The Mumpsimus

  When music gets you, it goes deep. Schopenhauer believed it's the only art that goes past the illusions of life and expresses — even exists at — the base level of reality itself. Anyone with a sensitivity to music knows that there is nothing else that so quickly mingles with emotions and memory. Which perhaps is why we experience such a wrenching ache at the death of any artist behind the music that remains most entangled with our emotions and memories. I was surprised by the force of feeling that struck me when I heard the news of Sinéad O'Connor's death. I hadn't been playing her music all that often these days. I'd revisited it pretty significantly after watching the (excellent) documentary Nothing Compares a year or so ago, but that was only for about a week. Not like when I was in high school and I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got lived in my CD player. Today, the hearse carrying the body of Shuhada' Sadaqat made its way through the seaside town of ...

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...

  When I was a weird kid besotted with dreams of a life in the theatre, a life in New York City, far from the rural home I felt completely alien in, I thought I was the only person in the world who really loved Stephen Sondheim. I knew other people respected him, were interested in him — the shows for which he wrote music and lyrics were commonly enough produced that I got to see quite a few before I left home; I knew a couple professors of music and theatre at the local college who would talk with me about what they appreciated in Sondheim's work. But nobody I knew loved him. Nobody I knew listened to cast recordings obsessively, memorizing not just every glorious lyric but every single strange yet perfect note.  I was not (am not) a musical theatre geek — aside from a handful of shows, I've never been especially enthusiastic about the form. Something about Sondheim was different. The intricacy of the music and lyrics appealed to my more analytical/intellectual side; the uns...

The new issue of Conjunctions  collects stories, essays, and poems that are, in some way or another, "Earth Elegies". It includes my most recent story, "A Liberation", which I chose to dedicate to the memory of my friend and mentor Katherine Min . She was generally known as Katherine, but to me she was Kathie. Or just K. (Kafka was one of the interests we shared.) She died in March, one day after her 60th birthday. It was the end of a long, hard struggle with cancer. I've wanted to write a tribute to her ever since the day of her death, but could not summon words that felt accurate or adequate. I'd known her since I was in college, when she worked in the office next to my mother, and one day she said to my mother that she was thinking about writing a screenplay but didn't know how, and my mother said, "My son's at NYU studying playwriting and screenwriting. I'll put you in touch." And she did. Though neither of us went on to do...

photo of Stephen Dixon by Christopher T. Assaf, Baltimore Sun Sometimes, I would get annoyed when I saw Stephen Dixon's byline, because sometimes it felt like he was everywhere . Pick up a literary magazine, scan the table of contents: familiar name, unfamiliar name, Stephen Dixon. For a while, too, I thought there was a uniformity to his style: long, headlong sentences, endless paragraphs, the minute thoughts of boring white hetero guys. Everywhere. Stephen Dixon. These feelings of annoyance never lasted very long, because I'd always end up going back to one of Dixon's collections, particularly The Stories of Stephen Dixon and, more recently, What Is All This?: Uncollected Stories . Open a random page of either of those books and you will find energy, weirdness, insight, humor, tragedy, wonder. And while, yes, there's often page after page of hetero white guy yammering, we mustn't forget that Kafka was among Dixon's favorite writers, and Dixon never g...

My mother died on November 3, 2018. She was, in so many ways, my first reader and my first editor. Five days before her death, she asked me to write her something to read. I went home that night and wrote the following essay. I brought it to her the next day. Her eyesight had weakened, and she didn't have a lot of stamina, but she was able to read a couple paragraphs of it. It turned out to be the last thing I wrote while my mother was alive. I read it at her memorial service, and numerous people asked to have a copy of it, so I am posting it here for all who are interested.  Ghosts by Matthew Cheney A reader of horror stories, and a fan of horror movies, I am familiar with ghosts and hauntings. As I’ve grown older, though, it seems strange to me that ghosts are typically represented as frightening, that being haunted is considered undesireable. Certainly, screaming banshees flying through the ruins of gothic mansions at midnight aren’t exactly comforting. But I’m thin...

