Damn, I fall behind on blogs and the rest of the world, and then this happens. I found out because weeks ago Ellen Datlow posted about Thomas Disch’s passing, and a particularly saddening way of going. Of course, I never met him. In fact, I’d only read a few of Disch’s books — 334 being the only novel, partly because it depressed me so, in an already-depressing time, but I also very much enjoyed his SF history The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of quite recently (here’s what I had to say about it) and, back in grad school, his …
Category: REVIEWS
Zombie Scholarship
Not the we-give-you-money-because-you’re-the-most-deserving-zombie kind, but rather the scholarly-work-in-the-subject kind. There’s a call for essays on scholarly perspectives on the zombie for an anthology. I’m thinking I know a few people who might be interested. (Yeah, Ben, I thinking of you, even if you’re not a litcrit guy, as it’s interdisciplinary and all that. Though “paraconsistent logic + zombies” might be a harder fit for a scholarly essay than for a short story, one of the editors is a philosophy prof!) More details in the extended post.
PiFan Book Fair: SF/Fantasy/Horror/Thriller novels and Magazines… in Korean!
Well, I was told I could pick up my tickets at the ticket booth today, but of course, I couldn’t. Somehow, though, I ended up at City Hall and noticed a huge display of books and magazines near the ticket booth. It turned out to be the biggest collection of Korean SF, thriller, suspense, and horror novels I’ve ever seen. I had already picked up some of the books, but I still managed to grab the following titles (in translation) for Lime: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (in hardback) Odd John by …
Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind by Gerald Graff
This is, basically, an excellent book. Make a gift of it to those you know who are decision makers in departments. Read it if you want to help make things better for your students. More for those who want details, as well as my reflections on a few of the things I learned reading it, but for most of you who are teaching in departments (in Korea) where students actually have enough English to learn, you know, academic stuff, or for those teaching in the mother tongue of their students: trust me! Order it! Go! Now! University EFL teachers in …
To Unpredictable Passions: Yeşil Grena/yoonsookjin, Lip-Syncher of Turkish Tunes
(LJ readers, pop on over to my site to read this post if the videos I embed beneath the cut aren’t working… LJ sometimes takes the videos in stride, and sometimes hates my embedding anything….) At some point or other I stumbled onto the existence of a Korean by the name (or pseudonym?) of Yoon Sook Jin (usually written yoonsookjin) who achieved some degree of fame online doing those sing-along webcam type videos which, since the dawn of Youtube, have been competing with cat photographs for how much bandwidth can be, er, used up in unentertaining entertainment. But you know, …
Christopher Hitchens Visits Room 101
Hitchens wrote a book about Why Orwell Matters. Looks like he learned one of the lessons of Nineteen-Eighty-Four during his own trip to Room 101. Here is what he had to say about it.
From Paris to New York… by Land?!?!?
I was browsing Manybooks.net’s new additions, and I happened upon this: Many who read the following account of our long land journey will not unnaturally ask: “What was the object of this stupendous voyage, or the reward to be gained by this apparently unnecessary risk of life and endurance of hardships?” I would reply that my primary purpose was to ascertain the feasibility of constructing a railway to connect the chief cities of France and America, Paris and New York. — From Paris to New York by Land, by Harry de Windt (1903) Eh? A transatlantic railway? Oh, no, they …
V and the Protesters
Some of the protesters have been using references to V for Vendetta during the demonstrations. Turns out Scott went up and talked to them, and asked whether they knew that V is an anarchist, or that the V sign is an inverted anarchy symbol. They didn’t. Scott thinks they’re “retards” who are guilty of “ethnocentric cultural misappropriation,” and that “they think that going to a massive anti-government demonstration is cosplay and means nothing serious in the end…” and that I’m being patronizing in excusing this. I disagree. Wanna know why?
Bad Run at Cinema
By the way, since I want to say this: What a crappy month it’s been for films in the cinema. I hadn’t gone in some time, but of the three films I saw, only Kung-Fu Panda amused me. Actually, it was good fun, once you got beyond the feelgoodishness of it all. I mean, it was very nicely animated and had some funny bits, some cool imagery — man, that scene with Master Oogway the turtle and the peach blossoms, man — and all that badass Tai Lung business, that was some fun, even if I was snickering (inwardly, always, …
Voix Angelique
One of the things I miss, over here in Korea, is how few really interesting foreign acts come and do shows here — at least, how few of such shows are accessible to me, given my schedule and given the range of what comes here. There’s no demand here for, say, a group like the Trevor Watts Moiré Music Group, or, say, for someone like Pandit Ulhas Bapat to drop in on Seoul. Once, long ago when I still lived in Montréal, I got the chance to see Salif Keita live. Which, my friends, if you don’t know how cool …