As I posted recently, I have decided that, this lunar year, I will take up the 50-book challenge, but I am taking it up as of Seolnal, the Korean New Year (which is the same as the more famous Chinese-New-Year). I was just too busy writing when the western New Year rolled around to start in on this, but Seolnal’s a good enough marker in time for such a challenge. So here I am, starting with 4 books. Book #1: Graham Greene’s The Comedians. This novel is a brilliant work of art. It’s a story set in Haiti in the …
Month: February 2005
A New Experiment
I’ve decided to do something a little different for a month or two, with my digital camera. I’ve decided to always take pictures on the manual setting, and with the color set to “Black-and-White”. I figure this is as good a way to learn about composition and about how to use light and shadow as any method. If nothing else, it will be a change in the kinds of pictures I take, and will make me a better photographer, so that if I ever do get around to using better equipment, I’ll have some inkling of how to use it …
And Now, To Conclude My Film Overdose…
… but I swear I won’t rent anything more today. I’m returning my last DVD tonight. In the last few days I’ve seen three films that were all quite different. The best of them all was definitely Donnie Darko, though I must say that they were all interesting. The House of Flying Daggers is a Chinese kung-fu film set towards the collapse of the T’ang Dynasty (though it could well have been any dynasty, if you ask me, and Western viewers are extremely unlikely to care about this bit of the film’s context). Well, if you’ve already seen Hero and …
Northern Lights?
via Oranckay, here’s Georgy Bulychev in an OhMyNews piece imagining North Korean transformation.
For You ESL/EFL Teachers Out There
Here are a bunch of listening exercises for ESL students. And here’s a funny page lampooning, uh, well, our profession. There are some rather pithy observations in there, to boot. via Hypersonic Beams