The Magnelephant Review

History and Piracy: A History

2012-01-31T17:33:00.001+09:00

Benji Edwards writing for Technologizer.

And what about cloud software? If all of our software tools become centralized and run over the Internet, it will be hard to pirate them, which also means they won’t get preserved. That’s bad for history.

When paleoanthropologists wonder if a 13,000 year-old Clovis point can take down a Bison, they tie one to a spear and let it fly. If spear points had been automatically cloud updated over the course of their development, however, we would only know of the most recent iteration in the design process. Clovis points wouldn’t exist today, and we’d be wondering how ancient Native Americans managed to hunt game with uranium-tipped bullets.

I had never thought about software and games, and the like, quite in the way of Beowulf and arrowheads before. Now I have. My brain is a better place for it, too.

Also, in light of a possible, eventual, transformation of the paper book industry to e-books, there's this to think about.

Current U.S. copyright laws have good intentions, but they ultimately jeopardize the survival of digital property because they do not take into account the rapid pace of digital media decay and obsolescence.

Our body of copyright law makes a 19th-century-style legal assumption that the works in question will stay fixed in a medium safely until the works become public domain, when they can then be copied freely. Think of paper books, for example, which can retain data for thousands of years under optimal conditions.

In the case of digital data, many programs will vanish from the face of the earth decades before the requisite protection period expires (the life of the author plus 70 years in the U.S.). Media decay and obsolescence will claim that software long before any libraries can make legal, useful backups.

Consider: Will an e-book of today run on an e-device 100 years from now? If only e-books are published, how will we archive them?

ttfn.

Soon I won't be here...

2012-01-31T17:17:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

It's snowing outside. A flat-bed truck is selling vegetables. Jonathan Franzen believes e-books are bad for society.

The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model

Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that’s reassuring.

Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough...

Also, I will be leaving Seoul soon. This city has given me more than I could have asked for. New friends. Old friends newly made. A collection of students that have blown my mind with their hearts, their brains, and their tendency to give presents and sing songs on the last day of class. We all had a good cry that day. The Doctor couldn't have asked for a better send-off.

In March, if all goes to plan, I'll be in India. There will probably be pictures. That's how these things work.

love.

ttfn.

p.s. I have a lot of time right now. I might use it to blog. I might use it to Google+. I might watch what I've left of Community, Misfits, Mad Men, various K-dramas, and snow. It's really quite nice.

2011 in Words

2011-12-31T22:30:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Sometimes I read. This year was no different. Here is a list of things*.

Enjoy.

1. Things of the Novel and Whatnot Variety Published In, or very Nearly In, 2011:

Habibi by Craig Thompson**

Bossypants by Tina Fey**

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Swamplandia by Karen Russell

The Arctic Marauder by Jacques Tardi

2. Things of the Novel and Whatnot Variety Published in the Past, in One Golden Age or Another:

Infinite Jest** by David Foster Wallace

Complete Shorter Fiction** of Oscar Wilde

40 Stories** by Donald Barthelme

A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov

Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O'Connor

Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

River of Gods by Ian McDonald

3. Some Selection of Things of the Longform or Longreads or What-Have-You Variety

Ray Kachel (photo by Wayne Lawrence)

"All the Angry People" by George Packer (one man, among many, at #OWS)

"Why Science Fiction Writers are Like Porn Stars" by Charlie Jane Anders

"Unspoken Truths" by Christopher Hitchens

"Pre-Occupied" by Mattathias Schwartz (on the origins of #OWS)

"Outsourcing Jobs" by Gary Sernovitz (on Steve Jobs, China, and Apple)

"Wall Street Isn't Winning -- It's Cheating" by Matt Taibbi

"The Last Movie Maestro" by John Jurgensen (a profile of John Williams)

"Stumptown Girl" by Margaret Talbot (a profile of Carrie Brownstein)

"The Han Solo Comedy Hour" by Frank DiGiacomo

"Al Goldstein: The Pornographer in Winter" by Lili Anolik

"Just Write It" by Laura Miller (on George R.R. Martin and fans)

"You Say You Want a Devolution" by Kurt Andersen (Except he's wrong. Mostly. Partly. The world of fashion, technology, and art has changed. Take the ten year old me and zap him 20 years into the future, and he would notice a difference. Trust me. He was a sharp kid. But, the article is an important one to remind you that some people's eyes go old before their time).

"The Writer as Detective" by Roger Rosenblatt

ttfn, readers. Happy reading.

*Note, that ** will be used to indicate these books may have changed my life and/or will probably be returned to, or thrust upon people, for a variety of well-intentioned reasons, as time goes on.

**See above.

2011 in Sound

2011-12-30T14:03:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

In 2011, I listened to things. Here is a list to that effect.

1. Things named after themselves

Bon Iver, Bon Iver.

Cults, Cults

2. Songs more beautiful than their name would lead you to believe

3. Bands that reaffirmed their awesomness

The Whole Love begins and ends with different sorts of long, meandering, wonderful. Well done Tweedy, and company. Well done.

4. Bands who reaffirmed that they're just having a bit of fun at this point.

5. New friends

6. Best use of a suicidal squirrel

7. ttfn, readers

Aetataureate

2011-12-28T18:55:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Happy Christmas. And New Year. And/or what not.*

As we reach the end of the year, you might be interested to know that several people are lamenting and debating as to whether or not our culture has become a prisoner to nostalgia or our nostalgia has blinded us to the new ways of being encultured.

See, for example, Kurt Andersen's "You Say You Want a Cultural Devolution" in Vanity Fair:

Ironically, new technology has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze: now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past. Our culture’s primary M.O. now consists of promiscuously and sometimes compulsively reviving and rejiggering old forms. It’s the rare “new” cultural artifact that doesn’t seem a lot like a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before. Which means the very idea of datedness has lost the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes.

Maria Russo's response at Salon,

New technology, he [Andersen] writes, has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze. He’s not the first to note that nostalgia is pervasive at the moment, with virtually everything ever produced in any medium so easily accessible, so primed for re-discovering, that it’s tamping down our desire to produce and consume newness. But there’s more going on than that. Hasn’t technology also made HBO and Showtime and AMC possible? Cable television has made what we watch in 2011 dramatically different, and dramatically superior, to what we viewed 20 years ago.

and this new entry, also at Salon, "Nostalgic for Everything" by Matt Zoller Seitz

“Nostalgia is denial — denial of the painful present,” says a philosopher (Michael Sheen) in Woody Allen’s surprise hit “Midnight in Paris.” “The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking**: the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one [that] one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”

If nostalgia is indeed a flaw, it’s one that many 2011 films and TV programs shared...

Andersen's article, while being in some ways completely wrong (mid-90s Wilco is the same as Ghost is Born Wilco? Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is in no way dated? Erm...), remains a fascinating entry into the conversation of how current cultural production is being perceived by those above and below a certain age.

In commenting on lifestyle and fashion, Russo seems onto something in her wondering as to whether or not, with so much of the conventional mores abolished as far as fashion (no pants for women, no piercings for men) and so much of our interactions occurring in virtual space (with our iPod, iPhone, Macbook, Android thing), fashion might have necessarily paused in the sort of fast-forwarding that occurred through the 20s, 40s, 60s, and on. People can wear whatever they want now, for the most part. And so they do. Or they don't. It's no big deal.

Generally, I find myself recognizing the intense, crafted nostalgia of things, especially music and film, of current chillwave, beach garage, and certain trippy, 80s relic, synth dance tunes. But, then again, I'm not confusing Josh Ritter with Dylan (as Andersen does), or Gaga's transgender anthems with Madonna's now (as Ms. Russo points out) almost passe (but still catchy, "Like a Prayer," anyone?) odes to a a more generalized sort of sexual freedom. Nor, am I worried that Midnight in Paris, or Super 8, or any of the other nostalgically flawed gems mentioned by Mr. Seitz, signal any kind of death of artistic evolution.

Most likely if you looked at any year's list of cinematic or televised product, you'd find plenty of nostalgia. 1981, for example and also the year of my birth, included such nostalgic endeavors as Chariots of Fire and Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark.

What interests me, more than anything else--as a boy on the cusp of emerging into a displaced generation--is the loss of tangibility Mr. Seitz talks of, as marked by the end of film and records and, one day, perhaps, books.

It is not a bad or good thing. It is just a thing. And it is interesting. And if, in my old age, I gather around me a library of smelly, crackly, nostalgia, or curl in a chair-bubble with a make-believe paper copy of Michael Chabon's latest ode to the latest Golden Age***, I imagine I'll just be happy to still be kicking about.

ttfn, readers. Enjoy your burrito.

*If your holiday is not listed here, please also enjoy it. If you are not a holiday person then, as Marc Maron suggested, at the very least try to enjoy a sandwich. If you are gluten-issued, there are sandwiches for you (and me), too.

**Actually, according to Michael Chabon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, it would more accurately and nonce-ly be referred to as, "the usual hallmark of the aetataureate delusion."

***See above.

Nice.

2011-12-23T23:18:00.000+09:00

Art by Christian Jackson. More pictures and interview here.

It's Only a Paper Moon

2011-12-17T23:20:00.002+09:00

Hello, readers.

A singer in Korea, ALi, wrote a song about a young girl being raped. This young girl was named, or at least known as, Na Young. You may read about Na Young's story here.

It seems that many people criticized Ms. ALi for writing such a song. The song's lyrics are as such:

The sound of the light and wind, falling from the sky
It rides the leaves and it rides the snowstorm

The deep sounds of the ocean from the ends of the earth
It shines on the sun, it shines on the sky

It's hard even to be alive and to breath
So she waits for the sun to set
She doesn't try to run away anymore
She stands there and waits for the moon to rise

The gray light that seeps out of a young girl's wet eyes
You threw away your youth, selling your body, selling your soul
Your pitiful life has been taken away from you

In this dizzy world, when you hope for a warm and brilliant love
Can you feel - can you feel it?
In the soiled heart, when you want a true and pure love
Can you do that - can you do that?

Looking here and there but you still can't believe in this world
Even if the world flows by so quickly, even if time leaves us
Trust your mind, trust your mind

It was unclear from the discussions and posts at allkpop or lancerlord, whether more criticism was directed at Ms. ALi for "disrespecting" the victim by bringing up painful memories, or because her lyrics ("you threw away your youth...") implied the victim was at fault.

Many commented that Ms. ALi should have asked permission.

Perhaps.

Ms. ALi held a press conference to apologize. This wasn't enough, apparently. So, she held another press conference where she could apologize some more, disclose and discuss how she was raped at around the same time as the young girl, and then ask for forgiveness, once again, for "causing so much worry and trouble..."

You should take a moment to read what she said. It is translated, so it's hard to say, precisely, what may be getting lost. That said, here are some quotes from allkpop:

On being raped:

In June of 2008, I was raped by a hoobae I knew from a group I was a part of. I was cruelly abused. I was hit in the face with a fist and suffered a broken cheekbone, needing four weeks of rest to recover. I was taken somewhere in a cab while unconscious, and I was raped. That hoobae, that criminal was arrested and taken to court. During the 1st round, he received a prison sentence of two years (suspended for four years) along with 200 hours of community service. However, due to the fact that there were no witnesses and evidence, he was deemed not guilty on the charges.

On how she felt:

At the time, I was going to keep it a secret for the rest of my life like my dad had said. However, the bitterness in my heart was not erased, and I believed that ‘Na Young’ (who had become a victim of rape around the same time) would share the same thoughts as me. So, I wanted to console ‘Na Young’, and I wanted to raise awareness about the crime of rape. That is why I put this song, which I had made during that time, on this album.

On what she wants from the man who raped her:

I still haven’t received a single word of apology from that person, so there is currently a civil suit going on. I believe that the best treatment for rape is to receive an apology.

An appropriately indignant commenter wrote a very long comment. You can read it on the tumblr of ancientrelic.

Here's what Kurt Cobain had to say:

What else could I write?
I don't have the right.
What else should I be?
All Apologies.

I hope Ms. ALi does not blame herself for what someone else did to her. I hope she doesn't blame herself for what a society of people is doing to her. But, it seems she does.

I wish, perhaps, she had talked to the family before naming her song what she did. But, then again, perhaps she wanted to tap into the shame and silence of a story that her country's people, for good or ill, very much would rather forget.

Many people, of course, would rather not be reminded that such things occur in their society--especially that they might be endemic, generally glossed over, and often only focused on in the most grisly of moments when said society might feel free to dip into their reservoir of han, that pool of suppressed anger and raging powerlessness, and righteously direct it at that one true, obvious horror, as in the case of Na Young, and, having done their duty, shut their ears, eyes, and hearts, ignoring the all-too-frequent and mundane horror of a woman being ignored because no one but her witnessed the "shame" done.

Alas, they must be reminded. You cannot look away. Things happen whether you believe in them or not. They continue to happen mostly because people choose to not believe in them. Or to ignore them--which amounts to the same thing. It's enough to make a girl wonder what's real.

Looking here and there but you still can't believe in this world
Even if the world flows by so quickly, even if time leaves us
Trust your mind, trust your mind

ttfn.

Home Cinema Doesn't Exist

2011-11-05T15:14:00.000+09:00

God bless you, Anthony Lane. And by God, I mean one of those black and white Bergman numbers where heaven is strawberries or some such.

There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice—preferably an exhaustive menu of it—pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended.

He also has some very funny, Freudian things to say about Brett Ratner's Tower Heist. It is the New Yorker, after all. And tower is in the title. There was no choice, really.

Oh, and actually, I'm quite happy with carte blanche. I want, as the subtitle up there says, everything ever. I want Pandora and Spotify and Grooveshark and podcasts curated by DJs. I want Mubi and Netflix and old, obscure, Spanish neo-realist films beamed to my brain, and I want, on occasion, to put on a coat and scarf, walk down a sidewalk in the fall, with yellow leaves falling and that smell in the air, and then enter into some dark room, sit down with a bunch of strangers, and watch something grand and silly, preferably with, of late, the involvement of Emma Stone or Wong Kar-Wai.

Happy 5th of November, readers. Remember, remember.

ttfn.

Porn stars and science fiction writers don't really care what you think of them.

2011-11-04T22:04:00.000+09:00

The other day, I read a thing in the New York Times that annoyed me. I decided to not bother thinking about it overly much, except that I was glad I read it all the way through. We'll get to that in a minute.

The thing in the New York Times was Glen Duncan's review of Zone One. It begins like so:

A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star. It invites forgivable prurience: What is that relationship like? Granted the intellectual’s hit hanky-panky pay dirt, but what’s in it for the porn star? Conversation? Ideas? Deconstruction?

