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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
Jihyun Park and I were recently interviewed by Cristina Jurado about our translation work—that is, our work translating Korean SF to English. You can see the interview (and lots of other cool content) in issue 2 of SMALL PLANET, here.
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.
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 …
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 …
Tonight, I saw the Kevin Yosua Trio, with guest Jacob Chung at our local jazz venue, Jazzin Lab. It was a great show. Everyone played their asses off! As a would-be saxophonist, I paid close attention to Jacob Chung’s playing, and man does the guy have chops. (I mean, I knew that from listening to his albums, but in person he’s just as much of a monster, albeit a sometimes soft-spoken one.) He has the kind of tone a lot of horn players would die for, and was a deeply inventive player. The bandleader, Kevin Yosua, was the bassist. He …
I recently wrote about our return to Korea, and about the return of some manuscripts I’d thought lost. But I’ve had another return recently, and I thought it’s worth commemorating in a post. That is: I’ve returned to fiction writing. I haven’t written a new story in several years—since well before the pandemic—and most of that had to do with having a kid around, and a (more than) full time job, and translation work on the side. I did some RPG writing, including publishing a couple of books over the past few years. But I’ve wanted to get back to …