The Mumpsimus

The marvelous Weird Fiction Review  website has now posted a conversation that Eric Schaller and I had about our books, our magazine The Revelator , the weirdness of New Hampshire, and other topics. Along with this, WFR  has posted Eric's story "Voices Carry"  (originally in Shadows & Tall Trees ) and my story "The Lake" (originally in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet ). So if you're curious about us or our writings (or just utterly bored), Weird Fiction Review  is a great place to start.

I was remiss in not noting the book release of my friend and comrade Jeff VanderMeer's new novel, Annihilation , the first volume in the Southern Reach Trilogy , to be followed by Authority and Acceptance later this year. It's getting lots of good press , great reviews , and wonderful support from its publishers. (You can read the first chapter here , if you're curious.)

Behold! The Weird Fiction Review  website has existed for a year now. During that time, it has published work from around the world, including such wondrous things as a new translation of Bruno Schulz's "The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hour Glass" , Olympe Bhêly-Quénum's "The Night Watchman" , and Finnish writer Leena Likitalo's first story in English, "Watcher" . And tons of other things, including my own "Stories in the Key of Strange: A Collage of Encounters" . The website has become a hugely valuable resource, and it just keeps getting better, more varied, more surprising, more impressive. If you haven't spent time with it, you're missing a treasure trove.

Today is Robert Aickman's 98th birthday, and in honor of that, here are some thoughts on my favorite Aickman story, "The Stains". I've been meaning to write about Aickman's work, and this story in particular, for a long time, but I have found it difficult to muster the courage to write about works that are so mysterious, so ineffable, so richly strange and deeply affecting. I think it is no coincidence that I have had the same struggle with the work of Franz Kafka, who is absolutely central to my reading life, and yet I have never written at much length about him at all. Aickman is not as great a writer as Kafka, but that's no insult; Aickman's talent and vision were narrower, his oeuvre less ragged. Nonetheless, there is an affinity of effect (and affect), partly, I suspect, because both writers were masters of writing from repressed obsessions, and both found unique, personal forms of fiction with which to encase those obsessions. "The Stains...

A not-strictly-new new piece of mine has just been posted at Weird Fiction Review , "Stories in the Key of Strange: A Collage of Encounters" . It's not-strictly-new because the collage is built from excerpts from things I've written over the past few years: blog posts, interviews, book reviews, Strange Horizons columns, stray essays. When the good folks at WFR asked me to contribute, I was up to my neck in grading student papers, etc., and though I wanted to contribute, I didn't have a spare brain cell to spend on something new. I thought putting together a collage would be an interesting exercise and easier than writing a new piece. It was definitely the former, but not the latter — I forgot how much I've written over the years... (Plenty of it is best left forgotten.) Trying to organize it all in some vaguely coherent and resonant way was a fun challenge, although I'm too close to it all to know if it's at all effective. At the very least, it...

After my own previous contribution to the burgeoning academic field of VanderMeer Studies, I am happy to christen yet another field: Schaller-VanderMeer Studies, a discipline inaugurated in ivy-covered halls with the Illustrating VanderMeer exhibit. True (Schaller-)VanderMeer Studies scholars do not limit themselves to the study of half a VanderMeer, however, and so I am happy to present here a monograph by Eric Schaller about the woman who was described by Xaver Daffed as "the better half of VanderMeer" (325). This monograph was originally published in the  Fogcon program book, March 2011. ANN VANDERMEER by Eric Schaller Something was happening back there at the tail end of the last millennium. And I’m not talking about The Gulf War, McDonald’s opening a franchise in Moscow, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the Spice Girls, or even Bill Clinton demonstrating new uses for a cigar. Although all these probably figure in there somewhere. What I am talking about a...

My previous post  about  The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction noted that it is in beta-text mode and so quite obviously incomplete. Among the lacks are entries on either Jeff or Ann VanderMeer . I am not a contributor to the encyclopedia nor am I in any way affiliated with it, but I do have a great interest in all things VanderMeer. Earlier this year, I wrote a biography of Jeff for Fogcon , where he and Ann were honored guests. (Eric Schaller wrote the biography of Ann, which I hope he will allow me to reprint here, but he's not returning my calls or email at the moment, probably because I suggested that for Halloween he should dress his dog as a character from Twilight .) I hope the information provided below will prove useful to the encyclopedists and any future scholars. My only goal in life is to be helpful. Jeff VanderMeer will, I expect, deny the accuracy of some of it, but I believe such denials only confirm the truths I am here able to provide to the world... ...

My latest column has been posted at Strange Horizons: "Old, Weird" . I probably should have included links to some songs and materials discussed in it, so here are a few to get you started... Some of Greil Marcus's The Old, Weird America  can be read at Google Books. The Wikipedia page on The Anthology of American Folk Music  has some good info and links. At the Folkways site, you can hear clips from each track of Harry Smith's Anthology  and also download the marvelous liner notes as a PDF. You can read some parts of When We Were Good: The Folk Revival on Google Books. I wrote a bit about Todd Haynes's I'm Not There  when it first came out. Tim Lucas posted some interesting quotes about Dylan's song "I'm Not There (1956)" at Video Watchblog  (the link to an mp3 of the song still works, at least as of this minute). You can hear Henry Thomas's sublime "Honey, Won't You Allow Me One More Chance" on YouTube. Some ...

