PiFan 2008

I like the newish Listal Widget that lets you flow-scroll through the images in a list. This is an (incomplete) list of the films I saw at the Bucheon International Fantastic (PiFan) Film Festival 2008. (I’ll post tomorrow, at greater length, about the  Korean Film Archive (KOFA) 괴수 대백과 (Giant Monster Movie Omnibus) retrospective I caught part of earlier this week.) View my Listal profile Get this widget at Listal I’m not going to stand a hope in hell of reviewing every one of them in depth, so I’m going to do a hit-and-run review: Ten words or less for …

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A Natural Part of a Balanced Page of Feedback

I just finished writing up the feedback on an essay that my class will be critiquing today. The title of the essay is “The Real Meaning of Marriage,” and it’s a good example of the wall I’ve been banging into lately in my work. There are standard issues that are pretty much part of the job, of course: the sinking feeling when one is confronted by sentences that were written by someone who obviously doesn’t read (in English, at least) on a regular basis, the apparent lack of proofreading, the dictionary-itis. Dictionary-itis, by the way, is a propensity some students …

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Conference Change

Ack. I knew Dokdo would ruin something for me. I just didn’t think the conference I was supposed to attend in Fukuoka would be relocated to Seoul over the territorial dispute. My first, over-the-top reaction was to resentfully sneer and mutter darkly about how self-isolation is the perfect solution to every dispute, but Lime ‘s take on it was that it’s simply pre-emptive damage control, for, as she put it, some small number of netizens are sure to raise a stink if they hear that a Korean Studies conference is held in Japan during the current relapse of “Dokdo crisis”-itis. …

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XY

By the way, I forgot to mention this when it went up, but my column over at the Canadian women’s magazine Cahoots is different in nature than it used to be. In the old days, I wrote about blogging women, basically reviewing interesting blogs by women with quotes and praise and so on. However, I ran out of steam on that — reviewing blogs is just not interesting work, I think, and I prefer to just splat praise on my own site when I find a good one — so I talked it over with the editor and, inspired by …

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Introducing… er, PuppySchubert나방BaudelaireRimbaud… Er, We’re Not Sure Yet

It’s been a very busy week, and I’ll have a few announcements to hurl out soon, on the far end of some rewriting I need to get done. But for the moment, I’m going to simply post something personal. I must preface this by noting that I’m really more of a dog person. Well, now, wait, that’s only sort of. When I first moved out from my folks’ place, I was shocked to find that I could breathe. Easily. Like, I didn’t feel like I was in the middle of some kind of weird asphyxiation torture all the time. I …

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Quick Note

Thanks to, er, Noah Body mentioning a link in the comments to this post, I was made aware of a whole festival of Korean monster movies that’s playng at the Cinematheque. (I missed some I’d have liked to see — though I may get another chance, at some point… we’ll see — but anyway, still getting to see a bunch.) I’ll be there Tuesday, the closing day, for all three films. Just in case anyone else feelings like watching The Host, Bulgasari, and some other Korean film I’ve never heard of before. By the way, I wasn’t the only person …

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A Late Bow of the Head

Damn, I fall behind on blogs and the rest of the world, and then this happens. I found out because weeks ago Ellen Datlow posted about Thomas Disch’s passing, and a particularly saddening way of going. Of course, I never met him. In fact, I’d only read a few of Disch’s books — 334 being the only novel, partly because it depressed me so, in an already-depressing time, but I also very much enjoyed his SF history The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of quite recently (here’s what I had to say about it) and, back in grad school, his …

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Zombie Scholarship

Not the we-give-you-money-because-you’re-the-most-deserving-zombie kind, but rather the scholarly-work-in-the-subject kind. There’s a call for essays on scholarly perspectives on the zombie for an anthology. I’m thinking I know a few people who might be interested. (Yeah, Ben, I thinking of you, even if you’re not a litcrit guy, as it’s interdisciplinary and all that. Though “paraconsistent logic +  zombies” might be a harder fit for a scholarly essay than for a short story, one of the editors is a philosophy prof!) More details in the extended post.

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Ape @ KOFA this Monday…

I’m sure I’m the only person interested, but the Korean Film Archive is showing some old SF movies this month. That is, this weekend and Monday. My Friday is already spoken for, and I have a DVD of Yonggary here, but I’ve never seen Ape (1976) and I’ve heard it’s deliciously awful, and since I’m researching Korean SF at the moment, — and it is apparently some kind of a Korean-American co-production — I am definitely going to see it. It’s playing at 2pm this Monday at the KOFA theater. I’m sure I’m the only one deranged enough to be …

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