Readings and thoughts for the first day of Christmas

"The Angel Door"
Here is a Christmas commission by a friend from college, artist
Mary Boxley Bullington. I suggest to those of you who love
and collect art that she is highly collectible and, indeed,
under-valued at this time. Her work is full of energy and beauty.
Click for a large version.

I heard this sung by Fr. Mark Michael last night, in a church that has for several centuries been a notable home to writers--novelist James Fenimore Cooper, nature writer Susan Cooper, poet W. W. Lord, essayist Fae Malania, children's author Paul Fenimore Cooper, and many more. It is one vision of things that have eternal life and power:

The Proclamation of Christmas

Today, the twenty-fifth day of December, unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth and then formed man and woman in his own image. Several thousand years after the flood, when God made the rainbow shine forth as a sign of the covenant. Twenty-one centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah; thirteen centuries after Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt. Eleven hundred years from the time of Ruth and the Judges; one thousand years from the anointing of David as king; in the sixty-fifth week according to the prophecy of Daniel. In the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad; the seven hundred and fifty-second year from the foundation of the city of Rome. The forty-second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus; the whole world being at peace, Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming, being conceived by the Holy Spirit, and nine months having passed since his conception, was born in Bethlehem of Judea of the Virgin Mary. Today is the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

And here is a clip from the discussion of another vision of immortality--cultural immortality--yoked to its debunking:

On the presumed immortality of fame as a cause of art and cultural significance.

Fame, according to Socrates, is therefore a form of reproduction. For those who can achieve it, it is far superior to the messy biological kind. Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory? Socrates is here expressing a fundamental belief of the Greeks: that acts of heroism or epic poems are not only nobler than mere sprogs, but also considerably more durable. Where living things fall like leaves in autumn, our cultural objects can endure. Kingdoms, titles and honour survive to be passed from one generation to the next; stories persist to be told by new generations of bards; bronze statues do not fall sick. Unlike human children, cultural offspring promise to be ‘everlasting’.  --Stephen Cave, Everlasting glory: There are few fantasies so absurd as the idea of living on through fame. So why does immortality still beckon?

Thoughts on literary immortality

Mary Boxley Bullington,
Winged Creatures,
Acrylic and mixed media collage on paper, 22" x 25"
December 2014

Some day the glacial lake some hundred yards from my door will vanish; some day a mountain may stand where it sank in earth. All things on Earth pass and change, as do we. 

Stephen Cave's vision of humanity's striving to be noble (or simply plain old famous for being famous, like a Kardashian) or make lasting art as an absurd quirk of biology and evolution is interesting, but in the end it means little to me. I do not write for glory or to have my name enrolled in stone. I write because it gives me joy, and because as I pursue something larger than myself, I also become larger than myself. What I am on the inside is then better and bigger than it was before. So I write to redeem the time and give a gift to a world in which I have sometimes been harmful or mere useless lumber--as we all are at times, more or less. 

In thinking so, I am far closer to the sentiments of a figure like the ignored, scorned, solitary artist of Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful," who creates the beautiful mechanical butterfly that flies with grace and natural motion but who also catches a "far other" butterfly--who becomes greater than he was before because he has participated in creation. The soul has long been compared, in art and words and on tombstones, to a butterfly. Like Hawthorne, the artist gives the creation of his heart and soul away, knowing it may be accounted a trifle, knowing it may be mocked. But he gives it freely in love.

Christmas wish

Experience sublime and beautiful things and be alchemically transformed to metaphysical gold, be in surpassing peace, love one another, be merry...

Butterflies on Mary Boxley Bullington's
cherry tree in Roanoke, Virginia.

Glimmerglass IRL

Glimmerglass
Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt
Mercer University Press, 2014

Various people have asked me about the "real Cooperstown things and people" behind Glimmerglass.  Here are a few:

