Guest Post — Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan

One day I happened to overhear a student talking about Star Wars novels, and I told him that Del Rey Books has sent me some over the years, and that usually I donate them to libraries, since I rarely read series fiction or media tie-in novels (rarely, but not never; heck, I used Jeff VanderMeer's Predator novel in a class once). I asked him if he'd like the ones that were currently sitting in a pile somewhere in my house, and he said sure. I had recently done a big library donation, so didn't have much more than a few advanced copies, but I brought them in anyway. When I gave them to him, at first I thought he was disappointed that they were ARCs without finished artwork, but it turned out his silence and immobility were the behaviors of a die-hard fan in bliss, as I had given him a novel that was hugely anticipated and not due to be released for at least another month.

It was then that I hit upon an idea: Here was a thoughtful, articulate, well-read student who was also a knowledgeable Star Wars fan, and I wondered if he would be willing to write a post or two for this blog in which he explored not just the specific books I gave him, but the attraction of the Star Wars universe for him and other fans, since the audience for this blog, as far as I know, is not mostly composed of readers as committed to the Star Wars universe as he. I love learning how people value books and movies and art of all sorts, and this seemed like a great opportunity to learn about the attractions of Star Wars fandom.

And so I give you Michael DiTommaso with a post on Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan and the life and purpose of a Star Wars fan. He writes the "Ask a Star Wars Geek" column at T.X. Watson's Blog-Shaped Thing, and has recently joined the staff of Beyond the New Jedi Order. 

I hear that Michael is working on a comprehensive post about multiple Star Wars books and their attractions, and if we are kind and encouraging, perhaps he will allow me to post it here once he's finished...


Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan
reviewed by Michael DiTommaso

I am not Matt Cheney, just to get that out of the way. I am instead the self-proclaimed biggest Star Wars fan in New England — a contention that's yet to be successfully challenged. How could I possibly claim such an audacious title, you may ask youself. Well, I've read about 133 Star Wars adult novels, and about 15 more young adult novels, as well as a couple of the comics. I've played several of the games, and read a maybe a dozen more short stories, all of these licensed parts of the Star Wars franchise. Of couse I have seen the movies themselves, many times.

It's kind of my hobby. The fact that it is Star Wars and not something else derives from three factors: firstly, as a kid, I watched the original trilogy of movies, and got excited about the prequels coming out (by that time I had already begun reading the X-Wing series, one of my favorites to date). Secondly, Star Wars was accessable (my godfather owned over 90 books, which he eventually gave me, though by that time, my love of Star Wars had already been sealed, and I owned my own collection of books). The third and biggest factor, though, is I didn't want to stop reading, and for that, Star Wars was (and is) perfect.

Rick Bowes on Stonewall at 40

Knowing Rick Bowes is a privilege for many reasons, but one of my favorites is that he is a wonderful historian of New York City. Walking the streets with Rick becomes a magical tour through the wondrous and terrible changes the city has seen over the centuries. Having lived in Manhattan for most of his life, Rick has also sometimes been an eyewitness to history, including the history made in the early hours of June 28, 1969 in Greenwich Village: The Stonewall Riots.

Richard Bowes is the author of such books as Minions of the Moon, From the Files of the Time Rangers, and Streetcar Dreams. He has won the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Million Writers Award, and been nominated for the Nebula Award. He reportedly likes writing but hates being a writer.

via Wikimedia Commons

In History's Vicinity
by Richard Bowes

It's odd to be old enough to remember history. The Stonewall Riot always makes me feel like a citizen of Concord awakened by musket fire on that crisp April morning and wondering what the commotion was.

In 1965 when I was 21, I came into Manhattan from college on Friday afternoons to see a psychiatrist on the Upper East Side.

On my way back to Penn Station and Long Island, I'd walk down Third Avenue. In the East Sixties, guys stood casually on street corners, paused significantly in doorways, gave sidelong glances: all very discreet. Eyes tracked me from the windows of the bird bars: The Blue Parrot, The Golden Pheasant, The Swan.

In those bars Piaf sang on the jukebox, men in suits sat at the bar. The legal drinking age was eighteen, but in straight places I still got carded and sometimes was refused service. Gay bars were much less fussy and the patrons could be generous.

The first gay bar I ever went to was one in Boston called something like the Tea Cup or the Sugar Bowl. I was sixteen and the drinking age there was twenty-one. They wouldn't serve me but didn't care if guys gave me their drinks.

Down the Avenue from the bars at Fifty-Third and Third was a world famous chicken run. Young boys stood in the cold in sneakers and thin jackets, waited under awnings, stared out the windows of seedy coffee shops and knew just who I was.

Those bars, those coffee shops, were criminal enterprises subject to police raids and being shut down. The men cruising and boys loitering could be arrested on a whim. Serving minors and serving as a place minors could be had for cash was no bigger a crime than catering to a gay clientele.

Mart Crowley's The Boy's In the Band was the first American play to deal overtly with the lives of the kind of men who drank in the Bird Bars. It opened on April 15, 1968. By the time the movie came out in 1970 its world of gay self hatred and closeted sex looked like a period piece.

Between the play and the movie's openings the Stonewall Riot had occurred. If I'd known the Stonewall was going to become an historic site I'd have paid more attention. In fact, it was one bar among many. Gay kids poured into Greenwich Village from all over the city, the country, the world. The nation was all on fire and every oppression but ours got protested.

The Stonewall Bar was badly ventilated, crowded, and filthy, the toilets were an abomination, the bartenders were hostile and the drinks were watered. But that was true in all the Village gay bars. Manhattan ran on methadrine, speed was easily obtained there, and the drags danced like furies. The crowd was very young. The scent was beer, sweat, amyl-nitrate, and cheap cologne.

My grandfather from Ireland used to say that if every man who boasted he'd fought in the Easter Rising of 1916 had actually stood at the Dublin Post Office, James Connolly and Padraic Pearse would be sitting in Buckingham Palace at the moment he spoke. In my case around three o'clock on that famous Saturday morning I was walking down St Mark's place with Allan, a guy I'd recently met. A kid we both knew rushed up and gave us a garbled story about The Stonewall. That's when we became aware of distant sirens.

In that time and place civil disturbances were what bullfights were to Hemingway's Madrid and we were all aficionados. The kid ran off to spread the news. Allan and I headed west, crossed Astor Place and went down Eighth Street, which was still the heart of the Village.

The book and music stores were dark but the bars were just closing and the after-hours clubs were opening. The street was full of people all looking west.

Near the corner of Sixth Avenue was what we recognized as the rear area of the riot. In the doorway of the Nathan's, a blond kid in short-shorts and mascara held a bloody towel to his forehead and a friend held him. From the upper floors of the massive, darkened Women's House of Detention across the Avenue, some inmates were yelling, "The fucking pigs are killing all the faggots."

