The Mumpsimus

Tomorrow morning marks the start of our spring semester, and so I thought tonight I'd do my regular pre-term post about what I've got planned.

I'm teaching three classes, one of which I've never taught before. They are Currents in Global Literature, Introduction to Film, and Outlaws, Delinquents, and Other "Deviants" in Film & Society. Let's look at them one by one...

Bradford Morrow, editor of Conjunctions and writer of The Diviner's Tale and The Uninnocent, in an interview conducted by Edie Meidav at The Millions:
I may be overly optimistic or utterly blind, but my view of contemporary American fiction is that it is as rich as ever. Some of the best work is being written in what until recently was considered, at least among the conventional literati, genre fiction. Horror, gothic, mystery, fantasy, fabulism. There are so many stunningly original and serious writers working these fields. I have to think that anybody reading this interview would agree. Just one example, though there are many, would be Elizabeth Hand. She composes sentences of ravishing beauty. She is capable of creating metaphor systems that are so dynamic and provocative. She can turn a fictive moment that seems deeply rooted in the everyday into something that, in fact, touches upon the sublime, the miraculous. Just read her novella Cleopatra Brimstone and tell me that Americ…

At Gukira, Keguro has posted some provocative thoughts on "report realism" in Kenyan fiction:
Over the past 15 years and more specifically the past ten years or so, Kenyan writing has been shaped by NGO demands: the “report” has become the dominant aesthetic foundation. Whether personal and confessional or empirical and factual or creative and imaginative, report-based writing privileges donors’ desires: to help, but not too much; to save, but not too fast; to uplift, but never to foster equality. One can imagine how these aims meld with traditional modes of realism and naturalism and also speak to modernist truncations and postmodern undecidability. However, report realism names a more historically accurate way to name a genre indebted (very literally) to NGOS in Kenya.

The report aesthetic goes beyond citing NGO facts and figures. It is concerned, above all, with a search for truth and accuracy and is threatened by imaginative labor. I cannot comment on the specific accura…

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Ron Paul's insistence that "compensated emancipation" would have prevented the Civil War:
We are united in our hatred of war and our abhorrence of violence. But a hatred of war is not enough, and when employed to conjure away history, it is a cynical vanity which posits that one is, somehow, in possession of a prophetic insight and supernatural morality which evaded our forefathers. It is all fine to speak of how history "should have been." It takes something more to ask why it wasn't, and then to confront what it actually was.  For more, see his first post in this series.

I've been reading through this year's Best American Short Stories, edited by Geraldine Brooks, little by little, almost randomly, not quickly, and mostly as a reward to myself when I get other work done. I got it as an ebook, because that's a nicely convenient way to read it. What ultimately attracted me to it was that this year's table of contents is more interesting to me than any in the last few years. (Finally, a BASS that isn't a Best American Rich White People!) My favorite story so far is Rebecca Makkai's "Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart", originally published in Tin House. For me this story alone is easily worth what I paid for the book.

When I was younger, I thought John Sayles was one of the greatest living filmmakers. I unhesitatingly said Matewan was among my favorite five movies (yes, I had a favorite five movies, something that seemed immensely important to me at the time). I made a special trip to see Men with Guns when it was first released — I saw it during a matinee in West Newton, Massachusetts, and I was the only person in the theatre. It was a glorious experience.

But somewhere along the line, I began to re-evaluate Sayles's work. I saw all of his pre-Matewan movies, and they didn't really do much for me — I admired their intentions more than their results. I didn't quite know what to make of 1999's Limbo; I felt myself trying very hard to like it, because it was Sayles, but it took a lot of work to summon much enthusiasm for it. Then Sunshine State I thought was just terrible: flat, schematic, obvious, dreadful. Silver City was worse. Casa de los Babys I sort of liked, and certainly admi…

A fascinating interview at Boston Review with the always-already-fascinating Richard Nash:
...I’m tremendously optimistic about the future of the book as an object. I think the worst years of the book as an object have been the last 50 years. [...]

Basically, when you’ve got an industry that is pushing out $25 billion worth of physical products into a supply chain, the vast majority of businesses are going to try to cut costs and increase revenues. And the simplest way to cut costs is going to be on the production side. So if the core of the business is no longer a supply chain, but rather the orchestration of writing and reading communities, the book is freed of its obligation to be the sole means for the broad mass dissemination of the word, and instead become a thing where the intrinsic qualities of the book itself can be explored. And much more about publishing, reading, Cursor, communities, etc.

Here's a fabulous article by Lili Loofbourow from The Hairpin that presents excerpts from a book she discovered on Project Gutenberg, Are Women People?It's full of awesomeness, but the Delany-ologist in me particularly liked this bit about pockets:

Why We Oppose Pockets for Women
by Alice Duer Miller

1. Because pockets are not a natural right.

2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.

3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.

4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.

5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.

6. Because it would destroy man's chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.

7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.

8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey fl…

I think the SOPA/PIPAinternetblackout protest is a useful way to increase the public's awareness of legislation that has a potential to really affect the way the internet is structured. It's a "publicity stunt", indeed, because one of the goals of most protest actions is to increase public awareness of the protestors' point of view. Inconveniencing folks is a good way to do that.

Pure inconvenience is counterproductive, though. The inconvenience has to be mixed with informing the inconvenienced people about your point of view. That's why the various sites blacking themselves out are also providing links to information and ways for folks in the U.S. to contact their legislators.

I find the arguments against SOPA/PIPA convincing, and though some good and powerful people have come out against these specific bills, that doesn't mean the bills are dead, and even if it did, a show of solidarity against such bills can't be a bad thing. There are strong and …