Bailey, Wetta, Charis...

Scott G. F. Bailey on Charis in the World of Wonders

Here's a clip from a new extended post about Charis in the World of Wonders from novelist Scott G. F. Bailley, author of The Astrologer. I picked this bit because he talks about language, but he has a lot more to say and is always interesting, so please take a look.

This is a beautiful book. Some readers, I have noticed, have difficulty with the poetic nature of Youmans' prose, and to them I say they should become better readers and lovers of language's music. "tilt and spill" "wondrous cascade" "ungrasped length" "bear and vessel what is unearthly and rained down" are wonderful constructions: just listen to the vowels and the rhythms, the moving accents from one sentence to the next. Youmans stretches prose, but never goes too far. Sound and sense, it's all there. I never do any book justice when I write about it, and I keep that tradition with this wee essay. Charis in the World of Wonders deserves lots of readers. Go be one of them, do. 

--novelist Scott G. F. Bailey, review post at Six Words for a Hat, 22 January 2021

And his earlier comment:

Marly Youmans' latest novel, Charis in the World of Wonders, is a great book...a rich tapestry of invention, a lovely long song of many overlapping themes. As with so much of Youmans' work, it is a myth writ on human scale, an instruction manual for discovering beauty and love in this fallen world. I do not exaggerate. 

C--novelist Scott G. F. Bailey, Six Words for a Hat, 31 December 2020

* * * * * * *

Fr. Augustine Wetta video on Charis

A Wetta-and-moi video was supposed to be up on youtube, but I can't seem to find it... so HERE is a link to the video on facebook.  If you click, you'll discover me in my dining room being interviewed by author and Benedictine monk Fr. Augustine Wetta (who was a private student of mine at the Antioch Workshops a few years ago. He has since published the novel we discussed (in part) at Antioch:  The Eighth Arrow: Odysseus in the Underworld.) I always cringe at seeing/hearing myself, so I have not watched it, but Fr. Dude (as he is known to his students at the St. Louis Priory school) asked some interesting questions...

The Red King's Friends

Please drop by the page for The Book of the Red King, now with additional new and enticing comments from novelist Scott G. F. Bailey, poet Ray Oliver, much-laureled poet and novelist Fred Chappell, poet Sally Thomas, poet Jeffery Beam, and poet and novelist Sebastian Doubinsky. The last of these posted a review on my birthday yesterday: lovely gift!

At right: a precious wentletrap by Clive Hicks-Jenkins... The Fool's beloved is the lunar lady, Precious Wentletrap.

Finding the new

copy belonging to artist/illustrator/writer
Jackie Morris
art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Since my short Goodreads giveaway for Glimmerglass will end in less than a day (1125 signed up at this moment), I think it's time for a Glimmerglass note...

I am a fan of novelist Scott G. F. Bailey's blog, Six Words for a Hat, and am always interested in what he says about books and writing. Currently he is talking about the need for "a story where a writer keeps working as he goes along, rather than sets up a game board and then simply unspools the plot."

Being but mortal, I am especially fond of what he says about my books (so far):

I have been meaning to write more about Marly Youmans' latest novel Glimmerglass, the second half of which features an adventure that is part fever dream, part mystical experience, and part thrilling escape. The protagonist of the tale encounters characters from scripture, myth, from literary history, and from her own subconscious. There is an admirable angel character who may or may not be Satan; it works either way, which is some trick. Some day soon, hopefully, I'll write about it, but for now I want to say that this is a book where the writer continues to push things, to work with her materials and find something new all along the course of the narrative. Yes, that's what I want to say, and that's what I want to find in a story.

Earlier he wrote about the first half of the book. 

Scott Bailey has a novel of his own, now in a reprint from MDA Books (originally published by Rhemalda.) The late critic David Myers wrote a wonderful  review of The Astrologer on his A Commonplace Blog. It's still waiting in my big To Be Read stack because someone who writes in such an interesting fashion about books is a writer I must read. (My husband has already stolen the book away and enjoyed it very much, I should add.) Scott Bailey also has some short stories in collections and is a writer and blogger well worth following.

