Tag: research

Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXIV

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This entry is part 51 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Okay, time to get my shoulder back to the wheel, I think. I’m making another try at returning to the Cantos. It’s been a busy time, but not so busy I can’t do this a few days a week in the morning, as a warm-up to my own writing. At least, I hope I can do it.  This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXIII

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This entry is part 49 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether the fiction project that inspired this series will ever come to fruition, but I’d like to try finish the Cantos just the same. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. In this installment, I try to figure out what we can say about Canto LXIII, the second of the …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII

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This entry is part 48 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether the fiction project that inspired this series will ever come to fruition, but I’d like to try finish the Cantos just the same. There’s also an index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. In this installment, I dig into Canto LXII, the first of the ten Adams Cantos, while touching on Merrymount and …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXI

gordsellar4 Comments
This entry is part 46 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, a few at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. Also, since the table of contents that my post series plugin creates has gotten far too unwieldy to include at the top of each post, I’ve gone ahead and made an index of the Cantos I’ve discussed, with links to each post. I’ll try remember to update it as I continue with this project. That index is here. The index is new, so I …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LX

gordsellar0 Comments
This entry is part 45 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, a few at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. Also, since the table of contents that my post series plugin creates has gotten far too unwieldy to include at the top of each post, I’ve gone ahead and made an index of the Cantos I’ve discussed, with links to each post. I’ll try remember to update it as I continue with this project. That index is here. The index is new, so I …

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Bruno Overload

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This post deals with some recent readings I’ve done on the subject of Giordano Bruno. It’s divided into three parts: Recent Readings covers the books I read, and my reaction to them, with a special emphasis on the system of artificial memory (that is, how Bruno modified the classical art of memory/memory palace system) that was one of Bruno’s biggest claims to fame in his own time. Side Note: The Temples? plays Six Degrees of Separation between Bruno and Jonathan Swift. I’ve narrowed it down to five degrees, too, which surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t: Europe from 1580 to 1680 was a pretty small world, and …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LIX

gordsellar0 Comments
This entry is part 44 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, a few at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. Also, since the table of contents that my post series plugin creates has gotten far too unwieldy to include at the top of each post, I’ve gone ahead and made an index of the Cantos I’ve discussed, with links to each post. I’ll try remember to update it as I continue with this project. That index is here. The index is new, so I …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: More on Canto LVII, and Canto LVIII

gordsellar7 Comments
This entry is part 47 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, a few at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. … aaaaand, we’re back. This post marks my second return to this blog project, the first one having been abortive (it ended after just one post, the previous one in this series). There’s good reasons for that: I was focused on some writing projects, and trying to use my time wisely while I had a lot of it. In the time since, a …

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Itaewon and the Imjin War (異胎圓 or 梨泰院?)

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Update (11 Feb. 2015): Commentary on Facebook has been helpful, especially this comment by Heyjin Jeon: In 1457, King SeJo (Son of King Sejong) said to the Minister of Finance, “Make workhouses for poor people at Bojewon, Hongjewon, Itaewon.”It’s before Imjin War. I think “梨泰院” listens like “梨泰院” and people made new meaning about the name. http://sillok.history.go.kr/url.jsp?id=kga_10305007_002 Here’s the relevant passage from that source: 다만 염려되는 것은 가난한 백성이 병든 사람과 더불어 뒤섞여 거처하기를 싫어해서 이로 인하여 뿔뿔이 도망하여 흩어지는 일이니, 보제원(普濟院)·홍제원(弘濟院)·이태원(梨泰院) 등 세 곳에 별도로 진제장(賑濟場)을 두고 사람을 임명하여 감독 관장(管掌)하게 하고, 또 오부(五部)의 관리로 하여금 날마다 윤번(輪番)으로 왕래하면서 검속(檢束)하고 …

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Magic, Science, Inconsistency, and the Principle of Acceptable Variance

gordsellar4 Comments

I’m enjoying Jim Baker’s The Cunning Man’s Handbook, an exhaustive look at the practices of the cunning folk in England (and to some degree America) from 1550-1900, which I’m reading as research for the book I’m writing now (which has a cunning woman as a major character). Baker’s text is full of (ie. basically, completely composed of) countless examples of what folk magic involved in different moments during modern English history, and it also has lots of interesting observations on how much of what neo-pagans claim as history is actually just “invented tradition” (in the sense that Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger discuss in The …

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