The Miéville List

I’m posting the Mieville List — the fifty-book list that I am planning to slowly work my way through over the next couple of years — mostly to note that some of these books are going to be pretty damned hard to get my hands on in Korea, seeing that they’re either out of print and the kind of thing you mostly only find in used book stores. Yes, this is a kind of appeal to the kindness of strangers, but not a loud one. After all, with the degree of traveling I’ve been doing, in some ways I have …

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Those technical problems I mentioned…

I mentioned some technical problems with my work visa situation at the present. Those not interested in stupid loophole situations that will probably never happen to them, you may wish to skip over it and just know that I’m dealing with a pain in the ass. For those curious, though, I’ll get right into it and describe all the idiocies to you in vivid detail. Here’s the deal… I went to the office yesterday to box up my things and go home to continue packing, and what do you know but Brian came in and told me that there was …

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In Bucheon

My new employer has a wireless LAN and that’s how I’m posting this. I’m just waiting for the secretaries’ lunch break to be over so that I can maybe get a look at my new apartment and my new office — they’re in buildings right beside one another, which is fine by me. I got to Korea late Monday night, and when I checked my email, the next morning, I discovered there was a general Faculty Meeting here in Bucheon today, 10:30am Wednesday. So I busted my butt to get here and arrived only ten minutes late. I was introduced, …

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Poem and Eulogy for my Father

At my father’s memorial ceremony my sisters and brothers-in-law read a poem written by my mother, and I read a poem written by me, and a eulogy mostly “written” by me but actually “composed” by family council in one very long meeting the night before his memorial. The poem is not really a Ghazal in the strict sense of the form, but as so many anglophones have done before, I neglected the rhyme-scheme, use of refrain, and many other things. As Erin Thomas explains in this essay/collection of Ghazal, such irreverent use of imported forms is all too common among …

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