New Website

It was time I had a website under my own name, and not just this here Mumpsimus. After all, I am more than a mumpsimus! Or so I tell myself.

Thus: matthewcheney.net!

Because my book of short stories is coming out in January, the focus of the site is my fiction more than anything else. At the moment, there's nothing there that isn't also here, aside from some pictures. But I'm sure I'll figure out something unique to host there in the coming weeks, months, years...

News & Newsletter

sitting in my office, contemplating what to write...

I've been wanting to try out TinyLetter for a little while now, having subscribed to a few newsletters that use it, and so I took some time to create a newsletter aimed at sending out information, musings, etc. about my upcoming collection, Blood: Stories, which Black Lawrence Press will release in January.

Why create such a thing when I've already got this here blog? Because I think of this blog as a more general thing, not really a newsletter. I will put all important information about Blood here (as well as on Twitter, and I'll make a Facebook author page one of these days), but the newsletter will have more in-depth material, such as details of the publishing process, background on the stories, etc. There will be some exclusive content and probably even some give-aways, etc. I probably should have titled it Etc., in fact... And it's not all limited to Blood — if you take a look at the first letter, you'll see some of the range I'm aiming for. That letter is public, and some of the future ones will be, too, but for the most part I expect to keep the letters private for subscribers only. (I've always wanted to be part of a cabal, and now I've started my own!)

One of the things I note in that first letter is that Mike Allen is running a Kickstarter to raise funds for his fifth Clockwork Phoenix anthology, and all backers can now read a 2006 story of mine that Mike first published, "In Exile". This is, as far as I remember, the only story I've ever published set in the typical fantasy world of elves and wizards and all that. (To learn why, read the newsletter!) Mike made an editorial suggestion for the manuscript that completely fixed a major problem with the story, so I've always been tremendously grateful to him, and I'm thrilled that it's now available to backers of this very worthy Kickstarter.

Around and About

A trio of items...

1.
Penguin Books is, slowly but surely, bringing all of Shirley Jackson's work back into print. Earlier this year they brought back the posthumous collection Come Along with Me, and just a few weeks ago they released new editions of novels that have been out of print for ages: The Road Through the Wall (her first novel) and Hangsaman. You'll be hearing more about those here later this summer. I've also gotten confirmation that Penguin will release The Bird's Nest and The Sundial at the end of January 2014 — two strange and fascinating books that have long deserved to be available once again (The Bird's Nest is currently available in the e-book of The Magic of Shirley Jackson).

Returning these books to print has brought about some new writing on Jackson. In March, Slate published "Why You Should Read Shirley Jackson" by William Brennan; last month, The New Yorker's book blog posted a fascinating account by Ruth Franklin, who is working on a new biography of Jackson, of the letters Jackson received after "The Lottery" was published. A few days ago, Open Letters Monthly published an essay about Jackson by Victoria Best that is well worth reading, particularly given its focus on We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a book that is, I think, one of the great accomplishments in American literature in the second half of the 20th century.

2.
There's a Bessie Head blogathon! I just learned about it, and don't have time this week to join in, but I will be following the posts avidly.

I repeat: There's a Bessie Head blogathon! Go!

3.
It's Readercon week! I'll be there Friday through Sunday, doing three readings and one panel. Also, I recently returned to the programming committee, having resigned last year in the midst of The Badness. The convention has done an admirable job of recovering from the missteps of last summer, and I'm thrilled to have been invited back to work with a remarkably great group of people. It's always a pleasure to see so many friends, to meet new friends, and to generally revel in the entirely nerdy, readerly atmosphere.

The Movies Are Dying: A Video Poem

The Movies Are Dying: A Video Poem.

(Futzing around, I made a thing.)

Recent Reading

Blogging always slows to a crawl during the second half of a semester, but I was surprised to see that it's been almost a month since I last posted here. Egads. I've hardly had a moment to breathe, though.

For now, I just want to capture a few moments of reading from the recent weeks.

Disseminations

part of Jacques Derrida's last library

Various items...

