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.

Fragile, perishable things--

"Sunset shot taken from the east side of the Baton Rouge levee, 

at 7:22, 3/20/2008." --Claude E. Nall III

My most important memories of early childhood are of Gramercy and Baton Rouge, places that seem in memory bright with color, drenched in light, alive with beauty. They are, I believe, memories that have fed me and made me the sort of writer I am. By the age of 13, I had lived in many places--South Carolina, Louisiana, Kansas, Delaware, North Carolina--but somehow those early memories of Louisiana have remained touchstones of the beautiful for me. The levee, the little mud towers under the house, the moonflowers at night, extravagance of blossom by day, the pink-throated lizards dangling helplessly from my ear lobes, the sugar garden in our backyard, the plants that spired up into the trees, the plums and bamboo, the shrimp in the rock pools: all these and more changed me. Did I regret leaving a place that was, to me, magical? Yes.

Back then I did not know that fragile, perishable things--civility, courtesy, respect, truth, goodness, beauty, order, civilization that allows the arts and human beings to flourish--are always at risk in our world. Though small, I knew death, even in the heart of my own family. But I did not yet know that such things as murder, chaos, and moral darkness could be.

And now we all know, over and over again, even on this very day, how fragile and perishable things are swept away. In Baton Rouge and Baghdad, in Dallas and Nice. We know lives lost needlessly to shadow. It is up to us, each one, to stand up for those fragile, perishable things, to praise them, to mourn when they are swept away, to do our very best to keep and protect them.

Father and son. Officer Montrell Jackson,
one of our public servants murdered in Baton Rouge today.
Dormit in pace.

I wrote this post especially for Greg Langley, the former (and the very wonderful) Books Editor of The Baton Rouge Advocate.

The Foliate Head sends out a leaf--

Thanks to Roderick Robinson for writing about The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press, 2012) on his blog, Tone Deaf. The post begins, "I bought Marly Youmans’ The Foliate Head because I’ve liked other poems she’s written. She wears her wide experience of literature lightly and I know from her blog, The Palace at 2 am, she has things to say which interest me." Read the rest here.

Side note: Copies are still available in various places, but the second print run will soon be sold out completely. (Thank you, readers, that you made it possible for a second print run to exist.)

It's one of the wonderful things about the internet that books no longer vanish completely when the traditional three-month window for reviews is done, and bookstores ship back their unsold copies. Large, deep-pocket publishers still control what sells best through the marketing of "lead books," for the most part, but the internet means that other books--books that are not "lead books" at one of our largest publishers--have a chance to be known later on. And that's a good thing, as what sells best is always the best.

Requiescat in pace

Liberté, égalité, fraternité... Floating in my mind are words from a different unrest: “I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again" -Anne Frank, The Diary. So sorrowful to think of the 84--more to come--dead, ten of them just children, and all those suffering grief and bodily hurt in Nice.