Kingbaeksu has a review that basically eviscerates, with clear, sensible logic, that “What’s So Good About Korea, Maarten?” book that’s been on shelves for a while. I was put off by the white guy wrapped in the Korean flag (you can see the cover at the link above) and the contents look pretty poor too. Repeating the blather you’ve heard from friends is no way to write a book. A blog, maybe, but not a book. However, there are some good books recommended at the bottom of the page. I think I’ll bear that list in mind next time I …
Category: REVIEWS
Ask, Receive
Lately, I have thought about asking whether anyone reading this site knew of films about Indians that are not Bollywood films. What do you know? Bruce Sterling recently posted a link to filmholic, where I found links to some titles! Easy as that! And worth viewing, for a first pass, isthe film linked here, which is “Pria”, a story about an Indian-Canadian girl who tries to lose her accent in order to meet the boy of her dreams. I’m considering playing it for students who worry so much about sounding like a “native speaker”.
The Wrong Guy
I’m probably the wrong guy to be teaching about punk rock & the Sex Pistols. The most wrong guy that could ever be found, perhaps. But I’m doing it anyway, and boy am I grateful that I ordered that Greil Marcus book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. And that I didn’t get rid of it the first time I tried (unsuccessfully) to read it. I may actually meander my way through the whole thing sometime soon. It’s interesting, if a bit circumstantial at points. UPDATE: As if on cue, I came across something at Antti’s site, …
NPR on Writers’ Creative Process
NPR has a report up containing interviews with various writers about their creative processes. No SF people jumped out at me when I glanced at it, though when I check it out later today, I may find I was wrong. Hat tip to the esteemed Jodi of The Asia Pages.
Disconnections
Two separate forms of disconnection, I’m on about here. One, I’m reading Pico Iyer, on the recommendation of ___, and the other, I’m getting annoyed with some kind of glitch in my on-campus net service. Getting internet connection for free is cool. Sort of. It’s cool when it works, but for the last few days, it’s only been working sort-of. Connection drops out for a little while, or else I get flagged as having a virus — ha, yeah, the Ubuntu Linux system is so vulnerable to computer viruses! The University server seems to think that continuous connection with updates, …
The Cremation of Sam McGee
Good narration of this spooky Robert Service poem linked over at Ruminations in Korea. Click here to check it out. It certainly put me back in the drafting mood for my own spooky, nasty arctic story.
한국 리포트 (Korea Report) by 왕 샤오링 (Wang Xiaoling)
Lime, my girlfriend, was reading a book by a Chinese exchange student named Wang Xiaoling (I’m guessing, from the Hangeul 왕 샤오링?) who’d visited Korea, called 한국 리포트 (Korea Report). She was quite excited to find another Asian voice criticizing Korea in the way she does, personally, and doesn’t see others around her doing. Generally speaking, I, of course, cannot read the book. (I did trudge through a couple of passages she pointed out to me, but the whole thing would be waaaay too hard for me.) But I can repeat a few of the things that Lime translated to me with glee. …
Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin
This review is what I posted over at Allconsuming, where I track all my book-reading and other media consumption these days… Whatever you think of Le Guin’s other works (I must admit to only having read a few of them myself), Changing Planes is not one that changes the canon of SF/fantasy forever. However, it’s unreasonable to expect that of any writer’s every volume, and Le Guin has certainly earned her name elsewhere. Besides, not being a great classic doesn’t mar what this book actually is… which is, a great, fun, amusing, and very imaginative romp through a bunch of …
Go go go Haruki!
Well, there you go, Haruki Murakami has Japanese received the Kafka Prize. Good for him, I think he deserves it for The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, if nothing else. Lime bought me a copy of After the Quake the other day and I’m looking forward to it, let me tell you. (Via Writing Under a Pseudonym).
Sometimes I think of Olaf Stapledon…
You know, the guy who wrote Star Maker, that novel in which a man wondering if all intelligent species just destroy themselves is taken on a trip through spacetime to see that, indeed, they probably do. Sometimes the news puts me in mind of him, and I wonder what he’d say or write if he saw this: THE SPECTRE of a nuclear race in the Middle East was raised yesterday when six Arab states announced that they were embarking on programmes to master atomic technology. Then again, there’s always Martin Rees.