Tag: KOREA

Linkery, Linkery…

gordsellar8 Comments

I have a huge list of links marked “to post” which, to be honest, I find kind of daunting. I used to post links a lot more, but lately my blog is mostly devoted to housing my ongoing project, Blogging Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, along  with occasional posts on SF or Korea-related issues. But I have had a few tabs open on my browser for over a week, which seem worth posting to me, and having been delayed for my critique group’s meeting by an annoying fridge-related disaster (though less delayed than another member), I am now sitting in a …

Continue Reading

Anti-English Spectrum vs. the Asiatic Exclusion League

gordsellar7 Comments

For those who think that the Anti-English Spectrum fanatics are bad, well, I agree. I personally think they’re a significant part of the reason why Korean society, which used to be pretty positive towards Westerners on a one-on-one level, has gotten increasingly hostile with every passing year I’ve spent here. (And yes, I’ll stand by that statement, in terms of my subjective experience, though I’ll also admit some of that has to do with my neighborhood and personal disenchantment.) I’d also say it’s part of the reason a video like this one (yes, it’s the MBC “Shocking Truth About Relationships With Foreigners” …

Continue Reading

Koreanizing Lovecraft (on a Budget)

gordsellar12 Comments
This entry is part 13 of 15 in the series Making "The Music of Jo Hyeja"

I’m still thinking this over, since I first mentioned it last January. Had an interesting talk on a couple of weekends ago with some of my Korean SF-fan friends about Lovecraft, the contents of which surprised me. I though ol’ H.P. was popular here, given that a large number of his works had been translated and published — in some cases, there are collections containing some of the same stories, worked over by different translators, put out by different publishers, even. But I was told that Lovecraft hasn’t really caught on in any appreciable way, which also makes it hard …

Continue Reading

Some “Interesting Videos” From (Or Related To) Japan and Korea

gordsellar2 Comments

Note: I’m cleaning out link folders — folders full of stuff marked “to post,” and will probably post a pile of goodies every week for a while… First of all: while I’m not really nuts for anyone’s pop music, the ardent praise and fandom of K-pop has always baffled me. K-pop has always struck me as a boiled down version of a watered-down version of Western and Japanese mainstream pop junk. Which is to say, I don’t usually have much nice to say about American and Japanese pop music either, though sometimes… well, sometimes you at least end up hearing …

Continue Reading

Heatstroke (Not the Music)

gordsellar0 Comments

No, not the piano piece I composed as an undergrad, when I didn’t know how to write music for piano. I mean actual heatstroke. I’m probably not heatstricken right now, but I sure felt like I was in the very early stages of it this afternoon: I was headachey and hot and needed to sit somewhere cool and where I went to buy water there was no cold water, and and and… (Hence, this rambling post. Though, also, I am testing whether my Twitter account is going to repost with the right image from now on.) But we finally found …

Continue Reading