The Mumpsimus

I stopped by the University library yesterday to take a look at the latest issue of American Literature because it includes not only some interesting essays about Samuel R. Delany, a fellow I've written about a bit myself, but also a fabulous essay by Aaron Bady , "Tarzan's White Flights: Terrorism and Fantasy Before and After the Airplane". In this essay, there is what may be my favorite statement-required-by-a-rights-holder evah (as they say). It accompanies a drawing by Robert Baden-Powell, author of Scouting for Boys , that appeared in the Daily Mail  in 1938 and is titled "Policeman Aeroplanes": Reproduced by kind permission of the Scout Association Trustees. The Scout Association does not endorse Mr. Bady's article or the use of air power against civilians. So relieved to have that cleared up! The cover for this issue of American Literature , by the way, reprints the famous August 1928 cover of Amazing Stories .  If Duke University Pres...

I had promised myself I would not blog again until I had finished x, y, and z, and while x and y are finished, z (an essay about J.M. Coetzee's memoir-novels) is beating me up and winning. But I'm going to pause in the fight for a moment and break my self-promise because today I discovered Aaron Bady's astoundingly excellent blog Zunguzungu via a marvelous post Bady wrote at The Valve about Chinua Achebe and the African Writers Series (a post that previously appeared on Zunguzungu). It's been a long time since I last encountered a blog where the excitement of discovery came from finding someone giving expression to inchoate thoughts I'd never quite found words for, but that happened again and again as I read through Bady's blog, especially the post "When Good People Write Bad Books" and this earlier Achebe post , referencing Norman Rush (whose Mating I adore, or, at least, I adored when I read it about ten years ago) to explore the idea of "g...