I recently saw two of the more controversial movies of last year, Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty. I don't feel compelled to say much about the former — it's fine for a Steven Spielberg movie, and wanting it to be more than a Steven Spielberg movie seems to me to be an error. Yes, I would have preferred, say, Charles Burnett's Lincoln or Alex Cox's Lincoln or Cheryl Dunye's Lincoln or even Guillermo del Toro's Lincoln, but what we got is Spielberg's Lincoln, and so we should not be surprised that every moment of possible emotion is squeezed through John Williams's typically John Williams score, or that there are lots of faces making faces, or that it is a white savior movie, or that it exemplifies the tradition of quality in Hollywood cinema. What we should be surprised by is that it is not worse — it is easily, to my eyes, Spielberg's most interesting and least annoying historical film. That may have something to do with Tony Kushner's script (PDF) ... but then, Kushner wrote the execrable Munich, so who knows. In any case, the performances are generally compelling, and it's nice to see the great Thaddeus Stevens get some acknowledgement after more than a century of general abuse; Tommy Lee Jones's performance as Stevens is a hoot, and yet not a caricature. On the film's fetishization of compromise and its hatred of radicalism, I'm with Aaron Bady ("It is, in short, a barely veiled argument that radicals should get in line, be patient, be realistic"), although I also wonder what we would make of the film had it been released ten years ago in exactly the same form. An impossible question, of course, but perhaps an interesting thought experiment, given how Lincoln wrestles with the idea of "war powers".

War Powers could be an alternate title for Zero Dark Thirty. I have nothing to say right now except that I found the film fascinating and deeply unsettling, but to be able to show why I think it is a devastating and subversive movie I have to wait till I can dig into its details on DVD, because so much of its meaning and effect for me came from specific shots and cuts. Some excellent writing has already been done about it, though — here are the essays that have most fit with my experience of the film:

• "Zero Dark Thirty: Perception, Reality, Perception Again, and 'The Art Defense'" by Glenn Kenny, which masterfully demonstrates why Glenn Greenwald's attack on the film as pro-torture is inaccurate and deceptive. Arguments about how all sorts of things are represented in the film can be legitimately made, I think, but Greenwald seriously distorts what is on screen to fit his thesis (which he had to do, because by the point where he actually saw the movie, he had too much of an emotional stake in the film being what he wanted it to be for him to ever say it was not what he wanted it to be).
• Manohla Dargis's review for The New York Times is a model of intelligent newspaper writing.
• "The Monitor Mentality, or A Means to an End Becomes an End in Itself: Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty" by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky is a fine beginning to understanding what is actually on screen and the implications.
• "A Brief Remark on Zero Dark Thirty" by Steven Shaviro is as insightful as we've come to expect from Shaviro. He's been writing about Kathryn Bigelow's work for many years, and his perspective is helpful. I anxiously look forward to his further writings on the film, because even with this "brief remark" he's delved more meaningfully into it than most other writers.
• Most recently, Nicholas Rombes has published "Zero Dark Thirty and the New History", which looks at the relationship between the film and concepts of history: " Zero Dark Thirty is about how some historical events remain so hot and dangerous that they cannot be treated directly; it would be like staring into the sun. Instead, such histories can only be approached in an administrative, almost bureaucratic fashion, and in such a way that suggests history remains, at the end of the day, a tangle of zero-sum stories, usually competing with each other for legitimacy."

I also recently saw Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning and Detention, two interesting films that make a mess of genre expectations. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is as much a horror movie as an action movie, but a horror movie more akin to the works of David Lynch than the average splatter film. (I could have lived without all the fight scenes being sped up, however.) Detention is even better, a mad mishmash of teen comedy, absurd sci-fi, and slasher movie. For me, it was the second most consistently delightful film of last year, after Moonrise Kingdom.

I don't have much to report for recent reading here, mostly because I've been reading books such as Change and Continuity in the 1984 Elections, which is marvelous, but, well, nothing I'd recommend to get you through the long winter months. I've also just begun reading Derrida: A Biography by Benoit Peeters (god bless interlibrary loan!), which is thrilling and revelatory so far (100 pages in). I had long believed Derrida made a living well into his twenties as a construction worker, but it turns out this is just another example of one of the many mistaken beliefs I have clung to.

I very much enjoyed Adam Green's profile, "A Pickpocket's Tale: The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins" at The New Yorker recently.

Also, two poems by Suzanne Buffam: "The New Experience" at The Poetry Foundation and "Ruined Interior" at Boston Review.

