Behind the Curtain…

Behind the curtain, I’ve been drafting a ton of blog posts in spare minutes when I’ve been stuck in my office. I’m not happy with any of them, but I’ve drafted a bunch.

I’m finding it harder and harder to feel like I want to make pronouncements on anything. When I talk about Korea, I get things wrong often enough that I’m reticent to bother — especially when not getting things wrong takes so much damned research.

When I write about books and authors — aside from Ezra Pound — I find myself much more, um, ambivalent. I’m at a point now where, if I am reading nonfiction and the author drops the ball in the first 20 pages, I’m pretty much ready to write that author off as not deserving of my time. (Most recent example? A People’s History of the World by Chris Harman… except I’m not sure how useful to others is a review of a book that runs, “The author dropped the ball something like ten times in the first twenty pages of a 700-page (not counting references) history book. I decided to get out of Dodge before wasting too much time on his work.” A real review would involve slogging through and summing up how often Harman dropped the ball all the way through. But I don’t want to make that time investment, to be frank.

Then there’s the stuff I’ve drafted about writing, about SF, riffing off interviews and other things I’ve read; those post drafts are okay, but I’m not really happy with them, and they need overhauling, simplification, and clarification.

Posts on special topics of interest — brewing, filmmaking, and so on — have been off the table for the last while, as I’ve been busy grading final exams. But all the calculation and tabulation and everything will be done by Thursday night at the latest. So maybe I’ll be posting a little more often then. We’ll see.

I have to get a Pound post up tonight, but that’s something I’ll do a little later.  My Dear Readers will forgive me backdating it a few hours, for the sake of saying it got posted on time.

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