One thing that fascinates me is how changing perspective changes a story completely. I was on the subway Friday night, to go meet Charles to go to a microbrew buffet in Kangnam — where a good time was had, by the way! — when I realized what I’d been doing wrong in “Dhuluma No More, My Brothers, and the Rains Will Come Again.” The original story (after the first revisions, following some very useful feedback from friends) was well-suited to being told in the 3rd person, limited omniscient point of view — from somewhere very close to the main character, …
Month: October 2007
Lee Myung Bak and Corruption
With all of the allegations of corruption that have been brought up against him, I’m amazed that the right-wing Presidential candidate Lee Myung Bak is actually still pulling 50% in the polls. I’m wondering whether the new-ish evidence I’m told has surfaced of his implication in the BBK price-manipulation fraud will be the needle in his balloon. Lime says there’s still a good chance of him being toppled, even though he’s leading. She even quipped that if he wins, she’ll want to leave the country, which is exactly what a lot of Americans I know said about Bush. (And they …
Zocalo’s Questions
A blogger who goes by Zocalo left a comment linking to a recent post about imperialist white male English teachers in Asia, and I started to type a reply. The reply got long enough that I knew it’d be multiple comments in the post, so I’m putting it here instead. Before you go on, you probably should read Zocalo’s post in full (as well as the post it links to). For those not click-inclined, here’s a snippet: I have mentioned a few times before that I read some blogs written by Caucasians teaching English in Asia. Some of these blogs …
No Maps
It must be weird to be asked to talk to someone with a camera long enough to have an hour and a half of footage. I’m watching the William Gibson documentary No Maps For These Territories, and I’m struck by the difficulty of this kind of “performance.” No doubt it is a performance: sitting around and talking is different from sitting around and talking to a camera. It’s interesting in a number of ways. It certainly provides some context to Gibson’s career, especially his recent comments about SF and the comments in the documentary about the relative difficulty of imagining …
Bye, Wonjjang
Two posts just got eaten. How come it only happens when I blog using Internet Exploiter? Anyway, I got Wonjjang out the door today. Poor fella has been waiting to be sent out into the cold, cruel world for a while now. That brings my current total number of stories out to market up to six. (Not including that story at Adbusters that I gave up on, which is nearly 11 months with no response, and which I only leave in my submissions tracker because, hey, it’s amusing me.) “Dhuluma…” and “McWar” (which will be retitled) will also both be …