Month: August 2014

A Recipe for Mum(me)

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One of the things about writing about historical brewing practices is that, while the methodology is likely not to be too different from what a homebrewer does–mash grain, run off wort, sparge, run off sparge, boil, ferment, package, imbibe–the technology used to complete those steps is absolutely going to differ. Fiction-writing requires details, so I’ve been hunting through brewing manuals of the 1700s, which is a manifold pleasure. It’s fun for a few reasons, but I’ll focus on one for now: the recipes. Among the most amusing is the recipe for Mum that I discovered in The Whole Duty of a Woman, …

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The Mudang’s Dance (Reprint)

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So, a few years ago, I was invited to write a piece for Arc Magazine. The result was “The Mudang’s Dance,” a piece on how accelerated modernization and social change seems to have given Korean society an interestingly different relationship with the future (and the past) from what dominates in the English-speaking world. The piece was only available in Arc 1.2… until now. It’s been reprinted in the premiere issue of Compass Cultura, a new travel webzine. See it here. (Note, it’s been a few years… which means my view has evolved somewhat since then; my view of Korea is always shifting and changing as new …

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Hop-Pickers and Pagan Ritual, from the 1750s to the 1930s

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I’m still working on a series of posts on the South Sea Bubble. It’s kind of fractal: the more you look, the more you see, and it all links so complexly that it’s hard to fit into a single series of posts. So anyway, in the meantime, here’s another subject I’ve been reading up on: the tradition of hop-pickers. It seems like there’s been a surge of nostalgic memory for the tradition of Londoners from the East End making their yearly pilgrimage–a pilgrimage involving 250,000 people at its height, at the beginning of the 20th century–out to East Kent, where a large proportion …

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Distillers vs. Brewers: Tabulated Expenses from 1736

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I know I promised a post on the South Sea Bubble next, but, well… it’s become a series, and the series isn’t done, so in the meantime, an interesting snippet from an anti-Gin tract.   Take note: Thomas Wilson’s Distilled Spirituous Liquors The Bane of the Nation (1736) has a clear agenda. (Also, an amazing title. 18th-century people just did titles like nobody else!) The agenda was to get the trade in gin banned in England; with that in mind, one should be careful how seriously one takes its content, especially concerning anything about distilling. It is, after all, a pamphlet written to rebut …

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Korean SF Festival 2014

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This entry is part 64 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Those tracking Korean SF might be pleased to note that the Gwacheon International SF Film Festival I blogged about a while back–and which has continued over the years since–has expanded into a kind of Korean SF Festival, full stop. There’s a big film component, but there seems to be much more than screenings and an exhibit nowadays, which is great! It runs from the 26 September to 5 October this year, and is being held at the same spot as the year I attended: the Gwacheon Science Museum which is a very good venue, as long as you don’t mind the trek out to Gwacheon. Here’s a link to …

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