Well, Fukuoka here I come. I guess my SF-writer credentials maybe came in handy this time, for one of my proposed papers — “Another Undiscovered Country: Understanding the Particularities of Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in South Korea Through The Examination of 21st Century Korean SF Cinema” — got accepted for the 4th World Congress of Korean Studies (the site seems not to work in Firefox/Linux… I suspect you need Internet Explorer & Windows to load it, as I was able to get at it on my dual boot) which is happening late this September in Fukuoka, …
Month: May 2008
“Lester Young…” Reviewed @ The Fix
What a lovely review of my story Val Grimm has posted at The Fix as part of a review of the July ’08 Asimov’s SF: Think about the first time you discovered science fiction you enjoyed; remember the wonder and joy you felt, the sort of sensation that makes you twelve years old again. Sellar conjures up that Ray Bradbury-esque golden-hour bliss with a piece which has a traditional feel but glimmers with freshness, originality, and craft…sort of like a good rendition of a jazz standard. There’s more, and you can read it all here. (I’m looking forward to when …
Big Surprises and Random News
For Inner Circle Members, only! So, let’s see: One of our department assistants suddenly quit without notifying any members of our department, yesterday afternoon at 4pm. Though I was one of the people who defended her and helped keep her in her position this semester, she decided to stick me with the crappiest class assignment possible — Monday and Friday night, as late as possible. That’s been fixed, as there was no way in hell, but it’s all a mystery. (She also stuck someone in the other English department in an unfeasible course assignment, too.) That someone else is a …
Seuma’il, Sshipal Balgaengi! (Smile, F*cking Commie!)
Over the last few years I’ve been trying to understand why so many Koreans seem to support the idea that Korea needs top-down censorship and top-down elimination of anonymity online. They often cite the abhorrent behaviour of “Korean netizens” as evidence, with the Dog Poop Girl cited as a minor example and the suicides of many pop stars who were criticized online as major evidence of the cruelty and need for firmer controls online. (Michael has a post up that pretty much says the same thing I’ve been saying since I first encountered this weird rationalization: that a pop star …
Fairness, Competition, and Roll Call (Plus Festivals and Sports Days)
Only one of the people who was supposed to lead a discussion in my morning Listening & Speaking class was there when I arrived to start class. (And I was a minute late myself!) I asked, “Are we having discussions today? Who is leading today?” And nobody said a word, so I went ahead and had someone take attendance, and then went off on a discussion tangent, about taking attendance in class. Earlier this semester, one of my foreign students wrote an essay about the abolition of roll call in University classes. Regardless of the essay’s strengths and weaknesses, some …