The Mumpsimus

Strange Horizons has now posted my review of John Clute's latest collection of materials, Stay . A taste: Even a mere glance through Stay , John Clute’s latest collection of book reviews, short stories, and lexicon entries, (or through any of Clute's books, really) will convince you that you are in the presence of genius. But a genius of what type? The type that can turn a million candy wrappers into a surprisingly convincing small-scale replica of a rocket ship, or the type that zips to the heart of a zeitgeist faster than the rest of us? Is this genius a fox, a hedgehog, an anorak? Does it sing in seemingly effortless perfect pitch, or is its singing, like that of a dog, remarkable simply for being at all? The desire to taxonomize is inevitable after reading even a few pages of Clute. He is a wild literary Linnaeus: obsessively compulsed to categorize. As someone generally uninterested in taxonomy, I have struggled to learn to read Clute appreciativel...

The start of a new term and then a huge computer disaster caused me not to post a link here to my review of Nnedi Okorafor's first short story collection, Kabu Kabu , which Strange Horizons  recently published. Here, for anyone who missed it and is interested, it is . The first paragraph, to give you a sense of it all: Nnedi Okorafor's first short story collection begins and ends with tales that evoke histories and challenge orthodoxies. "The Magical Negro" liberates an unfortunate cliché of fantasy fiction to go his own way, and so plants a sign in the narrative ground to let us know that these journeys, though fantastical, will seek some roads less traveled. "The Palm Tree Bandit" (first published  here  at  Strange Horizons  in 2000) reconfigures a different sort of mythos, shaking up the cartography of West African folktales to open some paths for women to play around with symbols and tools too often reserved for men. Both stories are narrative mani...

Strange Horizons has just published a collection of short notices from reviewers about what they read and viewed in 2013 . I thought there were too many good things in 2013 for me to be able to even simply list them all in the 250 words I was allowed, so I decided instead to focus on the writer who had, to my knowledge, the best 2013: Richard Bowes. The other entries are also fascinating, so it makes for a great reading list. Thinking back on 2013 after I wrote my previous post looking back on the year, I realized I left two important books out that would have been there if I'd remembered they were 2013 books — for some reason, in my mind, they were 2012 books. The first is Kit Reed's extraordinary retrospective collection The Story Until Now . In a great year for story collections, this was among the absolute best. The other is the second published and translated volume of Reiner Stach's eventually 3-volume biography of Franz Kafka, Kafka: The Years of Insi...

My review of M. John Harrison's extraordinary novel Empty Space  has been posted at Strange Horizons . My original version of this review was a long, crazy, rambling essay. Editor Abigail Nussbaum did heroic work helping me cut it down into something for a general audience. I like both versions — this one is much more a review, the longer version is ... brain spewings. Abigail kindly suggested that I post the cut pieces here on the blog, and I will do that later this week. I think the Strange Horizons  version is perfectly good for 90+% of readers, but a few folks might enjoy seeing what zany lands this great book, and its predecessors, sent me to. Update:   And here are the deleted passages .

New Year's Eve fireworks, 2012; photo by Matthew Cheney I have a small contribution in the grand collage that is the Strange Horizons reviewers' "2012 in Review" . Well worth taking a look at for the huge, wonderful variety of writers' interests and enthusiasms. Happy new year!

For various reasons, I've decided it's a good time to end my Strange Horizons column, Lexias. It began (untitled) on 7 February 2005, which means I've been writing it for more than seven years. I'm proud of the work that is there, and I don't want to dilute it or just keep repeating myself, so I've decided to switch things up a bit and move on to other projects (including occasional reviews for Strange Horizons ; in fact, I was just trying to finish a new one when I checked to see if the column had been posted yet). Looking back through the archives to see if I could find any special inspiration for a final column, something to return to or something to reiterate, I found various sentences and ideas I wished I could draw more attention to. And then the concept for the final column hit me — basically, to do what I did with my Weird Fiction Review collage, "Stories in the Key of Strange" , but this time to pull material only from past columns, a...

My latest Strange Horizons column is about John D'Agata and Jim Fingal's book The Lifespan of a Fact , which has been provoking a lot of discussion . My favorite of the responses to the book is Ander Monson's "The Skeptical Gaze" , because not only has Monson read Lifespan  with some care (which cannot be said for many of the people punditing about it), but he's also done some wonderful work himself to explore the possibilities and boundaries of fact and fiction ( I wrote about his excellent book Vanishing Point  a couple years ago for Strange Horizons ). (Pardon another parenthetical, but I also want to add that comparisons between Mike Daisy and John D'Agata are superficial and fundamentally wrongheaded, as  Josh Voorhees  pointed out at Slate . Daisy hid his lying and worked hard to do so, D'Agata has put his fictionalizing front and center and let the world respond. I wrote the column before the Daisy scandal broke, however.) Anyway, my own...

