The Mumpsimus

Terry Eagleton, from a review of the 50th anniversary edition of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: To describe something as realist is to acknowledge that it is not the real thing. We call false teeth realistic, but not the Foreign Office. If a representation were to be wholly at one with what it depicts, it would cease to be a representation. A poet who managed to make his or her words ‘become’ the fruit they describe would be a greengrocer. No representation, one might say, without separation. Words are certainly as real as pineapples, but this is precisely the reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the ‘air of reality’ of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick – a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve of a moustache, let us say) simply to signal: ‘This is realism.’ In such art, no waistcoat is colourless, no way ...

From three of the most interesting things I've read recently and, thus, started thinking about together... M. John Harrison: A world can be built in a sentence, but epic fantasy doesn’t want that. At the same time, it isn’t really baggy or capacious, like Pynchon or Gunter Grass. It has no V . It has no Dog Years . It has no David Foster Wallace. It isn’t a generous genre. The same few stolen cultures & bits of history, the same few biomes, the same few ideas about things. It’s a big bag but there isn’t much in it. With deftness, economy of line, good design, compression & use of modern materials, you could ram it full of stuff. You could really build a world. But for all the talk, that’s not what that kind of fantasy wants. It wants to get away from a world. This one. Ian Sales on Leviathan Wakes  by James S.A. Corey: There are some 150 million people living in the Asteroid Belt. The greatest concentration is six million in the tunnels inside the dwarf planet ...

From a recently-unearthed interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini , conducted three days before he was murdered: Have you bid farewell to the realism of your first features for good? I don't agree with this. After 15 years in Italy, they finally showed Accattone on TV. We realized it is not a realist film at all. It's a dream, it's an oneiric movie. Didn't they consider it a realistic film in Italy? Yes, but it was a misunderstanding. When I made it, I knew I was doing a very lyrical film, not oneiric as it now seems, but deeply lyrical. I used that soundtrack and shot it in a certain way for a reason. Then what happened was that the realistic world I drew inspiration from for Accattone disappeared; it is no longer there, so the film is a dream of that world. Mamma Roma is realist… Mamma Roma is more realistic than Accattone , maybe. I should watch it again. It is less accomplished, less beautiful and that's because it is less dream-like.

Glenn Beck appropriates ACT UP's Silence = Death. I went to some ACT UP meetings and protests in the mid-1990s in New York . One of them was a protest against the Pope. People who were braver and more committed than I dropped a banner out of Saks 5th Avenue that read "CONDOMS SAVE LIVES". I was with a group of about 20 folks who were allowed into a special police-created protest area in amidst what felt like a million Catholics waiting for the Pope outside St. Patrick's Cathedral. I remember a woman coming up with her young daughter to the waist-high metal barricades that enclosed us. She threw holy water at us and told her daughter we were vampires. Perhaps in this new alternate reality, Beck will have Larry Kramer on his show to talk about Ronald Reagan . That would be fun...

CNN has a report on a study of 78 families where lesbian parents raised children over more than 24 years, with the results being that those children's scores on a standard test of behavior and psychological health are better than the average for children in "nonlesbian families". Wanting to offer a skeptic's view as well as that of researchers, CNN get a few quotes from Wendy Wright, whom they identify as "president of the Concerned Women for America, a group that supports biblical values" (presumably they don't pick and choose the "biblical values" they support, since that would be nothing more than using your favorite Bible quotes to support what you'd believe anyway, with or without the Bible, so they're probably similar to A.J. Jacobs , except they actually believe it all). It's good journalism to have scientific studies commented on by crackpots.  Very fair and balanced, that. CNN notes that "Funding for the resear...

I just finished writing a long review for Rain Taxi of Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death , and it's one of those rare books that I just want to recommend to everybody.  It's going to the top of my list of really good science fiction/fantasy novels that can be safely given to people who think they don't like SF, but it's also a book that can be appreciated both by people who merely want to read an engaging story and people who want more than just a good story.  I had so much fun writing a review of Who Fears Death because it is, among other things, very much a book about textuality and storytelling -- about how the stories we tell, the words we use, the structures and vantage points we select, affect our perception of the world.  I kept thinking of some of M. John Harrison's books and the way they throw our readerly expectations and habits back in our face.  Some of the pleasure, though, in reading Harrison is masochistic ("Yes, master, flog me again f...