Pilfered (heh) from Nick Mamatas’s LJ, and following his variation on the rules: Plug your answers into Google Image and post pics. How hard can it be? The rule is actually to pick the first photo, but I just picked the first reasonably sized photo that wasn’t pornographic instead. I also chose the most interesting of the first two, because some of them really sucked. If you don’t like it, you can lick the insides of my shoes.
Today, during a break, a student told me that my class was shocking to him, in a good way. The reason? Basically, that unlike his other professors, I don’t ask a question with only one predetermined right answer in mind. I have the class entertain several different answers to a question, think about which one is important to them, and have them make decisions on what they want to focus. Sure, this is impossible in a math class, but this guy is a fashion design major, and he was saying my class was shocking because it’s different from his other …
The rewrite progresses slowly, mostly because I’m struggling to find out where the last draft went wrong. I could slowly explore everything I want to get at, but for this story, I’m trying for a kind of compression I’ve never achieved before. In short, I’ve managed to start telling shorter stories by limiting what happens in them; a shorter time-frame means a shorter story. I’m still at the point where longer arcs of plot, and more underlying ideas, necessarily mean a much longer story. But some of the reason for that is that I have a tendency to get explanatory …
Since my last post about readings was February/March, this one is March, Part 1.5. It’s been a busy month, and I’ve also been switching back and forth between a lot of different things, so I hardly read as much as I would like to be able to say I had. However, it’s been a month of very good, worthwhile reading. Picking up from where I left off, I tore through Small Beer Press’ LCRW No. 11, which was sent to me by the lovely and (enviably) talented Tina Connolly. My suspicion that it might be a worthwhile zine to subscribe …
Went to a concert last weekend. It was a show at which Kang Tae Hwan and Park Chang-soo performed. “How did you know about him?” my girlfriend asked me, after the show. I had to be honest and admit that I have no idea how I first learned of Kang, but I know that anyone who’s searching for local free jazz in Korea is finally going to encounter his name. His name, but not his CDs. They’re very hard to find (more about that later). Kang’s approach to the saxophone reminds me of nobody else, really. Imagine taking the amount …