A Decade of Archives 2: 2011

This is the second in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

Looking back through the posts for 2011, I felt great fondness for the year, if not for my blogging (I think overall it was one of the weaker years for The Mumpsimus. That tends to happen when life itself is busy and fulfilling, so I'm not complaining!) It was a year when I taught two of my favorite classes, Gender & Science Fiction and Global Literature; when we started blogging the Caine Prize; when Eric Schaller and I launched The Revelator, our very occasional online magazine; when I wrote, directed, and co-edited a short film without knowing much of anything about what I was doing; when I started making video essays; when I got to see one of my favorite Fassbinder movies, World on a Wire; and when I had a whole class pose for a picture whilst reading G.I. Joe comics. And much more!

When looking through the past posts, the one I ended up stopping on and wanting to think about more fully was one that grew out of my teaching of the Global Literature class: "Canonical Nationalism" from December, because though the post doesn't offer anything remotely original, I think it hits on important ideas about how we think about reading and writing, and how the categories we impose affect that thinking.

On Kipple and 2011

I have a couple of things at Strange Horizons this week: a new Lexias column, "Kipple", and a contribution to the annual year-in-review article.

I hadn't thought I'd read much that was first published in 2011, but looking over other people's contributions, I see I've read more than I thought; I just forgot when it was published. (For instance, I would have mentioned Gwyneth Jones's The Universe of Things, but for some reason I had it in my mind as having been published in 2010. I'm terrible with dates.)