“A Ghost Can Only Take” at Reckoning
My rambling gonzo* epic-mundane** essay “A Ghost Can Only Take” about walking the liminal zone inside an industrial city, ghosts, history, and landscape memory has been published over at Reckoning Magazine. While you’re there you should check out the rest of the magazine. There’s lots of good weird stuff in there.
One thing I wish to highlight about that essay is how much it’s unfinished as it can’t be finished, as it’s about where I live and the present moment in all it’s fluid, ever-changing glory.
Let me give you two examples. First, since I wrote that piece there’s been an earthquake on the north side of town that left a few hundred people homeless. Second, if Trump’s steel tariffs go through they’ll heavily impact where I live and work since the steel company in town is one of the leading steel companies in the world. If they start feeling the squeeze the whole city will. And that’s leaving aside any and all nonsense about a possible war on the peninsula.
Anyway, please give it a read if you’re inclined, or scroll through and look at all the pictures. (And if you like the pictures, there are plenty more where they came from.)
* What the editor called it.
** What I called it.
Moon Roses
I think these were on display to celebrate the Lunar New Year (Seollal) last week.
Man on Pipe
2018 is the year I go back to posting quotidian pictures. Sorry, not sorry.
Did I Mention…
Pohang, South Korea – 02/23/2016
Did I mention I more or less quit my job?
“More or less” because when the time came to renew my teaching contract for another year, I chose not to so now I’m just wiling away the days until my last one, which will be Friday.
I’ve been at my main school since 2011. It was great teaching these kids. I even liked most of them, in particular the current crop who will be starting 6th grade next week. But I also need a break. Which I realize is such a luxurious, privileged thing to say. And I feel both those things and not necessarily in a bad way, but in a fortunate and thankful way. It’s been a privilege to work with and know everyone I met students and teachers. I worked for years. I saved money. Now I can take a few months off to do as I please. Savings along with my wife’s income should hold us and once my visa gets sorted out I’ll be able to freelance and teach private students. We’ll see what happens.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m a little stressed out. Having no schedule, no time when I need to be up, no place I need to be, that’s spooky. I fear I’m either going to become completely indolent, or worse, and this is actually more likely, I’ll become so utterly fussy that I’ll be vacuuming the ceiling every day at 3 o’clock sharp and other somewhat OCD compulsions and more or less driving people crazy.
Did I mention I graduated grad school and am now a “Master of Education”?
A Master.
I’m glad it’s done. Now I can read all the books. All the books. But the degree might prove useful later on, especially when it comes time to find a new job. You’d think right?
One thing that always got me was when folks would say how they wanted to take a grad course while in Korea, but when I told them the time to enroll for my program they’d give me some long blahblahblah about how my school was a bad school and there are online programs and yaddayadda – and yes, fine, my school isn’t the greatest. It’s basically a local community college, but it really bugs me when I see people want to do a thing, talk about doing it, then when you point them to an opportunity to do it, they tell you how the opportunity is somehow wrong, and so they won’t do it. Meanwhile I got my degree and they’re still talking about getting theirs.
In other facets of my life I should apply that insight, instead of waiting for right conditions.
Did I mention our cat died?
Yeah, that sucked. But it was months ago. She was a big annoying cat who had like four owners by the time she was 4 years old – and I loved every fat ounce of her, but it turned out she had a heart problem. I like to think she had a decent three years with us. We still have another cat. Her name is Mona Lisa Overdrive. She’s also annoying. And I love her to pieces.
Some Links
From the beginning, the coexistence of the diverse groups that gravitated around D’Annunzio had been difficult. There were the citizens of Fiume and the Italian troops (the arditi, the carabinieri), but also Bolsheviks who rushed to the city (in a Moscow speech, Lenin said he and D’Annunzio were the only authentic revolutionaries of Europe); anarcho-syndicalists; futuristic, fascist Dadaists; and oddities like the curious war hero Guido Keller, whose mascot was an eagle, who slept naked in the tops of trees, and who was one of the new commander’s main lieutenants.
From a Cabinet Magazine article by Reinaldo Laddaga about Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1919 capture of the city of Fiume reads like something straight out of a China Mieville Bas-lag novel: A City for Poets and Pirates. It’s a fascinating read and worth checking out.
216 Words for emotional states that don’t exist in English. I have had the occasional schnapsidee myself.
When I say ‘my armor,’ what I really mean is a spreadsheet I used to analyze every piece of armor my character wore. Each piece of gear—the helmet, the chest piece, the chainmail legs—altered my character’s powers. My goal was to increase the amount of ‘Haste’ he had without giving up too much mana.
From Alex Golub’s artcile on The History of Mana: How an Austronesian Concept became a Video Game Mechanic . . . now I’m not going to say I’ve ever had a spreadsheet set-up for my D&D characters, but I will say I’ve known some people who have.
Some Links
Do you like links? I like links. I like having neat and interesting stuff pointed out to me. I like being shown towards articles I would never have found otherwise.
The internet is a big place. Why not let other people read bits of it for you?
