The Mumpsimus

The preconception, on the part of critics and actors alike, regarding cinematic theatricality as a marker of feeling—a prejudice in favor of one particular school and method of acting—remains as much an obstacle to creation as to appreciation. —Richard Brody 

I've got a couple of pieces of writing floating around out in the internets this week— A new Sandman Meditations piece has been posted at Gestalt Mash.  This week, the penultimate chapter of Brief Lives . If my counting is correct, this is the 50th Sandman Meditation. (The 50th issue of Sandman was "Ramadan" , but because I'm reading the stories in the order of the trade collections rather than the original publication, I wrote about that issue back in June when I read it in Fables and Reflections .) Over at Strange Horizons, it's Pat Cadigan week, and I've contributed an essay about some of the 1980s short stories that helped make Cadigan famous . It's a somewhat odd essay. I expect the nice young men in their clean white coats to show up at my door any moment... Also, it's Strange Horizons Fund Drive time! The site exists through contributions. The staff are not paid, but the writers are (the reverse of many publisher's policies). Except...

I hadn't read an ill-tempered screed against all things contemporary and academic for at least a couple of days, so it was with delight that I happened upon Joseph Epstein's Wall Street Journal review of The Cambridge History of the American Novel . What a hoot! Some sadistic editor at the WSJ assigned Epstein to read and review a book that was never intended for people to just sit down to read. It's a reference book, something for library shelves, a book to be cited, and, for its contributors, a credit for touting. That's not to say it's not useful -- were you doing some research on a particular phase of American lit, it might give good guidance, and I would find it especially useful with undergraduates to show them the wide range of topics that can be thought about, analyzed, studied. Like a 1,200 page collection of academic essays about American history. Useful for various purposes, but not really something to take to the beach or the bed. Properly categori...

From an interview conducted in 1977 by UCLA Ph.D. students with Raymond Durgnat , published in 2006 by Rouge : DURGNAT: Brigid Brophy said that fundamentally a novel is a take-over bid for one’s ego, and that’s probably true for any work of art. Having an artist’s mind take over one’s own mind in a way that enriches it instead of obliterating it. So temporarily, for an hour and a half, I can become more like Dreyer or more like Minnelli or more like anybody than I could be any other way. The mere effort of adaptation seems to me to be a valuable spiritual exercise; even coming to understand a Fascist mind, for example, via Leni Riefenstahl. In a sense, artists are the priests of alternative minds, that is, of communication. Some artists are so rich one endlessly finds more in them. Or one finds them congenial, like old friends. Others one respects rather than likes. There are works of art which one knows are pretty simple-minded, but a sort of temporary regression is probably good fo...

Scarface, 1932 There's an interesting two-part video essay by Matthias Stork posted at Press Play about what Stork calls "chaos cinema" -- action movies (mostly from the last 15 years or so) that violate classical principles of staging, framing, and cutting. I am in sympathy with Stork's overall point, and one of my few absolutely fuddy-duddy tendencies is a belief that classical action composition and editing is usually superior to the chaos cinema style Stork identifies -- I often want to yell at directors like Christopher Nolan  (who is five years older than me), "You kids will never understand why Howard Hawks is great!" But I have some reservations about Stork's analysis. Basically, they are two: 1.) He interprets an aesthetic technique as a single type of moral expression; 2.) he assumes all audiences watch the way he does.

I was distraught to learn that Ann VanderMeer will no longer be the editor of Weird Tales . During Ann's tenure, first as fiction editor and then as editor-in-chief, the magazine has been more exciting, alive, and contemporary than it had been in at least 60 years, publishing all sorts of different types of fiction from writers young and old, new and famous; writers known within particular popular genres and writers known better among the literati. The magazine has been a joy to read. More than a joy, really, because it became an exciting magazine of surprises, and we need all those that we can get. Ann's a great editor and will go on to many marvelous things in the future, as will the rest of the extremely talented staff. They worked wonders with limited resources, and I have no doubt the future holds great things for them all. Today, though, is a sad one. Thank you to everybody at Weird Tales  over the last five years. You've got a lot to be proud...

Over at Daily Kos, Denise Oliver Velez has posted a helpful overview of the complex history of civil rights struggles in the U.S. , particularly the 19th century. Just as the abolition movement spawned a struggle for women's suffrage, and the civil rights movement was the impetus for both second wave feminism and LGBT rights, the historical role of black women in the context of the suffrage movement is a key to understanding the founding of black women's clubs, sororities and political organizations. That history also explains the roots of the racial contradictions of second and third wave feminism and the development of black feminism. She goes on to discuss the rift between Frederick Douglass and some of the most prominent white women's suffrage activists after black men were enfranchised, as well as some of the later conflicts and complexities -- a history that had some eerie resonances during the 2008 election (for a good account of which, see Rebecca Traister's...