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 the series. This post picks up again (after another hiatus–I was busy for the last few weeks) one step closer to the end of The Fifth Decad of Cantos (also sometimes called the “Leopoldine” Cantos). Today I’ll be specifically dealing with Canto L, the penultimate Leopoldine Canto.
As I mentioned on Twitter the other day, I recently finished a draft of a weird novella with the working title, “In the Company of Distillers.” I guess the best way to explain the story is that it’s set in London at that part of the 18th century Gin Craze just prior to the government’s second attempt (and the first serious one) at Gin Prohibition… As far as the makeup of the story, it’s probably easiest to explain it more like the way one does a gin-based cocktail, that is, in the form of a recipe: two parts alchemy one …
The Muppets have been on my mind, ever since Mrs. Jiwaku started working on a painting which is, essentially, a mash-up of the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink with Jim Henson’s Muppet characters. And you’ll probably be wondering what The Muppets have to do with bigotry, though I swear, if you stick with it, it’ll make sense. (And no, I’m not talking about the recent Muppet movie and racial coding of characters. I’m talking about Jim Henson as a political subversive, something I talked about in my classes, but am pretty sure I haven’t posted about here before.)
Marc Laidlaw recently shared a link on Facebook to a post on “Good Writing vs. Talented Writing”over on Brainpickings featuring some ideas by Samuel Delany. Essentially, Delany draws a line between “good writing” and superior “talented writing”: The talented writer often uses specifics and avoids generalities — generalities that his or her specifics suggest. Because they are suggested, rather than stated, they may register with the reader far more forcefully than if they were articulated. Using specifics to imply generalities — whether they are general emotions we all know or ideas we have all vaguely sensed —is dramatic writing. A trickier proposition …
New as of right now: my long-delayed review of B.R. Myers’ The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters is out in the current issue of the Kyoto Journal (#77). Though the title is goofy — “Minjok Mama Madness! and Other Fairytales From North of the 49th Parallel” — the subject is serious, and the review is overall quite positive. My review isn’t in the online preview, though, so you’ll have to get a copy of this fine journal in order to read it. I’m enjoying my contributor’s copy, and can recommend the issue (and the journal) without …
… that seems to be cropping up these days, it’s not a post-80s world we live in. It’s in the shadow of the Baby Boomer Generation that we dwell, today: their politics, their economics, their morality, their paradigm. This insight I ran across on the Ivebeenreading blog in a post about a piece elsewhere where Kent Jones “takes after Quentin Tarantino for a poorly thought-out slam of John Ford.” It’s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; …
A long time ago, I started a planned series of posts that didn’t go very far, drawing some parallels between the England of the Gin Craze era (the early 1700s) and Korea in the first decade of the 21st century. I’m still not feeling like continuing it, but I am reading up on the Gin Craze (right now, working my way through Patrick Dillon’s wonderful Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva–The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze) as I continue working on a short story set during that period, and a number of things have struck me as fascinating. So fascinating, indeed, …
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 the series. After a very long hiatus, this post picks up again toward the end of The Fifth Decad of Cantos (also sometimes called the “Leopoldine” Cantos), specifically dealing with Canto XLIX–also known as the “Seven Lakes” canto.
This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series. In Part 3 of this series, I insisted that I actually do consume some of what everyone surely agrees is “popular music” by my definition of it–a hybrid form of performance art incorporating not just music but other performing arts, from theater and narrative storytelling and verse to fashion, makeup, dance, and more hyperreal narrative arts that are relatively new to the world, such as video and internet presence-management. But I also insisted that …
This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series. When my family moved from Nova Scotia to Saskatchewan, I had a pretty hard time of it. Understatement of my life, but it’ll do. The move began a long period of having the shit kicked out of me, and then struggling to find a way to fit into a youth culture I didn’t really understand. I was almost certainly dealing with PTSD from all the violence; I was definitely emotionally a mess; I was …