Month: November 2014

Dance Recital Poster Goes Viral. Cue Self-Righteous Expat Hand-Wringing

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Taehoon Lee is doing a useful service on Korea Observer that Robert Koehler used to perform over on The Marmot’s Hole, back when he started out: translating and posting Korean news items that don’t make it into the English-language news in Korea. But man, sometimes the reactions his postings get are just stupid and wrong-headed, and it’s almost always self-righteous expats who are eager to: critique the hell out of everything in Korea, and spew outraged critique all over Facebook Here’s an example, a poster for a dance recital at Chonbuk National University that went viral online. Lee posted about it …

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Scumbags & Con Men of Georgian English Brewing, #1: Humphrey Jackson

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The other day, I posted about folk magic in modern England, but aside from that, I’m also plowing through the piteous biography of Georgian London’s most hapless brewer. The biography, Dr. Johnson’s “Own Dear Master”: The Life of Henry Thrale by Lee Morgan was one I would probably have passed on, had it not been remaindered and on sale for only a few dollars, but it has proven entertaining so far, in part because Morgan seems eager to paint Thrale sympathetically. It’s not hard to understand why: Thrale was, at one time, head of the biggest brewery in England; he married up, he was …

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Magic, Science, Inconsistency, and the Principle of Acceptable Variance

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I’m enjoying Jim Baker’s The Cunning Man’s Handbook, an exhaustive look at the practices of the cunning folk in England (and to some degree America) from 1550-1900, which I’m reading as research for the book I’m writing now (which has a cunning woman as a major character). Baker’s text is full of (ie. basically, completely composed of) countless examples of what folk magic involved in different moments during modern English history, and it also has lots of interesting observations on how much of what neo-pagans claim as history is actually just “invented tradition” (in the sense that Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger discuss in The …

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Recent Books

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I’ve been reading a fair bit this year, as far as my standards go. More than usual, anyway. This is everything so far, though, of course, a few of those I gave up on and didn’t finish: I’ve been feeling a little disappointed lately in how so much of the SFF world online is so busy talking about scandals and outrages that we never seem to talk about the books anymore. Short stories, too, but, well, that’s for another post. So I figured: do my bit. Post about what I’ve read lately. Part of why I stopped was because–on some very bad …

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A Side Order of Context

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  Something I find fascinating is how people talk and talk and talk about diversity as if it only means different races, and not different cultures–that different cultures and the frame of reference in which they operate ought to be transparent to anyone without the slightest bit of effort or context. For example, the above image has apparently started doing the rounds on Facebook… at least, I assume so. I’m not tracking the trends, but a friend shared it. Is it racism captured in a nutshell? I don’t think so… but I’m guessing a lot of Westerners would. Don’t get me wrong. I’m …

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