When Jihyun suggested we watch the film Sound of Noise, I was skeptical at first. Musical terrorists in Sweden, that just sounded potentially too cheesy to be good.
Well, a couple of reservations aside, I actually found myself charmed by the film.
It’s more often than you might expect that I find intersections between the worlds of jazz music and SF. John Coltrane read Flash Gordon and other pulps and comics as a kid, and as I discuss in that same post, Sun Ra (and several other jazz musicians) talked about life from the point of view of an alien from another world who was visiting the Earth. (Some others talked more in terms of being “trapped” on the Earth, and there, the sad root of the metaphor probably lies.)
But in happier, more exciting news: my latest find, which maybe is only news to me, is about Nichelle Nichols, who played the groundbreaking and iconic role of Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek series TV programs…
This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, a few at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in the series.
This post ends off my discussion of The Fifth Decad of Cantos (also sometimes called the “Leopoldine” Cantos) by specifically dealing with Canto LI, the final Leopoldine Canto.
This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, a few at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in the series.
This post picks up again (after another hiatus–I was busy for the last few weeks) one step closer to the end of The Fifth Decad of Cantos (also sometimes called the “Leopoldine” Cantos). Today I’ll be specifically dealing with Canto L, the penultimate Leopoldine Canto.
You know, I’ve been trying for a few days to figure out a way of saying something useful about the Resnick/Malzberg/SFWA thing that’s the talk of the ghetto these days.
The thing is, it’s all obvious. What E. Catherine Tobler Said, basically. Others have said useful things too. Jim Hines has compiled many links. Or this is also a good run-down of things, if you prefer.
My thoughts? Actually, my reaction is much like Benjamin Rosenbaum‘s, but I prefer to share what me wife said to me when I brought the situation up to her, because she pretty much nailed what’s embarrassing, sad, and, in Rosenbaum’s words, disgusting about this.
As I mentioned on Twitter the other day, I recently finished a draft of a weird novella with the working title, “In the Company of Distillers.”
I guess the best way to explain the story is that it’s set in London at that part of the 18th century Gin Craze just prior to the government’s second attempt (and the first serious one) at Gin Prohibition…
As far as the makeup of the story, it’s probably easiest to explain it more like the way one does a gin-based cocktail, that is, in the form of a recipe:
Well, earlier this month I noticed that my last WordPress update finally killed the functionality of the plugin I’d been using to arrange posts in series, and I resolved to find something else. I finally have, but it took me a good chunk of time getting the posts into the series (which means it’s pretty late at night, since we accompanied our friend Nick to a few places today as part of his birthday celebrations, most notably a visit up to the bar in the Bitexaco tower, which is this gigantic building a few blocks from our home with a helipad and observation deck and so on).
One thing I’ve noticed since coming to Vietnam is that the internet is way more spam-laden. I never saw a quarter so much spam in Korea as I do here, and I’m not sure why my spam-blockers don’t prevent the popup windows like they (presumably) did in Korea.
A lot of the spam is for online games, especially kiddie RPG-type games. But I’ve noticed other ones, too, and figured screenshots might amuse–or horrify–my readers who can’t experience the WTF? for themselves.
(Warning: these may be NSFW.)
The Muppets have been on my mind, ever since Mrs. Jiwaku started working on a painting which is, essentially, a mash-up of the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink with Jim Henson’s Muppet characters.
And you’ll probably be wondering what The Muppets have to do with bigotry, though I swear, if you stick with it, it’ll make sense. (And no, I’m not talking about the recent Muppet movie and racial coding of characters. I’m talking about Jim Henson as a political subversive, something I talked about in my classes, but am pretty sure I haven’t posted about here before.)
Marc Laidlaw recently shared a link on Facebook to a post on “Good Writing vs. Talented Writing”over on Brainpickings featuring some ideas by Samuel Delany. Essentially, Delany draws a line between “good writing” and superior “talented writing”:
The talented writer often uses specifics and avoids generalities — generalities that his or her specifics suggest. Because they are suggested, rather than stated, they may register with the reader far more forcefully than if they were articulated. Using specifics to imply generalities — whether they are general emotions we all know or ideas we have all vaguely sensed —is dramatic writing. A trickier proposition that takes just as much talent requires the writer carefully to arrange generalities for a page or five pages, followed by a specific that makes the generalities open up and take on new resonance. … Indeed, it might be called the opposite of “dramatic” writing, but it can be just as strong — if not, sometimes, stronger.
Try saying that three times in a row, as quickly as you can.
Those who actually click through to the website will notice a few new icons have turned up in my sidebar among the social media links. I’ve started tracking my daily music practice in a public notebook at Evernote; I’ve got an about.me profile page up; and as of today I have also begun developing a clippings.me profile, for tracking nonfiction publications.
…for a value of today dating back to Mary Wollstonecraft’s tenure as a governess, and courtesy of Ruth Brandon’s book Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres:
Mary found them quite uncultivated, with no topics of conversation other than dress, dogs and marriage.
To which Mrs. Jiwaku immediately exclaimed: “It’s Korea!”
Meaning South Korea, today. Except that in contemporary South Korea, it’s not just rich young people… not everyone is like this, but the middle class, and even the aspirational types in the lower class, are mostly precisely this way.
Well, okay, dress, dogs, Kpop, and marriage.
New as of right now: my long-delayed review of B.R. Myers’ The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters is out in the current issue of the Kyoto Journal (#77). Though the title is goofy — “Minjok Mama Madness! and Other Fairytales From North of the 49th Parallel” — the subject is serious, and the review is overall quite positive.
My review isn’t in the online preview, though, so you’ll have to get a copy of this fine journal in order to read it. I’m enjoying my contributor’s copy, and can recommend the issue (and the journal) without reservation.
… that seems to be cropping up these days, it’s not a post-80s world we live in.
It’s in the shadow of the Baby Boomer Generation that we dwell, today: their politics, their economics, their morality, their paradigm. This insight I ran across on the Ivebeenreading blog in a post about a piece elsewhere where Kent Jones “takes after Quentin Tarantino for a poorly thought-out slam of John Ford.”
A long time ago, I started a planned series of posts that didn’t go very far, drawing some parallels between the England of the Gin Craze era (the early 1700s) and Korea in the first decade of the 21st century. I’m still not feeling like continuing it, but I am reading up on the Gin Craze (right now, working my way through Patrick Dillon’s wonderful Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva–The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze) as I continue working on a short story set during that period, and a number of things have struck me as fascinating.
So fascinating, indeed, that for me it’s a struggle to resist the urge to find a way to make my own narrative stretch over a couple of decades or more, just so I can work in all the neat details, an urge I’ve managed to resist so far but only barely.
In a book I read long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Christopher Dewdney wrote in his book of poetry The Radiant Inventory about neurology, using the most brilliantly poetical and beautiful language. He wrote about all kinds of things, of course: books of poetry are like that.
Apparently yes.
I was dealing with some stuff so I wasn’t so into it, but other people who tried it liked it… I suppose that’s encouraging, this being my first risotto. (It was a bit too salty, though.)
I basically followed Felicity Cloake’s advice, though:
… succeed, remind yourself of your goal, and try attack the problem in another way.
This is a categorically different kind of statement than, “try, try again.” I think this because the reassessment and questioning of goals is crucial.
Example: Today, my crit group met to discuss a dialog etude we’d all tried (this one) and we found that despite some individual differences, nobody felt all that good about their results.
