I will slave and slave until I break into those slicks

the slicks (maggie nelson, 2025)

Cards on the table: I don’t like Miss Americana, the 2020 documentary where Taylor Swift was doing her best to show everybody the “real Taylor.” For me, it adds nothing that wasn’t already plain from her music: Taylor Swift struggles with needing to be perceived as good, Taylor Swift worries about being frozen at the age she got famous, Taylor Swift is angry at Kanye West and the Kardashians, and so on.¹

When you watch Miss Americana, it’s obvious that what you’re getting is not, in some new way, the “real Taylor.”² I don’t mean it’s false,³ more that “Taylor Swift, the unguarded person” is something only a small group of people experience. In every other part of her life, Taylor already lives like she is on a hot mic. Inviting a camera crew in doesn’t make much of a difference. It’s still the public Taylor, telling the story she wants to tell about her life. I would rather listen to her songs.⁴ Taylor Swift is never going to be the subject of a documentary that is interesting on its own terms, rather than as a treat for the fans, because that would mean entrusting somebody else with the Taylor Swift story and she will not do that.⁵

So when Taylor announced the Eras tour documentary, I didn’t feel that excited and I thought, you know, maybe I’ll skip it. Also, I don’t have a Disney+ account. On the other hand, do you know what I miss? The Eras Tour. Do you know how much I miss being able to tune into the Eras Tour whenever? So much. So, so much. Thus my plan was: let’s just borrow somebody’s Disney+ login and watch the first two episodes of this Taylor documentary. However, that did not work, and I am not going to get a Disney+ subscription, not even for Taylor, because I am not a parent of a small child and therefore have no use for one.

Instead, I am going to read The Slicks, this new Maggie Nelson book about Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath. You already knew that because it was the subtitle. But I didn’t know it when I started writing those paragraphs. Life is a journey.

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I’ve had a contraband copy of the original zine of the The Slicks for a while. I put off reading it because I felt like it would make me cranky. I don’t like most writing about Taylor. I don’t like most writing that can be pitched as “smart people talk about stupid things.” (If they’re stupid, don’t talk about them.) This type of book can go a lot of ways and I would say nine out of ten of them are different kinds of “incredibly bad.”⁶ Maggie Nelson’s work I don’t know well: the only book of hers I’ve read is The Red Parts, about her aunt’s murder, which hasn’t really stuck with me.⁷ But I didn’t read The Argonauts or Bluets, i.e., the books people actually like.⁸ Finally, Sylvia Plath is a poet I had to learn to like, mostly because I understood early in my teenage years that she was “for me” and I instinctively refused to like anything that was “for me.”⁹

Anyway—let’s say there are three main approaches to this sort of book or essay or (as in this case) “book length essay”:

• One is the “hey kids! did you know Sylvia Plath was the Taylor Swift of her day?” approach (bad).

• Next you have the “trying to elevate a subject matter you secretly feel is beneath you by proximity” approach (bad).

• Finally, there is the approach of “fuck it we ball” (good).¹⁰

Maggie Nelson, to my immense surprise, takes route three. That is, if you hate Taylor Swift, she is not trying to prove to you that you shouldn’t. She is just following her own thread here. This book is also overwhelmingly focused on The Tortured Poets Department—which has become my favorite Taylor album (usurping Red, which I thought was impossible), but which was largely treated as embarrassing at the time of its release and still is by many people. TTPD also produced derisive comparisons to Sylvia Plath, which is, at least for me, the basic justification for this book. Nelson takes the high road here and quotes an example of a New York Times reviewer negatively comparing Taylor’s “excess” and “clutter” to Plath’s control. She mentions Taylor’s short-lived promotion of the Ted Hughes poem “Red.”¹¹

But the actual big, viral quote that circulated about Taylor and Plath when TTPD dropped, and one Nelson doesn’t mention, came from an anonymous review at Paste magazine: “Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!” I mention the Paste review because it makes clear that this already extant brand of Swift-and-Plath comparison is not rooted in respect for Sylvia Plath. You would never write that about Sylvia Plath if you viewed her as anything other than a rhetorical club.¹²

