Month: October 2013

Cowboys in Space: A Mixed Metaphor

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I’ve always wondered why people were so fascinated by stories of cowboys in space. For me, it’s always been a non-starter. Granted, maybe I’d like these stories better if I liked the characters and writing better, but the widespread for Firefly kind of baffles me, though of course we could chalk it up to different tastes with the writing, or my lack of fannish devotion to Joss Whedon. Lately, though, I’ve been trying to think in terms of why things do or don’t appeal to me… to figure out my own tastes, as it were. After all, I’ve liked very few …

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If I Could Brew Now…

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Saigon doesn’t seem to be a great place to be a homebrewer. As far as I know, there’s nowhere to buy grain, yeast, or hops in the city, and while there is  and active community of homebrewers up in Hanoi, there doesn’t seem to be one in Saigon. I could be wrong–and if I am, I’d love to hear more about it–but that’s my impression from scouring the web. This is tolerable, for me, because I brewed a hell of a lot–to the point of exhaustion, and being a bit tired of brewing–by the time I left Korea, and because Saigon …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LV (Plus, What Do Ezra Pound, Robert Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Sun Ra Have In Common?)

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This entry is part 42 of 59 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. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. This post continues my work on the “Chinese” Cantos, covering Canto LV, but may also interest people more interested in SF, fantasy, and so on. It includes a discussion of some pulp and weird authors contemporaneous to Pound, such as Robert Howard (specifically Conan) and Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. The puzzle, here, is a question: What does Pound’s Chinese Cantos have in …

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Again, With the Semi-Functional

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UPDATE (25 Oct. 2013): Well, I seem to have sorted out 90% of my problems. It was email spammers who were causing my CPU minutes to be gobbled up like hotcakes at a lumberjack soirée, and modifying .htaccess to limit remote access to the login and comment systems cut off a lot of the unnecessary traffic. I’m out of the woods, but I’m going to spend a bit more time tightening up the way the ship runs… installing caches and disabling WordPress’s waste cronjob system on the other installations I have of WordPress on this site. (There are quite a …

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Why Lewbowski?

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Well, Mrs. Jiwaku and I have become really big fans of the Coen Brothers. We’ve been watching their films, thinking about the structure and mode they use, and re-watching the ones we saw too far back to remember well, as well as checking out the ones we’d not gotten to yet. One thing I can say is that these guys buck the trend. Even with a picture like The Ladykillers, which in my opinion doesn’t quite hang together as it should, there’s plenty to enjoy, the characters are colorful, their collective fates well-deserved. I mean, a recurring gag where characters …

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Some Links

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One Good Turn: Eugie Foster is fighting lymphoma, and could use a hand, if you’re so inclined… she has some ebooks for sale, which will help her pay for her treatment. I picked up a couple, and figured I’d pass the word on while I’m at it. Literary: Ever been curious to check out Baudelaire? Don’t know which translator(s) most suit your tastes? FleursduMal.org is the site for you. You can read different translations of each of the poems from each edition, and make up your own mind! An interview with my friend Christine Lee Zilka and her coeditor at Kartika, …

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Semi-Functional For a Bit

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UPDATE: I think I may have found the solution to my problem. We’ll see in a day or two, I guess… ORIGINAL POST: Not many visitors bother with my Tag Archive or Archives, but they might notice that other functionalities are reduced at the moment. I’m having problems with one or another plugin eating memory like there’s no tomorrow, and while I try to figure it out, I’ll have to leave a bunch of plugins switched off. So that explains why this site is only semi-functional for the moment. Apologies if this inconveniences anyone. For those searching for a series, …

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My Wife, and Her Ass-Kicking Ways…

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Yeah, she got another award: this time, it’s the Abby Normal Award for Innovation, awarded by the Zompire Undead Film Festival in Portland. (See the post on Brutal Rice Productions’ site.) (I’m not quite sure why my name is on there, since I didn’t co-direct. Maybe they felt that the “innovation” was related to the script, or something, I’m not sure… but in this case, I really wasn’t very involved in the making of the movie… just the story and one draft of the script, soundtrack, and a little scattered foley, none of which are things that give one “collaborator” …

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One Coin, Two Sides: An Addendum

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By the way, in case it sounds like I was only talking about other people in yesterday’s post, I wasn’t. Even in the specific subject of writing for kids, I’m as guilty as anyone, though of course I end up crusading against the madness of Kitty Farmer, and in league with the likes of Ms. Pomeroy: Here’s some proof: A couple of years ago I collaborated with a colleague of mine (Haeyoung Kim) on a series of educational books titled Reading Street. (I posted about the books when they first came out, here.) One of the artists who contributed to the …

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