I mentioned a while back that the Red Leap Theater would be in Seoul soon to perform their adaptation of Shaun Tan’s wonderful masterpiece The Arrival . Well, tonight, my friend Sanko, Miss Jiwaku, and I attended the second-to-last performance. We were all quite impressed with it. I have to admit, I don’t often go for “modern dance” performances — often because, without some kind of narrative to hang on to, I find myself lost and bored — and so I wondered whether a dance troupe could really bring to life Tan’s wordless, intensely beautiful art. Without question, they did. They used all of …
Tag: reviews
Pound and the Occult: Leon Surette’s The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult
Depending on where you stand in terms of the literary establishment, my past week’s break from Canto-reading and Canto-blogging was either well spent, or a waste: personally, I consider it very well spent, but Leon Surette gives the impression that the majority of academic literary critics would disagree. Their antipathy towards him is perhaps understandable: they may not be emperors, but they dislike having a dissenter point out their lack of clothes as much as anyone, while Surette does so not just intelligently, but consciously… and not just because they’re dubious about Pound’s occult interests, but also because of what …
Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack
While there are many books I’ve read in the last few years and thoroughly enjoyed, it’s rare that I read something and feel as if I had been missing something amazing for years and years, and felt a desire to kick myself for taking so long to get around to something. Because I feel like I’ve learned something about the world, reading this novel: something desperately important and something we have forgotten, to our own peril. I first read Jack Womack’s word in 2000 or 2001 — I’d say probably the latter, just before I left Canada for Korea — …
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
Every novel I read by Vinge seems to me to be better than the last. Maybe it’s because I started with earlier work, or maybe it’s just the impression that each of his books gives me. But one thing is for certain: A Deepness in the Sky certainly is a hell of a novel, space opera or not. I finished it last night, on the couch, very late into the night, and found myself in an odd position for such a time: I was excited about it, and wanted to talk about it. But it was the middle of the …
Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin
Of late, I’ve been on a sort of kick where I want to read short books — books of fewer than 300 pages, in general, often even shorter. As I’ve been on this kick, I’ve run into pairs of writings that explore the same basic terrain at different lengths. I mentioned this when I reviewed Patricia Anthony’s Happy Policeman and I’m noting it again as I review this book by Emma Larkin, though in this case the comparable text is this short article from Time, published in 2002 (a few years before Larkin’s book). In this case, I have to say, …