The Mumpsimus

The Modernist Archives Publishing Project ("a critical digital archive of early twentieth-century publishing history") has now published a biography/bibliography I wrote about William Plomer , the man who, among other accomplishments, links Virginia Woolf and James Bond. Back in 2015, I wrote here about Plomer's little-known novel The Invaders , and that post explores what most fascinates me about Plomer: his reticence and, honestly, his failure. As I said in the MAPP bio, The Invaders  is a story of class conflicts and homosexuality, though the presentation of the latter was so quiet that one of the directors of Jonathan Cape, Rupert Hart-Davis, complained of the protagonist in one scene, “You don’t say, and hardly even infer, whether they went to bed together or not,” but Plomer refused to be more explicit (Alexander 194). When the novel was published, E.M. Forster wrote a letter to Plomer criticizing the ambiguity, which he admitted he felt was a failure in his ...

Over the last few years, Verso released Portraits  and Landscapes , two collections of John Berger's writings edited by Tom Overton , who is writing a biography of Berger. Meanwhile, Verso recently published Joshua Sperling's A Writer of Our Time , subtitled "The Life and Work of John Berger". It's partly a biography, partly a critical study, partly a tribute — and works well as each, so long as the partly  is emphasized. In his introduction, Sperling says one of the goals of the book is to "provide a fuller picture of Berger's development", and that it does admirably. Though I look forward eagerly to Overton's biography and I hope that fuller critical studies appear, Sperling's book is tremendously useful and welcome now as we reckon with Berger's legacy. Sperling says that Berger's "stature is undisputed, but the total significance of his work is often misunderstood. He simply produced too dizzying an array of forms for a ...

Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous . —Nathanael West, Day of the Locust 1. I want to say a few words in praise of the Amazon Prime show Patriot , which I never would have watched without a friend saying how strange, surprising, and affecting it is. Because of work and life, I haven't been able to read any fiction more than the occasional short story for a month or so now — my brain is pulled in too many other directions for me to hold a novel's details in mind — and few movies or tv shows have felt like anything other than loud wallpaper. This state of mind probably contributed to my appreciation of Patriot , as its mood fit so well with my own moment. Patriot  does not seem to have gathered many viewers, at least not among people I know or critics I read. (Amazon, like other services, doesn't release viewing numbers, so we can only use anecdotal evidence to guess about popularity or lack of it.) Season 1 got noticed here and there, Season 2 less ...

My mother died on November 3, 2018. She was, in so many ways, my first reader and my first editor. Five days before her death, she asked me to write her something to read. I went home that night and wrote the following essay. I brought it to her the next day. Her eyesight had weakened, and she didn't have a lot of stamina, but she was able to read a couple paragraphs of it. It turned out to be the last thing I wrote while my mother was alive. I read it at her memorial service, and numerous people asked to have a copy of it, so I am posting it here for all who are interested.  Ghosts by Matthew Cheney A reader of horror stories, and a fan of horror movies, I am familiar with ghosts and hauntings. As I’ve grown older, though, it seems strange to me that ghosts are typically represented as frightening, that being haunted is considered undesireable. Certainly, screaming banshees flying through the ruins of gothic mansions at midnight aren’t exactly comforting. But I’m thin...

Mike Flanagan's Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Hill House  is not an adaptation of the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House . The miniseries is a work of its own, separate, unique — but haunted by The Haunting of Hill House.  And not only The Haunting of Hill House : the miniseries is also haunted by the first adaptation of Jackson's novel, the classic 1963 film  The Haunting , and by numerous other stories and movies ( The Legend of Hell House , The Shining , etc.). During the first few episodes, I thought the connection to Jackson's novel was unnecessary, perhaps even burdensome. I assumed somebody had bought the rights and then, through the tortuous (and torturous) process of Hollywood development, the novel got more and more distant from the project while remaining contractually bound to it. Perhaps, I thought, Flanagan was able to do with this property what he'd done with Ouija: Origin of Evil  and convince the producers to let him make the...

via Wikimedia , by Victoria Johnson I've mostly neglected The Mumpsimus this summer because I've been working on other things, including another blog, one related to and in support of my new job as Interim Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State University: a blog called Finite Eyes . I have drafts of a couple of uncompleted blog posts for this site, and I do hope to get around to finishing them, but I'm not sure when, as the busy-ness of learning a rather big new job does not leave lots of time for extra reading and writing. I'm also trying to turn my dissertation into a book worthy of proposing to a publisher, and this process has proved immensely time consuming and slow. So not a lot going on here, Mumpsimus readers, and not likely to be a lot for the foreseeable future. (Though there will be some, I'm sure, now and then.)