Which, you know, is a perfectly fine and dumb way to begin a review, and designed, more or less, to get people to mention it on blogs so that the people reading those blogs will click the link to the review and so drive page views and advertising dollars to the New York Times.

This is, among other reasons, why I didn't bother mentioning it.

But, Charlie Jane Anders at io9 could not resist. And I'm glad she didn't.

She attempted to contact Glen Duncan for an interview. To ask him, for example, if he had ever dated a porn star, or if, perhaps, he had run into trouble with readers of his own foray into genre, The Last Werewolf; or if he had read Dhalgren? The Female Man? House of Leaves? The Wasp Factory? The Dispossessed? Air?

Glen Duncan did not respond. So, Ms. Anders went ahead and posted her questions for him and avoided any pointless ranting, saying "..it really feels like we're mostly past that by now, when places like the Atlantic are celebrating the trend that Duncan decries."

Instead, of a rant she closes with an inspired list of "how genre writers are like porn stars" which does great justice to both "slums" and includes, among other things, this:

Porn stars and genre writers are both trying, in very different ways, to satisfy a basic human need for a transcendent experience, something that takes you out of yourself. People — who feel imprisoned in these bodies, these lives, these surroundings — crave escapism and fantasy, but also a feeling of connection to a world where implausible things happen.

Go read the article.

Before you go though, I should say that Glen Duncan's review of Zone One manages to not completely go downhill from it's beginning, as it does manage this paragraph near its end.

The shape it makes is a love story. More specifically, a story of lost love, at first glance contemporary America’s for its own cultural protocols — from sidewalk etiquette to sitcom vectors — but beyond that, humanity’s love for ritual, its dependence on ways of imposing meaning on the void; for religious trinkets or scientific models or personal superstitions or long-term financial plans; for every gimmick, brand preference, boxed set or mumbled prayer that helps us deny the absurdity of our predicament and the certainty of death. Some “Zone One” humans are still at it, post-Apocalypse, framing the plague as God’s righteous reboot or the planet’s eco backlash, but for the antiheroic Mark Spitz the framing days are over. What happens happens, and there’s nothing behind it but a random biological swipe. Philosophically, the novel’s as existentially hard-line as they come.

It's a nice paragraph and, to a certain extent, shines some light on why, perhaps, Glen Duncan made such a fit about genre throughout--thinking, maybe, that genre also demonstrates humanity's love for frames and rituals.

Which it does.

The thing is that the term "literary" houses its own generic tropes, as much as science fiction, mystery, romance, and so forth, and really the distinction for readers comes down to whether, as a wonderful lady once told me, you crave comfort or surprise.

This, presumably, is what China Mieville was going on about in The Guardian concerning, "the literature of recognition versus that of estrangement."

You can find whatever you want, readers, wherever you want to look.

And, here's one more thing.

The reason Zone One succeeds, the reason The Soprano's was awesome; the reason Dhalgren exists; the reason the very blonde Buffy Summers walks down a dark alley and proceeds to kick demon ass, is that genres exist, and the creators of those works of art are in love with genre, almost as much as they're in love with surprising themselves, and us, by bending their beloved frames into new shapes.

Shapes which matter, which resonate, because we, as readers, recognize what the original frames looked like, what view of the world they allowed, and what this new frame, made by this new creator, has done to our way of seeing the world through their stories.

Genre is dead. Love live genre.

Happy reading, readers.

ttfn.

All Books Are Weird

2011-11-04T21:13:00.001+09:00

Kelly Link writes a particularly wonderful brand of odd.

Look. All books are weird when you think about it. I just read a terrific quote from an article by Edward Docx, “Among the Russians,” in which he and a group of Russian writers are talking about writing. Out of that conversation comes this description:

Deciding to write a novel is like visiting an obscure, half-forgotten and slowly-evaporating planet entirely comprised of swimming pools and deciding that what is needed is… yes, another swimming pool! But, for obscure reasons, a swimming pool that must be built single-handedly from scratch and then filled using only a syringe.

Read the rest of her interview at the Weird Fiction Review, wherein you will learn she's currently being disturbed by old, North Hampton farmhouses in Colson Whitehead's Zone One, and she was once an editor with The Greensboro review.

I had forgotten she was, like so many of us*, once an MFA student..

Of note, she will be an instructor, along with Gavin Grant, at the next Clarion West.

ttfn, readers.

*And by us, of course, I mean me and other people I know who were once MFA students. If you are not a former MFA student, that's okay. There's still time.

Ancient Sumeria

2011-11-02T22:49:00.000+09:00

From Jonathan Lethem and Occupy Writers:

Dahlia Lithwick says, “Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message. It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists. It’s a movement that feels no need to explain anything to the powers that be, although it is deftly changing the way we explain ourselves to one another… We are the most media-saturated 24-hour-cable-soaked culture in the world, and yet around the country, on Facebook and at protests, people are holding up cardboard signs, the way protesters in ancient Sumeria might have done when demonstrating against a rise in the price of figs. And why is that? Because they very wisely don’t trust television cameras and microphones to get it right anymore. Because a media constructed around the illusion of false equivalencies, screaming pundits, and manufactured crises fails to capture who we are and what we value.”

Here's Dahlia's article from Slate.

ttfn, readers.

Adventures in Depression

2011-10-28T17:54:00.001+09:00

This made me smile.

Visit Hyperbole and a Half, for more. Hyperbole is the blog of one Allie Brosh, who you can watch tell her blog's story on YouTube. Spoiler: It involves, among other things: Calvin and Hobbes, physics, procrastination, and a fish.

Myself, I am inclined to wind my way back through Hyperbole and a Half's archive.

Happy Friday, readers.

ttfn.

Neil Gaiman Presents

2011-10-27T22:03:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Neil Gaiman writes scary, lovely things. Very often he reads these things out loud to an audience. You can listen to him read the Newberry winning, The Graveyard Book* at The Mouse Circus.

He loves the act of storytelling so much, in fact--and audio books in particular, that he and Audible have joined in launching something called Neil Gaiman Presents. Gaiman will pick books, work with the authors where not entirely dead, and recruit the perfect voice for the story.

In his blog post on the opening, he mentioned a future release being that of "John Hodgman reading Robert Sheckley's hilarious pre-Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy galactic travel fantasia DIMENSION OF MIRACLES."

So, excitement +2.

Happy Thursday, readers.

ttfn.

*I read The Graveyard Book while road-tripping around the southern U.S.. I finished it in southwest Louisiana, at a house shaded by banana trees. It inspired me to wander one of the above-ground cemeteries nearby. I brought a dog along with me. We looked at many old things together. On the way home, a man carrying a brick and walking with a slight tilt, followed us for a time. Eventually, he stopped, which was nice.

Don't Look Now

2011-10-26T21:36:00.001+09:00

Maybe because I grew up in Britain, the opening almost seemed like one of those absolutely nightmarish PSAs that you would see. There were some extremely dour ones in the UK that implored you “Don’t play near ponds. Don’t throw your ball into the pond. Do not go near the dark water.” Once you’ve seen it a couple of times, you can start to see the allusions, too, the bad omens and the flashes forward to significant images and colors, and all that amazing cross-cutting that Nicolas Roeg does. It’s such an incredible sequence.

Edgar Wright writing in the A.V. Club on the merits of Don't Look Now, as part of a 24-hour Halloween horror movie marathon.

Small Horrors

2011-10-25T21:39:00.000+09:00

Dana Jennings in NYT.

The best work in dark fantasy and horror fiction these days is being published by small presses, haunted literary boutiques established (mostly) in out-of-the-way places.

There’s Small Beer in Easthampton, Mass., and Subterranean in Burton, Mich.; Centipede in Lakewood, Colo., and Cemetery Dance in Forest Hill, Md.; Tachyon in San Francisco and ChiZine in Toronto — and many more. They’re all devoted to the weird, to the strange and — most important — to good writing.

Interesting that with the stated love of the little wonders out there, only three authors, and their respective presses, get much mention (Geoff Ryman with Small Beer, Caitlan R. Kiernan with Subterranean, and Tim Powers with Tachyon). I would've liked a little more on what the others were up to.

Still, it's nice to see the small presses ballyhooed in the big press.

ttfn.

Seoul Mayoral Election, Now with More Flash Mobs!

2011-10-25T21:18:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Elections in Korea, and perhaps Seoul in particular, often involve a lot of coordinated dancing, rolling truck sing-alongs, and men wearing both cowboy hats and sparkly pants.

This video, though--so far as I know--is the first evidence of flash mobs being used in Seoul to turn out the vote.

Enjoy.

via (Global Voices) and also this Korean description which I cannot read.

ttfn.

Much Ado About Nothing

2011-10-24T23:23:00.003+09:00

Throughout Buffy, Whedon hosted the cast at his home for regular Shakespeare readings. Perhaps this grew out of that. Perhaps it is not Shakespearean, at all. Maybe it's about pool cleaning.

The real question is, how will it be distributed?

ttfn, readers.

The Lion and the Unicorn

2011-10-24T19:12:00.002+09:00

The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them--on what?

...

Although there are gifted and honest individuals among them, we have got to break the grip of the moneyed class as a whole.

...

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and the past. No real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist.

...

Quite soon it will be possible to say definitely that our feet are set upon one path or the other. But at any rate it is certain that with our present social structure we cannot win.

George Orwell writing in 1940, as "highly civilized human beings [flew] overhead, trying to kill [him]." It was difficult not to read certain passages without hearing some resonance with the present now-type happenings.

I wonder what he would have said if he were alive. Hopefully, he would've refrained from calling India "backward", which he does at some points. Silly, English man.

ttfn, readers.

Haruki Murakami

2011-10-22T22:14:00.001+09:00

“I live in Tokyo,” he told me, “a kind of civilized world — like New York or Los Angeles or London or Paris. If you want to find a magical situation, magical things, you have to go deep inside yourself. So that is what I do. People say it’s magic realism — but in the depths of my soul, it’s just realism. Not magical. While I’m writing, it’s very natural, very logical, very realistic and reasonable.”

From Sam Anderson's "The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami" in The New York Times Magazine.

It's a introduction, and trip, through Murakami's particular brand of reality. As well, Anderson--in visiting Murakami in Tokyo--visited several places in Tokyo made famous, or somehow actual, by the power of Murakami's imagination. You can see a slideshow of those places, and accompanying passages from Murakami's books, here.

Some bookstores in the non-Asian parts of the world are planning on opening at midnight for the non-Asian release of 1Q84.

Sometimes the world pleases me.

ttfn, readers.

Zone One

2011-10-21T22:45:00.001+09:00

Visit Strange Horizons for my review of Zone One, the zombie-tastic novel by Colson Whitehead.

The zombies have won. After wizards, vampires, and a brief fling with the possibility of werewolves, the results are in. Shaun of the Dead. Generation Dead. The Walking Dead. Zombies vs. Unicorns. Etc. Popular culture has arrived at a point where it craves a monster both overwhelming in number and completely devoid of spirit. Our world, for better or worse, belongs now to the dead and to those that love them. #yay.

Also, TIME has this video of Whitehead discussing Zone One's influences, including Death Wish, Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, and other horribly wonderful bits of pop culture.

ttfn, readers.

Dropbox: The Inside Story

2011-10-21T20:01:00.000+09:00

Victoria Barrett writing in Forbes on the matter of the cloud-syncing wonder-storage-thing called Dropbox. Much is made of the meeting between Drew Houston (Dropbox founder) and Steve Jobs, as well as the increasingly present cumulus-oriented competition of Apple, Google, and Amazon.

What Houston does is Dropbox, the digital storage service that has surged to 50 million users, with another joining every second. Jobs presciently saw this sapling as a strategic asset for Apple. Houston cut Jobs’ pitch short: He was determined to build a big company, he said, and wasn’t selling, no matter the status of the bidder (Houston considered Jobs his hero) or the prospects of a nine-digit price (he and Ferdowsi drove to the meeting in a Zipcar Prius).

I use Dropbox to transfer presentations from my office computer, to my laptop, to the computer in the classroom where I teach. It's also where I backup my writing and share pictures and things with my far-away sister.

It's a kind of magic*.

ttfn, readers.

*Queen reference (cue whooshy wind sound effect).

The Woman in Black

2011-10-20T22:26:00.000+09:00

Some out-of-context quotes from the Guardian on the trailer for The Woman in Black (starring Daniel Radcliffe of, well, you know).

Oh crap, it's the Hogwarts Express. Right, forget everything I just said about Daniel Radcliffe moving on. Someone book him a superior room in the Wolverhampton Travelodge for the duration of Potterquest Midlands 2024...

OH MY GOD! IT'S A BIRD ON A DESK! That's … actually, hang on, it's a bird on a desk. That's literally it. It's just a bird standing on a normal desk. That isn't very scary at all. Pull your socks up, The Woman in Black trailer. ..

ON NO! IT'S A muddy boy.

If you want to see the trailer from whence these sarcasms came, click the link above.

ttfn.

Google's Digital Bookcase

2011-10-20T22:01:00.000+09:00

Here's a perfect use for something like the OmniTouch. Slap a holo-bookcase in the corner of your bedroom and use the OmniTouch to track your hand as it spins, selects, and browses through books.

I'm afraid it won't replace the smell of paper and ink, though. Not yet, anyway.via (endgadget).

ttfn, readers.

p.s. Note, at endgadget, there's a link to the actual WebGL site for you to play with. They warn that it might kill your computer, though--due to resource devourment. Mine survived.

The Crucible (도가니)

2011-10-18T20:26:00.000+09:00

From The New York Times:

Since its release on Sept. 22, 4.4 million people, including President Lee Myung-bak — nearly a 10th of the country’s population — have seen it [The Crucible]. The film has tapped into widespread anger over official reluctance to take sexual crimes seriously, and over how justice is served, or not, in South Korea.

The cabinet has vowed to inspect all facilities for the disabled and minors to ferret out teachers with records of sexual abuse. The head of the Supreme Court admitted that “society is simmering with resentment” toward a legal system long criticized as “yujeonmujoe mujeonnyujoe,” or “not guilty for the rich, guilty for the poor.”

The film deals with the sexual abuse that occurred at the Inhwa School for the hearing impaired. Those incidents, along with the courtroom drama (no sign-language translation was provided) and the resulting sentences (some found guilty were released with suspended sentences), inspired a book of the same name by Gong Ji-young.

What's of special interest here is the foregrounding of disabled individuals as human beings who deserve some protection--or, at the very least, some recognition--from a society that often seems to prefer to forget they exist.

Here, disregard for the disabled is so entrenched that the subway authorities began installing elevators for wheelchair access only in recent years following protests by the handicapped in which they chained themselves to the tracks with signs that read, “We want to use the subway too.”

