Category: REVIEWS

What do the Starfish Think?

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I haven’t made an update here for the last few weeks, and a lot of long-promised (albeit probably not long-expected) posts languish unfinished. People are probably wondering if I went for a swim in the ocean and didn’t come back. Rest assured: I fear the ocean as much as I ever did, and am safe and (mostly) dry… just busy. That’s the nature of job-hunting, and it’s a bit like writing: lots of sitting at a computer fiddling with details, hoping your intended meaning comes across, sending things off into the void and then waiting for responses… so you send out more things …

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Baude Cordier, Pando, and The Lifecycle of Radical Music

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The composition on the left is “Belle, bonne, sage,” composed by Baude Cordier, a musician who fell into the “Ars subtilior” school — that is, the “more subtle” school of music, which flourished briefly right around the end of the 14th century, in southern France and Northern Spain: you’ll see some sources call that “late medieval” and others “early Renaissance,” though I think of it as the former in most terms… but in music, it’s kind of a toss-up, or rather, at that time and place, music straddles the divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The comparative (“more subtle”) refers to the Ars …

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Hidden Treasures…

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Having just finished Jim Baker’s The Cunning Man’s Handbook (which I discussed earlier here, and mentioned in passing here: it’s a big book, so I’d been reading it for a while now) I can say that big chunks of history suddenly make a lot more sense to me. For one thing, the constant fascination with hidden treasure. Basically, a lot of people seemed to think of the world as if it were some kind of Monty Haul D&D campaign: at least in the English speaking world, the idea that there were hidden caches of treasure everywhere was bizarrely common, to the point where treasure hunting was a significant part of …

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On Clueless Criticism

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There are these wasabi rice crackers available at my local convenience store. They’re great… provided you know how to eat them. One or two at a time, they’re not particularly spicy: they taste pretty good, they have only the faintest kick, and a small serving more than sates my appetite for snacks. Of course, if you eat more than three at a time, well, then they’re insane: the pain, the panic, the dizzying wasabi fumes pouring up into your sinuses, the flailing for the nearest cup of anything to dilute the wasabi and cut short that incredible pain. I should know: I have, many times, inflicted that pain on myself when snacking while distracted. …

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Recent Books

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I’ve been reading a fair bit this year, as far as my standards go. More than usual, anyway. This is everything so far, though, of course, a few of those I gave up on and didn’t finish: I’ve been feeling a little disappointed lately in how so much of the SFF world online is so busy talking about scandals and outrages that we never seem to talk about the books anymore. Short stories, too, but, well, that’s for another post. So I figured: do my bit. Post about what I’ve read lately. Part of why I stopped was because–on some very bad …

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Clueless Reviews, Complicit Academics, and Hallyu Nationalism

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Update (1 May 2015): My more formal review of The Korean Popular Culture Reader was published in Kyoto Journal 82, for those interested. Original Post: First, the clueless book reviewer: I’ve submitted my own review already–it’s apparently somewhere along the process toward becoming forthcoming, over at The Kyoto Journal–and I can say  found the book disappointing, but not for the same reasons as Bradley Winterton: I am sorry to have to say it, but The Korean Popular Culture Reader is close to the most disappointing book I have ever had to review. Not long ago I found myself engrossed in a Korean TV …

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The Newest Mind Meld, and Peter Watts’ Blindsight

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Just poking my head up above the surface to note that I participated in the most recent Mind Meld, addressing this question: Humans with funny foreheads are easy; truly alien aliens are hard. With that in mind, here’s what we asked our panel of experts: Q: What successfully makes an alien character, well, really alien? A bunch of authors responded. Also, I did (somewhat at length). Interesting stuff.  You’ll notice Peter Watts’ Blindsight gets prominent mention here. It just so turned out to be the book I was reading when the invitation to participate showed up in my email, and, well, was perfectly …

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Monk, Amblyopia & All

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Wanting to check one detail about Monk’s life, I picked up my copy of Straight, No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk by Leslie Gourse, and searched… and an hour later, I discovered I’d happily read a big chunk of the book. So far it’s a very balanced treatment, from what I can tell: Gourse doesn’t shy away from the few unpleasant things that come up, but doesn’t dwell on the either. It’s not a particularly musical biography, so far: no analysis of Monk’s music. (There’s more of that in Gabriel Solis’ Monk’s Music, which I’d dive into next if it weren’t …

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Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722)

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I’ve read a lot the last few months, and not posted much about the novels I’ve finished, but I’ll make an exception for this… and for one nonfiction book on governesses, which I’ll get to later this month. (And a few thoughtful posts on novels I wasn’t crazy about, which… well, they’ll go up eventually, I suppose, if they seem worth it when I revisit them.) Moll Flanders was an enjoyable enough book, once I got past the way novels were written in that time, which is to say, once I got past the lack of any kind of expository description of anything. Sure, Swift does …

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Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

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Well, I’m still at about page fifty of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which is an entertaining book so far, but which is nonetheless a bit slow going: the sentence structures take some getting used to, to say the least. I’ve temporarily abandoned ship to reread Gulliver’s Travels (for the first time since childhood), another popular Georgian novel and one with much less tangled prose. Still, I do intend to continue with Tristram Shandy–and for that matter Moll Flanders–once Gulliver’s finished his travels. I only made an effort to see Michael Winterbottom’s film adaptation of the former, titled A Cock and Bull …

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