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Malcolm Gladwell and Journalistic Agenda
I was surprised, a few years ago, to see Malcolm Gladwell being celebrated by a couple of acquaintances of mine online: after all, I’ve always thought of him as an author of, er, low-quality pop-theory books of the sort that could be boiled down into a paragraph or two, with scanty evidence and a lot of flattering platitudes directed at the reader:
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Mammoth!
Well, I got word last week about this, and I was very excited, but I was also traveling in buses with seats of unusual size (not to mention, inhumane design-shudder)…
But now, well: “The Clockworks of Hanyang” is being included (as a reprint) in Sean Wallace’s upcoming The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures. The whole TOC is here, and it looks ( Read more... ) -
Korean Fiction, For Free... (In a Limited Range of Editions)
While I think Charles Montgomery at Korean Literature in Translation overstates things a little bit by calling it a “triumph,” it’s worth noting that LTI Korea has released a set of twenty early modern Korean texts for free. (That is, early 20th century texts: “early modern” begins much later in Korean lit than English lit, where it’s used to talk ( Read more... ) -
A Brief Word About Historical Terminology
Just read a wonderful piece over at the excellent beer history blog Zythophile on the historical changes undergone by the terms “ale” and “beer”:
I used to think that their merger into synonymity was pretty much complete in Georgian England at the latest, agreeing with the historian WH Chaloner, who wrote in 1960, reviewing Peter Mathias’s great ( Read more... ) -
Beer and the Habsburgs, Plus Lager Confusion
In my recent post about the economics of brewing and the consolidation of breweries in London in the wake of the Gin Craze, I mentioned that I’m searching for sources on beer under the Habsburgs. I haven’t found all that much, but maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise: after all, wine was preferred in Habsburg Vienna, and the kind of taxation that ( Read more... ) -
A Little Context Regarding Korean 막방 먹방 ("Broadcast Eating")
So, the global news has been abuzz with the latest story about South Korea, which is that some Koreans are making vast piles of money by eating massive dinners on live broadcast online.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCkUMIDcylM
No, I’ve never tuned in. (I hate watching ( Read more... ) -
The Economics of Beer and Brewing in Gin-Craze London
I’m trying to get a handle on London Brewing during the 1700s (especially during the Gin Craze), as part of the research for the novel I’m writing set at that time. What’s interesting is how English brewing transitioned from being primarily a small-scale industry, to being a large-scale industrial business with international reach, during this ( Read more... ) -
On Trust
I just made my first real, serious edit to Wikipedia. I’d been reading about Yu Gwan-sun the other day, so I couldn’t help but notice something interesting mentioned in he book I’m reading now, Donald Clark’s history of foreigners in Korea from 1900-1950. In passing, Jeanette Walter is mentioned, and if that doesn’t mean much to you, that’s not ( Read more... ) -
TEFL RPGing Aplenty
So, a while back I posted about using an D&D-like role-playing game as part of my teaching with one of our students. (See: Youngmin and the Magic World.) I recounted the story, and promised an update, but I haven’t followed through…
Not for want of RPG action, of course. Youngmin has since rhyme-battled a forest ogre the size of a high-rise, teamed ( Read more... ) -
Last Night I Dreamed...
… and woke remembering the dream, so I figure, it must be noteworthy.
What I remember is that I was involved in making a film with Jetse de Vries. Mind, he was in the body of this other guy I know, a filmmaker in Korea named Josh, but it was Jetse alright, and he piled us all into a train with a ton of gear including stuff you’d see inside the van ( Read more... )