False Detectives, True Discourses, and Excessive Exegeses

I got caught up in the hype, got curious, and found a way to watch True Detective. It's my kind of thing: a dark crime story/police procedural/serial killer whatzit. Also, apparently the writer of the show, Nic Pizzolatto, is aware of some writers I like, and even one I know, Laird Barron. (Hi Laird! You rock!) What struck me right from the beginning was the marvelous music, selected and produced by the great T-Bone Burnett, and the cinematography by Adam Arkapaw, who shot one of my favorite movies of recent decades, Snowtown, and also the very good film Animal Kingdom and the marvelous Jane Campion TV show Top of the Lake. Something about Arkapaw's sensitivity to color, light, and framing is pure mainlined heroin to my aesthetic pleasure centers. If I found out he'd shot a Ron Howard movie, I'd even watch that.

So many other people have discussed the show that there are now, I'm sure, nearly as many words written about it as there are words in Wikipedia. My own opinion of the show is of no consequence, though for the curious, here's what I said about it on Jeff VanderMeer's Facebook page, where some discussion was going on: "I liked the music, cinematography, most of the acting and directing, but thought the writing was all over the place from pretty good to godawful. And episodes 7 and 8 were like the Goodyear blimp deflating mid-air and landing in a bayou of drivel. (The stars, the stars! Use the Force, Rust! The Yellow King is YOUR FATHER!!! Oh, wait...)"

Much more interesting to me is the discourse around the show. Why did this show inspire such a fanatical response? Why did we feel compelled to respond? Zeitgeist, genre, etc. probably all play into it, but a fuller answer would require some time and research, particularly about how the show was marketed and where and how it first caught on. 

I'm enough of a pointy-headed academic to hope one day for a whole book about the construction of True Detective's appeal, something that doesn't neglect the material aspects: budgets, advertising, Twitter. I'd also like to see analyses of fan responses to mystery/crime shows — for instance, a comparison of fan speculations between seasons 2 and 3 of Sherlock and fan speculations about the mysteries of True Detective before the finale. The choice in season 3 of Sherlock to offer a relatively acceptable but not definitive answer to the mystery of how Sherlock lived was, I thought, quite smart, because even though the creators probably had (unlike Conan Doyle) an idea of an answer when they wrote Sherlock's "death", they realized by the time it came to write season 3 that no answer they could provide would be satisfying after two years of fan speculations.  

True Detective took a different approach, partly because they didn't realize viewers would react the way they did, or that the show would be subject to so much ratiocination, and so they gave a rather ridiculous and clichéd end to the mystery, one that made not a whole lot of sense and tied up only the most obvious of loose ends. Pizzolatto's interest was more in the characters than the plot, or perhaps not even the characters so much as the mood and the projection of an idea of complexity rather than any actual complexity. 

Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

photo by Eamonn McCabe, from The Guardian

I was stunned this morning to learn of the death of Stuart Hall, one of the great intellectuals of our time. Stunned not because it was entirely unexpected — he was not in the best of health, and had mostly retired from public life — but simply because it feels strange to live in the world after Stuart Hall.

It's entirely likely that you have never heard of Stuart Hall. His fame, particularly outside of the UK, is mostly related to a specific academic field (cultural studies) and his work has not been as well collected and disseminated as it deserves. I was late to his work, learning of it only when I began my master's degree (in cultural studies), and at first I couldn't see its significance — a lot of what he said seemed tied to specific events, specific moments, and many of the ideas he considered were, I assumed at first, part of an academic past that was no longer relevant. His sentences tended to be complex, his vocabulary and range of references even more so. But something about what he wrote made me think I was missing something, and I'm glad I had that perception, because I was right. At some point, with some essay or another, it began to click into place. And from that moment on, I sought out everything I could find by Hall.

There will, I hope, be insightful reflections on his work in the wake of his death. I hope there will also be some new collections of his writings, because we need them. What most sticks with me about Hall's work is its nuance and insistence on tackling ideas in their complexity and contradiction rather than simplifying them, even if simplification would make us more comfortable or more righteous. I am wary of saying anything more right now, because to do so would risk just such simplification of his own ideas. Instead, below the jump, I will leave you with some links to writings by Hall, interviews with him, and a couple of video and audio items.

Weekend Reading

I've been thinking about short fiction a lot recently. The truth is, after working on three Best American Fantasy anthologies, I was shellshocked from reading piles of short stories, and stayed away from them. I pretty much stopped writing them for a while, focusing instead on academic writing, film stuff, etc. Judging the Shirley Jackson Awards was fun and brought me back to short fiction, but again in such an overwhelming way that by the time it was done, I didn't want to read another short story for months. And I didn't.

I've gotten over that, finally. I've read a few short stories over the last month (and it's been a busy month, so reading a few of anything is an accomplishment!), and, just as importantly, for the first time in years I've gotten back to writing stories — two so far this year, one of which already sold (I'll reveal the details once I've signed the contract).

I've had plans to write more about short stories here, but the time for doing so has eluded me. But I've still been reading, and still want to share. I've decided to do so occasionally, probably on weekends. An offering of weekend reading. So here are 5 stories, all available online, that I think are worth at least the time it takes to read them:

"Heaven" by Alexander Chee (TriQuarterly)

He wants to at least tell him, he understands what he wanted. He always had. He just hated that anyone could tell.

