UPDATE (17 December 2013): Although I am no longer living in Korea, I occasionally get updates on the situation. Apparently for expats in Korea can arrange for a month worth of coverage through AIG/Chartris, though apparently another moronic, restrictive change recently occurred to the laws governing travel insurance policies sold in Korea, and they only can offer a month of coverage to expats. If you still want to buy through AIG/Chartris, a commenter who sent me an email recommends contacting 이인용. Be warned, you will likely be required to claim that your trip is for business, rather than pleasure, to be …
Month: July 2011
The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban
Sometimes I think that we’re forgetting a certain kind of creativity in the hothouse world of genre fiction — a sense of freedom, actually, is what I mean. Yes, among us number the people who write the really weird stuff — audacious time travel narratives that turn all the tropes on their ear inteligently; stories of terror rooted in, well, something weird out the window — and a harrowing tale that one is (I’m thinking of Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber); stories imagining how, yeah, we are flushing the planet down the tubes, and what might happen to us …
Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin
Of late, I’ve been on a sort of kick where I want to read short books — books of fewer than 300 pages, in general, often even shorter. As I’ve been on this kick, I’ve run into pairs of writings that explore the same basic terrain at different lengths. I mentioned this when I reviewed Patricia Anthony’s Happy Policeman and I’m noting it again as I review this book by Emma Larkin, though in this case the comparable text is this short article from Time, published in 2002 (a few years before Larkin’s book). In this case, I have to say, …
Happy Policeman by Patricia Anthony
Well, a few days ago I finished tearing through Patricia Anthony’s Happy Policeman. I wanted to post a review then, but the Internet was pretty much ruined on campus and didn’t start up again till yesterday. Reflecting on my feelings about the book, I am left once again wondering why she is one of those authors I feel like we don’t remember in SF, and I think this fact in itself indicates something problematic in SF circles. Authors who have impressed me less (or at least less consistently — Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad, among others) are far better-remembered, and …
First Non-Contact?
I don’t know if this is the first case of attempted first contact, but it might well be: In 1913, David Todd made a flamboyant and well-publicized attempt to establish radio contact with Martians. “Assuming that there is life on Mars,” he told the New York Times, echoing the views of his old friend and patron Percival Lowell, “the evolution of intelligence through the cycle of a million years must be advanced beyond the best efforts of our puny intellects…. Possibly they carry on ordinary conversations at all distances on their planet, where to them miles are as inches. If …
The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan by Christopher Benfey
This book should be required reading for all who want to talk about Korea’s constant, deep-seated anxiety regarding the lack of a place in the Western imagination held by South Korea, and many Koreans’ jealousy of the place that Japan and China have in the Western mind, the foolish attempts to “brand” Korea and market the country onto the imaginative map of Westerners, and so on. What Benfey’s book shows is that Tokyo and Kyoto were not built in a day, and certainly not just in the 20th century. We might remember history as if Americans got interested in Japan …
Franco-Belgian Brewday: Wonmisan Raison (Rye Saison), and What I May Have Learned from Blending
Another day, another brewday. This one has a backstory, though. A while back, I tried to make a RyePA, which if you don’t know the substyle is simply an IPA — often an American IPA, as far as I can tell — that has a significant amount of rye malt in the grist. I was mashing in my brewpot/MLT setup, and the sparge got stuck, and it was hell… but it tasted pretty good nonetheless. Later, when I was kegging a batch of Saison, I realized I had an extra gallon of the stuff, but nowhere to put it. Meanwhile, …
“Contemporary Music” for Traditional Korean Instruments
I don’t know how much of this is going on in Seoul, but I was pleased to run across a channel on Youtube featuring a bunch of it. Now, when I say “contemporary music” I don’t mean people playing Beatles songs on traditional instruments. I especially don’t mean “fusion” music where people on traditional Korean instruments try to play in a jazz-fusion or rock-fusion setting, something I think rarely works. (Though I have heard tracks by a few indie bands that made great use of some instruments — haegeum in one song by 3rd Line Butterfly, and samul nori in …
Parti-Gyle Brewday: Wonmisan Oldboy & Wonmisan Fenian [Cookiejar] Raid
Yesterday was a big day for brewing stuff. Yesterday was the day to transfer Miss Jiwaku’s Old Ale to a keg to bulk age on cherries. That suggested that the optimal way to do it would be to rack the Old Ale onto however many Washington cherries I had on hand (which turned out to be the better part of 3 kilograms). I was faced with the question of what to do with the yeast cake from her Old Ale. While I realize that the Brett B. might have reproduced more, so that the blend is no longer at the …
Editing…
This afternoon, I had to make a trip to the department office to hand in some paperwork, so I decided to email myself the manuscripts for a bunch of short stories that I’ve either submitted for critique, or else want to submit for crits, and which I want to revise this summer, alongside the novel-drafting I’m doing. I figure, the university is giving me “credit” (as achievements, but not as publications) for story publications, so I ought to be able to print stories at the department office for the purposes of revision and editing. One reason I printed the stories …