eclexys
This weblog isn’t really any longer under reconstruction, but I’m making the most of that excuse. Be friendly. Or I’ll zap you.
Posted personal on Saturday, December 24th, 2005.
My Dad—newly returned from his jaunt to Africa—will be doing up a curry, I am guessing, tonight. My Mum will be around the house, probably playing with my nephew Nathaniel as Marie and Troy (Nathniel’s parents, my sister and brother-in-law) will sit on the couch and chat about what’s new these days. Annie—sorry, Isabella—will be relaxing, I hope, since she’s pregnant, and Martin will be happy to have her back from Africa. Or is he still in Nigeria? I have no idea, she didn’t mention in her email.
Anyway, all I know is that I miss my family, but in a kind of happy, used-to-living-faraway way. I imagine where they are and what they’re doing. This is what people who say, “You’re far away but you’re on our minds,” mean when they say it and really mean it.
As for me, I’ve got to go finish making dinner. It’s Christmas, but it’s also Lime’s birthday, so I gave her the pick of the meal, with the promise I’d cook whatever she chose. (It’s not as if I could cook a turkey on my gas range, even if I could buy one somewhere, so the traditional Christmas dinner is out.) Lime wanted spaghetti, so I’m doing Italian. Spaghetti Bolognese (sort of), a nice big salad, some bruschetta to start, plus a (hopefully) decent red wine. I mulled some passable red wine, as well, to have with our snacks.
But now I must got get my lunch, and get a couple of things done. We’re going off to drop a bottle of wine at the house of a couple of Ecuadorian nuns running an orphanage here where Lime has been volunteering, and I haven’t much time before our rendezvous. So I’ll just wish everyone a lovely, happy Christmas. May the people on your mind and in your heart also think of you; may you hear one anothers’ voices, and may you see them soon enough, if not on this day or the next.
Posted personal on Thursday, December 22nd, 2005.
Since I very often refuse to pull punches when the annoying things come up, I feel at least obligated to mention nice things when they do happen. One happened just yesterday.
My very happy iAudio M3 purchase of October 2004 turned into this November’s annoyed jittering mess a few weeks ago, so Lime did me a favour and looked up the local service center. To my shock, there actually is a local service center. We went there on Monday afternoon.
To my even bigger shock, the repair staff asked me whether I’d dropped the unit or not, without first telling me, “Hey, your warranty’s up, so you GOTTA pay, friend”. I said I had only exposed it to extremely heavy use, and the repairman told me he’d try to get me a new 20-gigabyte drive for free.
Which he did. I picked it up on Tuesday afternoon, in rather obvious shock. They reassured me that I in fact didn’t have to pay anything at all for the service. Now, that is great customer service. So great I can’t quite figure it out, but hey… I am a happy iAudio user, and I’m likely to buy another iAudio unit when the time comes, so there you are. They did a good job for me, and for the company they’re doing service for.
Posted my "serious" writing on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005.
For those up for something on the harsh side of Christmas, why not login or sign up and then follow this link to download my Xmas story? But please do let me know what you think, and please don’t distribute it without my approval.
By the way, the link does work, but only if you are logged in. Otherwise it looks like a dead link within the site. The power of privacy… which, if I upgrade to WordPress 2.0, I may have to give up (temporarily, anyway).
Posted sci&tech;, politica on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005.
Another day, another wave of spam in my inbox. It’s very easy to pick out, for me, but my webmail provider doesn’t seem to have a system sophisticated enough to catch only the bad stuff; as soon as it starts blocking spam, it also starts blocking everything else along with it.
My first instinct, like that of many people, is to think up and appeal for highly punitive responses to spam. After all, spammers—at least, the ones who’re pushing viagra and seething malware through unsolicited email, and through comments and trackbacks on blogs—are committing a much bigger crime than most of us consider. Estimates about spam traffic often wave effusively at numbers ranging from 40% to 70% of total Internet traffic. I’d certainly believe a rate of around 50-60%, honestly. This is a lot of energy, wasted; a lot of time, a lot of computers messed up by the viruses these things spread; a lot of revenue lost to businesses who don’t engage in this kind of junk mailing.
