The Mumpsimus

I haven't seen the movie Kelly's Heroes in ages, but what I most remember from it is something that became a running joke between my father and myself when I was a kid: Donald Sutherland's hippie-dippie character complaining about "negative waves". If something got too tense or critical, my father would deflect with a pretty good impression of Sutherland, saying something like, "Whoooooa, watch it with the negative waves, man!" Whenever I hear people complaining about reviewers (of books, movies, art, food, whatever) who are too negative, I can't help but hear Donald Sutherland's voice in my head. Negative waves, dude. Negative waves. When I first started writing reviews, the question of negativity was unavoidable. After all, right around the time I started reviewing, the world of litchat was obsessed with the question of "snark". The Believer was founded to combat those negative waves. Dale Peck's eviscerative style got every pu...

  I spent the last week in Seattle, Washington at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference , a conference I have been going to off and on for more than fifteen years now. AWP has provided some great memories for me. I first attended when the conference was in Austin, Texas. I had been invited onto a panel with Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Link, Laird Hunt, and Brian Evenson. (Wonder what became of any of them?) We also did a reading and had dinner with Michael Moorcock. Is it any wonder I remember virtually nothing else about that conference? Then there was the New York City conference where I worked in the Book Fair trying to sell or give away copies of Best American Fantasy and Weird Tales , which was a really exciting experience at the time because AWP was even more of a big-L Literature conference back then, and anything with "fantasy" in the title (never mind "Weird Tales"!) was quite a shock for some people. Then there was the Boston conference ...