WHAT? MONDAY

Gentle Readers,

I've decided to start a new feature that will appear every Monday if I remember to do it. I'm going to ask a question that I will answer myself, and then I hope you'll answer it too. It will help us learn more about each other and besides I'm one nosy bitch. It will also get our brains in thinking mode for the week. Remember, now, every Monday be prepared for this feature, which I will continue to do if I feel like it.

I think the first question is an easy one, though I've found in the past that some people cannot make up their minds about the simplest freaking things have difficulty choosing a single answer; therefore, if you like, tell us your two or three top choices.

And the question is

What is your all-time favorite book?

 It can be your favorite childhood book, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, cookbook, coffee table book. Remember Kramer's coffee table book about coffee tables on Seinfeld? It could even be that book.

As a highbrow English major, my Numero Uno favorite book is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce a close second and The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner an even closer third. 


Fitzgerald is so clean and perfect. Gatsby does not have a single wasted word, and the style if lyrical.

I also love everything Jane Austen wrote, some contemporary fiction, and lots of non-fiction that helps me learn my history. My favorite poets are Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath.

Now I hope you'll answer the question, too, or "Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through."

Infinities of love,

Lola

A DATE WITH DEATH

She died today. By her own hand. It was on this day in 1963 that she put tape around the children's bedroom door and stuffed towels under it and put a towel very neatly on the open oven door, lay her head upon the towel, and turned on the gas.

Why did she do it? Why did a person of such talent who was producing the greatest poetry of her young life kill herself, leaving behind her two young children?

I understand the possibilities completely.

Her husband left her for another woman.

She was an American living in freezing cold London with two little kids.

She had been in her flat for eight weeks and still didn't have a phone. If she so much as wanted to make a telephone call, she had to go out and queue up in the cold and wait to use the public phone. She was on a waiting list to get a phone.

She was on a waiting list to die.

Her former sister-in-law, who reportedly disliked her, yet was made her literary executor, criticized her for putting bread and milk near the children's cribs that morning, where they could not possibly reach it. Could anyone believe she was thinking clearly at that time?

I don't know if she had had all she could take, or if she just wanted to reach Oblivion - the Oblivion of a sleep that lasts a very long time. Perhaps she hoped she would be found before she actually died and would get the help she so desperately needed.

Maybe she hoped He would come back.