Strangechord

Ugh, we’ve had the most miserable weather here in Portland for weeks and weeks and weeks… Rain and sleet and light snow and hail. I’m sick of it! This is certainly the harshest winter the Rose City has had since I’ve been here (four years).

Fascinating article in this last Sunday’s NY Times regarding the future of music: Where Music Will Be Coming From. A few selected predictions:

- The varieties of musical styles explode. They increase faster than we can name them, so a musical Dewey Decimal System is applied to each work to aid in categorizing it.

- On auction sites, music lovers buy and sell active playlists, which arrange hundreds of songs in creative sequences. The lists are templates that reorder songs on your own disc.

In other news, for years, there has been rumor of a Sylvia Plath biopic. At one time, Meg Ryan was signed on to play the suicidal poet; at another time “Ted & Sylvia” was thought to be the working title (infuriating Plath fans the world over that Ted Hughes’ name should go first). I started compiling a “Complete List of Sylvia Plath Links” back in ‘96 at my Geocities page. This led my creating a Yahoo Group two years later, which I moderate and which now boasts over 600 members. A year ago, I splurged on a proper domain and host and continue to maintain and add to PlathOnline.com - a compendium of poetry, links, FAQ, articles, and bibliography. So, my point is, I’ve been heavy in the Plath loop for a while now. The following is the most official word of a Plath film I have heard (from Liz Smith’s March 11th column in Newsday):

Alison Owen is the producer of a film tentatively titled “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” based on the romantic dealings of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. She wants (Russell) Crowe to play Hughes because he is so passionate about poetry! According to Owen, Gwyneth Paltrow will be offered the part of Plath. The BBC production, with screenwriter John Brownlow and director Pawel Pawlikowski, will be filmed in England on a chintzy budget of less than $11 million. Big stars like Crowe and Paltrow would necessarily be working for love, not money.

No one is certain if Frieda Hughes, who is executor of both Hughes’ and Plath’s estates, will allow any of the original poetry to be used…

Russell Crowe? I’d prefer Liam Neeson as Hughes. Can’t say I’m too pleased with the choice of Paltrow either. Is she volatile and expansive enough to portray the woman who once wrote, “O my God, what am I/That these late mouths should cry open/

In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers”?