The Seven Deadly Sins » (trailer) by Antoine Roegiers, 2011

Marvelous share from youtube. Click bottom right for large screen view.

Antoine Roegiers animates Breughel drawings (1559) of the seven deadly sins.

See the Antoine Roegiers website

Storyboard and details here

for @DeathZen of the Twitterlands--

Message sent to Inogolo:
Name: Youmans
Pronunciation: as Yeomans: Yo-munz (rhymes with "no puns")

A certain party of four brothers who came to this counry before the Revolution were all "Yeomans." As spelling reform did not yet exist, their descendants tended to spell their names in various ways at various times--Yeomans, Yeamans, Youmans. However, the pronunciation often remained the same for family members who could pronounce consistently even if they couldn't spell consistently. (Others do pronounce in the way you have noted.)

Best,
Marly Youmans

The uncanny ordinary--

Life, what a strange substance, and all woven on the loom of time, which many say does not exist . . .

Take tomorrow, as that should be pleasant enough, being a Saturday. In the morning, be awakened entirely too early by small, demanding animals. That's a constant. Feel cotton-headed and dense. Drink tea and stare at the birds. Bake for the track meet sale later in the day. Tumble three children from bed. Dig around and weed in the jumble of flowers, trying to turn a cottage garden into Eden. Play with words and write a poem about something (last night it was the definition of a foreign word seen on facebook, so clearly it could be most anything.) Go sing John Rutter's "A Clare Benediction" for the funeral of a much-loved old lady. Then dash off to the youngest child's track meet. Cook because the man who likes to cook is out of town at a conference. Talk to him and my mother by the miracle of technology. Commit the daily laundrification. Probably fall asleep over a book. And perhaps all of that interrupted by surprise, for good or for ill.

If every day is a little life where one is born and dies away in a short space, how many days are worth the living? Or how many deserve a good job! at the end . . . Fewer of mine than I should like. Lately I've had the wish for each day to be more shapely, more meaningful--that no day feel, at the close, a gift that was wasted.

Wikipedia's woman-wrangle

Credit to Rutgers art history major Nicole of Bendomolina.
John Singer Sargent, "Apollo and the Muses," Boston MFA

The ongoing Wikipedia flap over the removal of women from "American novelists" and their placement in "American women novelists" continues. Here's a pretty good summation from The New York Review of Books. Out of curiosity I have peeked from time to time; yes, I was plunked into the women's sub-category.

Now I am back in "American novelists." Today there are twenty-one of us nestled under "Y." Nineteen are men; two are women. Ninety percent of Wikipedia contributors are men. Like VIDA statistics, these numbers are suggestive and need no comment.

The focus of all the articles I have seen on the general outcry (starting with an op-ed article by Amanda Filipaachi at The New York Times online site) is sexism, and there's no doubt that putting women in a sort of ghetto category is a slam against them. But I wonder if there is even more to it than unthinking sexism. Could this be a cracked, unintended consequence and legacy of university-based gender / multi-cultural politics--the sorting of literature and the humanities in general into gender, national, and ethnic categories that now govern many college programs? I wonder this in part because the man who started it all is currently a student in history at Wayne State.

Wikipedia mandates sorting and categories, but new categories ought to be judged by whether they are helpful or unhelpful. Of course it is not helpful for women to be shoved out of the category of "American novelists"; it simply suggests to readers that only men can be "real novelists," and that women writers do not matter. I expect Wikipedia will have to be content with the alphabet as a way to establish divisions among novelists and other kinds of writers. Any further sub-categories should depend on and refer back to what is called the parent category. (That's a bit of Wiki-geek-speak for you.)

Outside of Wikipedia, categories can be helpful when they attempt to redress invisibility--a lack of knowledge and lack of attention. I pause and feel thankful for the good work of poet, editor, and conference director Kim Bridgford and The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, an exhaustive database of women poets. Perhaps somebody needs to do the same thing for the novel. Couldn't one find a few equally well-known "Y" women to accompany the "Y" men on my Wikipedia page? And what about the remainder of the alphabet?

(Here's a little side tunnel off the main burrow. I just took a peek, and I am not in "American poets," where six men and one woman find themselves under the sign of "Y." Curious. I started publishing as a poet and have four books out with more to come, and am sorted as a novelist only. How do they decide? Is it a Potter sorting-hat moment, with madcap dithering between Ravenclaw and Gryffindor? Can't one be in two houses at once?)

What's the upshot of all this? If you are a woman with some spare time and an interest in the issues, you might think about joining the site. They feel the lack of women members, it appears. The current contributing members need to realize that in the case of Wikipedia, mere inclusion or exclusion amounts to a judgment. When Wikipedia is the first and often the last resort for many, especially college students accustomed to leaning on the site for information, it is essential that women be part of major (parent) categories such as "American novelists."

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Marly, recent and elsewhere:

• Thaliad's wild epic adventure in verse, profusely decorated by artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012) here and here 
• The Foliate Head's collection of poems with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Stanza Press (UK) here
• A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (novel) from Mercer University Press (ForeWord 2013 finalist in the general fiction category; The Ferrol Sams Award, 2012) here
• The Throne of Psyche, collection of formal poetry from Mercer, 2011, here
• Samples from my 2011-12 books at Scribd.
• See tabs above for information on individual books, including review clips.