Once again the world is talking about bullying. The depressing story of Amanda Todd has shown up in the world news. Even before the Amanda Todd story came out, though, I was thinking about this. I see some problems with the way we’re talking about bullying. Things that really, really irk me. I’m going to try lay them out as clearly and simply as I can:
I apologize for the lack of activity here. I have a lot going on, between working on several writing projects (fiction and scripts alike) and trying to get some stuff done around the house. In the process, I’ve let the Blogging Ezra Pound’s Cantos project slide a bit, though I do have a post about a couple of Cantos that is almost ready to post. But in the meantime, I’ll say a bit about the busy weekend. The biggest news is that over the weekend, “The Music of Jo Hyeja” got its World Premiere at the Los Angeles H.P. Lovecraft …
I have a huge list of links marked “to post” which, to be honest, I find kind of daunting. I used to post links a lot more, but lately my blog is mostly devoted to housing my ongoing project, Blogging Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, along with occasional posts on SF or Korea-related issues. But I have had a few tabs open on my browser for over a week, which seem worth posting to me, and having been delayed for my critique group’s meeting by an annoying fridge-related disaster (though less delayed than another member), I am now sitting in a …
Most semesters I have a last-minute class. It’s characteristic in Korea for things to be done at the last minute, including scrambling to find someone to teach a new or otherwise “specialized” course. Of course, teaching a new course takes a lot of preparation… but in every case where I’ve taught a new class, I’ve had it dropped in my lap (with my tacit acceptance, yes) at the last minute. What this adds up to is me being on a constant crash course every semester; one semester, it was the intersections of politics, business, and culture. Another semester, it was …
Note: I’m cleaning out link folders — folders full of stuff marked “to post,” and will probably post a pile of goodies every week for a while… First of all: while I’m not really nuts for anyone’s pop music, the ardent praise and fandom of K-pop has always baffled me. K-pop has always struck me as a boiled down version of a watered-down version of Western and Japanese mainstream pop junk. Which is to say, I don’t usually have much nice to say about American and Japanese pop music either, though sometimes… well, sometimes you at least end up hearing …
Most writers I know agree: going to a workshop like Clarion West isn’t, strictly speaking, a necessity for becoming a writer. However, one could say the same thing about film schools, or art and music conservatories, or for that matter for business managers. All kinds of things can be learned outside of a classroom-and-teacher paradigm. But that’s not an argument that Clarion West isn’t necessary. The workshop, and others like it, has helped a lot of writers I know get what they need to start functioning as authors–that is, as people who actually get their work published professionally, and contribute to …
Behind the curtain, I’ve been drafting a ton of blog posts in spare minutes when I’ve been stuck in my office. I’m not happy with any of them, but I’ve drafted a bunch. I’m finding it harder and harder to feel like I want to make pronouncements on anything. When I talk about Korea, I get things wrong often enough that I’m reticent to bother — especially when not getting things wrong takes so much damned research. When I write about books and authors — aside from Ezra Pound — I find myself much more, um, ambivalent. I’m at a point …
Regarding whether New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg is in the right or the wrong in his bid to legislate about what size of soft drinks can be sold in the city, the discussion seems kind of misguided in my opinion. It seems, in fact, misguided on both sides of the argument. Those who are up in arms for this “infringement of freedom” have some nerve: after all, why complain when sugar is added to an already long list of controlled substances? In America, people cannot ingest marijuana, cocaine, heroin, or a host of other chemicals legally. If a society has …
It’s amazing how foolish a person can be without realizing it. Ah, accusing people who trust to science of being arrogant. This is one we’ve seen before. It is a recurrent and utterly foolish red herring among those who believe to know mystical secrets of invisible deities, accessible only to those who have the “right” kind of faith and study the “right” ancient texts (usually as defined by elderly men in funny clothing), that studying the universe and developing models describing its physical functioning, while carefully, cautiously accepting those models only on the basis of hard evidence is a position of arrogance. …
So, people have started emailing me asking whether I’m the right person to contact about content on my website. This is relatively new, and I’m of half a mind to think it’s because of one or two plugins I’ve installed (mainly because my particular server doesn’t handle pingbacks and trackbacks very well, and I wanted to know who’s linking here). I suppose I could chalk it up to my blog having gotten just barely popular enough to get solicitations from people like this, but I’m not sure that’s the case. It seems to have started quite suddenly, which has me …