The Mumpsimus

The ever-marvelous Rachel Swirsky has posted her contribution to the Third Bear Carnival, "A Meta-Fictional Diptych Relating to the Stories 'Appogiatura' and 'Fixing Hanover'"(cross-posted to Alas, a Blog), which could be considered, as she notes, fan fiction. Now if only all fan fiction were like this...
Rebecca Salt, age fourteen, daughter of divorced middle class Jews from Long Island, was tired of being a Speller. She could still remember how things had felt before she got competitive, when Spelling was still a pleasure, when she had a sort of palpable sense of the l-u-x-u-r-i-a-n-c-e** of words and letters. She'd heard the symmetry between alphabet and language as a kind of ringing d-u-l-c-i-m-e-r, intricate and melodious. Sometimes the joy she took in words felt a-u-t-o-c-h-t-h-o-n-o-u-s, seeming to rise up in her from some ineffable, otherworldly source.

Six years into the rote of shuffling flash cards in every free moment, gasping out words as she…

The Third Bear Carnival continues, and will continue to continue over the next few weeks, I expect. The latest freakshow act contribution comes from Brian Francis Slattery, who offers some thoughts on "The Goat Variations" and "Three Days in a Border Town" over at The New Haven Review. Here's a taste:
One of the abiding pleasures of writing books, and being lucky enough to have them published, is the way in which they have led me to discover parts of the literary world I may not have discovered otherwise. Among them is a brand of science fiction and fantasy that’s been given all kinds of labels—my favorite is the New Weird—but basically boils down to books in which many strange and interesting things happen, and in which the writing is really, really good. My running favorite author in this group, which makes him one of my favorite living authors, period, is Jeff VanderMeer, a prolific and vastly talented writer perhaps best known for his books about a fantast…

My second Sandman Meditations column is now live at Gestalt Mash, this one looking at the second story, "Imperfect Hosts", and considering, among other things, the place of speech and thought balloons.

The wonderful online film magazine Reverse Shot has just released an entire issue devoted to sound, with essays on the sound of specific and quite varied films:
If one shot can contain an entire film in essence, then can a sound? And if the instantaneous break between two images contains shifts in perception that are the exclusive domain of cinema, then what happens when the aural element is added? Since the late twenties, sound has been as essential an ingredient as the shot or the cut in film’s construction, yet more often than not it isn’t discussed in film criticism, with all elements of mise-en-scène making it take a back seat.I'm very sensitive to sound in general, and whenever I used to direct plays I spent nearly as much time on the sound design as anything else.  For the past eight months or so, I've been working as the sound recordist for an independent film some friends of mine are making, and that's made me even more aware of film sound than I was before.…

One of my favorite people in the science fiction community, Cheryl Morgan, is one of the people launching a new publishing company, Wizard's Tower Press.  From their own description of their primary publishing purpose:
We concentrate mainly on making out-of-print works available once more as e-books, and helping other small presses exploit the e-book market.

We will also publish a small number of limited-print-run anthologies with a view to encouraging diversity in the science fiction and fantasy field. In addition to that, though, Wizard's Tower will be launching a nonfiction webzine, Salon Futura, which Cheryl will edit.  This is great news, because in my own experience working with her, Cheryl has been a thoughtful, intelligent, and persistent editor, which is an ideal combination of qualities for an editor to possess.

Salon Futura needs submissions.  Read their guidelines and submit!  They pay money, and you need that, I know you do!

Some friends and I went to see Inception this afternoon because we had some time to kill and we were all curious about it. For a summer blockbuster, it's not bad at all.

But.

Of course, you knew there would be a "but". For a summer blockbuster, it's not bad at all, is the faintest of praise. It's not like the competition is exactly a pantheon of cinematic glory.

My feelings about the film are similar to those of Dennis Cozzalio, who wrote a long, thoughtful post that relieves those of us who agree with him from having to say a whole lot more. He says, "It’s not a dreamer’s movie, it’s a clockmaker’s movie," and that sums it up well for me. I didn't strain as much to keep up with the background and plot as he did, but I suspect that's just because I'm very familiar with science fiction exposition. (I think Abigail Nussbaum also has a lot of insight into the movie, particularly from the SF angle.) The puzzle aspects of the film are fun,…

Jay Tomio has started a new website, mostly (but not only) devoted to comics, called Gestalt Mash, and he very kindly asked me to be a regular contributor. When he first asked, I thought he must have me confused with somebody else, because though I have some good friends who are comics experts, I'm only an occasional reader of them myself. The only comic I read regularly as a kid was G.I. Joe, and I didn't read my first graphic novel until I was well into my 20's. Jay asked if I'd write about Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, writing a short essay for every issue. I told him, with a bit of embarrassment, that I've never read Sandman; indeed, I only know Neil Gaiman's work in prose (and like some of it quitea bit). Jay said that would be the fun -- plenty of comics afficionados have written about Sandman ... but what happens when somebody who doesn't know much about comics does?

Well, the first of my "Sandman Meditations" has now been posted, …

by Eric Schaller


[This post is part of an on-going series of explorations through, investigations with, and inspirations from Jeff VanderMeer's new short story collection, The Third Bear.]

The film ends in the head of the viewer, not on the screen.
--Michael Haneke Perhaps because I'd recently read L. Timmel Duchamp's interesting and thorough review of the new Library of America edition of Shirley Jackson's major works, Michael Haneke's Palm d'Or-winning film The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band), felt like a movie inspired by a Shirley Jackson story.

It is, however, very much a Michael Haneke film, though a bit of a departure from the movies he's most famous for. We still have the focus on suffering, violence, and guilt; the tone and affect is still analytical, cold, distant; mysteries remain unsolved, their solutions unimportant to an overall scheme in which what matters is not so much the mystery, but the effect of the mystery -- and yet there is a tenderness to some of these scenes that has been rare in much of Haneke's other work. Part of that comes from the large cast of characters: it would be very odd to portray an entire village witho…