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Since I've been spending the past few weeks preparing a Gender & Science Fiction class, there's very little I seem to want to write about at the moment other than the thing Kate Bornstein calls "the gender cult".

Thus, we have yesterday's Strange Horizons column (written a week and a half ago), "The Failure of Masculinity" and today's latest episode of the Sandman Meditations, "Men of Good Fortune".  They are in many ways companion pieces.

By the way, I haven't had a chance yet to mention that Strange Horizons is holding their annual fund drive.  SH has paid contributors, volunteer staff, and no advertising revenue other than that which comes through Amazon Associates links to books.  This is SH's tenth year of putting out a new issue nearly every week.  It's an amazing endeavor, and the archives are rich with a wonderfully varied collection of material.  They are able to do so because each year lots of readers thank them with a contribution.  Let's keep thanking them!

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When one of my favorites blogs, The House Next Door, began the Summer of '85 series of posts and asked for submissions, I decided to give it a try.  I looked up a list of movies that had come out that summer to see if any were ones I could write about, and lo and behold, many were major films of my childhood.  (One, Pumping Iron 2, was directed by George Butler, who lives a couple towns over from me and once took my father hunting with Arnold Schwartzenegger, or so my father claimed.)

Though I could have chosen many of the summer of '85's films to write about, one was so obvious I couldn't ignore it -- Rambo: First Blood Part II. I emailed House editor Keith Uhlich, and he said go for it.

I thought I might write 800 words or so. It got a bit longer than that. Despite the current length, the essay feels bare bones to me -- there's a lot more to say about Reagan and Rambo, about gender and masculinity, and about all four Rambo films together, because they're each quite different (First Blood is I think unquestionably the best film in terms of what most reasonable people think of as quality, and it remains utterly heartbreaking for me every time I watch it, but parts II and III are much more enjoyable, since they're closer to being superhero epics. The recent fourth part, just called Rambo, I've only watched once so far, but it didn't really do much for me -- Rambo beyond the 1980s just seems ... sad. Son of Rambow accomplished more.)

It's a thrill to see my byline on a site I read all the time and respect immensely, and I'm particularly pleased that I could appear there with this essay, which for obvious reasons for anybody who reads it means a lot to me -- it's the most personal thing I've published since the first Strange Horizons column I wrote after my father's death, a column that is also about my father and film, and mentions Rambo.


And now, for you loyal Mumpsimus readers, a special photo to accompany the essay -- this is me holding the MP5 I mention in the essay ... while wearing a Small Beer Press T-Shirt:

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My latest Strange Horizons column has just been posted, and it's a sort of meditation on four books: Reality Hunger by David Shields, Narrative Power edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, and Vanishing Point by Ander Monson.

All four books are well worth reading, thinking about, arguing with. I especially hope that in the wake of Paul Di Filippo's review of Who Fears Death in the B&N Review that the column will offer an alternative way of evaluating the novel. For the way Di Filippo read the book, I think his assessment is valid, but he read it in the most narrow and silly way possible, the way someone who's only ever read science fiction would read. And I know he hasn't only read science fiction, so I'm perplexed at the assumptions he applies. I agree with his desire for fewer savior of the world/universe/everything characters, and in fact once wrote another SH column about it, but I think there's abundant evidence in the text that Okorafor is a smart writer who is as aware of this paradigm as anybody else, and is both using and critiquing it in complex, multi-layered ways, just as she is simultaneously using and critiquing other tropes, tendencies, templates -- not all of them from SF -- throughout the novel.

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I have a new column up at Strange Horizons, "Patriarchy Studies".

There was a bunch of stuff I wanted to put into the column, but decided to save most of it for future ones, since this one was having a hard enough time cohering as it was.  And some things might have been good to have there, but seemed distracting -- for instance, I had a long footnote about the complex relationship of Isaac Asimov and feminism, but cut it out because it was tangential to the direction I was trying to go in (suffice it to say, if you're curious about the complexities, be sure to read The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction and The Secret Feminist Cabal).

