The illuminator, cock-a-hoop!

Clive Hicks-Jenkins

13 hours ago · Edited

My copies of 'Glimmerglass' have arrived from Mercer University Press in the US, neatly and safely packed. I'm cock-a-hoop with delight. This is SUCH a pretty book, from its generously-sized reproductions of my chapter-headings, to the tawny endpapers picking up colours from the jacket. Mercer and the designer Mary-Frances Glover Burt have between them done a great job. Marly must be a happy author. I'm certainly a happy illuminator!  --Clive Hicks-Jenkins on facebook

I'm so glad he is pleased with the new book!

Books-and-words gallimaufry

Updatery 

I have updated the Glimmerglass page, cutting and adding and tweaking, and wouldn't mind a bit any comments to improve it. Launch events will start later in the month. Right now I'm working on the final stages of a manuscript...

The Uses of Tolkien

I've noticed a growing number of slight mentions of of Tolkien in the context of current events. Victor Davis Hansen has just dug into that vein of comparison. Here Hansen analyzes the state of the world, launching off from The Lord of the Rings.

"10 books"

I'm loving all these facebook lists of books that affected people and stuck with them. Every now and then I bump into one of mine--so far I've seen A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, Ingledove, and Catherwood on lists. Catherwood is out ahead of the rest. Considering that people can dive back more than a thousand years through English language books alone, I am tickled.

 "10 books" from that lovely poet and man, Dave Favier

The King of Elfland's Daughter, Lord Dunsany
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt
Marx's 1844 manuscripts
A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Marly Youmans
All the Strange Hours, Loren Eisley
Leaves of Grass, Whitman
William Blake's lyric poetry
Juan Luna's Revolver, Luisa A. Igloria*
William Butler Yeats' lyric poetry
The Walls Do Not Fall, H.D.
History of the Civil War, Shelby Foote
Vanity Fair, Wm Thackeray
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Debt: the first 5,000 years, David Graeber

*Note: Luisa and I will be reading together this month! See here. I'll also be reading from Glimmerglass with Philip Lee Williams, Lev Grossman, Kelly Link (and Raymond-Atkins-if-we-work-it-out...)

Bill Knight commented, "I had Marly Youmans on my list as well, but it was "The Thaliad", not "A Death", which I have not read." So that's the first I've seen for Thaliad.

Free speech (h/t @prufrocknews)

Wordsmiths rely on free speech. Academics ought to know what it means. But in our time, is it any surprise that the chancellor of Berkeley gets it wrong? Administrators have a weird challenge; they tend to be tugged toward a Babel of obfuscation, sophistry, word-inflation, falsehood, and jargon. It's evidently hard to resist. Go here for an interesting takedown and analysis of the chancellor's letter to the university. Here's a sample:

First, observe the hidden premise Chancellor Dirks is presenting — that free speech must have "meaning." This implies that speech that does not have "meaning" — as defined, one presumes, by Chancellor Dirks or a committee of people like him — then it is not "free speech," and perhaps is not entitled to protection. Dirks is smuggling a vague and easily malleable precondition to free speech. There is no such precondition. Our rights are not limited by some free-floating test of merit or meaning.

It gets tougher from there...

More "10 books"

Not a bull's head but a minotaur.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins

I love popping up on these lists. It's fun to be on one, and it's interesting to see what books are chosen. Here's the third one I've seen one of my books on, this one from Erica Eisdorfer, novelist and 35-year ruler of the Bull's Head Bookshop at UNC-Chapel Hill. That's an awful lot of service to words in the right order! Thanks, Erica.

Rules: In your status list ten books that changed your life in some way....

a. The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
b. The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell
c. Catherwood by Marly Youmans
d. Regeneration by Pat Barker
e. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
f. Wet Nursing by Valerie Fildes
g. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
h. Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls
i. You Never Call! You Never Write: A History of the Jewish Mother by Joyce Antlerd.

Dragons?

Study by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for the jacket of Glimmerglass

"Are there dragons in the book?"

Despite the vibrant one on the cover, there are no dragons in "Glimmerglass." There are, however, some salamanders in a cellar. Nor are there any flying lions. There is, however, a little statue of a minotaur that becomes important later on.

What is it?

This book stands "between" genres, if we must talk about genres. (I don't, as a rule.) In places, it invokes ancient conventions of storytelling like the Muse and the somnium. These are not elements of what might be called a strict realism, but neither are they unknown to us in the world, though we might describe them differently.

Writing as adventure

I'm afraid that I'm known for not doing the same thing twice (inconvenient for publishers but I hope fun for adventurous readers), and perhaps some will think that Glimmerglass is a striking-out into a new territory for me. For the story-weaver inside me, the work all feels like one enormous bolt of cloth with different projects of different shapes and patterns--after all, it's flying from the same loom.

The Clive-art

Neither, I should say, are Clive's cover images and interior images an attempt to convey the literal events of the book. Instead, they revel in the spirit of the book. I posted a longer version of his description earlier, and think it might be helpful:

Glimmerglass is strewn throughout with descriptions of the flora and fauna of an observed landscape. But like the Arabian Nights storyteller, Marly spins tales within tales that access altogether more fabulous topographies, and it’s as though the sea-serpent door-knockers and griffin-embellished wrought-iron gates of the real world, have been markers of hidden realms paralleling the everyday. Bearing in mind I’m a man who reveres the great eighteenth century wood-engraver Thomas Bewick, it was a foregone conclusion that when I came to consider decorations for the chapter headings and tailpieces of this wonderful book, I’d be moved to create a miniature naturalis historia.