How to use this Page

via Wikimedia Commons

I demonstrate hope.
Or the hope for hope. Or just more unanswerable holes.
—Mary Biddinger, "Beatitudes"

Perhaps other people's words will help. Here are some readings for homework:
(Sociologists in particular have developed and challenged these ideas, but for my purposes here, this general approach to moral panics is accurate enough.)

There are a variety of fronts and a variety of causes being fought for in the wider culture war that includes (utilizes, benefits from) such panics as the current one (over the University of Chicago dean's letter). It is a war over the purpose and structure of higher education (and of education generally), it is a war over the meaning and implications of history, and it is a war over the meaning and implications of personal and group identities.

Kevin Gannon is onto something when he writes:

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the backlash against so-called “political correctness” in higher education has intensified in direct variation with the diversification of the academy, areas of scholarship, and -- most significantly -- the student population. Underlying much of the hand-wringing about the state of the academy is a simple desire to have the gatekeepers remain in place.

Add to that: the challenge that Black Lives Matter and other movements have made to the university status quo.

However, I think Gannon's argument soon falls into one of the traps this moral panic sets. Look where he goes next:

For every ginned-up hypothetical scenario of spoiled brats having a sit-in to protest too many white guys in the lit course, there are very real cases where trigger warnings or safe spaces aren’t absurdities, but pedagogical imperatives. If I’m teaching historical material that describes war crimes like mass rape, shouldn’t I disclose to my students what awaits them in these texts? If I have a student suffering from trauma due to a prior sexual assault, isn’t a timely caution the empathetic and humane thing for me to do? And what does it cost? A student may choose an alternate text I provide, but this material isn’t savagely ripped out of my course to satiate the PC police.

The trap here is the defense of "trigger warnings", because that's not really what the letter and similar statements are about. People ought to be able to disagree about pedaogy while agreeing that the dean here overstepped his bounds. If a magic wand were waved and all the controversial issues that the letter is ostensibly about were made to disappear into unanimous agreement, the underlying questions of power would still remain.

What we need to look at are what the dean's statements are doing. If this is a moral panic, then it is trying to bring more people over "to the support of increasingly coercive measures on the part of the state" (or, in this case, university administration) and it "lends its legitimacy to a 'more than usual' exercise of control".

The letter is about control: who has it and who gets to assert it. Here, the increasingly coercive measures are not on the part of the state, but of the university administration. The letter is attempting to mandate against certain pedagogical practices and certain behaviors by student groups and individual students. The dean has asserted control. He has asserted the power to speak for the entire university.

I think it is an error to fall into the microargument over "trigger warnings", etc., because the meaningful argument is about who gets to mandate what, who gets to speak for whom, who dictates and who is dictated to. On the issue of this letter, that seems to me an argument for the University of Chicago's faculty, staff, and students to have together. But it points to a larger question of the neoliberal university.


The Neoliberal University
Over the last fifteen or twenty years in the United States, we've seen the triumph of a structural shift in universities, one that takes their medieval guild structure and alters it to a more corporate, neoliberal structure where all consequential decisions are the domain of the upper administration, where students become consumers and teachers deliver content, where one must optimize processes and appeal to external stakeholders and achieve high performance to enable success.  (I think of it as the Triumph of Business School Logic.) In such a world, all value is numerical and everything can be measured with market reports. (For more on neoliberalism, I tend to refer to Philip Mirowski's Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste.)

This is not, of course, to say that individual groups, departments, or organizations within universities are themselves purveyors of neoliberal logic. Some are, some aren't. What I'm talking about when I talk about the neoliberal university is its institutional structures and, especially, the priorities and actions of the administration, which under neoliberalism becomes (or wants to become) more powerful than in earlier structures where the faculty had more influence and control over the university as an institution. Such structures, priorities, and actions may be influenced by various groups outside the administration (the Economics Department, for instance, might have a particular influence on the administration's ideology and the College of Liberal Arts might have little to no influence. Or vice versa). But basically, the neoliberal university is the university not of colleagues and peers and truly shared governance, but of Boss Administrator.

Boss Administrator

Solidarity
There are contradictions in all this, as a recent Harvard Magazine article on "Title IX and the Critique of the Neoliberal University" tries to show, saying: "An obvious response to the narrative critiquing the corporatizing university might then suggest that it’s invoked to protect the interests of the faculty over those of students and other university affiliates."

Such a frame, though, relies on the idea that the faculty, the students, and other university affiliates have inherently different interests, and that those interests are in conflict. It seems to me that things are more complicated than that. It seems to me that such a frame is already working within the assumptions of neoliberalism. The frame hides the many areas where the different groups that constitute a university can stand in solidarity — as I think they must if we are to have any hope of building a structure for the modern university that is not neoliberal.

While recent events have highlighted faculty vs. administration, we need to find better ways not only to undo as much of that dichotomy as possible, but to also increase solidarity with students and staff. Staff in particular can get lost in the arguments, and yet at every school I'm familiar with, the staff are the people most essential to the smooth functioning of everyday life. The staff must be included in any consideration of the work of the institution.

The neoliberalization of the university depends on, encourages, and exacerbates conflicts between the interests of the faculty, the students, and other university affiliates. They are different groups, yes, and different groups made up of different people, yes, and as such may always be coming at the goals of the institution from different points of view, with different values and different priorities, but that shouldn't destroy the idea of the university as a coalition, a union of differences. The neoliberal university destroys solidarity.





A Personal (and Utopian) Vision of the University
I keep writing and rewriting this post because I keep falling into the perhaps unavoidable and perhaps academic habit of pretending to perhaps know what I'm perhaps talking about.


I cannot possibly pretend to have all the answers for how to escape the many binds that wrap universities in moral panics, culture wars, neoliberalism, etc. Not just because I am not omniscient. Not just because every institution has different systems and emphases, different quirks and qualms. But because—


My own life has been deeply shaped by the binds I'm (perhaps) pretending not to be all bound up in. Institutions I have devoted myself to continue to be warped and bruised (and occasionally polished) by them.


