Literature

A Love of Books

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My girlfriend says it is like watching a kid in a candy store when we visit a book store. I suddenly appear to have multiple arms, like a Hindu deity, and my stride becomes a purposeful lurch.

Any purpose to my stride can be attributed to my knowing that she is not much of a fan of shopping at all, and less of a fan of browsing, of idling, in a store whose shelves are taller than six feet and could crush us.
Read More

One Who Got Away

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

More so for Sylvia Plath than many other writers, readers develop protective feelings for her. Many openly express the idea that “only they” get her or are her best reader. Reading biographies of the dead poet, one encounters language akin to a lover describing the one who got away. Plath, a suicide, is a love who got away, for reader after reader.

The other Plath scholars or even her casual readers (if such readers exist) are viewed as rival suitors, as dead wrong for her, as individuals mishandling her bones. Some biographers refer to her by her given name, “Sylvia,” rather by than her personal and professional name, Plath, thus treating her as a familiar. Others are deeply offended by this practice, which does indeed appear to be something reserved for this poet alone. It has the effect of making her the star of a soap opera that she never cast herself in.

(Until her death in July 1995, I was friends with and a student of a Sylvia Plath scholar at SUNY New Paltz, Dr. Carley Bogarad. If ghosts existed, I wish hers was looking over my shoulder today.)
Read More

I Leave Me No Choice

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In Act 2, Scene 2, of Hamlet, the doomed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are chatting with Prince Hamlet. They are his old college buddies, and King Claudius (Hamlet’s step-father) and Queen Gertrude (his mother) have sent for them to attempt to learn what is bothering the young man, who has been acting with an “antic disposition” and saying strange things, half to himself and half to, well, no one can figure out who.

Hamlet greets them and speaks in the same riddling manner that he has been using with the rest:

HAMLET: Let me question more in particular, my good friends, what you have done to deserve such fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN: Prison, my lord?
HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Then the world is one.
HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ: We don’t think so, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

Hamlet quickly determines that they are not merely dropping in to talk about sports and the weather or to compare Klout scores but are indeed spies. Ultimately, he manages to have them both killed.
Read More