“What people see in the movie is a capsule version of their society,” said Chun Sang-chin, a sociologist at Sogang University. “There is anger over how the strong bully the weak, despair over how the system protects the well-connected, and fear that the same can happen to the rest of us.”

In my own classes, there are some students with various learning disabilities, and, for the most part, no special attention is paid to them by the school.

One of my students told me she was reading 도가니. She said it made her angry. I was unaware, at the time, though, just what an impact it, and the film, were having on Korean culture. For comparison sakes, if 10% of the U.S. saw a film, that would equal about a $300 million box office--which, you know, is pretty good for a socially conscious and fairly ugly indictment of "the foul underside of society."

Koreans excel at being outraged about things (see the above mentioned chaining oneself to the tracks or the protests over imported American beef ). Let's hope this outrage does some good.

ttfn.

OmniTouch

2011-10-18T19:54:00.000+09:00

This is the kind of thing that reminds me of graduate school. Big ideas, unmarketable implementations, but, if the right person (or company) sees the right way to use it, then something actual and cool could happen.

ttfn.

Fascinating things about suicide nets

2011-10-14T22:36:00.000+09:00

From the Apple Supplier Responsibility 2011 Progress Report:

In August 2010, the independent team (Tim Cook, among others) presented its findings and recommendations to Terry Gou and senior executives from Foxconn and Apple. The team commended Foxconn for taking quick action on several fronts simultaneously, including hiring a large number of psychological counselors, establishing a 24-hour care center, and even attaching large nets to the factory buildings to prevent impulsive suicides. The independent team also found that Foxconn had worked openly with many outside experts and government officials in reacting to the crisis. Most important, the investigation found that Foxconn’s response had definitely saved lives.

The emphasis is mine. The concern, of course, is that no one at Foxconn was commended for altering the actual work environment that led to the company dressing its building in a skirt made from, what I'm going to assume, was a giant circus-type safety net.

But, there's one more thing.

The independent team suggested several areas for improvement, such as better training of hotline staff and care center counselors and better monitoring to ensure effectiveness. Foxconn incorporated the team’s specific recommendations into their long-term plans for addressing employee wellbeing. The company is implementing an employee assistance program (EAP) that focuses on maintaining employee mental health and expanding social support networks. In addition, they have begun the process of expanding operations to other parts of China, enabling workers to be closer to their home provinces.

So, Apple's team suggested counseling the angry, sad, tired people into not being angry or sad or tired, and "better monitoring" to ensure their counseling was "effective". In more good news, Foxconn is "expanding their operations."

If you feel like occupying something, there's probably a city nearby for that.

ttfn, readers.

Korea Invented Pizza

2011-10-14T22:19:00.000+09:00

It's true.

Go here for more.

ttfn.

Occupied

2011-10-14T22:12:00.000+09:00

Photo by Zoriah.

NYC blinked this morning.

Officials in New York City on Friday postponed a planned clean-up of the downtown Manhattan park where anti-Wall Street protesters set up camp a month ago, averting what many feared could have been a showdown with authorities.

Occupy Seoul gets under way this Saturday.

Members of civic organizations advocating for consumer financial rights have a news conference to declare they will hold “Occupy Yeouido” protest at 2 p.m. Oct. 15...

Other social organizations also plan to have a rally at Seoul Plaza at the same time. All the groups will then gather at Seoul Plaza to hold an “Occupy Seoul” protest at 6 p.m.

ttfn.

Against Nostalgia

2011-10-11T21:42:00.000+09:00

Mike Daisey is a storyteller and monologist, among other things. He's performed at some events put on by The Moth. He's good. This is what he had to say recently in the New York Times.

Apple’s rise to power in our time directly paralleled the transformation of global manufacturing. As recently as 10 years ago Apple’s computers were assembled in the United States, but today they are built in southern China under appalling labor conditions. Apple, like the vast majority of the electronics industry, skirts labor laws by subcontracting all its manufacturing to companies like Foxconn, a firm made infamous for suicides at its plants, a worker dying after working a 34-hour shift, widespread beatings, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to meet high quotas set by tech companies like Apple...

Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. If we view him unsparingly, without nostalgia, we would see a great man whose genius in design, showmanship and stewardship of the tech world will not be seen again in our lifetime. We would also see a man who in the end failed to “think different,” in the deepest way, about the human needs of both his users and his workers.

This grew out of Daisey's work, and performances of, something called The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, his monologue/one-man show about his life and love of Apple, and the journey he took to China to meet with the workers there, and how it changed him. He is not unaware of the fact that other companies (Dell, HP, etc) also get there supplies in a similar, or worse, manner. He is aware, though, that like Nike was to the shoe industry, Apple is the brand that's most associated with the world's current manufactured bliss. If you're going to close the "sweatshops" of technology, they're the company you look at.

For myself, I've been reading Apple's supplier responsibility reports. In the coming days, when the mood strikes, I will post some of what it says. Fascinating things about suicide nets, for example. Apple, if nothing else, is active in auditing its suppliers and seemingly quite transparent about their (so-far) failures to enact lasting change. I don't know of any other tech company publishing the number of underage workers in their factories.

ttfn.

Out of Print

2011-10-11T21:12:00.000+09:00

T-shirts, sweatshirts, tote bags, and iCases (among other things) imprinted with the message that literature still matters enough to put on a t-shirt, or a sweatshirt, or a--well, you get the idea.

ttfn.

We Bought a Zoo

2011-10-11T20:56:00.000+09:00

Speaking of movies, last week, Entertainment Weekly put up a list of 25 fall movies to which they're looking forward.

Among the many possibly wonderful wonders included--such as Tin Tin with it's creepy animatronic-like motion-capture puddy people, or Hugo, the real-people Scorsese take on the spectacular illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret--the thing that caught my eye was that Cameron Crowe has a new film called, We Bought a Zoo.

This is the trailer.

I love Cameron Crowe. He embraces a kind of courageous sentimentality that circles around self-indulgent soppiness without, generally, falling into it. Say Anything, for example, hurt. Almost Famous, too. And, in between, there was that thing with Cuba Gooding, Jr.

Also, he's good with music.

Also, also, there are segments of Elizabethtown that I love with an intenseness that belies the fact that I'd be wary of actually recommending anyone else to watch it.

We Bought a Zoo is his first bit of fictional directing since that film. I am wary, but hopeful. There is Thomas Hayden Church, after all.

Busan Film Festival

2011-10-07T11:55:00.000+09:00

Heading south to Busan for the film festival today. Blog updates will be sparse. I will, of course, have my iPod with me, so I will not be completely out of touch. Thanks, Steve.

Here's what I'll be seeing.

The Bad Intentions (Peru/Germany/Argentina)

...a great new voice in the world of cinema, Rosario Garcia-Montero‘s “The Bad Intentions” is a brilliant coming-of-age story that’s funny, subtle, touching, and one of the best films of the year.

The Idiot (Estonia), an adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel.

The Reason Why I Step (Korea), a documentary about indie art and music.

The Enemy (Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina), a film about clearing the minefields of the Balkan wars.

Stella Days (Ireland)

“Stella Days” tells the story of a newly-arrived parish priest (Martin Sheen) who wants to open a cinema in the small town in the 1950s. His plans attract opposition from his bishop and some locals who fear the effect this outside influence might have on their way of life.

MESH (Walking) (Turkey)

Xelilo, a disturbed man, walks endlessly through the streets of the Kurdish village in the south east of Turkey. He is curiously being noticed by Cengo, a 12 year old boy, selling chewing gum. Their poor but carefree lives take a sudden turn, when the Turkish military takes power in 1980. The curfew and the resistance of the people become the centre of their lives with dramatic consequences.

11 Flowers (China/France)

Wang Han, 11 year old boy in the province of Ghizhou is confronted with a runaway murderer. Hiding in the woods, the wounded man takes Wang Han drying shirt and persuades him to help him out. Frightened and fascinated at once, Wang Han and his friends accept to keep it secret from the police. Strange things are happening at school and the police is everywhere

Poongsan (Korea) -- Produced by Kim Ki-duk

Poongsan has the unenviable – and death-defying – job of delivering messages across the North and South Korean border to separated families. When South Korean government agents ask him to smuggle in In-ok, the lover of a high-ranking North Korean defector, into the South, the damsel and rescuer fall in love instead

Happy weekend, readers.

ttfn.

One more thing...

2011-10-07T11:29:00.001+09:00

On Apple, Siri, and the Cloud Cage

2011-10-05T17:48:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

You may have noticed Apple held one of its events this past afternoon. Steve Jobs was not there. Neither was an iPhone 5. There was Siri, though, and something called the iPhone 4S which is the iPhone 4 plus the letter S, among other things.

Here's what some people are saying.

Nick Bilton believes everything's as much about Google as Apple.

To [compete with Android] the company had to offer a high-end phone that is very Applesque, complete with the slickest new features and software: the iPhone 4S, which starts at $200 and goes as high as $400. In addition, the company needed to offer iPhones for the masses: the iPhone 3GS, which is now free. All of these prices are valid with a two-year contract with the carrier for wireless service.

CNET on how Apple mostly uses the internet as a way to communicate with itself.

I find Apple's clear unwillingness to release Web front-ends to users' photo libraries or documents or stored music tracks galling. Apple could become one of the most powerful and useful consumer Web companies in the world were it to make all its users' content available to them from any device that had Web access. Of course, that would reduce the need for each user to have one of their own, or better yet several of their own, Apple devices to access their personal clouds of data and media. If every device was an equal citizen on the Apple Web, it might depress the volume of sales, and prices, of Apple gear.

Which is, depending on who you are, either wonderfully simple or terribly limiting. It's certainly convenient to have Apple put all your music in the cloud, but if you're forever locked into playing it with Apple devices, well, um, there you go. The cloud cage.

This is my next on Siri.

Recognizing context is a simple kind of logic, and very important for listening. When it comes to finding a good answer, however, a whole new level of logic is needed, and obviously this is the crux of Siri’s AI — all the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of it. One aspect I’m particularly excited about is the Wolfram Alpha integration. Wolfram Alpha makes more sense integrated into a personal assistant (like Siri) than subbing in as a search engine (like Google or Bing), and asking Siri to convert units or time zones, or to compare the land speed of Usain Bolt to a cheetah (my primary use for Wolfram Alpha revolves around such comparisons) is going to be endlessly useful / entertaining.

I'm having flashes of Angel and the evil lawyers of Wolfram & Heart. Also, as I tweeted, at some point in the future I'm prepared for smartphones to be equipped with customizable genuine people personalities so that your phone will not necessarily have to sound like a robot woman speaking from the inside of War Games.

And, here's Activate on the lives of workers at Foxconn, one of Apple's leading suppliers. It's a short doc, and doesn't go into terribly much documented detail. For more, consider reading these reports of strangely numerous suicides and Apple's response.

In its latest report, Apple said it conducted audits of 127 facilities throughout the world. Ninety-seven of those were first-time audits and 30 were repeat audits.
Although many consumer electronic companies around the world use these same suppliers for their products, more than 40 percent of the suppliers audited said Apple was the first company to ever have audited their facilities....

Apple says it's been "aggressive in helping underage workers return to their families and get back to school."

If underage workers are discovered, Apple said it requires the supplier to pay for education expenses, a living stipend, and lost wages for six months or until the worker is 16, whichever is longer.

That last bit, about Apple's "aggressiveness in helping underage workers return to their familes." Um. Scary.

Here's Apple's page on supplier responsibility.

It's worth a little thought. Even the woman, Debbie Chan--who's doing the doc--appears to be using something like a MacBook at one point, and certainly a smartphone. I for one, generally only tend to think about where the products I use come from in a considerate, but kind of useless way. Which is to say I think, oh, worker's rights are important, let me check the news about that on my Vaio/iPod/Etc.

*sigh*

ttfn, readers.

More on the Nobel winners

2011-10-05T16:35:00.000+09:00

For more on the Nobel physics winners (and frequent mention of some mysterious physicist nicknamed the 'Time Lord') go here. You'll get a nice profile and summary of the science involved by Jennifer Ouellette writing in the Scientific American.

After saying farewell, I commented to the Time Lord as we walked back home how much I liked Brian: “You have really nice friends.” (It’s true; pretty much all of the Time Lord’s pals are delightful, but then, I’m partial to physicists.) He agreed, and added, “And you know what else? He will absolutely win the Nobel Prize some day.”

Also, Discover takes a whack at explaining dark energy in a friendly FAQ.

Speaking of nobel prizes...

2011-10-04T21:23:00.000+09:00

Three U.S. - born scientists win the Nobel prize for physics.

"For almost a century the universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago," the citation said. "However the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the universe will end in ice.

Nostalgia Overload

2011-10-04T20:57:00.000+09:00

The floppy disk drive to the future:

"If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine"

.

American Novelists

2011-10-04T20:43:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

At Salon today, "Why American novelists don't deserve the Nobel prize."

Four years after Morrison won the Nobel, David Foster Wallace predicted the current rut in which our literature finds itself in a New York Observer evisceration of John Updike’s “Toward the End of Time.” Though he took particular issue with Updike’s autumnal output, Wallace parceled blame to all of the Great Male Narcissists, with their hermetic concerns and insular little fictions. The following is Wallace’s estimation of Updike, but it could just as easily be said about anyone else in the postwar American pantheon: “The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.”

The article points out two such insularities in modern writers by evoking Roth's "bygone Jewish precincts of Newark" and Cormac McCarthy's "gun-slinging west." Both go a long way towards making the point that Alexander Nazaryan, the writer of this article, perhaps hasn't been reading much Roth or McCarthy lately.

Perhaps the article's right, though, that a great deal of our pantheon-ed American writers have turned insular, and write their fictions--as Wallace lamented about Updike--more as a way to reflect what they feel about what they see, instead of exploring what they see and how others might feel (though, at what point did evoking an individual's experience become so anathema; at what point did it stop being universal when done well--even if it was your own?)

I don't really know. I haven't read much of the pantheon-ed writers of late.

In the comments of the article, a few brief mentions are made of those American writers working outside the pantheon--such as Gene Wolfe or Neal Stephenson--who are anything but insular in their writing. And by insular I mean, of course having main characters of a strictly white and American orientation. Both writers use a more expansive palette, exploring a world-sized amount of philosophy and suffering.

I'm fairly certain there are other examples, as well.

It would have been nice if Mr. Nazaryan had expanded his view of American writers beyond Roth, Delillo, Pynchon, et al. If those writers are guilty of insularity, then writers like Nazaryan--and those lamenting the state of American fiction--might do well to step outside their own insular views of American literature and read what else is out there.

ttfn, readers.

