Marly Youmans's Blog, page 88

And don't miss "Don't make fun of renowned Dan Brown."

And don't miss "Don't make fun of renowned Dan Brown."

Susan Morgan Leveille + Oaks Gallery

Click to see details.
Shawl by Susan Morgan Leveille.

Again I'm recommending weaver Susan Morgan Leveille (commission a coverlet, shawl, table covering, more!) and her Oaks Gallery at Riverwood (Dillsboro, North Carolina) for weaving and mountain crafts. Susan's great-aunt, Lucy Morgan, founded The Penland School of Crafts and taught a multitude of western North Carolina mountain women the

The Bandersnatch

Drifted into a wee small nap, and woke dreaming that I was at a literary conference, staying in a marvelous hotel with sunny big rooms and wide halls that felt like home (only tidier, lacking progeny.) The place was called The Bandersnatch, and the outside was made of wood, wonderfully carved in a folk-art sort of way with the Bandersnatch itself closely surrounded by flowers and leaves and

Word-doodling

Wandering around the labyrinth of Arts and Letters Daily over morning tea, I found a Sara Lodge review of Daniel Levin Becker's Many Subtle Channels--it's more like a feature piece, and is a sort of introduction to the fascinating word-twisters of OuLiPo, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle. Since I spent my afternoon and evening at a long track meet, I felt a bit frivolous and immediately

"Pretty well"

"In short, I am an ignoramus, but pretty well for a yeoman." -R. D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone

The "romance of Exmoor" was at first self-published (1869), or, as would have been said, "privately printed." The book did not sell very well. But the next year it caught fire with readers and has never been out of print since. Lorna Doone was admired by Mrs. Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevens, Gerard Manley

"Poets share La. connection, mastery of language"

Greg Langley on four books of poetry by poets with Louisiana connections here. As a child I lived in lovely Gramercy and Baton Rouge . . . Mr. Langley reviews Thaliad in The Baton Rouge Advocate.

Happy Mother's Day--

My mother's hands, at some finishing work on a piece fresh off the loom.
She is also a great gardener, particularly with native plants.
She used to be head of Serials at Western Carolina University's Hunter Library.
She lives on top of a mountain next to the sky...

The house in Thaliad--

Lakelands, the model for the home 

that the wandering children choose as home in Thaliad.

It is especially lovely on a summer's day when the front door

is open and one can glimpse the lake and sky through

the rear door of the center hall.




Lakelands, set on Otsego Lake, originally the home
of Congressman John Myer Bowers and Margaretta Wilson Bowers
and their eight children, built

Glass-paper work--

The first recorded instance of sandpaper was in 13th century China when crushed shells, seeds, and sand were bonded to parchment using natural gum.

Shark skin was also used as a sandpaper. The rough scales of the living fossil Coelacanth are used by the natives of Comoros as sandpaper. Boiled and dried, the rough horsetail is used in Japan as a traditional polishing material, finer than

On "the value of art"

Tranquil scene with fish, colored pencil, from the sketchbooks of Laura Murphy Frankstone at Laurelines

Yesterday I read Michael W. Clune's article, "Bernhard's Way," and have been thinking about his summation of art (in part borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu and his ideas on language as a mechanism of power, reflective of one's position in a social space) as viewed by "the tradition," "the