Marly Youmans's Blog, page 79

October 20, 2013

Beautiful things

A leaf from a commonplace book, on that interesting topic, beauty...

Hugh Nissenson:

One of the things that I felt I wanted to do as an artist was to expand the frontiers of my imagination as much as I could; to follow wherever my imaginative facility took me, and to create alternate worlds. I believe deeply that one of the reasons that we get a kick out of reading novels -- for that matter
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Published on October 20, 2013 23:08

October 19, 2013

Picnic in the rain, songs in the house--

James Krueger - read and listen and buy here


A picnic with many friends around a rural bonfire in the very lightest rain, not even pattering on the nearby pond, followed by a house concert with James Krueger . . . A lovely end to the day.



Extraordinary!  An extraordinarily talented writer with a real talent for poetic imagery.  Impressive poetic lines, beautiful and original.  Remarkable
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Published on October 19, 2013 21:01

Triptych with artisans, art, and music

Hand of St. Valentin. Paul Koudounaris

If a common thread runs through this three-stranded post, it is that each of these things I find interesting this morning made me see something new and anew--the past and church history, a Frost poem so familiar that I couldn't imagine it being unfamiliar again, and the state of culture. In each case, I saw or heard through another, and enjoyed what I
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Published on October 19, 2013 04:07

October 18, 2013

"Who will come to the old man's rescue?"

Robert Frost before he became "the old man."

Have you seen this article by Ron Charles, giving glimpses of a story? Joyce Carol Oates is stirring up attention, attacking Robert Frost (and his poems) by the means of the cudgel of a story in the November Harper's. I have a few thoughts about this sort of enterprise, even before I see the full story, only partially available to non-subscribers.
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Published on October 18, 2013 12:50

October 17, 2013

Book of labor, book of dawn--

Walden Pond. Courtesy of Bekah Richards
of Snellville, Georgia and sxc.hu.

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.  --Thoreau

Thoreau once joked that he owned a library of 900 books; they were all his own and all the same, for Walden had not sold. The pages uncut, they slumbered on the shelf, unread. Perhaps the book was too singular in its wordsmithery (despite kinship to
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Published on October 17, 2013 08:25

October 15, 2013

Poem of magic

Go here to see a complete version of this translation and art
by Kathleen Mooney.


Douglas Hyde and Amargin

from Geoffrey Moorhouse
Sun Dancing:A Vision of Medieval Ireland
(Harcourt, Brace, 1997)



"The old [Irish] stories say that there was a poet, Amargin, who led* the Tuatha Dé Danann when they arrived in Ireland. To him is attributed some Druidic verse which no less an authority than
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Published on October 15, 2013 04:18

October 13, 2013

9 Questions that plague the mind--

1.
Why is it that when a peaceful, lovely, semi-elderly cat gets out of the house, she panics and thinks that her adored humans are toothy creatures from that mining planet in the ALIEN movies?

2.
Why must novels never be 100% finished but only abandoned? (Yes, I just abandoned mine on a lonely hilltop, where it will survive or not.)

3.
Why do facebook friends ceaselessly try to lure me into
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Published on October 13, 2013 18:47

October 12, 2013

All writing deadlines met! Please come clean my house.

All writing deadlines met! Please come clean my house.
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Published on October 12, 2013 21:16

October 9, 2013

Lots of new Glimmerglass ideas from Clive here.

Lots of new Glimmerglass ideas from Clive here.
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Published on October 09, 2013 11:12

October 7, 2013

The Glimmerglass News

Clive is busy transforming the world of Glimmerglass.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins + Glimmerglass

If you'd like to see how the cover is progressing, go here. That's the second peep at what Clive is doing with Glimmerglass, forthcoming from Mercer in 2014.

Me + Glimmerglass

The book has been sitting at the publisher's for a very long time, waiting its turn. And so I decided to tweak it once more and
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Published on October 07, 2013 16:37