Night, village, snow

Home Sweet Home

Santa's Cottage in tiny Farkle Park
next to the 1802 Tunnicliff Inn 

Kiosk in Farkle Park
with clever snow-shedding roof.

Baseball Hall of Fame

Ranking board at the Baseball Hall of Fame

Village Library

Main St. house

Clark Foundation offices,
Main Street by Cooper Park

 Night-walk pictures by Michael, my husband

Glimmerwords

I have found the lost microphone and fooled around with recording a snip from Glimmerglass. I may do more. Unless the general populace detests my audio self.

Like many people, I dislike recordings of my voice. My father once tried to record me reading Alice in Wonderland when we lived in Louisiana (Wonderland), and I was so self-conscious that I think I lost my mind in a sort of 5-year-old way.

Next time I am going to record in my closet, which is all buffery-buttery-soft and should make for better sound. And thank you to Paul for the gift of the microphone, which I will try not to misplace again. Both books and microphones wander, it seems.

Small literary adventure

Vintage Cooperstown postcards (ebay)
showing Otsego Lake (Cooper's Glimmerglass)
and Kingfisher Tower, commissioned
by Edward Clark when times were hard
and the local stonemasons were out of work.

Sleeping Lion Mountain (or maybe Sleeping Mountain Really-Big-Hill) has been rubbed away by the mist, and even the romantic Kingfisher Tower is barely visible in the lake, next to a softened but still irregular line of shore and trees. But the sparrows are still chipping away in the wet rugosa roses, as cheerful-seeming as ever... Yesterday I wandered off to a wedding at All Saints Cathedral in Albany, and then on to see Yolanda Sharpe's new art at her house and the SUNY art department. The mist seems to have fooled with time, so all that seemed long ago when I woke at six this mornings.

Last week I had a semi-literary adventure. Michael and I went looking for the bit of landscape now called Natty Bumppo's cave. Cooperstown is stranded somewhere between the real and the mythic or fictional, with its castles and lake monster and semi-fictional Cooper places (not to mention the faux nineteenth-century village made out of real-but-transported buildings that is the Farmer's Museum, or the tourists dressed up like pro ball players), and that uncertainty was much of what made me write Glimmerglass. We spied what we thought might be the cave and climbed up, me in treadless shoes. By the nigh-vertical top, sliding and crawling on leaf litter and loose sticks, I was quite sure that I would be a very minor footnote in Cooper history, doomed to go pinwheeling down the slope. The cave was quite tiny, fit for only a pygmy family, but imagination can do a lot with the materials given.

On the way back, after teetering along the ridge for some time, we spotted a more prominent path that we might have taken. And now that I've seen some photographs, I realized that all that death-defying enterprise of scrabbling about and hanging on to little roots and skating on leaves was for something that was definitely not Natty Bumppo's cave.

Ice House Rant

So. It is poetry month... Don't forget
to sign up for a chance for free books
(next post down the page, or click here.) 

Cooperstown's first track meet of the season was: a. bitter; b. bit windy; c. dank; d. snowing! Of course it was snowing! How could it be anything else? It's merely April 5th, and we're never safe from large amounts of snow until May 26th (a date subject to change, depending on the weather...)

Questions that want answering, 
some of them vaguely literary.

How did it first come over the Coopers and other Yankees that it might be nice to live beside a beautiful but frozen lake and obtain their winter exercise by shivering?

Were these Yankees simply excessively stubborn and stalwart (and stupendously s-alliterative, like this stupid question), or were they simply in love with the landscape (which was splendiferous until the strip mall came in at the Commons?) Or was it something else entirely, not beginning with "s" at all? (Judge Cooper's patent, perhaps?)

Did the early settlers think it was profoundly weird to keep their deceased beloved's body in the ice house or wood shed all winter and then have to wait till June when the ground was thawed enough to dig a grave with pickaxes? Hmm. Might have to write something about the body in the ice house.

Why did "Real Feel" have to be 20 degrees lower than the thermometer this morning? (I'm going to quit looking at accuweather. It's too dratted depressing.) Why can't it be above for a change?

Why did James Fenimore Cooper come back from Europe? No wonder he ran off! He wanted warmth and culture and probably a corner café. There were probably very few Cooperstown corners in his time. And even fewer cafés. No Chingachgook Café. No Pathfinder Pizza. No Hawkeye Bar. No Last-of-the-Mohicans Restaurant. When he came back, he tried to drag Europe with him, as when he turned Christ Church into a Gothic treasure box. But the villagers were already terribly American. They'd taken over his favorite lakeside beach--his very own, with a family deed and everything--and wouldn't give it back. We the people still have it today!

You know what I'm tired of? Starts with an "l." Almost ends with "brr." Layers. Bonus question: You know what else I'm tired of doing? Shoveling ash.

Appropriately, the youngest and I are going to see Frozen. 

I live in a perfectly beautiful village that has no agonizing problems and am privileged to have enough to eat and central heating. But I still can't bend my mind around the idea that people lived in my house in 1808 and were cold. Very cold. Frozen, and with nothing of Disney about it at all.

Cooperstown frolics

With illustrator-artist-writer Ruth Sanderson and Rebecca Beatrice Miller--at the Farmer's Museum--

Snow. Birds. Thaliad.

