On November 20, 1962, three months before her death, Sylvia Plath was living in Devon, England, when she wrote to her college benefactress and mentor — Olive Higgins Prouty, a novelist living in the United States — about a second book she was writing. Plath wanted to dedicate it to her:
It is to be called “Doubletake”, meaning that the second look you take at something reveals a deeper, double meaning […] it is semi-autobiographical about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful & perfect. I would like very much, if the book is good enough, to dedicate this novel to you. It seems appropriate that this be “your” novel, since you know against what odds I am writing it and what the subject means to me; I hope to finish it in the New year. Do let me know if you’d let me dedicate it to you. Of course I’d want you to approve of it first!
In Plath’s characteristic aplomb, even in times of distress, she signed off, “With love, Sylvia.” The novel, however, disappeared.
If you live in an apartment in a city like New York or Paris, chances are you secretly spy on your neighbors. It’s hard not to. In my New York apartment, my living room window is only about 30 feet away from my neighbor’s. You notice things–like the fact that my neighbor had red plaid curtains until a woman started showing her face. The curtains quickly disappeared.
Turns out I’m not alone in my morbid curiosity about my neighbors’ tastes in window coverings. New York-based photographer Gail Albert Halaban has spent 13 years photographing people’s relationships with those they can see from their windows–and actually helping them meet each other. For her sprawling, multi-city photo series Out My Window, Halaban helps a person meet the folks who live across from them, and then stages a photograph of those people with their permission. She sets up lighting in their apartment, and then photographs them from across the way, capturing their lives through the window.
Ordinary experience used to include wild, nonhuman nature. It was around people as they worked and loved and took part in ritual. Wild creatures were a constant source of dramatic and mythical meaning. Why else do so many birds feature in poetry? One reason for the melancholy now felt by nature lovers is that the loss of wildlife threatens our ability to renew these meanings. And in times of environmental danger, we need to be skilled, collectively, at recognising the intricate links between ecosystems. The presence of wildlife teaches us this.
At least, Cocker argues, the collapse should not be allowed to occur without communal soul-searching. His title, Our Place, challenges Britain, in its social, ethnic and generational diversity, to begin that conversation. This resourceful and eloquent book could prove to be important.
Midway through “The Desert and Its Seed,” a searching and original novel by the Argentine writer Jorge Barón Biza, the narrator, 23-year-old Mario Gageac, has a revelation in front of a painting. Looking at Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s “The Jurist,” which depicts a man composed of bits of fish and poultry, he observes that the portrait contains two contrary personalities: “At first sight, it captured the astonishment of the victim, but then it acquired a different gleam, revealing the sinister mind of the strategist.”