Return of the Sandman Meditations

Things are likely to remain quiet around here for a little bit, because I need to force myself to kill the demons of procrastination and write a bunch of things for which I have deadlines.

But as one little hiatus begins, another ends -- Gestalt Mash is back (in beta) with new and better hosting, having suffered what any new site likes to suffer: faster-than-expected growth. Kudos to Jay Tomio for a huge amount of work migrating the site over the past few weeks.

Anyway, my latest column is about Season of Mists, Episode 3. (Previous installments are still here.) It contains this brilliant nugget of subtle insight, sure to recontextualize the entire Sandman series for you:
Entrails. Yum.

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In Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Roots of American Music by Ben Wynne

The review originally appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of Rain Taxi.


In Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Roots of American Music
by Ben Wynne

Louisiana State University Press 


“Today,” Ben Wynne writes, “the names Charley Patton and Jimmie Rodgers are rarely uttered outside the confines of documentary films or scholarly publications dealing with American roots music. Most people do not routinely listen to Patton or Rodgers records, and their songs are no longer heard on the radio.” [14] And yet the music of Patton and Rodgers echoes through most popular music from the middle of the 20th century to now, because Patton was one of the foundational figures of the Mississippi Delta style of blues and Rodgers was one of the foundational figures of what today is known as country music. From Patton and Rodgers we can trace a direct line to Robert Johnson, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Bob Dyl…
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Upcoming Publications

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The biggest is my book Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form: Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee at the Limits of Fiction. The (expensive) hardcover will be out in January, and a (less expensive) paperback will follow about a year later. I certainly wish that Bloomsbury did like other academic publishers and released the hardcover and paperback at the same time (and/or provided an inexpensive ebook), but so it goes. It will be available at academic libraries, and interlibrary loan is a godsend. (I expect my next academic book will be open access and openly licensed.)

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Orpheus in the Bronx by Reginald Shepherd

This review appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Rain Taxi. (I've left the page references in that RT uses for proofreading, as they may be useful to readers.)

Orpheus in the Bronx:
Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry
by Reginald Shepherd
University of Michigan Press


It's not difficult to trace the source of all the magic in Reginald Shepherd's first collection of essays—the author's sensitivity to the fruitful borderlands between aesthetics and politics—but pinning down each wondrous effect emanating from that source might take a while.This is a book rich with ideas and implications, a book that provokes and dazzles and sings.
In the introduction to Orpheus in the Bronx, Shepherd calls himself "someone who has looked to art and literature as a means for the expansion rather than the constriction of horizons" (1), and that tendency and quest is evident on every page of every essay.As a poet who is, among other things, black and gay, he might s…
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Elsewhere

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.

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Patriot (Seasons 1 and 2)

Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous. —Nathanael West, Day of the Locust

1.
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