"Understanding Human Behavior" by Thomas M. Disch (originally F&SF; here, Strange Horizons)
A lot of the time he couldn't suspend his disbelief in the real people around him, all their pushing and pulling, their weird fears and whopping lies, their endless urges to control other people's behavior, like the vegetarian cashier at the Stop-and-Shop or the manager at the convenience center. The lectures and demonstrations at the halfway house had laid out the basics, but without explaining any of it. Like harried parents, the Institute's staff had said, "Do this," and "Don't do that," and he'd not been in a position to argue. He did as he was bid, and his behavior fit as naturally as an old suit.

"Declaration by the Ghost of Emma Goldman" by Rick London (New American Writing)
I see now that the mind is occupied territory. Most likely, as long as we’re thinking the mind is under occupation. Despite our high ideals and surging rhetoric, we go on as if we were alone and adrift, seeking some small moment of advantage. Indeed, amid so much of the usual sectarian bickering you’d think we couldn’t see past our noses or had to close one eye to see out of the other. Will we ever pull aside the curtain on this hapless drama?

"Arbeitskraft" by Nick Mamatas (The Mammoth Book of Steampunk)

I was an old hand at organizing workers, though girls who consumed electricity rather than bread were a bit beyond my remit.

"Please Note That I Am Not Burt Reynolds*" by Sarah Sorensen (Identity Theory)

*Although I might be introduced to you as such a person. There was probably a point when I should have mentioned that I wasn’t actually Burt Reynolds. Of course, I’m not sure why she thought that I was Burt Reynolds to begin with. I don’t resemble Burt. Burt was never a portly woman in a pug t-shirt and skinny jeans.

Blogroll

Ron Hogan has an interesting post over at Beatrice, updating a 2008 post called "What's Your Ultimate Blogroll?" for the new year. This reminded me of a discussion I had with a creative nonfiction class in early December, where I was one of a few folks invited in to talk about blogging. One of the things the students asked was, "What blogs do you recommend?" I said, "Well, I've got a blogroll on the sidebar of my site with some blogs listed in it..." The instructor for the course laughed and said, "And it's got something like 300 blogs on it!"

It does certainly list a lot of sites, some of which, I'm sure, are defunct. I keep up with them all via Google Reader, and, in fact, display the list via Google Reader -- if you wanted, you could subscribe to the list itself and see every post from everybody on it.

Not very practical, though, as a recommendation service. And though in some ways it does, in fact, represent some of what I'm interested in, it doesn't prioritize that interest in any way, and it's too overwhelming for most people seeking new stuff to look at.

I've been thinking about ways of paring it down, or getting rid of it completely. With the various things I recommend via the Delicious and Diigo links on the sidebar, is there really a need for a blogroll at all? Couldn't that space be converted to, say, a list of the 10 blogs I most frequently and devotedly read?

Fresh Links

Just an addendum to my previous post, in which I lamented the breaking of Google Reader's share function, which enabled the "Fresh Links" widget over on the sidebar—

I have created a near fix, as you'll see if you look over on the side. I'm using the RSS feed from my Delicious account for this, since it was sitting dormant. (Thus some of those links are very much not fresh right now!)

Stuffs

Google has done gone and broke Google Reader, removing the sharing function to encourage people to use Google Plus instead. This means the "Fresh Links" section over on the sidebar is no longer able to be refreshed, and I'll probably go back to occasionally doing linkdump posts. Here, for instance, are some links:

• My latest Strange Horizons column, "Reading Systems", has been posted, as has my latest Sandman Meditations piece. (The Sandman pieces are going to be biweekly for the rest of the year rather than the regular weekly schedule because I'm just too busy to keep up with a weekly schedule right now, and I was getting really frazzled.)
• Team VanderMeer has launched The Weird Fiction Review, an online journal about kumquats. Famed kumquat collected Neil Gaiman is interviewed, and there's an interesting selection of nonfiction, art, and fiction about kumquats. Don't believe me? Well, go over there and see for yourself!
• In publishing news, it turns out that libraries are actually good for the publishing industry.
• Fandor has a great set of tributes to the great Derek Jarman. I'm working on something about Jarman's Caravaggio (25 years old this year!) and also a piece about Jarman for Rain Taxi, but I'm finding Jarman much harder to write about than I expected, and both pieces are vastly late. But I shall persevere!
• And here are 92 open-access film e-books. Never again will you complain about lacking something to read!

Out There

Some things of interest...

If you liked my recent column on Sexing the Body, evolutionary psychology, gender, etc., then you should really keep your eyes on the ongoing series of posts about sex science at the essential (though not essentialist) Echidne of the Snakes. Over the holidays, she read three books on the topic -- one I mentioned in my column, and have also praised before, Pink Brain, Blue Brain; but also two I haven't yet seen, Delusions of Gender and Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young. At the very least, read Echidne's first post of seven short conclusions reached after finishing the books. Great, great stuff.

And if you're curious to know more about this stuff, and Pink Brain, Blue Brain in particular, here's a lecture by its author, Lisa Eliot.

