The Mumpsimus

My new book About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community has now been published by Punctum Books as an Open Access work, which means there is a free PDF and the paperback is published at a reasonable price. The book's copyright is replaced by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, giving everyone the freedom to copy, share, and remix the work for noncommercial purposes. This summer, I'm going to play around with alternate forms myself (at the very least an ePub file for ebooks, but maybe also an illustrated website). About That Life was not going to be a book. I began writing it moments after I learned of Barry Lopez's death on Christmas Day, 2020. Lopez had been my workshop leader at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the summer of 2000, and he really changed my approach to life and especially to writing. I wanted to write a short article in his memory, and I especially wanted to share the writing exercises he h...

  This short essay about John Keene's story collection Counternarratives was first published at the Emerging Writers Network site in May 2017. That site seems a little buggy these days, so for the sake of archiving the essay, I am copying it here. Counternarratives remains for me the most impressive story collection by an American writer published in the 21st century.   KEENE SENTENCES   The stories of John Keene provide an aesthetic to push against the power of the cultural forces that venerate quick, easy thinking; forces that reduce knowledge to soundbites and hottakes and quick! mustread! breaking! stories, enforcing a compulsory presentism that is little more than mass amnesia — and self-aggrandizing mass amnesia at that. It’s a prose aesthetic to fight against any impulse insisting life here and life now is the most, the best, the worst, the only. His 2015 collection Counternarratives — easily one of the most invigorating English-language s...

  It began as a blog post. I was just going to write here some quick thoughts about H.P. Lovecraft's 1924 story "The Rats in the Walls" and how the narrator made me think about people who've lost their brains to QAnon conspiracies.  Then I couldn't help thinking about the concept of degeneracy, and of eugenics, and of Madison Grant, a name once famous and now forgotten, literally erased from the archives. I returned to a book I had read a decade or more ago, Jonathan Spiro's excellent Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant , a book that explains so much about the United States, popular ideas of science, the troubled history of environmentalism, and, in its own way, people like H.P. Lovecraft.  And then I wondered if maybe we ought to see Lovecraft's narrators as deeply unreliable rather than as visionaries. What if Lovecraft's fiction is a testimony to yearning as much as to horror, and what if the yearnin...

In The New Yorker , Parul Sehgal writes that the "invocation of trauma promises access to some well-guarded bloody chamber; increasingly, though, we feel as if we have entered a rather generic motel room, with all the signs of heavy turnover."  I am generally sympathetic to Sehgal's complaints here about the ways "trauma" has saturated so many narratives — I've been grumpy about this imprecise, all-encompassing, self-justifying, shallow use of the term "trauma" for at least a decade now, ever since I was introduced to the world of "trauma studies" in literary theory, a field I was particularly suspicious of because, among other things, it didn't seem to understand how fiction works. One way trauma has been deployed has been to indicate Seriousness in novels, a move I've perhaps been especially repulsed by because I find a lot of Very Serious Novels very very uninteresting . However, for me, Sehgal's outcry is simultaneou...

In the first decade of the Twenty-First Century AD, there was a vogue called blogging. Blogging happened when people operated websites and used those websites to publish their own inane commentary on the issues of the day. —Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell 1.  The best novel I've read in a while is only a novel in the loosest sense of the term, and its most traditionally novelistic parts are openly and deliberately terrible. It's less a novel than an angry, fragmented essay with some shards of novelish text scattered through it. I read it compulsively, addictively, hardly believing my eyes. Though the book is messy, angry, sometimes despairing, and often outrageous, more than anything else while reading it I felt joy — and, as often as not, sheer, unbridled glee. The book is  Only Americans Burn in Hell  by Jarett Kobek, and it was published in 2019, though I only discovered it recently. On the cover, the title is gigantic and Kobek's name only appears in a small...