The Mumpsimus

I am just coming to the news that Mark Woods, who ran the wood s lot site, died in February . I'd not been reading wood s lot regularly for a while — life got complex, internet reading more fragmented, and wood s lot  was just too rich, too full, too much: I hated skimming it, because it was material that needed to be absorbed more fully, more thoughtfully. I regret that, and am glad that the archives survive. I can't overstate the effect of wood s lot  on me in the early days of blogging here. (The consistent quality of the site is awe-inspiring. I look back through my own archives here and mostly think I'm looking at the doodles of a child. Read through the archives of wood s lot  and from the beginning you'll perceive a sharp mind arranging the signs and sights of the universe.) In the scrappy days before social networks and corporate bloggers, Mark Woods' site and David Auerbach's Waggish  offered a literary seriousness that made online writing see...

The late David Markson did not have a computer. In March 2004, Laura Sims told him that there were things written about him on blogs. He replied: NO, I've no idea what a Blog is. BLOG? Sims sent him print-outs: Hey, thank you for all that blog stuff but forgive me if after a nine-minute glance I have torn it all up. I bless your furry little heart, but please don't send any more. In spite of the lost conveniences, I am all the more glad I don't have a computer. HOW CAN PEOPLE LIVE IN THAT FIRST-DRAFT WORLD? They make a statement about my background, there's an error in it. They quote from a book, and they leave out a key line. They repudiate a statement of fact I've made, without checking, ergo announcing I'm a fake when the statement is 100% correct. Etc., etc., etc. Gawd. I have just taken the sheets out of the trash basket & torn them into even smaller pieces.  From the wonderful little book Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson , edi...

For the Advanced Prose Workshop class that I'm teaching at Plymouth State University this term, I had the students create and manage a blog. They've been playing with it for a little while now, testing out templates and figuring out how to post different types of things. We opened it up to the world today. I'm pretty much letting them do what they want with it, hoping that having a real audience for their work will be both educational and encouraging. With that in mind, I encourage you to take a glance and leave a comment, particularly if something they've written especially interests you. For many of these students, this is the first audience they've ever had beyond friends, family, and teachers. They're really just getting started with posting, but there should be a steady stream of material over the next few weeks. (And as I've warned before, my own blogging here is likely to be light through December.)

At The Kenyon Review website , Hilary Plum has been doing some excellent blogging about questions of empire, writing, canonicity, etc. I left a comment on one post that was mostly just me giving a short version of my canonical nationalism schtick, not because I thought the post was bad, but because the article Plum used as a basis for her thoughts annoyed me. (I wish I had made my gratitude for her own thinking clearer, but I was in a hurry, and it's internet, so...) Most recently, she wrote a post titled "Writing American Empire" that collects a nice range of ideas about U.S. novelists and the lands the U.S. has been occupying, invading, bombing, etc. recently. Trying to summarize the different points of view would likely distort them, so I'll just exhort you to head over to the KR blog to see what it's all about. If you've ever felt either excited or queasy about the phrase "cultural appropriation", this is a discussion you should read.

Ron Hogan has an interesting post over at Beatrice, updating a 2008 post called "What's Your Ultimate Blogroll?" for the new year. This reminded me of a discussion I had with a creative nonfiction class in early December, where I was one of a few folks invited in to talk about blogging. One of the things the students asked was, "What blogs do you recommend?" I said, "Well, I've got a blogroll on the sidebar of my site with some blogs listed in it..." The instructor for the course laughed and said, "And it's got something like 300 blogs on it!" It does certainly list a lot of sites, some of which, I'm sure, are defunct. I keep up with them all via Google Reader , and, in fact, display the list via Google Reader -- if you wanted, you could subscribe to the list itself  and see every post from everybody on it. Not very practical, though, as a recommendation service. And though in some ways it does, in fact, represent some of wh...

