Month: November 2012

Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XLVIII

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This entry is part 34 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 for a fiction project I’d like to write next year. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series. After a long hiatus, this post picks up again toward the end of The Fifth Decad of Cantos (also sometimes called …

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Talent Night, Part 2: How the Game Played Out (NSFW)

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This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Talent Night: My First Time Running a Game of Dread

Note: this is the second post in a series. In the previous post, I discussed my long, long hiatus from RPG gaming, why I chose the game Dread for my first game in a decade and a half, and a bit about the game mechanics. You might want to start there. So… we played our first session of Dread on Sunday night. I hosted a Dread game session with Miss Jiwaku, and our friends Nick, Katrina, and Ian. (Information about who played which character withheld to protect the preciously twisted minds among us, ha…) The scenario was one of mine, …

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Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, and Some Thoughts on Culture-Specific Modes of Reading

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Last semester, a student of mine gave me a paperback copy of the English translation of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. It was a very kind gesture, and I appreciated it very much. This whole culture of gifting professors–sometimes before exams, which is a little uncomfortable, but more often after–is rather nice. I’ll be honest, though: while some mainstream Korean literature I’ve found enjoyable, a lot of it leaves me kind of cold, for reasons that remind me of things my own students say when I ask them to interpret texts. I find that the standard mode of …

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Talent Night, Part 1: In Which I Pick Up RPG Gaming After Years Away

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This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Talent Night: My First Time Running a Game of Dread

Well, it seems like a month of returns: I picked up my saxophones for the first time in a long time, just out of curiosity regarding their condition. (I’ve not played them since 2005, and, well, it shows in the condition of the horns.) I also decided to try get and run an RPG game for an evening, and see if I enjoyed it. I’d long resisted the idea of trying out a role-playing game because they’re kind of a time-sink, or they used to be back when I last was an avid player. That was back in 1998–fifteen years …

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