The Mumpsimus

It was time I had a website under my own name, and not just this here Mumpsimus. After all, I am more than a mumpsimus! Or so I tell myself. Thus: matthewcheney.net ! Because my book of short stories is coming out in January, the focus of the site is my fiction more than anything else. At the moment, there's nothing there that isn't also here, aside from some pictures. But I'm sure I'll figure out something unique to host there in the coming weeks, months, years...

sitting in my office, contemplating what to write... I've been wanting to try out TinyLetter for a little while now, having subscribed to a few newsletters that use it, and so I took some time to create a newsletter aimed at sending out information, musings, etc. about my upcoming collection, Blood: Stories , which Black Lawrence Press will release in January. Why create such a thing when I've already got this here blog? Because I think of this blog as a more general thing, not really a newsletter. I will put all important information about Blood  here (as well as on Twitter , and I'll make a Facebook author page one of these days), but the newsletter will have more in-depth material, such as details of the publishing process, background on the stories, etc. There will be some exclusive content and probably even some give-aways, etc. I probably should have titled it Etc., in fact... And it's not all limited to Blood  — if you take a look at the first letter , yo...

A trio of items... 1. Penguin Books is, slowly but surely, bringing all of Shirley Jackson's work back into print. Earlier this year they brought back the posthumous collection Come Along with Me , and just a few weeks ago they released new editions of novels that have been out of print for ages: The Road Through the Wall  (her first novel) and Hangsaman . You'll be hearing more about those here later this summer. I've also gotten confirmation that Penguin will release  The Bird's Nest  and The Sundial  at the end of January 2014 — two strange and fascinating books that have long deserved to be available once again ( The Bird's Nest  is currently available in the e-book of The Magic of Shirley Jackson ). Returning these books to print has brought about some new writing on Jackson. In March, Slate  published "Why You Should Read Shirley Jackson" by William Brennan; last month, The New Yorker's  book blog posted a fascinating account by Ruth Fran...

The Movies Are Dying: A Video Poem . (Futzing around, I made a thing.)

Blogging always slows to a crawl during the second half of a semester, but I was surprised to see that it's been almost a month since I last posted here. Egads. I've hardly had a moment to breathe, though. For now, I just want to capture a few moments of reading from the recent weeks.

part of Jacques Derrida's last library Various items... I recently saw two of the more controversial movies of last year, Lincoln  and Zero Dark Thirty .  I don't feel compelled to say much about the former — it's fine for a Steven Spielberg movie, and wanting it to be more than a Steven Spielberg movie seems to me to be an error. Yes, I would have preferred, say, Charles Burnett's   Lincoln  or Alex Cox's Lincoln  or Cheryl Dunye's Lincoln  or even Guillermo del Toro's Lincoln , but what we got is Spielberg's Lincoln , and so we should not be surprised that every moment of possible emotion is squeezed through John Williams's typically John Williams score, or that there are lots of faces making faces, or that it is a white savior movie, or that it exemplifies the tradition of quality in Hollywood cinema. What we should be surprised by is that it is not worse — it is easily, to my eyes, Spielberg's most interesting and least annoying hist...

I still don't have time to write a substantive post about much of anything, but there are a bunch of things I'd like to note before I forget them, so here's a rather fragmentary and scattered post about things mostly unrelated to each other... I've been doing quite a bit of writing, but none of it is stuff that's currently for online venues. (For instance, I wrote an introduction to an upcoming art book from Hideaki Miyamura , about which I'm sure I will say much more later, once it's available.) Also, I sold a story to Steve Berman for an upcoming anthology of queer Poe stories, which is very exciting for me because I've hardly written any fiction in the last 2 years, and whenever I finally get around to writing a story , I always wonder, "Do I still remember how?" Apparently, yes. I'm also thrilled because I've had a chance to read a couple other stories that will be in the book and they're really excellent — honestly, even i...

