Celebrity Suicides, Netizen Trolling, and the “Success” of the Real Name System

In 2006, when I moved from where I used to live to the place I live now, I changed jobs, and suddenly I was able to understand what my students were trying to say about current events in classes. I taught a lot of conversational English and composition-type courses at the time, which meant I began to pick up on news and online memes in Korean society, because students would be repeating claims, arguments, and points almost verbatim. One of the earliest of these memes that I encountered was related to the “Real-Name System,” a then-proposed (and since-implemented) method for …

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Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot, Illustrated by Edward Gorey

I’d read everything else that T.S. Eliot produced — in terms of verse and drama, at least — but when I ran across a reference to Possum’s Book of Practical Cats in a Pound biography I’ve been working my way through (noting simply that Pound had nothing good to say about it), I realized I hadn’t read it. I found dug through the poetry-books-to-read on my shelf, found it, and dug in. Well, I can certainly see why Pound had nothing to say about it; in fact, it reads like poetry for kids, and, well… can you imagine Ezra Pound …

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Publication News: A New Story Out, and a Reprint in Good Company

I am in the habit now of not announcing things until they’re definitely announced by the publisher, but I have some publishing news that’s definitely out of the bag, and I’m pleased about it, so here it is: First off, my Clarkesworld story “Of Melei, of Ulthar” is going to be reprinted in The Book of Cthulhu II, from Nightshade books. Checking out the Table of Contents, I am frankly bowled over to find myself in the company of the likes of Fritz Leiber and William Browning Spencer, two authors I’ve been reading since I rediscovered speculative fiction as an …

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Thoughts on the MBC Clip and the Facebook Reaction

An article ran in the Joongang Ilbo yesterday about the recent anti-foreigner propaganda clip that aired on MBC, and which I mentioned here. Tonight, I posted a long post to Facebook, about the anti-MBC organization that has formed there. Mostly about how the organization needs to move beyond being anti-MBC if it is to achieve anything useful in the long run. What I wrote on Facebook (here) is as follows: A thought. MBC is not the source of these ideas, nor will it be the only place such crap is aired, published, or propagated in Korean society. MBC’s video isn’t the problem, it’s …

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So-Se-Ji

Today, just a funny story from my first few months in South Korea. When I first arrived, I was teaching at the Foreign Language Center at Wonkwang University down in Iksan. That is a small city, but it was okay for my first year or so in country. At the Language Center, our teaching duties were split between kids and adults, with a usual pattern of one morning class with adults, then two afternoon classes with kids, and a final fourth hour with either kids or adults. Eventually, I settled into a pattern of teaching two adult classes in the …

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