Here you go. The most wretched thing I've seen...well...since I went to bed last night. The Bell Jar is being peddled as chick lit. I suppose this was sort of inevitable.

Hannah Griffiths at Faber says, We think there is a reader for this novel who could enjoy its brilliance without knowing anything about the poetry, or the broader context of Plath's work. (i.e., "We hope our readers are too illiterate to ever have heard of Sylvia Plath.") Oh, this woman, she also says of the cover, We love it and the sales since publication suggest that new readers are finding it in the way that we hoped. (i.e., "You'll never, ever see our sales figures, but...hey, did you see that flying saucer yesterday?")

Ah. But it's all good, says Naomi Wolf: "I see nothing wrong with this – except perhaps that some young women seeking a lightweight beach read might get unexpectedly very depressed."

Wait for it...

o.0

You know, I had a headache before someone pointed this article out to me. Really, people. I don't need more anger. This mess isn't amusing, not in any way. It's sickening. It lies at the center of the ugly, idiotic realities of the publishing world, which is the world that consumes my life. I can't shrug and shake it off.

---

It's sort of snowing this morning.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,355 words on Chapter One of Red Delicious.

Last night we watched Howard Hawk's The Big Sleep (1946). And then I finished reading Caroline M. Smith's Dr. Seuss: The Cat Behind the Hat and Juliet Eilperin's Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks. Which brings books read this year to six, I think, with four in progress (I can never read one book at a time):

1. Susannah Clapp, A Card from Angela Carter
2. Roland A. Gangloff's Dinosaurs Under the Aurora
3. Berke Breathed's Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 5 1987-1989
4. Berke Breathed's Berkeley Breathed's Outland: The Complete Collection
5. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (in progress)
6. Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker (in progress)

Okay. Gonna go try to deal with the headache.

Le Sigh,
Aunt Beast