The Wow! Moment and Teachers’ Responsibility

Creative Writing teachers sometimes — not very often, but sometimes — experience a Wow! moment, when they see student work of a caliber that is simply way beyond the majority of the class… a student whom they feel moved to encourage to keep writing, in some capacity or other. Or at least, a student whose talent and hard work deserves recognition. That Wow! moment is even more powerful when you’re teaching Creative Writing in a foreign language. I just finished grading my last pile for the semester — aside, perhaps, from a couple of late videos submitted to Youtube — …

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Heatstroke (Not the Music)

No, not the piano piece I composed as an undergrad, when I didn’t know how to write music for piano. I mean actual heatstroke. I’m probably not heatstricken right now, but I sure felt like I was in the very early stages of it this afternoon: I was headachey and hot and needed to sit somewhere cool and where I went to buy water there was no cold water, and and and… (Hence, this rambling post. Though, also, I am testing whether my Twitter account is going to repost with the right image from now on.) But we finally found …

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Seoul Subway’s Not Very Brilliant Energy Conservation Method

Oh, this is brilliantly idiotic. Like, The Onion-quality, they-wrote-this-as-a-joke type stupid. At least, if I understood this report correctly, and it isn’t bullshit. (If it news report is bullshit, or if I’ve got things wrong, please, I beg of you, tell me; relieve me of the wide-eyed disbelief and horror. Video should load below. Sorry for the auto-launch.) YTN’s news report on the subway mildew smell of summer 2012 Apparently the done thing in Seoul this year is to keep air conditioning systems set to “above 26 degrees Celsius” in order to “conserve energy.” As far as I understand the …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XXV-XXVI

This entry is part 22 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, 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 …

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A Day Late and a Canto Short

It’s exam week, and I’m grading like hell. So this week’s Cantos posting will be 24 hours late, and I anticipate I’ll only get through Cantos XXV and XXVI — Canto XXVII will have to wait till next week… Patience. In the meantime, a little jump forward to post-St. Elizabeth’s, before a move back to his life very close to the time where we’re discussing him:

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