Finally, a new term has started at the university, so I'm back to teaching. Here are the syllabi for my classes, if you're curious: Murder, Madness, Mayhem (English Department course that I'm making into a course on dystopia and fascism this term) and Outlaws, Delinquents, and Other "Deviants" in Film & Society (Communications & Media Studies course that I've making into ... well ... something).

A Momentary Miscellany

I still don't have time to write a substantive post about much of anything, but there are a bunch of things I'd like to note before I forget them, so here's a rather fragmentary and scattered post about things mostly unrelated to each other...

I've been doing quite a bit of writing, but none of it is stuff that's currently for online venues. (For instance, I wrote an introduction to an upcoming art book from Hideaki Miyamura, about which I'm sure I will say much more later, once it's available.) Also, I sold a story to Steve Berman for an upcoming anthology of queer Poe stories, which is very exciting for me because I've hardly written any fiction in the last 2 years, and whenever I finally get around to writing a story, I always wonder, "Do I still remember how?" Apparently, yes. I'm also thrilled because I've had a chance to read a couple other stories that will be in the book and they're really excellent — honestly, even if you're indifferent to Poe and you think you only like your stories 100% hetero in their inclinations, you should get this book. (And not just because 100% hetero is so dull you should never talk about it in mixed company. But I'm not judging you. Actually, I am. Unless you read this book when it comes out next year...)

Speaking of coming out soon, we're almost ready to release a new issue of The Revelator. For a preview of what's to come, check out our Facebook page. It's even possible that we will manage to get two whole issues out within the next 12 months, doubling our current rate! A lot depends on our Copy Editor, but we've got faith.

A Miscellanea of Catching Up and Checking In

Crickets have taken over The Mumpsimus recently, mostly because I've been working on some projects and have started the new school year.

This will be a fragmentary post trying to capture a few things that seem to me worth capturing before too much more time passes and I enter senescence.

After a hiatus due to some technical reconfigurations at Boomtron, The Sandman Mediations have now resumed with a few thoughts on the first part of The Wake. I'll finish up The Wake in the coming weeks, then continue with Endless Nights, after which I plan to stop.

I made one last video essay before classes started up again, this one on Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales. I'm hoping to make another on Eastwood's Gran Torino soon, but not sure when I'll be able to steal the time.

Epigraphs for an Imaginary Novel

Going through notes for old pieces of writing, I discovered this collection of quotations I hoped to sprinkle through a piece of long fiction I was outlining ten years ago. The story itself never came to anything, but some shadowy traces of it remain in the collage...

If the New World fed dreams, what was the Old World reality that whetted the appetite for them?  And how did that reality caress and grip the shaping of a new one?

—Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

Why is it so inconceivable to our dramatists that some people do not know, or care, how they feel all the time?  That some people act with a detachable motive, or from a myriad of contradictory ones?  Why is life itself less interesting per se than explanations of life?

—Mac Wellman, “The Theater of Good Intentions”

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.  And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.  And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

It is the private dominion over things that condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull and wretched existence for themselves.  I believe that there can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives — young lives, old lives and lives in the making.

—Emma Goldman, “What I Believe”

I have carried out, before my own eyes and against my intention, a part of the modern tragedy: I have made a lasting flaw in the face of the earth, for no lasting good.

—Wendell Berry, “Damage”

A great idea springs up in a man’s soul; it agitates his whole being, transports him from the ignorant present and makes him feel the future in a moment....Why should such a revelation be made to him...if not that he should carry it into practice?

—William Walker, president of Nicaragua, 1855-1857

If we confine the concept of weeds to species adapted to human disturbance, then man is by definition the first and primary weed under whose influence all other weeds have evolved.

—Jack R. Harlan, Crops and Man

Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our desires.  Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life.  It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands.  It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own.  Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.

—Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge

Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion?

—Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle”

I actually had to develop a love of the disordered & puzzling, viewing reality as a vast riddle to be joyfully tackled, not in fear but with tireless fascination.  What has been most needed is reality testing, & a willingness to face the possibility of self-negating experiences: i.e., real contradictions, with something being both true & not true.

—Philip K. Dick, Exegesis, 1979

For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity.  God keep me from ever completing anything.  This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught.  Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

My favorite melodramatic theme: the harried anarchist, a wounded wolf, struggling toward the green hills, or the black-white alpine mountains, or the purple-golden desert range and liberty.  Will he make it?  Or will the FBI shoot him down on the very threshold of wilderness and freedom?

