That’s right, we got us an Ezra Pound study group going. It’s Chullsung, Jason, and me on Monday afternoons spelunking (and then trying to dig out way out of) his Bible-sized book of poems — or, you could say, his pagan-Biblical poem — The Cantos, starting 1:15pm weekly. Next week is Cantos 1-3, including earlier drafts if we can get our hands on ’em. I’m excited. (I think I’ll bring the relevant bit from The Odyssey as well, if I can find it among my books… but I think I left The Odyssey in Canada, and only have The Iliad …
Category: BOOKS & AUTHORS
Thomas Disch Interview @ Strange Horizons
I’m not really into his fiction, but I liked his treatise on contemporary poetry a few years back. Interview.
‘nother good link
I need to add BOOKFORUM to my list of links worth checking out even though they don’t have an RSS feed.
Foreign Fiction About Korea
I don’t often get a chance to stick something in the two categories Korea and Lit, so I’m excited. Here’s a list of short fiction about Korea in English. It’s mainly by non-Koreans… and the list also includes a link to a similar page for novels in English about the Korean War. That’d make an interesting area for some Korean lit major in which to draft a doctoral thesis, I bet: foreign depictions of Korea through the lens of war.
What I’m Reading Now: Dickens Surprise and the Roots of Protestant Korean Ecstatic Rites
Quick Note: That “and” in the title isn’t meant to suggest a connection between Charles Dickens and evangelical Christianity in Korea. There might be such a link, somewhere—hell, one of Dickens’ sons came to Canada and worked for the government, who’s to say someone else from his life didn’t end up in East Asia?—but I’m not posting any such thing. Although I have two other books on the go—The Golden Ass, a brilliant and hilarious Roman tale by Lucius Apuleius “Africanus”, and Philip E. Baruth’s political SF satire The X President—I have also taken the time to dig into a …
What The Hell’s The Deal With Ian McDonald’s River of Gods?
The book’s been highly praised, widely reviewed, and yet most of the bookshops I checked for it at (in Canada) had never even had it in stock at any point in time. Moreover, now that I’m asking an excellent book order service about it here, I’m told that it’s actually out of print! How can such a good book already have gone out of print? It’s insane. Well, maybe they’re changing the rights or reprinting it or something? Oh, wait: no, it’s just that the release in the states is simply years behind the release elsewhere, according to the author’s …
Pini Blog
If the names Richard and Wendy Pini don’t ring a bell, you probably won’t need to follow this link; if the names are familiar, yes, they have a blog. And they’re still working on stories set in the same world. (Not my kind of thing, but I suppose some people liked it, and I guess I did for a short stretch as a kid.) I tell you, sooner or later everyone will have a blog. Everyone. Including you, if you don’t yet have one.
Old News About Andre Norton
Blog of Death had an entry in march for Andre Norton, who passed away earlier this year. I am a few months late, and have nothing much to add: I wasn’t a fan of her writing, personally, though I’d only tried a couple of novels at the time I decided that. But the woman did write a lot, and publish a lot, and she was a woman of SF, which get her kudos in my book.
Book Meme
Thieved from Ritu’s place… 1)Total number of books owned? I have no bloody idea, but it took a serious hit because about five boxes were lost in transit, and even the pittance of insurance offered was never collected upon. In my apartment in Korea I have about 230 books, plus about 20-odd on loan to different people around the country. I think I must have thrice that at home. Of the 230 in my house now, I’ve half-read about 30 (especially omnibus editions like the collected HG Wells, Douglas Adams’ omnibus HHGG, and so forth) and fully read about 60 …
Tolkien Summary for Lazy Students
For those students who always turn up asking people for summaries of Lord of the Rings for book reports, here is an excellent summary. I mean, who has time to read such a long trilogy?