The Mumpsimus

  Another year gone. To this one, I am not quite so ready to say, “Good riddance!” as I was some other recent years, but I also have no great reason to want to hold on to 2022. I expect it is a year that will grow less and less defined in memory, its borders bleeding backwards and forwards, until it becomes the early 2020s and then sometime in the 2020s … When writing the recent Archive Dive post about past year-end summaries, I discovered I had not done one for 2021 … and I missed it. I regretted the handful of years I had not done any sort of summary, even just a basic list of favorite books. Not wanting to miss another year, I started taking notes for this one, and kept taking notes whenever anything occurred to me. So even though I'm sure there are plenty of items I've forgotten, it all get pretty long.  But the whole point of having a blog/newsletter/thing is to not be limited by the soundbite culture of social media, so I am going to glory in the opportunity to just go...

Dimond Library, University of New Hampshire, November 2017, photo by MC The year has ended. Indeed, it ended a week and a half ago. People were publishing reflections on the best/worst/whatever of 2017 months before the end of the year, and so now, in the peculiar reality of internet time, reflecting on 2017 seems about as current as reflecting on 1857. But 1857 was an interesting year, and so was 2017. I happen to remember 2017 better than 1857, though, and I want to preserve some of that memory, particularly what was read and viewed and thought about. So here we are. First, I should say that I published less in 2017 than in any year since 2002 or so. I published no new fiction. For nonfiction, there was only an essay on John Keene's sentences for Emerging Writers' Network  and two reviews for the print edition of Rain Taxi  (of  The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and The Year That Changed Literature by Bill Goldstei...

New Year's Eve fireworks, 2012; photo by Matthew Cheney I have a small contribution in the grand collage that is the Strange Horizons reviewers' "2012 in Review" . Well worth taking a look at for the huge, wonderful variety of writers' interests and enthusiasms. Happy new year!

In honor of the new year, let me point you toward some free things that have been giving me much enjoyment over the past week. First, Will Oldham (aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy)! This week, The New Yorker has a profile of this great American singer-songwriter . If you want to sample some of his music, you can get four legal, free downloads at Daytrotter . (His version of "Goodbye Dear Old Stepstone" is gorgeous. To hear Bascom Lamar Lunsford's version, go to this marvelous page of free mp3s of recordings from the '20s and '30s.) My first exposure to Oldham was through his acting -- his performance as the child preacher Danny in one of my favorite movies, Matewan . Much later, I heard he was a musician. I was skeptical -- actors who become musicians, bah! But one day Meghan McCarron and I were driving from Brooklyn to New Hampshire, and she gave me control of her iPod, and I discovered she had the Superwolf album that Oldham did with Matt Sweeney. ...