But my first instinct is not, in the bigger picture, sensible. It’s not sensible because the Internet is not yet settled.
So let’s think of the Net as a rough-and-tumble Old West town. There’s only one Sherriff, and he’s got only one relcutant deputy, and he don’t want no trouble. Which means you can break any number of minor laws that nobody cares about, and he won’t do nothin’ to ya. Most of the citizens are not just law-abiding, though; they’re humane. They don’t go around robbing one another because, well, just because someone left his front door wide open doesn’t give you the right to rob him. They know the Golden Rule and they follow it, mostly.
And then, one fine dusty afternoon, a stranger rides into town. He’s not a thief, but if he were, the townsfolk would be quite okay with that. They know that the Sherriff has a penchant for basically shooting dead anyone who tries to steal from them. This guy, he’s an odd duck, but not in the menacing way that would scare the fine townsfolk. He’s got this cart out behind his horse, and it’s full of dictionaries and old novels and risqué novels and dodgy-looking tonics—oil of smoke and snake oil, for example—and Sears catalogs with extra coupons that nobody in town’s ever seen the likes of before, and all sorts of things, in that cart. His name is Jim Spammer.
Click to read more …Posted film on Monday, December 19th, 2005.
One of the difficult things about living in Korea is that quality film just rarely makes it over here. For example, I don’t think a Spike Lee movie since Malcolm X has made it into cinemas in anyplace except maybe Seoul. A friend and I were talking last night about Lars von Trier, and she and I agreed that probably the next film he puts out won’t get released here because, well, someone made the mistake of putting Dogville in cinemas in Korea. Dogville—an experimental movie with no sets, just chalk lines on the wooden floorboards. Putting that film in cinemas was the quickest way to ensure no more Lars von Trier movies get released here.
Meanwhile, browsing in E-Mart, I noticed that all of the new Star Wars trilogy is on sale. But the new Star Wars trilogy doesn’t, you know, make any sense unless you’ve seen the old one. (And even then, it doesn’t make much sense.) Why is it that Star Wars III ran for weeks and weeks at the cinemas here? I don’t know. I can’t figure it out—and it’s not just in Korea. There are a lot of places where the original Star Wars movies haven’t really penetrated into the popular consciousness, and yet the new Star Wars trilogy has still made piles of money. Sometimes, I think people are a little like crows or ravens—they’ll grab up anything shiny that you put in front of them.
It’s not as if you don’t get good films here, of course. Some very good films get released here. But often, the majority of what makes it across the pond is the really poppy, plotless stuff. If you want to do better than that, you have to rent or buy DVDs, and even then, there is a lot of contemporary cinema that just doesn’t seem to show up anywhere here. (Except, again, maybe in Seoul.) So when one gets his hands on some Spike Lee films, one kind of gorges himself.
Click to read more …Posted Lunar New Year Readings, 2005-06 on Sunday, December 18th, 2005.
As I’ve mentioned in recent posts , I’ve been listening to the free & legal mp3 set that makes up the audiobook distribution of Lawrence Lessig’s very important book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Creativity.
Now, I know some people will have trouble counting it as a “book”, or my interaction with it as “reading”, since it’s an audiobook. However, I want to note a couple of things:
- As an unabridged audiobook, it took me longer to get through all the audio than it would to get through a printed book. Listening to a book on tape is not actually “easier” than reading it, especially not a book on copyright law—no matter how interestingly it is made by a good writing style like Professor Lessig’s.
- I actually have also scanned through the PDF version of the book, which is where I got the link via which I intend to purchase the book, once I get myself a credit card. The PDF, also freely and legally distributed, contains the images and charts which could not be conveyed by amateur readers.
