Well, no, wait, that sound better than it is. I just like the sound of that line, sung to the tune of a rather objectionable song but it always reminds me of the Agatha Christie novel title… So far I have three papers to present this fall. Two are within the space of a week and a couple of days, down in Melbourne at the beginning of September — one on ecology, politics, and dystopia in The Host at the annual Utopias conference hosted by Monash, and one on a couple of diverse uses of SF in the Korean classroom …
Tag: academia
Clarion West Write-a-Thon, 2010: Sponsor Me!
Well, the Write-A-Thon has been going, and I’ve been writing like crazy — but it has been, and this is very appropriate, essentially “crits” for my students’ essays and Creative Writing portfolios. But I’ve also been wading through the last of my grading for final exams — final exams finished just a little under a week ago — and I’ve also been waiting for my Write-A-Thon profile to show up on the site, so that I could solilcit some sponsorships. Well, it’s up now, so if you feel like sponsoring me, here’s where to go! Basically, the deal is: I’m …
One abstract out… one to go (later).
Well, that’s one of two paper abstracts sent out. The deadline was the end of the month. This one I particularly want to get accepted, as it’s the WorldCon in Melbourne this fall. We’ll see what happens! (It’s basically a presentation of how (sometimes) I use SF in my classes not only to teach about the role of SF in American culture, but also to teach about American or global Anglo culture more generally, and also to throw current events in Korea into a kind of comparative relief to get students to look at, and talk about, things from a …
Cut, Cut, Cut, and Another Review of “Sarging Rasmussen”
Well, today is not a particularly interesting day: I spent much of it cutting text. (I’ll spend the rest of it on laundry, steaming my floors with my new steamer vacuum, probably watching the remaining two-thirds of the Bollywood film Krrish, maybe having a coffee with the espresso machine that arrived today to replaced my previous, broken machine, and avoiding seed fruit, nuts, brown rice, and beans–because I’ve have an upset digestive system for most of the time since I got back from Indonesia, and am going to go to the hospital Monday morning to undergo, yes, basically the same …
When ATMs Attack, or, How Things are Going in Depok/Jakarta
I’ll be going back to Jakarta tomorrow because a certain ATM has decided to swallow my Samsung Card (a credit card) and not spit it out again. Put the card in the machine, watch it crash, watching Windows reboot (with the Diebold brand name proudly displayed, of course!)… quite a sad sight. The first time it happened was a week ago, and I thought it was a freak accident. Turns out, no, not at all. Samsung Cards crash BNC ATM machines in Jakarta, it seems. Or at least, at the mall I was at. Other than that, things are going …
What’s Your Major, Mr. Hippocampus?
A discussion of Steven Pinker in the comments for my last post brought up a memory from grad school, and I thought I’d post it here. I was sitting in the little coffee shop/diner place across from the Second Cup on du Parc, up in the McGill Ghetto in Montreal. It was basically my favorite place for a light meal, and I always had a samosa and a calzone — usually chicken, sometimes beef or veg. This time, I’d met up with my friend Chiraz and we were having coffee and talking. Somehow, I got onto the subject of the …
A “Sense of WTF?”
I’m one tiny little paragraph away from completing a draft of my paper which, well, I can’t quite call it the first draft. It’s more like draft v2.1. I wrote most of it once before, realized it sucked in structure and voice, restarted with a totally different voice but a similar (though subtly reworked) structure, and then filled in soe of the holes I’d left gaping in the first draft. I’ve edited so much of it already, though, that I anticipate only a half-day next week for editing, which means, once I finish this final paragraph, I’m free, free, free! …
The Singularity Ate My Homework and Other Database Wrestling
My employer doesn’t have good access to any of the fulltext databases with literature stuff (like MUSE or JSTOR). While it looks like this might get rectified in the next while, I am not going to be able to get my hands on this article. Which, in case you’re lazy, is titled “The Singularity Ate My Homework and Other Reasons I Can’t Predict the Future” by Ariel Mameon. It was published in the New York Review of Science Fiction back in 2004, is apparently available in the Texas A&M database. Or am I misunderstanding the listing? I’m wanting a look …
All Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Future Shock (1970) by Alvin Toffler
(Note: The “today” I mentioned at the beginning of this post was on April 21st. This has sat in the drafts pile for a while.) Today, I happened to pick up a copy of the 1970 futurist classic Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. This being Korea, there’s never a shortage of Toffler books around: the author’s tenure as an advisor to Kim Dae Jung seems to have ensured an enduring reputation here. (The library where I work even has a Korean translation of the book! I wonder how faithful the translation was, as well as how some of the, er, …
From an email
Yes, this is from a real email: Ha, I love saying, “hack my way into JSTOR”: it’s so mildly subversive and so painfully academic at the same time. Like painting academic graffiti (with in-text citations) on a library wall or something. If you’d shown me this when I was in high school and told me I’d written it, I’m not sure I would even have understood it, let alone gotten any enjoyment out of such a glimpse of my future self. As an undergrad? Oh my, I can imagine how dumbstruck I would have been. And now? Muhahaha. My, how …