Here are some incomplete thoughts on my personal values and visions for academia, because I am an academic and thus must have a list of personal values and visions for academia, mustn't I? These mostly feel obvious to me, even (embarrassingly) banal, but perhaps articulating them is worthwhile:

I value a diversity of pedagogies and a diversity of course options for students. I think students will gain the most from having available to them teachers who are devoted to the pedagogy of the most traditional of lectures and teachers who are devoted to the pedagogy of the most radical of student liberation and teachers who fall everywhere in between. No teacher is great for all students, no pedagogy is great for all students. Had I the power, I would, for instance, eliminate all requirements for syllabi and simply require that teachers be thoughtful about their pedagogy and that they enter the classroom from a basic standpoint of respect for their students as human beings and as people capable of thought.

Public education should be free and open to the public. Society at large benefits significantly from open access to education. If we can fund trillion-dollar wars, we can fund public education. We simply choose not to. One of the engines driving the neoliberalization of higher ed is the lack of funding from the public. When there isn't enough money to go around, everything gets assessed first by cost. That will destroy all the best aspects of our universities.

Students, faculty, staff, and administration need to be able to find solidarity within mutual goals (and mutual aid). A diversity of disciplines, of epistemologies, of pedagogies, of life experience, etc. makes solidarity both challenging and imperative. The question I fall back on is: What can we do to strengthen our multiplicities?

I want academia to be a refuge for us all. This idea is inevitably solipsistic, because academia has been a refuge for me. How can I find values and visions beyond my own experience? (A university that was a true refuge might be able to show me the way. I think it has sometimes. Sometimes I've been oblivious, pig-headed, scared. But sometimes I've learned other ways. Yes, sometimes.)

Finally, I yearn for a university where curiosity is celebrated as a kind of pleasure, where knowledge is a value unto itself, and where intellectual passion is perceived as essential to the good life.



But What About Trigger Warnings, Etc.?

What's the issue?

Is this the issue?

This is not the issue.

It is an issue. As such, it should be discussed, and it should continue to be discussed, and there should be nuance to the discussion.


I don't think "trigger warnings" (or, better: content notes) should be mandated or prohibited.

I don't think there is any practical way to mandate or prohibit such things without gross violations of academic freedom for everyone involved.

I could be wrong.

I am skeptical. I am wary.


I use content notes myself occasionally when presenting students with material that is particularly graphic or intense (in my judgment) in its sexual and violent content. That just seems polite. I spend a lot of time on the first day of class describing what we'll be doing, reading, and viewing; and later, I usually describe upcoming material to students so they'll have some sense of what they're getting themselves into. But I do that with most material, even the most ordinary and least controversial. It rarely seems pedagogically useful to me for students to go into upcoming work completely ignorant of its content and/or my reason for asking them to give that work their time and attention.

(In terms of whether students have a right to have alternative material if they are concerned about the material's difficulty for reasons of their own experiences or opinions, I generally think not, because they are usually not forced into a course. I say "generally" and "usually" because there are times when requirements, schedules, and such converge to effectively force a student into a particular course, and in that case, yes, more compromise may be necessary, but such situations are rare. I think. I hope.)

Beyond the sort of content notes I use when it feels necessary, my own feelings are (sometimes; often) along the lines of the anonymous 7 Humanities Professors who wrote an essay a few years ago for Inside Higher Ed.

Yes, I have fears. I fear chilling effects. Yes. I think chilling effects happen. I think they come from all sorts of different directions. I think they are sometimes contradictory. Much depends on individual places, individual policies, even individual people.

A lot of the rhetoric around trigger warnings, safe spaces, etc. can be turned around and used for reactionary, regressive purposes. Jack Halberstam tries to show this in "Trigger Happy: From Content Warning to Censorship". (I know a lot of people reject Halberstam's ideas. Rejection is fine, but I think dismissal is hasty. Show your work.)

Among the points made by the 7 Humanities Professors, two key ones are:

• "Faculty of color, queer faculty, and faculty teaching in gender/sexuality studies, critical race theory, and the visual/performing arts will likely be disproportionate targets of student complaints about triggering, as the material these faculty members teach is by its nature unsettling and often feels immediate.
• "Untenured and non-tenure-track faculty will feel the least freedom to include complex, potentially disturbing materials on their syllabuses even when these materials may well serve good pedagogical aims, and will be most vulnerable to institutional censure for doing so."

Most faculty are not trained psychologists or psychiatrists, nor should they pretend to be. I think pretending to be a therapist when you have no training in therapy is unethical and potentially extremely dangerous both for the faculty member and their students.

(Don't give in to the guru temptation. Kill the guru in you.)

And yet a lot of teachers are drawn to the profession for reasons that seem to lead them toward wanting to be therapists, and while (perhaps?) on a general level this might not necessarily be a harmful tendency, when teachers perceive of themselves primarily as therapists, they tread into dangerous waters. (I've seen this especially among acting teachers and creative writing teachers, but perhaps it is a common tendency elsewhere, too.) As Nick Mamatas has said, "Those who can't be a therapist, teach." This tendency should not be encouraged. Compassion, absolutely. Pretending to be a therapist, no.

I am not a therapist. I will not pretend to be a therapist. I am a quasi-expert on certain, very narrow, types of reading and writing. That is all.

There are resources on most campuses for students in crisis, and faculty should be familiar with those resources so they can direct students to them. (If a student's issues are too great for the resources of the university to help with, it makes no sense to me for the university or student to pretend otherwise, and in such cases a university should be able to compassionately and supportively say, "This is not the right place for you. We don't have the resources to help you here." Not doing so risks harming the student more. It is fatal for universities to try to be and do everything for everyone.)



Be Careful What You Ossify
From the Susanne Lohmann essay that Henry Farrell links to:

The problems to which the university is a response are hard problems, and there is no free lunch. Institutional solutions are generally second-best in the sense that they constitute the best solution that is feasible in the light of environmental constraints (in which case they are a defense), or they are less than second-best (in which case they are defective).