• The gatehouse on the Lake Road near the museums is the model for the house where Cynthia Sorrel lives. It does indeed have charming moldings sprinkled about the ceiling in the parlor. And yes, it has seven doors to the outside. When I was having lunch there long ago, I did see the waterline in the kitchen that marked flood height from the stream close by. 
• The mansion is gone, but the fossil-peppered part of the fictional mansion's appearance was inspired by a local stonemason, who one day handed a wonderful fossil to my daughter as the children and I stood watching him lay a dry wall.
• I was not thinking of any real-life people, though I confess that the two asexual figures--Theodore and Iz--were inspired by the idea of various old-fashioned Yankee families where the children never marry but live together always. My husband had four aunts and an uncle who lived this way all their lives. Traces of Fenimore Cooper appear here and there in the book. And I was once well and truly snubbed by someone from the Glimmerglass Opera, but the figure who snubs in the novel isn't modeled on that person--or, indeed, on any particular person. Cooperstown is the only place I've ever lived where snubbing actually happens, and I am afraid that I have found the experience of being emphatically snubbed (once by an opera employee, once by a woman who married a great ways "up") quite illuminating. Social layers and social snobberies are always fascinating for a storyteller.
• The Opal Bone... That strange figure was inspired by the Tiffany angel window at Christ Church Cooperstown, with its brilliant eyes, opaline flesh, and bright string of leaves around its neck. And Christ Church itself makes a few cameo appearances. And Cynthia looks toward Cooper Park from the church and sees that it is snowing.
• The frog pageants... Once upon a time, a rector at Christ Church and his wife had an inordinate number of elegant, leggy stuffed frogs. The pair often put on small froggy tableaux in the privacy of their home. During major renovation, they lived not in the rectory but in the gatehouse of the story.
• Glimmerglass itself, or Otsego Lake, with the underwater hillock that Fenimore Cooper used in the Leatherstocking Tales as the site for Muskrat Castle... Glimmerglass is Cooper's name for the lake. Bits of worn brick and transfer wear wash up from its depths, to be picked up by the shower. I have lots of friends who sail. Our lake has a deep, gouged-out glacial bed, so of course we have a snaky monster, seldom glimpsed. I'm not sure why I was impelled to send characters under the lake, but in winter people bore holes in the ice and fish from shanties, so the idea of unlocking the ice and entering the watery world is congenial to the place.
• Perhaps the labyrinths were suggested to mind by the tiny, leafy labyrinth at the Farmer's Museum, with a classical pillar at its heart. My children used to love to play in its mysteries. I do have a figure from the classical world in my labyrinth...
• The village is awash in ghosts, many of whom are colorful and who live near me, though I have never seen one. Very sensible people I've know tell me that they have seen a ghost, so perhaps I will have a chance. I've never even seen the three children who dance in the parlor of our house.
• We have two castles in the village, Kingfisher Tower in the edge of the lake and the stone Norman tower in the woods off Beaver Meadow Road. (Auto-correct wants to make that "Normal," but it's nothing like normal to have New World castles, is it?)
• Etcetera...

And a very merry Christmas-to-be to you, 

whatever or whenever you celebrate in turn, for 

"'God bless us every one!' said Tiny Tim, the last of all."

Glimmers

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, artist--his image
on the jacket, and this photo his!

Albany Times-Union review 
21 December 2014

Clip: "Readers of literary fantasy will welcome the novel "Glimmerglass," the 12th book by Cooperstown author Marly Youmans. It layers gothic romance, ghost tales and medieval dream visions into a coming-of-age story set in the village of Cooper Patent."

Marly at Tor

Clip from The Pop Quiz at the End of the Universe: Strangest thing you’ve learned while researching a book?

I live in a house built by a writer (Colonel Prentiss’s newspaper is still in print) in 1808. It’s a straightforward federal center-hall house, and it would appear to have few secrets. But if I dig in the garden, I find a Dutch pipe or a clay marble or shards of transfer-ware. Concealment shoes (meant to kick witches out of the house) were hidden in one of the chimneys. It’s the same way with peering back into time; surprise is everywhere. The main thing I’ve learned through historical research is that nothing is as they tell us in history books. Nothing is generalized, and everything is specific and strange and not at all simple because people are individuals and the rules for life change. When I was researching American slavery, I ended up reading about all sorts of oddities—the freedmen who owned slaves, the occasional white slave, peculiar punishments, holes in the ground for singing-into, etc. When reading Scots-Irish lore for two books set in the Carolina mountains, I was surprised by (and then used) beliefs having to do with witchmasters. Research is enticing because it steers in unexpected directions, yet also functions as a temptress who can lead a writer into the drear realm of info-dumps. But we don’t have to tell everything we know…

The joy of lists....

Books and Culture Favorite Books of 2014

Thanks to Books and Culture and its wide-ranging reader, John Wilson, editor, for another spot on Books and Culture's annual Favorite Books list. I am grateful that John Wilson ranges so very widely that he discovered and read my books some years ago, and that the magazine continues to support them. It's an interesting list, with Christopher Beha, Ayelet Waldman, Paul Celan, Michael Robbins, and Emily St. John Mandel among the poets and writers.

Weird Fiction Book List

The online Weird Fiction Review asked me for a list of three favorite books from 2014, and I have obliged. You may find the list (with one extra) here. Thanks to David Davis for asking. 2014 was not an especially great year for reading at my house; instead, it seemed to be an entirely-too-great year for being away from home and wild ferrying trips. I am looking forward to a month off from book events with only some child-ferrying trips... and so shall start next year with some extra reading and rereading. Joy!