… camp is indeed over, which is why I am posting about all the books I’ve read in the last few weeks! I am free for almost a month now. I have packing and moving to do, and it looks like Lime and I will be going on a trip next week, for ten days, to Thailand. (She booked the tickets tonight, and as long as her interview and application process go well, it’s a go! This is advantageous, since we’ll get more days in this way than we would get in if we went after her orientation.) Warm beaches, …
Month: January 2006
Lunar New Year Reads, #44: The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
While I did not technically “read” this text, I did spend more time listening to it than I would have spent eyeing the text. As it was, I downloaded it from Emule, but it’s a free audiobook available from Librivox. I do not know whether it is legal yet in Korea to circulate this text, although I am quite certain it was on a list of banned texts not long ago — just as were Camus and Sartre in my mother’s childhood in Quebec. I suspect it probably is legal here, though, since I managed to buy a heavily abridged …
SF and (Bits of) the Postmodern
The contents of this post were originally written as part of my post on Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife, but I felt that they deserved to be developed into a separate, individual post, which is why this is here. Conjure Wife and my understanding of how one could read that text critically brought to my mind a comment I wrote on an essay my friend Myoung Jae was working on lately, which touched upon the subject of postmodernist literary techniques, and the notion that it was through these techniques that a writer can express best the claims and values and criticisms …
Lunar New Year Reads, #43: Conjure Wife by Fritz Lieber
Damon Knight claimed that conjure Wife was “[e]asily the most frightening (and necessarily) the most thoroughly convincing of all modern horror stories,” and while I’m not sure the praise sits quite so steady nowadays, I do have to give Conjure Wife a big thumbs-up as far as diabolical imagination goes. This is my second reading of the novel: I read this book back in undergrad, the very same edition, actually, which I bore back to Korea from a box in my folks’ garage. When (back in 1997 or 1998) I mentioned the basic concept of the story to an RPGing …
Lunar New Year Reads, #42: The Question of Hu by Jonathan D. Spence
The blurb on the front of this book, a quote from a review in the the Washington Post Book World, reads: … A strange tale of adventure and foreign travel [that] illuminates grand historical themes… Hu’s story, so deceptively simple, makes powerful reading… [A] splendid book.” That’s about as apt a soundbyte as possible. What I found the book to be is a wonderful cross-cultural examination of ideas I first encountered in Foucault’s: the way that illness as a social object is constructed, that madness is construed by things like inconvenient uncontrollability, and so on — Spence makes no reference …
Lunar New Year Reads, #41: Kabuki 1: Circle of Blood by David Mack
Kabuki is not for everyone. It’s a dark, vaguely SFnal epic about, well, sort of about the intricate connections between crime, empire, sexuality, and power in an imagined Japan which, unlike many inmagined futures, is definitely, clearly, and intelligently linked to real history. It’s dark. Dark, dark, dark. But it’s also beautifully drawn; it’s insightful, and it reminds me in a way of how, in SF, sometimes the technology that is being discussed takes on the status of a character unto itself. In Kabuki, the art is like this: it takes on the status of a character, and in some …
Just WEIRD
This is plain weird: The mummified body of a woman who didn’t want to be buried was found in a chair in front of her television set 2 1/2 years after her death, authorities said. She said she was planning to come back.
For Those On the Road A Lot
For those of you forced to be on the road, especially driving, who wish they could spend the time reading, you might find useful the wonderful site of Librivox. LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project. It’s a very cool project. I am enjoying it and planning to download a novel …
Healthy Didgeridoo?
Via Alex Halavais, here’s a news report stressing the health benefits of playing the Australian didgeridoo.
The Living Wage on a Dying Planet
Over at TomPaine.com, I was reading through some letters on the subject of “The Dying Wage”, and ran across an interesting one: The problem with the wage ethic article is that when foreign-made goods can be produced with a lower wage then they will not be produced here. We have only three choices: 1. Let the American worker work for the same wages they do in China or India and suffer a similar deprived lifestyle because the imports are cheaper. Real American wages have been declining since 1977. 2. Keep the minimum wage in place, let untaxed cheap imports flood …