Artful Endeavors New England

I just finished rereading A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath after many years of maturing as a writer myself, and I have to say that this time around, Nancy Hunter Steiner came across to me as an astonishingly good writer -- as skilled in her own non-fiction writing as Plath — a poet of surpassing brilliance — was.

I'd like to know if Steiner wrote other books that I could track down and read. It seems to me a shame — a truly unjust literary loss — that she's not remembered more as a writer of consummate ability.

As I see it, A Closer Look at Ariel was breathtakingly well written, not just for its writerly sophistication but for its powerful insights into Plath, with whom she lived at Smith College for two years before Plath committed suicide at the age of 29. Steiner, whose work we hear very little about today, was also a terrible loss to the world of fiction and poetry, merely by virtue of our many decades of inattention to her.

Plath’s highly praised novel, The Bell Jar, helps us understand just how great were her gifts as a writer. And along with A Closer Look at Ariel, it provides us with a brutally honest look at how her ways of thinking, her emotional fragility, and her self-destructive behaviors finally led her to such a tragic, untimely death.

— Ross Alan Bachelder 3/22/21

The Life We're Living: November 16, 2020, 2020

December 22, 2020

Dear Readers (of life-enriching books) and Sharers (of heartfelt, well-informed convictions):

We're only human.

Am I not right about this? I think I am right, though there will always be a small handful of people who, on the basis of their inhuman conduct probably don't deserve to be included in that esteemed number.

So! Given our shared humanity, there are certain yearnings that all of us have, even though we're not always able to satisfy or even articulate them.

We always want, for instance, the Holiday Season we're currently immersed in to be at least as fulfilling as, if not more than, the one we were immersed in the year before.

But I also think it's safe to say that this year's Holiday is going to go down in history as one of the most painful, heartbreaking, and challenging Holiday Seasons in recent memory.

As we near the end of the year 2020, we know, to our anguish, that we've lost more people through to the grossly incompetent mismanagement of the Pandemic than in all the world's wars since the year 1900.

We're all struggling, some valiantly, to get past the most amoral, ruthless, corrupt, and politically inept Administration in the history of this country.

Unemployment, underemployment, and homelessness are easily as bad as they were during the Great Depression, more than a century ago.

It has become painfully obvious that our beloved, vaunted Constitution lacks the power -- the critical apparatus -- to put an end to a Presidency -- and a President -- who finds a perverse kind of joy in violating laws and moral precepts, destroying careers, and rewarding gross incompetence and criminal conduct with grotesque perks and blatantly unwarranted pardons.

The unavoidable deficiencies in remote learning are causing anxiety, depression, and educational chaos in America's families, and in our public schools and universities.

Contempt for and distrust of science and higher learning is at an all-time high, and the current President of the United States is more responsible for it than anyone else on this troubled planet.

White Nationalism -- bigotry of every imaginable kind, driven by an amoral President and the rampant re-emergence of the Neo Nazis and other hate groups -- is spreading across the globe at breakneck speed, and with terrifying consequences.

Lawlessness has become fashionable, in traffic, in stores, in churches, in schools, in police departments, in courtrooms, and in America's very centers of government--those grand edifices in every state where laws are written for the protection of everyone who calls him- or herself an American.

Countless people across the country are either undernourished, hungry, or starving thanks to a collapsed economy, unemployment, and an alarming inability to buy food and put it on the table.

And it's not just the physical and economic wellbeing of America's citizens that are being crippled by the greed and indifference of the One Per Cent -- it's also their mental and emotional health. People are going begging for psychiatric help, and suicides among farmers, doctors, first responders -- and even children -- are occurring at an alarming rate.

I'm not going to make an ass of myself by suggesting for one minute that I have solutions to any of these problems. But I know one thing, deep within both my heart and my intellect: the answer is not in religion, flags, and jingoistic patriotism. Nor is it in violence, bigotry, and sanctimonious pronouncements.

All I feel qualified to offer my readers this evening is a modest, well-meant handful of reasonable, rational, practical, heartfelt recommendations:

1. Read worthwhile books -- a great many books -- but don't bother with books that lack substance and preach hatred, and learn to recognize the difference.

2. Question authority. Too many Jews, Immigrants, children, people with disabilities, and People of Color have stopped doing so over the centuries -- have caved into manipulation and discrimination, bigotry and brutality -- and they've paid for it with their dignity, their humanity, and their lives.

3. Be kind -- to your friends, to your relatives, to people anywhere who serve you in any capacity in the marketplace, to your neighbors, and to any people you come across at random in your daily affairs.

4. Be helpful. I've found, as I age, that the more helpful I am with people from every walk of life, in any manageable situation, the better I feel, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. (No, I am not a formally religious person -- not at all -- but I believe there's a spiritual component in all of us -- a proclivity to kindness, a drive to be good -- which, with or without religious influence, I'm more than happy to call spirituality.)

5. Have the courage of your convictions, but not if they're designed to insult, demean, or cause pain to the people around you.

6. Know the difference between constructive and destructive behavior, and teach that difference to your children.

And this, as I see it -- and for what it's worth -- is the life we're living as of December, 2020 -- soon to be Christmas Eve and with a New and Better Year close on its heels.

Thanks for reading this outpouring, and may you find as much joy as you possibly can in both the Holiday Season we're immersed in and the New Year that will soon be upon us.

Ross

12/22/20

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