The Mumpsimus

Seeking a change of pace, I read Rafael Reig's Blood on the Saddle , a novel that could be described as Italo Calvino rewritten by Elmore Leonard. Sort of. It's kind of like postmodern-lite -- call it pomopop. (Or don't.) For the most part, Blood on the Saddle is a hardboiled detective story, but there are dashes of science fiction and western and general surrealism in there, too, with an evil corporation performing genetic experiments in the background and writers hiring private investigators to find characters that have gone astray and gun-toting cowboys (the best gods we get from our machines these days) climbing out of the pages of fictional popular fictions just in time to save not the day, but a couple hours, at least, before finding a metafictional sunset to ride to. The structure of the book is loose and even haphazard, allowing all sorts of allusions to play together. In the end, the novel is pleasantly superficial, appealing but not exactly memorable, a fine...

People have recently been asking me if I'm going to Readercon in a couple weeks, and I've done my best to avoid a definitive answer, not out of coyness, but because I really haven't been sure I could be there. Today, though, I decided all of my hesitating was stupid, and so, yes, I shall be there from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning. And if, after all of my waffling, Mike Allen will still let me be a part of the Mythic reading, I'll even be reading a few sentences of fiction.

I've spent the past week reading Samuel Delany's early fiction in roughly chronological order, starting with The Jewels of Aptor , then continuing on to The Fall of the Towers trilogy , Babel-17 , and Empire Star (which Vintage has conveniently packaged together ). (And yes, I realize I've missed The Ballad of Beta 2 -- I misplaced my copy and so decided to continue on until I figure out which pile of books it got buried under.) The only one of these books I'd read before was Babel-17 , the first Delany novel I ever encountered, having been introduced to his work through the stories "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" and "Aye, and Gomorrah" in anthologies. It's been ages since I read any of Delany's pre- Dhalgren books, and the experience has been illuminating. Delany's early work is the writing of an extraordinarily intelligent and talented young man, but The Jewels of Aptor and The Fall of the Towers real...

MANCHESTER, NH -- Renowned gravitologists Jeff and Ann VanderMeer have discovered a strangely focused gravitational force in southern New Hampshire -- a force that has prevented them from returning to their home state of Florida. Ann VanderMeer said, "As far as we can tell, this gravitational force only affects us, though it's possible many other people are affected, and we are simply too gravitized to be able to communicate with them." The VanderMeers discovered the force on Sunday, June 25, when they first tried to leave New Hampshire. "At that time," Jeff VanderMeer explained, "we believed the crossing of our personal gravitations with those of Eric Schaller, who was flying back to New Hampshire from Ames, Iowa, prevented our return to Florida, but that hypothesis has subsequently been contradicted by further events. We met Dr. Schaller at the Manchester airport so that we could study him in his native environment, and we discovered that his gravitati...

Not being anything more than an occasional viewer of horror movies, I hadn't heard of Cemetery Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore ) until Dave Kehr mentioned it in his "New DVDs" column in the New York Times . It sounded like good fun, and not more intellectual than my brain can handle right now, and so I asked the Netflix gods to send it my way, and they did. Cemetery Man has all the best elements of a low-budget horror movie -- special effects where the strings used to fly items are visible, cheesey music, gratuitous sex and violence, hilariously bad dialogue, terrible acting -- and yet it's also got some good acting, some clever dialogue, good zombie gore, and a surprisingly intelligent narrative overall. It's some sort of cousin of Shaun of the Dead (but with more nudity, because Rupert Everett is the sort of leading man one does want to see naked as much as possible). Set in an Italian town where everyone speaks, or tries to speak, in a British accent, Ceme...

A few months back, Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press told me I'd probably enjoy talking with Tina Pohlman, editorial director of Harvest Books (the paperback imprint of Harcourt ), because she had just acquired the paperback rights to three of my favorite books of 2005: Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet, and The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia. Indeed, this sounded like an extraordinary person, and so I contacted Tina and asked if she was willing to be interviewed. She was. Where did you begin in publishing, and how did you get to where you are now? I started as an editorial assistant at Houghton Mifflin in 1993. Then I went to Anchor Books/Doubleday in 1995 where I was promoted a couple times. Then Anchor was moved from Doubleday to the Knopf Publishing Group to join forces with Vintage Books and become Vintage-Anchor. I was with Vintage-Anchor for about a year and a half I guess. All told, I was with Anchor for about 5 1/2 ye...

I spent some time in Provincetown, Massachusetts with friends this weekend, but we only had time to see one film at the film festival that was happening there, a documentary by Barbara Hammer, Lover Other , about the surrealist writer and artist Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) and her step-sister/partner Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe). The best parts of the film were Cahun and Moore's artwork and the interviews with people who had known them when they lived on the island of Jersey , where, during the German occupation, they resisted the Nazis and were imprisoned. Unfortunately, Hammer tried to make the film into something more than a documentary by having actresses portray Cahun and Moore for some overwrought soliliquies and used annoying and amateurish visual stylizations in an attempt to replicate with film the effect of the original art, an unfortunate choice when the original work is so distinctive that any such manipulation is nothing more than distracting, and sometimes simpl...