Category: PERSONAL

My Favorite Painting?

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A former student emailed me, asking–among other things–for advice about things to enjoy during her upcoming visit to Montréal. One of the things I suggested was to visit the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, and I couldn’t help but mention my favorite painting there, which, unsurprisingly, is of a teacher. Here it is: I know, hopelessly old-fashioned of me. I like more modern artists too, believe me! Kandinsky! Dali! Escher! Er… look, among my bundle of posters–now in storage in a warehouse someplace in Koream waiting to be shipped to me eventually–are at least a few prints much more avant-garde and …

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Last Night I Dreamed…

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… and woke remembering the dream, so I figure, it must be noteworthy. What I remember is that I was involved in making a film with Jetse de Vries. Mind, he was in the body of this other guy I know, a filmmaker in Korea named Josh, but it was Jetse alright, and he piled us all into a train with a ton of gear including stuff you’d see inside the van of the Lone Gunmen (the conspiracy theorists guys from The X-Files) that was about to cross Korea. Jetse/Josh began monitoring something that looked like a heart monitor, with …

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Line by Line

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So, after years away from it (though I used to be not bad) I am teaching myself to sketch, draw, and ink images again. Inking’s new to me, so I decided to start with that. But of course, I figure,it’s a digital era, and Wacom tablets aren’t so expensive now… why not do it on my computer? So I got myself a nice little (not super-expensive) tablet and started off. I’ve got a set going on Flickr, not that there’s much point in going an looking there now. But I think this picture isn’t too bad: And no, I didn’t …

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My Secret?

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Got a funny tweet this morning: @GordSellar Just received your memoir from @HonestTea. #location pic.twitter.com/kGxqOYeVKS — Derek Brown (@derekbrown) September 6, 2013 Ha, funnily enough, I submitted this a long, long time ago, and forgot all about it. But for all that, the principle seems to hold. In the past couple of weeks, since relocating to our new apartment, I’ve: started exercising regularly (that is, swimming daily, and tracking it on Fitocracy, because gamification = motivation boost; I’ll be adding a regimen of bodyweight exercises next week, too), drafted close to 10% of the novel I’m working on (I should …

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The Stuff I’ve Been Doing of Late

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This is just a quick update for those wondering why I haven’t posted anything in a while. There’s snaps of food I’ve cooked, a rare recording of the current state of my sax playing as of right now (and a discussion of an online course in jazz improvisation I’m taking with Gary Burton, yes, that Gary Burton), and a little discussion of my writing.

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Out from the Sinews

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In a book I read long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Christopher Dewdney wrote in his book of poetry The Radiant Inventory about neurology, using the most brilliantly poetical and beautiful language. He wrote about all kinds of things, of course: books of poetry are like that. But among the things he discussed in the book was the neurobiology of break-ups, and why they are so difficult. I can’t quote the book, or even paraphrase it in any way I’d regard as trustworthy–my copy is somewhere in that other galaxy where I read it, in a box, floating …

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Winging It…

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If you can see this, then we’ve already left Korea, and are on a plane to Saigon–which you may not find on a modern map unless you look for Ho Chi Minh City, but the locals apparently call it Saigon. Our plans changed a few times over the last couple of months: first, we’d planned to fly to Berlin… then Chiang Mai, a place that still interests us even now… but finally, we’re going somewhere else. Just when we figured out our finances wouldn’t be quite as stellar as we’d hoped, we were contacted by friends who were in the …

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The Case of Park Chorong-Chorong-Bitnari, and the Anthropomorphization of Humans

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Caveat: I’m going off some of Mrs. Jiwaku’s (perhaps hazy) memories, and my own (imperfect) reading of some articles online, through a language barrier. I welcome corrections, as therefore there may be some mistakes in my understanding, or misreadings, or details that are off… A few years ago, I began writing this post, though I didn’t know what I wanted to say about it. Now, I think I do know, and it unsettles me. The story is somewhat disturbing, though I don’t do “trigger warnings.”

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Looking Back: “Erosion” (1999)

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In 2005, I hadn’t published much of anything, in any sense approaching a professional one. I mean, I’d gotten poems and short pieces into chapbooks, had published a couple of poems and a a small think piece in the university magazine were I did grad school, and a few short student articles in my undergrad campus newspaper; I’d even had a short piece of fiction included in a refugee awareness training program, though that was because my sister asked me to write something for the handbook she was compiling. But I had submitted a story to precisely one market in …

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On Academic Ecologies, Career Planning, and Worldbuilding,

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At my goodbye party last week, we were talking about the future collapse of the TEFL industry when brute-force autotranslation gets good enough that most people will only study foreign languages the way that some people still do math by hand. (I mean without a calculator–that is, out of academic requirements, a sense of old-fashionedness, or rare personal impetus to do so.) I commented that I think now is a pretty good time to distance oneself from TEFL altogether, and certainly a good time to get out of depending on jobs where one is directly teaching English.  (Unless one is …

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