The Mumpsimus

Stan Brakhage, from "The Dante Quartet" (Life has become time-lapsed fragments. I began writing these reflections some weeks ago, trying to capture the halting, disorienting, jagged experience of pandemic time. It all crumbled and keeps crumbling, yet in crumbling feels oddly static.) Time tripped ahead this summer; I can barely account for June and July in memory, though when I look back over events in my work calendar, notes I made for myself, emails I sent, I see that plenty of things got done, read, viewed, written. This is pandemic time, chaos time, life unmoored. Eventually, we will get to look back at these years and what they did to perception. The constant uncertainty, the underlying fear, the vigilance, anger, bewilderment. "The lost year," I said to somebody, then wasn't sure quite when I was referring to, and that confusion only highlighted the loss. The lost year began ten thousand years ago and yesterday. "I haven't been in this room in tw...

My latest column is up at Strange Horizons : "Learning to Write" . I didn't realize this would be SH's eighth anniversary issue. Eight years of weekly doses of fiction, poetry, essays, articles, etc. An impressive accomplishment, especially given that everyone on staff is a volunteer. They're all a joy to work with, and I think the results are extraordinary in many ways, so congratulations to all of the various Strange Horizon writers and staff over the years. The new column is a strange one, but then, most of them are. It's centered on Jules Renard's journals , recently reissued by Tin House Books , and appearances are also made by Jacques Roubaud's Some Thing Black and Gertrude Stein's How to Write . By the way, if you ever teach an intro composition class or something like that, I recommend sticking Stein's How to Write on a shelf, and when a student asks you for the "secret" of writing (or anything to that effect), tell them...