I was hoping Aaron Bady would respond to the New York Times article "In Sudan, a Colonial Curse Comes Up for a Vote", and lo and behold, my wishes came true: Invented Communities in Africa and America. Essential reading. Here's a taste:

One would never want to ignore the destructive effects the scramble for Africa had on Africans, and the last thing I want to do is downplay the extent to which contemporary African politics are organically related to that historical event. But history didn’t stop after that point, and this capsule account of the “colonial curse” relies on your being completely ignorant about almost all of it. The problem with colonization isn’t that Europeans drew up maps “with little concern for ethnic links,” and it isn’t true anyway. The problem is that Europeans drew up the maps they did with the intention of extracting as much in the way of labor and  resources as they could from Africans, and then did exactly that, often by quite carefully seeking to divide and conquer Africans by ethnicity.

The great and glorious Kelly Eskridge has many big ideas, but this week she got to write a Big Idea post at John Scalzi's place in conjunction with Small Beer press's re-release of her novel Solitaire.

Speaking of Small Beer Press, they're on a roll right now -- take a look at their current and upcoming books. Lots of excitement around Mumpsimus Central for Lydia Millet's forthcoming The Fires Beneath the Sea... And Karen Joy Fowler's What I Didn't See is a magnificent collection of stories -- elegantly designed, to boot.

Godard on the subject of e-books.

Jeff VanderMeer, Larry Nolen, Paul Charles Smith, and J.M. McDermott all recently wrote about Michael Cisco's latest novel, The Narrator. I haven't read or even seen a copy of The Narrator, but I've read some of Cisco's earlier work, and Jeff et al. are absolutely right -- he deserves a wider audience. I enjoyed reading all the posts, and especially liked Jeff's "Seven Views" because its form especially appealed to me.

The progressive passive: a peeve for the ages.

"Why All in the Family Still Matters" by Matt Zoller Seitz. My paternal grandmother loved All in the Family, so I remember watching it as a child with her. I've seen some episodes since, and as Seitz says, it's astounding how unimaginable such a show feels today -- it raises not only an appreciation for the writing and production, but raises a question: How did they ever get away with that?!


Have I mentioned the African Women in Cinema blog before? I don't know. I should have. But now's as good a time as any, because they have been running some fascinating interviews with women filmmakers, including Wanjiru Kinyanjui and Fatou Kandé Senghor.

Leviathan 5 news and a free PDF of Jeff VanderMeer's first nonfiction collection, Why Should I Cut Your Throat?.

Last Year's Links

I've been sharing items via Google Reader's sidebar widget on this site for quite a while, calling it "Fresh Links".  Whenever I see something in the RSS feed that seems interesting, I click the little share button, and voila, y'all get to see it.  It's increased my laziness, causing me not to create linkdumps much any more.  If there's something I am especially impressed with, interested in, or challenged by, I'll incorporate it into a post somehow; stuff in the Fresh Links section is stuff that seemed to me worth the time I put into reading it.

One of the things it allows me to do, if I choose, is see all I've shared.  I haven't done this before, but today I wondered what, for instance, I had noticed at this time last year.  Here's what was there:

December 3, 2009

• Anne Fernald on Girls Write Now

December 4, 2009

• Claire Dudman on Herta Müller's The Passport
• Chad Post with some Bolaño links
• John Williams on Carol Sklenicka's biography of Raymond Carver
• Crooks & Liars with video and transcript of a Rachel Maddow segment on the "kill the gays" bill in Uganda

And then nothing again until December 7, which happens to be a wonderful day because it is the birthday of Noam Chomsky, Tom Waits, and my mother, among other luminaries.  Here's what I shared then:

• Scott Esposito's posting of the table of contents of the new (then) Quarterly Conversation, which included my essay on Coetzee's autobiographical fictions.
• A Small Beer Press note about a sale to benefit the Franciscan Children's Hospital, plus pictures of Ursula
• A quick note at Language Log in praise of David Crystal's introduction to a re-issue of the first edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage

Oh, those were the days!  Back when we were all so much younger, so much better looking, so much more 2009ish than we are today!

I shall wear the bottoms of my blog posts rolled...

Public Service Messages of the Day

First, the Norton Critical Editions have their own Twitter account.  I love love love the NCEs and, in fact, have assigned three of them (Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, Modern African Drama) in a course this term.  I cannot express the incredible booklust the background photo on that Twitter page causes me...

Second, the NCE Twitterers are seeking people's favorite ghost/horror stories.  I said Joanna Russ's "My Dear Emily" and Robert Aickman's "The Stains", though could have certainly listed 100 others, too.  Maybe they'll decide to do a big Norton Critical Edition of horror stories....   Wouldn't that be fun?  Go share your own favorites!

In other news, I am not alone in connecting certain elements of the work of William Faulkner with that of Samuel R. Delany.  [In that discussion, I'm username Melikhovo]

In further other news, and also from Ta-Nehisi Coates's extraordinary blog, news from Paris Review editor Lorin Stein that there is an upcoming interview with Samuel Delany.  (And I expect by the time it's published, Stein will have learned to spell Delany's name!)  I think this is the first time I've beaten the Paris Review to an interview...  I haven't asked Chip about it yet, but will do so soon.

Finally, best thing I read all day: Zunguzungu on the films of Judd Apatow, masculinity, homoeroticism, homophobia, etc.

Catching Up

The end of summer continues to be busy for me (in good ways), and I've neglected a few things I should have linked to. Actually, I've probably neglected many things I should have linked to. For now, though, just a few...

I'm continuing to explore Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics over at Gestalt Mash, one issue each week. Last week was issue 5, "Passengers"; this week issue 6, "24 Hours".

