression, her mistreatment by doctors and lack of connection with her family and friends, whom she considered soulless drones. Critics have called it a classic of American literature, except for those critics who actually knew Plath, who all found it personally offensive. The image of the bell jar, Plath explained, connoted loneliness and isolation. However in reality it was clearly a metaphor for her cold, dusty nether regions. The Bell Jar was well received by critics, garnering glowing reviews such as this one from The Washington Post: "she'd get it right in the bell jar if you know what I mean."

Some of Plath's later poems were eventually published by Hughes, although many, including dozens of journals and an unfinished novel, were controversially destroyed by him. Hughes has been called "unsympathetic" for these actions, but he always maintained that everything he did for the lasting memory of Sylvia Plath was done out of the greatest sympathy. His range of official Sylvia Plath oven mitts still sell well to this day.

It Was True

"It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?"

-- Charles Bukowski 

The Fabric of the Cosmos

The Fabric of the Cosmos:

Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

by Brian Greene

In The Fabric of the Cosmos, author Brian Greene explains the fundamental concepts of space and time. It is actually an exposition on the nature of reality, on whether the universe is a permanent entity or a dynamic, ever-changing system. Perhaps you’ve never given it much thought. Brian Greene has. He introduces us to the concept of spacetime as a four-dimensional concept that aligns the three dimensions of space with the dimension of time, as originally set forth by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Greene does not stop there. He speculates on the nature of space itself by imagining the possibility of extra dimensions beyond our familiar three spatial dimensions. Greene introduces the concept of string theory, which suggests that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are not particles, but tiny, vibrating strings of energy. These strings exist in a space with more than three dimensions, and their vibrations give rise to the particles and forces we observe in our three-dimensional world.

Greene goes on to examine the enigmatic nature of time by discussing the concept of time's arrow -- the idea that time has a definite direction and always moves from the past to the future. This apparent asymmetry of time is related to the increase of entropy, or disorder, in the universe, as described by the second law of thermodynamics.

At this point, the reader is introduced to the strange world of quantum mechanics, where particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously and their behavior is governed by probability. Greene reviews the famous thought experiment of Schrödinger's cat, which illustrates the bizarre concept of quantum superposition where a particle can exist in two contradictory states at once. Greene also explores the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, wherein particles become interconnected in such a way that the state of one particle instantaneously influences the state of another, regardless of the distance between.

Shifting attention to the large-scale structure of the universe, Greene describes the concept of cosmic inflation, a period of rapid expansion that occurred in the early universe. He explains how this inflationary phase accounts for the uniformity and flatness of the universe, as well as the origin of the cosmic microwave background radiation, a remnant of the Big Bang.

Afterwards, Greene analyzes the Big Bang itself by describing the singularity, a point of infinite density and temperature from which the universe is thought to have begun. Unfortunately, our current understanding of physics breaks down at this point, and Greene relates how a complete theory of quantum gravity is needed to describe the universe at such extreme conditions.

The final part of The Fabric of the Cosmos is devoted to exploring some of the most mind-bending implications of modern physics. Greene covers the concept of parallel universes, where every possible outcome of a quantum event actually occurs in a separate universe. This idea is known as the multiverse and arises from certain interpretations of quantum mechanics with profound implications for our understanding of reality.

Greene concludes his book by emphasizing the importance of continuing to explore and question the nature of the cosmos. He acknowledges that many of the concepts he has mentioned, such as extra dimensions, string theory, and the multiverse, remain speculative and unproven. However, he argues that these ideas are essential for pushing the boundaries of our understanding and inspiring new avenues of research in theoretical physics.

Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907, to Rex Ivar Heinlein (an accountant) and Bam Lyle Heinlein, in Butler, Missouri, and was the third of seven children. He was a sixth-generation German-American in a family that had sent one of their own to fight in every American war, starting with the Revolutionary War.

He grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. Naturally, the outlook and values of the time and place (in his own words, "The Bible Belt") had an influence on his fiction, especially in his later works, as he drew upon his childhood in establishing the setting and a cultural atmosphere in works like Time Enough for Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. The 1910 return of Halley's Comet inspired the young Robert Heinlein's life-long interest in astronomy.

In January 1924, sixteen-year-old Heinlein lied about his age in order to enlist in Company C, 110th Engineer Regiment, of the Missouri National Guard, in Kansas City. His family could not afford to send him to college, so he sought an appointment to a military academy. When Heinlein graduated from Kansas City Central High School in 1924, he was initially prevented from attending the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis because his older brother Rex was a student there, and at the time, regulations discouraged multiple family members from attending the academy simultaneously. He instead matriculated at Kansas City Community College and began vigorously petitioning Missouri Senator James A. Reed for an appointment to the Naval Academy. The Naval Academy admitted him in June 1925. Heinlein received his discharge from the Missouri National Guard as a staff sergeant. Reed later told Heinlein that he had received 100 letters of recommendation for nomination to the Naval Academy, 50 for other candidates and 50 for Heinlein.

Navy

Heinlein's experience in the US Navy exerted a strong influence on his character and writing. In 1929, he graduated from the Naval Academy with the equivalent of a bachelor of arts in engineering. (At that time, the Academy did not confer degrees.) He ranked fifth in his class academically but with a class standing of 20th of 243 due to disciplinary demerits. The US Navy commissioned him as an ensign shortly after his graduation. He advanced to lieutenant junior grade in 1931 while serving aboard the new aircraft carrier USS Lexington, where he worked in radio communications—a technology then still in its earlier stages. The captain of this carrier, Ernest J. King, later served as the Chief of Naval Operations and Commander-in-Chief, US Fleet during World War II. Military historians interviewed Heinlein during his later years and asked him about Captain King and his service as the commander of the US Navy's first modern aircraft carrier. Heinlein also served as gunnery officer aboard the destroyer USS Roper in 1933 and 1934, reaching the rank of lieutenant. His brother, Lawrence Heinlein, served in the US Army, the US Air Force, and the Missouri National Guard, reaching the rank of major general in the National Guard.

 

 

After serving five years, Heinlein was compelled to resign from service due to poor health and thus took the opportunity to pursue his graduate studies in physics and mathematics at the University of California in Los Angeles. Except for engineering service during World War II, he was an established professional writer from 1939.

“Life-Line,” was Heinlein’s first short story. It was published in the action-adventure pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He continued to write for that publication—along with other notable science-fiction writers—until 1942, when he he reactivated his commission and worked as a military production engineer.

After WWII, Heinlein returned to writing full-time, with a focus on a more sophisticated audience. His first book, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), was followed by a large number of novels and story collections, including works for children and young adults. After the 1940s, he largely avoided shorter fiction. His popularity grew over the years, probably reaching its peak after the publication of his best-known work, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).

His diverse interests, concern for characterization, and technical details brought him a considerable number of admirers among general-interest readers. Among his more popular books are The Green Hills of Earth (1951), Double Star (1956), The Door into Summer (1957), Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), Methuselah’s Children (1958), Starship Troopers (1959), The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), and Time Enough for Love (1973).

 

 

Heinlein used his fiction to explore provocative social and political ideas and to speculate how progress in science and engineering might shape the future of politics, race, religion, and sex. Within the framework of his science-fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly addressed certain social themes such as the importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the nature of sexual relationships, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress nonconformist thought. He also speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices.

Heinlein was influenced by the visionary writers and philosophers of his day. William H. Patterson Jr., writing in Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, states that by 1930, Heinlein was a progressive liberal who had spent time in the open sexuality climate of New York's Jazz Age Greenwich Village. Heinlein believed that some level of socialism was inevitable and was already occurring in America. He absorbed the social concepts of writers such as H. G. Wells and Upton Sinclair. He adopted many of the progressive social beliefs of his day and projected them forward. In later years,he backtracked somewhat and took on more conservative views, believe that a strong world government was the only way to avoid mutual nuclear annihilation.