So Nelson takes this comparison people are already make and says: okay, let’s do it for real. That is not arcane knowledge one has to know already—all of that context is in The Slicks. And what Nelson does in the book is look at the similarities in the critical positions Taylor and Plath both occupy—the way that they are both criticized on similar grounds of being too excessive and too personal, the way they both directly chase(d) commercial success. The “slicks” of the title refers to the slick magazine, places like the Saturday Evening Post, which paid well and were high visibility without quite being prestigious.¹³ Plath chased this audience. As with Taylor, the art is one thing and the selling’s another. I often remark on here that I like artists who are also obsessed with their own marketing and business. The two can pollute each other, but they don’t have to.¹⁴ What happens eventually is that people forget the other stuff; they remember the music and the poetry.¹⁵ But they remember those things because an effort was made to make sure they saw it. I like try hards, I like strivers. I like the people who refuse to take things for granted.

One unspoken but real truth about the way people feel about Sylvia Plath is that they can tolerate these qualities in her because they can ultimately view her as a loser. (If you think that’s unfair, go re-read that Paste magazine line again.) You can’t do that for Taylor, the all-time apex predator of winning.¹⁶ As Sarah Churchwell mentions in The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe were linked in the media as tragic blondes whose deaths occurred in close proximity. But Taylor is just a blonde; she’s the final girl of pop music, she’s the Laura Palmer who lives, she’s Godzilla winning, she’s the one who doesn’t get got. If you think she has no talent that is supremely annoying, but it is also supremely annoying for people who have no strong opinion on her talent but simply anger that the other shoe hasn’t dropped and a fear that maybe it’s not going to.

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The Slicks is only forty pages long since, again, it was originally a zine. For this reason I find it difficult to “review,” and I guess what this newsletter represents are my own parallel, not-very-coherent thoughts as I read it and less of a critical evaluation. If The Slicks has a thesis, it is about how the critical response to excess is often to demand the imposition of external control:

[The differences between Swift and Plath], however, have not kept critics from relying on a remarkably similar script in response to both artists, likely because it’s the same script that has greeted female profusion, personalism, and ambition literally for millennia. This script—which at this point I could write in my sleep—was on full display in the immediate wake of the release of TTPD: rote shaming of making the personal public; calls for the artist to look outside herself for subject matter; charges of her vulnerability being faux, or deployed as a manipulative marketing tool; tongue-clucks about self-indulgence and being “in need of an editor”.…

When critics attempt to flex their sophrosyne in the face of someone’s spill, I usually hear a barely suppressed drive to mastery—to come off as more worldly, more orderly, more contained, more political, more radical, more grown-up, more you-name-it. Alongside this stab at superiority, I also often hear a perplexing ingenuousness, wherein the critic’s discombobulation at personal content has led them to apprehend a highly crafted pop song or memoir as craft-free discharge.

I would add to this only that when people call for an editor for a specific piece of work or say something like “if this was a student paper, I’d…” rhetorically what they’re doing is refusing to acknowledge somebody as a peer. The statement is, you are still a student, you are still learning, you cannot trust your instincts, you have to be curbed and taught before you can be trusted to be doing something on purpose.¹⁷ I say all this as somebody who was an editor and who values editors and who has had her work improved by editors; most people benefit from collaboration and I certainly do. But that’s not the subtext of the statement that somebody “needs an editor.”

One side effect of being, some would say, “a little too into” Taylor Swift is that she is a good way of demonstrating how bad most cultural writing is. We talk about the Death and Devaluation Of Criticism but nobody has participated in that death more gleefully than critics. Peter C. Baker had a line in one of his recent newsletters about alt-weeklies that has really stuck in my mind: “It’s sad and bad when alt-weeklies go away. Also: by the time they vanish, they’re often already mostly gone.”

A lot of writers want to be fake sociologists, at least when it comes to something they deem beneath their attention as an actual object. Everybody wants to write about what “Taylor Swift” means without pausing first to do the step zero of knowing what “Taylor Swift” is. Most writing about Taylor is either over-the-top fanservice (“Taylor Swift and The Subversive Power of Normal Girlhood”) or it’s haterade (“Taylor Swift and The Blandification Of America”).¹⁸ I read one review of this book (Brian Dillon in 4Columns) and I probably won’t read any others. Dillon I credit with genuine love of and respect for Sylvia Plath, which was why I read his. I can basically imagine every other positive and negative review already, so that’s as far as my interest goes.

