Marly Youmans's Blog, page 114

Tinies no. 3

Here's another in a series of word doodles made during the months devoted to award reading (June-Sept 15), when I had (and have) little time for myself... Click on the "Tinies" label below if you would like to read from the beginning, or else scroll down.

If you want to see my 2012 publications, please check out the tabs above for the novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer),

Realio & trulio O-U-T

The news has gone out on facebook and Twitter and elsewhere, so perhaps not many will be surprised: rumor had it this morning that The Foliate Head had been returned (again) from the printers--this time we hope it is perfect. And then Clive wrote me that at least one pre-order in the UK had been received. So we are hoping to receive our copies soon.

Limited edition.

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Medusans

Had a jolly dinner in Medusa, New York with five writers from L. A., New York City, and the Catskills. Not a one showed snaky locks or turned me to stone. One of the grand things about the internet is connecting with new people and then meeting them. Zipped back in the wee hours and pouring rain.

Tinies, no. 2

As I don't have time this summer to write anything of length, thanks to a major reading assignment, I have been writing fragments--what they are, I'm not sure. Odd, yes. Small also. Here's another, linked to no. 1:

OMIN THE COLLECTOR

Omin spends all his days fishing at sea. His spindly, absurd machines sparkle with salt and sun. He cranks the handles, lowering his intricate wheel upon wheel of

Tinies no. 1

I have discovered that having to read 316 books (I am on 190 right now, this very minute--just glanced away) in a short period of time is a good way to put a stop to my own writing. So I'm noodling about a bit, writing some Tinies that are related but maybe not going anywhere, maybe not prose poems, maybe not stories, maybe just seedlets blown like parachutes by the wind. Here's the first one.

A royal pain in the neck

Evidently when you have three and a half months to read 300+ books, you need to take very good care of your neck and back. I am longing for poet Dale Favier, Monsieur le Masseur, to drop by from the other side of the continent.


Today all I can think about is pains in the neck.


Here are some sharp pangs from an Infamous Pain in the Neck, all bright and prickly (just full of points):



...

Fluctuations of intensity

The late art critic Robert Hughes is being memorialized here and there, in great part through quotations because he knew how to arrange words in good order. Here are some I especially like. They speak to all the arts and so have something to say to me as a writer:

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is

Past the window

The wandering orphan, Pip, in the midwestern wheat fields... 
     “You feeling all right, Joe? Say, Joe—”
     The voices around the fire slid away. All Pip’s thoughts were gathered and reaped: there was nothing in his mind but Opal and the pallor of her wrist with the little blue vein flicking across—he tightened his grip and claimed her for his own.
     A surprising power burns in the

Melancholia

Something about reading hundreds of new books for a deadline is making me feel wistful--in part because not writing much makes me feel askew. But thoughts about how the world has changed in the past fifty years keep drifting by, and though many things have changed for the better, I am having a positively Yeatsian regret for lovely old courtesies that have been lost... A good deal of lovelessness

Fairy glamour

John Anster Fitzgerald, Titania and the Changeling Child

Fairy glamour is the name for the magic that can turn ashes and dead leaves into enticing fruit and sparkling wine--that can metamorphose cruelty or vapidness into a lovely face of beauty. But when you eat that fruit and drink that wine in Faerie, you are still consuming ash and dead leaf. And you can never go back to the world of