Different Meanings of “Colonize”…

The bits I agreed with in this article on colonization of space and colonization in history at The Space Review only had the effect of making me feel more uneasy about the bits I disagreed with. Colonization in the past always involved other humans, which is a big difference. Though I think if Mars does [...]

Lunar New Year Reads, #50: North, by Seamus Heaney

Relieved exhalation of breath.
Seamus Heaney (here’s his Nobel Prize website bio page) is a poet I come to again and again. The first thing I ever read of his writing, though, besides a couple of pieces in an anthology, was prose — essays, I believe, on poetics and poetry. For a few years, I read [...]

Lunar New Year Reads, #49: The Painted Bed by Donald Hall

The Painted Bed is a strong, hard book. It is painful, because, as one soon realizes, the title announces its theme, only a few pages into the book, is the deathbed of the poet’s wife, the bed of their sleeping, their dreams, the love and their sex in life, and the site of his wife’s [...]

Lunar New Year Reads, #48: The Golden Ass, by Lucius Apuleius

This is a Roman novel, which is a first for me: I’ve read Roman poetry, and Roman speeches, but never a Roman novel until now. Well, strictly speaking it’s actually not a Roman novel, but a Carthaginean novel, though it was written in Latin. The translation is a very old one, by William Adlington, which [...]

Lunar New Year Reads, #47 (sort of): 소리와 고요사? (Between Sound and Silence) by 고창수 (Chang Soo Ko)

This book is, technically speaking, not the #47 book of the year. It’s just that, as I looked through my shelves for something to read, it occurred to me that I’d brought a spare copy to have passed on to a poet-friend (my old teacher, Tim Lilburn) — and read it on the plane ride [...]

Marmot is no more…

… but luckily it’s just a name/site change. I’m looking forward to seeing it in its final, full glory. Currently Korea’s biggest blogger’s site is being called From the Nakdong to the Yalu.

Is it normal?

I did my friend a favour while she was housesitting a mutual friends’ dogs in Seoul, and stopped in a few times a day yesterday and today to feed her cat. Well, last night, the cat vomited I don’t know how many times. (The floor-heating system was on, too, and it was all dry and [...]

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