Category: REVIEWS

Reading the Cantos: A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound by Noel Stock

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This entry is part 35 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Well, the first book I finished (but not the first book I began to read) in 2013 was Noel Stock’s Reading the Cantos: A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound. (It’s a little library hardback, one my soon-to-be-former employer’s library by all rights shouldn’t have on hand, but since they did, I decided to plow through it while I could.) I’m not sure I have much to say about it, though it is a funny little book. At 120 pages, it seeks to tackle the whole of the completed Cantos–those available when it was written in 1967, at least.  However, it …

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26 년

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I haven’t seen a lot of Korean films lately, in part because not much has appealed to me. However, if you’re like me, and you like good Korean films but haven’t seen many for a while, the film you should check out is called 26 년. (Which, for those of you who speak just a little Korean, translates as “26 Years,” not “26 Bitches.”) Here’s a video on Youtube with some animations made straight from the original art:It’s the long-awaited awaited cinematic adaptation of a popular webcomic by a Korean artist called Kangfull (강풀); readers of my series on Korean …

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Xander and Anya, Willow and Tara, Giles and Jenny and that Woman Who’s Scared Off…

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So Miss Jiwaku and I finished watching the full series of Buffy The Vampire Slayer — it was her first time all the way through, and my second — a few weeks ago. I tried to sum up the experience, but it was pretty difficult. Hundreds of hours of fairly iconic TV don’t really boil down so easily as all that. There’s a lot I could talk about, but I figure I can post a few different things as they come to me, or as they come to me.

Today, what I’m interested is “nonstandard” relationships, and how I see them explored in the show.

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On Le Sacre, Oedipus Rex, and Igor Stravinsky

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This week, I had the students who are studying Ancient Greek and Roman Mythology and Biblical Narrative check out a couple of works by Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (the ballet) Oedipus Rex (the opera-oratorio) For Oedipus, we watched the one-hour DVD of the Seiji Ozawa production (the one with Jessye Norman) in class; for the other, I had them check out The Rite on  Youtube — it’s one of the productions in which the performers did they best to reenact Nijinsky’s original choreography, and they also attempted to resurrect — as faithfully as possible — the original costumes …

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On Modernizing/Adapting Myths, James Bond as Odysseus, and On the Undead Archetype

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Sometimes, when you’re teaching, you learn things. The other day, in my Greek Mythology and Biblical Narrative course, we had a discussion interesting enough that I feel like I learned a few interesting things. Figured I’d share: On Modernizing/Adapting Myths: In class, I was discussing the idea of archetypal figures with students in my mythology course, in the context of adapting ancient Greek mythology to a modern setting. We were specifically discussing their homework from a week before, which involved writting up synopses of their own for an imaginary adaptation of The Odyssey to a modern (post-1950) Korean setting. (They’d just …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XLVIII

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This entry is part 34 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. These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind for a fiction project I’d like to write next year. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series. After a long hiatus, this post picks up again toward the end of The Fifth Decad of Cantos (also sometimes called …

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Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, and Some Thoughts on Culture-Specific Modes of Reading

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Last semester, a student of mine gave me a paperback copy of the English translation of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. It was a very kind gesture, and I appreciated it very much. This whole culture of gifting professors–sometimes before exams, which is a little uncomfortable, but more often after–is rather nice. I’ll be honest, though: while some mainstream Korean literature I’ve found enjoyable, a lot of it leaves me kind of cold, for reasons that remind me of things my own students say when I ask them to interpret texts. I find that the standard mode of …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XLVI-XLVII

gordsellar4 Comments
This entry is part 33 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. These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind for a fiction project I’d like to write next year. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series. This post continues with The Fifth Decad of Cantos (also sometimes called the “Leopoldine” Cantos), specifically Cantos XLVI-XLVII (and for more …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XLII-XLV

gordsellar2 Comments
This entry is part 32 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. These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind for a fiction project I’d like to write next year. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series. This post (several days late, though that’s becoming a pattern this semester) deals with the first four cantos of …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XL-XLI

gordsellar0 Comments
This entry is part 31 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. These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind for a fiction project I’d like to write next year. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series. This post (several days late, as I was drafting a screenplay earlier this week) brings us to the end …

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