The Mumpsimus

I was going to write a report on some of my experiences at Readercon 22, but it felt flat and boring, so I've discarded it. It was a great convention, as always, and I got to see all sorts of great folks in the way one does at a convention: too quickly. Panels seemed to go well, I enjoyed the ones I saw, I survived the ones I was on, and I got to see Jeff Ford do a little dance at the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza , so my con was complete. For a comprehensive collection of links to reports on panels and the convention in general, as well as links to various videos of events, check out the official Readercon list . It was a wonderful few days, and I'm tempted to single out particular people who worked really hard behind the scenes to make it a wonderful few days, but really, everybody who volunteers for Readercon deserves thanks. Meanwhile, I have neglected this here blog a bit over the last week, and am likely to continue to neglect it while I work on some writing assignm...

The winner of this year's Caine Prize for African Writing is NoViolet Bulawayo for her story "Hitting Budapest" , originally published by Boston Review . "Hitting Budapest" was the first story we wrote about for the Caine Prize blogathon, and it's held up better in my memory than I expected it would. Despite my qualms about some aspects of it, there's a vividness to the language that gives it some freshness. Were I on the jury, it wouldn't have been my first choice (that would be "The Mistress's Dog" ), but it might have been second, or tied for second with "In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata" , though that's a story that, unlike "Hitting Budapest", has diminished in my memory.

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 ...

The liberal blog Talking Points Memo, always ready to score points against Republicans (a bit like shooting big fish in a little bowl these days), mocks boring presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty for his response to a question about homosexuality and genetics: Pawlenty told Gregory on Meet The Press that when it came to whether homosexuality was a choice or an innate part of a person's character, "the science in that regard is in dispute" and that it was unclear whether it was "behavioral or partly genetic." "There's no scientific conclusion that it's genetic," he said. "We don't know that. So we don't know to what extent, you know, it's behavioral and-- that's something that's been debated by scientists for a long time. But as I understand the science, there's no current conclusion that it's genetic." I've long been an opponent of the "It's not a choice!" crowd, though really my op...

Because I am an unabashed Terrence Malick fan , there was little question that I would find something to adore in his new film, The Tree of Life . Nothing highlights the subjectivity of evaluation to me as well as the fact that I will find a way to appreciate the work of a handful of creators in various media no matter what, because something in my past experience with them has made me assume that they are in some way or another smarter than me, and my job is to learn to appreciate whatever they have created. It's a sort of subservient humility -- anybody who wants to evaluate something honestly has to approach it with at least a bit of humility and try to allow the work to offer as much as it can, but with most things, especially in realms where we have some experience ourselves, humility soon enough gives way to the most basic, brutal evaluation: I think this thing is good, bad, or ugly. Without a sense of differentiation, there is no taste , and anyone who was humbly sub...

It's summer and I don't feel like writing a post of substance, so here's some fluff. On Facebook*, someone I know (who is welcome to out himself here if he so chooses), posted a fun exercise: "Apparently somewhere on facebook there's a challenge to name your favorite ten movie directors off the top of your head, no research or googling," adding: "It's an interesting personality test." It is indeed. I'm going to be brave and see what I come up with this morning... Rainer Werner Fassbinder Howard Hawks Alfred Hitchcock Werner Herzog Stanley Kubrick Terrence Malick Anthony Mann Michael Mann Jean Renoir Francois Truffaut The list itself took all of one minute (alphabetizing it and finding appropriate links for each took longer), and is probably one that would be similar were I to do it on another day -- certainly, there are a bunch of directors who I thought about including (Orson Welles, David Lynch, Wong Kar-Wai, the Coen Brothe...

The previous post, "The Sokal Hoax at 15" , was number 1,500 here at The Mumpsimus.