Choi Sori at the Edinburgh Festival

I’ve continued to enjoy the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and I’m pretty sad that it’s all coming to an end. The best street performance by far, Choi Sori & Arirang’s fusion of riveting Korean percussion and “extreme martial arts” provided some great opportunities for photographs. They began with traditional dances, the men wearing masks and the […]

Edinburgh Festival

I’m in Edinburgh, where I’ve managed (despite sleep deprivation and jet lag) to enjoy the Edinburgh Fringe Festival: acapella groups, cathedral choral music, a Jekyll and Hyde play at the Scottish Storytelling Center, and a bit of street theater, including jugglers with a unicycle 3 meters high.

Sharp Teeth

I teach Beowulf and Paradise Lost almost every year, something I wouldn’t do if I didn’t have a thing for epic poetry. From time to time, I’ve wondered why nobody writes epic poems anymore. You know—sprawling, thrilling narrative poems that ordinary people actually want to read. Somebody had to bring the epic back, and with […]

Worldcon

The World Science Fiction Convention was held this year in Denver, and I was lucky enough to be there inside the Colorado Convention Center, rather than on the outside, looking in. Highlights of the conference included the Masquerade contest, the GOH speech by Lois McMaster Bujold (who had some great things to say about genre-jumping), […]