The Mumpsimus

Things are likely to be slow here this week, as I will be the ringleader of ManBug Week at the LitBlog Co-op . There should be lots of provocative discussion of literature, sex, and entomology...

And now for some big news, or at least something that counts as big news around here: I'm going to a writing workshop/conference in Kenya from December 14-28. It's run by the Summer Literary Seminars program, about which I've heard good things from a friend who went to their St. Petersburg program. I entered the fiction contest, and though I wasn't one of the top 3 finalists (alas), I did manage to do well enough to get a significant reduction in tuition, and so it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. I've an interest in African literary culture and have been trying for a few years to remedy my considerable ignorance of both African literature and history; this program seems like a good way to continue that exploration. With luck, I'll be able to do a bit of blogging from Kenya, but I won't know until I get there what time and resources will allow. Between now and then I hope to write a bit about some African fiction, and I'm sure that af...

A Curious Singularity: A group blog about short stories. (via Out of the Woods Now ) Mark Thwaite's "Brief Thoughts on To the Lighthouse " . A description of "Writing the Unthinkable" , a workshop with Lynda Barry. (via Gwenda Bond ) A comparison of William Gass and E.L. Doctorow by Garth Risk Hallberg. William Gibson's typewriter . Classic Film Preview on Fritz Lang . Chris Barzak on M. Rickert and on failures of imagination . Invented Usage on postmodernism and jargon . 25 Years of Weird Al : "Somehow, at an age when Weird Al's early pop muses have died or retired or been charged with pedophilia, he still has something to tell us about youth culture." Hauntology . Lauren Cerand on bloggers and publicists . A plea for science fiction that "opens up the world rather than closing it down" . A conversation about "the best science book ever written" . Paul McAuley : There’s no one right way to write a novel. There’s no one c...

Today's happy thought comes to us via Ben Marcus, writing about Thomas Bernhard in the November Harper's : Bernhard's language strained the limits of rhetorical negativity: if his prose were any more anguished, it would simply transmit as moaning and wailing. Building interest in the grief experienced by people who look at the world and find it unbearable was a dark art of Bernhard's, and his characters do not resist the long walk to death's door but run to it and claw at the surface, begging for entry. After all, says Strauch, the agonized painter in Bernhard's first novel, Frost , "there is an obligation towards the depth of one's own inner abyss," even if meeting that obligation destroys you. Note that in addition to Frost being released in the U.S. for the first time, Bernhard's Gargoyles and The Loser have also been re-released in paperback.

My experiment in reading YA novels did not begin particularly well. I got 60 pages into A Drowned Maiden's Hair and found myself resenting the book because it was such a slog to get through, and any time I feel this way, I know that a combination of the book's qualities and my mood are leading toward nothing good for either of us, and so I stopped. It may be a perfectly good book for kids, but it was definitely not a perfectly good book for me. I then looked at The Black Tattoo , but it didn't really catch my attention, so I didn't read far, and instead moved on to other books. I may return to it, I may not. Then Meghan McCarron borrowed the advanced copy of Octavian Nothing that I've had since Kelly Link and Gwenda Bond insisted I pick it up at BEA , and she insisted I would enjoy it. Meghan was right. The book fully titled The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation; vol. 1: The Pox Party is among the best books I've read in ...

Because there is very little I would not do at the request of Clare Dudman, I shall continue the following meme-questionnaire-thing, which she tagged me for... This seems to have originated here and requires the responder to list 5 personal qualities not generally known to readers of the blog it's being posted on. The idea, apparently, is to collect things that would be interesting attributes to draw on for characters in fiction. Here's a required paragraph: PLEASE LEAVE THE FOLLOWING IN ALL ‘PEOPLE COLLECTION’ POSTS Remember that it isn’t always the sensational stuff that writers are looking for, it can just as easily be something that you take for granted like having raised twins or knowing how to grow beetroot. Mind you, if you know how to fly a helicopter or have worked as a film extra, do feel free to let the rest of us know about it :-) We are all, apparently, interesting in our particularities. Since I don't tend to put too much personal stuff up here, this should...

Things are a-hoppin' at the LBC, with Jeff Bryant proclaiming his passion for the book he nominated for this term, Sideshow by Sidney Thompson and me singing the praises of my nominee, Manbug by George K. Ilsley . Of course, Sam Savage's Firmin was the book that got the most votes, and it's a fun book well worth your attention, but don't neglect the other two, either. (And no, even though Jeff, Ed, and I are known in certain circles as The Boyz of the LBC, we did not agree beforehand only to choose books with one-word titles written by men.)