Police cars with flashing cherry tops barred the way. All along Sixth Avenue, firemen hosed down piles of burning trash. Paddy wagons and Tactical Patrol buses were parked two deep and the riot cops were angrier than I ever saw them.

Here coherent memory breaks down. From Sheridan Square I looked down Christopher Street and caught a glimpse of the front of The Stonewall Bar. Broken glass was everywhere. A car had been turned on its side.

The riot had broken down into guerilla tactics: roving bands of kids chanting slogans, burning trash. That weekend I saw a cop smash his club across the back of a guy who I think was just coming home with groceries, I heard people shouting from their windows at the cops to go away.

By Monday it was over. But events in this tumultuous city in that time of war and turmoil very soon began to be defined as having happened before Stonewall or after.

And it was kids like the ones on Fifty-Third and Third, not the suit johns in their uptown bars who had given us those nights.

Men with powdered hair and silk britches could have signed declarations and petitions to King George forever. But on that Concord morning it was men and women, not the most attractive or socially poised, not with the purest of motives or the loftiest of intents, people like me and perhaps like you who found themselves pushed one unendurable time too many.

The Singularity Trap

Sue Lange and I struck up a correspondence recently, and at one point she mentioned a slight obsession with the idea of the singularity. "Really?" I said. "Tell me more..."

Sue is the author of We, Robots, part of the Aqueduct Press Conversation Pieces Series.


When Matthew suggested I blog at the Mumpsimus on the subject of the Singularity or any other weirdity, I opted for weirdity. I needed a change. The Singularity is threatening to swallow me whole these days. Too often I feel trapped in it.

I know the Mumpsimus readers are an eclectic bunch. They are not all science fiction fans. For those who have no idea what the Singularity is, I invite you to take a quick primer via an excerpt from my book, We, Robots and meet me back here.

Everyone make it back? Great. Moving forward. The problem with not writing about the Singularity is that anything I do these days: orcharding, horse back riding, applescript writing, pie throwing, etc., seems to relate to it somehow. I can't think about the least little thing without tying it in somehow to nanorobots invading the environment or whether the latest OS will interface with the forthcoming brain implants.

Something as innocuous as a local music festival -- a very weird event more reminiscent of Dante's Inferno than any paradise of virtual reality -- turned into a blog rant on how strange and ugly non-Hollywood humans (i.e. you and me) are in the flesh. That's not what the music fest was about, but that's what I got out of it. This happens with me with everything now. No matter the subject, event, or location, the Singularity is somewhere in the middle of it, whipping the scenario into something ridiculously futuristic.

Here's a werdity I'd rather write about: the telephone, specifically plain old telephone service (POTS). On the surface, not very Singularityish, but not very weird either. Below the surface, though, down where we're going to go, things are different. Think of your great grandmother (Or great, great grandmother, depending on your age. I'm 50 thinking of my great grandmother, so calibrate your thoughts accordingly.) Think of your great grandmother stating, "If God had wanted us to be on the moon, He would have put us there instead of on Earth." Remember how she died in 1968, a year before the Eagle landed?

Good ol' great grandma. She really missed that one. Yet there was probably a time when her mother stated something like "When God wants people to speak to each other, He brings them face to face. None of this talking into a box nonsense." I'm sure great grandma laughed at such Luddism years later as her own phone rested cozily on the shelf in the breakfast nook. Yet she scoffed at Earth to moon communications. I'm sure she never envisioned cell phones, videophones, or free long-distance via SKYPE either. She died on the eve of the revolution secure in the idea that God had no more interest in inventing, developing, or filing for patents.

Why is that weird? Because, at 50, I can see back into great gran's life and recognize her mistake of not believing the unbelievable. Certainly she had the evidence, but she didn't buy it. She couldn't see where we were heading even though it was right in front of her. Things moved slower in her lifetime. The curve to the Singularity was still flat.

In my lifetime things have not moved so slowly. The curve is steeper. I can look up and see where we're heading and at the same time look down and see life without the Internet or instant communication with the entire world. I actually knew people that believed it wouldn't ever be possible. In other words, I experienced the past but I see the future as well. I remember quaintly answering essay questions and I've also filled in circles on standardized tests. Which is the best way? Which is better, and better for you?

Dunno, but even weirder: everything old is new again. I remember when natural childbirth was brought back into style. I watch organic farming--farming the old-fashioned way--become edgy, avant-garde with new science coming out about it every day. I saw Russia's economy turn around because they were the only country still making amplifier tubes and American rock guitarists, well, you know how fanatical they are about "getting their sound."

The point is, my lost generation not only sees the new superceded by the newer, but we also see technology go away and then come back. Great grandma saw only the old superceded by the new. Likewise, the younger folks see nothing but new. Even old stuff coming back is new to them. It's not weird to them that farming with highly designed pesticides and frankengenes is called "traditional" farming. They're so far beyond that, they actually see themselves under a glass dome on Mars, manipulating the soil, temp, and moisture on a world where they don't belong.

I'm not buying it. I'm not looking forward to it. Then again, I don't have to. My unique place in the world allows me to pick and choose my technology. I'm not frightened by software upgrades, but I don't feel the need to buy a new fancier cell phone every year either. If I like the old, I keep it. If the new is too far gone for my little head, I ignore it. Kids demand new and newer. They will have no problem embracing phone implants in their heads when that becomes available. Half of my generation don't even own a cell phone, and if we do own one, we leave it home half the time. I myself use a rotary dial. Of course my DSL comes in through the same line. I see no disconnect there (literally). It's not eccentric to me. It all makes sense.

Me and my peeps prefer wood over plastic, natural fibers over nylon, fresh food over liquid lunch, but only if it's affordable. The new generation is so past that. They'll race beyond plastic and embrace virtually created commodities. The new toys won't even be there, they'll just think they are, and that's good enough for them. The new stuff will certainly be affordable that's for sure. That'll bring us oldsters around and we'll all be happy then.

Meantime, I will scoff at the Singularity with every calcified bone in my body because if God wanted us to live forever She would've given us the perpetual motion machine. She would have given us some way of extracting work with no energy input, because that's what it's going to take: free energy. Living forever--the great promise of the Singularity--is wonderful in theory but who's going to pay for it? What if you're not born wealthy? What if you have to work for a living? How can the working/middle class ever retire under the life-eternal scenario? What if you're a ditch digger or a cleaner of portable johns? Omigod. What if you're a third grade school teacher? How would you like to be forever reminding eight-year-olds to bring their pencils to class and zip their trousers when exiting the bathroom. Sounds like a never-ending nightmare. Ask any third grade teacher if he or she wants to live forever.

Of course there might be no more third grade. As long as there's a set of implants for every American and DSL in every home we can kiss that scenario good bye. But then isn't third grade actually kind of great from the third-grader's perspective? Do you really want to forego third grade bliss?