As a necessary by-product of fulfilling their productive functions, the structures of the university have a tendency to ossify. It is precisely because the powerful incentives and protections afforded by these structures are intertwined with their potential for ossification that it is hard to disentangle where the defects of the university end and its defenses begin.

Perhaps ossification is a better way of thinking about the ideas I've been circling around here than normalization, or perhaps they work together.

If ossification is unavoidable, even perhaps (occasionally?) desireable, then: Be careful what you ossify.

Chagall, "The Concert"

Refuge
The university must allow refuge.

Refuge must allow the university.

GLOUCESTER: No farther, sir; a man may rot even here.

EDGAR: What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all: come on.

GLOUCESTER: And that's true too.

Exeunt.

Add a Comment

I have been busy and have neglected this blog. I forgot to make a post here about some of the most exciting news of my year: I have a story in the current issue of my favorite literary magazine, Conjunctions. It's titled "Mass" and it is about, among other things, a mass shooting.

Early this morning, at least 50 people were killed and 53 wounded in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The New York Times is currently calling this the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

I'm not going to write about the gun politics of this. For that, please read the work of Patrick Blanchfield, particularly "So There's Just Been a Mass Shooting", "God and Guns", and "The Gun Control We Deserve". (He's excellent on Twitter, as well, if you want his most recent thoughts.) I have sputtered on about the topic in the past, not always coherently. Patrick is better at it, and better informed, than I. Thinking through the complex, contradictory, vexing, and emotionally charged landscape of gun politics, I'm better (or at least more comfortable) in fiction. Thus, "Mass".

(Titles fascinate me. The title of this issue of Conjunctions is Affinity: The Friendship Issue. Affinity is something more than friendship. Friendship is useful, it feels good, it glues us socially, and sometimes it may be, yes, an issue. But affinity is more: its etymology [via Latin and French, a story told by the OED] is rich with ideas of relationship: relationship via marriage; any relationship other than marriage; a neighborhood; relationship between people based on common ground in their characters and tastes; spiritual connection; structural relationship; adjacency.)

A character in "Mass" has been reading theoretical physics:

“Not especially detailed theoretical physics, but introductory sorts of texts, popularizations, books for people who don’t really ever have a hope of truly understanding physics but nonetheless possess a certain curiosity. And its words are sometimes beautiful — a tachyonic field of imaginary mass — who couldn’t love such a phrase? I find it all strangely comforting, the more far-out ideas of quantum theory and such. It’s like religion, but without all the rigmarole and obeisance to a god. Or perhaps more like poetry, though really not, because it’s something somehow outside language, but nonetheless elegant, and of course constricted by language, since how else can we communicate about it? But it gestures, at least, toward whatever lies beyond logos, beyond our ability even to reason, though perhaps not to comprehend. At my age, and having spent a life devoted to language, there is comfort and excitement — even perhaps some inchoate feeling of hope — in glimpses beyond the realm of words. There is, I have come to believe, very much outside the text. What is it though? Call it God, call it Nature, call it the Universe, call it what it seems to me now to be — having read and I’m sure misunderstood my theoretical physics — call it: an asymptote.”

And then there is "Blood". And Blood: Stories.

"Why did you give it that title?" people ask. There are a lot of answers. (And that, in itself, is an answer.) Here's one: As a child of the early AIDS era, I always knew queer blood is politicized and scary. Scary, thus politicized. Politicized, thus scary.

Until recently, the FDA prohibited any man who had had sex with men since 1977 from donating blood. Now, if you've been celibate for a year, you can donate. The massacre in Orlando brought this policy back into the news, with various outlets reporting that while queers were attacked, and blood was needed, any man who had had sex with a man in the last year could not, under FDA rules, donate blood.

Blood is a reality and blood is a potent metaphor: beautiful and terrifying, wonderful and evil.

Consanguinity.

Blood is life and blood is death; blood is family and blood is genocide.

Is there an opposite to blood? What is water in our metaphors? It washes blood away, but also sustains us as we live, for much of what we are is water. Tears are made of water, salt, enzymes, hormones. They taste like oceans and look like rain.

Water is what we weep.

I weep for my queer brethren. I weep, too, for the inevitable homonationalism as queer shoulders are put to the wheel of US imperialism and US exceptionalism; as pride is wielded for Us against Them.

But I am not feeling political today.

Sometime looking backward
into this future, straining
neck and eyes I'll meet your shadow
with its enormous eyes
     you who will want to know
     what this was all about          

—Adrienne Rich,
"A Long Conversation"

Yesterday, my aunt, after (as they say) a (short? long? relative to what?) illness, died.

We had never lived near each other, but she was a profound influence on my life. She and her daughter, my cousin, gave me Stephen King stories when I was much too young for them. Night Shift, Skeleton Crew. The titles are still magic to me, the covers of the old paperbacks as powerful as any personal icon I have. So much of what I became as a writer is because of those stories. So much of what I became as a writer, then, is because of her.

She was a brilliant artist, a fun and funny person, so smart, so straightforward, saucy, even, and strong as the mightiest metal. She had a magnificent life with magnificent people in it, as well as hardship, oh yes, hardship, indeed, as we all do, yes, but still: she struggled, persevered, survived, didn't let the bastards get her down.

I will miss her forever and cherish her forever. Her husband, my uncle, provided me with my middle name, and I am always proud to have been named for him, one of the best people I know.

(The cover of my book called Blood is a picture of a man with his heart removed.)

At the wedding of my youngest uncle some years ago, my oldest uncle, this great man now a widower, gave a toast in which he said ours is a motley family of steps and halfs, of once- and twice-removeds, of marriages and unions and affinities, but in the end those designations don't much matter, because family is family, and that's who we are, and what we are, and what we have, because we love each other.

Affinity. And even more so that most important of political cries: Solidarity.

I remember that Auden kept revising his poem "September 1, 1939", because he couldn't decide between "We must love one another or die," "We must love one another and die," or nothing at all.

Here, then, my own tentative, inadequate revision: We must love one another or nothing at all.

