Marly Youmans's Blog, page 138

Recommended: Michael A. Morrison interviews Zoran Zivkovic

Here's a link to a long and interesting interview: Zoran Zivkovic with interviewer Michael A. Morrison, the two talking about "middle-European fantastika" and other topics of interest. The first portion is "Fantastika and the Literature of Serbia." The second focuses on the shape of his life in words: "A career in transition: From scholar, translator and publisher to author of fantastika."

Via

Sunday, Sunday--waving--skipping--

Lovely day, ending with a concert... and then was dragooned into helping with kid-homework, but hey--music all day. Made my friend Yolanda coconut curry soup with delecata (or is it delicata?) squash since she was semi-stranded in Cooperstown. And what fun, David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer asked for "Power and Magic" for their somewhat delayed Year's Best Fantasy 10 anthology. It was

The Lydian Stones

Announcement, announcement!

I am going to be starting a little side project on the 22nd, for no better reason than that it is my birthday and I feel like giving you (yes, you) a present.

It will be in blog format, and so far it is proving to be highly enjoyable for me and, I hope, will be for you.

Many people will be involved, the living and the dead, and I hope it will add a site for poetry

Maquettes for Paul and all

Almost noon, and a snowy Saturday is well underway... The wandering husband is no longer racing on horseback to the pyramids at Giza but is back in Morocco. Meanwhile I've taken the youngest to wrestling and gone to the store and picked him up and hunted black pants and then followed the school marching band to lay wreaths in memory of our veterans while I thought about Causley's "At the

Mome raths outgrabe; or, how to deal with a bad review

Photo courtesy of sxc.hu
and Paulo Oliveira Santos
of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.


Every few years a writer (Franz Wright, Alice Hoffmann, etc.) spills the boiling pot of his resentments about some critic or other to the entertainment of readers. This time it was Jonathan Lethem, going on about the perceived failings of James Wood--who had, oddly enough, praised the book in question a good

XD Department

Photograph courtesy of Mira Pavlakovic of Ozali, Croatia and sxc.hu

My husband raced on horseback (lost one race, won the other) to the pyramids at Giza today. Me? I cleaned house and ferried child no. 3.

Two anecdotes

Sunday evening

 

I laugh, reading an anecdote by the highly productive Professor William Ian Miller in his essay, "Losing It."



January 13, 2010: I am defending to a colleague the wisdom of the police rounding up the usual suspects.



Me: Claude Rains was being more than a mere cynic, which of course he
was also being, when he said "round up the usual suspects" because the
usual suspects

Burrowing

Evidently tomorrow UPS will bring the "second pass" for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer University Press, March 2012) to my doorstep. And that means I will need to start reading it again (again).  So this afternoon I shall be holing up to finish looking back over the manuscript of The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press, tba), as I need to get the absolutely final version turned in.

"Never attained by most"

Photograph of ink courtesy of  Ben Joosen of Brasschaat, Antwerp, Belgium and sxc.hu.

Here is Helen Vendler being penetrating and quotable in "Are These the Poems to Remember," a review of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited and with an introduction by Rita Dove  in The New York Review of Books.  I imagine that the author found this review a bit uncomfortable, as

Into the Light

I would dearly love to see this show at Anderson Creative, and send hearty congratulations to Paul Digby, who acted as curator, composed music for each of the three gallery rooms, and even contributed a pair of paintings. Paul, as you may know, has made videos for five of my poems, all on youtube, and he has a fascinating history in the arts--he is fearless and has tried many modes.  Lynn