All I'm going to say beyond that is, the Singularity is not a fake theory or a bit of science fiction fluff. It is a valid idea about as crackpotted as thinking about walking on the moon in 1968 was. Apparently God did want us on the moon after all, so extrapolating...well...kind of scary falling into the Singularity trap, eh?

Special Offer

Occasional Mumpsimus guest blogger Craig Gidney has a collection of stories coming out in November, and his publisher, Steve Berman, is making a truly generous special offer. Craig's struggling to get some necessary, expensive prescriptions at a time when he doesn't have health insurance, and to help him out, Steve is willing to send all the money from pre-publication orders for the book to Craig. See Steve's post for more information.

Craig's situation isn't the least bit unique. The American health insurance system is an atrocity. My father died with a great load of debt to hospitals, and his struggles over the past decade with insurance companies and medical providers were extensive. Myself, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I don't get sick in the next few weeks, because I won't have insurance again until October. But I'm lucky -- healthy, single, no need for maternity care, without much of a history of health problems, and able (for now) to afford $200/month in fees.

I'll be buying a few of Craig's books, out of solidarity and friendship. Thanks to Steve Berman for such a thoughtful and generous offer. Please help pass along this news.

Best of the Web Guest Blogger: Myfanwy Collins

Dzanc Books is publishing Best of the Web 2008, and because 1.) I think it's a great idea for a book and 2.) there are few things I wouldn't do for Dan Wickett and his Emerging Writers Network, I agreed to host one of the writers included in the anthology as a guest blogger here. (Other websites are doing the same thing, and I will post a link if Dan or anybody else creates a post with links out to them all -- and here's a collection of links to the others.)

The guest blogger here at The Mumpsimus is Myfanwy Collins, whose "The Daughters" is included in the book. Dan selected The Mumpsimus as the place that Myfanwy would visit because we are both New Hampshire writers, a distinction that truly makes us members of an elite. ("Elite? Oh, so that's what you're calling it these days, Cheney..." Dear readers, please allow me my delusions.)

The items below were, I believe, intended to be separate blog posts, but I'm not going to have time to post anything more today, and I don't trust Blogger with future posting, so you're going to get all four pieces at once. And I might even be able to tempt Myfanwy into sending me a few more...


“The Daughters”
“The Daughters” is a story that I wrote within Kim Chinquee’s online workshop “Hot Pants” and I was extremely lucky to find generous and enthusiastic editors in Eric Spitznagel and Steven Seighman from Monkeybicycle where the story was originally published.

I’ve been told the story is creepy, but to me it is childhood, and for some of us, childhood is the threat of having a paperclip jammed in your ear.

Online Publishing
I’ve encountered much debate on the validity of online publishing. Is it as good as print? Why would you give your writing away for free (this is always asked even though many online venues pay and is this all about pay, anyway?)? Yadda, yadda, yadda. There never seems to be a consensus. Rather, people just seem to like to argue about it.

When I was first exposed to ezines, I’ll be honest, I thought they were lesser than and that I would never send my work their way. Then I actually read some of them and lo and behold I found that they were publishing great, exciting, subversive stuff.

I wanted in!

My first fiction publication was at Pig Iron Malt and I’ve never looked back. To my knowledge, only good things have come my way from publishing online. My work has been exposed to many readers (and editors, who have solicited my work based on what they’ve read). I’ve made money. I’ve made friends.

I’ve been heard. And now I even work for an excellent online publisher—Narrative Magazine—where I am an assistant editor.

Best of the Web
I’m grateful to the fine people at DZANC and to Nathan Leslie for Best of the Web. It’s a positive project not only for the writers involved but also for the editors of the ezines. Whenever online publishing can get more attention and be seen as valid and necessary, I’m happy.

As for the book, I think it’s a fine and eclectic collection of work and I find that I’m already looking forward to what’s coming next year.

Living in New Hampshire
I live in New Hampshire. I live in a bog in New Hampshire. It’s dark here and one day last summer there was a moose in my driveway (I’m not joking). Before that, a bear in the backyard. A fisher lives underneath my porch (you don’t even know what a fisher is? Do you?). All of this would probably lead you to believe that I live deep in the wild, but I don’t: I can be at Target in ten minutes.

Living here hasn’t affected the creative aspect of my writing. It does, however, make it more difficult to be involved in the peripheral writing activities you would find in a more urban area, like readings, workshops, etc. They are here, I just have to work to find them.

With all of that said, for such a small state, New Hampshire has its share of writers—past and present—who have changed the way people read.

Nova Swing by M. John Harrison

a review by Dustin Kurtz

Nova Swing's conceit is essentially the same as the conceit of M. John Harrison’s previous book, Light. Somewhere out in the hinterlands of human-inhabited space there is a stretch of bad physics, a mean glowing strip of strange, light years long, known as the Kefahuchi Tract. In Light the Tract is a wild plaything for entradistas -- thrill-seeking celebrity pilots whose exploits seem to make up the substance of much of that galactic arm’s rumor. In an example of the casual but powerful analogy at which Harrison excels, the galactic neighborhood near the Tract is often called the Beach. The Tract is also puzzlingly related to an invisible, though hungry, earthly horror and his serial killer scion. And, just to spice things up, the Tract is somehow involved with ancient alien relics, the appropriation of which forms the goal of much of that book’s plot. If you haven’t read Light and are confused, don’t worry. I have read it, and those muddled sentences above are about the best I can do for a summary.

Nova Swing is set on a world that somehow intercepts that same Kefahuchi Tract on one discrete area of its surface. Or rather a sliver of the Tract, the alien K-code incarnate, has fallen to the ground near the depressed city of Saudade. The previous book spends much time in space, aboard a stolen military-grade K-ship. Here, though there are moments in which space travel comes into play, the action is almost entirely terrestrial.

With Nova Swing Harrison has written, or perhaps hopes to have written, a beautiful bastardization of far-flung science fiction and a gritty noir crime story. Gene-mods are sold like the latest fashions. Prostitutes with peppermint-scented hair, tusk-mouthed professional fighters and enormous horse-thighed rickshaw drivers all take their place among Harrison’s characters. His gun-kiddies, deadly packs of mercenary seven-year-olds sporting pastel raincoats and heavy weaponry, are some of his most memorable touches. Many of these characters are familiar from Light, though they are much more fleshed out here. The ostensible protagonists of the book are Vic Seratonin, a "travel agent" into the dangerous wastelands of fallen Tract, and Lens Aschemann, a grandfatherly detective who drives (or rather, is driven) around in a vintage convertible and looks like Einstein. Vic is this novel’s nihilist version of Ed Chianese. He is a terrestrial entradista. His predecessors entered the bewildering "event site" for adventure and glory. Vic, however, is terrified of the deadly chaos he encounters there. It makes him bitter and ashamed. The plot here is spare. Of course there is a bit of cat and mouse between Vic and Aschemann, particularly when Vic brings a piece of living code out of the site with some nasty side effects. There are some curious scenes in the event site itself, a bit of virtuoso accordion playing, and even one very gratifying firefight, but really this book, unlike either of the genres Harrison is drawing from, is not about the plot. It is about characters and atmosphere.