- Importantly, I think, in terms of Lessig’s argument, I was experiencing a derivative work of his book, one that he had legally released into the Creative Commons—and I wanted to experience it in that way, and listening to it beat reading it on a computer screen. So in a sense, listening to the book was also a way of testing the book’s premise about the value of Free Culture and of the allowance of derivative work, “piracy”, and so forth. Unsurprisingly, I do wish to purchase other of Lessig’s work, and perhaps even this book, sometime.
In any case, I am surprised to find myself completely fascinated with the American copyright situation, as it is, to me, just one more example of how Big Businesses are destroying whatever is left of culture.
I have to say that I am skeptical about the kind of “creativity” that Lessig feels is exemplified by Disney; for my own part, I find that the majority of derivative work is usually not worth the paper it’s printed on. For every Shakespeare (whom we all must admit wrote derivative works) there are a thousand furry-fanfic authors; for every Picasso (whom we must agree pirated bits of African art into his work, at times) there are hundreds upon hundreds of crap-cartoonists; for every Billie Holiday (who sang the songs of hundreds of other artists, but composed very little herself), there are a thousand talentless garage bands hacking their way through someone else’s songs.
It seems to me that Western culture has become a rip/mix/burn culture mainly because technology allows it very easily. In the past, people did do the analogue-tech version of “ripping” and “mixing” and “burning”; it was called studying, imitating, and performing or publishing. One still had to master something, however. Thelonioud Monk had to master musical theory and the pianoforte (and for that matter ear training and bandleading) before he could transform “Just a Gigolo” into something that was legitimately a “derivative” work, a “version” of the song, rather than just a paltry rendition of someone else’s tune. Shakespeare’s work is definitely derivative, but it is certainly not “merely” derivative; far from it, Shakespeare is one of the great examples of how great genius can take cultural dross and transform it to golden art. But this is a far cry from sampling bits and pieces of Marvin Gaye and Sly and the Family Stone and slapping them together; or, further, ripping bits of Björk in Apple’s GarageBand application and making some so-called remix with a different canned drumbeat. Now, if we are honestly to proceed, we need to come to grips with that fact: the vast and overwhelming majority of all “derivative work” is dross, not art.
But Lessig is not arguing from the point of view of art appreciation: he is not defending art, but culture. It is because of this distinction that he is correct, and that I must overlook my art-elitist misgivings and give him fair hearing. For what Lessig is concerned with are the following things:
- the ways in which the “creative commons” are now swamped with inefficient copyright laws and practices, stifling peoples’ freedom to work with creative works
- the free-speech implications of hypercontrolling copyright law combined with a media controlled by only a few large corporations
- the irony that the very creators who began with piracy are now the most vehement (and powerful) copyright advocates on the planet
- the ways in which popular piracy is being overblown and used as an excuse to crackdown on all copyright violations, including those that reasonably fall under fair use
- the ways in which technologies are becoming involved in the enforcement of claims to copyright protection, and how (the American) Congress is protecting these technologies despite the fact that they are obviously transitional
- the impact upon peoples’ empowerment and media literacy in a world both saturated by advertising and media
- the fact that all of this represents a perversion of the original use of copyright, and that the result has been the abandonment of the notion of public domain, which is an irreperable loss to humanity and human knowledge
- the fact that many kinds of media from earlier in the 20th century, devoid of any commercial life, cannot pass into the public domain and therefore will not be digitized and, as it degrades physically, will be lost to all memory and human knowledge
- his outrage at the fact that the Supreme Court, when it heard a case he was arguing on the subject, simply ignored his argument about why copyright law continually extended by Congress is a perversion and a wrong
- his vision of what we can do as a culture to rebuild the public domain and remind people how important it is to have a functioning public domain
Since the distribution of the Audiobook is completely legal, I’m now hosting it. You can start a Bittorrent download by clicking on this link for the magnet URI (it should work in Azureus, for example). But I want to support Lessig, so I will be picking up a copy of the book, or at least some of his books, as soon as I get a fair chance. You should, too. Of all the people out there, this guy is fighting for your culture, for you to have a free culture. If you want to know why, and how, read the book. And more important, if you don’t care, then read the book. Trust me, after you do, you will care.