And for Amazon.com's Omnivoracious blog, I interviewed Nnedi Okorafor, author of the wonderful novel Who Fears Death. (And Nnedi has just been interviewed over at Tor.com, too.)

Finally, my favorite internet item this week: a film called "Words", presented as an extra feature to a Radiolab program.

Of Essays and Norton Readers

The ever-extraordinary Anne Fernald has just put up a post asking for recommendations of essays, since she is on the advisory board for The Norton Reader and they're planning a new edition.

I have an extraordinary fondness for The Norton Reader, though some of that fondness is, as they say, extra-textual. The textual fondness is that I think it's a wonderfully generous selection of stuff -- in fact, I like it so much I've assigned the book in classes, and if I ever taught such a class again, I'd almost certainly use it again. The extra-textual fondness is entirely for John C. Brereton, one of the main editors of the book, who, almost exactly one year ago, had the excellent taste to marry one of my best friends and mentors.

So I care a lot about The Norton Reader.

And I like essays.

Thus, while my students were taking tests this afternoon, I thought about essays to recommend to the folks at the NR. My thoughts are all a-jumble on this topic, though, because I hardly know where to begin.

I had four immediate ideas, though:

1. For years, I have wished someone would anthologize John Leonard's essay "A Victim of Surprises", which I've frequently used in classes to demonstrate all sorts of different things (I mentioned the essay in my eulogy for Leonard).
2. The essay I have used most frequently to demonstrate certain types of rhetoric and argument is "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" along with a photocopy of the letters page of the NY Times Magazine the following week. I would love a book to include both.
3. My favorite edition of Best American Essays is the one edited by David Foster Wallace. Heck, Wallace's introduction itself would be a good thing to include (although I also like "Consider the Lobster" which is already in NR. Actually, I'd support a whole "Essays By David Foster Wallace" section of the book...) There's very little in the book that wouldn't be useful in NR. At the very least, Jo Ann Beard's "Werner" should be a shoe-in.
4. The NR should not ignore the online world. The context of rhetoric in our time is one that has moved more and more online, for better and/or worse. There are marvelous, professional online venues now -- and not just well-known-by-everybody spots like Salon, but also Strange Horizons and Quarterly Conversation and Rain Taxi Online and a gazillion other places that I don't happen to have written for. There are also all sorts of brilliant individual voices available via blogs (cf. the sidebar of this site). A book like NR would enter the current century if it were able to integrate such voices into its canon. But the key would be to avoid presenting the online world as if it's just like print. Two items particularly come to mind: The ability of blogs to use hyperlinks in all sorts of different ways, and the addition of comments from readers to not just blogs and opinion pieces, but even newspapers. If a book is really going to show the progression and potential of rhetoric, it can't ignore this, and it can't approach it in a superficial and cursory way.

Those were my immediate thoughts. Then I tried to think of a few more examples of specific texts that I would recommend. Given a week or two, I'd come up with a much better list, but I've got other things clawing at my attention right now, so in the spirit of keeping the online world in mind, here are some things I've kept bookmarks of that I think would be interesting or amusing additions to my beloved Norton Reader...

Helon Habila on Dambudzo Marechera
Louis Menand on cultural prizes
Barbara Ransby on Hollywood's Africa problem
"Viewing American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace" by Danah Boyd
Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia
"How to Write about Africa" by Binyavanga Wainaina
"The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" by Jonathan Lethem
Tim Wise on institutional racism and the SAT
Mark Liberman on "Sexual Pseudoscience from CNN"
"The Color of an Awkward Conversation" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"Obscenity Rap" by Geoffrey Nunberg
David Skinner on Webster's Third
"The Talking Helix" by Patricia J. Williams
"Being Poor" by John Scalzi and Nick Mamatas
Stanley Fish on norms and deviations
"The Gamble" by Samuel R. Delany (PDF)
"Gin, Television, and Social Surplus" by Clay Shirkey

(Those are just things I happen to have easy access to at the moment, so reflect my particular interests and prejudices, but I'm just making quick suggestions, not editing a whole book, so there's no attempt to be comprehensive or balanced.)

Miscellanea

I didn't intend to disappear from this blog for quite as long as I did, but I got busy with work on the manuscript of Best American Fantasy 3 (the contents of which we'll finally be able to announce next week!) and I've been teaching an online course for Plymouth State University, an interesting experience, since I've never taught classes entirely online before (nor am I all that sure it's a way I like teaching, but that's another story...)

I probably owe you an email.*

Readercon is coming up -- July 9-12. I'll be there Friday afternoon and most of Saturday. The great and glorious Liz Hand and Greer Gilman are guests of honor. The other guests ain't too shabby neither. Except for that Cheney guy. He's a putz.

