Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LIX

This entry is part 44 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, a few at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. Also, since the table of contents that my post series plugin creates has gotten far too unwieldy to include at the top of each post, I’ve gone ahead and made an index of the Cantos I’ve discussed, with links to each post. I’ll try remember to update it as I continue with this project. That index is here. The index is new, so I …

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Hothouse (1962), by Brian Aldiss

So, what in the world is going on in Brian Aldiss’ Hugo Award-winning 1962 stories that eventually got collected as Hothouse? Note that I wrote in, not with. I just finished the book the other day, though it took me ages to get through it and that’s given me a lot of time to ruminate on the parts I’d already read. The book is strange, in ways that I found both fascinating and frustrating. (But, honestly, the reason it took so long has more to do with my son’s newly developed Spider Man-like climbing abilities than the book itself.)

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: More on Canto LVII, and Canto LVIII

This entry is part 47 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, a few at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. … aaaaand, we’re back. This post marks my second return to this blog project, the first one having been abortive (it ended after just one post, the previous one in this series). There’s good reasons for that: I was focused on some writing projects, and trying to use my time wisely while I had a lot of it. In the time since, a …

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Black Star Rising by Frederik Pohl

So, somehow I’ve managed to fit in some reading this year, but I haven’t posted much about it. I figured I’d rectify that by doing a quick post about everything I’ve read, but… well, I started and then found I had a lot to say about several of the books. Here’s the first of them, a book I read this summer, after finding a hardback in a box at my mom’s house. Frederik Pohl’s Black Star Rising is a 1980s China-in-charge novel. That’s a subgrenre of SF, isn’t it? Some others that depict China on top, or flirt with the idea of …

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Misanthropy, Though Not in Timon’s Manner

Yes, this post is about doing misanthropy right, because there is a right and a wrong way… at least, if you want to be a celebrated writer (and a sane human being). But the means by which I arrived at such a thought, with enough force to incite me to write a blog post, means that this will have to double as a hit-and-run book review of sorts. I’ve been listening to Leo Damrosch’s biography of Jonathan Swift, and it’s been fascinating. The secrecy with which he conducted his life, and the resulting uncertainties that surround it; his involvement in politics as an anonymous pamphleteer …

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The Enchanted Wanderer by Nikolai Leskov

I hope the handful of people paying attention to this site will excuse my long silence : a lot of things have been brewing, and it’s a year of good news due out in dribs and drabs, but for now, I want to tell you about the book I’m reading right now, Nikolai Leskov’s The Enchanted Wanderer. I’ve never heard of Leskov before, but he’s proving to be wonderfully peculiar fun. The Enchanted Wanderer is a Russian novel from 1873, which I found the book at the district library one town over from where I live; as soon as I saw the description in the inner gatefold, I had to sign it out. …

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My 2015 Readings

Well, it’s 2016. I hope I read more this year than I did last. This list is a little incomplete: there’s some more game stuff I read, some of it in part and some in full. But it’s close enough to a list of all the books I finished, so I’ll go with this. My Library at LibraryThing It’s hard to pick standouts, because there were a lot of great books. Having so little time to read, I focused on things I felt I’d really enjoy. Still, if I were to recommend a few books, I guess I’d go with …

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The Books of September-December 2015

Well, the reading’s been a bit slow. I had an intense semester, and Mrs. Jiwaku was in the last trimester of pregnancy… and then the baby came. All things considered, I guess I read a fair bit, but it doesn’t feel like a lot. Not as much as I usually read. Then again, it’s been a productive few months, and time with the baby is good. Anyway, here’s what I’ve read since September.

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So Saith Xenophon

If you’re considering tabletop RPG systems and thinking about how XP (experience points) should work, or maybe just thinking about a fresh perspective on how adventurers might see what they’re doing, you could probably do worse than to read some old Greek manuals on hunting: Do not envy those who push ahead rashly for their own advantage, either in their private business or in public affairs. Remember that the best of them, although well thought of, are envied, while the evil ones are both ill thought of and badly off. For they make off with the property of the private citizens and that of …

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The Shin Kyung-Sook Plagiarism Scandal

Given how rampant plagiarism is in many fields in South Korea—and it really, really is, despite some limited attempts to address it—I figured it was only a matter of time until some famous contemporary author here got accused of it… at least, on a stage public and prominent enough for it to make it into the English language news. Well, that finally happened earlier this year, in September… accusation, scandal, flubbed dismissals, and finally an apology… well, sort of. (Kind of a non-apology apology, of the sort that’s very fashionable these days everywhere.) It happened back in September, but I’ve been busy so I’m only posting …

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