Month: February 2012

Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto I

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This entry is part 2 of 59 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. Where to begin? I could go back and read Personae …

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Tinker Tailor / Nameless Gangster

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Miss Jiwaku and I have lately seen two movies worth the price of admission: one that is #1 in Korea (범죄와의 전쟁 / Nameless Gangster — yeah, the English title is really unfortunate), and one that I’m pretty sure won’t be playing here for long: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I won’t say much about the latter beyond the observation that I learned something watching it: there’s no point in trying to watch an actually good, actually challenging movie in a CGV cinema. While I’ve gotten used to the audiences at anyplace except Cinematheque behaving like idiots, I hadn’t yet tried …

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Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff

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Ben Ratliff — a jazz critic for The New York Times, among other things — is like Trane in that he comes straight out with what he’s up to, though it might not be right away that you realize it. The title Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, if you look at it carefully, tells you what this book is really about, and it’s not just John Coltrane — it’s the story of the sound (or rather, the sounds) that burst into one’s mind when Trane’s name is mentioned: how Coltrane developed that sound from the beginning, how it evolved …

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A Particular American Fervency? (How It Might Connect to SF?)

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I just ran across a really interesting quote on American culture, which was embedded in a discussion of jazz, but seems to apply quite well to American SF as well. Apparently, from 1961 to 1965, a British literary critic named A. Alvarez ran a show on BBC radio where writers talked about the intellectual scene in the United States. Alvarez collected the interviews  in a book, published by Penguin in 1965, under the same title as the radio program: Under Pressure. One of the Americans interviewed was Robert Lowell, and he’s what he had to say about it: We have some …

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David Amram on John Coltrane and Albert Einstein

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Not long ago, I mentioned John Coltrane’s youthful interest in SF and pulp zines. But he was apparently also quite interested in science itself, something I’d suspected but don’t remember seeing confirmed as clearly as in this anecdote from David Amram, a French horn-playing jazz man who knew Trane in New York in the 1950s, and ran into him just outside a club, where Amram had just finished playing a set with Charlie Mingus. Coltrane was eating  a slice of pie, and: [Trane] said, “How are you?” I [Amram] said, “Everything’s fine.” And then he said to me, “What do …

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“Empty of Words, The Page” Coming in Black Static 27!

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… that is, if you’re a reader of the fine UK magazine Black Static. (And if you’re not–and you like dark fiction–then you should be.) My tale “Empty of Words, The Page” is appearing in issue #27 of that fine periodical, with lovely art and all. Here’s the snippet excerpted at the magazine’s webpage: Smoke and burnt paper and scorched glue: John Whitney stank of all of them, of those hideous pseudo-murders, as he slid down on his haunches until his backside thumped against the chilly floor of the Gare Central. His shivering worsened as a frigid gust from outdoors slapped …

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Empty of Words, The Page

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“Empty of Words, The Page” appeared in Black Static 27, the February/March 2012 issue. I’ve been a fan of the magazine almost since its beginnings (I missed a few issues at the start), and I am proud that Andy Cox gave the tale a home there! One of those things that’s very hard to get a handle on in writing — much more, I think, than in music — is the effective development of a unique, highly personal voice. Some of my writer friends somehow quite naturally seem to have done it (or maybe they just make it look natural), …

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Fair Coverage: Rude Canadians in Korea

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A funny memory hit me today, in the light of the comments to my post yesterday. I mentioned how there are rude people everywhere, but I feel I must give fair coverage to some Canadians I’ve known who were living as expats in Korea. It’s a memory from my first year in Korea. Now, that first year, I experienced a lot of strange, bizarre crap. Not all of it was from Koreans; in fact, most of the weirdness was from expats teaching in Iksan. One of the more interesting was seeing how young men who left Canada for Korea suddenly, …

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What Happens When You Ask Assholes to Be Polite (In Yeokgok, At Least), And How to Get Better at Doing It

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I swore to myself that I wouldn’t write bitching rants about Korea anymore, since they do nobody any good. So… I’m not. You might think I am, below, but stick with me: it comes around. Miss Jiwaku and I had a pretty nice day out today… well, mostly. (We saw the only decent film playing in a 5km area of our home, which was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and, well, I have to say: there’s no point in watching a good film — something without a techno music soundtrack, or a plotline even a monkey could follow — in a …

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Ezra Poundings – The Reboot

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This entry is part 1 of 59 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Years ago — seven years ago this fall — I started a study group, with whom I started working my way through Ezra Pound’s classic poem, The Cantos. When I say “classic poem” it probably makes you think of a single page of sparse text, which is understandable if you haven’t read the Cantos. So think more like a late James Joyce novel, but in poetical form. Think about a bunch of different languages, including not only various forms of English, but also old Occitan, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese ideograms. Think references to obscure historical and literary …

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