Mostly, I just wanted to bring Sally Boland's name out to the public beyond our university, because she was awesome.  I knew her at the end of her life, but her influence on me was primarily through the people for whom she was a colleague and mentor, many of whom became my mentors and colleagues.  I have Sally's copy of Adrienne Rich's On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, and it's a book I treasure.

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My latest Strange Horizons column, "Revisiting Hitchcock", has been posted.  It's a first stab at what will, I hope, become a longer project eventually, but writing about Hitchcock is tough because he's been so thoroughly written about before that it's hard not to just reiterate what lots of other folks have written.  But his work maintains such a hold on me that I also feel at this point that I can't not write about it, so who knows...

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Rain Taxi Review of Books is a marvelous magazine, and they've just begun their annual auction, which is an event I always look forward to because of the wide variety of items they have to offer, including dozens of signed books.

The new print issue of RT includes an essay I wrote about the work of Wallace Shawn, a playwright and essayist whose face and voice many people know from some of his iconic roles in movies and TV shows, but whose writing is vastly less known -- he's one of those writers who is more popular outside of his native country than in it.

Aside from a couple short stories that are currently wending their way through the submission process, my major writings since this summer have been the Shawn essay for RT and the essay on Coetzee for The Quarterly Conversation. The effect of spending so much time reading and re-reading the writings of both men is obvious in my latest Strange Horizons column, "On the Eating of Corpses".

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I probably achieve utter absurdity with my new Strange Horizons column, "A Story About Plot", wherein, like an awkward and amateur trapeze artist who has decided the key to success is to not believe in gravity, I try to link John Grisham, Nora Roberts, Aristotle, Shklovsky, and Peter Straub. The whole thing is, I expect, more a sign of my inevitable insanity than anything else.

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Hal Duncan, known to some as The Slayer of Shibboleths, to others as The Scribe of the Book of All Hours, to others as The Notetaker of the Geek Show, and to still others as THE....Sodomite Hal Duncan -- this (super)man is now writing a regular column for Fantasy Book Spot, "Notes from New Sodom".

In his first column, Hal does what many of us have done in our early ventures with such things, he digs into definitions (and thus stakes some ground). This is Hal, though, so what he does is really not much like what any of the rest of us have done. It's longer, for one thing. And full of that inimitable, erudite lyricism, that voice, that essence (spunk!) of Hal.

And with this first column of his, he lets me achieve one of my greatest ambitions in life: to provide an epigraph. An epigraph taken from my second column for Strange Horizons, "The Old Equations", a piece I'd pretty much forgotten I'd written, in which I staked out some ground of my own. My view of genre as a term and idea has grown more ... well, frankly, neurotic (in its hesitations and divigations) ... since 2005, and it was fun to reread that piece, in which I had more confidence than I have now. Which is not to say I think "The Old Equations" is wrong, just that were I to write it now I wouldn't write it the way I wrote it then. But I could say that for stuff I wrote yesterday, too...

Anyway, welcome, Hal, to the Hall of Columnists. Long may ye reign, in time and wordcount!

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My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted: "Phil and Jack", about the often-overlooked connections between Philip K. Dick and Jack Spicer. I wrote it a few months ago, but various factors out of just about anyone's control caused its publication to be delayed (it's surprisingly difficult to get long lines of poetry to wrap and indent in some types of HTML!).

The column's a little bit scattershot, but that felt appropriate. And let me just say again that if you like poetry and haven't taken a look at My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, you really owe it to yourself to do so. It's one of my favorite books of recent years.

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My latest column is up at Strange Horizons: "Learning to Write".

I didn't realize this would be SH's eighth anniversary issue. Eight years of weekly doses of fiction, poetry, essays, articles, etc. An impressive accomplishment, especially given that everyone on staff is a volunteer. They're all a joy to work with, and I think the results are extraordinary in many ways, so congratulations to all of the various Strange Horizon writers and staff over the years.