Kraken2

P. S. to the Kraken! post: Be sure and read Scott Bailey's clerihews at Six Words for a Hat (post and comments.) I'm afraid that I challenged him to a Chernyshevsky clerihew. This came about because his posts about Henrik Pontoppidan seeped into my head, and so I wrote a clerihew about Henrik Pontoppidan the novelist's ancestor (I suppose), Erik Pontoppidan the bishop, who had an interesting connection to cephalopods. So I blamed the Pontoppidan clerihew on Scott, and then remembered he was now writing about Chernyshevsky. Tada! I think I deserve chocolate for spelling Chernyshevsky, Pontoppidan, and cephalopods correctly (or close enough) in one post.

Lady Word of Mouth

New at Lady Word of Mouth:

MaryAnn Corbett, Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter

poetry

Gary Dietz, Dads of Disability

essays, memoir, and a smattering of poetry

and a new edition of 

Scott G. F. Bailey's The Astrologer

novel

Favorite Eve words--

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, art from Thaliad

Thank you to novelist Scott G. F. Bailey--I'm going to have to drink another glass of champagne after reading his 2013 reading list on Six Words for a Hat.

The living author who I'm most pleased to have discovered this year is Marly Youmans, who wrote Thaliad and A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. I'm looking forward to reading more from young Ms Youmans. She has an impressive catalogue.

Of course, he was a terrible liar on the "young" part, but we'll assume he's as honest as can be elsewhere, right? Isn't that lovely? And now, back to champagne and tapas...

Merry 7th day of Christmas and Happy New Year's Eve!

* * * 

Small Bites Menu 

 Tapanade with french bread

 Goat cheese gratin with thai pepper paste and marmalade glaze 

 Mini crab cakes with lemon aoli 

Pizza with water buffalo cheese, wild boar sausage and olives 

Carapaccio with horseradish cream 

 Butternut squash/potato and onion latkes with caviar 

 Grilled duck breast with truffle paste on baguette 

 Lava cakes and raspberries 

And proper amounts of champagne!

We didn't accept any invitations, as my husband is on call. Instead the four in residence have been drinking champagne and eating tapas, all except child no. 3, who had filet mignon to celebrate the day. He was eating some of the pizza until he heard rumors of water buffalo.

And so I am replete, you hear, crammed like Santa on Thanksgiving, glutted like a teenager's closet, gorged like a laundry bag in a dorm room--how dare you bring me thin strips of duck breast? And what do you mean by these intimations of dessert?

Resolution: lie by the fire and recover from blimpdom of New Year's Eve.

Added for Robbi: a few of Michael's prior New Year's Eve meals for guests.... Wish I had always thought to post them! The link is to a compendium of posts, so you'll see this post at the top--scroll down!

Thanks--

Note: reading at the Bright Hill Center celebration in Treadwell, 2-3ish today. Full-length reading there in 2014.

Thank you for the deluge of birthday wishes on facebook and elsewhere, and here's another post about A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage by novelist Scott G. F. Bailey.

Here are a few clips to entice:

A couple of days ago I finished Marly Youmans' beautiful 2012 novel A Death at The White Camellia Orphanage. I come here not to review the book, except to say that it's a wonderful novel and I recommend it to you. I can't review it because not only do I not know how to write a proper review, I'm not sure what to say about the novel. I don't know how to talk about it without diminishing it.

Or this:

Youmans gives us a nontraditional story arc, which surprises and succeeds entirely.

Or:

...and the novel, as I say, or should have said by now, works beautifully on this symbolic level just as it works beautifully on the surface level. It's quite a feat.

Or:

It is, however, a deeply moral book, written in gorgeous glittering prose, entirely earthbound in its story and not afraid of poking into the dark corners of real life but also fearlessly--if in a more subtle way--pointing away from that darkness.

I am grateful to Scott Bailey for visiting and re-visiting the book . . .