Years ago, I picked up a couple of issues of Poetry  magazine that Donald Hall had gotten rid of. I don't remember where. A yard sale or library sale, maybe. A random table in a random shop, a random shelf in a random hallway. I have no idea. I remember, though, that I almost passed them by. But I happened to look at the address label. Donald Hall. Eagle Pond Farm. Danbury, NH.  No bookish New Hampshire native would have been able to resist. If you aren't from New Hampshire, or don't live in New Hampshire, Donald Hall's name may not mean a lot to you — maybe you know he's a poet, maybe you remember a children's book he wrote, maybe you read one of his essays in The New Yorker , maybe you heard him on NPR, maybe, maybe... But for us New Hampshirites, Donald Hall is  poetry. His death at the age of eighty-nine (a few months short of his ninetieth birthday) feels, in a literary sense, as monumental as the day the Old Man of the Mountain fell to rubble.

I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.  —Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters Preface [update December 2018] The embargo period for my dissertation has passed, and so it is now available via the University of New Hampshire Scholar's Repository. It seems my doctoral dissertation has hit the ProQuest dissertations databases, so now is perhaps a useful time to say a few words about it here. First, the details for finding it, since there doesn't seem to be an openly accessible link: The title is  Lessoning Fiction: Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form , and it is Dissertation/thesis number 10786319 and ProQuest document ID 2056936547. (If you don't have access to any of those databases and would like a copy of the manuscript, feel free to  email me  and I will send you a PDF.) Here's the abstract: Writers committed to Modernist ideas of artistic autonomy may find that commitment challenged during times of socio-political crisis. Thi...

The first rejection letter I ever got was from Gardner Dozois . I was in 6th grade and had just learned about submitting stories to magazines; I had also just started reading my mother's boss's copies of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine , which Dozois had recently become editor of. I don't remember anything about the story I submitted, but I'm sure it was awful. I don't think I expected it to be accepted, because what I most remember is how excited I was to get a letter from the editor. My parents were kind and didn't tell me it was a form letter, nor that the signature was printed onto it, not written by the editor himself. I brought it to school to show my teacher. She, too, very kindly did not tell me that thousands of people likely got just this same letter. (After a few more submissions, I figured it out.) Dozois also edited what may be the single most important anthology in my life: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Third Annual Collecti...

For the Los Angeles Review of Books , I wrote about one of my favorite recent collections of short stories, Vandana Singh's Ambiguity Machines , published by the great Small Beer Press : There is a stately elegance to all the stories collected in Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories , Singh’s second collection after The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories . Both books are rich with models of what science fiction can achieve as well as models of the short story as a form. Even when she is writing about far-future, faster-than-light-traveling aliens, Singh never resorts to the clichés familiar from space opera unless to undo them, never forces fast pacing with staccato sentences and short paragraphs, never plays gotcha! with the reader. Singh is a scientist — a professor of physics — and all of her stories show a scientist’s determination to develop ideas carefully and responsibly.  Yet Singh is also an artist, a writer who evokes sensual wonders in musical pr...

In writing about Brian Evenson's book about Raymond Carver, I noted that both Evenson and I first read Carver right around the time we first read Kafka and Beckett, and we did so without knowledge of the contemporary American fiction writers he's often set alongside (e.g. Ann Beattie, Tobias Wolff, etc.). Later, I gained that context and, consequently, the context I'd originally brought faded, which is one reason why Brian's book so effectively brought Carver back to me — which is to say, it brought a way of reading Carver back to me. I don't mind the American writers Carver typically gets grouped with, but I'd be lying if I said their work really excites me. Kafka and Beckett, on the other hand, are among a very small group of 20th century writers whose work I am in awe of, work that I feel utterly incapable of writing about analytically, work that I can only point to and say, " That . Whatever great literature is, it must surely be that ." Now,...

At the end of my recent post about Raymond Carver *, I noted, via Brian Evenson's excellent book on Carver , the influence of James Purdy on Carver and Gordon Lish, an influence I hadn't paid attention to before. Coincidental to my rereading of Carver, I picked up a copy of The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy . Over the years, I've read and enjoyed (or at least admired) a number of Purdy's novels, but only a couple of his stories. Roaming around in The Complete Short Stories , I was stunned, overwhelmed. It was a similar feeling as I had when I first picked up The Complete Stories  of Clarice Lispector — an impression of a vast, original, surprising oeuvre  revealed and tantalizing, like standing at the edge of an extraordinary landscape: knowing that what is in front of you is unlike anything you've seen before, and that more wonder lies on the other side of the horizon. There's more in Purdy's Complete Stories  than I have time or inclinati...

My academic essay "The Reader Awakes: Pedagogical Form and Utopian Impulse in The Years " has now been published in  Woolf Studies Annual  volume 24 in a special section devoted to the late Jane Marcus . Here's the abstract: This essay considers Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years as a text in which the aesthetic functions pedagogically to train the receptive reader’s imagination toward liberation from oppressive literary and social structures. This interpretation develops from implications within Jane Marcus’s reading of Woolf’s later writings and seeks an understanding of how we might continue to learn to read The Years . Marcus proposed that the form of Three Guineas , which required “much noisy page turning”, was key to the way it sought to teach readers to read and, thus, to think. This insight can be applied to The Years to develop an idea of the novel’s subversive pedagogy: the way it teaches readers to imagine new alternatives to old forms and exha...