In an interview with Jeff VanderMeer, Harrison has said that this book was meant to explore some of his favorite people from Light in greater detail, and that intention certainly shows. His ensemble is endearing, in a pathetic fallen-world kind of way. They are all of them weary, nostalgic or deluded, bitter and strung out and wonderful. Each character, from his cancer-ridden old Emil to his ingratiating Fat Antoyne captures you and makes you want to read more. The problem is that Harrison himself is as much in love with his creations as any reader. He cannot, it seems, bring himself to let them go when the time comes. The main plot of the book is much shorter than the book itself, the excess being filled with the lives of his sallow flock.

Of the two genres, his noir elements are arguably the more successful. In fact, he is better in this regard than most crime fiction authors being published today. Take this scene in a shoreline bar:

"I’ve seen you here," Aschemann said.

She leaned towards him when he spoke. Asked him for a match, upper body bent forward a little from the waist, head tilted back, so that the dress offered her up wrapped in silk, jazz, light from the Live Music Nightly sign. She needed only a brushed aluminum frame to complete the image of being something both remembered and unreal. He’d seen that dress in the nanocam pictures of Vic Seratonin. More importantly, perhaps, he'd seen it fourteen days ago when she’d stumbled out of the toilet at the Café Surf disoriented by the neon-light and music as if she were new in the world. She still had an unformed labile air. Her smile was cautious, but the dress was ready to promise anything.

"I’m here a lot,” she said. “I like the band. Do you like them?"

He took a moment to light his pipe. He swallowed a little.

"They’re as guilty as ever," he said.

The science fiction elements are pervasive and, again, very well written, but somehow end up feeling less than necessary. Yes there is interstellar travel and virtual reality, the nanocams mentioned above, even an alien race or two. But all these elements are bent under the weight of Harrison’s forlorn setting. Thus the aliens are VR addicts and the gene-mod kits are used by desperate girls forced into prostitution by desperate circumstances. His characters are outsiders, one and all.

In fact, the entire world of Nova Swing is defined, indeed posited by, its outsider status. Paradoxically, the landscape we are shown in the book, possibly including the planet, even the entire galactic branch, are characterized as being apart from some unseen centrality. The center of this landscape, from which all affluence, power, and even hope might come, is only hinted at in personal histories, glimpsed in the actinic glare of ship engine flares. It is just over the horizon, just across that fence, three star systems down the line. But the force of action in nearly all narrative, particularly in the two genres from which Harrison is ostensibly borrowing here, is driven by the division between a center and its lesser valent. One of the classic character tropes of cyberpunk is the outsider pitting his skills and moral superiority against a mainstream system or structure.

With no focus, no centrality, Harrison’s downtrodden characters are trapped. They have no drive to action. Indeed, they often seem puzzled by their idleness. And though they are excellently written, they display little of the change, the development, that we associate with successful characterization. In this, I would argue, they resemble an older conception of character, an early romantic model of static character, tempered here by invasive third-person narration.

In the absence of a center to this othered landscape all character motivation must come from a different source. The Kefahuchi Tract, or rather its planetside sliver, fills that void. Harrison has mentioned the Tract as a location for alien physics inscribed on the substrate of the universe. In practice, however, the event site comes across as a dream locale, full of portent. Cats come streaming out at dawn and running back in at night. Their coats are white or black, but never mixed. Landscapes are uncertain in the site, and distances have no meaning. There tend to be a lot of stray shoes. The site, here, is an impetus to action. Vic is driven to explore it in search of an unruly client, and also to satisfy a local tough’s hunger for valuable artifacts. Lens is driven into the site by his own past, his curiosity, and to track down Vic Seratonin. The event site is a medieval wilderness to these characters. It is the source of all signs, a mirror of the meaningless void surrounding their small world. It is a hyper-semic realm, mirror to the empty a-semic reaches of space from which it came. Everything has significance in the site, even if this sign is only one of alienation and difference, not meant to be communicated. "In every corner there’s a broken telephone nailed to the wall," Vic says early in the novel. "They’re all labeled Speak but there’s no line out. They ring but no one’s ever there." Just as Harrison’s characters have in them shadows of the pre-romantic, unchanging except perhaps in form, but with no significance attached to such transformation, here we see the mythical dark forest through which all quests must lead. Vic Seratonin is a Percival with a drinking habit. He is an outsider even among this lot, drawn into the event site despite his reluctance and bald-faced fear. Just as in tales of knights-errant, the landscape demands the action and the knights merely fulfill it. Unlike most romantic heroes, Vic is explicit about it. "You want to know what it’s like in there? The fact is, you spend all your time trying to make something of it. Then guess what, it starts making something of you."

If, then, the book does share more with early Romantic tales than either of its apparent source genres, it is so excellent a book that it serves only as a surprising confirmation to me that I must love tales of romance and questing. It takes a great writer to defy the larger trends of genre, even literary history, from within. Harrison, with this book, shows himself to be one of the best writers in the field, whatever that field might happen to be.

The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson

a review by Craig Laurance Gidney


Like a patchwork quilt, Nalo Hopkinson’s new novel The New Moon's Arms positively seethes with patterns and threads that clash, but come together regardless. It’s a madcap comic novel about aging, the wounds of slavery, and the transformative power of love set on an imaginary archipelago in the Caribbean.

The action centers around Calamity Lambkin, a curmudgeonly 50-something woman on the verge of menopause. Her first person narration is raunchy and rollicking without resorting to the cheap sassiness that Hollywood assigns black women. You won’t find Calamity in a Tyler Perry movie anytime soon. Born Chastity, she has renamed herself Calamity after a life of hardship, involving a teenaged pregnancy, single motherhood and the disappearance of her own mother. During her father’s funeral, she starts experiencing intense hot flashes that coincide with her finding objects that have been lost long ago—mostly from her childhood. A monogrammed pin, a toy truck, and in one instance, her father’s entire cashew grove appears out of thin air. During a particularly violent storm, Calamity finds the strangest thing of all: a lost child who has washed up on shore, who babbles an incomprehensible language. She decides to act as a foster parent to the lost boy, which causes further complications in her life.

Calamity is a profoundly flawed character, but one whose heart is in the right place. She is deeply suspicious, has a mean streak as wide as the Sargasso, and makes alienating mistakes at the drop of a hat. The little lost boy brings out her vulnerability, even as she drives potential friends, lovers and her own child away. Her hard-headedness, though, is what drives her quest to find the lost boy’s parents.

