Month: May 2012

What Happens in Post Production…

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… stays in the film… for-ever. Which is troublesome when what happens in editing and post-production is what happened to Snow White and the Huntsman. Which must haunt actors, editors, camera operators, and everyone else subject to the pressure of studios and of directors. (I don’t know who’s to blame in this case: director Rupert Sanders I’ve never heard of before, so it may not be his fault — or it just may — but someone really screwed up the film.) Not that I had very high expectations for the film in the first place (Chris Hemsworth has not yet really …

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Poundmania: On Process and Plans

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This entry is part 19 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

So, I calculated the other day that if I spent about 25 days in July and August on The Cantos, I could finish reading the whole thing before Miss Jiwaku go on our summer holidays. Of course, that’s crazy, but it’s not beyond me. If I were to do it, I would in theory be doing a study-session and post every second day, though in reality, my Pound posts so far have been the product of a couple of days’ work (well, a few hours each day for a few days); Now, those of you with more math skillz than …

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“Unevenly Distributed: The Mudang’s Dance” in Arc 1.02

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UPDATE (31 May 2012): There’s a preview for my piece available here, for those who would like a sneak peek. ORIGINAL POST: The new SF/Science magazine Arc, put out by the makers of New Scientist, has just published its second issue, Arc 1.02, with the theme of “Post Human Conditions.” Among the contents is an article by yours truly, included as an installment of the magazine’s “Unevenly Distributed” column. My piece, titled “The Mudang’s Dance,” is about South Korea’s particular relationship with futurity, memory, modernity, and change — assessed in the light of William Gibson’s famous comment “The future is already here, …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto XVIII & XIX

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This entry is part 18 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one by one (so far — I may deal with a few at a time on occasion). These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind — how to write Ezra Pound as a figure in a novel in which modernist artists, poets, and musicians secretly waged an occult war in the earlier half of the 20th century. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend …

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Seoul SF&F Library — Relocated!

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This entry is part 54 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

So, recently, the Seoul SF & Fantasy Library relocated to Mapo-gu. The new location is near Hong-Ik Dae University, and is a wonderful space: large, bright, and very versatile, as well as above-ground — it is on the third floor of the building in which it is located. I was meaning to take some photos of the wonderful place, but it slipped my mind before I left, so that will have to await an update for this post. I attended a reception there, where many of Seoul’s SF fans, authors, and other personalities were in attendance, and we celebrated the …

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