Thank you

to novelist Scott G. F. Bailey for a lovely piece on A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. See it here at Six Words for a Hat. "The prose nods to Faulkner, to Shakespeare, to Yeats, to epic poetry; it vibrates with rich color and detail and feeling."

"Art is artifice"

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Marly Youmans, Thaliad
(Phoenicia Publishing, 2012)

Scott G. F. Bailey stole my brain:

The novel is and has always been a work of art, of artifice, an abstraction of a set of ideas about the world. A novel is—and pretends to be—no more “real” than a symphony, a painting, or a dance. Novelists might talk about life and the world, but they are not creating an accurate map of life and the world. To ask the novel to accurately mirror our own lives is to ask the novelist to do something that isn’t his job. Apuleius’ Golden Ass is clearly only a glancing blow against reality. The same can be said of Shakespeare, of Chekhov, of Chaucer, of Dickens, of Tolstoy, of O’Connor, of Woolf, of Manning, of whomever you care to name. Tristram Shandy contains many truths about life, but it is not a strict depiction of reality. The same can be said of Finnegans Wake. The same can be said of The Old Man and the Sea, or Lolita, or A Visit From the Goon Squad. I will also point out tangentially that every good book is an amalgam of what the author believes to be factually true and what the author has invented. The ratio of fact to invention is no indicator of the success of the book. And every representation of the world is imaginary, because the only accurate representation of the universe is the universe itself; anything else is an abstraction, an illusion, a fantasy, a falsehood, if you will. Art is artifice. There has never been a “realist novel” that was not a fantasy. There has never been an epoch where a work of fiction was equivalent to the actual experience of life. 

Now wasn't that good?

I'm always mentioning this business about "reality" and the novel to people. It's what makes talk about literary versus speculative fiction so often meaningless. But it's also what gives made things of all sorts much of their charm and beauty--the gap between creation and sub-creation, sometimes seeming narrow and sometimes wide.

Find him at Six Words for a Hat.

The Rrrrrandom Rrroundup

Thank you 

to Clive for a fresh post on Thaliad.

Not a bit surprised

Ted and Sylvia invoke spirits:

"Mention Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to the average poetry fan, and the first thing that comes to mind (other than the poetry, of course) is likely to be images of doomed romance, suicide, or love gone sour. Less well known are the pair’s experiments with the Ouija board. According to Hughes, in a note to his wife’s poem, Ouija, Plath “occasionally amused herself, with one or two others, by holding her finger on an upturned glass, in a ring of letters laid out on a smooth table, and questioning the ‘spirits’.”

The article goes on to talk about other interesting things such as Coleridge and the anima mundi....

Scott G. F. Bailey is baffled at Six Words for a Hat 

"I pause yet again to consider the state of American publishing. I confess myself baffled by it. It's rare when a new novel comes out that excites me, and when I look at the catalogues of independent presses I feel a definite estrangement from the books they're putting out. Everyone claims to be transgressive or experimental, but to me it's just a lot of formal gameplaying to hide, I strongly suspect, some pretty pedestrian ideas and inelegant writing. One is not supposed to say that aloud, if one is a writer, but there it is. I am aware that every novelist who can't get a book deal says the same thing. I am unable to critically evaluate my own novels, of course, as every novelist is unable to critically evaluate his own novels. So I can't even claim, honestly, that I write good books. I can only claim that I write books, that I have written eight of them. The most recent book I've written is called, for now, The Hanging Man, and I wrote the final sentence of the first draft around 1:00 PM, PST, today."

@tedgioia tweets

"I was especially impressed by [the late Arthur] Danto's claim that the future of art wouldn't be the pursuit of 'progress' but a return to serving human needs."

Dear journalists,

And yet another thing you're neglecting...

Could we spend slightly less time on the latest fracas du jour and a little more time on the plight of the honey bee? You gave the bee its moment and then moved on. We really need those little gold-dusted creatures. (Sylvia, bee poet, you should have stuck around and helped the honey bee!)