I got fan mail today. Perhaps my first piece of Fan Mail ever.(1) It was about “Lester Young…” What a very nice feeling. It made my day. But now I should clear off my desk and grade some essays and exams. With a big grin on my face. 1. I’m not counting comments on...
Read more →As part of my continuing adventures in figuring out what I want to say in my paper on SF cinema in Korea, this post discusses Raelianism in Korea whilst working through a review of two books on SF and their effects on the world. I’ve just finished reading Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare...
Read more →I had a post I was going to write, about fantasy, SF, and the demonstrations going on in Seoul these days, but I decided to pitch it as an article idea. The editor to whom I pitched it liked the concept, so I’m binning that post to keep the juice for my article. That...
Read more →Today the most surprising thing happened! I’m ending off my Anglophone Popular Cultures course with a discussion of SF and its role in (and effect on) Western popular culture. Last week, we watched Blade Runner and there was a panel discussion on The Fifth Element and Brazil. Today, my lecture focused on getting students...
Read more →For those living outside of the English-speaking, American-magazine-distributed world who are interested in reading my recently-published story “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues” in the July 2008 issue of Asimov’s SF, you might be interested in the Fictionwise eMagazine edition. (There’s DRM, of course, and I don’t usually buy things with DRM myself...
Read more →On The Eyeball Floor. It’s a dark, funny, weird, but very human story by the unstoppable Tina Connolly, up now at Strange Horizons. Go read it. And yeah, the title made me think of a certain Howlin’ Wolf song, just like it made you do, right? (Mashed with froggie madness here.)
Read more →Well, Fukuoka here I come. I guess my SF-writer credentials maybe came in handy this time, for one of my proposed papers — “Another Undiscovered Country: Understanding the Particularities of Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in South Korea Through The Examination of 21st Century Korean SF Cinema” — got accepted for...
Read more →I should be grading in-class essays, but my guilt at not yet having done so has been assuaged by the fact that another professor in the department, someone above me, confessed to not having graded her midterms either, and not feeling the slightest bit badly about it! So among all the other insanity of...
Read more →