The Mumpsimus

There are lots of reasons that the University of New Hampshire , where I'm currently working toward a Ph.D. in Literature , should be in the news. It's a great school, with oodles of marvelous faculty and students doing all sorts of interesting things. Like any large institution, it's got its problems (I personally think the English Department is underappreciated by the Powers That Be, and that the university as a whole is not paying nearly enough attention to the wonderful programs that don't fall under that godawful acronym-of-the-moment STEM , but of course I'm biased...) Whatever the problems, though, I've been very happy at the university, and I'm proud to be associated with it. But Donald Trump and Fox News or somebody discovered a guide to inclusive language gathering dust in a corner of the UNH website and decided that this was worth denouncing as loudly as possible, and from there it spread all over the world . The UNH administration, of cours...

As a little addendum to my post about the somewhat narrow aesthetics of Ben Marcus's New American Stories  anthology, let me point you to Nick Mamatas's "Anti-Fragile" , a story that does pretty much everything I was hoping to find somewhere in New American Stories  and didn't. On Twitter, I said: Had enough of shallow stories told in short sentences & bite-sized paragraphs? Feast on "Anti-Fragile" by @NMamatas http://t.co/R28zqR5l2f — Matthew Cheney (@melikhovo) July 27, 2015 And that about sums up my feelings. Well, also: I may be partial, as I am an avowed and longstanding lover of long sentences , and this story is a wonderfully skilled, thrillingly long sentence. It's well worth reading and thinking about.

Ben Marcus's 2004 anthology The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories  is a wonderfully rich collection for a book of its type. I remember first reading it with all the excitement of discovery — even the stories I didn't like seemed somehow invigorating in the way they made me dislike them. I've used the book with a couple of classes I've taught, and I've recommended it to many people. I was overjoyed, then, when I heard that Marcus was doing a follow up, and I got it as soon as I could: New American Stories . I started reading immediately. Expectations can kill us. The primary emotion I felt while reading New American Stories  was disappointment. It's not that the stories are bad — they aren't — but that the book as a whole felt a bit narrow, a bit repetitive. I skipped around from story to story, dashing in search of surprise, but it was rare. I tried to isolate the source of my disappointment, of my lack of surprise: Was it the subject matter? ...

Stephen Dixon: Good advice for writers: Write very hard, keep the prose lively and original, never sell out, never overexcuse yourself why you're not writing, never let a word of yours be edited unless you think the editing is helping that work, never despair about not being published, not being recognized, not getting that grant, not getting reviewed or the attention you think you deserve. In fact, never think you deserve anything. Be thankful you are able to write and enjoy writing. What I also wouldn't do is show my unpublished work to my friends. Let agents and editors see it — people who can get you published —and maybe your best friend or spouse, if not letting them see it causes friction in your relationship. To just write and not worry too much about the perfect phrase and the right grammar unless the wrong grammar confuses the line, and to become the characters, and to live through, on the page, the experiences you're writing about. To involve yourself totally...

via Philip Taylor, Flickr In talking with Robin DeRosa about open educational resources (OER), a lot of my skepticism was focused on (and continues to be focused on) the question of who pays for it. If I'm not just skeptical but also cynical about a lot of the techno-utopian rhetoric that seems to fuel both the OER advocates and, even more so, people who associate themselves with the idea of Digital Humanities , it may be because I've been paying attention to what the internet has done to writers over the last couple decades. It's not all bad, by any means — this blog is one of example of that, I continue to try to write mainly for online venues so that my work can be relatively easily and broadly accessed, and I put most of my syllabi online. I can do that because I have other income and don't rely on this sort of writing to pay the bills. Thus, in my personal calculations, accessibility is more important than revenue. But that freedom to choose accessibility ...

Wrenching . I don't know a better word for Hanya Yanagihara's novel  A Little Life , published earlier this year by Doubleday. Heart-wrenching , yes. But more than that. Not just the heart. The brain, the stomach, all the organs and muscles. It is a full-body-wrenching experience, this book. It's too early to say whether this is a Great Novel, whether it is a novel for the ages, a novel that will bear numerous re-readings and critical dissections and late-night litchat conversations; whether it will burn long or be a blip on the literary landscape. Who knows. It's not for me to say. What I can say, though, is that working through (sometimes rushing through) its 700 pages was one of the most powerful reading experiences of my life. There are passages and situations in this book that many readers will not want to live with, will not want in their minds' eyes, and I can sympathize with that. Yanagihara's own editor said , "I initially found A Littl...

Boomtron just published my latest Sandman Meditation, this one on Chapter Two of The Wake . "Sandman Meditation?" you say. "That sounds ... vaguely familiar..." In July 2010, I started writing a series of short pieces called Sandman Meditations in which I proceeded through each issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic and offered whatever thoughts happened to come to mind. The idea was Jay Tomio's, and at first the Meditations were published on his Gestalt Mash site, then later Boomtron . The basic concept was that we'd see what happened when somebody without much background in comics, who'd never read Sandman before, spent time reading through it all. I wrote 71 Meditations between July 2010 and June 2012, getting all the way up through the first installment of the last story in the regular series, The Wake . 75,000 words. And then stopped. I read Chapter 2 of The Wake and had nothing to say. I tried writing through the lack of words, but...