Posted Lunar New Year Readings, 2005-06 on Saturday, December 17th, 2005.
From the moment I saw the movie Lemony Snickets’ A Series of Unfortunate Events, I realized that these books had to be well-written. Dark, brooding novels for children aren’t really the norm—though I think this has more to do with the way adults think about children than anything, and I think it also reflects the changes in how we think about kids over the last few hundred years. It’s not as if the Grimm’s tales were written for businessmen or housewives seeking “the edgy”, after all—and the fact that the movie was so wonderfully interesting boded well. Of course, my family thought it was mad, those whole dark, gloomy film for kids. They couldn’t understand why anyone would show such a thing to children.
And yet that is the peculiar genius of Lemony Snicket’s writing, at least in this first tome of the series: it presents protagonists who, as children, are not super-empowered. The children do not have access t magic that gives them abilities beyond those of adults; they do not have an alien friend to aid them in their struggles. Rather, all they have is their own peculiar talents and gifts, and they must rely on these abilities in a world where most adults not only don’t consider their wants and needs, but even fail to actually listen to them or acknowledge them as people.
The reader, of course, gains access into the childrens’ minds, and more importantly, since most readers are children, the reader sees a reflection of himself or herself in the characters in this novel. This is interesting, because it brings to mind the very wise and insightful statement which I cannot attribute to anyone in particular, but remember vividly being spoken in a woman’s voice, about how very hard it is to be a child. When one is a child, one’s words and ideas are very often brushed aside as nothings; one’s insights are minimized into fancies and sillinesses, and one’s desires and fears are often trivialized or simply ignored. The world is full of adults who go about incessantly about how things are, must be, and about necessities, and they do not understand the world of children, and the necessities and importances of things in a child’s world any better than children understand these strange predilections of adults for “the way things are”.
The book is also brilliant because, in many ways, it is a kind of child’s handbook for survival in this kind of world. In a world where children cannot control the sphere of their influences, children can at least learn to understand the systems which govern the behaviours of adults. In The Bad Beginning, the Baudelaire orphans come to understand certain principles of Nuptial and Inheritance Law, for goodness sakes—their bookwormishness actually saves their lives, even after their inventiveness and appeals to adults for aid fail them. There are none of the giant, cute insects of James and the Giant Peach, or the straightforward moralisms of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, either—not to rip on Dahl, who is a splendid childrens’ book author. But Snickets’ book does not offer the victory of the nice, the aid from the unimagined corner. If the children are to survive, what they must do is to become extremely clever, and to learn how adults think and act, and use this knowledge to fight for their survival.
One of the brilliant writing techniques in the book enunciates this continually. Occasionally, Snicket uses words like “standoffish” or “posthaste”, and like any good childrens’ book writer, he uses the word in such a way that it’s generally obvious—from context—what the word means. But Snicket does something ingenius with these big words; he starts out (and occasionally reverts to) offering definitions of these words, but then proceeds to offer “alternative” definitions of these words, as well. These alternative definitions are not thoroughly of the Amborse Bierce Devil’s Dictionary type; rather, they are more often than not contextual definitions. For example, from the end of Chapter Five: The children just sat there, stunned. Mr. Poe looked up, and cleared his throat. “Posthaste,” he said, “means—”
“—means youll do nothing to help us,” Violet finished for him. She was shaking with anger and frustration… Chapter Five concludes with an explanation of the difference between things happening figuratively and literally, which one might think would be boring, and yet it explains a very important understanding which children intuitively understand, and which, contextually, is also an obvious survival mechanism for a child in an adults’s world—figurative escape sometimes having to suffice when literal escape from a situation is temporarily impossible. I will not retype it, but instead commend you to read the book and find the passage for yourself; it is brilliant, heartbreaking, and beautiful all at once… especially if you understand it as one of the most important “lessons” of the book.
