Debito Arudou’s “Micro-Aggressions”: What Really Drives the Highly Sensitive Expat Crazy

UPDATE: I’ve been thinking about this post, and I think the HSP concept may be just as flaky as the notion of “microaggressions” (at least as Debito Arudou presents it); it seems to me there’s a simpler explanation possible, which is this: many, many of the people whom I’ve known in Korea who were constantly dogged by the drive to understand why certain kinds of behaviour were so common here, were humanities majors. Humanities majors, when they actually are properly trained, tend to be analysis machines, and just as nature only punishes the most extreme of extravangances in phenotype (the Irish …

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미래경 (Futuroscope) #3 Has Arrived

This entry is part 53 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

It’s been one of those weeks, seriously it has — and today, during my office hours, I was flooded with visitors (which is to be expected, as it’s Teacher’s Day today). In any case, one of the visitors came by to drop off a package that had been accidentally delivered to the wrong office. In it was my contributor’s copy of the Korean “mook” (magazine-book) fanzine 미래경 (Futuroscope) #3 (Spring 2012), which contains my article “Outside Looking In” (translated to Korean by Insu Hong). (For those interested, I’ll see if I can post a copy of the piece in English sometime …

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“Fix” Published, and Launching “Stuff To Read”

Well, only subscribers will see it for now, but I just got my contributors’ copies for the July 2012 issue of Asimov’s SF, which contains my short poem “Fix” (along with work by a number of other wonderful writers, including Robert Reed and Michael Blumlein, the latter an author I’ve read and admired since I first started reading speculative fiction: The Brains of Rats is still on my shelf, here in Korea!) Even better, This is the first of two appearances I’ll be making in Asimov’s this year, with my short story “The Bernoulli War” coming in the following issue …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto XVI — Ending “A Draft of XVI Cantos”

This entry is part 16 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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Argh Argh Argh

Well, a subpage of this site that I wanted to launch soon is going to have to wait. I’m having trouble with WordPress coding. I’m probably just too distracted at the moment, but I kind of wish I could just drag-and-drop certain template patterns onto a widget-like layout for this particular template I’m using on the subpage. Ah well, maybe in the summer I’ll have time to actually figure out the horrors of the code — at the moment, I have too much else going on, and I’ve already burned a half an hour trying to get it to work!

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