Some things I've noticed out on the internets:

• Hal Duncan wrote a little post at his blog about ethics, reviewing, criticism, etc. A few people commented. Hal wrote another little post responding in particular to comments by Abigail Nussbaum and me. Then another related post on "The Absence of the Abject". And then two posts on "The Assumption of Authority" (one, two). They're wonderfully provocative and wide-ranging essays, but as the whole is now over 20,000 words long, I haven't been able to keep up with it. But I shall return to it over the course of the summer...
• Jeff VanderMeer has been working for what sounds to me like one of the coolest teen camps in the world, Shared Worlds, and as part of that asked a bunch of writers and other creative-type people, "What’s your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"
• I accompanied Eric Schaller and family to a magnificent concert by David Byrne a few weeks ago. Byrne's earnest dorkiness has been a balm to my soul since I was a kid. He's been on The Colbert Report a couple of times in support of his tour -- here, performing one of my favorite of his new songs, "Life is Long", and here performing "One Fine Day" (in which everybody seems a bit tired). The Colbert studio isn't quite Radio City Music Hall, but still...
• Tor.com has, in less than a year, become one of the best science fiction sites, and they've now launched a store that includes "special picks" from their great array of bloggers. (And, interestingly, though the site is allied with Tor Books, it's striven to be, as they say, "publisher agnostic", so it's not just about Tor's books.)
• Speaking of major SF sites, I enjoyed Charlie Jane Anders's post at io9 titled "4 Authors We Wish Would Return to Science Fiction" because it includes new comments from each of the four writers discussed: Mary Doria Russell, Nicola Griffith, Karen Joy Fowler, and Samuel R. Delany.
• I really loved Jeff Ford's post on the books he survived in primary and secondary school English classes.
• I seem to have written yet another Strange Horizons column.
  

Meanwhile, I've been reading a bunch of books I haven't written about. Some just for fun -- I went on a bit of an alternative history kick, reading C.C. Finlay's The Patriot Witch (available as an authorized PDF download here) and L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. The Patriot Witch attracted me because I've read some of Charlie Finlay's short stories and enjoyed them, and the book is set during the American Revolution, a time period about which I will read almost anything. The fantasy elements seemed a bit bland to me, but the scenes of the battles of Lexington and Concord were well done, reminding me of Howard Fast's April Morning, a book that, along with Johnny Tremain, was a favorite of mine when I was young. I'll probably read the next book in the "Traitor to the Crown" series because now I'm curious to see if the fantasy element develops in less familiar ways.

Lest Darkness Fall is, as many people through the decades have said, great fun, a kind of Connectic Yankee for readers who want their protagonists to be endlessly resourceful, optimistic, and lucky.

Somewhere in there, I also fit in Jack Vance's Emphyrio, an engaging example of a certain sort of classic ethnographic science fiction, something halfway between Lloyd Biggle and Ursula Le Guin.

I did a bunch of that fun, light reading because on the side I've been delving deeply into various books about British and American colonialism and imperialism for a story I keep telling myself I'm going to write: a steampunk alternate history about a mad scientist, a U.S. and British fight over Nicaragua at the beginning of the 20th century, and the atrocities it all leads to. Among the various books I've been dipping into for my researches are Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century by Daniel Headrick, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule by Michel Gobat, The Eclipse of Great Britain: The United States and British Imperial Decline, 1895-1956 by Anne Orde, The Sleep of Reason: Fantasy and Reality from the Victorian Age to the First World War by Derek Jarrett, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest by Anne McClintock, as well as such books of their time as Winston Churchill's My African Journey (pointed out to me by Njihia Mbitiru, who's been a big help in goading me on to write this story that I keep talking about) and The Ethiopian: A Narrative of the Society of Human Leopards. Also a couple of books I've been familiar with for a while, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire by David Anderson and Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins.

Clearly, I don't want to write a story -- I want to write an annotated bibliography!

Now, though, it's time to stop procrastinating and get back to work...


*Speaking of email, I've severely neglected the email address once associated with this blog (themumpsimus at gmail) because it became massively overloaded with spam (partly because I had redirected some ancient addresses at it) and sometime at the beginning of this year I made a resolution to clean it out, find real messages I'd missed, etc. I removed the link to it from this site so that people wouldn't inadvertently use it, but I expected to get it back up and working within a week. Then I kind of kept procrastinating. Every time I thought about it I suffered trauma. Now cleaning out and organizing the inbox is such a Herculean task that I may just give up and start over with a new, clean address. I don't know. I will fight through my anxieties and figure it out soon, though.

Stray Bits

I have finally made my way through the 3,000 emails that had accumulated in the mumpsimus at gmail account during my absence from checking it. Thank you to everyone for bearing with me on that. If you need a response of some sort to something, and I haven't yet replied, please send me another note, because I think I have responded to everything that seemed to need a response.

There are some sites and items I discovered from the mail, including:

• The First Book, a site created by Scott William Carter to provide interviews with and information about authors of first novels. Scott was my roommate at the very first science fiction convention I went to, and he's not only a tremendous nice guy, but has developed a great career with lots of short stories published in a wide variety of markets and now a novel that is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2010.
  
  
• Noticing my comments on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Henry Farrell let me know about a conversation with China Miéville about The Road that he had a year ago. I completely missed this when it was first posted (probably because I'd just gotten back from Kenya), and regret that, because it's very much worth reading.
  
  
• Starship Sofa is a science fiction podcast with a great selection of material -- right now there's a podcast (mp3) about the life and career of the much-too-neglected John Sladek, and past shows have included readings of stories by Pat Murphy, Bruce Sterling, David Brin, and others.
  