—Edward Abbey, journal, December 1951

To argue from analogy, every thing around us is in a progressive state; and when an unwelcome knowledge of life produces almost a satiety of life, and we discover by the natural course of things that all that is done under the sun is vanity, we are drawing near the awful close of the drama.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

When I reflect to what a cause this man devoted himself, and how religiously, and then reflect to what cause his judges and all who condemn him so angrily and fluently devote themselves, I see that they are as far apart as the heavens and earth are asunder.

—Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown”

You tell me of degrees of perfection to which Humane Nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.

—Abigail Adams, November 27, 1775

Catching Up, Once Again

This semester of teaching (at two schools) has pretty well kept me away from the blog here, but things are beginning to even out, and I should be able to return to my regularly irregular posting in the next few weeks.  I will probably even soon be able to reply to that email you sent me.  For now, though, some quick notes...

• Over at Gestalt Mash, my latest Sandman Meditations column finishes up The Doll's House.

• I've now finished reading Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, and will start writing a review of it for Rain Taxi very soon (I'm only about a month late on that...)  I found the book provocative, fascinating, and enlightening, but even if I hadn't, I think I'd be amazed at how stupid many of the reviews of it have been (the link is to The Complete Review's roundup; their own review is not one I agree with, but though I don't think it's up to their normal standard, it's not awful).  I won't address this in the review I write, since it doesn't seem appropriate, but I'll say it here: I don't think some of the negative reviewers actually read the book.  They certainly didn't read it carefully, and many seemed to read while having an axe in hand, ready for grinding.  Mark Thwaite addressed the problem back in September, and Stephen Mitchelmore further responded to it last month (in a blog post that I seem to need to link to at least once a week -- Mitchelmore and I are really different sorts of readers, I think, but that post alone is enough to make me grateful for the blogosphere).  When I started reading What Ever Happened to Modernism, I was ready to believe that some of the negative reviewers had misconstrued some of its arguments or maybe missed some of its subtleties, but the more I read and the more I then compared what I read to the reviews, the more I was aghast at how much was missed.  Many reviewers seemed to have read not the book but a problematic piece in The Guardian, which Josipovici has denounced.  (At least D.J. Taylor apologized, though he still called the book "horribly partial and wrong-headed", revealing himself to be both a pot and a kettle.)  It's true that Josipovici doesn't have much use for Martin Amis, Ian McEwen, Julian Barnes, and some of the other more prominent British writers of the last few decades, but his discussion of this is not a major portion of the book, and he tempers it with such statements as, "But I realise that this may be largely because of who and what I am."  He praises William Golding and Muriel Spark, he writes marvelously about music and visual art, his discussions of Wordsworth showed me ways to enjoy a poet whose wonders had previously eluded me, and he pointed me toward a book I'm now reading with wonder, Farewell to an Idea by T.J. Clark.  And now that I've written more than I intended to about What Ever Happened to Modernism here, it's time to get to work on that review...

• Josipovici's admiration for William Golding was not news to me, because he's sung Golding's praises before, but I read his latest comments on Golding at roughly the same time as I watched the Criterion Collection DVD of Lord of the Flies, with a commentary by Peter Brook that is among the most enlightening commentary tracks I've encountered.  I worship Peter Brook, so I'm biased, but though I had seen the movie quite a few times (it's one of the few cases where I love both the book and film), I'd never listened to the commentary.  It provides not just good information about how the film was made, but also, as is typical of Brook, a philosophy of art.  The additional comments of producer Lewis Allen, director of photography Tom Hollyman, and cameraman/editor Gerald Feil add context and provide a fine glimpse of Brook's working methods.

• The Carl Brandon Society is having a fundraiser drawing to raise money for the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship -- the prize is an e-reader loaded with good stuff.  Tickets are $1 each.  Go buy some!

I think I had other things to write about here, but they are slipping my mind, and time is short...

A Sign

My friends Rick and Beth Elkin are currently traveling from their home in New Mexico up to New Hampshire here to display their excellent wares at the 76th Annual League of NH Craftsmen's Fair. To amuse themselves on the trip, they're taking pictures of particularly interesting sights and sites and sending them my way. The above is my favorite photo so far.

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.

The First Day of School

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the first day of classes at Plymouth State University, where I'm teaching now.