Richard Hughes's first and most famous book, A High Wind in Jamaica , is one of the strangest novels I've ever read, which is really saying something. It's both delightful and disturbing in the way it presents -- in an unfailingly light tone -- children as amoral aliens. The novel is rich with irony, and it's not a satire so much as a relentless attack on sentimental notions of childhood. The possible interpretations of the novel are likely endless, but in many ways the book itself is about interpretation -- about the futility of trying to interpret a child's experiences and thoughts through adult eyes. (It's also worth noting that the novel was first published in the U.S. under the title The Innocent Voyage , which I'm rather more fond of than its better-known title. It was also once illustrated by Lynd Ward .) I was surprised this morning to discover an essay by British teacher Victoria de Rijke in a 1995 issue of Children's Literature in Educatio...

I was there at the beginning. Yes, soon after Dr. Schaller (my favorite mad scientist) captured the bird , I blindly selected one of my favorite tommy guns and slaughtered the creature with panache.  I gutted it with my teeth.  I deconstructed it with a gulletful of Derrida.  I chugged a shot of ennui and belched sentences of purple bile into the airspace of downed jetliners.  I wouldn't call it a beautiful sight, but it was what I had. Jeff VanderMeer called me a "smart ass", but I was used to that.  He'd called me worse ("cretinous wombat", "illiterate dirigible", "barbaric yawp", "Dick Cheney"). It all led to a chain reaction of words, words, words. And now those words have been packaged and frozen with flash, waiting for you to take them out of the freezer and stick them in the microwave of your soul. All for charity. Go now, my minions.  Pre your order.  Feed the Wyrm and its whimsical Ministry .  Bring back s...

If The City & The City is not my favorite China Miéville novel, that is only because I encountered Perdido Street Station at exactly the time I was ready for the riches it offered, and so the powerful, unforgettable experience of reading it will forever overshadow the experience of reading anything else Miéville writes. I think Iron Council possesses many virtues Perdido Street Station does not, but the latter is the novel that lives deep in my heart. It would simply be impossible for me to love a China Miéville novel more than Perdido Street unless I didn't think of it as a China Miéville novel. And it is almost possible to think of The City & The City as not a China Miéville novel. For one thing, there are no monsters -- at least not in the sense that we are used to monsters from his previous books. This is a great surprise -- what Miéville fan, after all, doesn't know that he loves creating monsters? For another thing, the writing is lean and straightfor...

When I was a kid, I listened to the "Dr. Demento Show" religiously. It played on the local radio station on Sunday nights. A couple of friends of mine would also listen, and the next morning at school we would compare notes about which songs made us laugh the most, which ones we thought were just stupid, etc. I often taped the shows so I could collect the funniest songs, and I spent hours copying the best songs from each week onto a single tape. Thus began a certain passion for weird music. Partly, my father is to blame -- he had been a DJ at a couple Massachusetts radio stations in the 1960s, and took home many of the 45's the station didn't want. Some of my earliest musical experiences were with these 45s, and there's some pretty bizarre stuff in there. Just like marijuana leads to heroin, those 45s led me to my current situation -- all sorts of stuff in my iTunes library that is utterly without redeeming social importance. I was going through some of my ...

I love happenstance and serendipity with music, so am quite attracted to a music meme Andrew Wheeler just shared : 1. Put your iTunes (or any other media player you may have) on shuffle. 2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer. 3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS! Here we go... IF SOMEONE SAYS "IS THIS OKAY" YOU SAY? Izakunyatheli Afrika Verwoerd (Africa is Going to Trample on You, Verwoerd) -- from This Land is Mine: South African Freedom Songs WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY? Six O'Clock News -- John Prine WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL? Another Man's Vine -- Tom Waits WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE? Pagan Poetry -- Björk WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO? I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine -- Bob Dylan WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU? I Kill Children -- Dead Kennedys WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN? Humdrum -- Peter Gabriel WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND? Brother Flower -- Townes van Zandt WHAT DO YOU THINK ...

Oh, if we denizens of the internets don't love us some lists! Me too, me too! I used to make lists of best this-that-and-another-thing -- best 3 home appliances I have used in my life (the pink feather duster always tops the list!), best 673 songs to listen to while shoveling gravel, etc. -- but there was something terribly authoritarian about it all, and the rabidly anti-authoritarian part of myself screamed back at the little tin dictator in my soul that such list-making is nothing more than a goofy manifestation of a fascist impulse. (The rabidly anti-authoritarian part of my soul uses the word "fascist" without much precision, alas. The more moderate anti-authoritarian part of my soul has read both Fascism: A Very Short Introduction and The Anatomy of Fascism and even the Wikipedia entry , so would never think of applying the term to such an innocuous little hobby as list-making.) The lists I like these days are of the personal kind -- the books that, for whatev...

Always one to be behind the times, I'd not heard of Improv Everywhere until today, but a quick scan of the website explained an event I'd unwittingly witnessed a few weeks ago: No Pants 2k8 , where hundreds of people in seven cities around the world took off their pants (that is, trousers -- in London I once made what I thought was an innocuous comment about "pants" and everybody thought I was making a ribald comment about underwear) and rode the subways. I'd ridden a train with one of these groups, and assumed they were participating in some sort of marathon. Or something. I don't know. You see weird stuff in NY all the time. But the latest Improv Everywhere event is marvelous -- be sure to watch the video of Frozen Grand Central . Hilarious and beautiful. Long may they improvise!