Folklore is woven into the structure of the novel that informs the narrative. An ancestor of Calamity’s, referred to the Dada Hair Woman, has several interludes set during the harrowing Middle Passage. Like Calamity, she is a ‘finder’ whose power is triggered by her menstrual cycles. This section is told in a mythic tone different from the rest of the novel, and readers will find echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved; like Morrison, Hopkinson is able to make scenes of unflinching brutality ultimately cathartic. Another folkloric strain concerns ‘the devil girl of the sea, that mirrors the action of the main story:

‘Keep your part of the bargain now,’ said the devil girl. ‘Pull me out of this hole.’

So Granny did that. The devil girl was slippery. Her skin was a deep blue, like the water in Blue Pit, the bottomless lagoon. And she was heavy for so! Granny managed, though. But before Granny could stop her, the devil girl shimmied up onto Granny’s shoulders, wrapped her legs around Granny’s neck, and tangled her long blue nails in Granny’s hair. ‘Carry me to where you living, Granny; beg you do,’ said the devil girl.

And she squeezed her legs tighter around Granny’s neck.

Hopkinson’s archipelago of Cayaba is rich with history and contemporary touches. It’s a culturally diverse setting where a salt-mining plant competes with family salt farms; where old beliefs compete with new ones (Calamity’s daughter is a new age hippy, much to her mother’s chagrin). ‘Jumbies’ and internet connectivity exist side by side. The struggles of the indigenous postcolonial population against corporate-driven political maneuvering is another theme explored here.

Hopkinson threatens to move into didactic territory when she adds a queer subplot. While admirable, it distracts from the main narrative thrust. Calamity’s got pregnant with her daughter by her gay best friend, and one of her current love interests is bisexual. Calamity reacts with anger at these perceived betrayals and gets soundly slapped down by people with more enlightened attitudes. These scenes come across stiffly and have an educational feel.

The New Moon’s Arms is mostly a fun novel. There were moments when I was reading it on DC’s Metro that I laughed aloud, and elicited strange looks from fellow passengers. It’s not every day you can call a postcolonial novel a ‘feel-good’ book.

The Music of Razors by Cameron Rogers

a guest review by Craig L. Gidney

Angels, fallen and otherwise, are making a bit of a resurrection in fiction. One can look to such treatments of the angelic mythos as Storm Constantine’s Grigori trilogy, which imagines the Nephelim as sexy outsiders, or The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox, where the fallen angel was a melancholic muse to the eponymous vintner. Fallen angels are a way to explore the mystical and mythic underpinnings of religion. The angels in these books are not evil in the traditional, villainous sense. Rather, they are tragic iconoclasts who challenge the heavenly status quo. Cameron Rogers’ novel The Music of Razors adds to the new wave angelic canon that includes Hal Duncan, Philip Pullman, as well as Knox and Constantine.

The Music of Razors is a contemporary gothic fantasy with historic and mythological back stories. The brief prologue sets the stage. A fallen angel murders another angel, then creates magical instruments with its bones:

From those bones the angel fashioned instruments approximating its own power....Mercurial and undying, the living bone was bestowed with aspects of the angel’s own function....It then scattered these instruments across the Earth...

The novel is about those who search and are affected by these mysterious instruments. We meet Henry, an alcoholic drop out, would-be surgeon, and murderer in late 1800s Boston. He joins a group of occultists and together they summon a forgotten angelic being who knows the whereabouts of the instruments. This has disastrous results, and Henry finds the course of his life forever altered by the encounter.

A second contemporary storyline concerns Walter, a 4 year old in England, who is terrorized by a closet monster. He makes a decision that casts him out this world and into a nether region presided over by Henry and his dark sorcery, while his body lays in a comatose state for 20 years. Walter must somehow protect his little sister Hope (who grows from imaginative child to sullen, gothy teen in the course of the narrative) from Henry through dreams.

Rogers has other storylines in the novel that are intriguing, but they are quickly (and often inexplicably) abandoned. The daughter of Henry’s rival occult has a brief appearance that features Rogers’ most interesting creation: the clockwork ballerina Nimble and her companion Tug, an ogre. These scenes, full of sinister beauty, are not given full development. Hope’s childhood friend (and lover) Sunni also has a skeletal storyline that is abruptly dropped.

The Music of Razors walks a delicate tightrope between moody horror and angst-ridden coming of age. It doesn’t always come together. Hope and Sunni’s tumultuous affair can stray into Dawson’s Creek existential teen drama. Rogers’ mythology shows real originality, but is often too esoteric for its own good. A fascinating back mythology of the angels, fallen and otherwise, is hinted at, but never developed. He also has a habit of revealing crucial character history late in the story, when it would have been more effective had it been introduced earlier. The novel has the disjointed feel of being a "fixup" book. The storylines presented here seem like orphans, all packaged together. One gets the sense that there is at least an entire novel’s worth of material that was scrapped and reshaped to form this book.

Despite these significant flaws, The Music of Razors is an arresting tale. The amoral aspects of fallen angels are beautifully rendered, and Rogers’ imagery is hypnotic and unsettling:

Something clicks, inside the dancer....The three-ring sphere in which the ballerina’s box-heart is housed begins to slowly and comprehensively spin, building speed, faster and faster, until light begins to creep up from the box. It is now a silver spheroid blur, growing brighter by degrees, and as that first scintilla of light makes itself known, so do other soft sounds come from elsewhere inside the ballerina: her joints, her fingers, the ball of her neck. As the light becomes a soft and constant glow—all of the quiet, tiny parts within her coming to life—her face slowly rises.

It is in scenes like these throughout the book that Rogers’ talent shows itself. His fevered, hallucinogenic prose is easily the equal of Caitlin R. Kiernan’s. Like Kiernan, Rogers is creating a hybrid genre—not quite horror, not quite fantasy—full of beauty and terror. It will be interesting to see how he develops as a novelist.

Passarola Rising by Azhar Abidi

a review by Craig L. Gidney

With the recent battles surrounding evolution, and the insidious influence of the religious right on public policy, Azhar Abidi’s debut novel, Passarola Rising is a timely (and timeless) fable. It is a philosophical romance, a distant cousin of Voltaire’s and Calvino’s work with a whimsical nod to St. Exupery. Like Voltaire—who appears in the novel—Abidi critiques the forces of organized religion and anti-intellectualism through fantasy and satire. Like Calvino and St. Exupery, Abidi has created a tall tale about flight that’s porous and full of air. The philosophy (and the physics) are decidedly featherweight, but it is an immensely enjoyable read.

Abidi takes the seeds of a true story, and embellishes it with a Baron Munchausen-like glee.

In the sixteenth century, Brazilian-born priest Bartolomeu Lourenco moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where he began to work on a flying machine, called the Passarola, which means "large bird" in Portuguese. It was tested out in front of the Portuguese court, where it attracted the attention of the Inquisition. Lourenco left Portugal and spent the remainder of his life in Spain. All that remains of Lourenco’s work are drawings for a ship, which do not suggest room for human cargo.

