Marly Youmans's Blog, page 108

Deep diving

David Austen for Ch. 30, "The Pipe"


How did I miss this?



I somehow overlooked the Big Read of a Big Book, a novel I have long loved. Moby Dick is a book that goes resolutely its own bright, ecstatic way and tramples on the middlebrow novel like an archangel crashing down on a minor demon. 



Luckily for me (with my head evidently swathed in the clouds), Midori Snyder writes about the

Reading Morgan Meis at "The Smart Set"

from "Egg Head," subtitled "For Martin Kippenberger, variety was the way to unify the world around him" In which he looks at bewildering mutability as one artist's way of compassing the world.

As nearly everyone has noticed, art in these times presents some unique challenges. One of the most unique is what I like to call the why-do-this-and-not-that problem. In times of yore, this wasn't such a

Getting a few things off the writer's chest--

On Martel and on being a judge


Why are journalists and others complaining that Martel should not have gotten the Booker because a. she has one already and b. somebody else could have used the promotion? If she should not have gotten it--a thing I do not know, not having read the books that are finalists--that judgment should have been made on other grounds entirely.

As somebody who (with four

Haunted

2:00 a.m...

My favorite part of the haunted house and hayride-with-no-hay in Elmira was when my youngest, now 15, had me by the coat (ouch! pulled out my hair) and said in a slightly high-pitched voice and various intonations: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!

Spooky-wise my favorite things were the shadowy man who leaped down from the ceiling and kept appearing in my peripheral

Washed-world

Gerard Manley Hopkins visited me this morning. We admired the yellow leaves hung with raindrops. I wrote him a poem.

Midori Snyder on Thaliad

Novelist Midori Snyder has written a lovely piece about the upcoming Thaliad on her blog, In the Labyrinth. She has read the book twice, a thing I love--rereading is the best reading--and has some interesting things to say about it in her post, "The Sublime Collaboration of Author Marly Youmans and Artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins: Thaliad." 

She also sent a blurb that draws on the review but is

Insomniac party with Christian Wiman

I have been reading and enjoying Christian Wiman's Ambition and Survival, picked up at the West Chester Poetry Conference in June and signed by himself . . . What did I say to him? Nothing much. What was I to him but another blurred face passing?

But when I woke at 4:00 a.m., I wandered here and there and settled on this Wiman essay. It has many figures and moments I recognize and respond to; it

Catherine Wiecher Brunell's first book

It's always interesting when somebody you know publishes her first book. In this case, it was Catherine Wiecher Brunell, one of the people I met through Miroslav Volf's Faith as a Way of Life national working group at Yale Divinity School. I wish her book well and hope that it finds that splendid little boat, readership. It is told in the scrupulously honest voice of a woman in search of how to

Kathryn Stripling Byer in the NCLHF

Kathryn Stripling Byer has been inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame--many congratulations to her! Kay was the first writer I encountered on a regular basis, back when I was in high school, already thinking of myself as a poet. I'd bump into her at the university library where both she and my mother worked at the time, and often we'd chat there or outside.

We had a similar

Starting out--

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage
(Mercer, 2012 - The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction)

Pip Tattnal woke in the dense warmth of an Emanuel County summer at 4:17 a.m., a fact that he would learn much later when he became acquainted with clocks. For the rest of his life he would jerk from sleep at that very instant, his body refusing to sleep through the stroke of darkness. He did not open his