My Blog

Almost There....

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 08:41:56 +0800

Ah... the end is in sight.

I am almost done with the Suzhou travel guide I’ve been working on for the past several months. The text is just about complete now, with only a couple of gaps to fill in here and there, and a little bit of tweaking, poking, and proofreading to do.

This week, some of my family members will arrive to spend Chinese New Year with me. I’ve been putting in a lot of effort to have the text of the travel guide done before they get here, and it looks like I’ll finish ahead of the schedule I’d planned. I’m glad for that, as I wasn’t sure I was even going to get it done by the self-imposed deadline. It’s nice to have the bulk of the work finished so that I can relax a little while they are here.

But I have to admit... I have another motive for wanting to be done before they arrive. I am planning to make use of them. My mom, sister, and best friend, who will all be arriving this week, are all excellent proofreaders, and none of them has ever been afraid to tell me when I am wrong. (I think they might actually like doing so.) I am hoping they’ll offer those two valuable services to me while they are here — proofreading, and letting me know where the weak parts of the writing are. It will be nice to have a set of workers to exploit for a couple of weeks, and I am sure they can help me improve the text.

Best of all, they are exactly the sort of audience I am targeting — people not particularly immersed in the culture of China, but intelligent and interested in learning new things about new places. I was very pleased when I took on the Suzhou project because I was given a lot of leeway about the content that I could use in the guide. The boss-man said, “Include anything you want, no matter how esoteric, as long as you explain it for someone unfamiliar with the culture.” That’s made the whole research and writing process lots of fun.

Suzhou is an amazing city, with a 2,500 year history. It is one of the oldest cities in the Yangtze Delta area, and has always been known as a refined, cultured place — all of which means that there is a whole lot of information out there related to Suzhou. I have been amazed at the amount of material there is to sort through, and choosing what to include and exclude has been a challenge.

Not surprisingly, I got pretty taken up with the classical gardens for which Suzhou is most famous. The philosophy underlying the building (and Chinese gardens are built, not planted) of a scholar’s garden is amazing. I can see why it takes generations to build an authentic Chinese garden — and why it is an extinct art today.

It’s been a great process, writing this travel guide, and I am hopeful that there will be more projects like this one to come. I’ll keep you posted about the release date of this one.

© 2010 Shelly Bryant

Hit (or Miss) List, January ’10

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:12:01 +0800

January was another good month for catching up on a lot of reading I’ve left dangling for a while. I made a little more progress on my Fill in the Gaps list and on the books I hope to read this year.

Here’s what I’ve been reading and watching in January:

Hit List
• House of Many Ways (Diana Wynne Jones)
• 2001 and 2010 (movies)
• The Return of the King (movie)
• Intrinsic Night (J. E. Stanley and Joshua Gage)
• The Book of Salt (Monique Truong)
• Dwarf Stars 2009 (Deborah P. Kolodji and Stephen M. Wilson, ed.)
• Attack of the Two-Headed Poetry Monster (Mark McLaughlin and Michael McCarty)
• Twigs & Knucklebones (Sarah Lindsay)
• The Rubiayat (Omar Khayyam)
• The Blind Side (movie)
• A Freed Woman’s Dance (Doris Cope)
• The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (Howard Pyle)
• Voices (Ursula LeGuin)
• Directed Verdict (Randy Singer)

Catching up on a couple of magazines:
Asia Literary Review, Elixir (back issues)
Star*Line, Scifaikuest, Not One of Us (most recent issue)

Miss List

No misses in January!

Neither Hit nor Miss

• Mental Fight (Ben Okri)
• Hum (Ann Lauterbach)

So, what have you been reading and watching this past month?

Instructional Videos for Poets

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:34:36 +0800

I was kind of surprised to come across these instructional videos for poets at The News Room.

Looks easy enough, doesn’t it?

(Visit HubPages for my thoughts on what it takes to write haiku — it’s just a very brief overview)

In Review

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:46:07 +0800

I like the way madameblogalot reviewed her blogging year of 2009. I know I’m a little late to the party, but I thought it would be fun to do the same thing.

Problem is, this blog got interrupted in the middle of the year, and I lost all of my earlier posts. But, I do have a couple of other blogs that I thought would be fun to review. So, here are the reviews of what’s been going on at Peregrine Online and Tai Shan. I’ll do the review by posting the first sentence of the first post for each month.

January

Peregrine Online: This is exciting.

Tai Shan: It has been fun looking at the arts scene in Shanghai over the last several blog posts of 2009.

February

Peregrine Online: I am back in Shanghai, having just arrived yesterday.

Tai Shan: A little video of our Chinese New Year celebrations in Singapore last week

March

Peregrine Online: The season is rolling around to the time that you can catch shows for free at the Miller Outdoor Theatre in Houston.

Tai Shan: Sichuan province provides one of China’s most famous cuisines.

April

Peregrine Online: It seems like this has been a long spring.