I loved my aunt fiercely, and I love fiercely all you queer folk out there aching and screaming and scared and willing to fight, and all who dance against the gunfire, hands held together through the pain, lips together in solidarity, lives together as we live and live and live — even if separated by oceans, even if drowning in tears — always striving, even if never reaching, like asymptotes, like believers and holy fools — as we remember and honor the dead, as we go on, as we must, you, me, all — whether strangers or the oldest of lovers, we are — we must be — a mass of friends, family, water, blood.

Add a Comment

It was time I had a website under my own name, and not just this here Mumpsimus. After all, I am more than a mumpsimus! Or so I tell myself.

Thus: matthewcheney.net!

Because my book of short stories is coming out in January, the focus of the site is my fiction more than anything else. At the moment, there's nothing there that isn't also here, aside from some pictures. But I'm sure I'll figure out something unique to host there in the coming weeks, months, years... Read the rest of this post

Add a Comment

 
The first book written for adults that I ever coveted and loved and read to pieces was a short story collection: Stephen King's Night Shift, from which my cousin read me stories when we were both probably much too young, and which was one of the first books I ever bought myself. Ever since then, short story collections have seemed to me the most wonderful of all books.

I started publishing short stories professionally with "Getting a Date for Amelia" back in 2001. I barely remember the kid who wrote it (in the summer of 2000). I'm not a prolific fiction writer; I've been lucky enough to publish most of the stories I've written in the last decade or so, but I average only two stories a year. Fiction is the hardest thing in the world for me to write. Some stories have taken many years to find a final form. The kid who wrote "Getting a Date for Amelia" also managed to write a novel; it was mostly terrible (or, rather, not terrible, which might be interesting. Just nothing at all special. Rather boring, in fact. An extraordinarily useful exercise, though, dragging yourself through a novel-length piece of writing, even if the end result isn't all that great). I like fragments and miniatures too much to ever write a proper novel, I expect.

And—

What? Get on with it? Ah.

Yes, I am dithering here.

Because I am about to write a sentence that still feels unreal, though I've been writing various forms of it into emails to friends for a little while now:

I am the 2014 winner of the Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press for an unpublished manuscript titled Blood: Stories that will be published by BLP in January 2016.

The book will mostly contain reprints, and finally bring together all of the stories I've published since 2001 that are 1.) worth bringing together and that 2.) play well with each other. There are also a few unpublished stories, ones that I've never found the right home for but that felt to me like they belonged with the others, both gained and added context from/to the others, and were worth publishing. The editors at Black Lawrence Press agreed. One of the things I love about story collections is the way they can recontextualize stories, and the greatest excitement for me of this collection is that it will finally allow stories that have been scattered across a wide range of publications over many years to speak to each other.

I'm also incredibly excited to have found a publisher that is excited by what some others have considered either a fault or danger of the collection: its breadth of genres and styles. Perhaps out of sheer stubbornness and delusion, I was convinced that I could not be the only person on Earth to think the overall perspective of the work would create a coherence beyond genre or tone, that there was, in fact, a persistence of voice and vision. That's what the BLP editors told me attracted them to the manuscript, and when they said that, I knew I'd found what may be the perfect publisher for my work.

So I am excited. Beyond excited. I don't have words to convey the feeling of achieving something I've work toward for so long, something I often gave up hope of ever achieving. I wanted to write this post not only to let the world know the news, but also to preserve this moment so that, working through the more difficult parts of the experience (oh gawd, people might write reviews!), I can look back and remember what it felt like to be at this moment of triumphant possibility.

And to thank you, whoever you may be, who felt that it was worth some bits of your time and attention to read my words. I hope to continue to reward your interest.

Add a Comment

It was twenty years ago today that Nine Inch Nails' second album, The Downward Spiral, appeared in record stores.

Despite being an album of relentless nihilism, aggression, profanity, and self-hatred, it is an album I still consider to be among the most beautiful music I know. For a while, I liked really loud, industrial music, but I've grown awfully mellow in my old age, and these days I'm much more likely to listen to something acoustic. (Even ten years ago, a friend described my taste in pop music as boiling down to "songs by whiny white boys". Which was not really true, even then. Well, sort of.) Nonetheless, I still listen to NIN, and, especially, The Downward Spiral.

I try to avoid explaining my musical tastes, since I spend much too much time analyzing most of my other tastes, and it's nice to have one analysis-free area of the brain. I haven't quite been able to escape an analysis of my love for this album, though. Because it's this album.

When we don't understand the attraction of a particular item, we often psychologize the people who do in a way that explains them as aberrant to us. My dislike of X is my norm, and so I have to tell a story to explain to myself your embrace of X in a way that maintains my norm. Some items have enough built-in prestige that the story of why I don't like them might force me to have to make some excuses for myself, but we usually still maintain some sense of the appreciator as aberrant. I have no appreciation, for instance, for Mozart's operas, and so even though I feel to some extent that that is a failure of my education and a signal of my plebeian tastes, I also have a sneaking suspicion that people who like Mozart's operas are kind of frilly, effete, decadent, and will, in all likelihood, be the first to die in the revolution. (This is, of course, entirely untrue and a terrible prejudice that you should not emulate or give any credence to.) Items built from the most repulsive of human desires and actions especially call forth such judgments. Plenty of people who don't "get" NIN assume that people who do are one step away from tearing the heads off small children.

still from the music video of "Closer"

Perhaps we are, indeed, on the verge of psychopathy (at least some of us). But the same could be said for lovers of Thomas Kinkade paintings. Personally, I feel a lot safer with lovers of the dark, repulsive, and nihilistic than with lovers of life-is-a-glorious-cycle-of-song kitsch, because I can't help but wonder when the pains and disappointments of life are going to cause such folks to snap. I assume that to be human means building up a lot of nastiness in our animalistic core, and art allows the structuring and expression of that nastiness, a filter for the excrement of consciousness.

