The Mumpsimus

I have been busy and have neglected this blog. I forgot to make a post here about some of the most exciting news of my year: I have a story in the current issue of my favorite literary magazine, Conjunctions . It's titled "Mass" and it is about, among other things, a mass shooting. Early this morning, at least 50 people were killed and 53 wounded in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The New York Times  is currently calling this the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. I'm not going to write about the gun politics of this. For that, please read the work of Patrick Blanchfield , particularly "So There's Just Been a Mass Shooting" , "God and Guns" , and "The Gun Control We Deserve" . (He's excellent on Twitter , as well, if you want his most recent thoughts.) I have sputtered on about the topic in the past , not always coherently. Patrick is better at it, and better informed, than I. Thinking through the complex, contradic...

© 2009 Mari Kurisato I don't want to be the cancer guy. I want to be the sci-fi guy. ... One of the things I realized almost out of the gate, literally the second day I was in the hospital, was I'm not going to get very much that's good out of this experience, maybe get to keep my life for a while, so I may as well make something of it that will help other people. —Jay Lake In all of my recent reflecting on 2013 , I neglected to mention one of the most powerful and educational bodies of writing that I read through the year: Jay Lake's blog posts on his experience with terminal cancer . (An index to early entries is here . See also: "A brief user’s guide to this blog" .) While Jay refers to these posts as "cancer blogging", which is entirely accurate, at some point I began to think of them by another name, conflating them with the title of a book by Audre Lorde: The Cancer Journals . The word journal also evokes the word journey , and ...

I'm teaching a section of a course next semester called "Murder, Madness, and Mayhem" at Plymouth State , and since a passionate minority of the readership here seems interested in my syllabi and the (so-called) thinking behind them, here are the texts I've settled on using: The Dark Descent edited by David G. Hartwell Blasted by Sarah Kane Dying City by Christopher Shinn Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut S. by Slavenka Drakulic Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery I don't entirely know what I'm doing with all these texts yet (the order was due at the bookstore last week, but the class won't begin till the end of January), but I chose them because I think they will illuminate different things about each other. The only text that I've been settled on using since the moment I learned I'd be teaching a section of the class ...

I kill hamsters!* I want to see them die!!! I'm even bringing my (extended) family into this! Say it one more time: ALRIGHT!!! *Yes, John says God only pokes hamsters in the rear end when we use "alright", but here he is not being entirely forthright with us. "A poke from God" is a well-known phrase used by certain secret societies and cabals to indicate a particularly painful form of torture that leads to death. Just ask somebody at the Creation Museum . They know about pokes from God.