‘YouTube’ Never Dissapoints January 27, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , trackbackOkay so in my constant (bizarre) attempt to prove that ‘YouTube.com’ does not, in fact, have a video on everything, I am once again bested. I simply searched for the words “Sylvia Plath” and found this totally insane video. It is an actual recording of Plath reading “Lady Lazarus” which is all very nice, but it is set to this video montage of overly dramatic teens being overly dramatic. It includes a ouiji board, flames, skeletons and of course a bell jar….it is pretty much laughably terrible but if you close your eyes you can hear Plath and I always think it’s neat to hear an author read their own work because I believe it is the best way to hear a poem recited in the exact tone it was meant to be read. So anyway that’s my exciting Saturday post…I will go into the poem itself later as it’s one of my absolute favorites but for some lighthearted weekend fun watch this video!
*oh and note how surprisingly deep Plath’s voice is, I don’t know why this is “surprising” but it is somehow. It is so deep and controlled that it adds a kind of haunting quality to the poem.
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Hey Amanda,
I experimented with embedding youtube videos in WordPress blogs, and it worked. If you want to do it, just copy the embed link the YouTube provides in a field to the right of the video and copy it into the “HTML” tab of the text editor.
Great stuff, more on experimenting soon.
thanks sooooo much for embedding the video!!!
Damn. That is one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in awhile. I’m trying to decide how I feel about that image near the end of Plath with her draft text superimposed on her body and face. I guess that it seems like it should be the other way, since what the video and her readers tend to do instead is superimpose Plath herself (her suicide, her mental illness) onto her texts. Otherwise how could they miss not just the anger but the humor of this astounding, wonderful poem? The part that most bothered me was the Plath-persona woman who had a blackened eye and fingered it in a close up, inviting us to look like Lady Lazarus herself– that is possibly the flattest concept of the confessional poets, rather than a richer kind of thinking about how life is rendered into art and performance, which is surely what Plath is talking about as much or more tha suicide or despair in this poem.
[...] Amanda started discussing her readings of Plath while talking about all the cool resources available to scholars on sites like YouTube. Moreover, she blogged a discussion her class had with Dr. Donovan from VCU, who is the Editor-in-Chief of the online literary journal Blackbird. During this discussion it came out that one of the students at VCU had “discovered” a poem by Sylvia Plath, “Ennui,” and Blackbird had published the piece to much acclaim. This was obviously a source of excitement for a budding Plath scholar and led Amanda to some more research -all of which she has blogged. To make a long, amazing story about undergraduate research a bit shorter -Amanda quickly realized that there are a number of Plath’s earlier poems in the Lilly Library at Indiana University that have already been indexed, including “Ennui,” but not published in the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Seems like the great find by Blackbird had already been discovered, and that many of Plath’s early poems have by sequestered in the Lilly Library for scholars but remain unpublished for a broader audience. According to Amanda: I’ve been reviewing the articles that came out around the time that “Ennui” was published in Blackbird and I am continually surprised by the quotes I find! For instance the one listed above which I found in both The Washington Post and USA Today. In an effort to remain unbiased and fair I was giving Dr. Donovan (the editor of Blackbird) and Anna Journey (the graduate student who “found” “Ennui) the benefit of the doubt and hoping that they had just been rather vague in describing how she “found” the sonnet, rather than simply claiming it a true discovery (in every sense of the word). However, it seems that everyone i’ve spoken with, and everyone in conjunction with Sylvia Plath (ie: Linda Wagner-Martin) were all under the same assumption I was: that Anna Journey did find an undiscovered poem. It seems completely inconceivable that no one ever flipped to the end of Plath’s Collected Poems and saw the list that allowed me such easy access to Plath’s unpublished poetry! I hate to harp on this, but i’m going to…All of Sylvia Plath’s unpublished juvenilia is accounted for and catalogued and safely stored in her archive at the Lilly Library. [...]
[...] started discussing her readings of Plath while talking about all the cool resources available to scholars on sites like YouTube. Moreover, she blogged a discussion her class had with Dr. Donovan from VCU, who is the [...]
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