The Mumpsimus

This afternoon, I will be flying to Los Angeles for the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference . Here's my schedule of events, in case you're in the area and want to say hello... Thursday, 3/31: Black Lawrence Press reading and party at CB1 Gallery , 7pm Friday, 4/1: Signing at Black Lawrence Press booth (#1526), 1-2pm Saturday, 4/2: signing at the GLBTQ Caucus Hospitality Booth (#633), 12-12.30pm And of course I'll be wandering around the conference and spending lots of time at the book fair.

Once again, chaos and luck have conspired to release another issue of the venerable Revelator magazine into the world! In this issue, you can read new fiction by Sofia Samatar and John Chu; an excursion into musical history by Brian Francis Slattery; surreal prose poems by Peter Dubé; an essay by Minsoo Kang; revelatory, rare, and historical Wizard of Oz comics; art by Chad Woody; and, among other esoterica, shotgunned books! Go forth now, my friends, and revel in The Truth ... and All!

This review originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of Z Magazine . I'd forgotten about it until somebody today mentioned that it's the anniversary of most of the striking workers' demands being met (12 March 1912), and so today seemed like a good one to post this: Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream   by Bruce Watson New York, Viking, 2005, 337 pp. Lawrence, Massachusetts was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, what might be called one of the greatest mill towns in the United States, but "greatest" is a difficult term, and underneath it hide all the conditions that erupted during the frigid winter of 1912 into a strike that affected both the labor movement and the textile industry for decades afterward.             Bruce Watson's compelling and deeply researched chronicle of the strike takes its name from a poem and song that have come to be associ...

John Eliot Gardiner, from Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (Preface): A nagging suspicion grows that many writers, overawed and dazzled by Bach, still tacitly assume a direct correlation between his immense genius and his stature as a person. At best this can make them unusually tolerant of his faults, which are there for all to see: a certain tetchiness, contrariness and self importance, timidity in meeting intellectual challenges, and a fawning attitude toward royal personages and to authority in general that mixes suspicion with gain-seeking. But why should it be assumed that great music emanates from a great human being? Music may inspire and uplift us, but it does not have to be the manifestation of an inspiring (as opposed to an inspired) individual. In some cases there may be such correspondence, but we are not obliged to presume that it is so. It is very possible that "the teller may be so much slighter or less attractive than the tale." [ source ] The very...

Eric Bennett  has an MFA from Iowa , the MFA of MFAs. (He also has a Ph.D. in Lit from Harvard, so he is a man of fine and rare academic pedigree.) Bennett's recent book Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War is largely about the Writers' Workshop at Iowa from roughly 1945 to the early 1980s or so. It melds, often explicitly,  The Cultural Cold War  with  The Program Era , adding some archival research as well as Bennett's own feeling that the work of politically committed writers such as Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck was marginalized and forgotten by the writing workshop hegemony in favor of individualistic, apolitical writing. I don't share Bennett's apparent taste in fiction (he seems to consider Dreiser, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, etc. great writers; I don't), but I sympathize with his sense of some writing workshops' powerful, narrowing effect on American fiction and publishing for at...