ONE SOUTHERNER, ONE BROODY SKY

It has snowed in the night. It will snow more. The sky sags, weighty and entirely serious with snow. Assorted corvids have appeared, making punctuation marks in all the whiteness. The positively multitudinous sparrows and one chickadee are in the rugosa ravel again, darting back and forth from rose canes to feeder. They know the kestrel is coming, and the snow as well.

Still, they go on hop-running along the prickly rose canes, and they light on the broken lilac and then flash away. Everything for them today is pleasantly horizontal, except for the snow and the kestrel, violently vertical.

THANK YOU, CRIER--

Thanks to journalist Michele Miller of Cooperstown for a nice fat article about Thaliad in the Cooperstown Crier. 

According to a media release from the publishing company, the book is about how the children remake their world after cataclysm, led by the youngest yet most determined among them, Thalia. The release states that children settle in a deserted northern village very much like Cooperstown, and in fact one may pick out versions of Otsego Lake, Lakefront Park, Lakelands, Kingfisher Tower, Christ Church, The Village Library and more as major parts of the world of the narrative poem.
...“Thaliad” has won praise from novelists, poets and other readers for its vigor, characterization and dramatic story.
“In ‘Thaliad,’ Marly Youmans has written a powerful and beautiful saga of seven children who escape a fiery apocalypse — though ‘written’ is hardly the word to use, as this extraordinary account seems rather ‘channeled’ or dreamed or imparted in a vision, told in heroic poetry of the highest caliber. Amazing, mesmerizing, filled with pithy wisdom, ‘Thaliad’ is a work of genius, which also seems particularly relevant to our own time,” novelist Lee Smith said in the release.
According to the [book] release, the book has been reviewed as an “exciting and heartbreaking myth of origin.” It states: “The book partakes of mythic and fairy tale elements while using the ideas of the heroic epic to tell a marvelous story about vivid characters. The result is a poem that is a highly readable adventure and story of rebirth with more in common with the excitement and drama of Homer’s epics and Beowulf than with difficult works of the recent past.”
“The epic form is not an easy one, and in lesser hands this audacious project would have failed,” poet Rachel Barenblat said in the release. “This is a beautiful and powerful book worth owning, worth reading and rereading. I am so glad that it exists in the world and that I can turn to it, time and again, glorying in the language and the hope.”
The poem marries story and adventure with compression and joy in language, Ellen Kushner, writer and longtime host of WGBH’s “Sound and Spirit,” said in the release. She called the book a “remarkable and daring work … combines the best of epic poetry with modern fiction” and is “by turns funny, insightful, and deeply moving.”
Youmans, a poet and novelist, had a busy year in 2012. She served as a judge for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature – reading 316 books between June and early September. Before that, she did a book tour in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Youmans’ [2012] novel “A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage” was selected as the winner of The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction for 2010. The award is given by Mercer University Press “for the best book that speaks to the human condition in a Southern context.”
Youmans has won various awards for her short fiction and has received a wide variety of recognition for her work.

Read the entire article here.  

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At the mouth of the Susquehanna

Since tropical storm Lee and the Susquehanna have wreaked havoc in New York and Pennsylvania and forced  more than a hundred thousand out of their homes, I am taking a walk-in-pictures (a small walk--I live hard by the mouth of the Susquehanna where it flows out of Lake Otsego) to the bridge over the river and Lakefront Park.  The mighty Susquehanna, so broad where I crisscross it on my way south, is usually a tiny river in Cooperstown--not much more like a wide, shallow creek.  In these photographs you will see the view from the bridge and the park--Susquehanna River, Lake Otsego, Lion Mountain, and bits of the park with ironweed and obedience plant and others planted last year to help control flooding.

Postcards from Irene

Home from the Carolinas. No power. Tree on both cars. Wind and rain, home sweet home. Update:  here are a few photographs taken in my back yard... Ain't complainin' now--Nate and I chased a NYSEG truck and begged for power (we were not scheduled, and the NYSEG office said at least a week more, maybe two or three), and now we have jerry-rigged power! Lines looped up everywhere and bound to be turned off and fixed some day, but we care not because it is light. Begging with good humor seems quite effective. The power return was quite a bit quicker than our last hurricane, Fran, when we were in the dark with cold showers in Chapel Hill-Carrboro for fifteen days.

Backyard urn toppled.

Our cars decked in Coffee Tree spars, branches, and leaves.

All those bare trees?  Those are really the fallen, wind-stripped
crown of a 70-80 foot Kentucky Coffee Tree.
The vultures and I are really going to miss that tree.
It made gorgeous shapes against the sky.

Our two cars that are now complete Bash-and-Dingmobiles.

Roof broken and pried off by the Kentucky Coffee Tree.
Our back yard ends at the wall of the little broken building.

Beautiful little nineteenth-century Cooper smokehouse
with arches on the other side where the fuel went in--
the bricks were smashed all along the roof and halfway down the wall.
Who needs power when you have sunshine pouring in?

The new skyline from my back yard.
From upstairs I can see more of the lake and Kingfisher Tower
than before, but I would have been happy to keep the tree.
The lake was just as much there then as now,
and I felt the tree was mine in the way that Thoreau felt
that a neighboring farmer's apple trees were his.