The Mumpsimus

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…

For The Millions, I wrote about David R. Bunch's extraordinary Moderan, recently republished by NYRB Classics for the first time in about 50 years and with material that's never before appeared in book form.
Here's a taste:
Moderan collects dozens of brief stories set in a future world apparently destroyed by nuclear bombs, a world where the landscape has been entirely paved over with plastic and the surviving humans have transformed themselves into cyborgs, their bodies mostly replaced with metal, leaving only a few flesh-strips as evidence of their old form. The men with the most metal become warriors whose identity is merged with the Stronghold that houses them, and the pleasure and glory of Moderan is the warring of its Strongholds. (Most of the stories in Moderan focus on Stronghold 10, the best at warring.)  The new-metal men hunker down in their Strongholds and wage war against each other. War is the most exciting thing in everyone’s lives, the way to prove strength …

Over at my more academic-and-pedagogy-focused blog, Finite Eyes, I have written a post of thoughts about and inspired by John Warner's valuable new book, Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.

A taste:
Why They Can’t Write is not primarily aimed at writing teachers, particularly not teachers with some background in composition & rhetoric. While there’s certainly much of interest to comp & rhet folks, Warner’s goal is to make available to a general audience the insights that have been central to composition pedagogy and scholarship for decades. “With this book,” Warner says on page 5, “I want to speak to policy makers, educators, parents of school-aged children, and even students themselves, so we can engage in conversation and collaboration that will meet the needs of our culture and communities.”

As I read it, I thought about who I would want to give this book to once it comes out in paperback. Yes, I’d love all the comp & r…