Month: July 2015

The Lais of Marie de France

gordsellar0 Comments

Though I don’t read it often enough, writing from the Middle Ages almost always gets me… at least, when I can get myself to read it, and, of course, when it’s actually accessible to me.  There’s something truly fascinating about Medieval literature, something fresh about it—probably, I think, because it operates along such different lines from modern fiction. So the other day I read a book that I’ve been meaning to get around to for almost two decades, ever since reading a small part of it for a course—The Lais of Marie de France. Who was she? Well, as with all authors of the time, it’s hard …

Continue Reading

Surviving in Trollworld

gordsellar4 Comments

So, Facebook’s buzzing over some idiotic opinion piece (don’t click on that link: trust me, you don’t need to read it) by one Choi Shi-yong that mostly amounts to “Korea=civilized; foreigner=uncivilized” as the theme that runs through the stream-of-consciousness drivel. There’s some particularly patronizing garbage about how sometimes they do after all… when they’re taught respect by Korean society: On the other hand, I saw a Canadian friend in a bus who has lived in Gwangju for over 10 years. He was willing to give his seat to the old lady after finding that she was standing right behind his seat. I thought that …

Continue Reading

Brutal Rice Films—Out and Coming Soon!

gordsellar1 Comment
This entry is part 15 of 15 in the series Making "The Music of Jo Hyeja"

I’ve mentioned this on Facebook and Twitter, but my wife has been releasing the films she’s made so far on Youtube, every ten days in July. They’re Korean-language films, but with English (and sometimes other) subtitles. On July 10th, she posted her award-winning debut short “The Music of Jo Hyeja”, which regular readers will know is our Korean modernization of Lovecraft’s classic story “The Music of Erich Zann”: On the 20th, she posted her second film, another award-winner; this time, it’s a Korean zombie apocalypse, “Environmental Pressures & Species Adaptation”: There’s one more film coming: the long-awaited “Daerijeon: The Proxy War”, based on the South Korean …

Continue Reading

Black Envy, White Envy, and Creativity as an Act of Love

gordsellar0 Comments

I recently checked out Hervé This’s Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism. In its pages, This opines about a dizzying array of things, though one must admit he plays fast and loose sometimes with some of the quotes he makes. (The quote from Plutarch that adorns the sidebar of my teaching subsite, for example, he attributes to Aristophanes.) Likewise, the book could have stood to have more specific, practical explanation of how its general and broad concepts might be applied in practice, though I suppose this book represents Hervé This in a sort of manifesto mode. Even so—or maybe because of this?—a …

Continue Reading