The Mumpsimus

Teachers stay teachers because they are addicted to the occasional joys, the joys that overshadow the common and continuous frustrations (mounds of things to grade, recalcitrant students, angry parents, obtuse bureaucrats). One of the greatest joys is to see students go off into the world and seize the opportunities they encounter. When Ramsay de Give was a student at the school where I teach, we all knew he was a talented photographer and an intelligent and compassionate human being. For various reasons, we weren't exactly sure what would become of him in the world, though. It was a great pleasure, then, when he sent me the address of his website, because there were the fruits of his past few years' work as a photojournalist, and the results are, in my entirely biased opinion, extraordinary. Ramsay uses his images to tell stories about the world, stories that might not otherwise be told. I found the "stories and essays" section of his website particularly moving...

The most interesting message board discussion I've seen recently concerns Lucius Shepard's film reviews , particularly his review of King Kong ("Jackson, once an edgy, intriguing filmmaker, has fallen prey to the same ethos that underscores the films of his immediate predecessors, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas: To make a mark, a movie must play as though to an audience of children...and not especially astute children at that"). Some of Shepard's reviews get reprinted in F&SF , and a reader poses the question to editor Gordon van Gelder: "Why do you continue to publish film reviews from a man who hates every film ever made by Hollywood?" It turns into a pretty good conversation, because the reader is not entirely pigheaded about his opinions, Shepard joins in later, and lots of good issues are raised and bounced around. Yesterday, I happened to read critic James Wood's essay in the third issue of N+1 , written in response to the editors of...

First, we need some context. Maria Headley and I have known each other since the late '90s, when we were both struggling, semi-idealistic aspiring playwrights attending the Dramatic Writing Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. I was a couple years ahead of Maria and destined soon to flee Manhattan for the coziness of the University of New Hampshire , while Maria was destined to embark on the ... experiment ... that would lead to her new memoir, The Year of Yes . What was the experiment? Quite a simple one: She said yes to everybody who asked her out on a date. Everybody. I haven't yet read The Year of Yes , but I know there's a happy ending to it all, because Maria married Robert Schenkkan, the Pulitzer-winning writer of The Kentucky Cycle plays, as well as Lewis and Clarke Reach the Euphrates , currently playing at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. He's not just an accomplished writer, but, by all accounts, a marvelous human ...

Well, we survived the holidays, so now it's time to purge the bookmarks: Nanofear! Clare Dudman on The Origin of "The Story of the Inky Boys" in Dr Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter . How to critique writers with low skills (via David Moles ). SkepticWiki (via Skeptico ). "Geographically absurd fabulations" that end up "rendering a work irritating or campily amusing". Jim Kelly walks the VanderPlank. Time for the best fiction of the year: four famous men, and a superwoman named Link. "[R]eading The Whole Story and Other Stories , you get a clear sense of why Smith might be frustrated with work that doesn't take risks, or with too many stories that know only their own existence. Her own writing is constantly exploring, constantly finding new things to say and ways to say it." Hal Duncan thinks King Kong is too long , and Hal would prefer a Kong less long. (Meanwhile, Peter Jackson recently said in an interview that he thinks Vellu...

Cheryl Morgan has posted Emerald City #124 , which includes a feature article by me, "Literary Fiction for People Who Hate Literary Fiction" , a piece I'm rather fond of because it ended up taking a lot more work than I had thought it would, and got me thinking about some assumptions of my own that I hadn't adequately questioned. I'm not sure much of that comes out in the article, which is pretty straightforward, but the process of revising it a few times for Cheryl forced me to have to consider some things I hadn't about the differences between readerly expectations within marketing categories. These ideas still feel vague and inchoate, but eventually I will probably explore them here or at Strange Horizons or elsewhere. We shall see. For now, though, there's the article, which is not comprehensive at all, but is, instead, an invitation for people to explore writers they might otherwise think are not their sort of thing.

And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?" --Dylan Thomas A Child's Christmas in Wales

The response in the peanut gallery to Eliot Fintushel's masterful "Bone Women" is not surprising, though it is sad. With any luck, the compulsive carpers do not represent the majority of Strange Horizons readers, but rather a little cabal of jerks with knees. Their anger when presented with stylistically and intellectually complicated writing is frustrating enough to make me want to solder their tin ears together. What is it that compels people to speak out against a story? It's not just that they didn't like it -- unless they think the world revolves around them, I doubt such people are strolling up and down every message board to issue their complaints against all they read. Were I to post about every story I gave up on, I'd have to write about hundreds. Most such things, we read, abandon, and forget. Not my thing, we think. No big deal. It takes something more to get us to express our opinion in public, some grudge or frustration, some little nit...