The Poet by Yi Mun-Yol

When I ran across a very positive review for Yi Mun-yol’s novel The Poet over at Korean Literature in Translation, I was really excited to check the book out. It’s a novel about a poet who went by the handle Kim Sakkat–“Rain-Hat” Kim, the grandson of a rebel-leader who suffered social censure (and, almost, the execution of his whole family, in retribution for the granddad’s “crime”). The grandson becomes a poet, and then a wanderer, and arguably the first proto-rapper or beat poet in Korea… and the novel purports to explore his life story. Sound great, right? Unfortunately, I found …

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Back in the Saddle

I’m working on a couple of novels at the moment, but, well… I should actually say, I’d been working on a couple of novels lately. Around Christmas or so, I got stalled on both, and stopped making forward progress. I couldn’t figure out why, so I took some time off and worked on shorter stories, and on getting some of my short stories sent out. (I have a large stock of finished/polished-up short stories I need to send out, but always seem to procrastinate about actually sending them anywhere.) But soon, stuck turned into stalled, turned into Steam. Anyway, Mrs. …

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The Gay Marriage-Pocalypse

This year, I’ve had two random people on Facebook who’d friended me for completely random reasons–one, a fellow saxophonist in Korea, and the other an Ezra Pound enthusiast in Indiana–completely lose their marbles on my Facebook Wall, after I posted something in support of marriage equality. The arguments are almost always the same: somehow my unapologetic atheism indicts my position; somehow they think I must be gay (presumably, because what heterosexual could support homosexual marriage? Ahem…); somehow gay marriage not being procreative is the problem, but not the only one (just one in a bag of trick arguments they pull …

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Books I Read in 2013

Here’s the annual list of books I read this year. Fewer than I expected, to be sure, but… that’s life. A lot of these happened to be the hard copy books I brought with me, or mailed to myself, when we came to Vietnam in March… which is to say, I was reading them because I wanted to get ’em all out of the way before the end of our time here, so as to have no sent or brought them in vain. I’d hoped to read them all, but I’m a slower reader than I like, and it’s been …

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