The Mumpsimus

  "Barry was not one to invest in answers. It was the questions that pulsed in his body and propelled him forward no matter where he traveled in the world." —Debra Gwartney, "Fire and Ice"   Barry Lopez died on December 25, 2020, shortly before January 6, 2021, which would have been his 76th birthday. Of course, that date two years now lives in infamy, a day of insurrection in the United States. Within the next few months, a little book I wrote in the wake of that day will be published: About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community . (It was originally scheduled to come out this past fall, but the publisher got a little backed up.) It will be published as an open-access book with a Creative Commons License by Punctum Books, so the PDF will be freely available and the paperback will be as affordable as possible. I will have more to say about the book when it is released. I want to note Lopez's birthday today, however. Of the people I have met in my life, ...

Today is Alice Munro's 90th birthday, and her singular, extraordinary career deserves great celebration.  Munro's first published story, "The Dimension of Shadow" , appeared (under her name at the time, Alice Laidlaw) in the April 1950 issue of the student literary magazine of the University of Western Ontario, Folio . According to Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives by Robert Thacker, she soon began sending her stories to Robert Weaver ( "the best friend the Canadian short story ever had" ), who ran a radio series on the CBC devoted to Canadian short stories; after rejecting a few, Weaver broadcast a reading of "The Strangers" on October 5, 1951. Weaver encouraged her to keep writing and to submit her work to literary journals. Her first professional appearance in print was with "A Basket of Strawberries" in Mayfair magazine's November 1953 issue. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades , was published in Canada in 1968, in the...

  8 fragments for Dylan on his 80th birthday—   1. Oh a false clock tries to tick out my time While it can feel a bit strange to think of any icon of youth culture (which he surely was in the mid-1960s) as an older person, Dylan has often seemed old, or at least outside of time. He began his professional career not as the rock 'n' roll innovator he would (briefly) become, but as someone devoted to the music of his parents' and grandparents' generation. His debut album only had two original songs (both folksy); all the rest were blues standards or old traditionals. Even when he was electrifying the acoustic world, he never lost his devotion to the old, weird sound. He followed up the rock of  Highway 61 Revisited  (1965) and Blonde on Blonde  (1966) with the antiquarian quiet of  John Wesley Harding  (1967) and the crooning country of  Nashville Skyline  (1969). Dylan turning 80 doesn't feel the least bit surprising; it feels appropriate. In...

  Waterhour, the rubble scow ferries us into evening, we, like it, are in no hurry, a dead Why stands at the stern. —Paul Celan, "Rubble Scow" trans. Pierre Joris One hundred years ago, Paul Celan was born; fifty years ago, he died. A variety of books have been released to honor this occasion, but the most significant, for English-language readers at least, is Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry translated by Pierre Joris , who has made the translation of Celan a significant focus of his life's work. Joris's translation of Celan's 1967 collection Atemwende appeared from Sun & Moon Press in 1995 as Breathturn . This was followed by Threadsuns in 2000, Lightduress and Paul Celan: Selections in 2005, The Meridian: Final Version-Drafts-Materials in 2013, and then in 2014, the companion volume to the new one: the magisterial Breathturn Into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry , which collected Joris's previous translations al...

from The Polymath Samuel R. Delany just celebrated his 75th birthday, an auspicious occasion. I've been writing about Delany for over a decade now — I've written and published more about his work than about that of any other writer: introductions to new editions of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw , Starboard Wine , and The American Shore ; on his early pornographic novel Equinox ; on his recent novel Dark Reflections ; an interview in 2009 . I spent some time last summer researching in his archives at Boston University and expect to return this summer, as about a third of my doctoral dissertation (in progress...) is devoted to his work. I've given presentations about him at academic conferences, and all of my academic friends are probably quite tired of my invoking his name at every possible opportunity. The simple fact is that I think Delany is one of the most important American writers, one who ought to be spoken of alongside any great American writer (however defined or ...

Today is Shirley Jackson's 100th birthday, and as I think about her marvelous body of writing, I can't help also thinking of the changes in her reputation over the last few decades, or, rather, my perception of the changes in her reputation. For me, she was always a model and a master, but there was a time when that opinion felt lonely, indeed. I discovered her as so many people discover her: by reading "The Lottery" in school. (Middle school or early high school, I don't remember which.) I loved the story, of course, but it wasn't until I got David Hartwell's extraordinary anthology The Dark Descent  for Christmas one year that I really paid attention to Jackson's name, because the book includes the stories "The Summer People" and "The Beautiful Stranger", both of which I read again and again. Around the same time, I read Richard Lupoff's anthology What If?  and thus encountered what would become one of my favorite short s...