Category: REVIEWS

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

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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

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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

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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

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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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Team Sports and Values?

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I always find it funny, seeing parents talk about the value of team sports: they’re always, always people who play team sports as adults, and how they loved playing them as kids. That’s fine, and I don’t contest that a kid can, while playing a team sport, develop his or her teamwork skills, discipline, understanding of the virtue of sacrifice, and grasp of the value of hard work. But… I value those same things, though I didn’t enjoy—and never really played—team sports after elementary school (and even in grade school, I never played them much). So then where did I pick up those values? The …

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The Novelist

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The Novelist—developed and published by Kent Hudson/Orthogonal Games—is an interesting and only slightly flawed game. When I heard about it, it was characterized as kind of a take on The Shining—the Kubrick film, more than the King novel—in that it involves a novelist and his family in an isolated house shared by an invisible presence. There’s one big difference: the viewpoint character that you play in the game is the ghost. Well, sort of. 

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Deadwood and Order

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As our baby has grown a bit, his needs and demands have shifted, so I’m trying to ease off watching TV and focus on him more, but for the first couple of months I found myself casting about for something to do while burping and feeding him, since he didn’t really engage much and “Aww, cute!” is less effective when you’re dead tired. Since reading was tough with both hands full, I set about catching up on TV series I’d missed over the years. More recently, I finished Mad Men, which… well, I’ll save that for another post, but before that it was Deadwood. After …

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My 2015 Readings

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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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How Do You Play Careless Whisper on the Sax?

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Ah, the things people on Quora ask sometimes: Read Gord Sellar's answer to How do you play Careless Whisper on sax? on Quora I haven’t been asked to do this often, to be honest. Once in a while someone will bring up Kenny G to me, and I’ll have to explain that Kenny G is sort of the M. Night Shyamalan of the saxophone world. (There’s a good bass solo—as in a fairly “metal” one, in fact—on the Kenny G Live album. We have now reached the limits of nice things I’m wiling to say about Kenny G and his …

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The Books of September-December 2015

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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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