It's no coincidence that I fell in love with The Downward Spiral when it was released. I was a senior in high school that spring, and faced the excitement and terror of moving from rural New Hampshire to Manhattan for college. Everything was uncertain. I had begun to accept that my sexual identity was not entirely heterosexual, and though I knew ACT UP said silence = death, I mostly believed sex = death, because what other fate could there be in the age of AIDS? I've never been comfortable with anger, and yet it was an emotion that continued to boil up in me because I felt no ability to be who I wanted to be, no ability to even quite know who the person I wanted to be even was, and while the great wide world was alluring, it was also overwhelming. Typical adolescent angst, but at its apex in those days for me, and something for which The Downward Spiral could be a kind of soundtrack.

Adolescent angst goes away, and with it many of the talismans used as balms against it. But The Downward Spiral, while powerfully capable of speaking to an adolescent on the precipice of terrifying adulthood, contains much more than that, and that's why it has stuck with me. The complexity of the soundscape, for one thing. That's where I keep finding the beauty in this music: there is a richness to it, a depth born of all the overlapping notes, chords, beats, and noise. That depth is given power through variety — there is a diversity to the sounds that remains beguiling. The power of the noise comes from the aching quiet that flows across it all. Trent Reznor's voice reaches points of absolute scream, certainly, but there are also moments of tenderness and exhaustion and even, perhaps, momentary peace. The imagery of the lyrics is often wretched, but there's also a defiance to the words, an acknowledgement of so much that is atrocious in life accompanied now and then by a stand against it. For instance, the end of "The Becoming", which still makes my heart skip a beat: "It won't give up, it wants me dead/ Goddamn this noise inside my head." The last words song on the album are from "Hurt" and are at least somewhat hopeful: "If I could start again/ a million miles away/ I would keep myself/ I would find a way" — sure, you could interpret that as a suicidal moment, but back in 1994, faced with heading off to a place that at least felt like it was a million miles away from where I'd spent the previous 18 years of my life, I didn't hear it that way at all. Céline Dion's recording of "The Power of Love" made me want to kill myself; "Hurt" gave me reason to live.

One of the things I continue to appreciate about the album is that though the speakers in the songs are generally self-absorbed and sometimes utterly despicable, I find room to think about a world beyond them. This is most obvious with "Big Man with a Gun". I'd grown up in a gun shop, and I knew (and know) the macho allure of weaponry intimately. I don't know of another work of art that so succinctly gets at that allure, the psychopathic virility that is so often the masculine ideal. The song is not remotely subtle. Its lyrics' blunt vulgarity is appropriate to the throbbing noise of its music. A copy of the song should be sent out with every NRA membership card.

There's a kind of pathetic, aggressive, self-loathing masculinity to most of the songs on the album, and this, too, I find fascinating and powerful. From early on, I heard the album as telling the story of a man who aspired to masculine ideals that he couldn't attain. (I wouldn't have been able to say it that way 20 years ago, but it's basically how I was listening to the songs together.) I got a copy of the first NIN album, Pretty Hate Machine, soon after Downward Spiral, and quickly decided that the later album was a kind of sequel to the song "Something I Can Never Have" — there, the speaker is "starting to scare myself", and in Downward Spiral, song after song is all about that scare: trying to express it, trying to escape it, being consumed by it.

The songs on Downward Spiral were, yes, sometimes pure catharsis, and loud enough to wipe out the wounding world beyond their noise. But they also invited, and still invite, a kind of analysis and narrativizing that are, I think, extremely healthy. I spent more hours than I'd like to admit wondering about the meaning of specific lines and even words in the songs, wondering why particular sounds appeared in particular places, analyzing whether I thought the narrator was admirable or disgusting, strong or weak, me or not. I built stories in my mind to justify what was going on in the songs, and entire epic tales to explain the world between them.

Now, 20 years later, I still respond to the musical choices on the album, to the often powerful lyrics, but I also have what those rare pieces of art we encounter at just the right time give us: the memory of vivid early experiences. The world of 1994 and its accompanying years comes back to me through the music I listened to so obsessively. I am not nostalgic for those years. I wouldn't want to live them again. I am vastly happier now. But it's good to have some contact with that lost self, to feel a bit of the way back to what I don't want to fully recover. It's easy, too, to feel that the person I was then — so young, naive, stupid, bewildered — is gone. But he's not. Some trace of him lives in my perception of these songs now as I listen to them yet again. Twenty years is a long time, and it is no time at all.

Add a Comment

Posting has been nonexistent here for a bit because not only is it the start of a new school year (a time when posting is always light here), but, as I've mentioned before, I'm also now beginning the PhD in Literature program at the University of New Hampshire. This not only involves lots of time in classes, time teaching First-Year Writing, and time doing homework and class prep, but I'm also driving over 300 miles a week commuting to and from campus. And of course there are also the inevitable writing projects — currently, I'm writing an introduction for a new translation from the Japanese of a very interesting novel (more on that later, I'm sure), a couple of book reviews and review-essays and essay-essays, a couple of short stories, and the always very slowly progressing book manuscript on 1980s action movies. And I've got a couple video essays I want to make in the next month or so. And I'm editing a short film I shot this summer. And, well, naturally, blogging is not really at the forefront of my mind right now. But it is there, somewhere, in amidst everything else in that rattletrap of a mind.

Me & my pal Jacques

I've been wondering, too, what exactly to write about the whole PhD thing. For instance, the first question that occurs to people when I say I'm doing this thing at my advanced age: For god's sake WHY? My answer is simple and honest: They're giving me health insurance and a teaching stipend, which is actually a step up for me, since the stipend is a few hundred dollars more than I made teaching as an adjunct, and now I won't have to pay for my own health insurance. So I actually make more money now as a graduate student than I did as a college teacher. (Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of higher ed!) And I only have to teach one class per term and I get to take classes where I get to read a lot and write a lot and talk about, you know, litritcher. What's not to like? Of course, I know as well as anybody that the last thing the world wants is another lit PhD, and there are no jobs, and even if there are jobs the tenure track is disappearing rapidly and adjunctification is the name of the game in higher ed, and all that jazz. I know. Boy, do I know! It's entirely possible and even likely that I will never get a full-time job on the tenure track. But I honestly don't even know if I want a full-time job on the tenure track, or if I want to stay in college teaching at all. I'm very conflicted about that. But I'm not conflicted about the stuff I really do love: I love the research, I love academic conversations, I love reading complex and difficult stuff. And for a little while, that's what I'll get to do. I'm not going into any financial debt to do it, so I figure it's about as good a plan as anything else. I'm still open to marrying a successful investment banker, winning the lottery, and/or discovering I'm the lost heir of a billionaire. But this will do for now.

