The Mumpsimus

This is the sixth 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 . I'm Not There 2007 began with an outtake from an interview I did with Juliet Ulman of Bantam Books and ended with a rather mysterious announcement on December 24 that I would need to take a break from blogging for a while. The reason for the hiatus was something I discussed in the previous post : my father's death. I last talked with him on my cell phone as I was walking home after seeing Tim Burton's movie of Sweeney Todd , a review of which was the last substantive post I wrote that year; the next afternoon, I got the call from the New Hampshire State Police. The only thing I managed to write between the announcement of my absence and then my later return was a column for Strange Horizons  that adds some context to it all, "Of Muses and ...

The Farther Shore is the current LitBlog Co-op pick, and reading it caused me to think about a few different things, given that the novel portrays American soldiers in East Africa. It was, in fact, exactly a year ago that I was a tourist in Kenya , only a few hundred miles away from Somalia, where Matthew Eck had fought for the U.S. Army in the 1990s. A few hundred miles, a decade of years, entirely different worlds. (The U.S. has had a long history in Somalia , with U.S. military operations continuing , though this time as part of operations against al-Qaeda, while the situation remains complex and difficult .) Before reading The Farther Shore , I wondered about why it needed to be a novel -- why, in these memoir-sodden days of ours, would a writer choose fiction when he could probably have gotten more money and notice by writing about his own experiences? I became a bit skeptical of the fiction, because there were many possible pits it could fall into: politics and polemics ove...

I can’t control or predict how readers will respond to or understand what I’ve written, but I gather that some readers have found the violence in Jamestown quite horrifying, as I often did while writing it, while others have been inclined to read it as slapstick, as I often did while writing it. I think there are many passages in which characters are deeply disturbed by the violence done to and by themselves, while there are many others in which characters respond glibly and blithely to violence they’ve witnessed or perpetrated. Why write (or intend to write) violence that sometimes feels real and sometimes fake and stylized? I think as a way of representing both the experience of violence and the representation of violence: violence as violence and violence as spectacle. To put it another way, I meant to wr...

This is the beginning of Jamestown week at the LBC , with much fun and excitement promised. I'm putting together at least one post about the book, but for now will offer some links of related, or even unrelated, interest: An interview with Matthew Sharpe at Failbetter.com A reading by Matthew Sharpe at NPR A Q&A with Sharpe at New York magazine A TimeOut New York article about Sharpe and Jamestown More Sharpe & Jamestown links from Scott Esposito John Clute's review : "It is in this treating of its characters as soft-shoe, and of the world(s) they do their numbers on as an extremely slippery stage, that Jamestown seems so 21st-century, so surprisingly capable of making the reader feel that it has been told from some point far beyond the events remembered and anticipated between its opening and its closing curtain." Ed Park's review : "On any given page, Sharpe can swing contagious exuberance ('How unpleasant and interesting it is to be a...

It's LitBlog Co-op time again, and this quarter's pick is Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe , a bizarre and wonderfully fun novel that LBC nominator Megan Sullivan sums up well: Set sometime in the future, this book chronicles a group of settlers from Manhattan traveling South in a large bus/tank to establish an outpost in southern Virginia. The book features historical figures like John Smith, Pocahantas and others. Each chapter tells the story from a different character’s perspective. The settlers are led by John Ratliff, whose mother’s boyfriend is the CEO of the Manhattan Company, who are enemies of the Brooklyn Company. The Indians, who speak English (which they try to conceal to the visitors), aren’t technically Indians. They just try to live like them and are “red” because they’re not using strong enough sunscreen. Powhatan leads them with the help of his advisor Sidney Feingold. Pocahantas falls in love with greasy haired communications officer Johnny Rolfe and saves the li...

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.

