Month: May 2012

Tania: Memories of a Lost World by Tania Alexander (And Thoughts of My Father the Story-Teller)

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This is only the second biography of Moura Budberg that I have read — the first was Nina Berberova’s biography, which I picked up in Seattle in 2006 and, as it goes with me, took until 2010 for me to read. (In that respect, I’m doing much better with Tania Alexander’s memoir Tania: Memories of a Lost World — I received it back in March, amid a shipment of Pound-related books, and have read it only a couple of months later.) I don’t have a lot to say about the book, but I think as a memoirs go it was well-written, thoughtful, …

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Childish Employers

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Just to be up-front, I’m not talking about my own current employer in this post. I’m talking about the experiences of those around me, including Miss Jiwaku but also a number of other people I’ve known in Korea over the years. One of the things I will never understand — and this is a cultural difference — is the poor respect that so many Korean employers have for their employees’, and the incredible amounts of respect they seem to think they have the right to demand from them. Take the process of quitting a part-time job. As far as I …

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Note to Brewer Self: CaCl in the Mash/Boil, and a Student Brew

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So I’ve sampled some of the Mild ale I made for Miss Jiwaku, and my impression is that it’s not bad, but could use more… more of the maltiness, which is supposed to define the character of the beer. I was looking up some mash chemistry info to reply to a query by another homebrewer and realized that I hadn’t done any water treatment in making my Mild, but that adding Calcium Carbonate (CaCl) could help emphasize the maltiness of the brew. I shall have to remember that next time. My use of Windsor yeast certainly helped (the wort stopped …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto XVII — Toward “A Draft of Cantos 17-27”

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This entry is part 17 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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In Times of Upheaval

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Interesting details gleaned from Tania: Memories of a Lost World by Tania Alexander (daughter of the infamous Moura Budberg, about whom I have posted before, many times, all the way back to 2006, as part of a story I am once again about to begin revising, after finishing a draft in 2010): during World War I, what was Russian high society doing? There were no official parties or embassy balls for the duration of the war, but right up to the  October 1917 Revolution it was possible to maintain the outward appearances of social life, and restaurants and gypsy taverns …

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