  
• This isn't from the mail, but I'll add it here anyway: A thoughtful review of the soon-to-be-released Criterion Collection DVD of Alex Cox's Walker. This is an extraordinary movie, and I'm looking forward to seeing the DVD very much, because I've only ever watched it on an old videotape I got a few years ago, and the image quality on the tape is awful. I first got interested in Walker after I returned from a trip to Nicaragua and started reading up on Central American history -- and one of the stories that most captured my attention was that of William Walker, who took a ragged band of ruffians down to Nicaragua and declared himself president. Cox turned the story into a bizarre movie, and when I first watched it my reaction was basically, "Huh?" But a second viewing endeared the movie to me, and Ed Harris's performance as Walker is extraordinary -- he's one of the best actors out there, but seldom gets a chance to really show what he can do to the extent he got with Walker. The film is a political satire, an over-the-top historical epic, a chaotic mix of anomalies and goofiness, a sad and affecting tale of American capitalism and imperialism. Other films were made in '80s about Nicaragua -- Under Fire and Latino come to mind -- but Walker has more depth and nuance (even amidst its blustery weirdness) than its more straightforward and painfully earnest cousins, and it has withstood the passing of time all the better for it.

And

Things are going to continue to be light around here for at least a month, as I have various duties to attend to, deadlines that are quickly threatening to pass, etc. And last night I decided that I needed to start the Big Project over yet again, despite progress, because it's obviously in the wrong POV and starting far too far from the stuff that matters. And I owe 13,593 people 642,482 emails. And only a few of them are princes in Nigeria who want me to take care of their money for a few days. And I've been sick, which is never fun, though I have reached the post-sickness point of being just utterly weary.

(I perplex my students repeatedly because they have all been indoctrinated into believing that sentences cannot begin with such words as "and" or "but", that paragraphs cannot have more than five sentences in them, that sentences with more than a certain number of words in them are run-ons, etc. I tell them this is not true. I tell them what matters is purpose and audience. I tell them there is no such thing as "right" or "wrong" style and usage, just style and usage that work and are appropriate to particular audiences and purposes. They ask me why their other teachers told them differently. I want to say, "Because they were lying. All of us lie to children. You will, too, someday." Instead, I say, "They were trying to teach you some basic principles. They were good at heart. Don't be bitter. There are plenty of other things to be bitter about.") (What is my purpose here? Whittling away the time. What is my audience? [No comment.])

And now for what you hunger for: links!

• At the LitBlog Co-op, we have announced the one book out of three that got the most positive votes from members: The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck. (It's notable that this is the second novel in a row we have chosen by a person named Matthew. I am entirely in favor of this tendency.) I mostly liked The Farther Shore, and so will be participating next week in some way or another in discussing it. (Yes, some of the procedures at the LBC are changing. We're not discussing all three nominees anymore, just the book that gets the most votes. And we're going to spread the posting around across various blogs, using the LBC site as a hub collecting them all rather than the One True Place of Posting. We'll see how it goes.)
  
  
• I just read Cormac McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, which I liked very much at the beginning, but less so as it went on, because there was nothing in the voice, events, or characters that, once I spent some time with them, I found continually engaging. I didn't expect a lot from his first novel, though, and found my eventual disengagement with it interesting on an intellectual level, because it's something that happens to me a lot: I read a third or half of a book, feel like I've gotten what there is to get, and stop. Or, I finish a book and think I should have stopped reading much earlier, because in some way or another the book felt to me like a lot of reiteration rather than development or surprise. Such a response is as much about the reader as the book. For instance, I finished reading a contemporary novel recently that many people have raved about -- indeed, I've seen nothing but good reviews of it, praising it for its style and its ideas -- and yet after being quite excited at the first hundred pages, I grew ever more uninterested as the second hundred fifty passed across my eyes, because the book was, as far as I could tell, little more than an elaboration of what had been set up in the beginning. The style was admirable simply for its consistency, and so it provided little pleasure, because even a great piece of food eaten again and again and again grows tedious. Basically, though, I just felt like I could have imagined it all just fine on my own, and so the writer's attention to detail and narrative felt, in some ways, like an imposition. I wanted more gaps, ambiguity, and surprise. I don't read to have what I could imagine for myself confirmed; I read to discover what I couldn't imagine, what I couldn't know, what I couldn't dream or extrapolate or come up with on my own.
  
  Which is not to say I could have imagined all of The Orchard Keeper after the beginning -- not at all, no way, nuh uh. It's just that it stopped pricking my imaginating in interesting ways, and by the end I felt unfulfilled.
  
  
• Via Mark Sarvas, I discovered an essay by Cristina Nehring about "What's Wrong with the American Essay". I agree that many of the essays collected over the years in various books of American essays and personal essays and essayistic essays are ... well ... boring. But that's just because most of us aren't as good as Virginia Woolf, whose "Death of the Moth" is, I think, among the greatest things ever written in English, and could be seen as suffering from some of what Nehring criticizes, except it isn't, because it's written by a genius. What really bothered me about Nehring's essay, though, had nothing to do with her, but rather with whoever at the website decided to illustrate the piece with a picture of the new Best American Essays edited by David Foster Wallace. I kept waiting for Nehring to discuss the Wallace collection, because in his introduction Wallace says some of the same things she does, and I found this particular entry of the series to be more entertaining and immediately engaging than any of the others I have read (and I've read a few. I like the Alan Lightman one quite a bit, too.) Nehring notes the dates 1996-2006 multiple times, so it becomes clear enough that she isn't discussing the Wallace volume, but then to put the Wallace book prominently on the page with the article is misleading.
  
  
• Speaking of great essays and essayists, Elizabeth Hardwick has died at the very fine age of 91. I owe much of my understanding of Melville, if I can claim to have any, to her. In honor of her, check out "Grub Street: New York" from the first issue of the magazine she helped found, The NY Review of Books.
  
