Month: May 2010

Coming Up: Beer Festival, June 12th

gordsellar4 Comments

So Rob at homebrewkorea.com has organized a homebrewing SMaSH-off festival. If you’re not a homebrewer, you likely have no idea what SMaSH means, but it’s simple: Single Malt and Single Hop It’s a special kind of challenge that homebrewers take upon themselves, to keep things simple, and focus on their brewing techniques, instead of mucking about adding extra grains or other stuff for effects. Anyway, there are two parts to the event: the first half is for the brewers, who will sample one anothers’ beer and and talk shop.That’s already booked solid, but for most readers, unless you’re a homebrewer …

Continue Reading

Names That Ain’t Workin’

gordsellar12 Comments

When I first arrived in Korea and ran across one of those names (I think it was Beom Seok (read: Bum Suck) and mentioned it to other teachers, I was horrified by the story I heard of some kid in a hakwon class whose teacher giggled at his name, which indeed was something that sounded like “Bum Suck”; push came to shove and finally, when the parents found out that the name brought, to English speakers, images of someone sucking on a bum, they changed their kid’s name. I mean, talk about trauma. This isn’t an urban legend, as far …

Continue Reading

The Uses of Doubt

gordsellar2 Comments

I have been thinking about a story I drafted a while back — maybe a year ago, maybe 18 months ago, I can’t remember — and to which I haven’t yet gotten a chance to return, though I may soon. In any case, it’s a fantasy tale of two cultures — a low-tech patriarchal culture being overrun by a high-magic matriarchal culture. It was, in fact, inspired by what a Taiwanese student in one of my classes in 2008 wrote about the Taiwanese colonial experience — the way Taiwan in general experienced Japanese occupation, but also how the Chinese mainland …

Continue Reading

The Bodhisattvas

gordsellar0 Comments

“The Bodhisattvas” appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Subterranean, guest edited by Johnathan Strahan for Spring 2010. (A Korean translation, by Kim Chang-gyu, titled “보살들,” appeared slightly earlier in the <백만 관년의 고독 > One Million Light-Years of Solitude) SOAO Workshop anthology from Omelas, December 2009.) This story was influenced by my attendance of two astronomy-focused workshops for creative writers (and other creators): The SOAO Workshop at Sobaek Mountain (South Korea) hosted by the Korea Astronomical and Space Science Institute in February 2009, and the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop in July 2009. The original version of this story formed part of …

Continue Reading

English Made Difficult…

gordsellar4 Comments

Last week, I happened to stop by the little used book shop area at my local train station and picked up some funny little books because, when I opened one, it was so mindblowingly awful and hilarious and sad all at the same time. The books are all by one author: a guy named Robert Bahk (1923-1991), about whom I’ve found very little online—though, you know, I haven’t searched too hard. His bio says that he did some school in the USA, and attended some Ivy League school—attended, yes, but no mention of graduation was made in the bio I …

Continue Reading