Earlier today, I posted some story notes about “The Bernoulli War,” my most recent publication (in the current Asimov’s SF). If you’re interested in reading more about the story, including: why spambots ate the story for half a year, the original character naming scheme, the book that inspired it, a bit about the thought process and earlier attempted stories that got mulched into the draft, … and more… well, you can read more about it here.
“The Bernoulli War” appeared in the August 2012 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It received an Honorable mention in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois, and was reprinted in Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013 Edition. A funny thing happened on the way to the publisher… No, really. This story was all but accepted in mid-2011, but there was some issue with the way the characters were named. Originally, I used strings of characters from various writing systems: Khmer, Chinese, Hangeul, Greek, Roman, Sanskrit, and so on. For example, the iterations …
This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, a few at a time. 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. Or maybe about artists, musicians, and poets waging a secret, occult war in some other world vaguely like ours, in a time period …
(Note: This week’s first (and only on-time) posting for the series on Pound’s The Cantos is a review of an academic text I completed a few weeks ago. Since I will have completed my discussion of A Draft of Cantos 17-27 this week, I figured I might as take the opportunity to post this already-written-up post while I’m still mired in final exam stuff. (If I was less busy, I’d have posted this after Canto XXX. But it’s the week after exams, and I’m up to my neck in grading, so…) (By the way I’ll be posting my reading of Canto …
Behind the curtain, I’ve been drafting a ton of blog posts in spare minutes when I’ve been stuck in my office. I’m not happy with any of them, but I’ve drafted a bunch. I’m finding it harder and harder to feel like I want to make pronouncements on anything. When I talk about Korea, I get things wrong often enough that I’m reticent to bother — especially when not getting things wrong takes so much damned research. When I write about books and authors — aside from Ezra Pound — I find myself much more, um, ambivalent. I’m at a point …