I Get Invited to an Academic Conference

My first glimpse of Beinecke Library

 

Me to My Sister: I was invited to give a paper at an academic conference in [expensive city].  I’ve never been there and I have a really good friend there

 

Sister: Sounds nice

 

Me: I’m not sure I can swing it financially

 

Sister: How much are they paying you

 

Me: I don’t get paid. It’s a career thing

 

Sister: If they invited you, they should pay you

 

Me: It doesn’t work that way. I pay them

 

Sister: You do?

 

Me: There’s a $350 registration fee and that gets me a group discount at a hotel but hotels are like $250 a night there, and I’d have to stay two nights at least and maybe three because my friend wants to show me around the city. I’ve always wanted to go there

 

Sister: Can’t you stay with your friend

 

Me: She has a roommate who sleeps on the couch. Rents are so expensive there

 

Sister: Well at least they pay for your plane ticket?

 

Me: No, they don’t do that

 

Sister: Then why would you go

 

Me: It’s kind of an honor to be invited, they’re really interested my research and I’d meet other scholars who do similar topics and hear what they’re researching, and maybe get my name out there and make some friends who work at universities who might tell other professors in the field what I’m doing or at least that work is being done. That’s the value of it. Plus I could put it on my resume. I figure it will cost about $2000 with food and rides to and from the airport

 

Sister: They don’t even feed you

 

Me: We get one lunch

 

Sister: 

 

Me: Guess I shouldn’t go, should save the money to do research at Yale

I Was Playing Paper Dolls

Aurelia in Sarasota, Florida, Easter 1967

Early in the Plath Family Papers research I saw I’d been working with paper dolls and of course I had, because between Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Aurelia Plath and I there had never been anything but paper. 

Although they had been real living people, what I’d read determined the faces I gave them and how I clothed them. Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie Sylvia wore upper-middle-class clothes, as if the costumers never met anyone like Sylvia Plath who bought off the rack aspirational clothes not quite so expensive or  flattering. And a whole generation now thinks Sylvia had blue eyes when they were plain common brown. 

That only proved that Sylvia imagined is not a person with an eye color. She is a cutout to be costumed: The Marilyn Monroe of literature, if you like. A feminist. A mystic. Political. Suicidal Esther Greenwood. Clothe her however you want. And instead of outgrowing our Sylvia Plath paper doll we got farther and farther away from the doll and deeper into the paper. Thinking Sylvia is her paper we generate more paper arguing whether paper equals truth. Any eight-year-old can tell you that’s a misapprehension.

In the new Plath Family archives I’m at my keyboard as at a sewing machine upstyling some old togs papered onto Sylvia, Ted, and Otto -- they're all in the archive -- and trying to craft for Aurelia a face and presence I am now privileged to see. Reading Aurelia's diaries and the lists of hundreds of friends in her bursting address book and seeing notes and inks and photos she cherished I felt as if her live warm body was stirring and arose as after a long sleep. She is more alive, more colorful and collected, more Queen Elizabeth II, than the Aurelia on whose life I thought myself an expert.