The Mumpsimus

Most people my age have never heard of Phil Ochs, a singer-songwriter of the 1960s who, for a brief time at least, was as prominent in the folk music world as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Ochs's early work was mostly very topical (his first album was titled All the News That's Fit to Sing), and his later, less-topical songs never really caught on beyond Ochs's already-established audience, many of whom wanted him to return to recording songs with only an acoustic guitar for accompaniment. His later years were marred by alcoholism and mental illness, and by the time he hanged himself in 1976, at age 35, he was remembered -- if he was remembered at all -- as a relic of the previous decade.

But when I was growing up, Ochs was famous in our house. As a radio DJ in Massachusetts in the mid-60s, my father almost lost his job because of an Ochs song called "The Ballad of William Worthy". My father was no bomb-throwing radical -- he always voted for Republicans, including N…

One word can change everything.

Take, for instance, my latest Sandman Meditations column at Gestalt Mash. It now begins with this note:
UPDATE: A portion of this essay is based on a misreading. Not just a questionable interpretation or one of my more idiosyncratic reveries — no, literally a misreading, and one I did not learn about until after my mistake was already public. Please see the note at the end. As you'll see if you go and read the piece, my eyes were blind to the word "it" in a speech bubble. A little word, not the sort you might expect to cause major problems, a simple pronoun, no big deal.

But the presence or absence of that it determines the meaning not just of some events, but of the motivations of the protagonist of the story.

This is further confirmation of Mark Twain's great insight that "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."…

The latest issue of The Paris Review includes not only fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Roberto Bolaño, David Gates, and Amie Barrodale along with poetry by, among others, Frederick Seidel and Cathy Park Hong, but it also includes interviews with Samuel R. Delany and William Gibson.

An excerpt to whet your appetite:

DELANY Gide says somewhere that art and crime both require leisure time to flourish. I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate.
INTERVIEWER Do you think of yourself as a genre writer?
DELANY I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind of writer or another. That's about the cloest I…

I just got my schedule for Readercon events, so for folks attending, here's a preview of some of the fun (updated July 6):

Friday July 15 
11:00 AM   The Readercon Classic Nonfiction Book Club: The Jewel-Hinged Jaw.
Matthew Cheney, Elizabeth Hand (leader), David G. Hartwell, Barry N. Malzberg, Chris Moriarty.
Matthew Cheney's introduction to the most recent edition of Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) makes the case for the importance of this critical work: "Since 1977, when The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared, it has been impossible for anyone writing seriously about the nature and purpose of science fiction to ignore the ideas of Samuel Delany. Disagree with them, yes. Take a different approach, certainly. But the ideas first expressed in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and then refined and reiterated and revised in numerous other books [including his novels] are ideas that have so powerfully affected how science fiction has been discussed sinc…

(This is the latest in a weekly series of posts about the short stories nominated for this year's Caine Prize for African Writing. For more information, see my introductory post. The other posts about this story so far can be read at: Method to the Madness, Zunguzungu, and The Oncoming Hope. To keep up with it all, follow the Twitter hashtag #cainepr.)


Lauri Kubuitsile's"In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata" (PDF) is a delightful little story about, among other things, sex. The story is written in the style and manner of a comic folktale, its characters cartoonish and its situations amusingly absurd. Though sex is the topic of the story, at its heart this is a tale of equilibrium lost and regained -- just about the most surefire and time-tested template for comedy.

I'm wary of saying much about this one, because it would feel a bit like trying to explain a joke, and explaining jokes is the quickest way to kill them. Certainly, there's a bit to say about the gender …

Via Tempest Bradford I read the call for stories for a proposed anthology called Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations. The title and description are utterly screaming out for submissions filled with casual, ignorant, and textually-inherited exoticization and racism.

The "lost race / lost civilization / lost world" story derives from an imperialist history and view of the world, but at its most benign it's a version of the old "a stranger comes to town" story, with the stranger as the explorer and the town as the "lost" place. ("Lost" only to the stranger; to the inhabitants, it's been there all along and this "lost" talk is very odd, though maybe helpful if you're seeking to build a tourist industry.)

On Twitter, Cheryl Morgan wonderfully suggested, "What you need is an anthology full of brown people discovering the lost society of the USA. Gods of Mt. Rushmore?" David Moles said he'd already written that story wi…

I've got a couple of new pieces elsewhere:

At Tor.com, "Mr. Modesitt & Me", a personal essay in honor of the 20th anniversary of L.E. Modesitt'sThe Magic of Recluce. An interview I did with Lee for the anniversary will be posted later this week.

And after a week's break, I'm back with a new Sandman Meditations column (the 41st!), this one on "Parliament of Rooks".

Also, I'm not the only one writing an issue-by-issue chronicle of The Sandman -- fellow Caine Prize blogger The Oncoming Hope is doing so as well. Check it out!

The folks at NPR are asking for summer suggestions of "The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books", from which they will compile a final list.

There are 1,850 comments and counting right now. Plenty of the sorts of books that have inhabited such lists for decades (The Foundation Trilogy, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, Lord of the Rings, etc.), but also lots of idiosyncratic choices, which is, I think, exactly what such a list should get -- indeed, I would love them to get so many eclectic comments that it's impossible for a list of fewer than 534 titles to be created from it.

In that spirit, I submitted two lists:
The Odyssey by Homer
Hamlet by Shakespeare [though, on reflection, I think if I were to do it again I'd put Twelfth Night here]
The Double by Dostoyevsky
The Castle by Kafka
Orlando by Woolf

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison
We Who Are About To by Joanna Russ
The Return to Nevèrÿonseries by Samuel R. Delany
The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad
The Affirmati…