Radiolab

2011-10-03T12:26:00.000+09:00

Radiolab is a fantastic radio show about the science and mystery of things such as mechanical turks, broken hearts, and symmetrical molecules. It also boasts a soundscape of loopy, intwerwoven gibblets of dialogue and sound that make the experience of listening actually worth, well, listening to. It's radio done in a way that lives up to the strength of its sensory limitations.

Jab Abumrad, a co-host along with Robert Krulwitch and a musician by training, was recently named a MacArthur "genius."

If you're not listening, Ira Glass explains why you should at Transom.

If you want to read more about the sound of Radiolab, Nieman Journalism Lab has a nice bit on that.

Also, The New York Times had an interactive widget that let you play with the Radiolab sound a few months back. It's cool.

ttfn.

It's Arrested Development

2011-10-03T12:11:00.000+09:00

Jason Bateman on Twitter:

It’s true. We will do 10 episodes and the movie. Probably shoot them all together next summer for a release in early ’13. VERY excited

Apparently, talks have been had with Netflix and Showtime about distributing. Certainly would win Netflix back a lot of love. Maybe a few customers, too.

These episodes would proceed any movement on the oft-rumored, never-actual, but maybe now immintenly possible, Arrested Development movie.

All of this came out at the New Yorker Festival. All of the Bluths and Mitchell Hurwitz (creator/writer/genius) were there.

When asked about the movie possibility, Mitchell Hurwitz said, "We're 80% of the way to an answer."

Read more at the New York Times.

Happy Monday, readers.

ttfn.

Yep.

2011-10-01T12:36:00.000+09:00

The things our friends find and put on Facebook. Magnificent.

ttfn.

Charlie Kaufman

2011-10-01T01:35:00.000+09:00

In an interview with Time Out London, Charlie Kaufman talked a bit about his next movie, Frank or Francis.

If I look at some of the things in the script that I’m about to embark on, I’d have to say I don’t really have any idea how we’re going to do it. I’ve been pretty good at keeping logistics away from the writing process. It’s important when you’re writing to not bridle yourself with pragmatic concerns. The movie I’m about to do has got a lot of scenes and a lot of characters. And the scope of it and the world it inhabits is very, very large. In the broadest possible sense, it’s about online film criticism, but as usual, the world that I’m writing about is not necessarily the world that I’m writing about. It’s just a place to set it. There’s a lot in there about the internet and anger: cultural, societal and individual anger. And isolation in this particular age we live in. And competition: it’s about the idea of people in this world wanting to be seen. I hate to use the word “about”, as it implies that what I’m doing is an analogy and that I’m trying to say something. I’m not. That’s for the audience to do.

There's more in the interview about the screenwriting (it's not therapeutic), dreams, and being called a mathematical storyteller.

All of his movies tend to comfortably unravel my brain. Even Synecdoche, New York, which made an amount of sense approaching zero a great deal of the time, added up to something true and painful by the end. It didn't have to make sense. It just worked.

I don't remember that being how math usually functioned, but maybe math has moved on since I left school.

ttfn.

Roger Ebert still loves Netflix...

2011-09-30T23:55:00.000+09:00

Roger Ebert writes in Businessweek, of all things, about his continued--sometimes ambivalent--love of Netflix.

Netflix is woefully short on silent films and weak on foreign films. It offers all of three operas on film. It should work on those areas. Its website is a disaster. A more searchable front end would dramatize the depth of its selection. But it remains a service I treasure and use often.

In the article, Ebert also mentions that, at 50% off its high, he thinks that Netflix's stock is a BUY!

It's possible he didn't use exclamation points. Or all-caps. You know how I am with these things.

I wonder who approached who for the writing of the article. Curious. Fascinating.

ttfn, readers.

1Q84

2011-09-30T19:31:00.000+09:00

Murakami once wrote a book in which there were unicorn skulls and talking shadows. His new book, 1Q84, arrives in English on October 25th. I am experiencing some amount of anticipation.

Amazon Interest in Netflix

2011-09-30T19:27:00.000+09:00

From the wild, wouldn't it be funny if, speculation department known as analyst chatter:

"We believe the tablet launch and the integration of Amazon's e-books, digital music, and digital movie offerings with the tablet indicate accelerating pace of innovation at Amazon to stay ahead of the secular shift to digital format. We believe there is a high likelihood that Amazon will: 1) launch a 10-inch tablet priced below $300 in early 2012, and 2) purchase the streaming business of Netflix," the analyst said.

Fun to ponder, in light of the Kindle Fire, but somehow doesn't seem right. Why? Don't know. Just a feeling. Maybe it's just that it doesn't seem Netflix would throw in the towel just yet, and Amazon seems to be doing fine gathering its own content.

Motley Fool thinks Microsoft or Apple would be more likely suitors.

If I were in the U.S., I'd be using Netflix and hoping Netflix stays Netflix. They were always good to me.

ttfn.

Browncoats Mixtape

2011-09-29T22:40:00.000+09:00

A Firefly rap album exists. That is all.

via io9.

Happy tightpants, readers.

ttfn.

Girls and The DC New 52

2011-09-29T22:23:00.000+09:00

DC recently rebooted their superheroes back to ~~square~~ issue one.

Some of these reboots, particularly that of Catwoman and Red Hood and the Outlaws, engendered (pun!) some discussion of the blatant display of fan-fiction-esque fan-service*.

From Comics Alliance:

And that is the whole problem with this false notion of "sexually liberated" female characters: These aren't those women. They're how dudes want to imagine those women would be -- what Wire creator David Simon called writing "men with t*ts." They read like men's voices coming out of women's faces. Or worse, they read like the straight girls who make out with each other at clubs, not because they enjoy making out with women but because they desperately want guys to pay attention to them.

Also, Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress: "Should Feminists Give Up On Comics?" And, a response at the Atlantic: "Don't Worry, Not All Comics Are This Sexist", which seems to me to go without saying, but there is a nice list of small-press comics and Asian imports worth perusing.

Here are two pretty pictures of such.

ttfn, readers.

*This being that ubiquitous euphemism from manga and anime wherein fan, generally, means boy who wants to see girl bits.

More Kindle Thoughts

2011-09-29T22:02:00.000+09:00

John Gruber on Amazon & Apple:

Back in June, Harry McCracken laid out the key question to ask of any tablet: “Why should somebody buy this instead of an iPad?” The Kindle Fire is interesting because it’s the first one with a good answer: it’s much cheaper, Amazon offers a digital content ecosystem that rivals Apple’s (fewer apps, more books), and millions of people already use and enjoy Kindle hardware. The e-ink Kindles are to the Kindle Fire what the music-playing iPods were to the iPhone, and what the iPhone was to the iPad — traction in the mass market based on trust and loyalty.

The iPod certainly halo-ed me. It feels right when you use it. It's what makes me think if and when I buy a new laptop, I'd want a MacBook Air. As for the tablet, that's more of a toss-up--as, really, it's not really all that necessary. Most of the reason I want a tablet at the moment, is because it would be a more cost-effective way to subscribe to magazines when traveling abroad.

Apple and Amazon are approaching this tablet territory from opposing sides. The iPad takes it on from the high end. It’s the best possible device in that price range from the world’s best maker of devices. The Kindle Fire takes it on from the low end. The iPad is a credible laptop replacement for many people — and with iCloud and another year or two of hardware improvements, that’s going to be true for more and more people. The Kindle Fire is a laptop replacement for almost no one. It’s a peripheral, not a second computer — and it’s priced accordingly. You can get a Kindle Fire and a new top-of-the-line e-ink Kindle Touch for less than the price of an iPad. It’s a very different take.

Very true. If I was in the U.S., I'd be tempted to go for the dual Amazon set-up over the one iPad. It would be like having that fabled e-ink/back-lit dual display machine. Except, you know, one of the screens goes in your back-pocket and the other screen goes in your jacket pocket.

In any case, I would wait on the tablet. Many have said Amazon rushed it out for the holiday season, and another, more awesome--more Amazon designed--tablet will be forthcoming early next year. Maybe January.

In other news, some people are freaked by letting all of their browser's browsing be processed by Amazon--privacy and such.

ttfn.

If only I had a flowchart...

2011-09-29T19:37:00.000+09:00

A few months back, NPR compiled a list of the 100 best science fiction and fantasy books. There were, of course, no arguments. Everyone agreed precisely on what was included and what was excluded, and what placement each book/series received.

I mean, who doesn't think the Wheel of Time series is the 12th best thing ever to come out of the world of SF/F? Or, for that matter, that the number of women in the top 50 should be able to be counted on one hand?

If you meant to dive into this list, but were waiting for someone to produce a flowchart that might help you navigate your way to a starting point by way of pithy questions, well, you can relax.

Sf Signal has made such a flowchart, and everything makes sense now. Follow the link for the embiggened one.

ttfn.

Amazon Silk

2011-09-29T00:26:00.000+09:00

Amazon debuted the many old and new varieties of Kindle this morning: a non-touch, ad-loaded, e-ink Kindle ($79), an e-ink Kindle Touch ($99/$149 for Wi-Fi/3G), and the tablet, Kindle Fire, for $199.

So, in theory, if one wanted, they could buy an e-ink Kindle and a Kindle Fire and still come in for nearly half the cost of an iPad. That's not to say that any of these things will function as well, or be as beautiful to look at, as Apple products, of course. My eyes do adore e-ink, though.

Most interesting to the techie part of my brain was the new cloud-based web-browser that comes on the Fire, called "Amazon Silk".

Watch. Learn.

Somewhere out there, I can hear the distant voice of a friend cursing the "evil" Amazon. She knows who she is.

ttfn, readers.

p.s. Apparently all of the e-readers at $79, $99, and $149, come with ads. So. There's that.

Portrait of a Sentence

2011-09-28T20:33:00.000+09:00

"It doesn't matter if there's a ghost, or a robot, or a detective in a book, the question that should still preoccupy you is: Are the sentences worthy of hanging on the wall, one by one?"

~Benjamin Percy is profiled, along with his sister, at Salon.

ttfn.

World's Best Tzatziki

2011-09-28T18:01:00.000+09:00

Some days ago, a friend asked me for suggestions of salads which are not so BORING AS TO BE INEDIBLE. It's possible he didn't speak in all-caps. Sometimes I exaggerate for effect.

Among my thoughts of roasted red peppers, fresh olives, thinly sliced cucumber, arrays of fruit and walnuts, and what have you, it occurred to me that one of the greatest things you can do for a salad (or anything for that matter), is to dress it with tzatziki.

Kalyn's Kitchen posted one of the better recipe's I've encountered. She called it the world's best. I have no idea if that's scientifically accurate. It tastes good, though, so go ahead and make it. Grab fresh dill if it's handy. Use greek yogurt (or, better, strain your own). If you have a salad or old shoe that needs eating, this will do you fine.

ttfn.

Kindle Fire

2011-09-27T23:39:00.000+09:00

So, Amazon's tablet, set to debut on Wednesday, will possibly be called the "Kindle Fire." All word-play jokes aside, at the very least, it avoids confusion with certain feminine products. Price is said to be anywhere from $199 to $300. It doesn't matter terribly much to me. I don't want a backlit Kindle anything. I'm excited about the new Kindle Kindle, what is good for reading. Below, see a graphic from AppleInsider. The nicknames for the Kindles disturb me.

ttfn.

Habibi by Craig Thompson

2011-09-27T20:10:00.000+09:00

Blankets by Craig Thompson was a magical and painful thing. I also remember there being a lot of snow. His new book is Habibi, and it looks more magical, and possibly more painful. In her description, Laura Miller throws around words like semi-fantastical, skyscrapers, Dumas, calligraphy, and camels. Other graphic novels are also talked about. They look amazing. But I don't know as much about them. Except for The Arctic Marauder which I reviewed for Strange Horizons.

An image from Habibi by Craig Thompson

ttfn.

Obsession.

2011-09-26T23:35:00.000+09:00

Obsession x Voice (Failed Writer #6) from Yuvi Zalkow on Vimeo.

ttfn.

Evolution.

2011-09-26T23:20:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers. I am experimenting with things. I don't know what will happen. Possibly light is the second fastest thing in the universe. Science happens. Watch out.

ttfn.

Super Color Super (Super Sketch) Photos

2011-07-11T22:55:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Super Color Super organizes shows of music and art and monsters in Seoul. These are some bits of kidnapped light from their Super Sketch show at Theater Zero in Hongdae. It was their two year anniversary, and it was fun. Enjoy.

Happy art-making, readers.

ttfn.

Michael Bay Care Bears Movie

2011-07-07T23:44:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Upon the news of another bit of beloved and merchandised 80's nostalgia, the Care Bears, returning as a CGI-animated television show in 2012, it seemed only reasonable to begin discussing, in earnest, what the inevitable 3D #MichaelBayCareBearMovie will look like. Some friends and I on the Twitter (with the aforementioned hashtag) have begun doing just such a thing.

For starters, it would mix 3D CGI with live-action. And therefore it would not only be possible, but essential, to have a a Pearl Harbor style love-triangle between Tender Heart (voiced by Nicholas Cage?) and a token hot model (whomever Michael Bay is currently getting along with at the time of production) and a token hot CGI bear with giant lips and tail (Uncast at the moment).

The Care Bear stares will, necessarily, be super slo-mo blasts of super-saturated awesome. Truly, has any childhood teddy bear super power ever been more appropriate for the 3D treatment? Audiences will feel the feelings of noble heartedness, tender heartedness, and sweet baby hugs surrounding them. (Michael Bay will most likely have to expand his emotional palette for this film)

Also, the Care Bear mobile will shoot rainbow lasers at storm clouds and evildoers. (Michael Bay will also be expanding his color palette.)

Also, also, there may possibly be an enchanted, apocalyptic comet voiced, possibly, by Will Smith or Steve Buscemi, depending on how we want to play it (unless we can get Orson Welles to come back to life and thereby finally unite the universe of Transformers and Care Bears).

Also, also, also and speaking of which: a Jesus Christ Care Bear whose stare resurrects people. And thus we have zombies.

Tears are guaranteed as one (or more) of the Care Bears will die in a self-sacrificial act of tender heartedness in order to save the world from No Heart and his enchanted comet of doom. Alas.

The final shot: a pan out showing a new monument in Washington, D.C.: a line of giant Care Bears flanking the reflecting pool.

And someone mentioned there should be a Christopher Walken Care Bear musical number. Possibly just before something horrible happens. Possibly we got a bit silly at this point.

In anycase, this is where we've gotten. Perhaps we could go further. Many parts are unclaimed. No Heart, Beastly, the token hot Care Bear.

Possibly we need go no further.