I have a couple of things at Strange Horizons this week: a new Lexias column, "Kipple" , and a contribution to the annual year-in-review article . I hadn't thought I'd read much that was first published in 2011, but looking over other people's contributions, I see I've read more than I thought; I just forgot when it was published. (For instance, I would have mentioned Gwyneth Jones's The Universe of Things , but for some reason I had it in my mind as having been published in 2010. I'm terrible with dates.)

Google has done gone and broke Google Reader , removing the sharing function to encourage people to use Google Plus instead. This means the "Fresh Links" section over on the sidebar is no longer able to be refreshed, and I'll probably go back to occasionally doing linkdump posts. Here, for instance, are some links: My latest Strange Horizons column, "Reading Systems" , has been posted, as has my latest Sandman Meditations piece. (The Sandman pieces are going to be biweekly for the rest of the year rather than the regular weekly schedule because I'm just too busy to keep up with a weekly schedule right now, and I was getting really frazzled.) Team VanderMeer has launched The Weird Fiction Review , an online journal about kumquats. Famed kumquat collected Neil Gaiman is interviewed , and there's an interesting selection of nonfiction, art, and fiction about kumquats. Don't believe me? Well, go over there and see for yourself! In publishing new...

It's the final week of the Strange Horizons Fund Drive , and there are lots of fun prizes that have been donated by the various folks who support SH. But you shouldn't donate just to get a prize. You should donate because that's what keeps SH going, and has kept it going for 10 years now, long enough to make it venerable . Their staff is all volunteer, but they pay their writers good rates (think of it as the opposite of the Huffington Post that way). Here's some useful info: Where does my money go? Strange Horizons  is staffed entirely by volunteers, so everything you donate goes towards the running of the magazine. At the moment, our costs break down something like this: Your  $5 donation  will cover our administrative overhead costs for one week Your  $20 donation  pays for one poem or one review Your  $50 donation  pays for one article Your  $100 donation  allows us to sponsor a convention event Your  $250 donation ...

My latest column is up at Strange Horizons , and this time it's about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic science fiction film World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) . If you want to see World on a Wire  (and you should!), it's available on home video in the U.K. and Europe , and in the U.S. can be seen via Hulu if you subscribe to Hulu Plus  (you can get a free trial subscription for a week, or if you have .edu email address, for a month). Rumor has it that Criterion will be releasing the film on DVD and Blu-ray in the U.S. at the end of this year or the beginning of next [ update:  the rumors were true ]. It's also still touring various U.S. cities -- at the end of this week, it will be at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA. I'm a Fassbinder nut, so will passionately defend even his films that only lunatics defend, but you don't have to be as obsessed with Fassbinder as I to see get pleasure from  World on a Wire.  (Although if "efficient" pl...

I've got a couple of pieces of writing floating around out in the internets this week— A new Sandman Meditations piece has been posted at Gestalt Mash.  This week, the penultimate chapter of Brief Lives . If my counting is correct, this is the 50th Sandman Meditation. (The 50th issue of Sandman was "Ramadan" , but because I'm reading the stories in the order of the trade collections rather than the original publication, I wrote about that issue back in June when I read it in Fables and Reflections .) Over at Strange Horizons, it's Pat Cadigan week, and I've contributed an essay about some of the 1980s short stories that helped make Cadigan famous . It's a somewhat odd essay. I expect the nice young men in their clean white coats to show up at my door any moment... Also, it's Strange Horizons Fund Drive time! The site exists through contributions. The staff are not paid, but the writers are (the reverse of many publisher's policies). Except...

My latest column has been posted at Strange Horizons: "Old, Weird" . I probably should have included links to some songs and materials discussed in it, so here are a few to get you started... Some of Greil Marcus's The Old, Weird America  can be read at Google Books. The Wikipedia page on The Anthology of American Folk Music  has some good info and links. At the Folkways site, you can hear clips from each track of Harry Smith's Anthology  and also download the marvelous liner notes as a PDF. You can read some parts of When We Were Good: The Folk Revival on Google Books. I wrote a bit about Todd Haynes's I'm Not There  when it first came out. Tim Lucas posted some interesting quotes about Dylan's song "I'm Not There (1956)" at Video Watchblog  (the link to an mp3 of the song still works, at least as of this minute). You can hear Henry Thomas's sublime "Honey, Won't You Allow Me One More Chance" on YouTube. Some ...

Strange Horizons yesterday posted my review of Gary K. Wolfe's Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature . That review begins by making a specific distinction between book reviews and a certain type of literary criticism, a distinction that Abigail Nussbaum considers in a blog post about the sorts of things she's looking for as Strange Horizons's reviews editor. I don't particularly disagree with the qualifications and complexities Abigail adds to what I wrote; the distinction I settled on was useful for that review, and seemed worth mentioning because it was absent from Wolfe's own taxonomy of reviews vs. criticism. As with so many things, in reality the distinctions are not hard and fast.

