The Mumpsimus

Boomtron just published my latest Sandman Meditation, this one on Chapter Two of The Wake . "Sandman Meditation?" you say. "That sounds ... vaguely familiar..." In July 2010, I started writing a series of short pieces called Sandman Meditations in which I proceeded through each issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic and offered whatever thoughts happened to come to mind. The idea was Jay Tomio's, and at first the Meditations were published on his Gestalt Mash site, then later Boomtron . The basic concept was that we'd see what happened when somebody without much background in comics, who'd never read Sandman before, spent time reading through it all. I wrote 71 Meditations between July 2010 and June 2012, getting all the way up through the first installment of the last story in the regular series, The Wake . 75,000 words. And then stopped. I read Chapter 2 of The Wake and had nothing to say. I tried writing through the lack of words, but...

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...

I had to skip a week of Sandman meditating because of a billion other commitments (you might have noticed this here blog has been quiet...), but the column is back this week with some thoughts on the final chapter of  A Game of You . I try to avoid looking at any response to the columns, including the comments sections, because I discovered early on that if I pay much attention to what folks are saying about the columns, I then start tailoring what I write to those responses. And for various reasons, with this particular project I don't want to do that. I have to admit, though, I loved this tweet from Neil Gaiman : I promise that whenever I come to an end with The Sandman , I'll write a column that looks back over this whole strange endeavor, because I've really pushed myself to write these pieces quickly and as a kind of first response, without a whole lot of reflection, which means, I'm sure, some of the columns are just barmy. My perception of individual Sand...

I'm doing a terrible job of posting links here to my Sandman Meditations column every week (following Gestalt Mash on Twitter is the easiest way to be updated).  We've finished with Preludes & Nocturnes and have now moved on to The Doll's House with "Tales in the Sand" and "The Doll's House" . I also wanted to mention that Tor.com recently reprinted one of my favorite Gaiman stories, "Bitter Grounds" , a story I've admired since its first publication, and one I'm thrilled to see available online.

My latest " Sandman Meditations" column has been posted at Gestalt Mash , this one about the eighth issue, "The Sound of Her Wings", which is the concluding story in the first collection, Preludes & Nocturnes . With the eighth issue, the Sandman is free for the first time of all the concerns that occupied him previously, and so “The Sound of Her Wings” is a kind of coda to the tale up to this point. It’s a particularly interesting issue in that it has no overt conflict; what conflict there is exists within Dream himself. Read more...

My latest "Sandman Meditations" column has now been posted at Gestalt Mash.  This particular column seems transitional to me, bringing myself as a reader to the foreground, because sometimes that feels necessary; the next installment goes in the opposite direction to some extent, and I expect as the experiment continues I'll be trying out different modes of narration, simply because doing all 75 or so of them in the same way would get rather tedious for all of us... Here's an excerpt: The third  Sandman  poses some problems for me, someone who has read almost no DC comics and has only the vaguest sense of their characters and history. The vagueness and sense share a source: popular culture in general. You’d have to live in some remote part of the world, away from billboards and newspapers and televisions and radios, to avoid all references to DC characters, given how many of them have metamorphosed into stars of movies and TV shows. I was going to write a sentenc...

My second Sandman Meditations column is now live at Gestalt Mash , this one looking at the second story, "Imperfect Hosts", and considering, among other things, the place of speech and thought balloons.

Jay Tomio has started a new website, mostly (but not only) devoted to comics, called Gestalt Mash , and he very kindly asked me to be a regular contributor. When he first asked, I thought he must have me confused with somebody else, because though I have some good friends who are comics experts, I'm only an occasional reader of them myself. The only comic I read regularly as a kid was G.I. Joe , and I didn't read my first graphic novel until I was well into my 20's. Jay asked if I'd write about Neil Gaiman's Sandman series , writing a short essay for every issue. I told him, with a bit of embarrassment, that I've never read Sandman ; indeed, I only know Neil Gaiman's work in prose (and like some of it quite a bit ). Jay said that would be the fun -- plenty of comics afficionados have written about Sandman ... but what happens when somebody who doesn't know much about comics does? Well, the first of my "Sandman Meditations" has now ...