Possibly we need to think of other 80s shows that deserve the Michael Bay treatment. Captain Power, anyone? Silverhawks?

If you'd care to join the discussion, hope into the comments below or Twitter up the hashtag #michaelbaycarebearmovie and twitter tweet away.

Happy weekend, readers.

ttfn.

p.s. Here's a link to my last review at Strange Horizons. It concerns The Arctic Marauder.

p.p.s. This t-shirt design from Threadless has me imagining a serious Bad Boys-esque vibe to this thing.

p.p.p.s. Owen Wilson could make a decent Nobel Heart horse.

p.p.p.p.s. Ben Affleck could probably do Beastly. He's good at funny voices. I saw him do one in Jay and Silent Bob.

Swamplandia! and Other Exclamations

2011-06-12T15:07:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Swamplandia! is a book by Karen Russell in which young adult types deal with alligators, ghosts, and other horrible, beautiful (sometimes dead) things. You can read my review at Strange Horizons. You can also read about Ms. Russell's appreciation for Kanye West (Is Kanye sitting around wringing his hands, wondering if he's just written a clunker of a metaphor? No, Kanye responds to his critics with a gleeful "Na-uh, you can't tell me nothing!"), among other things, at Esquire. Or listen to her talk about fantasticalness at NPR.

Also, a Seoul friend has a short story up in text and audio form at Giganosaurus and PodCastle, respectively. It's called "After October" and concerns Russians and zombies.

Also, also, there's this from the Physicians Committee for Responspible Medicine, on the good (it's nice to see a plate of fruit and vegetables) and the bad (it might be nice if the government supported the growing of fruit and vegetables):

Also, also, also, this is a trailer I stumbled across on Jesmyn Ward's blog--she being a future writer-in-residence at the Ole Miss M.F.A. program what where I matriculated once upon a time.

This trailer contains three of my favorite things: French, animation, and magic.

Enjoy.

Happy les lapins, readers.

ttfn.

June

2011-06-02T21:31:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

It seems to be June. Amazing how that happens. Just the other day it was some other month entirely.

In the news of me, I finished a draft of a story which garnered two basic comments: it is intoxicating to the point of physical discomfort, and, at some point, Dorothy has to just walk down the road.

Also, my students have had their field day and now, as they were last year, they are tasked with making video projects for their English teacher.

Here is what field day looks like.

The students line-up. They do stretches. They are happy it is not raining like people said it would.

Among other activities, there is the classic sport of synchronized photography.

And there is this, too.

And a lot of races involve various forms of bondage.

See note above.

At the end of the day, the students play a game called X's and O's, which is neither tic-tac-toe-ian nor Lombardian. It is a game where students are asked a question, and then move to either one side or another (the X or O side). The students who are wrong leave the field. The picture below is of the many students who are right.

Also, also, in the news of me, there is the slight swelling/not-exactly-numb thing going on in my TMJ joint (especially on the right side) which has slowed my actualizing the desire to bake chewy wonderful things. Possibly this is allergies of some kind--to some stray bit of gluten or cross-contaminated thing. Or the changing weather and rapture survival. Happily this slightness is possible getting slighter. Or possible I am losing more feeling. Oh, physicality.

Here are some pictures, though, of gluten-free pizzas made for an Italian night writers crit.

This would be after pre-baking.

And the next two would be after baking baking. One is a spinach-pesto pizza, and the other a 호박 pizza. (Ho-bak is Korean for pumpkin. I've just re-remembered I can type 한글 (hangul) and it's fun.

They turned out quite well and involved yeast and a slow-rise done over-night in the refrigerator, then a bit of a freeze, and then a thawing out and waiting during the afternoon before we writers were ready to eat. At which point, the pre- and bake-baking happened and yumminess ensued.

Happy June, readers. She's a good month.

ttfn.

Seoul Grand Park Zoo. Also A Very Slight Amount of Buffy

2011-05-06T21:55:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Today, I ventured out to a zoo with my school, and students. I rode a ski lift with two of them (students, not schools. Physics, you know). We flew over a pond, some sheep, and a very small mountain. It was a very slow trip. We were unafraid. Except for that one time, when one of the students said, "I'm taking the S.A.T. tomorrow." And I said, "Are you nervous?" And she said, "A little bit."

Note: She meant the U.S. S.A.T., not the Korean one. She has plans on going to the Ivy League. Or, at least, NYU.

Here is a picture of that which we were not afraid.

Inside the zoo, there were lions, and tigers, and bears, and not a single oh my. Some gibbons, though. And a polar bear. And a hyena that looked at me for a long time in the nocturnal room. We were by ourselves. It was dark. Pretty sure no one got possessed. But we'll talk about Buffy, some other time. I've only just got around to finishing Season 8. Must process the death and stuff, first.

Here are some pictures of animals that may or may not have been sad about where they were.

These are animals called, "Jungang High School Girls." There are, approximately, at last count, about 700 or so of these things. Usually, they wear muted, black uniforms. Today they wore a lot of flannel. And denim. It was like if grunge happened in the 80s and in Korea. One student wore a leather jacket, a short, black-and-white striped dress, and sunglasses. She was perhaps aware that, among other animals at a zoo, there are usually boys.

Flamingos. Pink ones, I believe.

A sort of fox. Saw one in Tokyo. That one was awake and running and later I discovered a fox shrine that possibly incorporated her or him into being. This fox was cute and sleepy.

Yes, that child is holding up a sign to that monkey. Yes, that monkey is reading it. If you would like to have a New Yorker style caption contest, then, by all means, get to it.

Not entirely sure why they decided to build a giant, sacrificial, stone altar in the middle of the zoo, but there you go.

Barbary sheep worshipping at the "Ball of Food We Can Eat."

The rare, and difficult to properly pronounce in Korean, "Pororo." I do not know why he is angry.

That is one leopard asleep on another. Lovely, and a little bit tragic. Life, you know.

Bear.

Happy Friday, readers. Happy Birthday, sister. Your gift is in my imagination. Perhaps it will be in the mail, soon.

ttfn.

Vegan Bakesale

2011-05-02T19:58:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

I am sitting at my kitchen table. It is a very small kitchen, and a much smaller table. Much of the table is covered by cookies and truffles and Cyndi Laupers.

Also, I've opened the windows and there's a nice breeze. Sometimes it smells like sesame oil.

Yesterday, I promised pictures and words concerning the Vegan Bakesale Fundraiser what occurred this past rainy Sunday at a bar in Itaewon called Roofer's. Enjoy.

This would be the table with many, many people buying things. People bought so many things that, in fact, the bakesale raised 942,000 won to aid Mercy Corps and JEARS in their efforts to save humans and animals in Japan.

The things the many, many people were buying looked like this.

A table of yum. Cupcakes and pies and brownies and truffles and, well, let's get a bit closer, shall we. Note: You can see the alien and Sae Hee (baker of the majority of gluten free stuffs and blogger at VeganBeats) in these pictures. One of them owns an animal-shaped pencil case and princess umbrella. I will leave it up to you, readers, to decide who is who and what is owned by whom. I enjoy being needlessly mysterious.

These are Cyndi Lauper sugar cookies. They are named this, I assume, because they are what one wants to eat when the working day is done. Some of them were in the shape of people. I do so enjoy biting the heads off of things.

This is a name-tag for the cookies. The circled bit in the corner is not an indication that they came from the 6th floor, but that they are gluten free. There was a whole corner of gluten free wonder. Here's some more.

Until yesterday, I had never heard of this carob, a delicious sort of almost chocolate like raisiny thing that dogs, and humans, can equally enjoy without worry.

Ah, tropical yum. What is surprising about these, is the perfect amount of salt that accompanies each bite of sugary nutty goodness. Also, I flashbacked to Asheville, N.C. when I saw this note that the cookies contains nuts. It is always nice to know what one is getting into. It is also nice to know that you can eat things without worry--so, yay for considerate and skillful food makers.

Here are pictures of other delicious looking things that I assume were also delicious because by the end of the sale most of them were eaten by happy looking people.

Lemon cupcakes.

Jelly doughnut muffins.

Mostly empty table.

Vegan doggie treats. Yes, they exist. No, I didn't try one. Yes, I was tempted.

For more photos and descriptions from two of the fantastic baker people who made this happen, you should visit Alien's Day Out and VeganBeats.

And with that said, readers, I must bid you adieu. Monday is my day to watch The Game of Thrones and Doctor Who in a self-made double feature of tragi-whimsical wonder.

Happy Deliciousness, readers.

ttfn.

p.s. More pictures if that is your cuppa.

Seoul, I Love You

2011-05-01T09:50:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

It is Sunday morning here, the rain has stopped, trains are rumbling by, and very soon, I will begin to write a review for a book concerning alligators and ghosts and bird men. Before I do that, though, three things.

1) Yesterday, I attended a Vegan Bake Sale at Roofer's in Itaewon. It was organized by the alien, among others. She made sure there was gluten free stuff. I took many pictures. Tomorrow, I will post them along with my comments. Spoiler: :)

2) A friend has been accepted into the Clarion West Workshop--one of those once-in-a-lifetime amazing/cool/terrifying/traumatizing things wherein people of like-mind exile themselves into an enclosed structure for six weeks and write, eat, sleep, fail, and fail better at various things (mostly writing and sleeping). This sort of thing costs money. My friend is not rich. If you feel like chipping in to help, you can and should go here. She will appreciate it. You will know she appreciates it because, depending on how much you chip-in, you will receive her appreciation in the form of tarot readings, hand-made postcards, or origami's containing secret messages.

3) I have been using my oven. Here are pictures.

Muffins made, for the most part, with sorghum and a bit of coconut flour. I replaced the eggs with a flax seed slurry. Such slurries are made by grinding some amount of flax seeds and then whisking that with some boiling water. Depending on how bindy you want your flax seed slurry to be, you can play with the ratio of liquid to flax seeds. A bit thick would be 2 parts water to 1 part flax. Something more eggy, is generally in the 3:1 range.

One of the things good and right with the universe is pizza.

I have been playing with the recipe by the Gluten Free Girl. What I've found, for my mix of flours and current location in space-time, is that adding a bit more yeast and allowing 2-3 hours of rising time results in a crispy, tender crust.

And then there was bread. I am not completely happy with the bread I've made, as it is not exactly the fluffy, sometimes crispy, often airy and crumbly stuff I remember as bread. It is something a bit denser. I have gone with more liquidy dough. I have allowed a bit more rising time. I have decided that more experimentation needs to be done. Here's what has been made so far.

One of the things that Gluten Free Girl says about gluten-free bread dough, is that one should not expect it to act like gluteny dough. She suggested allowing the mixture to be more goopier. So I did. I think maybe this one was a bit too goopy. But that depends on what one wants, of course. This is the bread resulting from that above goopness.

I cooked it in a not bread pan, as you can see. I like the cracking. This is what it looks like on the inside. It was tasty and there were air bubbles and it toasted well.

Below, there is a less goopy gluten-free dough. Also, a picture of the finish ball of bread. I did not take pictures of the inside because it was morning and I was listening to the audiobook version of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer and pictures slipped my mind.

And now, to work. Have a happy weekend, readers.

ttfn.

Because It Wouldn't Fit in Twitter

2011-04-17T13:22:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

In the midst of another experiment in muffins, I watched Roger Ebert’s TED talk. I attempted to tweet about it, but failed.

This is what I was trying to say.

When I was two-years-old, I saw Return of the Jedi in theaters. My mom says I cried at the end. Roger Ebert gave the movie 4 stars. You can watch his review with Siskel on YouTube. He said of Admiral Ackbar that he appeared to be “the missing link between Tyrannosaurus Rex and Charles De Gaulle.”

I didn’t know he said this at the time, of course.

But, for as long as I can remember, I have been listening to, and reading, what this man has said about movies. Sometimes I re-read his reviews of films like The Shawshank Redemption because they are, in their own way, works of art. At my first ever surprise party, someone gave me a book of his reviews called, Awake in the Dark.

I have a vague memory of recording his review of The Phantom Menace because: 1) I did not want to miss it. 2) I wanted to be able to pause and fast-forward so as to hear the review without being spoiled for the movie.

For the past few years, I have missed listening to him talk about movies.

Ebert lost his voice some time ago due to surgeries performed in an attempt to rid him of cancer. If you have not, you should read this Esquire article about Ebert's experience. Ebert has, during this time, become quite the prolific blogger and tweeterer on all manner of subjects cinematical, political, and galactical. He has not stopped talking, you see. Not really. And now, one day, it looks as though he may have a voice again. Sort of. Listen.

Happy Sunday, readers. I must go remove a pan of muffins.

ttfn.

Secrets and Fantasies

2011-04-08T23:27:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

My review of The Secret History of Fantasy, a collection of post-1977 short fiction edited by Peter S. Beagle, is up at Strange Horizons.

In similarly fantastic, but less secret news, George R.R. Martin is about to become more popular. On April 17th, HBO's adaptation of The Game of Thrones, the first book of Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, will hit our TVs and bittorrents and various interviews and profiles are popping up. The New York Times interviews Martin here, and The New Yorker profiles him here (though it would appear at the moment The New Yorker wants you to pay for the whole thing).

Laura Miller, one of my favorite writers about writing (of Salon and Magician fame), does the profile for The New Yorker. She has written very well and often about fantasy--on TV and in prose.Once, I fantasized about her. She was on her living room couch, completely clothed, wearing a sharp pair of glasses, and accomplishing the remarkable feat of eating a bowl of cheerios while reading Dickens (possibly Dombey and Son) and watching Battlestar Galactica.

Finally, I have an oven now. It makes muffins. Here's how that went.

The aforementioned. It's a Multi-Oven Pro from a company in Seoul called, Bread Garden. It goes up to somewhere around 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Before delivering the oven, Bread Garden delivered me two hand-mixers of small and large size. Then they took them back and gave me the oven. I do not know why it had to be this way.

Flour and scale.

Soy milk and apple cider vinegar for that sort-of buttermilk goodness.

Figs.

Figs in batter. The recipe from Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef is here.

Batter in muffin pan.

Muffin pan in oven.

Muffin rise.

Muffin offered to Liz Lemon.

Muffins in mass.

Happy Friday, readers.

ttfn.

2011-03-30T21:31:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Of late, I've been reading Turntable Kitchen. It's a blog about food and music and these are both good things. What they do is pick an artist, album, or a song, and pair it with some kind of food stuff. Sometimes it is something like The New Pornographer's "Together" with a Chicken Tortilla Soup and dreams of summer. Sometimes it is Finnish Cardamom Buns and The Vagrants, "I Can't Make A Friend: 1965-1968." They have a nice mix of music for March, here.

