The Mumpsimus

Since moving to Hoboken, lots of people have asked, "How are you doing? Are you settled? Are you euphoric? Are you crazy?" I tend to mumble an answer, trying to find a word that sounds simultaneously like yes and no . Even though this particular part of the Earth is one of my favorites, there's nothing easy about pulling up stakes after a decade of pretty stable living. I tend to avoid blog posts about my life and all that, partly because there's not a whole lot of all that to it, but I do want to take this lazy Saturday to chronicle a few things and offer some public thank yous. I start work at a new school this coming week, and before I get all tangled up in that post-summer life, I want to preserve here a few great moments. I owe thanks for sustenance and company to all sorts of people, including Gordon van Gelder, Liz Gorinsky, Juliet Ulman, and other friends new and old. Including one I'll mention at the end of this post. Rick Bowes is one of the gr...

Four years ago, I posted the first entry on this blog, a simple dictionary definition of the title. The next day, I said what I thought the whole thing was about. Then I posted a review of my friend Jim Kelly's story "Mother". I had no idea what I was doing, in every sense of that phrase. What most amazes me is how much has changed in four years. I feel like a grizzled old man, because way back then we didn't have all these fancy-shmancy interfaces -- we had to learn some HTML code! (I can just imagine what those of you who've been doing this for 10 years or more think of us whippersnappers...) Litblogs were few and far between. Not many people were blogging about science fiction in particular, which is what I started with, though soon I ended up throwing in whatever I happened to be reading or thinking about. According to Blogger, there are 936 posts here so far (with this being the 937th). The wordcount must be in the hundreds of thousands. The archiv...