05/25/13

Review in Kyoto Journal #77

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.

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05/24/13

Despite All the Nostalgia for the 1980s…

… 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.”

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05/21/13

More on the Gin Craze

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.

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05/21/13

Out from the Sinews

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.

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05/20/13

Can You Make Risotto with a Southeast-Asian-Twang?

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:

I had to use arborio rice–the other stuff wasn’t available.
I forgot to get white cooking wine, so I just used red, which gave the risotto a pinkish color (deepened by the red bell pepper I threw in later).

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05/20/13

Etudes for Writers, 3.1: If At First You Don’t

… 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.

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05/13/13

Writing Etude #3: You Are What You Say

Well, the writers I live with and I tried out the last writing etude I posted, and the results were really quite interesting, but I’m going to update that post sometime with results and thoughts.

When we concluded our discussion of that etude, we decided to try another one, suggested by the inimitable E.G. Cosh. She wanted to work on dialogue, and on revealing things through dialogue–especially things like character motivation and and the nature of two characters’ relationship. She suggested the twist that we work on dialogue-intensive (or dialogue-only) scenes, and write the same scene twice, with the same motivation driving each character, but changing the nature of the two characters’ relationships when we rewrite the scene.

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05/12/13

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto XLIX

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.

After a very long hiatus, this post picks up again toward the end of The Fifth Decad of Cantos (also sometimes called the “Leopoldine” Cantos), specifically dealing with Canto XLIX–also known as the “Seven Lakes” canto.

This post is part of a series titled "Blogging Pound's The Cantos":

Previous in series

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05/11/13

Practice Notes Shared at Evernote

One of the things that has been surprising about moving to a new computer is being able to access social network/media services so much better than I could in the past. While my first instinct is to blog everything as a way of putting information into accessible storage, it’s not really the most efficient way to do everything.

So I’ve been exploring, and one of the services I’ve found to serve a purpose I needed is Evernote. While I don’t think posting about my music practice here is a terrible idea–and I will be posting sometimes as part of my series about coming “Back to the Sax”–I don’t want to clog this blog with the minutae of my daily practice regimen… although I would still like to share my practice records publicly.

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05/7/13

About that MBC Parody Video

A good long time ago, James at The Grand Narrative urged me to write about the things I discuss below. I thought it was a good idea, but relented at first, thinking that maybe I might get fired the way Gerry Bevers was for posting about Dokdo.

Then I got busy, and stayed busy.

Then I left Korea. And here we are.

But this video came up again, where I live now, as part of a discussion about sexism and racism in Korea, and I realized that I’d never gotten around to it, and that I should. Because I learned a few things from the experience, including things I think both Koreans and expats in Korea (perhaps especially the latter) ought to think about.

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05/7/13

Morosco Exercise, And Moving Forward

So, a little digging reveals the Victor Morosco exercise that Phil Barone described to me has been posted online with more detailed explanation. (Presumably posted by another of Morosco’s students?) Or, at least, it’s an exercise that very, very closely resembles the one Phil reccomended to me, and which seems to teach the same essential things.

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05/4/13

Sax Practice Notes

Well, I’m still doing those exercises Phil Barone gave me to do. I’m pretty happy with the result, and I’m finding that taking more mouthpiece is making a big difference, and that overtone exercises are also helping a lot. Maybe it’s just that I’m recovering my embouchure, I’m not sure–that must be part of it–but I have begun to develop a largeness of tone that I remember wanting and needing, but not knowing how to get, back when I was playing in Dabang Band.

This, of course, also brings me to a couple of problems:

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05/1/13

Dread: Saigon Falls

So, the other night we played through my new scenario for Dread, titled “Saigon Falls,” with my housemates here in Vietnam.

It was an interesting experience for a few reasons. For one thing: we were playing imaginary characters living in our real (shared) house. That was odd, because a lot of the story took place inside the house, and the geography of the house played a part in a lot of scenes.

It was interesting secondarily because the characters were modeled on the previous occupants of the house we’re staying in, a group of frathouse morons who apparently had huge, drunken parties weekly, had people falling off balconies and breaking their hips (or the neighbours’ windows), and who left everything in the house at least slightly trashed. Honestly, I couldn’t really imagine how they lived in here with rooms where none of the lights were working, showers that barely sprayed water, and so on.

The plot of the game was simple: it was a variation of The Hangover–indeed, a variation of the “You Wake Up…” Dread scenario I ran across on the RPGgeek forum, set specifically in our house. In my variation, the monsters were primarily cockroach-based–giant roaches, human-roach hybrids, and so on.

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05/1/13

The Day I Made a Gumbo…

… was today. My first gumbo, too. Vegetarian and gluten-free, because I was cooking for the house. Apparently a success.

The gumbo itself is sort of a mishmash of recipes I saw online. I found such an incredible amount of diversity among the recipes that finally I decided, there is no such thing as a definitive gumbo recipe.

Gumbo is conceptual: stew, with chunks. Herbs, spicy if you like that. Slow cooked. Okra and smoked sausage are nice, but not absolutely required. (The latter I’m omitting only because this meal is to be en famille.) Often served with rice. Beans are good, but again, not 100% required. Roux likewise.

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04/30/13

Etudes for Writers, #2.1

In my last post in this series, I mentioned (and linked) the blog of my friend Ian McHugh, an excellent Australian SF/fantasy writer. I wanted to mention this post of his, regarding the usefulness (or uselessness) of word frequency analysis when trying to figure out what you’re doing unconsiously in your writing, as well as when thinking about character voice, but I felt it would distract from the etude I was discussion.

Hence, another post. Interesting stuff, which I recommend you go check out.

I may try to work up a new exercise based on it, if I can.

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04/29/13

Etudes for Writers, #2: A Fine Balance

At Clarion West, our instructor–one of my favorite authors, the brilliant Maureen F. McHugh–suggested an idea to our class that seemed, when I heard it, to be self-evidently logical and obvious… except of course I’d never heard it stated explicitly before, or thought of it myself, and when she suggested it, my mind was also blown (to tiny bits, yes).

We were discussing one of my classmates’ stories (one by this guy, and outstanding writer I must say, and no relation to Maureen…). The story was very worldbuilding-heavy, and the plot was a little convoluted, and even the SF junkies in the class found it a little hard going.

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04/28/13

What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 5 — What I Listen to When I Listen to Popular Music

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series.

In Part 3 of this series, I insisted that I actually do consume some of what everyone surely agrees is “popular music” by my definition of it–a hybrid form of performance art incorporating not just music but other performing arts, from theater and narrative storytelling and verse to fashion, makeup, dance, and more hyperreal narrative arts that are relatively new to the world, such as video and internet presence-management.

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04/27/13

What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 4 — Music and Identity

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series.

When my family moved from Nova Scotia to Saskatchewan, I had a pretty hard time of it.

Understatement of my life, but it’ll do. The move began a long period of having the shit kicked out of me, and then struggling to find a way to fit into a youth culture I didn’t really understand. I was almost certainly dealing with PTSD from all the violence; I was definitely emotionally a mess; I was lost and confused about who I was; and my peers were, like all schoolkids, none too sympathetic.

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