The other thing I wonder about is how much I should write about the progress of my classes and research. For now, I'm not really going to write a lot about it. This term, I'm only able to take one literature class because I also have to take a course on teaching college composition. I can't pretend to enjoy that part of this. All the Composition & Rhetoric people are lovely and brilliant, but I am very much not a Comp/Rhet person. Really, I think I've got more affinity for mechanical engineering than I do Comp/Rhet. I'm glad there are people out there doing it, because it can really be noble work, but I don't know of another field in the discipline of English about which I am less interested, so surviving 30+ hours of it during orientation and now 3 hours/week of it for class, plus teaching the First Year Writing course, is nearly enough to make me rush home and do math problems for fun.

The literature class I have this term is on trauma theory, which I didn't even know was a thing until fairly recently. I've generally avoided psychological approaches to literature, and so this is an interesting foray outside my comfort zone. I would be deeply, deeply surprised if it makes me more fond of psychological approaches to literature than I have been in the past, but it's a provocative class and I think I will at least get a good paper on Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country out of it. We'll see. First, I have to survive reading Freud, a writer I sometimes find really quite hilarious, but other people apparently take him seriously and therefore don't appreciate my giggles. (Pause for a passage from Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, as translated by Brian Massumi: "That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by, then filling the void with associations. He knew that Freud knew nothing about wolves, or anuses for that matter. The only thing Freud understood was what a dog is, and a dog's tail. It wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough.")

What I'm most enjoying, honestly, is having access to a nice big library every day. I love Plymouth State's Lamson Library beyond all others, because it was my savior as a child and then over the last five years I've been able to cajole and harangue the librarians into buying lots of books and movies that were of vital interest to me, so the collection now bears quite a bit of my imprint. But Plymouth doesn't have the resources of UNH, and so I already have piles of books on all sorts of different subjects checked out, because I easily get bibliographic whims — for instance, a sudden desire to read all of Donna Haraway. Many of my happiest hours working on my master's at Dartmouth were spent in the library there, a library I still return to at least a few times a year.

Is it any surprise, then, that I'm doing a PhD? The only surprise is that it took me this long to get organized enough to do it. After all, I'm really not fit for any other sort of endeavor!

Add a Comment

So my husband and I just happened to be in the New York Public Library (!) and were checking out their 100 year exhibit. I'd been looking at the few exhibits related to children's books, when my husband nudged me towards a case in the middle of the room I must have walked past without noticing three or four times.

And there they were. Scuffed, worn, dirty, grey... loved. Pooh, Tigger, Kanga. Truly tiny Piglet. Eeyore. (No Owl, Rabbit or Roo -- poor Kanga!) I'd known there were there, but I'd completely forgotten.

Museums and libraries are amazing things.

(This explains why no Roo, but did Owl and Rabbit never actually exist?)

Add a Comment

First the good news: a good deal on an ebook bundle of Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" series. See Books on the Knob for details.

Now the bad news: Duane will be updating the series. (The ebooks on sale are the originals.) I suppose there are some good arguments for doing this, but I hate it. Children who can only read the latest, most modern stories will have no problem at all finding what they like. Not all children need to be pandered to; some like to have their imaginations and outlook stretched. My life would have been much sadder without the "dated" books of E. Nesbit, Lousia May Alcott, Edward Eager, Frieda Friedman, Elizabeth Enright. My son is enjoying some of those books right now, 30+ years later.

Add a Comment

The room in which The Mumpsimus was born. Photo from February 2007.

Well, golly. Today marks eight years since I created this blog back in 2003. I didn't post anything beyond the definition of the word "mumpsimus" on that first day, but then things got going with a post about a story by James Patrick Kelly after a brief statement of purpose.

The statement of purpose ended by saying, "Who knows what will come of all this?"

What became of it was certainly more than I ever expected. The busiest time for the blog, in terms of posts and of visits from readers, were the first few years, particularly 2004 and 2005. There weren't a whole lot of other people doing what I was doing, and it felt like everybody who was writing blogs about books and literature of any sort knew and read each other (hence the creation of the Litblog Co-op). But the blogosphere expanded rapidly, and one day it seemed like there were 1,000 book blogs out there. And a lot of us stopped thinking of ourselves as fundamentally book bloggers, for various reasons. I still write a few reviews a year, but usually for places other than this blog, and though I've always written about film here (the 6th post on the site was about Brazil), I've grown more and more interested in writing about it as over the last few years I've been involved in making some movies and have started teaching film and media courses.

The blog wouldn't have survived if it couldn't change along with me, and it really has -- not just visually, as this Wayback Machine capture of the site in the fall of 2003 attests. It's always been a place where I've tested out ideas, basically presenting a first-draft face to the world, which wasn't scary until suddenly, when I got some links from well-trafficked sites in 2004, people were looking. A lot of those early posts seem embarrassingly awkward, naive, and wrongheaded now, but there are recent posts that are awkward, naive, and wrongheaded, too. That's the territory, the necessary risk for any endeavor like this.



2003 feels awfully distant, in many ways far more distant than 8 years. If I'd told my 27-year-old self, sitting at an iMac G3, struggling to learn enough HTML to make the blog work, that in 2011 he'd still be writing the blog, I don't know what he'd say. I think his immediate response would be, "Really? My life will be that much of a waste?"

But then I could say, "Actually, in 2011, even the White House has a blog. It's not quite as dorky an activity as it is today."

"Does somebody correct Bush's spelling for him? Or help him with compound sentences?"

