Marly Youmans's Blog, page 110

Waving, waving--

Here I am, gazing out the windows of the Latte Lounge in Oneonta, watching the Oneontans wander and a man dressed like Neil Gaiman wrestle a large black dog on the sidewalk... Ah, he has plunged upstairs with the dog in his arms. Quite strange. I'm waiting for my older children to get out of a loooonng driving class. So I shall go hang out at the Huntington Library and fiddle with The Book of the

A failure of imagination--

I may have more of a mixed crowd among my Twitter and facebook friends than most writers do; I'm not sure. But for a long time I have been bothered about the vehemence and hatred I see expressed by many of my e-friends about an amorphous "they." Usually this means liberal friends expressing anger or scorn toward conservatives or their beliefs, though occasionally I see the reverse. That tilt is

Janus-post: look both ways

Why do you feel that it is important that commercial fiction receive critical attention?

Jodi Picoult: Because historically the books that have persevered in our culture and in our memories and our hearts were not the literary fiction of the day, but the popular fiction of the day. Think about Jane Austen. Think about Charles Dickens. Think about Shakespeare. They were popular authors. They were

Good-by to all that--

Yesterday, the day of sad news and the giant Winnebago stuffed with yipping dogs (alas, parked directly in front of my house, which stands, like many old village houses, rather close to the street) is done. Heralded by two hungry cats kneading my prone and possibly edible body, one barking dog and many cheeping sparrows hopping about from the dripping giant rugosa to the hunch-backed lilac, the

Internal exile

What I find interesting this morning:


Writing is a temporary surcease from exile. It is not a search for one’s "voice" or "subject"; it is not the invention of a "self" nor even of a "world." These are the concoctions of critics, who study the scattered places where the writer momentarily relented from his unrelenting search for some place to relent from his unrelenting search. The word writing

Fool party

After yet another five hours spent in ferrying two children and then waiting in Oneonta while they drove around with Ted of Baxter's driving school, I am ready to party! Being a writer and hence capable of large amounts of peculiar behavior, I am working on the poems in The Book of the Red King for my reward. That means I am revising some, tossing some, slightly tweaking others, and patting a few

Poetry, fiction, hippos--

STRAY THOUGHTS, LITERARY AND OTHERWISE--
ANIMAL,VEGETABLE, NO MINERAL

1. When you buy a gigantic cauliflower, no one will notice and so somebody else will buy another gigantic cauliflower, and then there will be no room in the fridg inn.

2. When hippos poop in the water, they twirl their tails in circles and attract fish. (This sort of thing is what you learn when your husband goes to

My podcast (blush!)

I've had a book dedicated to me; never have I had a podcast dedicated to me. But it's fascinating, focusing on writer Andrei Sinyavsky's A Voice from the Chorus. John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, is probably the most well-read man on the continent, and if he says this book had a great impact on him, I'm going to read it. I suspect you should too.

Adventure Boy

Michael-my-husband has been having some difficulties in exiting Africa by way of Maputo and then Johannesburg. Evidently he had a Kafkaesque passage when accused of gun smuggling in Mozambique... Eventually he did fly off.  But then he and hundreds of others were turned back to the airport when someone on board the plane suffered a heart attack. I hope that victim survived and is feeling better

"Show us what he does and how"

Clip from Ruth Franklin's acceptance speech for the 2012 Roger Shattuck Prize in criticism:  It’s obvious why the reviewer needs the novelist—not just any novelist, but a good novelist, even a great one, to challenge us to rise to his or her level. But the novelist also needs the reviewer: not just as a vehicle for advertisement, but as an enforcer of standards. If we speak only to praise—and my