I’m currently at the observatory on Mt. Sobaek with a bunch of Korean SF writers/publishers/translators and astronomers, for the three-day 2009 SOAO workshop. (2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, by the way.) This is the Korean equivalent of the Launch Pad workshop held in the US yearly, and similarly brings together scientists and SF creators. I’ll have more about this later, including tons of pictures and some video, but for now all I’ll say is that I’m catching just enough of the discussions to kick myself (hard) for not only not having studied Korean much in the last few …
Month: February 2009
Swiss Cheese News and the Un-Mediagenic Reportage Barrier
Boing Boing has updated — with very little new information — about the case of Dymond Milburn in Galveston, Texas. “Hey, look, a little black girl in her yard! She must be one of those hookers we’re looking for!” “But the hookers we’re looking for are white. And she’s in her yard, with her doggie, fiddling with the circuit breaker.” “SO?!?!? She’s totally a whore. I mean, look at how she’s dressed. What, are you scared? There’s four of us and one of her, bro. Come on, let’s go enforce the law.” [Car door slams.] “Hey, little black hooker girl. …
Hiking Boots?
I’ll be going to a mountain on Wednesday, as part of a very interesting workshop involving Korean SF writers and astronomers — oh, yes, a listening comprehension test three days long, which I’m already failing, but more about that afterwards — and I’ve been told it would be a good idea to have some hiking boots. I’ll be in Seoul tomorrow, and would be able to pick some up, except I have no idea where such things could be gotten — that is, winter boots, in “large size” (ie. 300, 305, 310, or bigger, depending on the brand). Apparently the …
Gnome!
Usually you’d expect any mention of Gnome here to be related to the version of Ubuntu Linux I use, but this is a Gnome of a different color. Today an enthusiast of the Gnome Press — the company that published a ton of formative SF, like Asimov’s most famous books — discovered my blog and linked me from his own, which is called The Great Gnome Press Science Fiction Odyssey. He’s got a pretty interesting blog there with personal stuff and stuff about the Gnome Press books that he collects. Yet another SF fan in Korea bubbles up out of …
Sh*tbag Attacks Constitution (Again)
So, Kenneth Starr is once again doing his bit to hold a rifle to the groin of American democracy. Yeah, the same guy who wasted millions trying to find out whether President Clinton did the same sorts of things we all know Republican Presidents have done in the past, because the real scandal he was investigating turned out to be politically useless… Well, now he’s now out to delete all those same-sex marriages that happened in California before vast numbers of inmates members of the Church of Mormon decided it didn’t believe in separation of Church and State, and that …
Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future
The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has long used that line to describe their music: “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future” and their membership has, over the years, included people who I’d say deserve that appelation: music I hope is remembered, is fundamental to the interesting things that come in the future of innovative, intelligent music. But for the latter half of the phrase, “ancient to the future,” it’s always brought to mind Steve Coleman’s music. Coleman is a badass alto saxophonist, as you can see in this clip: … and with his various groups over the …
Locus Recommended Reading List, Asimov’s Interzone Readers’ Awards Poll
UPDATED and republished: if you’ve seen this post before, skip to the last paragraph! Just now my friend Maura pointed out that the wonderful folks at Locus were kind enough to include two of my stories from last year on the Locus Recommended Reading List for fiction from 2008: the novelette, “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues” (from Asimov’s SF, July ’08) and the novella, “Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang” (from Tesseracts Twelve). To see my name listed among so many I respect, and my stories among others that just blew me away this year, is a tremendous …
Cai Live!
As of today, my story, “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands,” is now live at Apex Magazine. Check out the contents for the whole February 2009 issue here: there’s some great stuff, including SF Murphy’s “Tearing Down Tuesday” (which I saw in Interzone a while back, and really enjoyed at the time), a couple of things by Lavie Tidhar (this guy is everywhere!), and I got a particularly good kick out of a little nonfiction (I think) piece by Alethea Kontis titled “Monster in the Closet.” (Oh, the flashbacks from childhood!) In addition, Apex is launching a subscription PDF version …
Clean Reinstalls? What?
Today I went to the Woori Bank to get my 공인 인중서, which is, basically, a little electronic certificate that I need to have in order to file my taxes. (Which I can only do on paper now: the electronic tax filing through my workplace closed a week ago, and the office assistants either didn’t know, or assumed that foreigners couldn’t do it, or forgot to tell me when it was announced. After a little discussion in which I mentioned I’d done it before (with a different office assistant who is now gone), and it’s much easier with a 공인 …
Back to the Nose to the Grindstone
I’m finally back on the wagon in terms of writing: I put in 1000 words on “Moe Yuki Ona,” my J-fetishizing-expat-in-Japan horror story, and I spend an couple of hours slowly working my way through “A Killing in Burma,” a project I left by the wayside a while back to focus on other things, but which I want to get out of the way before I start anything new. If you search the latter title in my blog, you’ll see babblings about it going quite far back, and since I like the vaguely cartoon-like quality of the characters and story, …