Well, I got my rewrite of “Lester Young” finalized today, and sent off. I also finished my first (well, actually, second attempted) draft of my Sado Seja story, “Eight Days,” about the eight days Prince Sado spent dying in a rice chest, and how he ended up in one in the first place. Someone asked me whether it was SF, and I replied that it’s more of a dark fantasy/horror thing. Historical dark-fantasy/horror, set in a Korean palace. But definitely there’s magic: you got your reincarnation, a magic Taoist text, a bit of necromantic assassination (not in Sado’s life, in …
Month: November 2007
On Derrick Jensen
Note: I wrote this a while back. For a while, I was quite impressed with some of Jensen’s rhetoric — and in terms of education, I still apply some of his ideas, though in what I think is a more rigorous and sensible form. But on his endless vilification of “civilization” and “the culture,” I have lost my patience. To take the man seriously is to see the holes in his arguments. He’s no more a hypocrite than most of us — but he is more self-righteous in his hypocrisy. My disenchantment with Derrick Jensen is now utterly complete. I …
Bathed in the Light at the End of the Tunnel
The editing gig I’ve been working for a month or so is now, finally, thank the stars and the heavens, over. While I’m thankful for the filthy lucre, working on two textbook projects at the same time and mostly close to the deadline, during an already-busy semester, while keeping up my writing (somewhat, because I had deadlines of my own to keep), pushed me very close to my limits as a human being. Last week was relatively free, but the couple of weeks before, and the last few days, have been so crammed that I felt as if I were …
Great Progress
I’ve made great progress on a few things: Textbook editing is almost at an end! A few more hours of hell and it’s all over! Whew! “Lester Young…” is now essentially rewritten. I need a good hour to proofread it and then I can send it off! (I’m reworking it for a major magazine. More news when I have something final to announce.) A great deal of “Eight Days” fell into place in the last couple of days. Chunks of it just sort of bubbled up out of my subconscious, and insisted on being written. I also made a couple …
Media Accountability
For those who like to rant about the Korean media and its promulgation of bogus urban myths and the like, US papers (and presumably Canadian ones) are not above reproach. (PDF there, just warning you.) It seems that suicide rates actually don’t go up in the US around the holidays: Newspapers are close to putting to rest the myth that the holidays increase the risk of suicide. A new study shows a dramatic drop in articles that – despite having no basis in fact – attribute the arrival of the holiday season with an uptick in suicides. An analysis of …
Um…?
I happened to googling for something at the Korea Herald and look what I found! I don’t know if this is new, and frankly, it doesn’t scare me — I use Linux, and have never encountered a virus for my platform. But, um, you know, someone at the Herald should probably look into this.
Making Groups Work
Over the last week, my students have been making a series of unusual presentations. In my bid to: make conversation classes more interesting, and get students to think about conventional problems in unconventional ways, … my second-most-recent homework assignment for them was to consider major potential problems like a possible influenze pandemic; global warming; peak oil; and the ecological collapse of certain areas of the world. However, getting people to just talk about these problems rarely does any good. Young people are aware of them, are used to their existence, and seem less than appropriately concerned about them. So having …
Train Sabotage in France
Sometimes it seems like folks such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling might be right in having turned to non-SF in recent years, since, after all, the world is just as surprising as cyberpunk was. Like, for example, with this orchestrated sabotage on the French railway system reported by BBC news: France’s high-speed TGV rail network has been damaged by a “concerted campaign of sabotage”, the SNCF state-owned rail operator has said. It said acts of sabotage overnight, including fires, caused huge delays to TGV services already hit by a long transport union strike over reforms. What’s unsaid is that …
On Ze Plate
… ‘zere is too much! I’m a little behind on grading, but not as much as I thought I would be a week ago. I have an unknown amount of textbook-editing left to go, but at least three full books I’ll need to proofread (possibly more than once for one of them) in the next few weeks. The proofing/editing requests are in the standard Korean mode: last minute, high-volume, jaw-droppingly short deadlines. I am unlikely to meet any more of those shockingly unrealistic deadlines: I’ve decided my health is more important than someone else’s panic. Chest pains are not a …
Back to Life…
Up for air again. I haven’t posted much of substance lately, and I’m not (really) about to start now. The editing gig I took on has hit that chunk on the exponential curve of increasing involvement where time for sleep begins to erode, where I stop even the minimal amount of tidying I try to remember to do, where I stop cooking or eating properly. This is not nice territory, but the gig is almost done, and the worst of it, I hope, is past. More time for other things, then: too-long-deferred grading, working on drafts, edits, submissions, my column, …