"Nobody cares about spelling on the web. But the president in 2011 isn't Bush, and he's fairly articulate, probably more articulate than he is effective, really. Oh, and he's black. And his name's Barack Obama. Barack Hussein

Display Comments Add a Comment

My husband was buying some books for a birthday present today (the Wayside stories, you know you want to know) and a certain picture book was prominently featured on the counter. After the purchases were concluded, he discovered our son had picked it up and was reading it. He asked what he thought, to which our son said, "I don't understand what kind of person would tell someone to go to sleep that way."

My husband explained that sometimes when kids won't go to sleep, parents get very frustrated and feel at the edge of their ropes, and told a few choice stories from the past.

To which our son replied, "Well now I feel guilty!"

So to everyone who worried about actual kids reading this book... it's a good thing!

Display Comments Add a Comment

I've been thinking that I haven't been making the best choices for read-alouds; the books I loved to read to myself don't always translate. So tonight I put my mind to finding a book that would sound wonderful and came up with Little Plum by Rumer Godden. I remember how fond I was of the unique way Godden wrote sentences, blending narrative and dialog.

It's going great; my son is responding so well to the cadence and the language. At one point he said he could just tell he was going to like this book. Since he had me read for a solid hour, I'd say so.

Add a Comment

Tonight I started reading Magic in the Alley to my son. Right after Cleery wished to find something enchanted in every alley, he burst out, "this is going to be a GOOD book!"

Add a Comment

I started reading The Witch Family to my son today. I thought he would enjoy the part in which the little witches do everything backwards, including math: 1+1=0, 2+1=1, and so on. He did. So much, that he started calculating how it would work with negative numbers and fractions.

Add a Comment

I was adding my comments on Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything In It to my bibliography of books featuring multiracial families and came across my review of In My Heart by Molly Bang. I donated my review copy of it to my son's preschool and I don't know if he actually remembers the book, but he still often tells us, "I carry you in my heart."

Add a Comment

Some years ago, a certain very thoughtful and patient person who will remain nameless committed a dastardly act of copyright infringement and photocopied, in its entirety, my favorite children's book, Magic in the Alley by Mary Calhoun. I have since then managed to obtain a legitimate used copy. Seeing as the book has never been reprinted and is going for $21 and up online, I wondered if anyone out there might want the photocopy? Drop me a comment. Unless that makes you an accessory.

Display Comments Add a Comment

... because he would be devastated to see this perspective on his favorite books.

Add a Comment

Our family Read-Aloud adventures have successfully transitioned from Edward Eager to E. Nesbit! I don't really know why I'm so surprised; when you think about it, the childhoods of Eager's world probably doesn't seem that much further away from the current one than Nesbit's does. It's all strange and of the past. The language is more complex, but my son enjoys complex language. Also, his father does the best English accents, what more could you ask for?

I love listening to the questions he asks as he hears the story. So many things are new to him. Turns of phrase, concepts. He talked about the magic stories generally having four children - my boy identified his first literary trope! I'm so proud.

In other news, I'm reading Marcelo on the Real World, which is very interesting. But I'm not quite getting why Marcelo is hesitant to call his condition Asperger's Syndrome. He certainly seems autistic to me.

Add a Comment

Somehow, in the merry-go-round-that-aspires-to-be-a-rollercoaster that is my life, I missed this interview that Charles Tan conducted with me about Best American Fantasy (volume 2 is now, finally, making its way into the world!), writing, reading, theatre, teaching, reviewing, etc. It was a fun interview, and I'm grateful to Charles for giving me the opportunity to ramble on about some favorite topics. Here's a taste:

What for you makes a good story?

I wish it were something simple and reliable -- I wish, for instance, that I loved every story with the word "arugula" in it. That would make writing and reading much easier. But, alas, it's all more ineffable than that. Generally, it boils down to surprise and individuality. I don't continue reading stories if they don't contain some element of surprise -- if they don't make me wonder where the writer will take the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page. I'm not a fast reader, so if I feel like I can write the rest of the story in my head, I stop reading. Similarly, I want stories that are not like all the other stories I encounter -- I want stories that create a sense of individual voice and craft. Thousands and thousands of stories are published every year, and most of them have far too much in common with each other.

Add a Comment

Colleen Lindsay asked me to write a little something for her blog, perhaps something about MFA programs (though I've never attended one), perhaps advice to beginning writers (though there are vastly better people to receive advice from), perhaps pictures of sickeningly cute animals. I dithered, then wrote this.

Pictures of sickeningly cute animals will have to wait.

Display Comments Add a Comment

My son is sprawled on my office floor, reading a book of tips on raising an autistic child.

No wonder he's always a few steps ahead of us.

I'm a little unnerved if finding books on my shelves turns out to be a trend. I hate the thought of taking a book away from him, but seven does seem a tad young for bodice-rippers.

Display Comments Add a Comment

I found a ton of classic... for some definition of classic... Old Skool romances at a library sale, and as always, am really curious about the backstory of how they got there, since it was clearly someone's once much-loved collection. Did they die? Get widowed? Discover feminism? I've heard from a number of people that losing a husband destroyed their ability to enjoy romances, and Eva Ibbotson stopped writing them after her husband died. (Romance's loss is children's book's gain.)

There's something very poignant about reading these old books, which are so horribly dated now, yet have had such strong appeal to countless readers. It feels a little like stepping into a time machine and living in someone else's past.

Display Comments Add a Comment

On August 18, 2003, I wrote the first post of this blog, a definition of the word "mumpsimus". The next day, I posted some ideas about what I thought would be appearing here. Then another post, some thoughts on a story by James Patrick Kelly.

Five years later, the blog has lived longer than I ever expected it to, been read by far more people than I ever imagined possible, and the posts have had far more range and variety than I thought they would when I was guessing what might pop up in what I then called, with more accuracy than I could know, "this mad universe".

