The Mumpsimus

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…

This review originally appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Rain Taxi.


Allah Is Not Obliged
by Ahmadou Kourouma
translated by Frank Wynne
Anchor Books


First published in Paris in 2000 as Allah n'est pas obligé, and now arriving in the U.S. for the first time, Ahmadou Kourouma's final novel is the harrowing story of a child soldier in Côte d'Ivoire and Liberia in the 1990s.It is a story of adult atrocities perceived (and committed) by a child, but ultimately it is something other than that, a fiction that shows how fiction can—and, perhaps, should—fall apart when asked to bear the weight of the real horrors of the world.
Though his four novels are as yet almost unknown within the United States, Kourouma's reputation in France is strong, and he received various awards before his death in December 2003. Born in 1927 in Côte d'Ivoire, he spent time during his childhood in Guinea and Mali before going to France for school and later to Indochina as a soldier with the Fren…

This review appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Rain Taxi.

Upon the Altar of the Nation: 
A Moral History of the Civil War
by Harry S. Stout
Viking

Any history of the U.S. Civil War is a moral history, because the brutal events of the war have little meaning in and of themselves, and so historians must put forth interpretations and arguments about not only how, but why such blood was shed.  The paradox any historian must confront, though, is that the Civil War, while inevitably draped in moral evaluations, is rich with contradictions and complexities that render all moral judgment at best reductive and shallow.

"Instead of declaring the Civil War a just war dictated by prudent considerations of proportionality and protection of noncombatants," Harry Stout writes, "I argue that in too many instances both sides descended into moral misconduct."  Though this is hardly a revolutionary thesis, Stout builds evidence for his argument with stubbornly repetitive clarity via …

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…

After Jimmy Carter's timid efforts to make America adjust to late-twentieth-century realities, Reagan installed fantasy as the motor of national consciousness, and it's still pumping disastrously along.
—Alexander Cockburn I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface.
—Derek Jarman
In March of 1985, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech to a business association and quoted Clint Eastwood’s most popular line from the 1983 “Dirty Harry” movie Sudden Impact:  "I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead, make my day."

As a former Hollywood actor and head of the Screen Actors Guild, the 40th president relied on movies to help him communicate his ideas and emotions, and to help him understand the world and his place in it. Biographer Lou Cannon wrote that "Even when he was gone from Hollywood, Hollywood was never gone from him. He watched movies whenever he could, and the movies were the r…

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 nostalgia occasionally for the youthful hope and for a certain innocently arro…

Mike Leigh's latest movie, Peterloo, is one of the most disappointing films I've ever seen.

This is not to say it is necessarily a bad movie — there are countless worse ones, and, indeed, there are things to admire in Peterloo. Disappointment depends on one's expectations; mine were so high that I sought out a British DVD because Peterloo isn't being released in U.S. theatres until next month, and maybe not to a theatre anywhere near my rural world. (Amazon is one of the producers, so I assume it will hit Amazon Prime once it finishes its limited U.S. run.)

My disappointment stemmed from having not been disappointed with a Mike Leigh film since 1997's Career Girls, a movie about which the less said, the better. With that one exception, Leigh's run from High Hopes in 1988 to Mr. Turner in 2014 seems to me one of the most consistently interesting of any English-language filmmaker. (His earlier work I have more mixed feelings about. A lot of it seems intentionall…

Over at my other blog, Finite Eyes (about academic subjects, and things related to my job as Interim Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State), I've got a few new posts, including one on the pricing of academic books, which might be of at least vague interest to Mumpsimus readers.

There's also a post thinking about John Warner's excellent book Why They Can't Write. And a post that's gotten tons of traffic after being Tweeted out by a few prominent academics' accounts: "Cruelty-Free Syllabi".

I keep recommending Maria Dahvana Headley's most recent novel, The Mere Wife, to people, and so it seems I should write a little something about it.

(Had my summer and, especially, fall been less fraught, I would have written about The Mere Wife some time ago, because it's a terrific novel and Maria and I have been friends for more than 20 years now, making me very much inclined to tell the world when I think she's done great work. But life intervened, as it does. Here I am, though: World! The Mere Wife is great work!)

The Mere Wife  slyly elides some of the differences between novels, epics, and narrative poems. Novels are omnivorous monsters that eat up every form and mode they encounter, and a writer who knows this — who, in fact, revels in it — is set to wrangle and wrestle the beast into a powerful shape. Since The Mere Wife is inspired by/riffing on Beowulf, a raid on the fortresses of other storytelling forms is especially appropriate. There is a freshness to this n…