Also, if you did not already know, Heinlein is the guy who came up with the line, “There ain’t no free lunch.”

I'm In the Dark Here

If you're tangled up, just Tango on...

"We are all broken, that's how the light gets in."

-– Ernest Hemingway

Stranger in a Strange Land

One of the books that influenced me and offered an alternative view to life in general was Stranger in a Strange Land, written by Robert A. Heinlein.

Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel and is on everybody’s list as among the top 10 science fiction novels ever written. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and subsequently raised by Martians. The story explores his interaction with and eventual transformation of Terran culture.

The title "Stranger in a Strange Land" is a direct quotation taken from Exodus 2:22. The working title for the book was "A Martian Named Smith," which was also the name of the screenplay started by a character at the end of the novel.

Stranger in a Strange Land won the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel and became the first science fiction novel to enter The New York Times Book Review's best-seller list. In 2012, the Library of Congress named it one of 88 "Books that Shaped America."

Synopsis

Prior to World War III, the crewed spacecraft Envoy is launched toward Mars, but all contact is lost shortly before landing. Twenty-five years later, the spacecraft Champion makes contact with the inhabitants of Mars and finds a single survivor, Valentine Michael Smith. Born on the Envoy, he was raised entirely by the Martians. He is ordered by them to accompany the returning expedition.

Smith is confined at Bethesda Hospital, where, having never seen a human female, he is attended by male staff only. Seeing that restriction as a challenge, Nurse Gillian Boardman eludes the guards and goes in to see Smith. By sharing a glass of water with him, she inadvertently becomes his first "water brother", a profound relationship by Martian standards, as water on Mars is extremely scarce.

Gillian's lover, reporter Ben Caxton, discovers that Smith is extremely wealthy. Ben is seized by the government, and Gillian persuades Smith to leave the hospital with her. Gillian takes Smith to Jubal Harshaw, a famous author, physician and lawyer. Eventually, Harshaw arranges freedom for Smith and recognition that human law, which would have granted ownership of Mars to Smith, has no applicability to a planet that is already inhabited by intelligent life.

Smith becomes a celebrity and is feted by the Earth's elite. He investigates many religions, including the Fosterite Church of the New Revelation, a populist megachurch in which sexuality, gambling, alcohol consumption, and similar activities are allowed and even encouraged and considered "sinning" only when they are not under church auspices. Smith has a brief career as a magician in a carnival, in which he and Gillian befriend the show's tattooed lady.

Smith starts a Martian-influenced "Church of All Worlds", combining elements of the Fosterite cult with Western esotericism. The church is besieged by Fosterites for practicing "blasphemy", and the church building is destroyed, but unknown to the public, Smith's followers teleport to safety.

Smith is arrested by the police, but escapes and returns to his followers, later explaining to Jubal that his gigantic fortune has been bequeathed to the church. With that wealth and their new abilities, church members will be able to reorganize human societies and cultures.

Smith is killed by a mob raised against him by the Fosterites. Jubal and some of the church members return to Jubal's home to regroup and prepare to found new Church of All Worlds congregations. Smith reappears in the afterlife to replace the Fosterites' founder, amid hints that Smith was an incarnation of the Archangel Michael.

Development

Originally titled The Heretic, the book was written in part as a deliberate attempt to challenge social norms. In the course of the story, Heinlein uses Smith's open-mindedness to re-evaluate such institutions as religion, money, monogamy, and the fear of death. Heinlein completed writing it ten years after he had plotted it out in detail. He later wrote, "I had been in no hurry to finish it, as that story could not be published commercially until the public mores changed. I could see them changing and it turned out that I had timed it right."

Heinlein got the idea for the novel when he and his wife Virginia were brainstorming one evening in 1948. She suggested a new version of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894), but with a child raised by Martians instead of wolves. He decided to go further with the idea and worked on the story on and off for more than a decade, believing that contemporary society was not yet ready for it.

