The Mumpsimus

I sometimes fall prey to a silly and mistaken idea: that small-press 'zines are something new. And then I discover someone like John Benson, who has been publishing his 'zine Not One of Us for 19 years now, and has garnered quite a few accolades during that time. After Sonya Taaffe introduced us last year, I knew that I would want to interview John, but other obligations stole my attention, and I didn't get around to it until now. It was, I hope you'll agree, very much worth the wait. When did Not One of Us begin? What made you want to create it? To explain how Not One of Us began, I have to back up a couple of steps. When I first met my (now) wife Anke Kriske, I was a doctoral student in history and she was an aspiring author who was not a native English speaker and did not know how to get started. For three years, before and after we married, I edited her stories and tried to market them. Finally in 1984 a story of hers ("Transitus") was accepted by...

Lots of things out there to cause you to leave here: Some new unbooked blogs: Dracula Blogged and This Date, from Henry David Thoreau's Journal . I got the links from The Little Professor , who discusses them briefly, with some good ideas and questions about how they work and why. She's put up a lot of good posts, recently (including a review of Dozois's latest Year's Best Science Fiction ). Speaking of a lot of good posts recently, the academic group blog The Valve has been opened wide and spouting great ideas and discussions over the past week. There was John Holbo's post about John Crowley, and Crowley showed up to join the discussion in the comments . John Holbo then had an interesting piece on "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Pulp" . And Ray Davis on "The Liebestod of the Author" , with a fascinating anecdote about a Kate Wilhelm workshop at Clarion . And Miriam Burstein (the aforementioned Little Professor) on academic prose . Whea...

I happily took a break from a mound of reading and writing to visit some weblogs and hope for perhaps an idea for a short post hereabouts. I was happy to see Gwenda had posted the nominations for the World Fantasy Awards , and was amazed by all the richness in each category, when suddenly I got to the "Special Award: Non-Professional" nominations, and saw my name there. Clearly, Gwenda was playing a silly joke. So I hopped over to the official website to see what the real nominations were. Gwenda was not joking. Huh. Well. I'm too stunned to come up with a good response, except to say thanks to the judges, and congratulations to all the nominees. It's a magnificent list of writers, editors, publishers, and artists, and I'm amazed to be in such company.

The minute I saw the cover of Don Nace's Drawn Out , I knew it was something special. Usually, I don't judge a book by its cover, but when it's a collection of drawings, the cover is a good starting place. Flipping through it while ignoring various other books that needed to be reviewed, I discovered I was incapable of giving it anything but my fullest attention -- it was too strange, too raw, too enchanting to be dipped in to. I went to the first page, then the second, the third, and continued on to the end. The effect was beyond any description that avoids the purplest of prose, although one person I showed the book to described the effect in a way I very much liked: "It hurts. But it's a necessary hurt." Drawn Out became a book I carried around with me to show to people. Not just anyone -- the drawings are too emotional, the story they tell too painful, for them to be appropriate for just anybody. But everyone I showed the book to had the same reacti...

Some good questions have been asked in the comments section to my previous post about Hal Hartley's new film, and so I thought it might be helpful to foreground that discussion a bit by giving it its own post. Toward the end of the post about The Girl from Monday I wrote, "It's sad to see once-interesting artists decide that they have messages to communicate to the world," which the commenter pointed to and said, That's a strange statement. It could be argued that ALL artists feel they have messages to communicate to the world, and I can't see that as a bad thing. It seems that what you object to is the lack of sophistication in these particular messages, or their lack of relevance to you, not their existence. I then suggested it was a matter of approach, the difference between asking questions and giving answers, which elicited the question, "So no one has any answers to offer, even provisionally?" That seems a vital and important question to me,...

Below is the latest in a continuing series of guest reviews. Our reviewer this time is Teresa Tunaley , who spends most of her waking hours working as a freelance Art/Editorial Director for LBF Books . Living as she does on an idyllic tropical island in the Canaries, Teresa is the first -- but not last -- of the guest reviewers to be from outside the United States. The Boar by Joe R. Lansdale reviewed by Teresa Tunaley In The Boar , award-winning author Joe Lansdale displays once again his excellence for storytelling. In the 121 pages of this short novel, Lansdale cleverly combines both humour and horror into a heartwarming story of tragedy, love and despair. The reader is taken on an adventure to Texas during the Great Depression of the '30s as we follow in the footsteps of fifteen-year-old Richard Dale and his encounter with a giant boar, better known to all the locals as 'Satan'. Lansdale creates a unique world that draws on folklore for its inspiration. For me, the ...

Why do good filmmakers go bad? In the case of Hal Hartley , it may be the effect of trying to apply a limited style to a range of subjects -- what seemed amusing and absurd in Hartley's films through Henry Fool has, in the more expansive settings and more serious attention to philosophies and "issues" of The Book of Life , No Such Thing , and The Girl from Monday , turned to awkward sentimentality, sophomoric self-righteousness, and mannered tedium. The Girl from Monday seems like the work of a film-school student who's seen a bunch of Hal Hartley movies: it's got the same affectless performances, off-kilter photography, and rhythmic editing, but the tone is more plodding, and what was once so prevalent in Hartley's best films -- surreal and absurd moments interspersed with naked realism -- has become a rarity. Hartley's early films worked so well because they applied what seemed to be a self-consciously Meaningful style of acting, filming, and editing...