Crickets have taken over The Mumpsimus recently, mostly because I've been working on some projects and have started the new school year. This will be a fragmentary post trying to capture a few things that seem to me worth capturing before too much more time passes and I enter senescence. After a hiatus due to some technical reconfigurations at Boomtron, The Sandman Mediations have now resumed with a few thoughts on the first part of  The Wake . I'll finish up The Wake  in the coming weeks, then continue with Endless Nights , after which I plan to stop. I made one last video essay before classes started up again, this one on Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales .  I'm hoping to make another on Eastwood's  Gran Torino  soon, but not sure when I'll be able to steal the time.

Going through notes for old pieces of writing, I discovered this collection of quotations I hoped to sprinkle through a piece of long fiction I was outlining ten years ago. The story itself never came to anything, but some shadowy traces of it remain in the collage... If the New World fed dreams, what was the Old World reality that whetted the appetite for them?  And how did that reality caress and grip the shaping of a new one? —Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark Why is it so inconceivable to our dramatists that some people do not know, or care, how they feel all the time?  That some people act with a detachable motive, or from a myriad of contradictory ones?  Why is life itself less interesting per se than explanations of life? —Mac Wellman, “The Theater of Good Intentions” There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.  And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, ...

This semester of teaching (at two schools) has pretty well kept me away from the blog here, but things are beginning to even out, and I should be able to return to my regularly irregular posting in the next few weeks.  I will probably even soon be able to reply to that email you sent me.  For now, though, some quick notes... Over at Gestalt Mash , my latest Sandman Meditations column finishes up The Doll's House . I've now finished reading Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? , and will start writing a review of it for Rain Taxi very soon (I'm only about a month late on that...)  I found the book provocative, fascinating, and enlightening, but even if I hadn't, I think I'd be amazed at how stupid many of the reviews of it have been (the link is to The Complete Review's roundup; their own review is not one I agree with, but though I don't think it's up to their normal standard, it's not awful).  I won't address this in th...

My friends Rick and Beth Elkin are currently traveling from their home in New Mexico up to New Hampshire here to display their excellent wares at the 76th Annual League of NH Craftsmen's Fair . To amuse themselves on the trip, they're taking pictures of particularly interesting sights and sites and sending them my way. The above is my favorite photo so far.

I didn't intend to disappear from this blog for quite as long as I did, but I got busy with work on the manuscript of Best American Fantasy 3 (the contents of which we'll finally be able to announce next week!) and I've been teaching an online course for Plymouth State University, an interesting experience, since I've never taught classes entirely online before (nor am I all that sure it's a way I like teaching, but that's another story...) I probably owe you an email.* Readercon is coming up -- July 9-12. I'll be there Friday afternoon and most of Saturday. The great and glorious Liz Hand and Greer Gilman are guests of honor. The other guests ain't too shabby neither. Except for that Cheney guy. He's a putz. Some things I've noticed out on the internets: Hal Duncan wrote a little post at his blog about ethics, reviewing, criticism, etc. A few people commented. Hal wrote another little post responding in particular to comments by Abig...

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the first day of classes at Plymouth State University , where I'm teaching now. This is my eleventh year of teaching. Nonetheless, as ever, the first day looms as something both terrifying and exciting. This year is terrifying for new reasons, most having to do with teaching college for the first time, but last year was a very different environment, too, and I adjusted to that well enough. After the first class or two, the terror will go away, and probably some of the excitement, too, as we settle into a routine, but the unknown is always nerve-wracking. I've spent much of this week preparing for classes. If you're curious about the sorts of things I'm doing, I've put some information up here . Those pages will grow and change over time, of course, and at least one of them is mostly a placeholder right now, waiting for me to get more time to add to it. Meanwhile, if you're looking for something to watch, Reprise came out on DVD toda...

Life here at Mumpsimus Central continues on apace, despite the slow pace of posting. I finally got done all that I needed to do for Best American Fantasy 2008 and so now can begin trying to get organized for the next volume. I finished acting in a production of Taming of the Shrew that was fun and successful, and I enjoyed the irony of that being the show I appear in before teaching an introductory course in feminism this fall at Plymouth State (in The Riverside Shakespeare , Anne Barton makes the strongest case I've read for the play's subversive elements, but I'm still not really convinced). And I'm slowly getting organized with all of the tasks I have here at the house, though this has not been helped by the phone line getting hit by lightning, the lawn mower needing major service, etc. In terms of reading, I've mostly been trying to prepare for my classes, sifting through gazillions (yes, that's a technical term) of essays and articles in search of one...

