One Coin, Two Sides: Children’s Literature and Censorship

So, I’ve been working with a Korean writer who is trying to branch out into writing kid’s books in English, and to writing fiction. So far, she’s mainly written nonfiction stuff–educational books–but now that she’s in Saigon, she feels like she has the time and freedom to branch out into fiction. It’s been pretty interesting to go through the basics with her, week after week, because so much of what’s true of kid’s fiction is true of all fiction. Characters, motivations, story problems… they’re all there. Kidlit is sometimes a little more directly allegorical, and sometimes is a little more …

Continue Reading

Line by Line

So, after years away from it (though I used to be not bad) I am teaching myself to sketch, draw, and ink images again. Inking’s new to me, so I decided to start with that. But of course, I figure,it’s a digital era, and Wacom tablets aren’t so expensive now… why not do it on my computer? So I got myself a nice little (not super-expensive) tablet and started off. I’ve got a set going on Flickr, not that there’s much point in going an looking there now. But I think this picture isn’t too bad: And no, I didn’t …

Continue Reading

Jazz Spoken Here (Incoherently)

Last night I dreamed I was playing in a transtemporal big band, on tenor sax. Next to me, Duke Ellington, on… trombone. (He said he took it up for the challenge, because he already knew everything he was ever gonna know about the piano. “… and the trombone’s humble.”) We were in Korea, playing a gig in Seoul sometime in the ‘oughts (we were time travelers, remember?), and I was asked to speak about my time in the country. I was honest, talking about the good and the bad, which didn’t seem to entertain the audience much; when I looked …

Continue Reading

“The Logical Question and the Decaying Answer”

Whew! I’m feeling a sense of immense achievement, probably a little out of proportion to what I’ve actually done. Then again, this is a blog, so… I haven’t composed any new music (in terms of writing it down, I mean) in a couple of decades, but I have finally finished inputting the first of the pieces I’m notating with Musescore. Here’s the first page: I’m pleased because Musescore also lets me export audio for the pieces. The renderings are not perfect–honestly, they show the flaws of the piece, in that a human touch is really necessary for the piece to …

Continue Reading

Learning Curves, Apparent and Hidden

Back when I was a music student, it wasn’t all that unusual for people–especially students–not to have a computer at home. That’s what computer labs were for, so, yeah, my first few years of internet-use all took  place in campus computer labs. Campus computer labs tended to have only the sort of software everyone needed, so while the music notation software Finale has been around for ages, I never really learned to use it properly: the only computer I knew that had it installed was a tiny little Mac Classic in the “electronic music lab”–a tiny, windowless room mostly taken …

Continue Reading

The Terror Live (2013) and Killer Toon (2013)

I’ve seen a couple of Korean movies lately worth commenting on. Those in Korea are probably too late to see this on the big screen, and those outside Korea may not get a chance, but anyway, Mrs. Jiwaku and I saw the 2013 Korean film The Terror Live this evening. My general thoughts on The Terror Live were very positive, despite having to make do with my iffy (and waning) Korean-language listening skills. (Probably seeing it at the cinema where we saw it–the Lotte Cinema at Lotte Mart–was the mistake; when I watched another Korean blockbuster a week ago at a …

Continue Reading