Today I visited a cafe called Cafe Harunohee for the second time in a week. It is a cafe oft-mentioned and loved (and sometimes used as an art and food exhibition hall) by the alien from aliensdayout. Besides it having a spectacular name that rhymes with itself, it also serves up a nice array of caffeinated beverages and foods and sweets, of which a great deal are vegan-able. There is also--tucked away in a ceiling nook, next to some sort of pomegranate-related box--a Gundam robot. I'm going to assume it's like a gargoyle and will protect all in Harunohee from mega-beasts and other, more evil, giant robots.

On Sunday, on my first visit, I had a nicely foamy soy latte and a bit of disappointment that they had no food to eat on the weekends. But, as I was told, they would have food during the week. So, I finished my drink, and read some more of Swamplandia!, and went home, with thoughts to return.

And so, this being Wednesday, and solidly in the week, I visited again. I ordered a lunch set and was brought some buckwheat tea to drink as I waited. It was yummy.

The food turned out to be curry, which was nice, with so-gogi, which is Korean for beef and also nice, though not something I wanted to eat. Sometimes I forget to say things I should say. They were quite understanding and said they would eat the curry and made me the food they generally serve on Thursday and Friday, which is a sprout bibimbab. Since I can't have the red pepper paste generally poured on such things (gluteny), they sprinkled some sesame oil on instead. This was also yummy. As was the espresso afterward.

The alien happened to stop by while I was there, and so, just in case, Hello, again.

On the bus back home, I opened a window. It was bright and breezy and just warm enough. I listened to Neko Case, Asobi Seksu, and The New Pornographers. I dreamed not of summer so much as spring, which in Korea lasts for about two weeks. You have to be prepared, or you'll miss it.

Happy such and so forth, readers. Try not to get involved in too many wars.

ttfn.

p.s. Yes, you are right. These pictures are not from Harunohee. These are pictures of food I ate this week. Next time I go, I'll take pictures. Promise. Or, you could just look here.

p.p.s. Completed a review of The Secret History of Fantasy for Strange Horizons and will let you know when it is readable, readers.

There Is So Much Stuff Here

2011-03-25T22:50:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

I am listening to Antony and the Johnsons. I like them. They sound like a church I wish existed and maybe does, somewhere, in some multi-verse or another. As a friend told me on Facebook, "There is so much STUFF here."

Here is some stuff that, of late, I ran into--or ran into me, as the case may be.

Sarah Kay is a spoken word poet. She, along with Phil Kaye, runs a group called Project V.O.I.C.E. It is a group which works with young people, teaching and encouraging them to engage the world and its stuff through spoken word poetry. She recently gave a talk at TED in which she performed two of her works, "B" and "Hiroshima." They were quite good. They made me kind of almost cry.

You can find several of her stuffs online, such as, "Love Letter from the Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire," which is silly and funny and probably not apt to make you kind of almost cry.

An excerpt from David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, appeared in The New Yorker recently. It is about a boy trying to connect with all the parts of himself. It is called "Backbone." While not spoken, it is good, too.

Yesterday, a student asked me, "What about plants?"

She was speaking to my vegetarianism. I said, "Well, erm, I've thought about that and though I don't really know if they feel pain, I think maybe they don't---and, from what I've read, organic farming tends to probably not produce quite the same amount of pollution (or resource burden) as animal farming.

She seemed satisfied with this.

I was not. In my thinking about food, it has never really entered my mind that living did not entail some amount of other stuffs dying.

Brian Cox (scientist, British, knows stuff) has a series of BBC documentaries called, Wonders of the Universe. In the first episode, he discusses Time and Loss and Life. In the second episode, he discusses how all of the everything that exists--including you and me, readers--was born from the heart of dying star.

Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I shouldn't call myself an ethi-tarian, which is a dumb made-up (kind of pretentious sounding) word I just made-up that means someone that tries to eat ethically according to one's one arbitrarily defined sense of ethics--in this particular case, causing the least amount of suffering to, in no particular order: that which you eat, the people who tend that which you eat, the world which gives birth to that which you eat, and also penguins and polar bears because those guys need our help.

Speaking of plants:

Carol Kaesuk Yoon's "No Face, but Plants Like Life, Too" from a week or so ago in The New York Times.

An article from 2009 in Wired about plants having social lives.

Also, this TED talk from the end of last year: "The Roots of Plant Intelligence" (which is not the source of the crush referred to in the tags, though Mr. Mancuso is a fine bit of stuff as far as stuff goes).

I can smell my beans boiling. I should check on them.

Happy stuff, readers.

Everything is alive.

Enjoy.

ttfn.

Now With More Pancakes. Also, Coffee.

2011-03-13T02:10:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

It is the weekend. This means I made pancakes. Also, today I used, for the first time, my very own hand-grinder to hand-grind coffee beans. I don't know if a hyphen is really necessary in the word hand-grind, but it appears my fingers think so, and I've learned not to argue with body parts. It leads to such silly horror movies.

The other thing I did today was work on a review for Strange Horizons and attend a celebration of fermentation. This latter thing was an even in Itaewon where many makers of moldy good things--such as beer, cheese, kombucha, pickles, etc.--gathered to display their wares.

I sampled some kombucha and coconut peanut butter and much conversation. With fellow gluten-free person and fellow lovers of Radiolab. I also got to share some gluten-free beer with the brewers in attendance, as well as a friend, who is also a brewer and has promised to attempt, in his mad ways, the making of gluten-free beer.

I also met Mipa of Alien's Day Out, whose link you can find over there to the right. This marks the first time I've ever met someone who writes a blog that I follow who is not already a friend--in the let's grab a coffee sense of friendship, as opposed to the goodreads friendship, for example, which I share with Neil Gaiman.

It is always nice to meet so may people in one place who are passionate about things. You learn so much and, in this case, you get to eat some really good pickles.

Remember to check out the Gluten-free Ratio Rally, readers, if you're in need of it, or just interested in baking something up in a mad baker sort of way.

Enjoy.

The recipe for pancakes today came, mostly, from GF in the City. That flour there is teff and brown rice flour. There's salt, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger, too. And baking powder + baking soda. And I forgot about the potato starch, but they turned out alright. You'll see.

The thing you can do with soy milk (milk of any kind, really), is put a tablespoon of some kind of vinegar in it, and wait a bit. What happens is you get something like buttermilk. And, if you use apple cider vinegar, as I did this morning, you get something like amazing. What you do after that is mix the amazing, along with egg or an egg-replacement, into the above flour. Your goop will look like the above. The baking soda, plus the acid from the vinegar, is what makes the bubbling.

Oh, heat. How useful you are.

A stack of yum.

Another in the series, Pancake with hand.

Bonus. Polenta.

Happy madness, readers.

ttfn.

Pancakes and Promises

2011-03-07T22:43:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

I promised pictures.

Here are pictures.

Enjoy.

Equipment.

A mix of buckwheat, oat, teff, and brown rice flours, along with tapioca and potato starch.

Goop. Used Gluten-free girl's recipe, sans the flax and egg and almond and buttermilk;

plus some chia and soy milk.

Pancakes.

Hand with pancake.

Pancake with home-made maple syrup

(made with maple sugar...is that how you make maple syrup? It's how I made it.)

Sweet potato hash with some purple cabbage.

Happy imagining, readers.

ttfn.

Korea and Gluten and The Future

2011-03-05T16:41:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

I am back in Seoul, in Korea. I have an iPod now. It tells me real-time bus information and the weather and nearby restaurants and also sometimes I listen to music on it. My students have complimented its fuschia-ness, as well.

Sweet potato tacos with pineapple slaw. Also, beans. Gluten-free tortillas.
The Wild Cow in Nashville.

One of the things that occurred to me during my sojourn into the U.S., was how much it had actually weighed on me, the explaining to Koreans what it means to be allergic to gluten, as well as a vegeterian. Sometimes, in Korea, it is quite simple. People understand. They are considerate and accommodating, where accommodation is reasonable (such as, "Please don't put the wheat tortillas on the plate with my naked fajita."). Sometimes, though, it is less simple and seems to involve explaining that fish and chicken and pork are all meat and once, truly, someone did refuse to not put the wheat tortillas on my plate for reasons that escaped me at the time but which I chose later to imagine involved their being quite attached to the way they believed a plate of food should be arranged in terms of color and shapes.

Huevos rancheros as had at The Laughing Seed Cafe in Asheville, NC. Note, that is tofu, not eggs.
And they were yummy. And, yes, those stalagmite formations are gluten-free.

I respect obsessive attention to detail, so I was happy with my made-up reason.

All of this is to say that I will continue to eat out and learn more and useful ways to explain things in Korean and also that I bought a toaster oven.

Hopefully, it will arrive soon.

This is a boston cream pie cake. It is gluten-free. It can be had at The Posana Cafe in Asheville.
Most everything is gluten-free here. Everything everything is good.

And then I will bake things according to ratio's in the way currently being expounded by the Gluten-Free Girl of Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef.

She, and other blogging people, are calling it The Ratio Rally.

Vegetable tempura at Posana.

This month is pancakes. I made some this morning. My mix of flours included buckwheat, oat, brown rice, and teff, as well as the starches of tapioca and potato.

I used soybean milk, too.

They were tasty. I failed to take pictures. I promise not to in future times. There are many more pancakes to make. You will see them.

It's possible this blog will begin to have many pictures of food, both as fun-ness and as motivation to not stop making tasty things as inspired by both Nashville and Asheville's astounding plenty of yum: pictures of which have decorated this post.

Other people do this cooking and picture thing. Gluten-free girl, for one, as well as Alien's Day Out, whose quixotic attempt to remain vegan in Korea has often inspired me, if not to be vegan, then at least to remain vegetarian in the face of those occasional Korean questions/temptations as to whether chicken might not be some kind of un-meat.

I enjoy reading these people. Much in the way that I write stories due to my love of reading stories, or often blog because of my love of reading blogs, I imagine the chronicling of my food adventures in Korea will follow a familiarly imitative and celebrative path.

We'll see. You never know with the future and food. Once we have replicators I don't know what we'll do.

Spring rolls at Posana.

Happy #foodisgood, readers.

ttfn.

Nashville.

2011-02-16T03:03:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Currently, I am in a coffee shop in Nashville with my sister. She is "working." Sometimes when she is "working," she is talking to the coffee shop girl about Egypt and/or bagels.

It's different being in the U.S.A, specifically Nashville. There are trees and grasses and places like Whole Foods where entire sections of entire aisles are marked with gluten-free stickers and you can even buy gluten-free bread and, yes, bagels. In Seoul, there are very few trees or grasses and no Whole Foods. There is very little vegan cheese, either. Alas.

Also, in Nashville, there are places like Matteo's which make delicious pizzas, both with and without gluten. They even have gluten-free desserts.

I'm afraid I'm getting a bit spoiled. Alas, alas.

Will have to buy a toaster oven in Seoul. And make things like this and this and spoil myself by means of effort.

In other food-related news, the other night the family of me went out to eat at a tapas restaurant called ChaChah. It's owned and executed by Arnold Myint, who you might have seen in Top Chef D.C. His parents run a restaurant/grocery, the International Market and Restaurant, across the street from ChaChah.

Here are pictures.

The restaurant.

Pork belly smoked in house with apple butter. Earl Grey cured salmon. Chorizo. Mahon. Herbed chevre ball.

Papas Bravas (fried potatoes) with a nice bit of aioli, a dressing of garlic and olive oil and, in this case, something that makes it that color.

Mushrooms with garlic.

Fried calimari in the foreground. Some lamb skewers with cilantro-yogurt sauce in the background. Also, sister.

Smoked red pepper bisque with coconut milk and yum.

Mom.

Sister makes brother look weird.

Brother makes sister look blurry.

Bar and ghost.

Spicy, somewhat Spanish, chocolate sauce and, what you don't see, is the house-made marshmallow and graham cracker.

Pumpkin Crema Catalonia, a pumpkin creme brulee with maple-whipped chevre and pepitas (pumpkin seeds) sprinkled on top.

It was all quite delicious and I thought I took more pictures but apparently I was eating and forgot.

Tonight will go see Chris Thile and the Punch Brothers at The Mercy Lounge.

Happy Nashville, readers.

ttfn.

Back From The Future

2011-02-03T16:49:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

At around 3 or 4 in the afternoon yesterday, I was on a ferry somewhere in the waters between Japan and Korea. I checked my cellphone to see what time it was. It said it was 9:42 a.m. on February the 25th.

I was confused and wondered what year it was. It turns out the year was 2042. Here is a picture.

This morning it seems to be the first day of February in 2011. Tomorrow being Groundhog Day, and the day after that being New Year's--if you believe in that sort of thing.

I am typing this in bed. It is cold outside and the tea is warm.

The last ten days I was in Japan. Six days in Tokyo and four days split among Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka.

Today, I will tell you about Tokyo.

It is place I have wanted to visit for a long time.

From the age of 14 to 22 or so, I spent a lot of time watching a lot of anime. Not as much as some, more than others. Sci-Fi channel, back when it was called such, used to show an anime movie or two around midnight on the weekends. Most of these I don't remember. Some of them had scary trees. Almost all of them featured a Tokyo of monsters, blood, robots, and girls who never had on what seemed a practical arrangement, or amount, of clothing.

As time went on I discovered things like Cowboy Bebop and Akira and Evangelion. I discovered Miyazaki and Ghibli.

I also watched Kill Bill and Lost in Translation.

Tokyo was the place that made these things--or, at least, made them possible.

So, when I say that Tokyo is more than I had imagined--please keep in my mind that I put a lot of time and effort into imagining it. I dreamed of flying trains and funky hair, of precisely sculpted trees and living sex dolls. I wanted to believe that friendly demons walked the streets and quiet, lovely temples with fox spirits really did give one a welcome respite from the hustle and robots of the modern day life.

And, well, here are some pictures of the real thing. You can decide which parts I imagined.

Freaks and Geeks

2011-01-21T00:51:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

I am listening to American Beauty by The Grateful Dead. Just keep that in mind.

Today, on the last Thursday of winter camp, my students made a music video. I promised them that I would not post it on either YouTube or my blog. They did not say I couldn't describe it, though.

There are three girls in this class. One of them seems shy, and plays with her hair, and loves heavy metal music. One of them seems very not shy--once, unasked, she came to the board and borrowed my marker and drew a picture of what she was trying, and failing, to describe--but she begged, for a time, to not have to do a music video. The third girl is quiet and funny.

The thing they did was take a K-Pop song by The Wonder Girls called, "So Hot," and transform it from a look at us we're clean and pretty and hot video into a rant and satire against what people think girls are supposed to be. It included much fawning cuteness (animal ear hoodies) and simulated nose-picking (black markers were used). In the end, they decided, however messy and uncute and uncool they are, they are still "so hot." It was fun and encouraging.

