Month: July 2011

The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan by Christopher Benfey

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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 …

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Franco-Belgian Brewday: Wonmisan Raison (Rye Saison), and What I May Have Learned from Blending

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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, …

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“Contemporary Music” for Traditional Korean Instruments

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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 …

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Parti-Gyle Brewday: Wonmisan Oldboy & Wonmisan Fenian [Cookiejar] Raid

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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 …

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Editing…

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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 …

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