10 Favorite Books
Here’s a list of 10 “favorite” books. As with all such lists I get to number five then the whole thing becomes a fist fight. They are listed in no particular order.
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Slam by Lewis Shiner
Radio Free Albemuth by P.K. Dick
The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Odile by Raymond Queneau
The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith
Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer
The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson
Muddled in Translation
Jin’s doing some translation work, so she’s become more sensitive to the way things are translated here. Examples:
1.) We’re watching an English language show subtitled in Korean, something on the Discovery Channel. The narrator speaks of a “promising failure”. This however was subtitled in Korean as “expected failure”, as if “promising” meant “promised” and therefore the failure was “expected” instead of being a failure that showed the way forward. The whole thing struck me as very curious considering the stakes, issues, and ensuing trauma placed on success and failure here, and how a potentially positive thing such as a “promising failure” had it’s positive attributes stripped away from it to be wholly a negative.
2.) The habit of taking English words, spelling them in Korean, and using these new words instead of preexisting Korean words. We’ve seen this with “trousers” and “dough”, and whenever it occurs it makes me feel pretty bad, because my job is likely a vector of contagion for this habit. This will even occur to the potential detriment of a project. So if an English language RPG-style video game talks about steel swords and silver swords, two things Korea has a pretty rich tradition of, those words get phonetically translated into Korean becoming something like “sil-li-va swo-da” instead of using the Korean word for silver sword with generations of history behind it.
Up a Mountain
Mossy roots. Also the best picture I took all day.
This one is for the Mossy Skull.
I did a bit of hiking today on Mount Naeyeon outside of Pohang City. It’s actually still in Pohang county but an hour by bus north of downtown. It was a beautiful late summer day: windy and relatively cool. It rained when we got off the bus but cleared up when we reached the trail. The trail runs beside a river then loops around one of the peaks. There’s thirteen (twelve?) waterfalls along the trail. We passed maybe seven of them. There’s also a Buddhist temple, Bogyeonsa, with various hermitages and buildings nestled in the valley.
If you’re in Pohang it’s a great day trip.
Now come the blurry cellphone pictures.
A waterfall
LOOK INTO THE LIGHT!
300 years ago a monk probably lived in this cave.
The folks on the right were a father and son pair meditating above a small waterfall.
Overall a pretty fun day.
The bus trip is cheap, about 2USD (1,500 Won), with another 2.5USD tacked on for admittance to the park. We didn’t visit any of the temple buildings although most of them were open to the public and you could hear monks chanting from various points of the trail. This added to the calm atmosphere (as an aural environment it was amazing: water trickling over rocks, wind blowing through leaves overhead, and monks chanting… yeah, I wanted to record it all).
The one thing I wished I got a picture of was the coffee vending machine in the middle of the forest where the trail branched towards the temple. It wasn’t even near a rest area, just there beside the trail.
Next time.
What He Said
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about said better than I could. It’s from Gord Sellar’s blog and deals with “Industrialization of Culture”. And while Gord’s speaking in terms of k-pop and girl groups, he mentions it being a wider trend:
One of the worst things about consumerism is that it gets a decade or two head start over our capacity to critique it. Actually that might be the worst thing.
A Wash
Apparently this week is a wash.
Not that it has been a bad week, not at all, but a few curveballs got thrown my way and I’m focussing on them along with the usual project. So the blog is on the back burner, which I’ll say now should be expected. Blogging is somewhat lowish on my list of priorities. Well, sort of. I’m reluctant to just put up any post and would rather have none than a lot of filler or worse, posts I regret. I wrote one all about how much I love Ken Watanabe’s hair (best over 30 men’s hair style next to William Tecumseh Sherman’s) and another called “On Pringles, On Writing”, but not sure I want to post either of them.
Next week I’ll be back with my two posts.
Maybe one will be about Pringles or Ken Watanabe’s hair or our favorite place to buy donuts. You’ll have to wait and see.
The View From Scum Beach
The big beach in Pohang is called Bukbu. It has the decent beachfront where masses of people loiter about and do their beach thing like promenade, drink too much, and sleep on the sand. I live near Songdo Beach, which I’m going to hence forth refer to as Scum Beach.
It’s actually not that bad, but if you saw it you’d know what I meant. Still it’s cool to see people parasurf or whatever down there.
