The Mumpsimus

This is the third in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found  here . Munyurangabo 2010 began here with a look at the extraordinary film Munyurangabo  and ended with a look at the extraordinary writings of Wallace Shawn . During the year, I turned my general education class called "The Outsider" into a course on the idea of the image of Africa , a turn that revitalized the course for me, personally, but which faced some huge obstacles in making it work for the students. (Nonetheless, one of those students, now a senior, stopped me last term when he saw me on campus and said the course was really influential and valuable for him. So it worked for one person...) Teaching that course also led to one of my favorite posts from 2010: a look at The Story of an African Farm  by Olive Schreiner . Lots more happened. The third...

When crime writer Robert Galbraith was revealed to be J.K. Rowling, I of course thought of Richard Bachman and Stephen King, but I also thought of Jane Somers and Doris Lessing . Lessing wrote and submitted two books under the Somers pseudonym, they were rejected by her publisher (Jonathan Cape) in Britain, and when they were eventually published by Michael Joseph in the UK and Knopf in the US, they were barely noticed and didn't sell well. The story itself is interesting and, as these stories tend to do, reveals much about the power of expectations created by a recognizeable writer's name. Now, in a short piece at the New Yorker website, James Lasdun has revealed himself to be the in-house reader at Jonathan Cape who rejected Lessing's first Somers novel . Once Lessing's ruse was revealed, it seems he was a bit of a laughingstock, which is unfortunate — I expect most, if not all, of the people who criticized him for rejecting the book would probably have don...

This is the second in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here . Looking back through the posts for 2011 , I felt great fondness for the year, if not for my blogging (I think overall it was one of the weaker years for The Mumpsimus. That tends to happen when life itself is busy and fulfilling, so I'm not complaining!) It was a year when I taught two of my favorite classes, Gender & Science Fiction and Global Literature ; when we started blogging the Caine Prize ; when Eric Schaller and I launched The Revelator , our very occasional online magazine; when I wrote, directed, and co-edited a short film without knowing much of anything about what I was doing; when I started making video essays ; when I got to see one of my favorite Fassbinder movies, World on a Wire ; and when I had a whole class pose for a picture whil...

Some time in the winter, I fired up the Netflix machine and watched the first few episodes of Wallander  with Kenneth Branagh . It was occasionally interesting, but I found Branagh's lugubrious, blubbery, hangdog acting insufferable. It's rare that I like Branagh in anything, so I decided to try out the other Wallander  that was available for streaming: the 2009/10 Swedish series starring Krister Henriksson . This week, I finally let myself watch the last two episodes available. I haven't loved a TV show this much in ages, and the final episode of series two is heartwrenching, though the last scenes are sweet and touching. I was moved halfway through the episode to send a frantic text to a friend (who, though she hasn't watched the show, has been amused by my growing obsession): "They killed Wallander's dog! The heartless Swedes!" I was, it turned out, jumping to conclusions and slandering an entire nation. But I have never been moved to send a text...

2003 A month from today, this blog will be 10 years old. I'll reflect on that amazing, terrifying fact at that time. For now, what I'd like to do is begin a series of occasional posts that dip into the archives. Barring unplanned events, personal and/or technological failures, etc., I hope to do 10 posts between now and a month from now — posts that somehow or other explore what's been buried here. We'll start with the recent past, though I'm going to ignore this current year, since it still feels too present. That brings us to 2012 , which began with a post about blogrolls and ended with a post about some movies . (To update that final post, now that I've seen more films from 2012, my favorite 10 would be: The Amazing Spider Man; Cosmopolis; Detention  [technically a 2011 movie, but it didn't get off the festival circuit till 2012, so I think of it as a 2012 movie];  Holy Motors; The Kid with a Bike; Moonrise Kingdom; Oslo, August 31st; Premiu...

As I mentioned when it was published, my review of M. John Harrison's Empty Space  for Strange Horizons was a more polished version of a rather ragged, untamed essay. For the terminally curious, here are the parts that I cut. Most of the cuts were done for reasons of focus; a few I made simply because the sense of the sentences seemed, on reflection, too hermetic (or just wrong). To indicate context and provide some form, I've included connecting material at the beginning and end.

My review of M. John Harrison's extraordinary novel Empty Space  has been posted at Strange Horizons . My original version of this review was a long, crazy, rambling essay. Editor Abigail Nussbaum did heroic work helping me cut it down into something for a general audience. I like both versions — this one is much more a review, the longer version is ... brain spewings. Abigail kindly suggested that I post the cut pieces here on the blog, and I will do that later this week. I think the Strange Horizons  version is perfectly good for 90+% of readers, but a few folks might enjoy seeing what zany lands this great book, and its predecessors, sent me to. Update:   And here are the deleted passages .