Month: January 2013

Cloud Atlas (Updated!)

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(Note: I’ve added and update, because it turned out I had more to say.) Original Post: Just saw Cloud Atlas. I think Mrs. Jiwaku’s response is a pretty fair one: “It’s a commercial-deep movie.” Which is to say, a commercial movie can only be so deep, but this one tried for that. (So did Life of Pi, which we also saw recently, but that film failed in my opinion.) The interracial makeup… I don’t know what to say about it, really, except that I’m a bit baffled. I thought at first it was supposed to convey continuity between lives of …

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Meditations on Junk, #1: Ugly Koreans/Ugly Americans

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I’m flipping through Min Byoung-Chul’s Ugly Koreans/Ugly Americans. (Which is, by the way, insanely overpriced on Amazon.com.) It’s a sort of typical book in Korea, basically intellectual junk crammed full of East vs. West generalizations and “explanations” by a Korean who doesn’t himself quite grasp what he’s taken upon himself to explain. (Also, to be frank, the first half of the book seems to be made up mainly of genuinely rude, disgusting, or dangerous behaviours common among Koreans, while the second half, supposedly balancing this, is full of very tame gestures and comments about how Americans are “impatient” with people …

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Eine Kleine Zombiemusik

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I’ve just put the finishing touches on the music for Mrs. Jiwaku’s third short film, a zombie movie. Over the course of the project (developing the music, I mean) I’ve posted in-progress clips to Soundcloud, but now I’ve got the final, tidied-up and cleaner tracks up. They are, for the moment, downloadable–in part because Mrs. Jiwaku will need to download them. They are quite loud, by the way: I de-normalized the output because it seems to fit the aggressive sound we need, especially in the non-autonormalized version of Track #3. Just a warning, for those listening on headphones or about …

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Reading the Cantos: A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound by Noel Stock

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This entry is part 35 of 59 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Well, the first book I finished (but not the first book I began to read) in 2013 was Noel Stock’s Reading the Cantos: A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound. (It’s a little library hardback, one my soon-to-be-former employer’s library by all rights shouldn’t have on hand, but since they did, I decided to plow through it while I could.) I’m not sure I have much to say about it, though it is a funny little book. At 120 pages, it seeks to tackle the whole of the completed Cantos–those available when it was written in 1967, at least.  However, it …

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Hitched

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Well, I just realized that while those on Facebook all know about it, I haven’t mentioned it here, so: I got hitched last weekend. That’s right, Miss Jiwaku is now Mrs. Jiwaku–and in a rather literal way, too, since the inscription in our wedding bands is (in Korean) Jiwaku. For those wondering, that’s an Indonesian term of endearment that translates literally as “my soul” (but which couples use). I haven’t updated because I’ve been busy: both of our mothers were able to come to Korea for the occasion, and we’ve been pretty busy showing my mother around, meeting with Mrs. …

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Final (Korean!) Brewday: Wonmisan Last Hurrah Hoppy Weizen / Wonmisan Kitchen Sink Dubbel

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Well, that’s it. Things are winding down, and it’s time to stop making new beer. I’m selling my gear to my friends Rowan and Ian, who will be remaining in Korea for a while a brewing up a storm, but I figured I might as well use up my remaining malt and adjuncts as best I can. So, yes, my last brew in Korea is a double-batch kitchen-sink type brew, made at the last minute. I did everything I could to use up all my remaining malt, hops, and adjuncts, and just went ahead and made brews that could work …

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Wheaty Brewday: Wonmisan Wedding Weizen/Saison Wit/BelgoWheat

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As experienced brewers might guess from the title of this post, I had a little crisis with my yeast, in both halves of the batch of wheat beer I brewed up this week. I figured I would try and brew up a wheat beer and serve it very fresh–like, probably stupidly fresh–for the wedding, for those people who aren’t used to sour or rich dark beers. (Most of what I’ll have on hand is one or the other.) Thing is, I did this batch as a no-chill brew, because it’s really cold out–meaning I can chill without effort, but also …

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Normal Sadism, Weak Boundaries, and Social Unhappiness

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I was having a discussion with someone about life in Korea–someone who feels pretty much like I do about it–and something interesting crossed my mind. It’s the concept of “normal marital sadism” that was coined by the therapist David Schnarch to describe the very common form of emotional sadism that seems to develop in a lot–a lot–of marriages. He published an article on the concept back in May of this year, in Psychology Today: People who refuse to acknowledge their own hatred, vindictiveness, and punitiveness are the most pernicious people to those they love. You can’t learn to control hostile impulses you …

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The Books of 2012

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My Library at LibraryThing One might think that the animated parade above of the covers of the fifty-some books (plus a couple I’m partway through at the moment, which I’m counting since they were and will continue to be huge reading projects) is not bad for a year’s reading… but if you look closely at my list of books (there’s a list below), you’ll find a couple of things worth noting. Some of the books are short; some are game books (which are usually short as well); some are slim tomes of verse. I actually felt like I didn’t get …

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