Years ago, I picked up a couple of issues of Poetry  magazine that Donald Hall had gotten rid of. I don't remember where. A yard sale or library sale, maybe. A random table in a random shop, a random shelf in a random hallway. I have no idea. I remember, though, that I almost passed them by. But I happened to look at the address label. Donald Hall. Eagle Pond Farm. Danbury, NH.  No bookish New Hampshire native would have been able to resist. If you aren't from New Hampshire, or don't live in New Hampshire, Donald Hall's name may not mean a lot to you — maybe you know he's a poet, maybe you remember a children's book he wrote, maybe you read one of his essays in The New Yorker , maybe you heard him on NPR, maybe, maybe... But for us New Hampshirites, Donald Hall is  poetry. His death at the age of eighty-nine (a few months short of his ninetieth birthday) feels, in a literary sense, as monumental as the day the Old Man of the Mountain fell to rubble.

The first rejection letter I ever got was from Gardner Dozois . I was in 6th grade and had just learned about submitting stories to magazines; I had also just started reading my mother's boss's copies of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine , which Dozois had recently become editor of. I don't remember anything about the story I submitted, but I'm sure it was awful. I don't think I expected it to be accepted, because what I most remember is how excited I was to get a letter from the editor. My parents were kind and didn't tell me it was a form letter, nor that the signature was printed onto it, not written by the editor himself. I brought it to school to show my teacher. She, too, very kindly did not tell me that thousands of people likely got just this same letter. (After a few more submissions, I figured it out.) Dozois also edited what may be the single most important anthology in my life: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Third Annual Collecti...

1. I am writing this on Virginia Woolf's 136th birthday. Ursula K. Le Guin , who died a few days ago, was a lifelong reader of Woolf's work, and the trace of Woolf's writing and thinking can be found not only throughout Le Guin's essays, but also in her fiction, different as it is in style and substance from Woolf's own. Le Guin not only read the famous novels, but she also cherished some of the works that get less notice these days, including Three Guineas , a fierce critique of patriarchy and militarism, the Woolf book that I think most deserves a revival in our cruel, murderous era. It's likely that I started reading Woolf because of Le Guin. I was probably 12 or 13 years old, I had heard that Le Guin was among the greatest of science fiction writers, so I sought out her work, and the library had some anthologies with her short stories in them ( The Hugo Winners  volumes, Again, Dangerous Visions , etc.) as well as her essay collection  The Language o...

The Spring 2017 issue of Virginia Woolf Miscellany  (issue 91) has been posted online as a free PDF. It includes a brief essay I wrote in remembrance of Jean Kennard, who taught a Woolf seminar twenty years ago that helped set me on a path I am still following. Here's a taste: We read all of the novels except Night and Day , plus Room, Three Guineas , and the essays in Michèle Barrett's Women & Writing anthology. I remember being so exhausted from reading that I could hardly keep up with my other classes, but it was a profoundly fulfilling exhaustion, because reading such a volume of Woolf made her words and images feel like a presence in my life, a sort of companion.

I am just coming to the news that Mark Woods, who ran the wood s lot site, died in February . I'd not been reading wood s lot regularly for a while — life got complex, internet reading more fragmented, and wood s lot  was just too rich, too full, too much: I hated skimming it, because it was material that needed to be absorbed more fully, more thoughtfully. I regret that, and am glad that the archives survive. I can't overstate the effect of wood s lot  on me in the early days of blogging here. (The consistent quality of the site is awe-inspiring. I look back through my own archives here and mostly think I'm looking at the doodles of a child. Read through the archives of wood s lot  and from the beginning you'll perceive a sharp mind arranging the signs and sights of the universe.) In the scrappy days before social networks and corporate bloggers, Mark Woods' site and David Auerbach's Waggish  offered a literary seriousness that made online writing see...

