Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LV (Plus, What Do Ezra Pound, Robert Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Sun Ra Have In Common?)

This entry is part 42 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. This post continues my work on the “Chinese” Cantos, covering Canto LV, but may also interest people more interested in SF, fantasy, and so on. It includes a discussion of some pulp and weird authors contemporaneous to Pound, such as Robert Howard (specifically Conan) and Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. The puzzle, here, is a question: What does Pound’s Chinese Cantos have in …

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Why Lewbowski?

Well, Mrs. Jiwaku and I have become really big fans of the Coen Brothers. We’ve been watching their films, thinking about the structure and mode they use, and re-watching the ones we saw too far back to remember well, as well as checking out the ones we’d not gotten to yet. One thing I can say is that these guys buck the trend. Even with a picture like The Ladykillers, which in my opinion doesn’t quite hang together as it should, there’s plenty to enjoy, the characters are colorful, their collective fates well-deserved. I mean, a recurring gag where characters …

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One Coin, Two Sides: An Addendum

By the way, in case it sounds like I was only talking about other people in yesterday’s post, I wasn’t. Even in the specific subject of writing for kids, I’m as guilty as anyone, though of course I end up crusading against the madness of Kitty Farmer, and in league with the likes of Ms. Pomeroy: Here’s some proof: A couple of years ago I collaborated with a colleague of mine (Haeyoung Kim) on a series of educational books titled Reading Street. (I posted about the books when they first came out, here.) One of the artists who contributed to the …

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One Coin, Two Sides: Children’s Literature and Censorship

So, I’ve been working with a Korean writer who is trying to branch out into writing kid’s books in English, and to writing fiction. So far, she’s mainly written nonfiction stuff–educational books–but now that she’s in Saigon, she feels like she has the time and freedom to branch out into fiction. It’s been pretty interesting to go through the basics with her, week after week, because so much of what’s true of kid’s fiction is true of all fiction. Characters, motivations, story problems… they’re all there. Kidlit is sometimes a little more directly allegorical, and sometimes is a little more …

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Jazz Spoken Here (Incoherently)

Last night I dreamed I was playing in a transtemporal big band, on tenor sax. Next to me, Duke Ellington, on… trombone. (He said he took it up for the challenge, because he already knew everything he was ever gonna know about the piano. “… and the trombone’s humble.”) We were in Korea, playing a gig in Seoul sometime in the ‘oughts (we were time travelers, remember?), and I was asked to speak about my time in the country. I was honest, talking about the good and the bad, which didn’t seem to entertain the audience much; when I looked …

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The Terror Live (2013) and Killer Toon (2013)

I’ve seen a couple of Korean movies lately worth commenting on. Those in Korea are probably too late to see this on the big screen, and those outside Korea may not get a chance, but anyway, Mrs. Jiwaku and I saw the 2013 Korean film The Terror Live this evening. My general thoughts on The Terror Live were very positive, despite having to make do with my iffy (and waning) Korean-language listening skills. (Probably seeing it at the cinema where we saw it–the Lotte Cinema at Lotte Mart–was the mistake; when I watched another Korean blockbuster a week ago at a …

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A Serving of Links

A sampling of what I’ve been digging into lately. Books: Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? Remember how those Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone added die rolls and character information to that paradigm? Now imagine reading one and not having to flip from one page to another. Imagine one that takes advantage of all the possibilities of ebooks. Is this new version of Dave Morris’ classic Heart of Ice what you imagined?  (I haven’t read it yet, but it’s getting rave reviews, and I plan on checking it out.) R.H. Kanakia presents: a Taxonomy of Readers. I’m …

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On Enigma

Jenny Greenteeth image

For the last few days, I’ve been taking medicine for an ear infection I suddenly developed. It’s not completely clear what caused the infection: contamination of the water in the pool where I swim is possible, but it’s just as likely that it’s a side effect of a particular asthma medication I’ve been taking. In any case, it’s not completely resolved, but it is a lot better than it was… yesterday, I was worried my eardrum might burst from the pressure, but today it’s almost normal again. (On the one side, at least.) Anyway, as a result, I’ve been unable …

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