  
• And from the most recent issue of the NYRB: Michael Dirda on Joyce Carol Oates. Oates is an amazing, overwhelming, frustrating writer, one who it's difficult to really get a picture of without devoting your life to reading her work (Randy Souther's Celestial Timepiece website is a great help. In fact, the JCO discussion group there was the first online community of readers I ever joined, when I was a wee lad finishing up college.) Dirda mis-states the title of A Bloodsmoor Romance and leaves out the third of Oates's experimental Gothic novels in his mention of them: Mysteries of Winterthurn, which I remember being among the books of Oates's that most impressed me. I just received a galley of a new edition of that book that will be out in May of next year, so I am hoping to get the chance to reread it, and hoping it will find a new audience now. In some ways, in fact, I think we are now better ready to receive the sorts of genre play that Oates was up to with Winterthurn and the other books, and it might now have a better chance of finding an audience. Perhaps, too, we will finally see The Crosswicks Horror published.
  
  
• Ms. Gringa found A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead, which made me think of a 45 my father had (RPM record, not gun, though there were plenty of those, too) of Peter Sellers singing "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!". I wondered if they were available on the internets, and lo and behold, there's a TV clip of Sellers being introduced by the Beatles as he does Laurence Olivier as Richard III reciting "Hard Day's Night" -- and there's also a site called The Songs and Sounds of Peter Sellers, which offers mp3s of not only the two songs I knew, but also other Beatles covers, including one of Dr. Strangelove putting a rather ... Hitlerian ... spin on "She Loves You". (Sellers later returned to his German accent, and also returned to Richard III.)
  
  
• Happy Chanukah to all my Jewish friends!

Glowing Reviews

Ed Champion linked to this, and I'm passing it on, because the customer reviews on this product are the funniest things I've read all week.

Wo(o)lf(e)s in the World

Virginia Woolf and Gene Wolfe are topics of a few conversation out on the internets these days:

• Some of Virginia Woolf's first editions are a bargain on the collector's market.
  
• Woolf and other artists are being used to promote arts education.
  
• Woolf [and others] and neuroscience. Or not. (The author of the book in question responds here.)
  
• "Virginia Woolf and Boring Habits"
  
• Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen is reading a lot of Gene Wolfe and writing up his responses.
  
• Waggish reads The Book of the New Sun.
  
• Spurious offers further thoughts on Book of the New Sun.
  
• Richard Crary's thoughts on Mr. Waggish's thoughts.
  
• Hoof and Hide is a Gene Wolfe blog. Which is not to say a blog by Gene Wolfe. Which is an interesting thought. In fact, I'd like to see Gene Wolfe and Virginia Woolf collaborate on a blog. Yet another of my impossible desires...

Miscellanea

My thoughts are fragmentary today. Here are some of the shards:

• A few days ago I watched The Dresden Dolls: Live at the Roundhouse, and though it didn't give me the utter and complete joy of the Dolls' earlier DVD, Paradise (because how could they possibly top Christopher Lydon listening to the song about him?! And Brian Vigglione's wonderful drumming at the beginning of "Half Jack"? And the stiflingly heat and invigorating intimacy of the stage? And...?), it's great fun if you like their music. I was particularly taken by the collaboration with Trash McSweeney (of the Australian band The Red Paintings) on the old Tears for Fears song, "Mad World". I've liked the original version of "Mad World" since I first heard it while riding on the school bus one day many years ago -- that version of the song seems utterly psychotic to me now; Gary Jules offered a somewhat more melancholic and teen angsty version later. The McSweeney/Dolls version turns it into a kind of anthem.
  
  
• Speaking of music, as I just was -- do you all know about the Daytrotter website? (I'm often late to this sort of thing.) Tons of free, legal downloads of indie bands performing exclusive versions of their songs. Far too many great bands for me to point any out here, but I will point to one particularly beautiful song: Shearwater's "Nobody".
  
  
• Speaking of beautiful, my mothers are famous! Being good, frugal Yankees who like to globetrot, they read Budget Travel magazine religiously, and my mother thought that for their once-in-a-lifetime trip to New Zealand and Hawaii this past summer, they should get some advice. (This was mostly because my mother wanted to learn how to surf.) So they wrote in, and the magazine did a little piece about the Hawaii part of their trip. Then my mother got to write up how it all went. The picture on the website is of them, which is appropriate, but I hope some of their great photos of sights (and sites) from the trip make it into the printed magazine.
  
  
• Haydn vs. Mozart. (Mr. Bowes, I expect a comment!)
  
  
• I don't think I ever linked to my review of Rupert Thomson's Death of a Murderer at Rain Taxi. Until now.
  
  
• "The Night of the Cure": a play by Austin Bunn.
  
  
• Currently reading: Foreigners by Caryl Phillips (more a book to appreciate than love, I think, but there's much to appreciate) and Christopher Priest's The Affirmation (which I'm finding incredibly unsettling, though I'm not sure it's a particularly unsettling book -- I think it's just driving a sharp pin into some of my current neuroses).
  
  
• A Manual of the Art of Prose Composition.
  
  
• A map of the Apocalypse.

Barzak Day in the Blogosphere

This post will be updated throughout the day with links to material about Christopher Barzak and his first novel One For Sorrow, released today. Thanks to everybody who is participating!