This is my eleventh year of teaching. Nonetheless, as ever, the first day looms as something both terrifying and exciting. This year is terrifying for new reasons, most having to do with teaching college for the first time, but last year was a very different environment, too, and I adjusted to that well enough. After the first class or two, the terror will go away, and probably some of the excitement, too, as we settle into a routine, but the unknown is always nerve-wracking.

I've spent much of this week preparing for classes. If you're curious about the sorts of things I'm doing, I've put some information up here. Those pages will grow and change over time, of course, and at least one of them is mostly a placeholder right now, waiting for me to get more time to add to it.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for something to watch, Reprise came out on DVD today in the U.S. I've got it on my Netflix list and will be curious to see if I respond to it as strongly now as I did when I saw it in the spring, when it was, for reasons that are somewhat mysterious to me, exactly the movie I needed.

Also, the Great and Glorious Hannah Tinti, editor extraordinaire of One Story, has welcomed her first novel into the world: The Good Thief. I bought a copy at a local bookstore; if it's made it to New Hampshire, it ought to be just about everywhere by now. I hate going into a book with huge expectations, but Hannah's just about the best editor I've ever worked with, and I loved her story collection Animal Crackers, so it's impossible for me not to expect marvels and wonders galore. We shall see...

Progress Report

Life here at Mumpsimus Central continues on apace, despite the slow pace of posting. I finally got done all that I needed to do for Best American Fantasy 2008 and so now can begin trying to get organized for the next volume. I finished acting in a production of Taming of the Shrew that was fun and successful, and I enjoyed the irony of that being the show I appear in before teaching an introductory course in feminism this fall at Plymouth State (in The Riverside Shakespeare, Anne Barton makes the strongest case I've read for the play's subversive elements, but I'm still not really convinced). And I'm slowly getting organized with all of the tasks I have here at the house, though this has not been helped by the phone line getting hit by lightning, the lawn mower needing major service, etc.

In terms of reading, I've mostly been trying to prepare for my classes, sifting through gazillions (yes, that's a technical term) of essays and articles in search of ones to foist off on the feminism class -- I've collected well over 100 items, and am trying to determine which are most important and which are least -- a fun, if a bit overwhelming, process.

Yesterday I read Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer by Riki Wilchins, which I first learned about via Cheryl Morgan's excellent review essay about it. It's a readable and interesting book, good as a primer, though occasionally frustrating to anybody who's read a bit of Derrida and Foucault, since the use of their ideas is so simplistic, but I suppose that's a good counter to some of the tendencies of academics who have tried to write with the same sort of complexity as D&F but without much talent for it. Wilchins is better on Judith Butler's idea of performativity, but I may just think that because I'm less enamored of Butler than of Derrida and (especially) Foucault. I think Cheryl has given Wilchins short shrift on the concept of performativity -- I don't think Wilchins would deny that a person can have a strong sense of gender identity while also acknowledging that gender is performative and not essential (this is, as far as I can tell, why Wilchins devotes an entire chapter to race and critical race theory: race has a strong power over our sense of identity and many consequences for people's lives every day, but that doesn't mean we can't also point to the inadequacies of the concept of "race" and notice how the concept is constructed and enforced). But I don't think it's an important misreading (if it is even a misreading; I may be reading too much onto Wilchins's text to make it agree with my own feelings!), because so often the idea of performativity is used to suggest that a strong gender identity is something fanciful or easily discarded, or that transgender people are just pretending, and I'm glad Cheryl was able to attack that idea.

In any case, Queer Theory, Gender Theory is a clear and useful book to introduce people to important ideas about gender and its power in the world.

I had mentioned earlier that I was reading Nisi Shawl's Filter House for a Strange Horizons review, and might read Greg Bear's City at the End of Time for a review as well. I'm still intending to write about Filter House, but I won't review the Bear, since I managed to get 100 pages in and then just had to give up; I'm still quite fond of Bear's work in the 1980s and early 1990s, but the new novel is much too abstract and badly paced to hold my interest, and if I kept reading I'd just resent the whole thing. The Shawl collection is posing different difficulties -- what I've read so far is, alas, disappointing, though the fault may be more with my expectations than her writing: this is a book I very much want to like -- but the difficulties are ones I think I can write about, and, in any event, I'm hoping there will be a few stories among the ones remaining that work well for me.

I'm also still making my way through Meja Mwangi's novels, and enjoying them quite a bit. More on all that later.

A few days ago I got Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life by James Hawes and skimmed through parts of it. It got some press recently (under its British title, Excavating Kafka -- I don't know if there are differences beyond the title) for presenting information about and images from Kafka's collection of pornography. Hawes and his publisher are working hard to suggest that the book shatters all sort of myths, but aside from printing pictures of the porn (considerably less scandalous and disgusting than Hawes suggests -- I've seen worse in the art of the Greeks and Romans), Hawes doesn't seem to contribute much to the discussion that somebody who's read a bit about Kafka won't already know -- he's mostly attacking straw men. Worse, the narrative voice is so coy and grating that the book is nearly unreadable -- it's the voice of a teacher trying desperately to entertain an indifferent class, and only succeeding at shedding the last vestiges of his dignity.

Finally, my not-for-anybody-but-myself reading at the moment (always important when you have a lot of books to read for reviews or classes) is Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs, which is an extraordinary study of how Woolf wrote each of her books. It's the sort of book that will fascinate anybody interested in a writer's process, regardless of whether you've read all the books under discussion (I've pretty much read them all, but some of them not in over 10 years, when I took a Woolf course my senior year of college. But I even found the chapter on the one Woolf novel I've never read, Night and Day, compelling).

Stuffs

Things fell into neglect here. Various reasons for that, most having to do with busy-ness, though the silence of the last few days has been caused as much by heat as anything else -- my study here is not air conditioned, and we're having a heat wave, which has made the keys to my laptop actually hot to the touch, so I've been keeping away from the computer. Things are a little bit cooler tonight, though, and so here are a few stray bits of something or other...

First, don't miss the Strange Horizons fund drive. Lots of fun prizes available, and your money supports a worthy cause -- a weekly online magazine that actually pays its writers (though not the staff) and is officially a nonprofit organization. (Don't punish them for publishing me; everybody has their faults.)

Some Strange Horizons readers may remember the Speculative Poetry Symposium I put together a few years back. One of the members of that symposium, Theodora Goss, has just published an interesting book with the ever-interesting Aqueduct Press, Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. I just got a copy, and though the poetry is generally not to my taste (most 19th century poetry in English isn't), I found the book an interesting read nonetheless, because Dora does a fine job of contextualizing the writers' works. The book ends with a collection of Dora's own poems, and this addition broadens the book's argument -- it's not only an anthology, but a study of influence and inspiration.

And here's another worthy project: Guys Lit Wire--

Guys Lit Wire exists solely to bring literary news and reviews to the attention of teenage boys and the people who care about them. We are more than happy to welcome female readers - but our main goal is to bring the attention of good books to guys who might have missed them. The titles will be new or old and on every subject imaginable. We guarantee new posts every Monday through Friday and have a list of twenty-three individual scheduled contributors plus several additional occasional posters all of whom have different literary likes and dislikes. We hope to provide something for everyone and will strive to accomplish that goal.

This is going to be a hugely valuable tool for not only teenagers, but parents and educators as well.

Meanwhile, yes, we're still working on Best American Fantasy 2. We should have some exciting news about the contents ... soon...

Quick Thoughts on Diverse Things

Amazingly, the world didn't pause while I paused blogging, and, in fact, lots of things happened. I also managed to see some movies and read some books (or parts of books). I may come back to some of these topics later, but here's a quick run-down...

• Kenya: I have been trying to keep up with the news from Kenya, where violence has continued since the disputed election. Occasional Mumpsimus contributor Njihia Mbitiru let me know that he and his family in Nairobi are well, but he said there is plenty of chaos. The Kwani? Blog has been publishing a series of opinion pieces, all worth reading.
  
  
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy: A friend gave me his copy of this book, forcing me to read it at last. The arguments that were made by some people about whether it's science fiction, or whether McCarthy should have steeped himself in genre writing before setting out to create his own book, or whatever -- all these arguments felt irrelevant to me as I read the book. Perhaps even more than irrelevant: they seem to me to completely miss the point. (But what's the point? Maybe points...) The book's ancestry is closer to Faulkner and Beckett than The Long Tomorrow or A Canticle for Liebowitz. The only thing that disappointed me about the book was its deus ex machina ending, which is what, I expect, made it catch Oprah's eye, but which seemed to me to be an easy way out of the circumstances McCarthy had set up. That, though, is subject I don't have time to really develop here...
  
