The Mumpsimus

Banner image for Geoffrey Goodwin's Facebook page   Geoffrey H. Goodwin was a writer, a bookseller, a friend. He contributed here at The Mumpsimus in the early days, starting with a conversation about Hayao Miyazaki's film Howl's Moving Castle , which we saw together in Cambridge, Massachusetts when it was released in 2005. Geoffrey then contributed two interviews: one with Thomas Ligotti , another with Jedediah Berry . We had planned for Geoffrey to do more interviews and guest posts, but other commitments pulled him away. His final contribution here was to our Delany Roundtable in 2014. 2014 turned out to be a disaster year for Geoffrey. A car accident caused by a drunk driver brought significant physical and mental injury to him. His later years were extraordinarily difficult. His later years. Yes, Geoffrey is gone now, his death reported as cardiac failure , the failure of the literal heart of a person with, in the metaphorical sense, an extraordinary heart. It is ap...

Recently, Locus published an online discussion of the work of Samuel R. Delany with a bunch of different writers and critics, primarily aimed at discussing Delany’s status as the newly-crowned Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America . Plenty of interesting things are said there, and the participants include a number of people I’m very fond of (both as writers and people), but the particular focus ended up, I thought, creating a certain narrowness to the discussion, especially regarding the post- Dhalgren works, and I thought it might be nice to gather a different group of people together to discuss Delany … differently. So here we are. I put out the call to a wide variety of folks, and this is the group that responded. We used a Google Doc , and the discussion grew rhizomatically more than linearly, so you'll see that we sometimes refer to things said later in the roundtable. (This makes for a richer discussion, I think, but it may be a little jarring ...

by Geoffrey H. Goodwin (Geoffrey Goodwin was last seen around these here parts when he interviewed Thomas Ligotti . I'm thrilled that he has now returned with an interview with Jedediah Berry, author of The Manual of Detection and of one of my favorite stories of recent years, "Minus, His Heart" (first published by Chicago Review and conveniently reprinted in Best American Fantasy 2008 ). Jed has worked for Conjunctions and Jubilat , and he is currently Wizard-of-Many-Things [my term] at Small Beer Press .) Geoffrey H. Goodwin: You've worked in the field a long time. When did you last have a job outside of books and publishing? Jedediah Berry: My first job out of college was with PEN , the non-profit writers’ organization, and before that I was doing a work study job with the literary journal Conjunctions . I would have to go back to my first year of college, when I was washing dishes and painting curbs yellow. (Laughs.) So it's been a very long ti...

by Geoffrey H. Goodwin (Geoffrey Goodwin is going to be popping in here at The Mumpsimus now and then with interviews with a variety of writers. I'm thrilled that the first he has provided for us is an interview with a writer as unique and fascinating as Thomas Ligotti.) Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Thomas Ligotti are a reasonable list of the three best writers of horror short stories. In the tradition of gnarled minds that scare more with their thinking than with simple shocks, they're almost certainly the ones who matter most. Ligotti is a genius at exploring emptiness and nothingness. He has committed his life to rejecting life. It's harder than it sounds. His stories take place in a "world forever reverberant with the horror of all who ever have lived and suffered" (a phrase taken from "We Can Hide from Horror Only in the Heart of Horro: Notes and Aphorisms" , excerpts from his notebooks from circa 1976-1982). His many books, including ...

To do a formal review of Howl's Moving Castle , I would want to see it again, and see the subtitled version rather than the dubbed. But there were a number of images, questions, and moments that stayed with me, and I wanted to work through a few of them, so I asked Geoffrey Goodwin, with whom I watched Howl , if he wouldn't mind doing a completely informal discussion of the movie, and he agreed. (Note: One of the references that recurs in the discussion is to something we talked about while trekking around Cambridge in search of the theatre where Howl was playing: We thought it might be fun to create a new Latest Dark Cabal . I don't remember why we settled on the title we did, but it amused us at the time.) GG: Are we going to do this under our real names or as Dark Cabal II: Babies with Weaponry? MC: Definitely The Latest Latest Dark Cabal: Babies with Weaponry. You said after the movie that you were surprised you cared as much about Howl as you did. Have you thought ...