Readings, September/October 2026

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This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Readings 2026

Fiction Bora Chung’s Your Utopia (translated by Anton Hur) was the first book I finished this in September. Before leaving for Canada this summer, I’d been partway into it—having gotten in signed by the author after sitting on a discussion panel with her—so after returning, I dug in again as soon as I got the chance.   I think the story that stuck with me most after finishing the book was “Seed,” though “The End of the Voyage” also hung around in my mind quite a long time afterward. They’re rather opposite stories, in some ways: “Seed” is hopeful and radical, …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXXVI

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This entry is part 57 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This is a series where I post what I think are slightly atypical readings of  the Cantos of Ezra Pound. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. Today’s selection is one of the celebrated “Pisan Cantos,” Canto LXXVI.

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXXV

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This entry is part 57 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This is a series where I post what I think are slightly atypical readings of  the Cantos of Ezra Pound. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. Today’s selection is one of the celebrated “Pisan Cantos,” Canto LXXV, plus some discussion of Pound’s relationship with music.

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Appendix K Added to Sidebar

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I just realized that I didn’t have a link up to my Appendix K posts, so I’ve added that to the sidebar on my site, but I figured I’d also post here. The series was commissioned by Aurélien Lainé, the creator of the Koryo Hall of Adventures RPG for D&D 5E, and was focused on Korean books, music, and films that could be inspirational for someone running a game in that setting, though of course those books, music, and films are worth checking out in their own right for anyone interested in Korean history, myth, and folklore, as well as …

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Restoration Complete

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I recently mentioned that I was working on restoring some old posts that had been mangled or partially lost. Well, I’ve just finished the process. In all, it looks like maybe two posts were lost, and those were posts I’d made private at some point, so I suppose I’m not too sad about having lost them.  It’s sobering seeing some of the things I wrote back when I started this blog in my later 20s, but, well, onward and upward. I am at least trying to post more thoughtful things now, and briefer things, too. My posting was really, really …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXXIV

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This entry is part 58 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Right, I’m back. This is a series I started years ago. The series sat fallow for some time, but I’m taking it up again for now, for as long as I have time and energy to post and to study these poems. For those who’re new to the series, I recommend starting with the first post, and bearing in mind that I tend to post what I think are slightly atypical readings of  Ezra Pound’s book of poems, The Cantos. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. Today’s selection is the first …

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Readings, July/August 2026

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This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Readings 2026

July and August of 2026 were not bad for reading! I did travel some, so I read less than I otherwise might have—traveling with a kid makes reading a challenge—but I still got through a fair bit.  I should note, I’m partway through a few books (including a translation of the Ilyǒn’s Samguk Yusa as well as the still-not-quite abandoned Morte D’Arthur) but my rule is to post about books once I’ve finished them, so those will have to wait. Below is what I finished during these two months.  

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Exploring Plex, or Trying To

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UPDATE (31 August 2026): Maybe I misunderstood what the problem was with getting Plexamp to stream from my servers. I’m able to stream the music now even when I’m not on the household wifi network, so maybe I don’t need access to the router after all. (I think maybe my Plex server was just down at the time when I tried to test it.) That’s positive news. I’ve even set up a couple of small Plex servers for use in the classroom, assuming I can stream there, because I’d prefer to use that than to be dependent on whatever media …

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The (Great?) Restoration, and Looking Forward

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So, one of the things I’ve been doing behind the scenes, a few posts at a time, is restoring posts and comments that ended up with garbled text. Something was set up incorrectly with this blog’s database, and I had a bunch of UTF-8 text stored in the database, except the database was set to latin-1 encoding. This worked, until it didn’t.  So anyway, I hired someone to fix it, and he was able to repair most of the database, but there were a couple of hundred comments and posts that had garbled text even despite the fix. (Presumably they …

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