Abidi takes this curious footnote and constructs an alternate history for the visionary priest. In this version of history, Lourenco builds a flying ship, powered by four copper vacuum bulbs, and enlists his younger brother Alexander as an assistant. The two of them flee to France, where they are hosted by Voltaire, and given various missions by Louis XV, who is enamored of the Passarola.

Bartolemeu becomes a fearless proponent of scientific reason. He has given up his devotion to God and replaced it with a devotion to exploration, one that gets him in trouble more than once. Portrayed by Alexander, the narrator of the novel, Bartolemeu is the ultimate idealist, blithely unaware of decorum or social diplomacy:

His childlike trust in destiny, a cynic might call it recklessness, won me over and I began to consider my service in a new light, where it required courage and valor, and the vanity, as I vaguely suspected then and certainly know now, of greatness lifted my courage and calmed my fears.

A particularly amusing scene has the former priest shooting down (in scientific terms) mad King George of England’s idea for a flying ship of his own. The major tension in the novel comes from Bartolemeu’s unbridled élan for discovery clashing against the more earthbound concerns of kings and military leaders. A dangerous rescue mission in Poland almost ends the flights of the Passarola.

Alexander is both perplexed and intrigued by his brother’s obsession with flight. Through his various voyages, he comes to understand his brother, and conveys the near-religious experience of flight:

The Passarola began to climb. Now I could see the entire estate, the church and the pastor’s residence below me... I then saw the fields, like a chessboard of green and golden squares draped over the hills... The land glowed at the horizon. The sky where the sun had sunk was burnt red, The seven hills were lit with its last rays... The air was cold and except for the sound of the wind in our sails, we were surrounded by silence.

The Lourenco brothers manage to convince Louis XV to fund scientific expeditions, and here the novel hits its lyrical stride. Like the early science fiction of Jules Verne, Abidi conveys a since of wonder. Passage after passage describes the beauty and strangeness of the natural world.

We were flying high above a thunderstorm. The tip of our mast was ablaze with St. Elmo’s fire—our standard, a tongue of blue flame. A scarf of bright light began to rise from the horizon, gliding swiftly up into the sky.... Soon the sky below up was also glowing with fiery orange and strange purple lights. Some of them had distinct pulsing forms, and tendrils, red and white, that extended up into the void, like the roots of some celestial garden.

The two brothers are commissioned to explore the Arctic circle. It is during this voyage that Alexander finds he doesn’t share Bartolemeu’s sense of adventure. The two of them part ways after Alexander suffers a near-fatal illness, and he hears of his brother’s exploits from afar.

As with some of Calvino's books, Passarola Rising conveys essentially abstract ideas about religion and man’s inquisitive nature with prose infused with a comic tone. This tone was the one problem I had with the novel. It was like a meringue—a little too cloying. The Cardinal that chases the Lourencos has some hackneyed, anti-climatic lines. I was waiting for the Swiftian bite of satire. Whatever satire is present is mostly vague. The influence of the Inquisition is brief, and not as strong a theme in the novel that the blurb on the back cover suggests. Bartolemeu’s soapbox rants about Truth threaten to turn him in a cipher, rather than a fully realized character. The cameos by historical personages are also a bit slight, rather than elucidating. The brief novel is at its best when it goes into full picturesque mode, both in its lyrical tone and the episodic plot structure.

Ultimately, Passarola Rising belongs in the same category as The Little Prince, because it is less an allegory about religious persecution and the search for Truth than it is a boy’s adventure story.

Illyria by Elizabeth Hand

a guest review by Craig Laurance Gidney

It was less like building a house than like colonizing an island, this freakish, lovely and marvelous atoll that rose from gray wasteland of St. Brendan’s High School like some extravagant Atlantis we’d willed into being. All of our previous alliances and identities were tossed aside—jock, freak, egghead, cheerlead and anonymous. (pg. 76)

Back in the early 80s, when I was fourteen, I was in a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. While I did not get the part I wanted (Ariel), I remember the days leading up to the 3 day engagement as halcyon. The time spent preparing for the play is one of those perfect bubbles of euphoria that we all strive to recreate. That brief moment in time was key to crystallization of my identity. Joining a stage production is like entering a rarified world, where everyone agrees to create an alternate reality out of a spellbook -- a script. (And Shakespeare is surely the greatest of those enchanters). Elizabeth Hand’s brief novella Illyria evokes the power of theater and its effect on performers.

Set in the late seventies in upstate New York, Illyria charts the artistic destinies of Rogan and Madeleine Tierney. Madeleine is the narrator in the story. She and Rogan, in a Shakespeare-worthy conceit, are soul twins -- he is the last child in a line of boys, she is the last in a line of girls, and both were born on the same day in the same year. They are both descendants of a great stage actress from the turn of the century (modeled after Sarah Bernhardt), and their mingled families have set up a colony of sorts in a small town on the Hudson River. Both Rogan and Maddy have the theatrical gene, which has skipped the rest of the Tierney family, and they are drawn to each other. Their relationship knows no boundaries, and, indeed, has a sexual aspect to it. Maddy adores Rogan, who is a wild child with a mercurial streak. She sees herself as the moon to his brilliant sun, and often saves him from going supernova.

Rogan looked like he’d fallen from a painting... His hair was reddish-gold... He had cheekbones in a feline face -- not like a housecats; more like a cougar or a lynx, something strong and furtive and quick. (pg. 13)

One day, in a secret crawlspace in Rogan’s room, they find a toy theater trapped within the drywall.

Inside the wall was a toy theater, made of folded paper and gilt cardboard and scraps of brocade and lace…Thumbnail sized masks of Comedy and Tragedy hung from the proscenium arch, and a frieze of Muses that looked as though it had been painted with a single hair. (pg. 28)

This mysterious theater glows with magical lights and possesses strange power -- at one point, it even snows glitter. The theater awakens both Rogan and Maddy’s nascent talents. Their Aunt Kate (called by Rogan, ominously, Aunt Fate) recognizes their talents and begins to nurture them. Both cousins end up in a high school production of the Bard’s Twelfth Night that forever changes them, and seals their fates. If Maddy is an actress, Rogan is the wild heart of the artist. He has the same dark energy of Rimbaud or Jim Morrison. Maddy performs the role of Viola, while Rogan becomes the Fool Feste. He brings the text to life.

While some knowledge of the play adds depth to Hand's story, the Shakespearean references mostly add texture. Illyria is the setting of Twelfth Night, a surreal landscape hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, where a set of twins find love and adventure. This mirrors Maddy and Rogan’s unorthodox relationship, and fuels it. Hand's story is primarily a bildungsroman in the realistic mode, though it is infused with fantastic elements, such as the magic toy theater and a not-always-benevolent fairy godmother. It’s a uniquely American take on similarly-themed works by Angela Carter or Jeanette Winterson, a sort of "mythic reality" fiction. As usual, Hand’s prose has a feverish quality where emotions and gestures are epic, and archetypes lurk just beneath the skin. On a deeper level, Illyria shows that talent is like an amoral force of nature, with the power to create and destroy.

