The Mumpsimus

via Wikimedia Commons I demonstrate hope. Or the hope for hope. Or just more unanswerable holes. — Mary Biddinger, "Beatitudes" (I keep writing and rewriting this post.) I thought I knew what I felt about the academic controversy du jour  (a letter sent by a University of Chicago dean to incoming students, telling them not to expect trigger warnings, that academia is not a safe space, that open discussion requires them to listen to speakers they disagree with, etc.) — but I kept writing and rewriting, conversing and re-conversing with friends, and every time I didn't know more than I knew before. Overall, I don't think this controversy is about trigger warnings, safe spaces, etc. Overall, I think it is about power and access to power. But then, overall I think most controversies are about power and access to power. Overall— The questions around trigger warnings, safe spaces, and campus speakers are complicated, and specific situations must ...

via Wikimedia Commons I demonstrate hope. Or the hope for hope. Or just more unanswerable holes. — Mary Biddinger, "Beatitudes" (I keep writing and rewriting this post.) I thought I knew what I felt about the academic controversy du jour  (a letter sent by a University of Chicago dean to incoming students, telling them not to expect trigger warnings, that academia is not a safe space, that open discussion requires them to listen to speakers they disagree with, etc.) — but I kept writing and rewriting, conversing and re-conversing with friends, and every time I didn't know more than I knew before. Overall, I don't think this controversy is about trigger warnings, safe spaces, etc. Overall, I think it is about power and access to power. But then, overall I think most controversies are about power and access to power. Overall— The questions around trigger warnings, safe spaces, and campus speakers are complicated, and specific situations must ...

Jeff VanderMeer has a good post up about style. You should read it. I, being endlessly excited by the topic, responded with a comment as long as the post itself. I didn't really mean to do that, and was embarrassed upon posting it to see just how much I'd written, but I was in a hurry and didn't have a chance to write concisely. But I wanted to offer a comment/question about translation -- specifically the fact that some great writing survives some really bad translation -- and see what folks did with it, if they did anything other than just groan and ignore me. Which might be the best response. Nonetheless, the post itself is worth considering... Meanwhile, I was tempted to write a long post here about the blazing idiocy of John Mullan's "12 of the Best New Novelists" thing at The Guardian , but other people are on it . Really, though, I know what you most want from me: cute wombats !

If you haven't read John Coulthart's commentary on the recent controversy over an exhibit at the Smithsonian, do.  It's called "Ecce Homo Redux" .  Here's the first paragraph: If the news of the past few weeks has felt like a re-run of the 1980s—ongoing recession, government cuts, riots in London, Tories casting aspersions on the undeserving poor, the threat of another royal wedding—then add to the list of déjà vu  moments a flurry of outrage concerning art and religion in America that’s like a recapitulation of the  Helms vs. NEA  spats of 1989. On that occasion Andres Serrano’s  Piss Christ  was in the firing line, accused of being a blasphemous portrayal. This week it’s been the turn of a video installation of a short film made the same year,  A Fire in My Belly , by David Wojnarowicz, a work featured in an exhibition I linked to a couple of weeks ago,  Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture  at the National Portrai...

So, after lots of kerfluffle, Elizabeth Moon is no longer invited as Guest of Honor to WisCon . And, rather quickly, Juan Williams is no longer employed by NPR. Good. Some people are crying about free speech and all that, but that's silly.  If an avowedly feminist, anti-racist, and progressive/left/whatever convention doesn't want to honor somebody who posted what seemed to lots of folks (including me) an Islamophobic and blazingly ignorant screed ... that seems like a fairly predictable outcome, one that maybe should have even happened sooner .  It's not like Moon had been invited as guest of honor to the Newt Gingrich Sing-a-long -- it's WisCon!  (And as Nick Mamatas points out , this is not the first con to disinvite a GoH.)  She's welcome to attend WisCon if she wants, she just can't do it as a guest of honor. With Juan Williams, NPR doesn't want to pay a guy who says he's scared of Muslims when they get on planes.  NPR's not destr...

Hal Duncan's latest "Notes from New Sodom" column had me shouting, "Yes!  Yes!" at the morning air as I read it -- one of those wonderful moments when somebody puts into words ideas that I've felt in my own brain only as pre-verbal tadpoles swimming through mud. The topic of the column is the phrase "cultural appropriation" as applied to works of fiction, and Hal uses the TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender and the recent movie derived from it to launch into a learned, thoughtful, and vulgarity-filled argument against the phrase. I've never been comfortable with the idea of "cultural appropriation" applied to fiction, or anything, really, because of the way those words turn culture into property and force any discussion of representation into a discussion of ownership.  Instead, it should be a discussion of power.  Power not only of one group over another, but also the power that stories wield.  Words and narratives matter, th...

Lucile Hadzihalilovic's 2004 film Innocence is haunting, beautiful, mysterious, unsettling, and maybe bait for pedophiles. Based on some of the reviews I've read, what you think of the movie may depend on how much you blame Hadzihalilovic for her husband. First, the movie. It's based on Frank Wedekind's 1901 novella Mine-Haha: or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls . Wedekind gave us the controversial works Spring Awakening (recently seen on Broadway ) and the Lulu plays , which were filmed as Pandora's Box in 1929 by G.W. Pabst and made Louise Brooks a star. Knowing this, it should be no surprise that Innocence is a surreal story of a weird boarding school for pre-pubescent girls, and that certain sexual undercurrents are present.

Lizzie Skurnick: "I just want to say," I said as the meeting closed, "that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it's disgusting ." (I wasn't built for the board room.) "But we can't be doing it because we're sexist," an estimable colleague replied huffily. "After all, we're both men and women here." But that's the problem with sexism. It doesn't happen because people -- male or female -- think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man's wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he'd be a better manager. It's not that women shouldn't be up for the big awards. It's just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like...

A couple weeks ago, Lev Grossman wrote an essay for The Wall Street Journal and I was in a bad mood that day (having choked on all the butt-ends of my days and ways) and so I decided to take issue with Mr. Grossman's representation of literary modernism. I know my pet peeve against people using the term "modernism" in certain ways borders on the irrational and is at best a bit of lit geekery, but so it goes. I certainly didn't expect a lot of notice. But there was a lot of notice, and various people started piling up either to pummel Mr. Grossman's essay or to celebrate it. There was, at least from the perspective of a lit geek like me, some fascinating discussion in amidst the ever-vociferous noise of internet brouhahahahahas. I know Mr. Grossman considered some of what I said to be too ad hominem, and though I may not feel that it was too ad hominem, he's absolutely right that, out of disappointment that someone of his educational background, broad r...

For certain reasons , I've been musing on some of the science fiction stories that, over the years, at one time or another, I might have classified as "mindblowing". Just a little personal list, one made very quickly... "The Lost Kafoozalum" by Pauline Ashwell "Blood Child" by Octavia E. Butler "Fool to Believe" by Pat Cadigan "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" by Samuel R. Delany "The Start of the End of It All" by Carol Emshwiller "The Faithful Companion at Forty" by Karen Joy Fowler "Midnight News" by Lisa Goldstein "The Violet's Embryos" by Angélica Gorodischer "Out of All Them Bright Stars" by Nancy Kress "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin "Tiny Tango" by Judith Moffett "No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore "Rachel in Love" by Pat Murphy "A Scarab in th...