The Mumpsimus

One decade ago today, I sat down and started writing blog posts here. This is the room I wrote in: That room no longer exists, and not just because it doesn't have all my books and papers everywhere. The house was renovated (for the first time in decades) after I left, with the area that had been my apartment pretty well gutted. The computer I began the blog with was an iMac G3 . A year later, I got the laptop that's visible in those photos. I've been working up to this anniversary moment by writing posts about each of the years in the decade. Here they are for easy reference, along with the primary topics of the posts: 2012 [beginning to look back]   2011 [some thoughts on canonical nationalism] 2010 [the turn to film writing] 2009 [month by month] 2008 [thoughts on teaching & syllabi] 2007 [the bad year] 2006 [a Mumpsimus taxonomy] 2005 [some old posts worth saving] 2004 [Annus Mirabilis, or, Why I Owe A Lot to Neil Gaiman] 2003 [the begin...

This is the tenth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary today, August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found  here . Well, here we are. The beginning. I started the blog after reading something in an emailed newsletter from my internet provider about Blogger . It sounded interesting, and I was curious to learn about HTML, which you needed to know the basics of to be able to format anything, so I took some of the last few days of summer vacation and played around. I'd recently begun reading science fiction and fantasy again after a relatively long absence. The New Wave Fabulists  issue of Conjunctions  brought me back, showing that some interesting stuff had happened since I'd stopped reading SF with any regularity in the mid-'90s. I got interested in the writers associated with the New Weird , and, especially, the contentious discussions that surrounded it ...

This is the ninth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found  here . 2004 was the first full year of The Mumpsimus. It was also the year with the largest number of posts: 319. (These days, I'm able to get out about 100 or so in a year.) And it was the year when a relatively large number of people began to notice what was going on here. That initial attention is what made me think this was not, perhaps, just a useless lark. A lark, yes, and largely useless, yes, but maybe not completely so... The year began with a post about returning : I hadn't paid a lot of attention to the site at the end of 2003, having written one post in December and none in November. The first paragraph of that post indicates that I was still thinking of this as a site about, primarily if not exclusively, science fiction. The reason for my absence...

This is the eighth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found  here . 2005 was a big year around these here parts, as the blog was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. I went to the World Fantasy Convention and wrote up a report of that experience here. It was an exciting time. From my perspective now, though, 2005 doesn't seem like all that great a year for actual blog posts,. There are lot of them — 2005 is second only to 2004 in the number of individual posts — but most of them are quick links, bits of news, etc. The stuff that I now will just throw on Twitter , or ignore altogether. This is reassuring, actually, because I often look back on the number of posts in 2005 and 2004 with fondness and even a certain awe — how did I ever write so much? (My life was no less busy and crazy back then; indeed, it was busier and...

This is the seventh in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found  here . Miami Vice K: There are times when I'd really love to live in your world. M: It's full of existential crises, but not a lot of headaches. K: I've already got the existential crises, so it might be a nice change. M: There's a reason the first album that ever made a strong impression on me was Stop Making Sense . K: So that's your aesthetic credo? M: No, I don't have a credo. It's just something I thought of and so I said it. It's probably not even true. —"A Conversation After Miami Vice " 2006 seems to me an ideal year of The Mumpsimus, not because all of the posts are high quality (they aren't!) but because the diversity of posts covers just about everything I think of as Mumpsimusian. In other years, th...

This is the sixth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found  here . I'm Not There 2007 began with an outtake from an interview I did with Juliet Ulman of Bantam Books and ended with a rather mysterious announcement on December 24 that I would need to take a break from blogging for a while. The reason for the hiatus was something I discussed in the previous post : my father's death. I last talked with him on my cell phone as I was walking home after seeing Tim Burton's movie of Sweeney Todd , a review of which was the last substantive post I wrote that year; the next afternoon, I got the call from the New Hampshire State Police. The only thing I managed to write between the announcement of my absence and then my later return was a column for Strange Horizons  that adds some context to it all, "Of Muses and ...

This is the fifth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here . Posting in 2008 began late because in December 2007, my father died, leaving me not only with the emotional and psychological challenge of a dead parent, but also with the challenge of now being the heir to a house, property, and gun shop 300+ miles away from where I was then living. By the end of the year, I had quit my job, moved back to New Hampshire, gained a Federal Firearms License to sell off the inventory, and started work as an adjunct professor at Plymouth State University in the English Department and the Women's Studies Program. The year ended with a post noting that George W. Bush had done a wonderful thing for New Hampshire, making our sole contribution to the U.S. Presidency, Franklin Pierce, look better. It was a relatively thin year for ...

This is the fourth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here . 2009 began with an unremarkable post pointing to a couple of free items on the internets and ended with a post on introductory film textbooks  (December 2009 began the shift toward more frequent film posts that I discussed in the 2010 commemoration). Looking back on it, 2009 seems like a year with some good specific posts, but overall I don't think of it as a banner year for the blog in any way. I've been struggling with coming up with much to say about it, in fact, so instead of trying to tie everything together artificially, I'm just going to offer a few thoughts on some of my favorite posts from the year. First, not really a post here (though  I mentioned it ):  an interview with me that Charles Tan did in February 2009 . This gives a sense of...

This is the third in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found  here . Munyurangabo 2010 began here with a look at the extraordinary film Munyurangabo  and ended with a look at the extraordinary writings of Wallace Shawn . During the year, I turned my general education class called "The Outsider" into a course on the idea of the image of Africa , a turn that revitalized the course for me, personally, but which faced some huge obstacles in making it work for the students. (Nonetheless, one of those students, now a senior, stopped me last term when he saw me on campus and said the course was really influential and valuable for him. So it worked for one person...) Teaching that course also led to one of my favorite posts from 2010: a look at The Story of an African Farm  by Olive Schreiner . Lots more happened. The third...

This is the second in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here . Looking back through the posts for 2011 , I felt great fondness for the year, if not for my blogging (I think overall it was one of the weaker years for The Mumpsimus. That tends to happen when life itself is busy and fulfilling, so I'm not complaining!) It was a year when I taught two of my favorite classes, Gender & Science Fiction and Global Literature ; when we started blogging the Caine Prize ; when Eric Schaller and I launched The Revelator , our very occasional online magazine; when I wrote, directed, and co-edited a short film without knowing much of anything about what I was doing; when I started making video essays ; when I got to see one of my favorite Fassbinder movies, World on a Wire ; and when I had a whole class pose for a picture whil...

2003 A month from today, this blog will be 10 years old. I'll reflect on that amazing, terrifying fact at that time. For now, what I'd like to do is begin a series of occasional posts that dip into the archives. Barring unplanned events, personal and/or technological failures, etc., I hope to do 10 posts between now and a month from now — posts that somehow or other explore what's been buried here. We'll start with the recent past, though I'm going to ignore this current year, since it still feels too present. That brings us to 2012 , which began with a post about blogrolls and ended with a post about some movies . (To update that final post, now that I've seen more films from 2012, my favorite 10 would be: The Amazing Spider Man; Cosmopolis; Detention  [technically a 2011 movie, but it didn't get off the festival circuit till 2012, so I think of it as a 2012 movie];  Holy Motors; The Kid with a Bike; Moonrise Kingdom; Oslo, August 31st; Premiu...