The Mumpsimus

One word can change everything. Take, for instance, my latest Sandman Meditations column at Gestalt Mash . It now begins with this note: UPDATE: A portion of this essay is based on a misreading. Not just a questionable interpretation or one of my more idiosyncratic reveries — no, literally a misreading, and one I did not learn about until after my mistake was already public. Please see the note at the end. As you'll see if you go and read the piece, my eyes were blind to the word "it" in a speech bubble. A little word, not the sort you might expect to cause major problems, a simple pronoun, no big deal. But the presence or absence of that it  determines the meaning not just of some events, but of the motivations of the protagonist of the story. This is further confirmation of Mark Twain's great insight that "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the ligh...

Now and then, those of us who write book reviews let our guard down and make generalized statements that could be proved wrong with a single exception. Sometimes we buffer such statements with qualifiers that technically relieve them of being pure generalizations, but I doubt many readers are fooled. For instance, last year I wrote a somewhat less than positive review of Nisi Shawl's short story collection Filter House . I even said this: While I find it easy to believe readers will experience Shawl's stories in different ways -- such is the case with any basically competent fiction -- I cannot imagine how a reader who is sensitive to literature's capabilities and possibilities could possibly say these stories offer much of a performance. I certainly made a point of highlighting my subjectivity here: "I cannot imagine how...", but still. The intent is clear. I spent most of the review saying, in one way or another, that this book seemed to me the epitome of m...