In any case, I think it is not because of its darkness and its perpetually frustrating plot that the book (and the series) is so popular with children: rather, I believe it is because of the way it speaks honestly, and insightfully, to the situation of children in an adults’ world that this series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, is such a smashing success with young readers. I myself look forward to when I will get the chance to read more from the series, though for now, while only hardbacks are available in Korea, I think I shall hold off for a time.
But certainly, these books are worth looking at not only for a parent, but for anyone writing for children. If I ever follow through on my on interest in writing a few kids’ books, I will certainly make sure to have read the whole series, as well as revisiting Dahl, working my way through at least some of the Harry Potter tomes and Pullman’s works, and checking out several other authors as well. For I do not mean to disparage Dahl and Rowling; I am sure (and in the case of Dahl I know) their books offer other virtues of great value to kids. But to me, it seems like Snicket’s book is the first one since Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are that offered anything like survival techniques for an imaginative and bright child in a world of distracted, grumpy, or even downright nasty adults. And if you ask me, our young people are sorely in need of such instruction.
Posted Lunar New Year Readings, 2005-06 on Saturday, December 17th, 2005.
“A shock writer”. “A weirdo”. “That Fight Club guy.” These are the kinds of things that are said not altogether praisefully about Chuck Palahniuk, but I am not sure I can really agree… or disagree.
I’m not sure I can agree with the pejorative use of a term like “shock writer” because, well, it’s pretty clear that Palahniuk values the shocking, the gut-wrenching, the revolting. It’d be one thing if he was publishing books full of snuff photography, or writing simply sadistic fantasies; in other words, it’d be one thing if he weren’t very clearly working at constructing texts of literary merit. But when you read his writing, you very quickly get the sense that he has, very pruposefully, considered his writing voice, mastered it, taken control of it on a deep level, and that for him the telling of these stories is about more than just the shock moment, or even the narrative contour toward and through shock.
Palaniuk’s Survivor is a good example of this. Click to read more …
Posted politica on Friday, December 16th, 2005.
Yes, the premise of the article I just read is as bad as you think from the title of this post. It’s that bad.
What the difficulties of boot camp do to justify torturing Iraqis and other “suspected terrorists”—and let’s remember that in America now, a feminist T-shirt is enough to place you under enough suspicion to block you from attending a Presidential speech—is beyond me.
Yet this is, well, at least for a little while, the thrust of Max Boot’s “opinion” piece in the L.A. Times, titled “Hate torture? Consider boot camp”. Oh, wait, there’s also the fact that Hussein’s forms of torture were much “worse” than America’s, and the repeated claim that torture was never “authorized”. Uh, why is it that the Bush administration also has been very protective of late, of the absence of laws forbidding torture performed by Americans abroad? Why is it that they need to even pass a law like McCain’s to forbid torture?
Boot claims that the offenses at Abu Ghraib were “inexcusable” but also justifies them, implicitly, by claiming they were “not as severe” as Saddam’s torture methods. The center of the complaint by Boot is that, yes, these are torture methods, but are somehow nicer, not so bad, as far as torture methods go, and after all, they work: they’re “said to have yielded valuable intelligence”; so why in the world would Congress ban such treatment of prisoners just because it’s, you know, “cruel, inhumane or degrading”.
Oh, here’s where the anomaly comes in: Boot’s worried that America will treat its foreign prisoners better than its own soldiers.
But soldiers signed up with the army, or at least, to date the draft hasn’t really been reinstated. Soldiers are not in a foreign territory. They’re not living in a secret, hidden facility with little or not communication with anyone from their homeland for several years at a time.