The new column is a strange one, but then, most of them are. It's centered on Jules Renard's journals, recently reissued by Tin House Books, and appearances are also made by Jacques Roubaud's Some Thing Black and Gertrude Stein's How to Write.

By the way, if you ever teach an intro composition class or something like that, I recommend sticking Stein's How to Write on a shelf, and when a student asks you for the "secret" or writing (or anything to that effect), tell them it's in that book over there on the shelf. Tell them any page of that book will teach them more about writing than anything else. Then watch their face as they read. (Okay, yes, it's a little cruel, but still...)

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I thought my next Strange Horizons column was going live next week, so I didn't notice when "Ordinary Zhang" was published earlier this week. But it was! The thesis of the column echoes some ideas I first brought up in my review of Paolo Bacigalupi's collection, but my primary purpose in writing it was simply to get people to read or reread Maureen McHugh's magnificent China Mountain Zhang.

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Alas, March is shaping up to be a tremendously busy month, and so things here at The Mumpsimus are likely to continue to be light for a little bit, but part of the busy-ness comes from writing stuff for other places, including my latest Strange Horizons column, this one made up of meditations and hypotheses and, for all I know, wrongheaded foolishness about some intersections between the poetry and science fiction/fantasy communities.

If, then, you have some bizarre and pathological need to read more of my words, and you haven't yet sought the clinical help you should seek for this, then click the link above.

If, however, you are looking for a list of unusual deaths, that would be here.

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Behold the animal-band kingdom and it’s wonderous variety of herds, hives, breeds and gaggles brought to you by none other than yours truly. The Homo sapiens over at Paste Magazine were in need of “A Field Guide to Animal Bands”. Up to the challenge, we grabbed our gear and ventured out into the land of beastly monikers. And this is what we saw..... Read the rest of this post

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Hello All,

Long time no see. I just got married, so we know how that goes.....the invites have to be stellar. Anywho, it just so happens that this weeks topic fits perfectly with a piece we just finished for Fortune Small Business magazine. The article was about taking a closer look at tax credits for the small business who's research and development programs are influential within their industry.

Cheers,
Mutt Ink

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Hello All,

Long time no see. I just got married, so we know how that goes.....the invites have to be stellar. Anywho, it just so happens that this weeks topic fits perfectly with a piece we just finished for Fortune Small Business magazine. The article was about taking a closer look at tax credits for the small business who's research and development programs are influential within their industry.

Cheers,
Mutt Ink

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So how do you illustrate the concept of love? How about a triptych…set in a winter’s field…with a wee little bird and her puppet boy?

Prints available at Thumbtackpress.com.

Happy Holidays from Mutt Ink

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We’re currently putting the finishing touches on some illo’s we did for the creepy children’s mystery “Puppet Master” by Joanne Owen. It’s about a kidnapped girl, an astronomical clock and the world of marionettes. It will be available this Spring, but only in the U.K. (for now). Here are a few illos. Hope all is well with everyone.

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Hello All,

Sorry for the absence, but we've been hunkered down in the studio. I did want to pop out for a second to show you a few things we've currently finished.

The first is a piece for The New York Times. The article is about the current trends of Organic Cosmetics. Click here to read the article.


The second is a set of illo's we just finished for Seattle Metropolitan Magazine's Urban Brawl section. The question posed, "Do we need a watchdog to mind the media?."




Anywho, we have to go back inside now.

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A second Village Voice piece for the cover of their Educational Supplement featuring the Pratt Center. The on-campus think-tank focuses on the preservation and revitalization of New York’s neighborhoods.

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We got a call from The Village Voice last week to create a spot illustration for an article on the translation of Robert Walser's 100 year old novel The Assistant. So we did it.....and here it is. Click here to read the article.

Cheers,
Mutt Ink

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