Category: PERSONAL

Attention Bloomsbury: The World Is (Mostly) Not White

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UPDATE (25 Jan 2010): Well, they’re changing the cover. But since the point of this post wasn’t just Magic Under Glass, but also about the problem of how it happened, I’m leaving the post as-is. The problem is not really isolated, just as the solution is already known — this World SF Blog post has a bigger discussion on covers and poor cover choices (as well as some good ones). ****** Dear Bloomsbury, You know what I’m emailing about, right? Yup. The cover of Jaclyn Dolamore’s Magic Under Glass. I’m white. I’m a reader. I love books. I buy books. …

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Teacher Competence & Textbook Design

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The interesting thing about textbook publishers in Korea is that they need to consider the competence of the people who will be using their books. As anyone who lives in Korea can guess, thisis most crucial for the TEFL industry; despite the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of native English speakers teaching English in Korea, there are also hundreds of thousands of non-native speakers teaching English. And since the method for selecting people for teaching jobs doesn’t seem to prioritize skill or ability in the subject they’ll be teaching — at least not when it’s English — and …

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Readings 2009

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UPDATE: Ooops! I forgot the Rilke I read. Not sure how that happened, but I’ve added it to the end of my list of works.UPDATE 2: Ooops, and Lisa Randall. How could I forget that? ORIGINAL POST: Among my frustrations with 2009 was the fact I got to read way fiction less than usual. WAY less. I was very busy with many things, including health concerns that prompted spome very intensive exercise, new academic writing responsibilities, travel, and also a lot of time spent intensively working on dealing with some personal issues, as well as doing the basic research on …

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Random Observations

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While I really would prefer to be blogging something a touch more substantial, I’m overloaded with The Freelance Project That Refused to F*cking Die. So, while I’m a little tied up with that — and unable to dive into the fiction-writing project I thought I’d be well into by now — all I have time to post for today are a couple of random observations about stuff in Indonesia, in the vein of my earlier mention of rock star styles here.

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Metal Softies

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Indonesian rock bands have a seriously weird aesthetic for self-representation, from the point of view of a Westerner, that is. You see these guys who look for all the world like a death-metal band — weird hair-tattoos (like, where they shave intricate patterns into their hair), leather and spikes, braids in their beards, and tough-guy expressions — but then you hear the music and they’re singing soft-rock, ballads, lovesong-sounding stuff. By the way, I’m not ignoring the comments that are being made here… but after half an hour at the Starbucks, discovering that everything (including Gmail) except my website was …

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When ATMs Attack, or, How Things are Going in Depok/Jakarta

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I’ll be going back to Jakarta tomorrow because a certain ATM has decided to swallow my Samsung Card (a credit card) and not spit it  out again. Put the card in the machine, watch it  crash, watching Windows reboot (with the Diebold brand name proudly displayed, of course!)… quite a sad sight. The first time it happened was a week ago, and I thought it was a freak accident. Turns out, no, not at all. Samsung Cards crash BNC ATM machines in Jakarta, it seems. Or at least, at the mall I was at. Other than that, things are going …

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Rabid Dung Beetles

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One reason I love my friend Adam Lipscomb’s blog is because of what he writes about politics — or, rather, the magical way he writes about idiots in politics and religion in America. For example, this post. Go on, read it, it’s short, and it has Pat Robertson, rabid dung beetles, rotted Norway rads, fetid dogshit, and Pat Robertson shitting his own teeth. It’s beautiful. A beautiful imagine for the rationalists of today. Now, skipping to the meat, the point is that Pat Robertson claimed that “they” (them folks in Haiti) made a pact with the devil and that’s why …

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Jakarta Blues

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No, not blues in the Robert Johnson/Mississippi Fred McDowell/Miles Davis sense. Blue is the color of the cabs you want to take in Jakarta: Blue Bird Taksi (Taxi) are cabs I have found most trustworthy around here. To answer a few questions: yes, I am in an apartment in Jakarta, which I have rented for the months of January and February, the break between fall semester 2009 and spring semester 2010. No, I have not permanently relocated to Jakarta. Yes, I am enjoying the warm weather, though mostly because there are air conditioners all over the place. That said, it’s …

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