Over at Press Play, I have a brief text essay about and a video tribute to Christopher Lee , who died on June 7 at the age of 93. Here's the opening of the essay: Christopher Lee was the definitive working actor. His career was long, and he appeared in more films than any major performer in the English-speaking world — over 250. What distinguishes him, though, and should make him a role model for anyone seeking a life on stage or screen, is not that he worked so much but that he worked so well. He took that work seriously as both job and art, even in the lightest or most ridiculous roles, and he gave far better, more committed performances than many, if not most, of his films deserved. Read and view more at Press Play.

It is with tremendous sadness that I share news I received this morning from my friend David Beronä's family: David passed away peacefully at home last night. He'd been fighting a brain tumor for about a year and a half, and so while the news is not quite a surprise, it is a blow. [ Update:   Here's David's official obituary .] I interviewed David for Colleen Lindsay's blog The Swivet in 2009, where we talked about his Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels , which had recently been published by Abrams. I knew very little about graphic narratives before meeting David, and he gave me an extraordinary education over the years, as his knowledge was vast and his passion was thrilling. Eric Schaller and I had the honor of publishing what David told us was the last piece of writing that he completed before getting sick, the essay "Franz Masereel's Picture Books Against War" , which appeared in last year's issue of our magazine The Revelat...

via The Paris Review Nadine Gordimer has died at the age of 90 , a significant age to reach, and yet, as always with the loss of a major figure (particularly one who stayed active and known) it feels like a robbery. We are greedy, we living people. Writers satiate some of our greed against death by leaving us with their words. Gordimer's oeuvre is large (she began publishing fiction in South Africa in the late 1940s), and her fiction in particular will live long past this moment of her body's death. Because Gordimer was so active in the anti-apartheid struggle, and her writing so often addresses the situation in South Africa at the time of its writing, it is easy to fall into the trap of reducing her to a political writer and to ignore or downplay the artistry of her work. She sometimes encouraged this view in her essays and interviews, but she also understood that she was not a propagandist, telling Jannika Hurwitt in 1979 , "I am not by nature a political crea...

© 2009 Mari Kurisato We knew this day was coming, but that doesn't really make it easier. After years of struggling with cancer, Jay Lake has died . Jay leaves a legacy of family, of friendships, of writing, and of science. He had his genome sequenced, and he submitted himself to grueling experimental trials. He could have gone more quietly into this good night; he chose instead to try to help the people of a future that has been denied to him. One of his greatest legacies may be to have helped, in some small or large way, to move us closer to a cure for cancer. In place of eulogy, here's something I wrote when Jay could read it . Farewell, friend.

photo by William J. Smith/AP, via Washington Post Via a series of Tweets from Tamara K. Nopper , I learned that William Worthy recently died at the age of 92. I knew very little about Worthy the man, but his name has been one I've known since childhood, because of a Phil Ochs song about him, "The Ballad of William Worthy" . My father was a DJ at a radio station in Massachusetts in the 1960s and played that song one day, because though his politics were rather different from those of Ochs or Worthy (he voted for Nixon and generally supported the Vietnam War), he loved to challenge authority and get in trouble. That he did. As he told it, a bunch of little old ladies wrote letters to the station to demand that this upstart DJ be fired. The station manager screamed at him never to play anything like that damned song ever again. By the time I was old enough to be taught the contents of the record collection at home, I heard that story and listened to the song. It...

photo by Ellen Datlow, 21 Nov 2007   I hate that this sentence must now be in the past tense: Lucius Shepard was one of the great American writers . It's hard to find words, even though I've had 24 hours to search. In a review of The Dragon Griaule , I invoked Conrad and melodrama, and quoted Eric Bentley on both. Here's part of that quote again, because it gets at exactly what Lucius Shepard's stories mean to me, and why they mean so much: Only under the influence of a narrow and philistine Naturalism can we ask why an artist shows life at a remove and in some established genre. The transposition of an inner struggle to a duel between persons does not even need a convention to carry it: such changes are made nightly by everyone in his dreams. If one can make of one's tussles with suicidal wishes a drama of love and honor, one has given to private and chaotic material a public and recognizable form. One has made art out of fantasy and pain. And now a sen...