Month: April 2014

More on the Stourbridge Fair

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I’ve mentioned the Stourbridge Fair here before, in terms of what Daniel Defoe had to say about it. Well, today I found a little more information that’s coming in handy for my novel-in-progress. Here’s a nice page on the Stourbridge Fair’s history: they sold more than hops–including ale and beer!–and from that page, here’s a segment regulating the sale price of ale and beer. (And yes, the seem to rules make clear a distinction between the two, beer being hopped and ale being unhopped. Evidently this is reflected in the provisions for soured ale, and the lack of same for beer, …

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Back on Track With “The Company of Distillers”

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So, I’ve finally figured out what the hell was wrong with the novel I’ve been trying to write, tentatively titled The Company of Distillers–why it was so damned stuck after I reached basically the halfway point or so. It means excising most of what I’d written since Christmas–about half the text I have on hand now–but that’s for the best, and I have a clearer picture of where it’s headed now. (And a clearer picture of what I was doing wrong, not just in this book but in the other one I’d been working on, too.) What helped me, besides …

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Mission Child by Maureen McHugh, and Thoughts About Stretching the Limits of the Genre

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I’ve loved Maureen McHugh’s writing since first contact. That was, like for many people, her debut novel China Mountain Zhang, a book I stumbled upon in the Chapters in downtown Montréal, I think sometime in 1999 or so… a couple of years before I left for Korea, where (back in the old days) I had to make do with reading whatever I happened to find. It was because Maureen was teaching a week at Clarion West in 2006 that I decided to take the plunge and go; it was because of China Mountain Zhang that I realized the kinds of stories that …

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Three Questions About Western Historiography and Korea

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Another excerpt from Donald Clark’s Living Dangerously in Korea, and two three questions: Given the speed of change in modern Korea, it takes some mental effort to recall the conditions of diet, health, housing, education, and living standards that prevailed in Korea at the time of liberation. In the 1930s, for example, life expectancy was thirty-six years for men and thirty-eight years for women. Women were treated like chattel by their own relatives. They had little autonomy or even identity of their own. They were known as so-and-so’s mother or daughter or wife and their given names were so seldom …

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Paul Auster on Writing in Oracle Night

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I usually find it kind of boring or annoying when writers write about writers (and about writers writing, especially, or even worse, about writers struggling to write), but Paul Auster has managed to do it well, both in his autobiographical Hand to Mouth (a review of which I wrote in 2006, though it was lost to the aether at the time and I never rewrote it), and in the book I’m reading now, Oracle Night.

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