They’re soldiers, by the way. Soldiers, meaning military personnel, are afforded a certain degree of hardship by international conventions governing war. Soldiers, for example, may be shot and killed by soldiers in the opposing army with impunity; this is how war works.
Likewise, since 1929, there have been provisions for the treatment of prisoners of war (in the third Geneva Convention); and it’s not as if the notions in the Geneva Conventions were just invented by some idealistic twit who’d had no experience of war. Rather, it was after prolonged, awful experiences of war that these conventions were hammered out, and this explains why so many nations ratified them.
The crucial point Boot (implicitly) relies upon is that this “War on Terror” is a different kind of war altogether from those fought in the past. This is true: it’s not like any of the organized wars of history, the Civil War, the Hundred Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, World Wars One and Two, The Korean War, and the Vietnam War, for example. Those wars, to whatever degree anything I’ve read is correct—with possibly the exception of the Vietnam war—were generally fought by soldiers against soldiers, and national production rate against national production rate, and intelligence against intelligence. In other words, it was not completely a case of random quasi-civilians ordering destructive attacks on civilians. (The exceptions being Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which definitely were “terror”-ist acts in the debased sense in which we now seem to use the word.)
But yes, the rules of war are changing. To whatever degree Iraq even has anything to do with the War on Terror—despite his claim that the choice he made to take America to Iraq was a good one, Bush has admitted the intelligence was wrong, and that there were major errors underlying the decision—the rules of this “war” do not infringe on the Rights of Man. Intelligence gathering? I think that American Intelligence has bigger problems than the loss of cruel, inhumane or degrading forms of torture; these are the people Bush claims convinced him that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. These are the people who went along with the claim that there were, even if it was Bush telling them to do so. In all of this, the notion of human rights seems to be off-limits, but it is human rights that are central to this discussion.
This is the crucial point that Boot misses: that human rights, declared as absolute truths, do not change with circumstances or convenience. They cannot, by definition. Ought people captured by soldiers for any reason to be subjected to psychological or physical torture? Or, more simply: is torture right, or wrong? To those who think this simplistic, who think of this in a case-by-case scenario, imagine your father, or sister, or child, being “waterboarded”. Imagine this relative of yours standing naked in a cold cell for ten hours straight, or having his or her sleep cycle adjusted in order to depress him or her. Imagine all of this being done on a mere suspicion. Imagine her or him being detained for months at a time, with no chance of communication with you, in a foreign country. Does this sound like “fair” treatment for a prisoner, on the grounds of a mere suspicion? If not, then we can say it is absolutely wrong; what’s good for your sibling is good for all; what is bad for your sibling is a general moral evil. This is the answer that was arrived at long ago, and formulated into the Third Geneva Convention. It’s as simple as that.
In our time, we tend to be cynics. Republican scholars and thinkers—Francis Fukuyama for one—tend to celebrate the end of utopian or idealistic thinking, and yet in a culture where utopianism and cynicism used to balance one another to produce a kind of hopeful pragmatism, now we have cynicism waxing and utopianism almost nowhere to be found. We have a President lying to his people, then admitting it was all false, and still not being impeached; we have civilians suggesting that laws against torture—the very same laws that would have been called upon to protect them, if their nation had been invaded—are malleable, aren’t so important, that they ought to be poo-pooed for the benefit of intelligence gathering.
Well, the Framers of the American Constitution were not starry-eyed idealists, which is to say they had a very strongly pragmatic streak to them, but they were not, at the same time, strangers to idealis. Ideals underlie the American Constitution in many places. Ideals are what gave America, in its early days, a kind of hope and source of pride which citizens of other nations rightfully envied and flocked toward. However, it seems that era is over; the Greatness of America as a nation of ideas, a nation that affirms the dignity of humans and the fact that right and wrong do indeed exist, that Greatness has passed away into the night. Or, worse, that Greatness has been strangled by the American Right, by the politicians and the profiteers whom the civilians have allowed to hijack the nation.
Posted personal on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005.