I remember that play I was in long ago: How the actress who played Ariel went on to become a renowned scholar of Spanish literature, while the actor who played Caliban reportedly went through a dark, self-destructive period. Maddy sips from the fountain of inspiration, while Rogan drowns in it. Illyria asks the reader if artistic obsession is a gift or a curse, and leaves the question unanswered.

Some Thoughts on Kwani? LitFest from Beverley Nambozo

I asked fellow Kwani? LitFest/SLS 2006 participant Beverley Nambozo for some thoughts on the experience, and she provided the following...

Nairobi.
The performance poetry class began like a secondary school literature lesson. Thankfully, it escalated to a mature discourse. The students did not get the opportunity to perform before others but it was a good learning ground. There was genuine enthusiasm in the class and some students also had a chance to visit other workshops. With more training material and a stronger communication network, much more work can be covered for next year. The Heron Hotel: Stiff necked writers, editors and librarians concealing their huge breakfasts with manuscripts, note pads and journals. Hmph! Timid students milling around the Tin House editor, Farafina Magazine editor, Sable litmag editor and Kwani? editor wondering if their works had hopes of existing off their worn out looking manuscripts into the above mentioned finer established magazines. An orderly disorderliness marked the routine at the Heron Hotel. Meals, workshops, meals, bus trips, payments, checking in and checking out, busy lobby, intellectual interaction. In the dining area, the literary fanatics would ogle the damsels from other continents wondering if they should ask if she could share her manuscript with them or share her body with them. Biding their time, they waited and waited and waited…

Lamu
Human beings are incapable of such equanimity. The wonders lay in the sand. Numerous. Each grain a potion to feed the egos of lustful tourists, idlers and children. The winders lie within the Muslim prayers echoing with comic earnestness. I was hypnotised. I was enchanted. I walked into Lamu at night blindfolded as the beach boys led me through the alleys whose stone walls veiled the secrets of the coastal girls. I held on. Trusting. Running. The blindfolds came off and danced before my eyes tempting me to dance with them. Standing in the ocean, the fluorescent algae swam around me daring me to join them in their aquatic frenzy. I plunged in washing away my urban burdens. Time, urgency and promptness are but luxuries in Lamu. With extended breakfasts, exaggerated desires to swim and sluggish exits from the hotels, Lamu is an island that detaches itself from international dialogue, reason and common sense which is why it is the most imperfect place for writers who need to exist in a real world. In Lamu, the best way to engage with the Island is to talk and watch. Talk to the island folk, talk to the squeaky voiced henna artists, talk to the red skinned tourists, talk to the orange and black haired beach boys, talk to the ocean, talk to the donkeys.. and when the conversations end…(which they never do) go back to your hole called home and write. I am wary of writers who go to far away islands to write. They are just show offs who are suffering from identity crisis and so need to pollute an island with ink from pens that never dry.


Beverley Nambozo is a Ugandan writer born in 1976. She has been a member of Uganda Women Writers’ Association (Femrite) since 2000. She is currently working on a collection of erotic poetry and a novel, Two Lives. She has also written a few academic papers on gender, media and literature.

Beverley has worked as a radio show morning host of two years at 104.1 Power FM in Kampala. She also served as an Audience Relations Manager, conducting regular market surveys. Before that she was a teacher and dance instructor at Rainbow International School in Kampala. Since 1999, she has been in an active dance group that usually holds concerts in and around church and the community. Beverley has also been involved in several HIV/AIDS sensitization campaigns amongst youth in secondary schools and universities.

Ships in High Transit

Below is a discussion by Njihia Mbitiru of "Ships in High Transit" by Binyavanga Wainaina.

Thank you to everyone who so kindly wrote of their anticipation of the following:

Around the age of twelve I took a highly significant shit. The actual shitting was not that special; what gave this otherwise banal episode an aura of importance was what happened after: as I pushed down the handle, I noticed for the first time, painted on the side of the porcelain tank in faded bold print: Made in Sussex.
That same evening I told my father of my discovery, expecting as children typically do that parental enthusiasm for the banal would be equal to or greater than their own, not understanding that by the time older folk have started having kids, the exotic origins of the downstairs crapper are as banal as the shit they were made to move.
Matano's boss may very well have his toilets made in Sussex and shipped to Kenya and all parts of the Commonwealth. I went on to peg most every toilet I saw and used with identical features as of British origin. Though I can’t fairly say I make a conscious association, hydraulic disposal of personal waste has an air of Albion stronger than say, wearing shirts and pants my ancestors would not consider proper clothing.
How interesting then, to read this excellent story, which extends the metaphoric potential of waste production and disposal into a meditation on history, identity, and the vagaries of negotiating both. (Spoilers start here).

Armitage Shanks, one of that class of not-quite Brits, has decided he should perhaps aspire to the “heroism” of his ancestors, of shipping "heavy ceramic water closets around the world".

So he decides to make shit up (Note: I can't promise I'll stay away from all the easy excremental puns--please bear with my enthusiasm). Enter the Maa, a piece of fakery both rank and grandiloquent.
The story of the Maa People niftily synthesizes the most common stereotypical narratives about Africa, and draws on that reliable saw of everyone from Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rider Haggard (whose brother, by the way, was for a time a colonial District Officer stationed in Kenya) to Leo Frobenius: a group of isolated primitives is somehow in possession of ancient wisdom, which they have intuitive (and therefore degenerate and inferior) access to. Typically there's a pile of old stuff to go along with this mystical power, tied to it in some ineffable way. While this intuition is beyond the pale, so to speak, simply unacceptable as the route to that legacy, it takes the right person to come along and use his superior faculties in claiming that antediluvian prize.
It's also this apparently innate superiority that turns primitive intuition, itself a mask placed on the "Other", into a non-threatening artifact (Matano’s astute disappointment with the desire of Westerners to turn a person into an index of exotic features, for example). And the story is full of these ostensibly non-threatening artifacts, like Matano, Abdullahi, Otieno a.k.a Ole Lenana, and the "Maa" women arrayed in the hotel courtyard to sing for Armitage--I mean Ole um Shambalaa's guests.

All involved in the local end of the charade understand, like um Shambalaa, that making shit up pays. And all are prepared to go to the necessary lengths (i.e. “making a white man your pussy” as Otieno does, getting in business with Nigerians— Matano’s secret sex tape) in order to realize profits.

No desires—especially the sexual kind—are ever anything but part of a sales pitch. Everything is a hustle. Everything has a price, and the rapacious hunger for profit is only successful in the degree to which it identifies and secures an equally rapacious desire for what is on offer.

I’m thinking of the pitches in the story, first Shanks, then that of Prescott and Jean Paul (as seen through Matano’s eyes), Abdullahi’s, the anonymous panting-into-the-receiver monologue for the “SugarOhHoneyHoneyMommy” in Germany, and the unwittingly self-parodying macho bluster of the beach boy. The story could even be seen as a parody of a sales pitch, pointed bitingly at its own absurd debasing premise. Everyone has something to sell. The goods are a body and history is a marketing strategy.