Once upon a time, Jeff Ford was one of my favorite bloggers.  He posted stories, rants, photos, etc. on a Livejournal site charmingly called 14 The Ditch.  It's now only available in fragments on the Wayback Machine , alas.  Mr. Ford quit halfway through his first term decided to focus more of his time writing award-winning stories and novels , and further recovering from once collaborating with a schmuck , the lowest moment of his career.  He opened a Facebook account and spent most of his time posting cute pictures of cats and the occasional status message such as, " Jeffrey Ford has decided to accept the offer to write 10 books in the Left Behind series.  Important to have an eclectic career if you want to survive these days as a writer. " Thankfully, Mr. Ford has decided to return to the land of blogging with a new Livejournal site, Crackpot Palace .  No more cute cat pictures, he promises.  And he's given up Left Behind for the Predator se...

Every time Amazon flexes its muscle to reveal just how powerful its monopoly is (cf. the latest brouhaha ), I grow a bit more uncomfortable making all the book title links on this blog ones that go to Amazon and, through their Associates program, send back some spare change to me.  I mean, I know I'm immoral for using Amazon so much, but I've already admitted to being a pox upon the bookselling body in general.  In most of my choices as a consumer, I'm a pox upon the entire world, a blight of bourgeois indifference, a hemmorhoid on the......  Well, you get the idea. But what about you?  Why should Amazon be the only choice you have when following a link to find out more information about a book, and possibly to order a copy for yourself?  Why should I force you to be the same sort of immoral pox-blight-hemmorhoid as I? I've stuck with the Amazon Associates program for, as I said on David Moles's blog , reasons of inertia and of not knowing of...

I had promised myself I would not blog again until I had finished x, y, and z, and while x and y are finished, z (an essay about J.M. Coetzee's memoir-novels) is beating me up and winning. But I'm going to pause in the fight for a moment and break my self-promise because today I discovered Aaron Bady's astoundingly excellent blog Zunguzungu via a marvelous post Bady wrote at The Valve about Chinua Achebe and the African Writers Series (a post that previously appeared on Zunguzungu). It's been a long time since I last encountered a blog where the excitement of discovery came from finding someone giving expression to inchoate thoughts I'd never quite found words for, but that happened again and again as I read through Bady's blog, especially the post "When Good People Write Bad Books" and this earlier Achebe post , referencing Norman Rush (whose Mating I adore, or, at least, I adored when I read it about ten years ago) to explore the idea of "g...

While watching the marvelous end credit sequence of WALL-E last week, I thought I saw Shaun Tan's name amongst the art department, but I wasn't sure, because I was having too much fun following the concept of the credit sequence to pay close attention to the names. I thought I could rely on IMDB, but no, he's not listed there. Did I dream it? I fired up the ol' Google, though, and voilá -- this article from The Australian , wherein it is said: "...he was commissioned to do art work on the Hollywood children's films Horton Hears a Who and the forthcoming WALL-E . While he enjoyed both jobs and insists he has no complaints, most of his work ended up on the cutting-room floor." The jaws of Google are vast, though, and they also caught an entry on TOR art director Irene Gallo's blog that is really the point of this whole entry. What they caught was Bob Eggleton's comment : "The ending credits are worth the price of admission and,really un...

Sad news this morning: Giornale Nuovo has reached an end . Giornale Nuovo is a blog I've been reading and linking to for years now, and, in fact, I have probably linked to a greater percentage of the posts there than to any other blog, because though new material came out somewhat infrequently, the posts were so often fascinating and beautiful -- many times focused on artwork of some kind -- that they deserved much attention. The archives are rich and extraordinary, and well worth sauntering through. I will miss the excitement of new GN posts, but I am grateful for all that has been given to us over the years, and I will keep some hope up for an eventual resurrection.

Potash just let me know that there are two new blogs worth keeping an eye on. First, the Kwani? literary magazine and organization now has its own blog (not to be confused with the Kwani? litfest blog ). I was thrilled to see that Kwani? 4 has officially been published , and I hope copies find their way to the U.S. soon (the first three are available at various places, and are worth seeking out). I saw a preliminary edition of Kwani? 4 when I was in Kenya in December, and it's a big book rich with fiction, poetry, and nonfiction of all sorts. Second, Binyavanga Wainaina has a blog . Actually, that should be Binyavanga Wainaina has a blog!!! , because it gives me great joy that one of the most astute writers I know is now going to be (at least occasionally) posting new material online. Binyavanga is presenting not only some of his own writing, but that of writers he knows and admires, including Jackie Lebo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie .