The Mumpsimus

  On August 18, 2003, I clicked "publish" on the first post of The Mumpsimus blog. That very first post was a simple definition of the word of the title. The next day, I wrote a statement of purpose . And then kept going. (Thanks to the Web Archive, you can see what the original version of the The Mumpsimus looked like.) All together, it's 2,074 posts and who knows how many millions of words. In 2013, I wrote a series of posts looking back year by year at the blog's first decade. That's as thorough a chronicle of the origins as I can make, and since it was ten years closer to 2003 than we are now, it's probably more reliable than my ever-less-reliable memory. Looking back at those lookings back, I'm pleased that in the post about 2003 , I highlighted my friendship with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Jeff and Ann were up here for Readercon last month (Jeff was Guest of Honor) and we hung out together with Eric Schaller for a few days in Boston afterward. (It...

  In an effort to make The Mumpsimus more flexible, lively, and up to date, I have decided to move it to Patreon . Don't worry — everything (and more) that I would normally post here, I will post for free at Patreon. But there will also be at least one paid level for folks who want more, including a series of dives into the archives. The public posts on the Patreon page are available to view without signing in or subscribing. If you want to get updates, though, the best thing to do is subscribe. For that, you will need to create a Patreon account. After you are signed in, just scroll down and click the Follow button to subscribe for free to public posts.  Of course, you are also welcome to join the $1 tier to enjoy the Archive Dives. But if that's not of interest, don't worry about it. Truly! One of the things I like about Patreon is the ability to customize what you get and how you interact. I've enjoyed this as a subscriber to a number of other people's Patreons,...

J.M.W. Turner, "Sunrise, a Castle on a Bay: Solitude" I see I haven't published a post here since the end of March. An uncharacteristic silence, even in these days of more limited blogging. Mostly, this has been because I've been busy with a bunch of other things (including another blog ), but I've also reached one of those periodic stages (for me, every 5-10 years, it seems) where I re-evaluate what I'm writing, who I'm writing for, the purpose of putting words out there in the world. One of the things I've been thinking about recently is how much I miss the old days of blogging, the early 2000s. Not that I miss any particular thing I wrote — I think the vast majority of what sits in the archives of this blog is not worth revisiting — but rather the energy and community, even the naivety. It's not something that can be repeated; I am not what I was, technology has changed significantly, the world is different. But I feel a tinge of nostalgi...

via Wikimedia , by Victoria Johnson I've mostly neglected The Mumpsimus this summer because I've been working on other things, including another blog, one related to and in support of my new job as Interim Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State University: a blog called Finite Eyes . I have drafts of a couple of uncompleted blog posts for this site, and I do hope to get around to finishing them, but I'm not sure when, as the busy-ness of learning a rather big new job does not leave lots of time for extra reading and writing. I'm also trying to turn my dissertation into a book worthy of proposing to a publisher, and this process has proved immensely time consuming and slow. So not a lot going on here, Mumpsimus readers, and not likely to be a lot for the foreseeable future. (Though there will be some, I'm sure, now and then.)

A quick site note: I've neglected to update the Fiction page on the blog here for some time, so I just did so. It now contains not just links to stories originally published online, but information about all the fiction I can remember publishing over the last 10 years or so. A couple old links were dead, and I found two stories completely available via Google Books ( "The Lake" and "In Exile" ), which made me very happy, because those are two of my personal favorites (which is to hint that reader reaction to them has been decidedly ... mixed...), and I had thought they were inaccessible and obscure. But no! (Well, their content  may be inaccessible and obscure — or, as some have maintained, pretentious, arrogant, presumptuous, artsyfartsy, and — or maybe that was somebody describing my cats...) You can even still buy the whole zine or book in which they appeared, which you should, indeed, do, because you are a supporter of small presses! (Though you should r...

I was bored with the old look of this site, so decided to change things around a bit. (If you're reading this via RSS or a mobile device or something, check out the actual website to see.) There may be some adjustments as I try it out on other computers and browsers, but for now this will do. Until I decide to go all neon green. Because clearly the internet needs more neon green.

Just an addendum to my previous post , in which I lamented the breaking of Google Reader's share function, which enabled the "Fresh Links" widget over on the sidebar— I have created a near fix, as you'll see if you look over on the side. I'm using the RSS feed from my Delicious account for this, since it was sitting dormant. (Thus some of those links are very much not fresh right now!)

It's long been time for this site to get a facelift.  Well, now it has one.  I've not only changed some of the formatting and colors (yes, I'm fond of purples; it's my site, it will have lots of purple!), but also taken advantage of Blogger's new Pages feature, familiar to anybody who's used Wordpress.  The pages are listed up there beneath the site header. The About and Fiction pages are self-explanatory, but the Selections page probably needs a few words of introduction. For a couple years now, I've wanted to put together a collection of the nonfiction I've written over the last seven years or so (since a piece of mine about George Saunders appeared in English Journal in May 2003), but I've struggled to come up with a book-length manuscript that is more than just a collection of miscellanea.  I could easily put together a collection just of my writings on science fiction, or on film, or general book reviews, or extended essays on writers su...

I'm experimenting with a new version of the blogroll in the sidebar. The hack to create it comes from Google Operating System and utilizes Google Reader . (Yes, we've pretty much become All Google All The Time here at Mumpsimus Central.) I do wish there were a way to ignore the first articles "A" and "The" when alphabetizing, but I haven't figured it out yet; also, people are alphabetized by their first names. When I was writing in every link separately myself, I alphabetized the blogroll by ignoring initial articles and sorting by people's last names, but I also stopped updating the blogroll because it was absurdly time-consuming to keep doing this in Blogger's template editor, which has some nice features, but which, when it comes to revising long lists of links, is awful. So the compromise I've made is to have an easy-to-update blogroll that is not alphabetized perfectly. (See what sacrifices I make for you?!) I thought about creatin...

I've been working with the template manager for the new version of Blogger, so the layout here is now new -- not unfamiliar, I hope, but there are some changes to colors and shapes and content. There are limits to what I can do without going in and editing the HTML code itself, which I'll probably do eventually, because there are some things from the previous layout that I like but that the template manager doesn't allow me to fiddle with (such as the sidebar font size differentiated from the post text size). The greatest benefit so far is that the three-and-a-half-year-old code, a Frankenstein monster built from an old template and adjusted by me using an ancient edition of Dreamweaver, is now gone and replaced with something much cleaner, which will make future edits easier and should make the page load more quickly and coherently. We'll see. A work in progress... Happy new year everybody!

I rely on NetNewsWire for RSS feed reading, but have begun to experiment with Google Reader as an online alternative. As part of that experiment, I'm trying out the sharing capabilities, so you will now see (I hope...) a "Fresh Links" section of the sidebar. This offers some recent links to weblog posts that I've found in some way or another interesting. You can connect from there to my public page , which also has its own feed if you want to receive it all in your own reader*. I'll keep playing with it see how it works out. Ideally, it could be an easy way to keep some fresh content going, and reduce some of the need for big linkdump posts. Note: If the "Fresh Links" section has disappeared, that means I'm fighting with it or am abandoning it. If it looks funny, that means I haven't gotten the code to integrate well with this site's template. In other words, this is all a test. *I've only been able to get the feed to work in Go...