  
• The Oscars: I was disappointed I'm Not There didn't get more nominations, but on the other hand, I'm glad, because if the Academy had shown similar taste to my own, I'd be terrified that I was becoming much too predictable in my affections. (Except now I'm terrified I'm becoming much too predictable in my affections by liking movies such as I'm Not There...)
  
  
• Lars and the Real Girl: I saw this movie with a couple of friends. We all thought it was amusing, but also agreed it would have had more substance if it had been more willing to delve into the darker areas of its story. It could easily get a G rating, despite the presence of a sex doll. It's a Hallmark Hall of Fame story about generosity, love, community, and tolerance ... and it happens to have a central character who thinks his anatomically-correct toy is a real person.
  
  
• I loved Alan DeNiro's thoughtful review of The New Space Opera, because it expressed eloquently and insightfully exactly my feelings about so many things, particularly the often-missed possibilities of contemporary science fiction.

A Few Quick Notes

It's likely there won't be much in the way of updates around here for at least a few days, but I have a few fragments of information and marginal bits of thought to share before I go...

• John Joseph Adams wrote a nice piece for SciFi Wire about Jeff and Ann VanderMeer's guest editing of Best American Fantasy.
  
  
• Speaking of Best Americans, all the various ones from various publishers now seem to be out in stores. I stayed up much too late last night, utterly engrossed in The Best American Essays 2007, guest edited by David Foster Wallace. I always find a few essays in that book to be fascinating or impressive, but none of the other volumes I've read have so completely hooked me -- indeed, in all the other volumes I've encountered at least one essay that cured insomnia. That's not the case with this edition. I was reading the first essay, Jo Ann Beard's "Werner", last night at a pizza place across from Cooper Union, and I not only nearly missed the Jonathan Lethem event because the piece was so gripping, but it was a struggle not to burst into tears at the end of it. Breathtaking. As are so many of the other essays.
  
  
• I am doing everything I can not to run out and buy a copy of Denis Johnson's new novel, Tree of Smoke. The good people at McNally Robinson can attest to my immense powers of self-control. They watched as I struggled with the Mr. Hyde that kept pushing me toward it, toward it, toward it... People emailing to say how much they're enjoying it and how brilliant it is do not help the cause. I actually petted a friend's copy of it when we went out to see the play Have You Seen Steve Steven?. Even though it's a heavy book, she is addicted to it and carries it around with her wherever she goes. Actually, I think she does this to torture people like me, who lack the time to tackle a gazillion-page tome of brilliance right now. What else would explain her putting the book on the table at the bar we went to? In the middle of the table? Why why why do my friends insist on tormenting me?!?
  
  
• How was the play? Entertaining, generally well acted and directed, but the script (an amalgamation of Albee and Ionesco) falls apart in the last third, as if the writer didn't really know what to do with her set-up and threw her hands in the air and said, "Well, whatever!" I liked what was going on in the end more than what was going on in the beginning -- a bit too much of a familiar "aren't people in the mid-west funny?" and "isn't middle-class suburban life suffocating?" attempt at satire, despite some marvelous lines -- so it would have been nice if the script actually created a context for the absurdity of words divorced from meanings to be more, well, meaningful (the play becomes a game of ping-pong with free-floating signifiers). The end is amusing enough in its oddity, but there's no weight to it. It's strange, but not estranging. Nonetheless, watching the play was not at all a boring or tedious experience, and 13P is a really great venture, one I hope to continue to follow.
  
  
• Finally, as Woody Allen once said, "In summing up, I wish I had some kind of affirmative message to leave you with. I don't. Would you take two negative messages?"

A Question

I've been working on finishing up a long review with a deadline of tomorrow, so my brain is a bit fried. The review sparked a question that I have no answer for, though I'm sure it will be easy for somebody out there to respond to.

The question is this: Is there an anthology of science fiction stories about drugs?

The dream book that popped into my mind, and one I'm pretty sure doesn't exist, would be a wide-ranging reprint anthology covering everything from mad scientists with weird serums to 1960s psychedelia to cyberpunk narcotics to ... well, I'm blanking on recent druggy SF stories, but I know there are a few.

Lacking that particular book, though, what is there?