Five years doesn't sound like much time, and yet look at how much has changed! When I began The Mumpsimus, the blogs I had read were all personal or political. There were plenty of sites about science fiction and fantasy, but I didn't know of anyone using a blog to write primarily about SF, and so I thought I would give it a try. I had only recently begun reading SF again after shrugging it off during college, and I thought the blog would give me an opportunity to find patterns between what I read, to formulate some ideas, to watch myself become reacquainted with a form of writing that had changed quite a bit in my absence. (I was inspired by two things primarily: the "New Wave Fabulists" issue of Conjunctions, to which I subscribed at the time, and the New Weird discussions at the TTA Press bulletin boards, which I discovered via Kathryn Cramer's blog -- in fact, I probably owe my decision to create The Mumpsimus to Kathryn, whose site I had been reading for a few months, originally because of her commentary on current events, until I found myself getting more and more curious about the SF community that appeared in glimpses and glances therein.)

Things did not start quickly. I wrote only 16 posts in all of 2003, and 10 of those were in the first month. This makes sense -- I was teaching at a boarding school, and that job took over my life again in September, and my sense of myself as a writer was not yet attached to the blog, so it was easy enough to ignore, and I was still thinking of this as a science fiction blog: if I wasn't reading much SF, I didn't have anything to write (I did allow myself to exclaim some joy when J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel, and tried a bit desperately in the last paragraph to tie it to something having to do with SF). January 2004, though, brought 24 posts, and I began to give myself the freedom to write about anything I felt like, regardless of its connection to science fiction. 2004 was the most productive year, with 319 posts total. Blogs became ever more popular during that time, and every month more people were using blogs to write about books.

319 posts shows, too, how suddenly the blog took over my life. I had, for the first time, a sense of an audience for my writing, and I wanted to satisfy it. I wrote quickly, without too much reflection, and though now I look back in awe at how much I wrote, I don't have any desire to return to that level of productivity, partly because it often led to half-baked or idiotic posts, blustery generalizations, vague pronouncements, and obvious self-contradictions. It also led to some sentences, paragraphs, and even entire posts that I'm quite proud of.

Some of the conversations and controversies of the early years have been lost, because Blogger did not have a native comment system then, and I tried out a couple of different ones, without much satisfaction (I wouldn't say I'm satisfied with Blogger's, but at this point, it's good enough). But somehow I think we'll all be just fine, even if all the comments about Lord of the Rings and homoeroticism have been lost.

I couldn't maintain the productivity, though, because the blog had put me in contact with enough people that I was given the opportunity to write reviews and commentary elsewhere, and so there wasn't as much material for this site. I thought about quitting many times, but instead gave myself permission to take breaks whenever I wanted. I'd achieved an audience for a while, but the struggle to keep that audience coming back, to keep the numbers of unique visitors high, to get links from more prominent sites, etc. -- the struggle began to wear me down. My life kept changing, too, but not in a way that gave me more time -- I started a Master's degree and then became a department head at the school where I worked. The only way the blog could survive was if I only wrote in it when I felt like it, even if that meant fallow periods and a much slower rate of posting. The only reason to keep doing this, after all, was if it could be fun.

And it is fun. More than fun. My life has changed so much over the past five years that I am grateful to have had this one stable element to it, and to have an archives of some of the things I have thought about, read, and seen during that time.

Often over the years, I thought that if The Mumpsimus could survive to its fifth anniversary, that would be enough, and I would give it up and move on to other things. (Often, I doubted it would make it to a fifth anniversary.) I don't feel that urge anymore, though, because I also don't feel the urge to try to get tens of thousands of readers, to review every book that comes through the door, or to blog when I don't feel like blogging. There are now thousands of blogs about books and reading, about science fiction and fantasy, about literature and life, and I feel no pressure to add to the noise except when it's amongst the noise that I want to be. So why put an end to this thing that has already metamorphosed so many times? The temptation to call it quits has subsided, at least for now.

As much as I write this blog for myself, I would never have continued this long without the readers who have joined in the discussion, sometimes to cheer me on, sometimes to add information, sometimes to challenge my statements and assumptions. Many of the people I met through the blog in its earliest days are now among my most frequent correspondents and closest friends, some of whom I see frequently in "the real world", many of whom I only get to see once a year at best, and most of whom I still owe emails to.

Really, this post is just me using a lot of words to say thank you. Thank you to the people who have been steady readers over the years, and thank you to the folks just now coming by. Nobody is forced to read this stuff, and that some of you continue to choose to amazes me, frightens me, humbles me. Thank you.

Display Comments Add a Comment

There is something about the first summer vacation of my son's life that puts autism in the forefront of my mind. Day after day of unstructured time... utter bliss for some kids, utter torture for an autistic kid. And his parents.

Schedules, clocks, breaking everything down into controllable-feeling chunks of time... these are the days of our lives.

Add a Comment

There's been a lot of ideas about summer reading lists floating around the kidlitosphere, which I've been following with interest, because I'm seeing first hand lately how very much my son wants to choose his own books. The 48 Hour Book Challenge was a big help in getting him to transition to chapter books and Evan and I are falling over ourselves suggesting all our favorites. But he steadfastly makes his own choices at his own pace.

I was so thrilled when he finally picked up my suggestion of Louis Sachar's Wayside Stories, but it turns out he's been reading them at school. School books seem to have much more cachet that home books. I wonder if he would be responsive to a reading list.

He finished the fourth Magic Treehouse book the other day and decided to read it aloud to his father, since "it's exciting because it's about pirates." That touches me so much, that he not only wants to read but he wants to share what he reads.

He and his dad have a deal now, he will read a chapter of Pirates on Penzance, or whatever the heck it's called, aloud and his dad will read a chapter of his choice--The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

(And tangentially--how on earth could anyone stand that movie? A Lucy that snivels and squeals and BATS HER EYES COYLY?! It is to barf.)

Display Comments Add a Comment

A nightly scene at our house these days, with minor variations:

me: Okay, bedtime.

Ben: I haven't finished my chapter!

Evan: Which chapter is it?

Ben: "Dischord and Dynne"

me and Evan, silmultaneously: Awwwwww....

me and/or Evan: Okay, just this once.

Add a Comment