Month: May 2015

Whilst Nature Was Busy Making Cabbages: The Woman in White

gordsellar0 Comments

Of all the places to find a euphemism for baffling passivity! This is from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White: A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting …

Continue Reading

The Cosplayers of the Late Ming Dynasty

gordsellar0 Comments

Wait… cosplay? In the late Ming Dynasty? Apparently, yes. And I don’t just mean dressing up in costumes, which is a universal and ancient activity. I mean cosplay. What’s the difference? I’ll let Jonathan Spence lay out the dots, before I connect them. Here’s a passage from Return to Dragon Mountain: After his dismissal by the prince of Lu, [Zhang Dai’s] father returned to Shaoxing in early 1632 just before the region was smitten with a prolonged drought, which badly damaged crops and led to the threat of famine. For both father and son the ordinary fabric of life was starting to unravel. Zhang Dai, …

Continue Reading

Bodhi Dharma’s Work Song

gordsellar0 Comments

I recently made some updates to the Dabang Band subsite, mainly just fixing broken photo galleries but also adding song lyrics from the old archived site so they’re better formatted and more easily reachable. While I was doing that, I ran across lyrics for a few songs that never got recorded. One of them wasn’t mine, so I don’t know how the melody went–I’m pretty sure I never even heard the song, and I’m not sure how it ended up on the website. However, I also found the remnants of several of my own long-ago attempts at songwriting. It was a tough, …

Continue Reading

Mark Majcher’s Twenty Four Game Poems as a TEFL Resource

gordsellar0 Comments

I recently picked up Mark Majcher‘s book Twenty Four Game Poems on Bundle of Holding (which is basically the Tabletop RPG gamer’s equivalent of Humble Bundle). I actually bought the bundle mainly for this book, because it intrigued me so profoundly, and I have to say, I’m glad I did. A “game poem” is basically just a short, simple pick-up game of some kind, for which the rules and mechanics are simple, and the game is focused on a single, straightforward idea, theme, or mini-arc. For example, players might adopt the role of a bird flying around to some purpose, and narrate their flight’s beginning, middle, …

Continue Reading