You know how when you’re eating lobster and are licking melted butter from your fingers, and the whole time your Kosher buddy is sitting there looking at you in disgust and starts in on the whole “cockroach of the sea” thing?
Well, watching a horde of these critters skitter like a living carpet across a rock makes you rethink your position.
Mmmm. Delicious.
Control
I’m not a fan of writing posts, especially those written by unpublished, self-published, and/or “neo-pro” writers. Nor am I fan of “celebrity slushreaders” going on about how they dream a story they select might win a Nebula like they were right there writing the story beside the author, or at the very least keeping their tea mug filled, as if reading slush wasn’t the equivalent of being so much human baleen.
Bullshit on all that.
But I’ve got two writing posts itching to get off my fingers so let me just get them done between now and next week and then I won’t have to write about writing or slushing for the rest of the year. I’m putting it here for my own benefit as much as anyone else.
People talk a lot about hooks and openings and grabbing the reader so they keep on reading. And yeah I use the word hook as well, but it’s not about that at all. (Rudy Rucker has a great bit on “hooks” in his Writer’s Toolkit, which everyone should download.)
Other folks talk about establishing trust between reader and writer, and I agree with them but wondered how that trust was gained because it has to be right at the start. Then I got a couple stories in the slush this week that helped me figure it out.
What it comes down to is control.
You can do whatever you want in your story. Write it lush or transparent. Climb Freytag’s pyramid or flip it on its peak and kick it in the rear. Anything goes as long as you’re in control.
As long as each word and sentence connects to the next word and sentence and the whole thing makes a pattern where there’s nothing more you can subtract from it. That’s control. Having pieces left in your hand at the end is control.
What’s not control is starting your story with a well-groomed hook and then piling on introspection, backstory, and/or setting details. What’s not control is leaving nothing out, but throwing it all in there and hoping for the best. Lush doesn’t mean overgrown or overwriting a story so thick it collapses under its own weight.
Every word must link together. They can be ugly or oddly shaped words, but they have to fit into the story’s overall pattern (and of course that pattern can be all freak-a-deak weird, but there has to be some discernable resonance there).
That’s it. Writing post number one is done. It’s all about control.
Next week 10 Bad Slush Habits. Until then here’s Spoek Mathambo’s disturbing cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control”. Don’t blame me if it gives you nightmares.
Boast of Quietness
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to
understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to
arrive.
– Jorge Luis Borges
(translation Stephen Kessler)
Thanks to Saladin Ahmed for sending this my way.
Awesome Archer Guy
My wife feels guilty when we watch Korean movies and they’re not in subtitles. It’s not much of a problem since we tend to watch period action movies and I dig the fight scenes. (The Korean I know is limited to numbers, a few phrases to keep me from starving/dying of thirst, and jinja which is Korean for “No way!” You wouldn’t believe the mileage you can get out of jinja…)
And really in action movies are hard is it? You know the good guys and you know the bad guys and you know which characters are going to complicate things and you can see who’s doing what and where they are and whether or not the fight will be with bows or guns or knives or shish-ka-bob skewers or whatever. Really. It’s not hard.
But after the movie we’ll discuss it and my wife will fill me in on the more subtler bits of plot and whether or not the script was any good (normally they’re not, but she gives high marks to Reign of Assassins.)
She’ll also want to know what I named the characters, because she knows me and if I’m sitting there watching a movie and engaging with it I’m going to be making up the story and giving the characters names based on their costumes or characteristics. So I’ll tell her, “Yeah. That guy was Grumpus. And the other guy was Blue Eyes, and the girl was Lala and her mom was Mrs. Fred…” and you get the picture. Basically I’m free-associating.
Well, all this is to say we went to the movies and saw Awesome Archer Guy. It was about a guy named Hawkeye and his sister Wasp and their buddy Dudley, and some brutish Mongolians showed up when Dudley and Wasp wanted to get married, and Hawkeye had to track the Mongolians to save Dudley and Wasp and the Mongolians were bad-ass (especially Ryu Seung-ryong’s character) except for Prince Shiny Blue who got set on fire. He was a simpering putz.
The actual name of the movie is Arrow: The Ultimate Weapon, so you know I wasn’t that far off…
Revell Box Art
Here’s an assortment of box art from Revell. I wish I knew the artist’s name. These pictures come from Plastic Soldier Review.
Yesterweird 