My latest Strange Horizons column was posted at the beginning of the week; the subject this time is Joanna Russ . One thing I thought about including, but couldn't figure out how to fit in, was that Russ's marvelous story "The Clichés from Outer Space" predicted one of the elements of Bryan Vaughn's comic Y: The Last Man (a series that I must admit I only read the first 3 collections of, its virtues utterly lost on me). In the comic, the Daughters of the Amazon are a bunch of evil, man-hating lesbians who cut off one of their breasts to be able to shoot arrows better or something, which is what some folks have  said the actual Amazons did back in the day ( the myths are contradictory ). It's possible that this noxious stereotype is ironized and deconstructed later in the series; I didn't stick with it long enough to find out. The relevant passage from Russ's story is one I quoted only a sentence of in the column. It's from the section called...

My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted, this time a celebration of Fritz Leiber's centennary . I mentioned last week that I needed to come up with a title for my Strange Horizons columns. Through much of last week I was fighting off the worst illness I've had in years, so perhaps the title is simply the product of fever, but nonetheless, now in a less fevered state, I like it: Lexias . It keeps to the pattern of the other columnists (Scores, Diffractions, Intertitles, etc.) in being a single, plural word. And it seems mostly accurate to my project, if you think of the word as Roland Barthes used it in S/Z : "a series of brief, contiguous fragments ... units of reading" (Richard Miller's translation). (For more on Barthes, by the way, this is an interesting site .) But for my purposes, "lexias" is fun, too, because it is the term Samuel R. Delany picked up (from Barthes) for  The American Shore , which can be described as a book-length...

I've been writing columns for S trange Horizons for some time now, chronicling whatever happened to be obsessing me at the moment when the column was due, for better or ill. It's a good challenge. Various other columnists have come and gone during that time, with Karen Healey and John Clute being the most recent regulars, offering diverse and fascinating stuff. Now, two more folks have joined the roster, and they're both people I've at least been acquainted with for a while, people who I have great fondness and respect for: Vandana Singh and Genevieve Valentine. Vandana's first column appeared last week, Genevieve's this week . Great, great stuff. We've also been asked to provide names for our columns in addition to the individual column titles. Clute's got Scores, Vandana is Diffractions, and Genevieve is Intertitles. I envy them all. (Being in such hallowed company, I'm tempted to call mine Excrement, but I'll probably come up with som...

My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted . It's about one of my favorite books of nonfiction, Ann Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body . I first tried to write it as a straightforward appreciation, but for reasons that will become obvious from the column, I couldn't do that right now. So I broke the voices in my head into two configurations, X and Y, and had them talk to each other -- they're neither and both "me", and that proved to be just the distancing effect I needed. Here's a sample: X:   Anyway, what I was saying was that I wanted to talk about  Sexing the Body , which was one of those books that, when I first encountered it, completely changed my way of viewing the world. Y:  No it didn't. X:  What? Y:  I was there. You first read it for a graduate course on sexuality and science where a chapter was in the course packet. You sought out the book for a paper you wrote about Eugen Steinach, one of the crazier of the crazy bunch of ear...

Yesterday, Susan Marie Groppi won a well-deserved World Fantasy Award as editor-in-chief of Strange Horizons .  I did a little dance for joy when I found out, because aside from this here blog, Strange Horizons is the publication I've had the longest ongoing relationship with as a writer.  It was just about six years ago, in fact, that Susan first asked if I'd be willing to write an occasional column , and the request just about knocked the wind out of me, because all the writing I'd done had been stuff I'd had to hustle myself -- nobody had ever asked me to write for them before. I've had the pleasure of writing reviews and interviews for SH, too, and it really always has been a pleasure, because the community of staff is exemplary.  The magazine has lasted longer than most of its peers, and the quality of work has been astoundingly strong for a weekly website. Susan's award was in the "non-professional" category (a category I have a certain fon...

Since I've been spending the past few weeks preparing a Gender & Science Fiction class, there's very little I seem to want to write about at the moment other than the thing Kate Bornstein calls "the gender cult". Thus, we have yesterday's Strange Horizons column (written a week and a half ago), "The Failure of Masculinity"  and today's latest episode of the Sandman Meditations , "Men of Good Fortune" .  They are in many ways companion pieces. By the way, I haven't had a chance yet to mention that Strange Horizons is holding their annual fund drive .  SH has paid contributors, volunteer staff, and no advertising revenue other than that which comes through Amazon Associates links to books.  This is SH's tenth year of putting out a new issue nearly every week.  It's an amazing endeavor, and the archives are rich with a wonderfully varied collection of material.  They are able to do so because each year lots of readers th...