The Music of Jo Hyeja: An Update (AKA My Work Begins)

This entry is part 7 of 15 in the series Making "The Music of Jo Hyeja"

We now have a deadline for getting the music and foley, as well as the final editing, finished for The Music of Jo Hyeja, and that is the 9th of March. This became our deadline because that’s when we will be taking the final cut of the film to get the audio postprocessing done. (By some kind of organization in Seoul that supports independent filmmakers by dong this kind of work for them, either inexpensively or free of charge — to the filmmaker, at least.) This means I have a ton of stuff to do, especially because we also learned, from …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto II

This entry is part 4 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. My readings, designed to help me write a novel featuring Pound as an occult adventurer (more on that here), will stray from the merely academic to the unusual and highly fanciful, so take all this with a grain of salt! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Today, I’m continuing with the Cantos, and specifically addressing Canto …

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Stick Out Your Tongue by Ma Jian

When I was walking down a quiet road in Rome about a year ago, searching for a present for Miss Jiwaku, I stumbled upon a little English bookstore, which according to the bookmark I got there was called “The Almost Corner Bookshop,” at 45 Via del Moro, Trastevere. I remember the shop a little, and it put me in mind of a little English bookshop I visited in Thailand, somewhere near Khao San Road, before I learned to avoid that district. Both of those shops were unusual in that they seemed to have a really literary clientele, well, assuming the …

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“The Journey to the East” by Herman Hesse

For those who noticed the quotation marks in the title, rather than italicization, yes, this is a novella, not a novel, though it is published in book form. The version of the “The Journey to the East” I read is the translation by Hilda Rosner, and this is a little book I picked up at The Strand in New York when I visited several years ago. Having a hankering for shorter books these days, I dove into it this afternoon. I discovered that it is a far different book from what I expected. It is advertised, in the back cover …

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Korean Brewday: Black Mak — My First Makkeoli

I’m hosting a party this Monday night for some people I know to see our friend Chris off, as he leaves Korea for India, and then parts unknown, a day or two later. Chris is gluten-intolerant, so I figured it might be nice to finally try make some makkeoli for him… I’d been planning on doing so for a long time, but never gotten around to it, so I thought I should bloody well get it done.

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