And it is a problem when I can write responses to art, as Nelson says, in my sleep; if I already know without reading a text, or reading the first couple lines, precisely what somebody will say and how they’ll say it, I don’t want to spend any time with that work. If it happens often, I cease to respect the critic. The reason this becomes so visible with Taylor is not because of her or the ways people find her irritating, but because everybody wants a slice of the attention constantly directed her way. Thus there is a large volume of writing, mostly bad, mostly careless.

All writing that is worth something has to be rooted in careful attention to the actual object. That is not sufficient to produce something good but without it everything’s just air. The ways in which art can be good or great are, in my experience, perceived through generosity and openness. When that openness is not rewarded, then the qualities of badness something possesses are easily discerned and codified. But there’s no ten step proof to explain that something is worth your attention. You can argue something is significant,¹⁹ but things can be significant without ever being good. Works of criticism that persuade me into believing something is worthwhile do not generally make an argument to that effect; if they do it’s often the worst and least persuasive part of what I’m reading.

The Slicks is a product of careful attention. I wouldn’t say you have to read it. I would say: if you do, it won’t waste your time by telling you everything you thought it would say already.

1. I knew the first two from songs like “The Archer.” I knew the last one because I have a basic understanding of human emotions.

2. Also, while I don’t really hate “ME!”—she has way worse songs, including on Lover—because of its status as the one song it’s always fine to hate even in deep Swiftie territory, the scenes dedicated to her composing “ME!” feel like a real life version of the scenes in Ishtar where the main characters are writing the worst songs imaginable together.

3. Previously:

"Taylorbot"

4. It’s like the Lover selections from her diaries, which I own but have never sat down to read—I don’t doubt these are real excerpts from her real diaries, but I do doubt that her hand-selected group of them contains any big revelations.

5. Sometimes people say Taylor has a “yes man” problem, but… I don’t think that’s actually true. Taylor has a control problem. But as has come up before with other things, her need for control is a case where you can see the same thing propelling her forward in some ways and holding her back in others.

6. For some people the project is, I guess I’d say, offensively poptimist. Certainly it’s poptimist in the basic sense that poptimism is a critical movement that treats pop music as an artistic object—but—to be rude—I just don’t take most people’s taste in music very seriously. I am the only member of my immediate family who listens to pop music at all so I have perhaps some unique standards here. If you listen to Philip Glass and your problem with Taylor Swift is that she writes too many songs in C Major then I will read your criticisms on that front with interest. Otherwise… I don’t really care, you know?

I like Brian Dillon’s work most of the time but I was scratching my head a bit when I read his 4 Columns review (which is the only review I have read) where he singles out as a great pop lyric—with the implication (to me) that Taylor cannot match this kind of energy—Lana’s “now my life is sweet like cinnamon / Like a fucking dream I’m living in.” I don’t think that’s even the best line on Born to Die, honestly.

7. My main memory of reading it is that I thought the guy who was eventually convicted absolutely did it, but the state didn’t prove its case, which I often think with true crime. That’s not Maggie Nelson’s problem, obviously, it’s just what I happen to remember.

8. I’ve never read a book.

9. I spent my prime Sylvia Plath years (i.e., teenagerdom) resenting her and refusing to read her. I ran across “Daddy” in an anthology and couldn’t deal with it at all. I’m not sure exactly when my resistance began to go away, but one significant point was running across a reference to Plath in the diaries of Barbara Pym:

12 January. Have finished my 1976 read of Romantic Novels. I am reading Sylvia Plath’s letters. All these years I seem to have misjudged her – the kind of person she seems to have been – dates with Amherst boys and at Cambridge that anthropological psychologist Mallory Wober. And liking clothes and hair-dos. Then alone in that bitter Winter of 1962–3 in a house in Fitzroy Rd – where Yeats lived – with two children, starting to write at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning – deserted by Ted Hughes – that was how it was.

This is from A Very Private Eye, which also contains a similar letter to Philip Larkin:

Romantic novel reading is now finished so I can read what I like. I had the letters of Sylvia Plath from the Library. How is she regarded as a poet? I was amazed at what a simple ordinary sort of girl she seemed to be, writing about clothes and hair-dos and boy friends. I must say it put me against Ted Hughes but maybe there was something to be said for him. You probably know him?