When I started this blog I thought of it being a bit of a scrapbook, a place to put down random ideas, pictures, and notes. Earlier this week I asked a friend to send me the link to an article he told me about over a year ago, and the thought occurred to me that maybe I should keep track of those. Plus sharing a note of such things might be worthwhile.
So here we are…
Teaching: Just Like Performing Magic: Teller (the silent half of the comedy team Penn & Teller) talks about his experiences teaching high school Latin. Things to crib here if you’re an ESL/EFL teacher and want or get to design your own curriculum.
The Significance of Plot Without Conflict: A bit about the kishōtenketsu style of story telling. I think there’s a critique of this style of story telling, just as there’s one of Campbellian heroes with a thousand faces, but knowing it’s out there is pretty helpful.
Return of the Mercenaries: Since I live overseas near a US military base, I’ve had a chance to hang around with contractors working for the Department of Defense. All of them have been tech guys, but the stories they tell of their friends who are involved in combat operation makes your average mercenary sound like a combination of a prima donna ballerina and a viking berserker.
Twitter Weird Science Facts: I’m glad these are back. I had my wife in stitches telling her about FDC Willard, the physicist cat. And we both agreed that badger/coyote hunting teams sounded like the scar-faced gangsters of the animal world. Beatrix Potter was right!
The Swincar E-Spider: “Ferdinand, I must ride.”
April Books
I’m still gill deep in thesis-land and so have been avoiding books. To keep me from falling down novel rabbit holes I reward myself for reading about “Metacognitive Learning Strategies In Second Language Acquisition” by letting myself read a short story or novella every now and then. Here are some high and low lights:
The good….
Guys and Dolls and Other Writings – Damon Runyon
I can’t believe I’ve never read these stories until now. They’re kind of corny mainly because they’ve been riffed on to the point that their originality is buried under decades of imitation. But when you get over the corny, there’s a lot to love.
Stories – Edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio
A fun collection of grim stories. I’m not done with it yet, but so far some highlights have been: “Blood” by Roddy Doyle – A weird horror story about a modern day 40-something Irish banker that suddenly finds himself obsessed with the idea of drinking blood. “Fossil-Figures” by Joyce Carol Oates – Creepy story of the relationship between twin brothers from their birth to their deaths. It’s not a horror story, but it uses a horror story’s tone, and is really quite well done. “The Truth is a Cave in The Black Mountains” by Neil Gaiman, which would be a drive-to-the-story story in less talented hand, but here it’s a story of vengeance set during the era of Border Reivers.
Fantasy – Edited by Sean Wallace and Paul G. Tremblay
Once upon a time Fantasy was a print magazine that became a webzine that became part of another webzine called Lightspeed. This book collects stories from the print era all the way back in 2007. We were all so young then… It’s a good collection too with stories that presage later trends but aren’t harbringers yet, so they’re still weird and crunchy and have odd bits poking out from them. A fun read if you can track it down
And now the not so good…
The Last Defender of Camelot – Roger Zelazny
Zelazny’s a weird author that I know I should like more than I do, but I don’t. What I think the problem is, is that I come to Zelazny too late and all those spots where he’d sit comfortably I filled with other writers. So I read him and think things like, “that was a pretty great story, I’ve seen other people write better.” Maybe it was the collection. This book’s volume X in the collected short fiction of Zelazny, and maybe more completest than a highlight reel. As it was I finished the book thinking how Zelazny’s a great writer of bad stories that I don’t much like.
Cat picture…
Oh and I guess I kind of lied or forgot or whatever. I did read some longer things, novellas, novelettes, and an actual novel.
Chess Story – Stefan Zweig
Weird novella from 1938 about a chess match onboard an ocean liner between a rustic, crude savant and an obsessive doctor who’s recently escaped from the Nazis. It’s fairly straightforward, but with something ominous underneath it.
Sir Orfeo – JRR Tolkien
It’s weird to think that the medieval European world had no idea what the Iliad was about and had to make do with oral accounts that they reskinned with their own reality, so Achilles is a knight and the Trojan War like the Crusades. Sir Orfeo is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus where Eurydice gets abducted by the King of Fairy and Orfeo’s a king that renounces his crown to become a minstrel. It offers both Mythic McMedieval Feudalism and splendid and profane secrets.
The Cyclops Goblet – John Blackburn
Pulpy thriller about a conman and his wife getting wrapped up in a scheme to steal a hoard of Renaissance gold hidden on a plague-ridden island off the coast of Scotland. Loathsome characters, plenty of double crosses, and a page count that guarantees events move along at a fast clip. It’s a Valancourt reprint. Check it out.
The City and The City – China Mieville
I kept reading this expecting something horrible to happen that never quite did. I appreciated that. This is a great weird thriller that might not be genre but it’s certainly genre adjacent, where the best bits of it read like Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side dragged forward and left gasping for breath in the 21st century. A detective in an Eastern European country tries to solve a murder case that sends him to a different Eastern European country that happens to be his own viewed from a different frame of mind.
Where Do You Buy Your Squid?
“Hey guy, look in the back. I’ve got some primo molluscs swimming around back there.”
Yesterweird 