Kassandra Jo Tomaras's Blog, page 3

A Paean to Bureaucracy

For the last not-quite-seven years at Bates College. The following text was composed and delivered as an address at a farewell party organized on my behalf, somewhat against my will. I ended up surprised and pleased by what I wrote, and so I share it.

I decided to prepare remarks because while, as you all know, I have no trouble with improvised public speaking, sometimes others have trouble with what I end up saying when there’s no script to guide me. I would have preferred to individually tha...

A Newly Published Story, and a Note about Awards Eligibility

My story "Simple Present" has been published at "Igxante: An Ontology / Becoming: An Anthology" (scroll down for my piece) by Kate Morgan / Human Decency Is Key. Though fictionalized, this is also the most personal piece I have published yet. It also serves as a reductio ad absurdam against Orhan Pamuk's rape-apologia in the form of a philosophical novel, The Museum of Innocence. And the person who inspired it is now 11 years old.

This is the time of year when writers of science fiction and fa...

A Note in Favor of Polemical Vignettes

Opposed to the philosophical novel--the bloated doorstop of prose in which two thousand years of patriarchal clichés take on the lyrical weight of a dubious story--is the polemical vignette, which peers into a corner of the universe that the novelist has deemed unworthy or uninteresting and finds there a probative counterexample to one or another grotesque generalization. Like Hamlet to Horatio, it says, here is something, from heaven or on earth, not dreamt of in your philosophy, take accoun...

Catching Up: Der Nister, and more books

Illness, family obligations, and miscellaneous dramas have limited my time and energy for writing. Here are some quick updates:

Der Nister

The first of my Der Nister translations to be published is "Walking," my translation of the story "Geyendik." I've been able to trace the story's bibliography to the 1929 Kiev edition of Gedakht; if anyone knows of earlier appearances, please share the bibliographic information. Its appearance is thanks to the excellent Samovar project by Strange Horizons. Y...

Seeing Ramallah

Can poets be great prose writers? Can a writer's quality be judged in translation? After having read I Saw Ramallah by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, my answer to the first question is, "Why not?" And to the second, it is clearly yes if one is fortunate to have Ahdaf Soueif as one's translator.

The experience Barghouti describes--a displaced person is allowed to return to the hometown from which he was forcibly separated, not in conditions of freedom, but in an awkward power-sharing ar...

It Mek

I have bookshelves. Many shelves, full of books, and then there are the books that do not fit on the shelves. After more than five years in this house, the gradually increasing entropy of tsundoku had gotten to be too much, even for me. In the last few weeks, my wife and I--on my initiative--have alphabetized the books by author's last name, re-shelved them, and purged the collection of duplicate copies and other things we do not want. The books from U-Z are still unshelved, and I estimate we...

A Look Back on a Disappointing Year

My Own Writing

Three stories of mine were published this year. If you want to read "Ruins of a Future Empire," you will need to order a print back-issue of Salvage No. 4, since they do not put their fiction and poetry up on their website. I think it's worth it, not merely for the story, but because Salvage is a serious journal of political thought that deserves to be more widely read. "A Summary of Menistarian Law..." is, for now, only available to subscribers to Lackington's, another publicat...

Meta-Anthology 2017

As I have explained in previous years, I make no pretense to this representing the best short stories of this year. First of all, because they are not of this year, having all first appeared in 2016. But also, since I could not possibly keep up with all short fiction publications of interest, I have culled them from four key anthologies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Best American series, in its Short Story, Mystery Story, and Science Fiction and Fantasy instances, and the Pushcart Prize. Despi...

The Long Road to Menistaria

I wrote "A Summary of Menistarian Law, Composed for the Citizens of Olakia, in Response to Our Present Crisis by Dr. Clemons Indement," early in the year 2014. It was just published in the "Trades" issue of Lackington's (No. 16). I will hold off from talking about what inspired the story until more people have had a chance to read it. For now, I will take a page from my issue-mate Alexandra Seidel and tell the story of the story, some of the reasons why it took so long to find its way into pr...

Cognitive Dissonance in the Shadow of Bolshevism

A problem of the far left, at least in Anglophone countries, seems to be that we believe our major problem to be "the problem of organization." That "the problem of organization" is posed as such, as if it were a singular problem rather than a carrying case for a great number of other, potentially knottier problems, is a symptom of the fact that, 100 years on, we remain in the shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, or more precisely, of a given set of received myths about that historical...