Today I read a rather interesting interview with JG Ballard at Salon. It’s mainly about Ballard’s thoughts on his own work and the work of William S. Burroughs, and I found it interesting because he had some very intriguing things to say about what he terms “the bourgeois novel”.
Hesse’s Demian
One night during a discussion between some friends, including my girlfriend, Hermann Hesse’s book Demian came up. One of the things I like about our relationship is that while neither of us simply runs out to read books that the other has read, we sometimes do recommend books to one another and eventually talk about them.
Technique and Politics in Hard SF
In his famous Harper’s piece,“Perchance to
Dream: Reasons to Write Novels in an Age of Images”, the now oft-discussed
Jonathan Franzen articulates his personal motivation for writing literature
in an age where the most powerful media is not print but image-based technology
like TV and film. He starts out the description of a retreat from the world
— a world that his persona in the essay feels has gone mad. He writes:
“I began to think that the most reasonable thing for a citizen to
do might be to enter a monastery and pray for humanity.” This, from
a man who describes his connections with the outside world as “the
twin portals of my TV set and my New York Times subscription.” He
decants nightmares of a Silicon Valley VR-helmet plague, and derides rampant
multiculturalism…
Ankles (Not a Frog)
Okay, so, we’ve graduated to learning the scissor kick, and frog kick (which is which and so forth are less than clear to me at this point). Our teacher is bent on having us understand the leg motion necessary. So imagine this: we’re all kneeling on floaterboards by the edge of the kiddie pool, knees slightly apart, and feet turned to the side. This really really hurts, especially for me… I have such inflexible ankles that I’ve actually had to do tendon-stretching exercises in the past to render walking less painful. And then teacher comes up and reminds us that …
Why No Blogs in Korea?
UPDATE (7 Aug 2015): Having just recovered my blog’s earliest posts and added them to my database, I find myself bewildered reading this. Obviously there were blogs in Korea in 2003—I mention a few—and I was just baffled at how they hadn’t become a mainstream, phenomenon yet in Korea, as they were starting to do in the English-speaking world. Korea caught up, later, and blogs had their day here as in the outside world. Now, everyone knows what blogs are, though they seem to have survived about as poorly in Korea as anywhere—having been slaughtered by Twitter and Facebook (especially the latter). …