Today is May 5, Karl Marx’s 208th birthday. Last night, celebrities got together for the annual display of wealth that is the Met Gala, this year with the billionaire Bezos family as honorary chairs. Could there be a more appropriate anticipation of Marx’s birthday? Protestors should have set up cake […]
I delivered the following essay as a paper at the 2025 Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston. (There are actually a couple more paragraphs here than in the paper as delivered, since I cut it for the sake of time.) A paragraph or so is repeated from a chapter I […]
Francesca Wade’s new book, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, has been cause for some good writing about Stein recently. I have most appreciated Adam Thirlwell’s LRB essay “Devotion to the Cut” (more about Stein than about Wade’s book) and Ryan Ruby’s Bookforum review “In Search of Lost Stein”. Reading these pieces made me […]
1. In September 1986, Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015) put on high heels, painted a hammer & sickle over half his face, and walked into a meeting of communists and leftists in Santiago, Chile to speak one of his earliest pieces of writing, a manifesto of being and difference: I need no […]
In September 2004, Harcourt released Gifts, a new novel by Ursula K. Le Guin aimed at the young adult market. The press release I have for it states, “Gifts is Ms. Le Guin’s first novel for teens in decades. Like so much of her writing, it is beautifully crafted and […]
June 27 was Robert Aickman’s birthday, but I missed it. I was busy somehow. I’m often late to people’s birthdays. I don’t think Aickman minds very much, since he’s been dead for most of my life. To be honest, I was thinking it was this month. I’ve been reading Tartarus […]
Today is the 103rd birthday of Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019), and it provides me with the opportunity to say something I am happy to say every day: “You should read some writing by Carol Emshwiller.” I have a few more things to say, but I am perfectly happy if you skip […]
In 2018, I wrote a post at The Mumpsimus about Raymond Carver, inspired by Brian Evenson’s little book about Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Soon after I published it, Google decided the post was plagiarized clickbait and removed it. I could never figure out what […]
I’m going to write a bit here first about a book you are unlikely to read. This of course poses a problem for you as a reader: why bother reading about a book that will have likely no place in your life? That question, though, is one that lurks beneath […]
The Internet Archive has decided to respond to the corona virus crisis by creating what they call the National Emergency Library, and they have gained publicity from the likes of Jill Lepore at The New Yorker, from NPR, and from lots of people who support open access projects, open educational […]