Marly Youmans's Blog, page 141

Georgia cussing

Photograph credit:  Justyna Furmanczy (UK) and sxc.hu


My father was born in 1926 and grew up on a little sharecropper's farm west of Savannah. I was trying to remember the Lexsy cussing of my childhood--it was nothing like swearing today. Even after he ran away and became a teenage tailgunner and then eventually a professor of analytical chemistry--a sample of the American-dream rise that I

A few spoonfuls of Disch

The thought that Thomas M. Disch a.k.a. Tom Disch (he wrote poetry under the latter name) left this world at 68 because it seemed about to oust him from the nest where he had been happy and written dozens of books of poetry and and fiction and highly readable criticism still rankles. He lost the partner to death and then lost their house in Barryville, and he seemed about to lose the Manhattan

Emptying

Photograph:  Jar with birds-of-paradise at Siem Reap, Cambodia, 2009

While I was drinking tea this morning—meditative drink, tea
is—I realized that the arc of my life as I approached my mid-thirties slowly
turned away from everything valued by the world I grew up in.  It's as if I had to undo everything that I
had done and was "supposed" to do in order to be what I am.  Even though I began

Yolanda Sharpe: Ink and Wax

Yolanda Sharpe: Ink and Wax
Selections from Foliage and Still Life Drawing series
and Urban Fragments Painting series
September 24-November 5, 2011
The Earlville Opera House
Opening September 24th, 6-7:30 p.m.


























Note on the photographs:
I took these before the start and after the close of the opening to Yolanda's show in the upstairs gallery. The photograph of two artists

Post-Irene insurance adjusters and other jolly work on th...

Post-Irene insurance adjusters and other jolly work on the menu today--schedule jammed, back tomorrow!

Ink and Wax: Yolanda Sharpe

   

Yolanda Sharpe has an opening at the Earlville Opera House Gallery on 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, and I hope there will be a good turnout. She is a remarkable person, a local artist who also writes poetry and has sung locally with the Glimmerglass Opera and performed recitals in this country and in Russia (where she was just on a Fulbright Exchange) and who knows where else... The Opera House

A Modest Proposal (Uncreation Project)

Photograph courtesy of sxc.hu
and Keith Syvinski aka LeoSynapse
of Franklin, Indiana.

Hop two posts back ("Unskilling, uncreation") if you want to see the post this one continues, dealing with Professor Goldsmith the conceptual artist. I invite you to answer any of the questions below as yourselves or as Goldsmith Himself. To usurp his identity and burble, sing, or lecture as you please seems

Unleaving

What a drear day! It might as well be "a drizzly November in my soul," though there are too many leaves for that.

The dog Susquehanna is curled up in her hyper-insulated house. That cats are in ouroboros position. Grackles are hopping across the porch, nabbing pebbles of dog food without much fear—hopping back again and toppling down the steps, beaks wide.

A dank Fall has arrived, though I

One Burns High

I just hung an etching on my wall—a little one by Nancy Dahlstrom, "One Burns High." It's a darkish print with trees barely visible in the background, and in the center is a burning stand of pampas grass.  Last summer I was at Nancy's home studio and had a hard time picking out a piece; I chose this one at the time because it seemed both simple and to possess a kind of mythic power.

Unskilling, uncreation

Photograph: courtesy of sxc.hu and Jef Bettens of Herk-de-Stad, Limburg, Belgium.As Jef Bettens and sxc.hu do not ally themselves with long-dead Duchampor with Kenneth Goldsmith, I here acknowledge their rights to this work!



According to its author, I have neither to credit nor to do anything but claim as my own the passage about "uncreative writing" below. But as I do not wish to claim it,