The first 120 or so pages of Shutting Out the Sun (2006) are fascinating, and indeed, Zielenziger’s portrayal of a number of Japanese hikikomori (shut-ins), their families, and those working the help bring them back out into the public world, manages to be very thoughtful and compassionate, and even, at times, moving. Later chapters are less powerful, in my opinion, in part because of the way Zielenziger presents the social problems he chooses to tackle. Many, such as the falling birth rate, the lingering (relative) conservativism among men, the precipitously-declined birth rate, and the national obsession with conspicuous consumption of brand …
Month: January 2012
Pardon the Mess…
Pardon the mess, all: some of the links around here are not going to work so well for the next few days, until I finish tidying up my template stuff around here. The good news is, I love my new template (courtesy of PressWork) and I think it makes my blog much more readable and professional-looking. (And it’s much easier to tinker with settings as well, thanks to the theme’s frontend.) I’ve wanted to change my template for a while now, not only to get rid of pages that aren’t useful, but also so I could reorganize categories and also …
The Dangers of Expat Writing: Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb

While many expatriates have been great writers, in my experience, expatriates sometimes don’t do such a great job writing about the expatriate experience — with Graham Greene being a notable exception. They inevitably tend towards the same kind of thing that one sees in the expatriate blogosphere — the clever theorizing, the ranting, the mockery and the essentializing. Indeed, I have not read a single (published) book of fiction or autobiography by an expat, describing his or her life here in Korea, that didn’t have these kinds of problems… the urge seems to irresistible for most. (Of course, I haven’t …
Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein, and a Question About the Depiction and Significance of Racism in Characterization

T.E.D. Klein is one of those writers whose disappearance baffles many lovers of weird fiction. After his celebrated novel The Ceremonies (which I have not yet read) and his collection of novellas titled Dark Gods, he seemed to go mostly off the radar, and to stay there (unless one was reading the right magazines, I suppose)… until Subterranean put out a collection of his short fiction, titled, Reassuring Tales, about six years ago. (That was a limited edition and I never see it online for less than $200, so I suppose I won’t be reading it till I get somewhere …
Pale Brewday: Wonmisan Belgian Pale/ESB
I’ve felt like getting back into Belgian brewing, but at the moment I have a nice cake of Safale S-04 (the English Ale yeast) in the bottom of a carboy, and I’d like to pitch onto it, so I figured today would be a great day to do a double batch, split right down the middle, with half going onto Belgian yeast and half going onto English.