On the other end are the Jean-Paul and Prescotts, themselves in search of an angle, of something to sell and a way to sell it, and the working class European tourists taking a vacation from twelve months spent in “some air-conditioned industrial plant”, availing themselves of the pleasures their history has prepared them to seek after, again and again, and that the locals are working overtime to convince them is really their hearts’ desire.

There is plenty in this single story to think over, and it’s a testament to Wainaina’s acuity and skill that he is able to suggest in just a single story about tourism the devastation wrought on a whole continent by the relentless application of the pernicious logic underlying this sad business.

Earlier I told a story about my early experience with a toilet, and if I may, I’d like to take a cue from Wainaina and, at the risk of being excessive, tie that encounter more firmly to the story.

The promises and injunctions of colonialism are those of the toilet. With independence came the realization that, in fact, both the revamped toilet and the shit it was supposed to disappear could still provide an entertaining spectacle (the secret raison d‘etre of tourism?), if only because the nation-state-toilet was now a caricature of its former pure, guided-by-the-enlightened-European self, a thing now made of shit. Shit disappearing more shit; developed, highly industrialized others may come attend the museal proceedings, and for a hefty price, extracted by the locals with cynical resignation, indulge in purging themselves into various flavors of delight.

Shanks’ efforts are ironic in their production of the very thing his family devoted itself to making disappear. His desire to sanitize his past is simply more bullshit proffered in the hopes of making money. Matano and the rest chase that money, and find themselves laboring to produce shit facsimiles of their history, their selves, for the pleasure of others. It is still possible to do things like provide for one’s own, to make sure that “things will appear in the household” and “school fees…mysteriously paid”, but these minor victories cannot be weighed decisively against the logic to which all efforts are finally bent.

And so the wheel turns as before, a sad dirty secondhand joke laughing mirthlessly at itself. For money.

Topical exegesis aside, the story is put together well enough, and I’m looking forward to that promised novel. I suspect Wainaina’s will find the novel a more amenable form than the short story.

I do wish the story were leaner. There are extraneous bits whose variant repetition of thematic concerns does not seem to add to the story. For example, the paragraph about the village is a distraction and should have been left out. Same goes for the one featuring the Texan.

Otieno is an interesting character, particularly in the context of an aggressively homophobic society, who should’ve had more space in the story. The lamentably common stereotype of coast-dweller as more susceptible to the foreigner-introduced “perversion” of homosexuality receives comparatively little treatment for a story so deftly concerned with the production of stereotypes. Wainaina could have gone further.

Jean Paul’s view of the proceedings would have made for a satisfying counterpoint to the well-handled treatment of Sixty Minute Lady. I also wanted to hear more from the “Maa” women, who always appear as a group. Why not as individuals? Isn’t there one local woman—Giriama femme to Matano’s homme—who might have featured with the same prominence as the other more visible characters? I’m not interested in the reproduction of social inequities in the structure of a story purportedly about those inequities; I am unlikely to learn anything interesting if this is the case.

In this sense the writer appears to share the blind spot of his main protagonist. This is less a negative criticism than the recognition by an artist that one is always working within the parameters of a received discursive imperative, and whether or not we hew to the injunction that we must obey this imperative, I find the most rewarding literary experiences (reading, writing, and discussion) come from an investigation of the marginal and “distasteful”.

Some little things, such as a Swedish man named Jean Paul, I found mildly distressing.

Marechera references are always a plus, and I encourage those unfamiliar with this extraordinary Zimbabwean writer to read Black Sunlight, from which the line “ and the mirror reveals me, a naked and vulnerable fact” is taken, as well as House of Hunger, The Black Insider, and Cemetery of Mind, all of which are readily available in the US. For those in Zim, send me a copy of Mindblast!

This is a longer post than I intended, but honestly it doesn’t feel long enough. I hope this story receives the attention it deserves, for its merits as a fine piece of fiction that is part of what Borges might have called our universal patrimony, and also as one of the best short stories to have been written by a Kenyan in a long time.

Thanks to Matt

Hello all. I didn't realize that Matt's never done this before--had a guest blogger--something he failed to mention when he suggested I try it...
I apologize for having kept you all waiting--I realize Matt meant for this to come on sooner, but I've been having cold feet.
But, I'm very excited and grateful to Matt for the opportunity. He and I had dinner the week before his departure, and our conversation has stayed in my mind. The prospect of his visiting my hometown had the curious effect of making me feel as though I had just arrived in the US, as opposed to having lived here for several years.
I also realized, with pleasure, the swarm of connections that each person has the ability to make by simply leaving one place and going to another. Perhaps there will be time to talk in some detail about these connections in my entries. I feel in this moment generous enough to make a number of philosophical remarks about chance and fate and so forth, but as my papa says, this would be just "winetalk".
I'm simply happy that a friend of mine has the chance to see the place where I'm from, a chance so few of my friends here have. I'm also happy that SLS is providing a much needed fulcrum for the literary efforts in Kenya and in the region, efforts which a change in the political climate has allowed to thrive.
That there are now, in Kenya, not just Nairobi I hope, fifteen year olds writing bad poetry and nursing the stirrings of literary ambition who have the opportunity to know of such an event as SLS, let alone attend or be close to it in some way, is itself a watershed.
I look forward to the emergence of an open, vibrant literary culture. I want those same people, my neighbours, my relatives, my friends, who fed me with all sorts of books, with the skiffy that made me want to become, well, a skiffie, to see "local produce" on their shelves.
With that in mind, let me say that the next entry will be on "local produce", so to speak. I'll be talking about Binyavanga Wainaina's "Ships in High Transit", which Matt mentioned.

Guest Blogger: Njihia Mbitiru

I'm getting packed up and ready to head to Kenya for a couple weeks, and while I'm gone I will try to post an occasional update, but I also thought it would be fun to try something I've never tried around here -- a guest blogger.

And it only makes sense that while I'm in Kenya the first Mumpsimus guest blogger should be Njihia Mbitiru, who is in the same masters degree program as I am in at Dartmouth, is a Clarion Workshop graduate, and is originally from Kenya. In fact, my participation in SLS Kenya owes a lot to him, because he stopped me one day at the Dartmouth library and said he'd just read an amazing Kenyan story -- "Ships in High Transit" by Binyavanga Wainaina. That put Wainaina's name into my head, I read up on his literary organization Kwani, and started paying more attention to Kenyan writers. When I chanced upon a reference to SLS Kenya somewhere, I was intrigued, and when I saw Wainaina was involved, I decided to apply.

So please be nice to Njihia while I'm gone -- this is his first time blogging, so any encouragement is welcome. His first post should appear sometime in the next day or so, if all goes well...