Tai Shan: I’ve just moved from one really small flat to another somewhat bigger one, and achieved a huge upgrade in the process.

May

Peregrine Online: The Raffles Hotel in Singapore is a site with a rich history, and it still houses lots of excellent activities and facilities today.

Tai Shan: Living in Singapore, there are two types of weather: hot, and rainy.

June

Peregrine Online: Make your plans to attend the Flute Festival in Singapore.

Tai Shan: In China’s big cities, you can always find a park where people gather and enjoy some semblance of nature, and also practice hobbies.

July

Peregrine Online: Apologies for the long break blogging here.

Tai Shan: I’ve recently had a busy schedule, and an uncooperative network.

August

Peregrine Online: Finding perfect holiday cottages sounds like a daunting task.

Tai Shan: One of the most interesting things to see when traveling through Yunnan province is the diversity in races and cultural groups living there.

September

Peregrine Online: Beginning tomorrow, there will be a big event going on in Shanghai, the Asia Pacific Contemporary Art Fair.

Tai Shan: The New Bohemians are at it again.

October

Peregrine Online: I only recently set up my Facebook account — I know, way behind the times, huh?

Tai Shan: I am pleased to announce that I got a really great gig for the next several months.

November

Peregrine Online: The Five Elements in Chinese Thought have been on my mind a lot for the past year.

Tai Shan: My plans for brunch with friends over the weekend quickly turned into an outing more filled with excitement than I expected it to be.

December

Peregrine Online: I stumbled across a really useful site recently, with loads of bicycle maintenance and riding tips.

Tai Shan: Before I left Shanghai for Singapore a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Think Like Chinese by Zhang Haihua and Geoff Baker.

And there you have it... that’s what I’ve been up to for the past year on my blogs. (The links are to the specific posts.)

© 2010 Shelly Bryant

With an Agenda

Sat, 9 Jan 2010 20:00:55 +0800

I don’t usually have a real agenda for my reading, unless there are certain texts assigned for work. For the most part, I just make my way through my books (several at a time) as I feel like it.

Last year, I signed up over at the Fill in the Gaps blog to join other bloggers in reading 100 books by the end of 2015 (each reading his or her own list). These books will be for the “gaps” between my regular reading schedule. I like the idea, and so far have enjoyed the experience of sticking with a loose idea of things I’d like to finish reading in the near future, but without having a precise schedule for when to read each title. I decided I might like to put together a list of things that I am wanting to read in 2010, focusing on books that are geared to help me become a better writer (specifically, a better writer of speculative poetry).

Some of the titles are on my Fill in the Gaps list. I only put here those I plan to get to them this year, and of those that I intend to tackle in 2010, I only included those that are focused on helping make me a better speculative poet.

So, here are some of the things I aim to be reading over the next year. (It looks like a lot, but remember that poetry collections are often very short volumes.)

Poetry Collections

Attack of the Two-Headed Poetry Monster - Mark McLaughlin and Michael McCarty
The Other Side of the Lens - G. O. Clark
Strange Vegetables - G. O. Clark
North Left of Earth - Bruce Boston
Double Vision - Bruce Boston
Sensuous Debris - Bruce Boston
Intrinsic Night - J. E. Stanley and Joshua Gage
Twigs and Knucklebones - Sarah Lindsay
Genesis, an epic poem - Frederick Turner
Renascence and Other Poems - Edna St. Vincent Millay
In the Yaddith Time - Ann K. Schwader
The Book of Styx - Eddy Styx
Barrow - Bryan Thao Warro
You Are Here and Other Poems - Gene Van Troyer
Ossuary - JoSelle Vanderhooft
Phantasmagoria and other poems - Lewis Carroll

Collections by the following poets (not yet sure which collection I’ll tackle for each)

Ray Bradbury
David Kopaska-Merkel
Wang Wei
Tennyson
A. B. Yeats
Franz Wright
T. S. Eliot

Anthologies

The Rhysling Anthology (upcoming)
Classic Haiku
Modern Japanese Tanka

....along with a big stack of back issues of various poetry magazines

Nonfiction

Science and Poetry - Mary Midgley
The Practice of Poetry - Robin Behn
Poetics - Aristotle
Relativity - Albert Einstein
The Book of the Dead - E. A. Wallis, ed.
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women - Donna J. Haraway

Fiction

Le Morte D’Arthur – Sir Thomas Malory
Looking Backward - Edward Bellamy
A Descent into the Maelstrom - Edgar Allan Poe
Mabinogion
Shades of Grey - Jasper Fforde
Voices - Ursula LeGuin
The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights - James Knowles

....and something by George MacDonald and J Alan Erwine
(that’s two different works, not a collaboration — unless J has some skills in
necromancy that I don’t know about, in which case I will definitely read the
collaboration)

I’m very sure the list will be modified as I go, but for now, this is what I want to aim at for 2010. It’ll be fun to look back next January and see how many changes have been made.

© 2010 Shelly Bryant