The revelatory, and perhaps even revolutionary, power of Francis Lee's film God's Own Country  resides not in the plot, which follows a formula familiar for centuries, but in the absence of conflicts we have been trained to expect by other narratives. It is a film that has inevitably been marketed as a story of gay farmers, a kind of Brokeback Yorkshire — but the wonder is that it is not  that, not at all. Brokeback Mountain  is all about the pain of repressed love and socially unacceptable lives. In God's Own Country,  love may be repressed, but it is not because of same-sex desire, and there are elements of life that are socially sanctioned, but not because of homosexuality. When it comes to farming in northern England, there are far bigger conflicts and problems than how two guys have sex. This is not, though, one of those awful "gays are just like straights!" movie-of-the-week stories in which two people elicit all the feels by demonstrating that just b...

Nathan Alling Long is the author of the flash-fiction collection The Origin of Doubt , recently published by Press 53 . Timothy Liu said of the collection, "He blurs the lines between flash fictions and prose poems. All of a sudden, genre distinctions start to give way, and what we thought we thought we knew is altered, transformed. These stories span the gamut from traditional to queer trans-genre forms, marvelous to behold in times like these when political discourses and abuses of language have sunk to unforeseen lows." Nathan's writings have appeared in a wide range of publications and venues, including  Glimmer Train,   Tin House , The Sun ,  Story Quarterly, Strange Tales V , and NPR. He has taught at various schools; currently, he teaches creative writing, literature, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stockton University. Though he has lived all around the country, and traveled all over the world, he now lives in Philadelphia. I met Nathan in...

Today is the anniversary of Virginia Woolf's death in 1941. Tomorrow, I defend a doctoral dissertation with a chapter on Woolf's 1937 novel The Years , and I have spent much of last few years studying Woolf's writings and life in the 1930s especially. Here, a few thoughts on that. Woolf's last decade is under-appreciated both by general readers and by scholars, although there seems to be growing scholarly interest in her final, not-quite-finished novel Between the Acts . ("Under-appreciated" is, of course, relative — Woolf is one of the most-studied writers of the 20th century, and many of her contemporaries don't have even a small percentage of the attention for their entire ouevres  that Woolf has for her least-read writings.) The relative lack of interest in Woolf's life and work after The Waves  has various sources, many of them having to do with why readers are attracted to Woolf in the first place. Her achievement with Mrs. Dalloway , To the...

BPM: Beats Per Minute (120 battements par minute)  tells the story of AIDS activists with ACT UP Paris in the 1990s, and its scenes of ACT UP meetings are among the most compelling representations of everyday political planning and argument I know of other than the extraordinary land reform debate scene in Ken Loach's Land and Freedom .  (There's also a powerful debate scene in Loach's later  The Wind that Shakes the Barley ,  but Land and Freedom  is even more remarkable in my eyes because it so patiently dramatizes a kind of conversation rarely even imagined by most of its likely viewers. Almost any other director would pare such scenes down to soundbites, but Campillo lets us watch discussions play out and doesn't simplify the arguments into pro/con battles. We see the characters react, think, respond. Even in a movie like Land and Freedom , the narrative starts with a focal character and brings us into the story via that focal character. One of the m...

Electric Literature  has now published a roundtable discussion between Sofia Samatar, Carmen Maria Machado, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, and me about a thing we provisionally call "speculative memoir". This began when Sofia had separate conversations with us all over the last couple years about fiction in fact, the creative possibilities of nonfictional writing, the perils and possibilities of memoir, etc. She and I talked for a long time about it when I was first putting together ideas for my dissertation, and I've kept with quite a few of the ideas we originally discussed. (Perhaps no surprise, as my interest in the topic goes back a ways with one of the subjects of my dissertation, J.M. Coetzee.) And as someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction, the distinctions always interest me. Sofia also has a new book out, Monstrous Portraits , "an uncanny and imaginative autobiography of otherness", with drawings by her brother Del. Seek it out!

Sometimes I buy a book for its cover, and this is one, a 1979 Bantam edition of Andrew Holleran's classic Dancer from the Dance.  The cover ... well, it speaks for itself. Flipping through the book, I was at first annoyed to see some pages with underlining from a red felt-tipped marker. I find other people's annotations in books extremely distracting to the point where I usually can't even read a page with someone else's notes on it. (My own notes are fine. Its the imposition of someone else's reading experience — someone else's consciousness — that makes it impossible for me.) But then I was intrigued. Only two pages had underlining. Why only two? It wasn't like a textbook, where sometimes you'll find notes in some of the early pages and then nothing later, the student clearly having given up. No, these were pages 73 and 75. One sentence on each page.