The Mumpsimus

This is the ninth 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 . 2004 was the first full year of The Mumpsimus. It was also the year with the largest number of posts: 319. (These days, I'm able to get out about 100 or so in a year.) And it was the year when a relatively large number of people began to notice what was going on here. That initial attention is what made me think this was not, perhaps, just a useless lark. A lark, yes, and largely useless, yes, but maybe not completely so... The year began with a post about returning : I hadn't paid a lot of attention to the site at the end of 2003, having written one post in December and none in November. The first paragraph of that post indicates that I was still thinking of this as a site about, primarily if not exclusively, science fiction. The reason for my absence...

It's a sunny, cool Saturday morning up here in the wilds of New Hampshire, and I was filled with the desire to share some music this morning, but wasn't sure what. My recent discovery and obsession, Ted Hawkins ? Couldn't choose just one song. The most amusing song I've heard this week, Marion Harris's "I'm a Jazz Vampire" ? Tempting, tempting... But then a finished copy of Alan DeNiro's novel Total Oblivion, More or Less arrived in my mailbox, sporting its fabulous cover, and Booklist gave it a starred review , and for various reasons that will become apparent the minute you read a synopsis of the book, I couldn't get a certain Andrew Bird song out of my head, and then found this lovely video someone had created for it, and my choice of music to share with you this morning was pretty much made for me. Enjoy--

Long-time Mumpsimus readers will remember a young man named Alan DeNiro, subject of an interview in 2004 , and a young woman named Juliet Ulman, subject of an interview I conducted for Fantasy magazine in 2006. Recent readers will remember that, in 2008, the elves of Mumpsimus Mansion expressed excitement that a young woman named Colleen Lindsay moved from the world of publicity to the world of agenting, and one of her first clients was the above-named Mr. DeNiro. Well, our plan for world domination is coming together. Super-writer DeNiro has, via the talents of super-agent Lindsay, joined forces with super-editor Ulman ! The elves are jumping up and down with joy, expressing great congratulations to Alan for selling his novel Total Oblivion, More or Less to Juliet at Bantam via Colleen. Numerologists will note that the various important events (interview 1, interview 2, joy for Colleen) occurred in even-numbered years. What do we have planned for 2010? Wait and see, my child...

Alan DeNiro : And so it comes back to emotion, and in a weird way I feel a bit like I've come full circle since when I was 15 and writing poems and stories as a tonic to alleviate my misery. The emotional responses that I write about are part of the world, and part of my engagement with it. This isn't a move toward easy therapeutic confessionalism, but rather to be unafraid to use my self as material, halfway between the public ambulatory life and the private sphere of my own thoughts. To see my imperfections and faults as, perhaps, codes themselves that can at one point be reinterpreted on the page as hope.