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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