The Mumpsimus

Most images grabbed off the internet are terrible. A few days ago, I wrote a draft of this post that was a snarky attack on a badly thought-out essay by J. Robert Lennon at Salon . It would be nice if sites like Salon would expend more of their energies in bringing attention to some good writing that doesn't get noticed rather than running yet another quick-and-dirty "contrarian" takedown. After writing the snarky draft, I realized my problem wasn't with Lennon or the essay per se. My problem was more with the people who seemed so desperately to want to like his essay. Lennon sets himself up against  some comments by Dan Chaon  that have been bouncing around the internet for a while (for some unfathomable reason, that website doesn't clearly date its material). These comments by Chaon are intelligent and accurate. He says writers need to read widely and eclectically, and he even suggests some good things to read. Specific, helpful advice. Lennon decides ...

David Smith, untitled I have to admit that while plenty of Damien Walter's "Weird Things" columns at The Guardian are interesting, and it's really wonderful to see a major newspaper paying regular attention such stuff, and Walter seems like a passionate and thoughtful person ... the latest one, titled, "Should science fiction and fantasy do more than entertain?" pretty much made me gag. Mostly it was that headline that caused the coughing and sputtering; the piece itself isn't terrible, is well intentioned, and seems primarily aimed at a general audience. I'm not a general audience for the topic, so in my ways, I'm a terrible reader for what Walter wrote. Thus, I'll refrain from comment on the main text. But there's a statement he made in response to a commenter that didn't make me cough and sputter, it just made me question something I hadn't really questioned before: the term "formalist" and its relationship t...

I don't have time or desire to expose all the errors and bad assumptions in Lev Grossman's essay "Good Novels Don't Have to be Hard" , but thankfully I don't have to: Andrew Seal has already shown how wrong Grossman is about so much . Grossman's essay reminds me of a lot of things I've read in science fiction fanzines and blogs over the years where people want to justify their taste and pleasures against armies of straw people marching through an alternate literary history. But I don't really feel any malice toward SF fans and amateur critics who are passionate about what they spend most of their time reading; that they don't have a nuanced understanding of Modernism is really not a big deal. That a man who has a degree from Harvard in literature and did work toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale, has written for Lingua Franca, the Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, Salon and the New York Times , and has been...

A reader writes to Tin House : I have read several issues of Tin House , including the most recent. Two vegetarians go on a hunting trip . . . enough said. I feel that I have several pieces that would fit the magazine, however, I am struggling with just one thing. This question is geared not only toward the magazine but the writing workshop as well. Do you accept genre fiction? I was also wondering how I might go about determining whether or not my piece fits into a specific genre and what general fiction is. Thank you in advance. —Confused in LA And Tin House responds. Now, I happen to like Tin House very much. We've reprinted stories from the magazine in each volume of Best American Fantasy . Their "Fantastic Women" issue was awesome. Their current anniversary issue is also awesome. Just about all of their issues are awesome. But the response to Concerned in LA is not awesome. It's disappointing. I spend too much time, perhaps, defending writers, editors, a...

While reading (and enjoying) a recent review at Strange Horizons , I became obsessed with a single word: mimetic . Writing about Vandana Singh's story "Thirst", Dan Hartland says, "Indeed, 'Thirst' is a largely mimetic piece, which opens itself to the fantastic only towards its close..." and then at the end of the paragraph finishes by saying, "two planes often opposed to each other in fiction co-exist and co-mingle, rendering metaphor, allegory and mimesis one". He calls another of Singh's stories "essentially a mimetic story about the search for truth". There's a minor tradition within the science fiction community of using mimetic and mimesis to mean the opposite of the fantastic . The oldest such uses that I could find (with a quick and profoundly less than exhaustive search) date to the early 1970s, and the casual employment of the term in those contexts makes me suspect that it has a longer history within the SF wor...