Month: November 2013

Thoughts About You Bright And Risen Angels by William T. Vollmann, Flaws, and Envelope-Pushing

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When my friend, fellow Poundian, and coworker Jason Silvis left South Korea–I think in 2005–he gave me a copy of William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, I imagine probably because the SFnal elements and the sheer challenge of the book would appeal to me. He had given the book a good hard try, but–at least from the pencil markings he’d made–didn’t get very far into it. Having just finished reading the book, I can see why. It’s a flawed book, even for a first novel, and not easy reading by any stretch of the imagination… or, rather, I …

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Ancient Tourist Traps and Military Textuality

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I’ve recently read some really good books, and am working out just what I want to say about them, but in the meantime, I’ve just started on a biography by Adrian Murdoch’s titled The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World. Julian is, basically, as the book suggests, the last great pagan emperor of Rome, which… well, given my occasional musings on how European history might have been different had paganism resisted being steamrolled by Christianity–perhaps, by more effectively co-opting elements of it, in the way Christianity actually did to paganism–the topic excited me. Two …

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Links You Should Check Out

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Today, I was reminded of why I stopped doing these link roundups: they’re time-consuming to produce. I’ll probably switch to just tweeting or linking on Facebook, like almost everyone else I know, and this is probably the last post like this I’ll do. But anyway: Typhoon Haiyan: We were lucky: it was much-diminished when it hit Vietnam, and on top of that, it landed nowhere near us. Folks in the Philippines were nowhere near so lucky, and pretty desperately need our help. Climate change is apparently making storms (and other extreme weather events) worse, so events like Haiyan are likely …

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Resolved… Baidu Blocked

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Yeah, so: my hosting problems? It had nothing to do with my database. Nothing to do with my plugins, or anything else I was doing. (Okay, moving one little command in my config file a little higher up helped somewhat, but that wasn’t the main problem.) It had everything to do with bots needing to be blocked. Which, you know: you’d think that would be the first thing they’d suggest, since that’s nothing to do with WordPress and everything to do with spammer parasites attacking websites in general, right? I just wish someone had suggested it weeks ago, and saved …

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“…With Greater Dignity.”

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Miyako no Sora is the school song of the First High School of Tokyo, the one its students sang in farewell to classmates who had to leave to go to war. One after another they went away, as if beckoned by some great invisible hand, and it seems that for a time the song echoed through the school grounds, morning and night. We learned it from an alumnus of this school, when his company happened to be stationed in the same town that we were. It was a fine tune for sending off young men, a tune with a bright, …

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