• Colleen Lindsay offers an in-depth interview and a classic photo. She's also giving copies of the book away!
  
• The Stage @ The Oakland is heading up the Youngstown, Ohio side of Barzak Day.
• Into My Own presents an interview with Chris.
  
• Chris guest-blogs at Gwenda Bond's place.
• Small Beer Press and LCRW (about whom more later) offer "Barzakian Secrets of the Barzakian Plan for Barzakian Galactic Domination".
• Colleen Mondor writes about Chris's short stories.
• Jason Erik Lundberg has been reading Barzak from the very beginning.
• Jeffrey Ford has some nice things to say.
• The Creativity Incubator launches a new feature, Creative Spotlight, with One for Sorrow.
• The new Science Fiction Awards Watch notes that Mr. Barzak is in their database.
• Secritcrush remembers One for Sorrow from a workshop a while back.
• Into My Own actually started Barzak Day a couple months early.
• Midori Snyder also began early, and offers a lovely review of the novel.
  
• Fantasy Book Critic notes One for Sorrow's release, and many others, plus a giveaway of other books.
• Tales from the Rustbelt reviews One for Sorrow.
  
• Mike Eats...Books?! devours One for Sorrow.
• Youngstown Renaissance joins the fun.
• Fellow Bantam author Tim Pratt reminisces, and mentions one of my favorite Barzak short stories along the way.
• Scott Westerfeld explains why, though he seldom blurbs, he wanted to blurb One for Sorrow.
• A Barzak Day post from Pittsburgh.
• Meghan McCarron on the man and his work. Fully.
  
• John Klima joins the celebration and links to some Barzak short stories online.
• Strange Horizons fiction editor Jed Hartman reminds us that Barzak has been a regular contributor to SH with fiction, reviews, and an interview.
• Strange Horizons fiction editor Karen Meisner offers some thoughts, and mentions karaoke.
• Elad Haber on friendship and Chris Barzak.
• Alan DeNiro on Barzak at Clarion and what makes this particular writer special.
• Justine Larbalestier adds a few words.
• Richard Butner remembers "Dead Boy Found" when it was a wee little workshop story.
• Haddayr Copley-Woods joins in.
• A victim of time zones, Ben Rosenbaum shows up late to the party.
  
• Brooke, who has been so instrumental with One for Sorrow's launch in Youngstown, on "Why I Love Chris Barzak"
• Elizabeth Hand reviews One for Sorrow in The Village Voice.
  

Happy Birthday Señor Borges

My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.
-- Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
"El informe de Brodie" ("Dr. Brodie's Report")

Some Borges links in honor of this fine day:

• The Borges Center at the University of Iowa
• Modern Word page of Borges resources
• Another Borges site
  
• Wikipedia entry
• Borges site with English translations of some stories, poems, and essays
• Borges's poem "Heraclitus" translated by Thomas Frick
• Borges's story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in English and Spanish
  
• Audio excerpts of Borges's Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1968
• A lovely HTML version of Borges's story "The Garden of Forking Paths"
• Borges's very short story "The House of Asterion" provided by Mr. Waggish
  
• "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Borges
• A 1980 interview with Borges
• Video: Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man
  
• John Barth on Borges and Calvino
• NYT article on Borges's Buenos Aires
  
• A few links via The Guardian
• A BBC radio programme about Borges
• The Borgesian Cyclopedia (links and articles)
• Borges's India: Mystics and Bibliographers
  
• Clive James on Borges's politics
  
• The Queer Use of Communal Women in Borges' "El muerto" and "La intrusa"
• Of Mirrors and of the Labyrinth
  
• Borges's widow visits a labyrinth

Jamestown Week Begins

This is the beginning of Jamestown week at the LBC, with much fun and excitement promised. I'm putting together at least one post about the book, but for now will offer some links of related, or even unrelated, interest:

• An interview with Matthew Sharpe at Failbetter.com
• A reading by Matthew Sharpe at NPR
• A Q&A; with Sharpe at New York magazine
  
• A TimeOut New York article about Sharpe and Jamestown
• More Sharpe & Jamestown links from Scott Esposito
  
• John Clute's review: "It is in this treating of its characters as soft-shoe, and of the world(s) they do their numbers on as an extremely slippery stage, that Jamestown seems so 21st-century, so surprisingly capable of making the reader feel that it has been told from some point far beyond the events remembered and anticipated between its opening and its closing curtain."
• Ed Park's review: "On any given page, Sharpe can swing contagious exuberance ('How unpleasant and interesting it is to be alive!') and aphoristic head-scratchers, shrewd pop-culture quotation and hairpin dialogue, the brilliant joke and the dumb joke and the dumb joke repeated enough times that it becomes brilliant."
• Dan Green is ambivalent.
• APVA Preservation Virginia presents the history of Jamestown.
• Virtual Jamestown offers first-hand accounts of Jamestown and maps and images.
  
• ABC News on the history and archaelogy of Jamestown.
• Chief Roy Crazy Horse of the Powhatan Nation on "The Pocahontas Myth".
• Video of Virginia native Katie Couric discussing Jamestown's 400th anniversary.
  
• Video of the demolition of Rhode Island's Jamestown Bridge.
  
• Video of The New World.
• Wikipedia entry on Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.
• From The Onion, a story datelined Jamestown, VA: "High School Student Whines His Way to 4.0 GPA".