If you have been completely cut off from all news and media sources for the last month, you may have missed some surprising news. Or, at least, it surprised me. The Bell Jar turned fifty this year. It was a shock, since I was sure it was from the 60s, which was like twenty five years ago. But not so.
For many female writers who came next, the ghost of Sylvia Plath has always loomed large. Lately, I feel as though she is everywhere I turn. Even this morning, as I was waiting to wave someone away in our drive, I absently switched on the radio on the windowsill and just happened to catch Hayley Atwell reading from Andrew Wilson’s new Plath biography Mad Girl’s Love Song. I hadn’t realised this was the BBC book of the week, although, had I stopped for one minute to consider what it might be, I would have had to guess this, or the Bell Jar itself. (I will search the schedule in a minute, it must surely be there, or on BBC4.) After all, Sylvia and her infectious, feminine, feminist madness is everywhere at the moment.
Which is, in my view, a good thing. Continue reading
If you’ve been reading this blog, then you will know that one of my goals for 2013 is to try and think a little differently about creative expression. As part of this process, I have managed to be become the embedded writer in an astonishing project involving more than that 100+ wet plate photographers from more than 25 countries. It’s called ‘The Mask Series‘ and the idea is quite simple. Everyone involved takes one image, using a wet plate camera like the one you see here. In other words, no film. Instead, you mix up the chemicals needed to make your chosen surface (glass, tin, aluminium) photosensitive, and then, provided you haven’t blown yourself up yet, you take a photo that has a vintage M10 Czech Gas Mask in it. (This does actually make a lot more sense if you look at the blog devoted to the project.)
Since I am writing so much about this project now, I decided it was about time I took a gas mask image of my own. Continue reading