Howard Waldrop Blogs

The world has achieved perfection. Howard Waldrop is blogging at the Small Beer Press site:

You’ll notice there’s a beaver in both ads, the animal more responsible even than the buffalo for the settlement of the US from sea to shining sea.

You’ll also notice Lincoln is wearing a stovepipe ("beaver") hat. It’s all surrealistically related.

(Waldrop has, actually, entered the blogosphere before. But it's good to have him back.)

After the Apocalpyse, Discoveries

Scott McLemee's Inside Higher Ed column this week tackles a topic I took on myself recently: the culling of books. It caused me to reflect on living with a substantially reduced library, since I am now post-cull, and am actually only living at the moment with a small group of the books I saved, since the majority are still in storage back in New Hampshire.

While I enjoy not feeling quite so entombed by tomes as I used to be, again and again I've wanted to grab a book I know I have, only to discover it's not here. It's a strange sensation, the sensation of seeing something in peripheral vision that disappears when you turn your head, the sensation of seeking ghosts.

Not that having fewer choices of what to read has stopped me from reading too many books at once. As of this moment, I am in the midst of reading Dangerous Space by Kelley Eskridge, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World by Donald R. Howard, The Virtu by Sarah Monette, Beyond This Horizon by Robert Heinlein, Lost Son by M. Allen Cunningham, Sides by Peter Straub, and I'm probably going to start In a Town Called Mundomuerto by Randall Silvas very soon, because I just decided to abandon Mary Modern by Camille DeAngelis (didn't hold my interest, alas, amidst the competition). Not to mention various magazine (just got new issues of F&SF;[Alexander Jablokov and Ted Chiang in one issue!], Interzone [ever more gorgeous, and this issue full of Michael Moorcock!] Harper's [Alice Munro!]...) So I'm hardly starving for things to read. And I did bring substantial collections of my old favorites -- Shakespeare, Chekhov, Woolf, Faulkner, Beckett -- though somehow I managed to leave all the Kafka behind, which is just causing terrible angst, and the only poetry I brought with me were two books by Jennifer Moxley, which are wondeful, but not enough, and...

Well, anyway...

Really, the whole point of this seemingly pointless post was to say that in culling my books I discovered some I'd forgotten I had, and that was a great joy. I brought one of them with me, and have been reading it with immense pleasure: Far from the Madding Gerund, a collection of posts from one of my favorite blogs, Language Log. I remember being quite curious about the book when it first arrived, because I wondered how a book of blog posts would work, but then it got buried in the piles and I honestly forgot I had it.

At first, I found reading it a bit awkward. The biggest problem is one of hyperlinks. The blogosphere thrives on hyperlinks, of course, and though this causes some people concern, for me it's one of the attractions of blogs, because I like to be able to have the option of either follow the directions links lead to or not. With a book built from a blog, the editors and publishers have to figure some way to handle the links, and the folks who put Far from the Madding Gerund together decided to indicate links in the text with a lighter font and with a URL and a little bit of info about the link set as marginalia. It's as elegant a solution as I suppose there is, but it's pretty awkward. I got used to it as I read along, though, and the content of the book is, I find, so compelling that a bit of awkwardness doesn't detract.

I wondered, too, why anybody might want the book when all of these posts are, as far as I know, still available via the Language Log archives. But there's a difference between reading online and reading a book, at least for me -- really, I behave differently. I read a bunch of posts at Language Log the other day, but skimmed around between them, following links, jaunting about. When I sat down with Far from the Madding Gerund tonight, I skipped around, but not nearly as much as I did with the actual site. I read five and even ten pages in order at a time. I also felt a somewhat different attitude toward what I read -- reading the posts as a book, I reflected on them more, read them more slowly, reread parts, thought about things I might share with my students or with friends. I do all that with the blog itself, too, but less frequently. There was something about the book as a book that caused me to consider -- in a subtle way -- its content more carefully than I consider the blog's content, because my mind still treats books and websites differently. It's hard to describe the experience without implying that one way of reading is better than the other, but I honestly don't think of them as better or worse. I'm glad to have the book, because it organizes its information differently than the blog, and so I have discovered things in it I haven't discovered online. Blogs with archives as vast and substantive as those of LL benefit from a kind of "greatest hits" book, and the careful editing of this book has grouped posts together in such a way as to highlight connections that might otherwise not be obvious.