It's time again for another pick from the LitBlog Co-op, and this time it's Alan DeNiro's Skinny-Dipping in the Lake of the Dead ! I kept quiet during deliberations, because Alan's a friend and I could easily be accused of favoritism, but I'm thrilled the book came out as the top pick. Even if I hated Alan, I'd still like the book. And I don't hate Alan. In fact, Alan and The Mumpsimus have a long history, as he was one of the first writers I ever interviewed here. Later, he participated in the speculative poetry symposium I put together for Strange Horizons. (Nowadays, I hear, he lives in a cardboard box in Montana, where he survives on fried boll weevils and wombat blood. Let no-one suggest that association with this weblog has deleterious effects!) During Skinny-Dipping week at the LBC, we will be discussing the book as a whole, individual stories, and other topics, and I am frantically searching for the pictures of Alan in a bikini that I have ...

This blog has been more sporadic and had less content in the past couple months than I would like, but life got suddenly very busy in a bunch of different ways, and I'm still playing catch-up. But some stuff is winding down, and I'm hoping to be able to make things a bit more consistent and varied around here within the next month or so. In the meantime, here are some almost-random fragments of whateverness... It's Wizard of the Crow Week over at the LitBlog Co-op . Most, if not all, of my blogging this week will be over there. We've already posted the first part of a roundtable discussion, and we'll have more parts going up later, as well as some contests for people to win copies of the book, a podcast interview with Ngugi, and various other fun things. We're putting the finishing touches on Best American Fantasy and have put out a call for submissions and recommendations for the second volume . The book is currently available for pre-order from Amazon ...

Over at the LitBlog Co-op, it's Demon Theory Week . This book didn't do much for me, but that may have as much to do with me as it, so don't stay away, because the discussion has already gotten interesting.

It's Seven Loves week at the LitBlog Co-op , and I highly recommend stopping by now and then this week, because Valerie Trueblood's novel is absolutely beautiful -- lyrical, affecting, complex, and entrancing (any other quarter, it probably would have been my first pick, but I couldn't help but fall hopelessly in love with Wizard of the Crow ). I'm hoping to do a bit of posting about it later in the week, but some unexpected events at work have knocked me a bit behind on things.

Over at the LitBlog Co-op is an annoucement of this quarter's Read This! selection , a book that I utterly adore. (And I just about utterly adore one of the other nominees, too, so it seemed to me like one of the stronger quarters the LBC has had in a while. I'll have a lot more to say later.) Things are likely to be slow here this week (as if they haven't been for the past few weeks...) because we're finishing up work on Best American Fantasy , which is shaping up to be a pretty durn interesting anthology, methinks, and one unlike any other out there. (Not that I'm biased or anything.) Speaking of BAF , Jeff VanderMeer (who also recommends the LBC pick) has posted his thoughts on some of what we've encountered while reading. I'm still thinking about all this, trying to have something resembling a coherent thought after reading and discussing piles of stories, so I'm going to refrain from saying anything for right now other than that basically I co...

ManBug Week has wound down over at the the LBC with a podcast interview with George Ilsley created by the great and glorious Carolyn Kellogg of Pinky's Paperhaus and the tenebrous, ranting denizens of The Bat Segundo Show . I haven't been on a fast enough internet connection yet to listen to the interview, but Carolyn told me she enjoyed talking with George and that he said plenty of illuminating and amusing things, so I'm looking forward to listening to that part of the interview. I'm more wary of the beginning, because Carolyn and I talk about the book for a moment before introducing George, and I expect I sound like an idiot. Ignorance is, perhaps, bliss.

Things are a-hoppin' at the LBC, with Jeff Bryant proclaiming his passion for the book he nominated for this term, Sideshow by Sidney Thompson and me singing the praises of my nominee, Manbug by George K. Ilsley . Of course, Sam Savage's Firmin was the book that got the most votes, and it's a fun book well worth your attention, but don't neglect the other two, either. (And no, even though Jeff, Ed, and I are known in certain circles as The Boyz of the LBC, we did not agree beforehand only to choose books with one-word titles written by men.)