Heinlein was surprised that some readers thought the book described how he believed society should be organized, explaining: "I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers ... It is an invitation to think – not to believe."

His editors at Putnam required him to cut its 220,000-word length down to 160,000 words before publication.

Heinlein himself remarked in a letter he wrote to Oberon Zell-Ravenheart in 1972 that he thought his shorter, edited version was better. Heinlein also added some new material to the shorter version. The book was dedicated in part to science fiction author Philip José Farmer, who had explored sexual themes in works such as The Lovers (1952). It was also influenced by the satiric fantasies of James Branch Cabell.

Reception

Heinlein's deliberately provocative book generated considerable controversy. The free love and communal living aspects of the Church of All Worlds led to the book's exclusion from school reading lists. After it was rumored to be associated with Charles Manson, it was removed from school libraries, as well.

Writing in The New York Times, Orville Prescott received the novel caustically, describing it as a "disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire, and cheap eroticism"; he characterized Stranger in a Strange Land as "puerile and ludicrous", saying "when a non-stop orgy is combined with a lot of preposterous chatter, it becomes unendurable, an affront to the patience and intelligence of readers." Galaxy reviewer Floyd C. Gale rated the novel 3.5 stars out of five, saying "the book's shortcomings lie not so much in its emancipation as in the fact that Heinlein has bitten off too large a chewing portion".

Despite such reviews, Stranger in a Strange Land won the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel and became the first science fiction novel to enter The New York Times Book Review's best-seller list. Critics have also suggested that Jubal Harshaw is actually a stand-in for Robert Heinlein himself, based on similarities in career choice and general disposition, though Harshaw is much older than Heinlein was at the time of writing. Literary critic Dan Schneider wrote that Harshaw's belief in his own free will, was one "which Mike, Jill, and the Fosterites misinterpret as a pan-deistic urge, 'Thou art God!'

Writer Sophie Kleeman has taken issue with the roles of female characters within the novel and statements made about women, such as Jill's assertion that "Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s partly her fault".

The book significantly influenced modern culture in a variety of ways.

Church of All Worlds

A central element of the second half of the novel is the religious movement founded by Smith, the "Church of All Worlds," an initiatory mystery religion blending elements of paganism and revivalism, with psychic training and instruction in the Martian language. In 1968, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (then Tim Zell) founded the Church of All Worlds, a Neo-pagan religious organization modeled in many ways after the fictional organization in the novel. The spiritual path included several ideas from the book, including polyamory, non-mainstream family structures, social libertarianism, water-sharing rituals, an acceptance of all religious paths by a single tradition, and the use of several terms such as "grok", "Thou art God", and "Never Thirst".

Heinlein objected to Zell's lumping him with other writers such as Ayn Rand and Robert Rimmer; Heinlein felt that those writers used their art for propaganda purposes, while he simply asked questions of the reader, expecting each reader to answer for him- or herself. He wrote to Zell in a letter: "... each reader gets something different out of the book because he himself supplies the answers. If I managed to shake him loose from some prejudice, preconception or unexamined assumption, that was all I intended to do."

Though Heinlein was neither a member nor a promoter of the Church, it was formed including frequent correspondence between Zell and Heinlein, and Heinlein was a paid subscriber to the Church's magazine Green Egg. This Church still exists as a 501(c)(3) recognized religious organization incorporated in California, with membership worldwide, and it remains an active part of the neopagan community.

Grok

The word "grok", coined in the novel, made its way into the English language. In Heinlein's invented Martian language, "grok" literally means "to drink" and figuratively means "to comprehend", "to love", and "to be one with". The word rapidly became common parlance among science fiction fans, hippies, and later computer programmers and hackers, and has since entered the Oxford English Dictionary. In November 2023, xAI, an artificial-intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, launched Grok, a large language model chatbot named after the novel’s neologism; the system is integrated into the social-media platform X (formerly Twitter).