Month: March 2014

Musical Sketches

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So, I’ve just posted some sketches for the soundtrack I was working on in early March for my wife’s film project–that is, 대리전/”The Proxy War”. I won’t be doing any more work on the sketches till we have a rough cut, but I figured it might interest some people. This film is SF, comedic but also action, and yet in a lot of ways it’s conceived as being in the mode of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, which means that narration is a huge part of how the story gets across. By the way, the soundtrack material has taken up so …

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When It Rains

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One thing that happens when you get busy trying to write a novel or two is that short story publications slow down, so I haven’t had a lot of publication announcements to make recently, but when it rains, it pours. (As I’m about to rediscover when the rainy season strikes us again here in Saigon.) In any case, I finally do have some publication news, all of which struck basically at once a month or so ago. (I waited till the ink was dry on all the contracts before announcing anything, though.) Firstly, I have a novella forthcoming soon in …

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Alain de Botton is a…

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Well, I haven’t actually read him, so I don’t know, but Fisun Güner makes a pretty good argument that at least when it comes to art and art appreciation, he’s “a moron.” Güner’s harsh, but understandably so: there’s always someone out there who’s ready to explain to people who do get art, and celebrate it, why they’re doing it all wrong because people who don’t get art aren’t getting art. It reminds me of a drummer I knew in music school, who scolded me and a few of my friends for not seeing in our heads the same picture he saw …

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Sopranoed! WX5ed! Fluted! But… Argh!

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UPDATE (27 March 2014): Hold on! Looks like my students were wrong, and there is one sax tech somewhere in Saigon. Problem is, I’ll have to track him down myself: I went to the music shop my student mentioned to see if they had something that could remove the stuck swab, and they told me that, no, they can’t, but there’s a saxophone repairman in District 10 who can do it. They called him and he confirmed that he could. The catch? They tried to tell me I couldn’t go there myself, I had entrust the horn to their care. …

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The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch

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When I read Thomas M. Disch’s 334 back in grad school, I found it didn’t make much of an impression on me, beyond its unremitting and overwhelming grimness. Perhaps the bleak grimness of graduate school distracted me from its finer points? I’m not sure, but I can say that the cruelty and bleakness of The Genocides has definitely made an impression on me: I have essentially devoured it over the last day-and-a-half.  

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