The most recent book I’ve read for my pre-Clarion preparations is Brown Girl in the Ring, by Nalo Hopkinson. Because I haven’t had much exposure to the pronunciation and dialect being used by the characters in a lot of the dialogue, I had a lot of trouble hearing the voices clearly in my head. When I heard Hopkinson reading (if you can get this Realaudio stream to open, you can hear her too, reading an excerpt from what I am pretty sure is her second novel, Midnight Robber), it helped me to get a lot better sense of the way …
Category: REVIEWS
Those Percussion Groups
If you’ve ever seen a really tight percussion/performance group, and wondered how they got to be so damned well tight, so deeply in unison, I can tell you. They practiced like mad. Like absolute mad. The dance steps and everything. Outside my window. If I had more time, I would grab some audio and post it. Maybe tomorrow. They’ve been practicing for hours every evening and I’m sure they won’t suddenly stop tomorrow. I’m not complaining, by the way. I can always put music on, and it basically drowns it all out. But it is quite amazing how singlemindedly dedicated …
Pre-Clarion Readings, Part the Next…
I posted quite a while back after I’d read Maureen McHugh’s Half the Day is Night, that I was trying to get through some more books by some of my soon-to-be-teachers. I had a goal of reading two books by each teacher, minimum, by the time I arrive in Seattle, but it’s looking more and more unlikely. McHugh’s not a problem, as I think I’ve read about half of her published body of work — some of Mothers & Other Monsters, Mission Child, and Necropolis (though much of that first book mentioned is available online, and I spent a chunk …
The Rest of Semester
I’ve been looking for a way to work in a podcast into one of my classes, especially the Media English class, but there just wasn’t room this time around. However, I did a slight overhaul of my rest-of-semester-plans with some of my students. Here are the results: Students in my Media English class are making presentations. This is for most of them in lieu of the Media Diaries which they were supposed to start keeping in Week 2, but which most of them never really started. It adds a little to the workload, since they’re supposed to be getting their …
A Cappella and Other Thoughts
Yesterday I attended a concert on campus. There’s a shy girl in one of my writing classes who came to me, ticket in hand, and asked me if I would come and see her sing. She’s a nice kid, and a diligent student, so how could I refuse? Well, it turned out to be a cappella music concert. You know, where vocal groups sing without instrumental accompaniment (aside from a little beatbox work by some of the guys in the ensembles, and that’s still not really instrumental). Now, it may seem strange to those of you who think of groups …
Nebula Awards Winners
An online mailing list post alerted me to the fact that the 2005 Nebula winners were recently announced. Locus has more. Amusingly, more than one of these authors is teaching at Clarion this year… Clarion East. But, hey, that’s just the luck of the draw. The teachers at Clarion West, where I’ll be, have won comparable awards in other years.
NPR : Science Fiction Writers Target Global Warming
I got a reference to this NPR segment on SF writers and global warming from an email notification I’m subscribed to. Worth checking out, except of course for (what passes as) the thoughts from Michael Crichton, who’s too stupid to count. Bleah.
Too Late But Fun
During a marking break, I finally got a chance to experiment with the mashup tool that Yahoo created for the San Francisco International Film Festival. I was too late to be eligible for my video mashup to be entered into the contest and played on the big screen, but it was fun nonetheless. The mashup is in the gallery, and I registered under the name gordsellar. The title of the mashup is “(No electric sheep)” and it’s just a man’s dream about women. Silly, but it was fun to play with this technology. Too late but fun has two meanings, …
Goreans (NOT Koreans)
Salon Chain gang is a look at the disturbing lifestyle being led by some extreme fans of John Norman’s icky, weird, disturbing Gor books. Female slavery and such. It shocks me how such cruddy books could inspire such a weird movement. No, wait, it really doesn’t. I find it very amusing that the dimwits who actually believe the Japanese changed the spelling from Corea to Korea to put the Koreans down (as if they cared about Romanizations!), and who sometimes spell it Gorea for, well, complicated and somewhat silly reasons, now have to contend with a bunch of messed up …
Canadian Music Stars Against DRM
Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlin, Sum 41, and Barenaked Ladies have come out to voice their opinions against DRM.