The Mumpsimus

I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.  —Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters Preface [update December 2018] The embargo period for my dissertation has passed, and so it is now available via the University of New Hampshire Scholar's Repository. It seems my doctoral dissertation has hit the ProQuest dissertations databases, so now is perhaps a useful time to say a few words about it here. First, the details for finding it, since there doesn't seem to be an openly accessible link: The title is  Lessoning Fiction: Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form , and it is Dissertation/thesis number 10786319 and ProQuest document ID 2056936547. (If you don't have access to any of those databases and would like a copy of the manuscript, feel free to  email me  and I will send you a PDF.) Here's the abstract: Writers committed to Modernist ideas of artistic autonomy may find that commitment challenged during times of socio-political crisis. Thi...

I suspended this blog before John McCain suspended his campaign to work on the economy, so please vote for me on election day. My running mate is an androgynous simulacrum of Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman who spends most of its time arguing with itself about the role and value of government in effecting meaningful change. I will be de-suspending the blog soon, though, because today I am going out into my backyard to talk with the squirrels about my plan for the economy, a plan that rests its many tentacles on a single bodily proposal: to release all non-violent offenders from prison to make room for various denizens of Wall Street. And to provide free feather boas to everybody who wants one. Oh no! One of my cats just ate the Squirrel Majority Leader! The squirrels are in an uproar! The whole economic plan is now in jeopardy! Bad kitty! BAD! My friends, I'm afraid I'm going to have to suspend the blog for a few more days while this crisis is resolved.