I hadn’t really thought of Plath that way, which is—my fault. But one thing I will say in my defense is that outside of encountering “Daddy” in that anthology, there was not a lot of Plath that I organically ran across when I was reading poetry. (There was, I would discover a lot later, a reason for this absence—it was expensive to quote Sylvia Plath.) In any case it was when Plath was revealed to me in her dimensions as a very ambitious person that I began to find a way into her work, which I am still doing.

10. “Fuck it we ball” is my general approach on here. Søren Kierkegaard in persona as Anti-Climacus wrote that to defend is to discredit and I took that to heart back… whenever I read that. He was not talking about Taylor Swift but he would have if she’d been alive.

11. To take a totally pointless detour here: the Hughes poem was posted on Florence and the Machine’s book club Instagram account, and even though the real overlap between Florence fans and Swifties must be gigantic, online Florence fans are very hostile to any association between the two and flooded it with negative comments until it got taken down. And there was a lot of “Taylor Swift is platforming a domestic abuser” stuff in fandom spaces.

But this is also an example of the way Taylor is cautious about airing all of her taste in public. One odd public appearance Taylor made a few years ago was this promotional interview she did for the All Too Well music video. She is clearly very nervous, which I think is partly because she seems to have realized a few seconds in she is wearing the wrong dress for this kind of intimate sit down chat. (It’s metallic and if she gestures or moves it goes clink.) At one point Taylor names some pretty “on brand” choices (The Way We Were, Marriage Story), and then the interviewer then brings up that he’s heard she’s a big fan of John Cassavetes.

She rolls with it, but I don’t think she would ever have brought him up herself. Public Taylor will not talk about watching John Cassavetes, even if she does watch his movies. She will not name him as an influence, even if he is. She understands that people will not believe this comment from her, but that they will believe that she’s influenced by (to pick a later answer) Nora Ephron. It’s not that what she says isn’t true… but that there’s a lot that is true that she leaves out. She mentioned Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath on the interview circuit for Red (Taylor’s Version), and that was okay—but mentioning just Ted Hughes is unacceptable. The idea that Taylor might see herself in the figure of the person who gets the last word isn’t acceptable if that person is a man.

12. In point of fact I think most critics (though not all, i.e. yours truly) would not compare a pop star to a poet unless they didn’t really respect the poet, i.e., Plath is the closest thing to a pop star poet because of her association with teenage girls.

13. From The Slicks:

Plath took a different tack. Despite her posthumous fame as a representative of “high art,” while she was alive, Plath wanted literary success on a mass level. She was, as Rose says, “shameless in her desire to write for this market,” and sent her writing to Mademoiselle, Ladies’ Home Journal, The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, Women’s Day, and Seventeen. As Plath put it, in terms the young Swift would likely have understood (and that would likely have appalled Dickinson): “I will slave and slave until I break into those slicks.” Plath may have been a snob about some things (I have no doubt she was; magnanimity was not her calling card), but, as Rose details, her ambition overpowered any snobbery about venue. What’s more, unlike many female artists who attempt to prove their seriousness by avoiding platforms that cater to women or teens, Plath went for both full throttle.

14. Recently I was talking with a friend about how weird I find it when critics praise books by basically saying… “nobody will buy this book.” It’s very weird.

15. This happens even when it comes to “present Taylor” versus “past Taylor”—I don’t think she’s ever done a marketing trick as over the top as the one she did for the original 1989, in which (if memory serves) the deluxe CDs came with randomized polaroids which made fans want to collect all the polaroids by buying multiple CDs. For Red she partnered with Pizza Hut. But now people feel like “oh, that was when she was about the music.…”

16. And she’s not a sore winner anymore.

17. In the realm of art I find the yes man / no man conversation genuinely strange as it seems like some people believe the ideal creative conditions are some person telling you, your ideas are bad and your work is bad over and over.

18. Even the nuanced stuff is usually a list of the same handful of opinions (“Taylor Swift Needs An Editor And Also To Stop Writing About Herself”). (As Nelson mentions.)

19. That is why stans love numbers.