Well, it looks like the week before and the week after Christmas will be a little different than I imagined. I’ll have a fair amount of packing to do, I’ll probably need to find an apartment for March, and it looks like I’ll be in Canada for something like 2 weeks. Lime is going to be able to leave around Feb 1st and will need to be back by about Feb 18th.
Since a person cannot pack, pack, pack all day, one of the things I plan on doing is some writing and revision. I’ll have basically two weeks before New Year’s, and maybe week after Winter Camp, which, you know, is three solid weeks of time to spend on writing. Last time I had three solid weeks (a year ago), I drafted a novel.
One of the things I’m considering doing is working on editing that novel; it needs some polishing, and a few more episodes added, in order to really work. So that’s one project I could take on.
I also have a short story called Instead of Pinochets which I would like to whip into shape (meaning edit into shape) and send out soon.
In addition to that, there’s the following:
- Soul Competency: the story of an Aramaic-as-a-Foreign-Language teacher in the time of the Second Coming.
- Rupt: an increasingly complexifying story (or novella) focusing on a specific kind of psychological terrorism (non-corporate green-activist advertising) that uses the medium of VR to break into the clouded mind of the average citizen, and which looks at the story from the point of view of the activists, and the “victims” too.
- A tale told by a kind of official-investigator-and-people-retriever who travels through time retrieving temporal refugees fleeing contemporary (mid-21st century) genocides, when their presence in the deep past has a strong enough effect on the future for a measurable ripple effect; these people are brought back and made to live in Lightcone-External Containment Units, their children reintegrated to the world population slowly, one by one. The guy has some issues with this, especially considering he was also retrieved in this way himself during his adolescence. This story is pretty deeply flawed but I love the idea of the use of deep prehistory by refugee groups as a kind of zone of sanctuary, as well as the idea of the Lightcone-External Containment Unit as a bureaucratic response to the kinds of paradoxes that ensue and which need to be averted.
- A story about a group of superheroes like the X-men or The Fantastic Four, except that this team of superheroes is made up of mutants from Northeast Asia—Japan, China, and the Koreas—who just can’t seem to get along. It’s hard to write clever political allegory.
- A novel about a futuristic Cold War, which I’m not talking about these days since I’m sketching notes continually, and don’t want to blow any secrets.
I have decided to abandon the story I was thinking of writing based on the apocryphal belief that during the Colonial Period, Japanese astrologers set about driving metal spikes into mountains in order to weaken Korea’s national “chi”. Despite some of the interesting things stated in this essay, I think the whole notion is urban legends and that they’re effectively explained by this comment over at Japundit. I hardly believe the Japanese sent Astrological Corps to Korea to mess up the mountain chi. It sounds like America sending droves of tourists to some African country armed with cameras for the purpose of stealing souls—the misunderstanding of an encounter with a technologically more advanced society (the Japanese beat the Russians in naval warfare, don’t forget) becoming legend. But it still is an interesting legend, and I think I may work the whole misunderstanding into a fiction story set in a more fantastical setting. The notion I have for my NaNoWriMo project next year is coming together and I think it’s going to be a decent novel draft, actually, especially if I think and prepare a lot in the coming year.
I plan also to print and send out some stories which need to go to magazines soon. I have a stack of short stories which ought to have been sent out years ago, and I mean to have them in envelopes and ready to go with me to Canada, from which I can post them more easily. I’ll also have an address where reponses can be posted to me, by then.
One last thing I want to do in my free time: review the Taiping Rebellion books I have here. I intend to go to Nanjing sometime soon, perhaps next summer during one of Lime’s busy periods. I’d like to know what questions I have, what I want to learn while I’m there, and to make a plan as far as what to do—shall I see Shanghai? shall I try to meet scholars on the subject to pose questions?—and review is the best way to prepare. It shall be my spring semester hobby.
And now, I must hurry off… I have to get my day on, and a busy day at that.