Marly Youmans's Blog, page 73

At Random

You needed some Random Fungal Fun, right?
Photograph by Paul Digby (2013)
from my mother's forested mountaintop.

SURPRISES

While performing the slight, mildly pleasurable task of dropping spam into the realm of Balrogs, I found this "shiver in the curtain of the world"--and was surprised at my own thoughts, six years back. And it occurs to me that I haven't played with the palace characters

A proper thanks to Dale Favier, and an introduction to his writing-

Thank you to poet Dale Favier, way off on the other side of the continent, for this lovely facebook post... I'm a fan of his as well, so it's very sweet to have him comment on a book of mine this way. (And I should say that I'm grateful to the people on twitter and Facebook who have shared an enthusiasm for my books; I hope that I always remember to thank them, but if anyone has slipped by

Jumble!

Goodbye, Christmas season--
Mary Bullington ornaments,
Market Gallery, Roanoke

Thanks to Patrick Kurp

for a lovely post about The Foliate Head. I've often read posts in his literature blog, Anecdotal Evidence, and am especially pleased (and surprised) to appear there.

Podcasts

I'm a little fuzzy on whether people like the podcasts (see prior post if you missed it) or not--probably won't do

Epiphany: gold, frankincense, and podcasts

"Puck in Spring," from The Foliate Head (Stanza Press, 2012)





"Ship of Trees," from The Foliate Head (Stanza Press, 2012)


"Clock of the Moon and Stars, from The Foliate Head (Stanza Press, 2012)



"In the Shadow of the Jasmine," from The Foliate Head (Stanza Press, 2012)


"I Heard Their Wings Like the Sound of Many Waters,"
The Foliate Head (Stanza Press, 2012)





Order direct from

Twelfth Night

Here are some more ornaments, this time for Richelle Hawks, bead sweeper at Shipwreck Dandy. She saw the prior batch and told me that she would make me an ornament for next year, so this is especially for her--and for you, if you like such things. She is the queen of "handmade rustic assemblage jewelry."

Our Norway spruce will probably stay up until my husband is back from Kyrgyzstan, as I

11th day of Christmas--

Now and then I've been glancing at my husband's progress toward Istanbul... and now he has landed. He'll be there for a bit before flying on to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, land of Himalayas and snow leopards and ibex and yurts. If you are a follower of this blog, you probably already know that I married a man of adventure. He got up in the small hours and drove to JFK in the blizzard, and only went

M. R. James / Michael Chabon

Merry 10th day of Christmas...

I've been reading Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Oxford University Press, 2002), a collection of the ghost stories of M. R. James, a writer I've gone back to from time to time. The twelve days of Christmas are always a good time for reading James, as many of his stories were written as Christmas Eve entertainments at his college. This Oxford World's

On the 9th day of Christmas

Snow-and-lights tree

Lovely snow falling all night and day... As a Southerner, I can never grow weary of watching snow fall, or of seeing twilight transfigure the landscape and make it glow.

Before dawn tomorrow, my husband leaves for the airport in NYC, stopover in Istanbul, and then his goal, the Kyrgyzstan Himalayas. Snow leopards! Ibex! Nights sleeping in a yurt.

All this means I shall

Thoughts worth expressing

Image courtesy of sxc.hu and Jenny Sliwinski of the UK

I like and recommend this brief Alan Jacobs essay that reveals (with the help of Murdoch, Orwell, and Lewis) many needful things to the reader (and that's me too): why we should read old books; why we should seek out opponents who differ from us in thinking from another age rather than the rabble-rousers from our own day; how to seek out

Happy buy-lots-of-books year!

first book purchase of the New Year, 12:48 a.m., January 1, 2014: 

I should have managed it earlier, but this is a good one for starting out the year: Luisa A. Igloria's poetry collection, "The Saints of Streets" (University of Santo Tomas, 2013.) Luisa has a website at luisaigloria.com, can be found on facebook and twitter, and publishes a poem a day at Dave Bonta's via negativa. Some day