The other thing I did today was watch the last four episodes of Freaks and Geeks.

This is one of my favorite scenes. It features a character named Bill being alone and happy. It was described to me once at a bar by a friend of mine who's name, in fact, was Bill. Neither of us were alone at the time, but we were also happy.

While watching the scene here, in Korea, I remembered Bill describing it to me and it was kind of like watching it together.

It's amazing the different ways different people at different times can be happy.

The other thing I did today was wish that everyone who ever needed to watch Freaks and Geeks could see it.

I wonder if they have a Korean translation.

Happy whatever day it is, readers, wherever and whoever you are. If you're not sure where or who you are--that's okay. You're not alone.

ttfn.

p.s. On Saturday, I will be in Tokyo.

Bittersweet.

2011-01-14T20:01:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

It was pointed out to me by a friend that my blog is "just so happy." I do not know how or why this has happened, but it may have to do with the fact that generally if I'm feeling not happy in the world is stupid so why do things bother existing sort of way, I do not open my laptop.

At such times, I usually take to writing and ending all of my scenes by killing the characters with meteors.

It's cathartic.

In other news, in the winter camp class which I'm teaching, we discussed adjectives for songs. The students learned such useful terms as: trippy, funky, quirky, gloomy, energetic, aggressive, noisy, and bittersweet. For each word, we listened to a song. So, for trippy we listened to Hendrix's "Voodoo Child." For gloomy, we went with The Cure.

On bittersweet, they were at first confused.

"It's bitter...and sweet," one girl said. "It doesn't make sense. They're opposites."

"Yes," I said. "That's the point."

And then I played "Chicago," by Sufjan Stevens.

And when I asked them what bittersweet meant the one girl said, "Happy and sad."

And I said, "Why do you say that?"

And she said, "Because, it's like the words seem sad and the music is kind of happy and energetic."

And I said, "Yes."

And someone else said, "Violins are bittersweet."

And then we were all killed by a meteor and felt much better.

Here's fun things to click, readers.

Lois Tilton's thoughts on, and favorite short stories from, 2010

A TED Talk by Stefano Mancuso in which plants dance and think about things and you try to resist the urge to name your eggplant before whipping up a stir-fry with garlic and ginger and other brainy things.

One trailer for 5-25-77, a movie which I'm still not quite sure whatever happened to.

Beautiful, fascinating pictures from Love Hotels in Seoul by Grace Kim. She was allowed into the rooms after customers had left, but before the staff had reassembled the pillows and blankets and things. In one there's a remote control on the bed which seems to indicate maybe someone just wanted a nice, quiet, and warm place to watch a bit of television.

Anthony Bourdain lists his favorite things of 2010, which include Barry Hannah, Jack Pendarvis, and How to Train Your Dragon.

He's a smart man who should not be killed by falling space objects.

And now I've noticed that Snow White has started over on the wall so I should probably venture out into the cold and look for a warm place with food.

Happy Friday, readers.

ttfn.

A Thing With Too Many Words

2011-01-04T14:36:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

At the end of every year, Strange Horizons asks their reviewers to submit a year-in-review roundup--a paragraph or so concerning their thoughts on the year in speculativeness.

Since I have written reviews for them in 2010, they asked me to write one of these things and so I did, but it ended up being much too long and far too preoccupied with umbrellas.

I cut it to an appropriate (and umbrella-less) size, though, and you can read that version, along with everyone else's roundup, at Strange Horizons. There are many things listed in people's lists that are worth discovering and arguing about. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu, for example, continues to receive much love, and there were some who felt the new season of Doctor Who was not awesome. (Note: Sometimes I was one of those some and very often in 2010 I ended up arguing with myself, and sometimes losing, about the even more manic than usual pace of the Whoverse.)

For those who would like to read the version of my roundup with many too many words about umbrellas, here you go.

I am writing this in my apartment in Seoul, South Korea. It is snowing. People here carry umbrellas on days like this—usually brightly colored ones. Sometimes checkered or polka-dotted ones. This used to seem strange to me, but that was at the beginning of the year, in February, when I had just arrived in Seoul and hardly anything had happened. Lost hadn’t ended. Doctor Who hadn’t rebooted (again). Zombies weren’t outperforming Mad Men. North Korea hadn’t decided to start blowing stuff up (again). It was a simpler time.

2010, for me, will be remembered in large part as the year I moved to Korea and made new friends, learned of the magic of sweet potato lattes, and became acquainted with han—the Korean concept for a lonely kind of sadness mixed with enraged helplessness. It will also, though, be remembered as a year in pop-culture in which there were many goodbyes, a few hellos, and a surprising amount of dead things which refused to stay dead.

We said goodbye to Lost, which, for all its ghosts and magic and science and tendency to trip over its own ambition in pursuit of cheesy, spectacular melodrama, ended up being about what it was always about, a group of people—who they were, who they are, and who they might have been. Also, that final shot of Jack, perfect.

We said hello to the new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new version of Doctor Who (that’s 10 new’s if counting tires you). Steven Moffat took over for Russell T. Davies as show-runner, and Matt Smith replaced the much-loved David Tennant as The Doctor. In Moffat’s episodes from previous seasons (“Blink,” for example), he showed himself to be a brilliant writer of giddy, child-like horror, and much of that scary wonder popped up this season, so I was happy and excited about what the future holds for Amy Pond and this, the eleventh, Doctor.

2010 was also another banner year for the undead. We had, among other things, Zombie Economics, Zombies vs. Unicorns, The Walking Dead adapted for AMC by Frank Darabont, and also, of course, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. I haven’t read Zombie Economics or Zombies vs. Unicorns, but I plan on reading the one with magic horses. The Walking Dead, I thought, succeeded in understanding that the title referred not to the zombies, but to a group of people struggling within the confines of horror to remember what it means to be alive and human. And, as for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, it managed to resurrect—with both brains and heart—the collective 8-bit unconscious of an entire generation, while simultaneously demonstrating that generation’s remarkable capacity for distraction, interconnectedness, and general kick-assnesses. As such it was derided as insular and self-indulgent by some, and possibly the best movie ever about anything, by others. I lean towards the second camp, but then I once played The Ocarina of Time with my sister, more or less non-stop, for an entire day or possibly weekend. It’s hard to remember, really. We were young and time was different then.

Finally, and most recently, 2010 gave us the beginning of the end of Harry Potter with The Deathly Hallows, Part I, a film which continued that series’ unblemished record of being impeccably filmed and acted, and yet, somehow, never quite capable of capturing the depth of narrative and wit present in Rowling’s books. It was still, though, appropriately scary and exciting and tragic. The Korean girl beside me gasped and wowed and cried at the proper places—as did I. There was a moment in the film when, after Ron has run away and Harry and Hermione’s quest has become stuck in a tent in the middle of nowhere, Harry takes Hermione hand and they dance to a Nick Cave song playing on an old radio. They are hesitant at first, unsure of themselves and their feelings and Ron’s absence—not to mention the terror waiting beyond their tent. In the dance, though, they forget and they smile and they spin. It’s a new kind of magic for them and this series—one only learned, generally speaking, by growing up.

It’s weird to think that next year we’ll have to say goodbye to the boy who lived for a second time.

But that’s time for you. It’s wibbly and wobbly and wimey. Things begin. Things end. The scary magic of it all never really goes away.

In 2010, the apocalypse seemed a bit closer than usual. Violent protests across Europe, tea parties in America, failing economies, assassinated nuclear scientists, fears of pandemics and world-devouring black holes, not to mention leaked secrets, continued and threatened war, and the announcement that The Phantom Menace will return in 3D. Yesterday, Seoul held a practice evacuation. Sirens wailed. Fighter jets zoomed overhead. No one paid it much mind, really. There was a moment, though, before I googled the situation, when I imagined this city disappearing—all of its sadness and rage and umbrellas lost. I was afraid. I felt old.

Thankfully, if the stories of 2010 teach us anything, they teach us that the end of the world happens all the time—whether it’s zombies, aliens, dictators, smoke monsters, or he-who-must-not-be-named— and if we can just keep calm, aim for the head, believe in the power of love and sacrifice, procure a sonic-screwdriver of some kind, and, for god’s sake, remember to remove from around our necks the evil locket of evil that we know makes us evil, then maybe, just maybe, we might make it through next year without being devoured, blown up, or transformed into a bitter, hopeless, nega-version of ourselves.

It’s possible. Most things are.

So long, 2010. Hello, future.

Good luck, everybody.

Chris Kammerud

Seoul, South Korea

December 17^th, 2010, a day that it snowed.

Loss, Time, Hope, And Other Nouns, Continued...

2011-01-01T23:09:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

2010 was a different sort of year for me and the world, in that it found me moving to a different country and the world moving closer to being swallowed by a man-made black hole.

Last year, I wrote this concerning the end of the year and the decade. It included many hopes and resolutions which were stolen and made-up and combined into a giant paragraph of resolute awesomeness.

Of these resolutions, I managed to accomplish several in 2010, including: failing spectacularly at something, pretending to be something I'm not, and making several things that didn't exist before I made them. I maintained a decent awareness of the fact that everyone is falling.

I also accomplished in 2010 several things which I had resolved, and failed, to do in 2009. These included: celebrate New Year's in a foreign country (Hello, Korea). Get paid for a review and/or interview (See Strange Horizons). And have an adventure or two (See this).

My time in Korea has been sometimes painful and sometimes ridiculous (there were many incidents of being lost and/or confused about geography and life which I managed not to post about), and I thought, at many different points, that I would leave after one year. Teaching hundreds of students a week gives one the sense that you are more a performer, at times, than a teacher. It's tiring.

Also, Seoul is a big city and people can be indifferent to your existence.

But, after a while, you begin to know many of the hundreds of students and, more importantly, they begin to know you. They talk to you on their way home from school. They write letters. They say "Happy New Year" and "Don't forget my name," and, "Last night I looked up Doctor Who and found out there were many Doctors but David Tennant is the most handsome."

As for the city itself, if you're lucky, you find people. Or they find you. And then you, and the city, don't seem so indifferent any more.

There are many wonderful people in this country. It's good the world went unswallowed long enough to have met them.

I will be here next year. And then, after that, probably, somewhere else. Korea has given me new friends and better clothes and a somewhat more immediate understanding of what it means to try and meld a deep-rooted despair with a mad rush for the future.

We'll see what happens in 2011.

For now, click the clicky thing for the things which, in no particular order, made me happy in 2010. Note: many of these things will be in list format as lists continued in 2010 to be a thing which made me happy.

Favorite Albums of 2010:

High Violet, The National
Go, Jonsi
The Suburbs, Arcade Fire
Teen Dream, Beach House
Halycon Digest, Deerhunter
The Wild Hunt, The Tallest Man On Earth
Heart of My Own, Basia Bulat
Age of Adz, Sufjan Stevens (Sort of. Sometimes. It depends.)
So Runs the World Away, Josh Ritter

Special Mention: L.A. Burnout 2 (Still Burnt) a compilation from Sean Howe and Aquarium Drunkard.

Favorite Songs of 2010:

"Bloodbuzz, Ohio" and "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks," The National
"Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)," Arcade Fire
"Let Go," jj
"Heart of My Own," Basia Bulat
"Go Do," Jonsi
"Tighten Up," The Black Keys
"Futile Devices" and "Now That I'm Older," by Sufjan Stevens
"Excuses," The Morning Benders
"Memory Boy," Deerhunter
"Rattling Locks," Josh Ritter
"Take Care," Beach House
"Colors," April Smith and The Great Picture Show

Note: Best part of "Sprawl II..." is near the end, when the keyboards begin to sound eerily like Mannequin's (and Starship's) "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now."

Album Listened To The Most While Traveling On A Bus Across Korea in 2010:

The Suburbs, Arcade Fire.

Favorite T-Shirts of 2010:

Only one choice, really.

This shirt is an equalizer. It bounces along to music or vigorous clapping. It also reminds me of care bears. The person wearing the shirt is good, too.

Favorite Blogs of 2010:

Aquarium Drunkard, for introducing me to things otherwise I would have missed.

Aliens Day Out: A Vegan in Seoul, South Korea, for much the same reason, and also for being a vegan in Seoul and inspiring one to continue to veg and make magic in the kitchen. Korea would have been much less good without her pictures and words.

Favorite Cafes of 2010:

Cafe Sukkara
Hoho Myoll
Cafe aA
Terra Rosa
Coffee Lab
Post-It Note Cafe (See pictures)

Special Mention: Seoul itself, for being insanely in love with coffee. Here are pictures.

Favorite Restaurants of 2010:

Cafe Sukkara
OK2
Zelen
Buddha's Belly
Le Saigon
Osegyehang
Friends' Houses

Favorite New Yorker Short Story by George Saunders of 2010:

"Escape from Spiderhead," George Saunders

Favorite Ending of 2010:

Lost, the final shot.

Favorite Movie Seen in 4D of 2010:

How to Train Your Dragon

Best Description Of An Old Serial Found in 2010:

"The Technicolor Time Machine," aka "The Time Machined Saga" by Harry Harrison:

The narrative revolves around the efforts of a mediocre film director to save his job, his livelihood and just incidentally the studio he works for. To do this, he enlists a mad scientist, the crooked studio owner, a jazz tuba player, a cowboy, two fabulously stupid movie stars, and a real live ocean-crossing Viking. He ends up making history, but in a way he never dreamed of.

Favorite Books and Graphic Novels Read, But Not Necessarily Published in 2010, of 2010

Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut
The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
Scott Pilgrim, Bryan Lee O'Malley
The Scar, China Mieville
Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
The Typist, Michael Knight
The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams

And, erm, I'm sure there were other things.

2011 will be my thirtieth fall around the sun. I plan to continue to fail spectacularly and often, to publish and sell stories, to make things that didn't exist before, to cook, and to travel, and to be awesome. You should do those things, too, readers. At least the ones that apply to you. Everyone can fail better if they try.

In a few days a round-up of sorts of my sci-fi/fantasy/magical/British watching habits will show up on Strange Horizons, at which time I will post here a longer round-up that had many too many words for their purposes.

See you then.

Happy falling, readers.

ttfn.

In Which My Secret Mission Is Revealed: Now With More Christmas!

2010-12-27T21:55:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

It has taken nearly a year of "teaching" and "being awesome" but, at last, my secret mission as an English teacher in Korea is complete.

After showing students a certain episode of Doctor Who, the talk from my co-teacher is that some of the students have begun discussing their need for every episode ever.

This is the power of "Blink."