Things fell into neglect here. Various reasons for that, most having to do with busy-ness, though the silence of the last few days has been caused as much by heat as anything else -- my study here is not air conditioned, and we're having a heat wave , which has made the keys to my laptop actually hot to the touch, so I've been keeping away from the computer. Things are a little bit cooler tonight, though, and so here are a few stray bits of something or other... First, don't miss the Strange Horizons fund drive . Lots of fun prizes available, and your money supports a worthy cause -- a weekly online magazine that actually pays its writers (though not the staff) and is officially a nonprofit organization. (Don't punish them for publishing me; everybody has their faults.) Some Strange Horizons readers may remember the Speculative Poetry Symposium I put together a few years back. One of the members of that symposium, Theodora Goss , has just published an interesting ...

Amazingly, the world didn't pause while I paused blogging, and, in fact, lots of things happened. I also managed to see some movies and read some books (or parts of books). I may come back to some of these topics later, but here's a quick run-down... Kenya: I have been trying to keep up with the news from Kenya, where violence has continued since the disputed election. Occasional Mumpsimus contributor Njihia Mbitiru let me know that he and his family in Nairobi are well, but he said there is plenty of chaos. The Kwani? Blog has been publishing a series of opinion pieces, all worth reading. The Road by Cormac McCarthy: A friend gave me his copy of this book, forcing me to read it at last. The arguments that were made by some people about whether it's science fiction, or whether McCarthy should have steeped himself in genre writing before setting out to create his own book, or whatever -- all these arguments felt irrelevant to me as I read the book. Perhaps even more...

It's likely there won't be much in the way of updates around here for at least a few days, but I have a few fragments of information and marginal bits of thought to share before I go... John Joseph Adams wrote a nice piece for SciFi Wire about Jeff and Ann VanderMeer's guest editing of Best American Fantasy . Speaking of Best Americans , all the various ones from various publishers now seem to be out in stores. I stayed up much too late last night, utterly engrossed in The Best American Essays 2007 , guest edited by David Foster Wallace. I always find a few essays in that book to be fascinating or impressive, but none of the other volumes I've read have so completely hooked me -- indeed, in all the other volumes I've encountered at least one essay that cured insomnia. That's not the case with this edition. I was reading the first essay, Jo Ann Beard's "Werner", last night at a pizza place across from Cooper Union, and I not only nearly missed ...

I've been working on finishing up a long review with a deadline of tomorrow, so my brain is a bit fried. The review sparked a question that I have no answer for, though I'm sure it will be easy for somebody out there to respond to. The question is this: Is there an anthology of science fiction stories about drugs? The dream book that popped into my mind, and one I'm pretty sure doesn't exist, would be a wide-ranging reprint anthology covering everything from mad scientists with weird serums to 1960s psychedelia to cyberpunk narcotics to ... well, I'm blanking on recent druggy SF stories, but I know there are a few. Lacking that particular book, though, what is there?

The world has achieved perfection. Howard Waldrop is blogging at the Small Beer Press site: You’ll notice there’s a beaver in both ads, the animal more responsible even than the buffalo for the settlement of the US from sea to shining sea. You’ll also notice Lincoln is wearing a stovepipe ("beaver") hat. It’s all surrealistically related . (Waldrop has, actually, entered the blogosphere before. But it's good to have him back.)

Scott McLemee's Inside Higher Ed column this week tackles a topic I took on myself recently : the culling of books. It caused me to reflect on living with a substantially reduced library, since I am now post-cull, and am actually only living at the moment with a small group of the books I saved, since the majority are still in storage back in New Hampshire. While I enjoy not feeling quite so entombed by tomes as I used to be, again and again I've wanted to grab a book I know I have, only to discover it's not here. It's a strange sensation, the sensation of seeing something in peripheral vision that disappears when you turn your head, the sensation of seeking ghosts. Not that having fewer choices of what to read has stopped me from reading too many books at once. As of this moment, I am in the midst of reading Dangerous Space by Kelley Eskridge, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World by Donald R. Howard, The Virtu by Sarah Monette, Beyond This Horizon by Robert ...