Other side-effects are that I'm pretty sure the teddy bears below are interdimensional robot assasins sent from the future to steal our hearts and eat them. Just keep your eyes on the screen. You'll be fine.

Hyundai Department Store in Apgujeong

Creepy.

After eating a small child's heart, the bears' fur takes on a red hue.

Book Binders on Garosu-gil

A small part of the shiny of Lotte Department Store at Euljiro il-ga

Ice Skating Downtown

Serious work.

The line for skates.

Happy Monday, readers. Keep your eyes open.

ttfn.

In Which Promises Are Kept and Doctor Who Gets A Very Brief Mention

2010-12-26T11:50:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Merry Christmas, if that's your cup of tea. If you don't like tea I don't know what to do with you.

But here are pictures, though, of Seoul Plaza and Christmas, of trumpeting angels and giant trees and snow globes. This is a city what likes the shiny thing.

Enjoy.

And now, I think, it's time for Doctor Who. Come back tomorrow, readers, for ice skating and creepy, animatronic bears.

Happy merry.

ttfn.

In Which There Are Things and Promises

2010-12-12T17:56:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Aquarium Drunkard is a wonderful musical blog. It's run by a man in California and named after a Wilco song. It has featured French songs and soul songs and Guthrie songs and zombie songs and, right now, you should listen to Rock n' Roll Santa by Yo La Tengo as you continue reading. It's December, after all. Or you could sample the Beatles' Christmas Singles. They're a pretty good band.

Speaking of Christmas, Seoul has erected a giant Christmas tree and snow-globe in the City Hall Plaza. Also, there are sparkly department store displays featuring elves, neon ice, and igloos made of plastic-jugs. Pictures soon. Promise.

This past week the students completed their speaking tests. They performed conversations they wrote themselves. These conversations were generally about trips to far-away places like Los Angeles or Bali. Two sets of students expressed a wish to go to England so they could learn to speak English with a British accent. A few wondered about things: alien first contact or the dumb sadness of Hans Christian Anderson's, "The Little Mermaid." One group wondered what would happen if Korea became a unified country.

Also last week, my review of Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake went up at Strange Horizons.

Also also, of late, I've found more and cool useful things to do with the Kindle. There's kindlefeeder, for example, which will collect, and mail, up to 12 feeds for free to your Kindle. It costs extra for more feeds and automatic delivery. This, plus Instapaper, has made the Kindle into an efficient and magical enabler of reading all those New Yorker essays, online short stories, and random blogs, which I always meant to read but never did.

For example, this New Yorker essay on sitcoms and Chuck Lorre. They speak generously of Two and a Half Men's laugh appeal, and glowingly about the scientifical funniness of The Big Bang Theory--a show I suppose, at some point, I should try.

Or, "Superhero Girl" in Fantasy Magazine or "The Taxidermist's Other Wife" in Clarkesworld. Both of these are good things to read, too.

As are the many and sundry lists of best music, books, geeky gifts, and Korean dramas of the past year. It is that time of year. In the coming days I will post my own lists. Possibly of some of those things. Possibly of others. Probably not of cats.

Happy December, readers.

ttfn.

Musings

2010-11-26T18:41:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

It is six o'clock in the p.m. on a Friday of no particular color in Korea. People here are, for the most part, maintaining a certain kind of practiced indifference towards the possibility of impossibly bad things happening.

In America, it is in the very early morning of Black Friday and people are lining up in the hopes of achieving free lattes or half-price jetpacks or whatever it is that people think worth waking and standing in line for at 3 a.m.

Here are things I am thankful for.

1) A friend pointing out to me Joss Whedon's response to Warner Brothers' announcement of a new Buffy movie. This is what he, Joss Whedon, said.

"This is a sad, sad reflection on our times, when people must feed off the carcasses of beloved stories from their youths - just because they can't think of an original idea of their own, like I did with my 'Avengers' idea that I made up myself."

2) Tea. Especially English Breakfast Tea and Earl Grey. Also, ginger tea. And this one cinnamon kind of tea they have in Korea whose name, in Korean, sounds similar to coffee.

3) Coffee. Korea has a fantastic amount of coffee shops and cafes, from the terribly cute and sometimes wonderful, to the terribly wonderful and usually still cute. Also, there are Princess Cafes where you can dress in sparkly, sparkly dresses. One of my favorite new kinds of coffee is a concoction called The Mad Scientist.

4) Korea. It has grown on me. Not entirely in a fungal/body snatcher way, though there's some of that, but more in a place with Mad Scientist blends of coffee and people who are kind and interesting and sometimes rude and so very similar to the sorts of people that live in other places--except that here they tend to be relatively shorter, healthier, and surprisingly afraid of fans. There are also a lot of motorcycles.

5) My students, who in large part account for number 4. They are cute and smart and today, during their speaking test, one pair discussed the possibility of starting a zombie colony on Mars so as to allow our two cultures to co-exist in a peacable, non-apocalyptic manner.

6) Friends, new and close and older and farther away.

7) Stories.

8) Lists

9) The internet, and, as part of that, the future. It worries me sometimes the intangibleness of everything floating around out there--all those paperless books and messaged hearts and complicated emoticons. But, then, there's this:

10) "One sees clearly only with the heart. Everything essential is invisible."

11) Food, which up to this point, happily remains quite visible and tangible and smell-able, with its various smells of ginger, sugar, cinnamon, cumin, pepper, browned butter, maple, rosemary, and garlic.

12) You. Also, me. Words of all kinds really. They are inadequate but useful things. Erm and also are two of my favorites.

13) Pictures. The internet is full of them. Here are some.

14) Also, this.

15) And that.

16) And so forth.

17) Happy Thanksgiving, readers.

18) ttfn.

Kindle Doohickeys

2010-11-18T17:21:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Today is the day Korean high school seniors take a test in order to determine whether or not they will succeed or fail as human beings. It's kind of like the SAT in the U.S. Yesterday, in my neighborhood subway station, random high school seniors asked me to wish them good luck and so I did and I hope it helped.

Today is also a day I did not have to teach since, even though I don't teach seniors, the 1st and 2nd graders (Korea has 3 grades in high school) are not allowed to come to school since they will make noise and the 3rd graders taking the most important test in their life are quite prepared to kill anything that moves. One of my co-teachers, who must monitor test-taking students, said he had to remain perfectly still or risk being eaten.

I spent the day reading a book made of paper (Salem's Lot--a gift from a friend for All Hallow's Read) and also writing and then deciding to take a moment to blog about my newest obsession--reading things without paper.

For example, did you know there is software and instructions on how best to read Manga on your Kindle? I did not, until I did, and once I did, I thought maybe it would be a good idea to finally get around to reading some Manga.

Once I had a copy of Battle Angel Alita, but that was as far as I went.

This turned out to be a good place to get started reading more Manga.

Here's some other Kindle-y useful things.

Calibre will convert pretty much any e-book format into any other e-book format.

Wired has a guide on how to do almost everything with a Kindle.

Project Gutenberg is a good place to get free ebooks of classics past their copyright.

Also, as a friend pointed out, there are Kindle games. Even Scrabble (though for this you have to pay $4.99).

As well, it's incredibly useful, I've found, to forward the stories that friends send me to the Kindle. Instead of reading them on a laptop, or printing them on scrap paper, I can look upon the Kindle and forget that it's there and simply enjoy reading and making notes as I go.

Niftyness, really.

Happy test day, readers.

ttfn.

Mountains. That's all.

2010-11-15T23:23:00.000+09:00

I decided not to edit yesterday's post. Mountains are big things. They need their own space. Like trolls. Or beanstalks.

Here are pictures.

Happy fall, readers.

ttfn.

Kindle.Typist. Mountains.

2010-11-14T22:48:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

This past Thursday, my Kindle arrived. I have been tweeting about it.

I realize I am late to the e-reading party. My Kindle is the Kindle 3, after all.

Still, I was excited and unsure and worried that the lack of smell, and heft, would bother me, and now, having put the Kindle to the test, I find myself in the usual position of thinking myself a very silly person. The future is not such a bad place to be.

On a pair of five-plus hour bus rides to the southwesterly parts of Korea and back, I read one entire novel (The Typist by Michael Knight), many bits of The New Yorker, news from The New York Times and BBC, checked my e-mail, tweeted, and loved every bit of it.

To be sure, the internetty bits of the Kindle experience are black and white and a bit slow and nothing like you would have on an Ipad (with its multicolored and absorbitant powers) or even, probably, a decent-sized smartphone, but it works rather well--especially for reading newspaper articles or columns or short-stories or anything wordy, really. The web-browser has a mode called, "Articles Mode" that dispenses with the ads and links around an article and presents you with a nicely formatted, high-contrast, easy-to-read version of whatever it is you want to read.

It's the easy-to-read thing that is the kicker. For a long time, I have read places like the Times and The New Yorker or Strange Horizons on my computer, and while it's colorful and wonderful and graphic, it was always annoying after an hour or so, if not less. Backlit screens shooting electrons into eyeballs, make my head swimmy, my eyes annoyed. But, on the Kindle, The New Yorker can be browsed and read for however long you have and there's no swimminess. It's just reading.

E-ink, with all it's reflective and unbacklit power, is wonderful. My eyes endorse it.

Also, here's the thing.

I love books. I do love the way they smell and the way they fold and the way they turn yellow. I have been reading them since, as far as I know, my motor functions allowed me to hold one--before that they were read to me. But, I will admit, there was something very freeing about reading a novel on the Kindle. I didn't have to pack the book, for one. But, more, I didn't have to turn the pages or notice page numbers or how far along I was or remember to place a bookmark. I just read and read and read and sometimes looked outside at passing mountains and then read some more. It was nice.

Tomorrow I'll edit this post with pictures of mountains. It is late now. My head is swimmy.

Sleep well, readers.

ttfn.

Escalators. Fire. Hello.

2010-10-24T17:23:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

Of late, two people have made mention to me of the existence of this blog and pondered as to my own continued existence.

In honor of them, and to solidify my still-existing state, here are pictures and words.

Two weeks ago, I visited Busan for the film festival. There, I saw five films, of which one I loved without qualification, one I loved with some surprise, and one was about two very old and very child-like brothers who were washed away to a far-away land during their childhood. That movie featured a dead Nazi paratrooper on the beach and American submariners who spoke with Eastern European accents. The other two films I saw I've mostly succeeded in forgetting.

Giant sign. Normal-sized people.

Time of Eve, a wonderful movie about robots.

Actors, photographer, and a ghost.

Many films were at a cinema located inside the world's largest department store. The place is called Shinsegae. Inside they have an ice rink. On the roof, there is a park. I was fascinated by the escalators for some reason.

Not an escalator.

I am of course also fascinated by people dancing with fire. This was last night in Hongdae Park.

More later, as always, readers..

ttfn.

Singing Room Sparkle

2010-09-19T21:36:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

It's the tenth anniversary month of Strange Horizons. Presently, they're celebrating ten years of speculative non-fiction articles and interviews which have covered a gamut of speculativeness, from interviews with the likes of Kelly Link or Terry Brooks, to articles about elven power chords and rational magic.

They are also collecting donations, so that such and future wonders shall not perish from the earth.

And, if you didn't know, Neil Gaiman has written an episode for next season's Doctor Who. Originally, it was to be for this year, but then they ran out of money, so they scheduled it to run next season. And then they asked him to rewrite it so that it wouldn't cause them to run out of money for next season, since they planned, for some reason, on having other episodes besides his. A table reading has recently occurred, though, of Neil Gaiman's now, possibly finished Dr. Who episode, so maybe it really will exist one day.

In other news, yesterday a group of people, of which I was a person, visited a singing room. In Korea, these rooms are called Noraebang. In Japan, they are called karaoke. I understand, from people experienced as Koreans, that these words mean different things. And, in fact, in Korea I have seen rooms called Karaoke. I do not know what the difference is. I could google it, but sometimes mystery is nice.

What a singing room is, is a round room with an arc-couch along the back wall and a circular table in the middle. There is a large TV at the front and tamborines on the couch. The room also comes with two very big books of both Korean and English songs, and something like a large, old calculator, which sits on the table and allows you to punch in the code for the song you want to sing.

Having punched in the code for a song, say Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" or "My Heart Will Go On," the regular room lights dim and then sparklier lights begin to flash. A video plays on the large TV. The words you are to sing will show up on this video. The video itself, from my one night of experience, will almost certainly be a Korean video that more or less doesn't not exactly fit the song. For "My Heart Will Go On", there was a video of a futuristic war involving Koreans, a jungle, and what looked a lot like lasers. In the end, someone did drown, though.

Other things I discovered during this experience are:

1) It's better if the room is less hot.
2) Duets are best if both people know the words, or at least the language, of the song chosen for a duet.
3) Unless said song consists of a lot of La, La, La, or Ha, Ha Ha, Ha, kind of words. Those are universally easy, not to mention awesome, to sing.
4) Tamborines are fun.
5) Calculators are simple.
6) Things that look kind of like calculators but have many more buttons than calculators are usually not.
7) Some of the people I know can sing.

In future news, next week is a holiday in Korea called Chuseok. It is a harvest holiday that Koreans tell me is like Thanksgiving, presumably so that I understand it involves family reunions and generous amounts of food, and not that it involves turkeys, football, awkward historical truths, awkward contemporary truths, and Christmas shopping.

During said holiday week, I will spend some time catching up on writing and reading, and some time visiting a co-teacher and previously mentioned people who live in places south of Seoul.

Hopefully these visits involve the generous amounts of food hinted at. If not, I will settle for an awkward truth or two, historical or contemporary. Either of these can be surprisingly filling.

Happy holidays, readers.

ttfn.

Wonderlands, Part Two

2010-09-16T22:46:00.000+09:00

Hello, readers.

At the Sungkok Art Museum, from now until September 26th (or November 11th), there is an exhibition called, "Over the Rainbow, Parts One and Two." It is a celebration of multiculturalism by way of industrial pipes, black lights, spice labs, waltz rooms, white blobs named Amu (which means anybody in Korean), henna, and much more!

Well, maybe not that much. But it was cool.

Click the clicky thing for pictures and comments.

The spice lab is a room in which many test tubes full of spices hang from the ceiling. There's also a table covered with small plastic bags, also full of spices. It smells wonderful.

Here is where you can have henna done while smelling the spices.

People learning to waltz.

This is the first room of part one. It's disorienting in a good way. The artists are called Yeop.

This is Amu and and his maker, Kim Kyung-Ah.

This is Amu in real life.

This is Amu being popular.

This is Amu being alone.

Faulkner said the shadow of a branch is always more interesting than the branch itself. So, this is me at my most interesting.

Happy wondering, readers.

ttfn.