In which dream I apparently was seen writing poetry (something I don’t do much anymore) somewhere in Moscow, and this was enough for some organization above both the SVR (international intellligence service) and the FSB (the domestic one) to track me, watch me, and strongarm me by visiting my short-term rental apartment in the guise of a plumber and rendering the toilet unusable.

Later, when waiting for the processing of a tourist visa to some other place in Russia, I found myself on the phone with someone at the Russian tourist office, where I was told — by a shocked attendant speaking with a vaguely Indian accent (as if he were just some guy in Mumbai answering the call at a call center) — that the repairman who’d ruined the toilet and the spy I’d seen following me around town were the same guy… and that the person I’d talked to last time I’d called the call center was the same man, too.

“Spooky!” I said.

The guy at the tourist office agreed: “Yes, very spooky. Are you sure you want to come to Russia?”

“Oh, hell, how will that guy know I’m coming?”

There was a short pause, and then the Indian accent disappeared, the voice shifting to one I felt (in the dream) was not only familiar, but nearby: yes, the voice of the man who’d come and ruined the toilet.

“I’ll know,” that voice said softly, “Because you’re telling me. Take your troublemaking someplace else, Mr. Sellar.”

The last I remember in the dream, I was going through the security checkpoint at the airport, in my pocket a ticket for someplace in Russia, thinking, “I don’t care who is watching me: they can’t kill me for writing verse.” But I also remember a vague uncertainty about this assertion passing through me; and yet, off I was going, just the same. I think… or was I leaving back through security again, canceling my trip? I’m not sure. That was about when I woke up.

Warning: for those who’ve spent too much time at poetry readings, this may provoke flashbacks, either of crass poetry or of poets trying to read stuff that isn’t crass to audiences used to it. (I’ll admit, when I was young I was perhaps as crass a poetry listener as anyone. Well, maybe not anyone, but…)

There may be more in weeks to come. But for now, just one bit of doggerel.

Do not read Gentle Stuff When First in Line
(for Robyn Sarah)
by Gord Sellar

Do not read gentle stuff when first in line
Such poems will make everybody yawn;
Rage, sex, or theft would be just fine.

Your poetry is delicate like wine;
But learn, when you look up and we’re all gone:
Do not read gentle stuff when first in line.

As poets busily their topics mine
Like quarries, searching for what they may spawn –
Rage, sex, or theft would be just fine

But please, no yawning letdowns; we’re no swine,
Yet, please, titillate us, turn us on:
Do not read gentle stuff when first in line!

Inspire, yes, or tease or torment, whine
Even and we enjoy — write on a scone!
Or rage, sex, or theft would be just fine –

So cook some nasty shit up. Show your wit!
Write a poem about nudity on one’s lawn!
Just don’t read gentle stuff when first in line:
Rage, sex, or theft would be just fine.

I am so sorry I have no time to call you.
I’ve been so busy recently and I don’t want…

Good band, on top of it:

I have been considering making a barley wine for quite some time now, but I have never actually gotten around to it until now. Since I am eager to produce a batch of Mild ale for Miss Jiwaku, I figured now would be the perfect time to go ahead and make a smaller (10L) Barley Wine, using the first runnings for that and the second and last runnings of the (capped) mash for a (20L batch of) Mild.

This makes enough sense since Milds are supposed to be lighter in body, and one wants to mash a Barleywine at a lower temperature, to ensure the wort becomes as fermentable as possible. Besides, I’ll be capping the mash for the Mild so some sweetness will be added despite the longer-than-usual mashing process. (It has to be longer since I’ll be adding grain when I “cap” the mash; but while this might sound like a fairly even tradeoff, the malts I’ll be adding will add color and sweetness alike, and I need the color to get a mild of the shade I want, which is, a darker reddish-brown hue.)

When I started formulating a recipe for a barley wine, I got into all kinds of complex grists, thinking that a massive complexity of malt bill would also mean a nicely complex wort. Now, I’m not saying that’s exactly wrong, but I started to think about beer and complexity, and Schumann — the composer — came to mind. Schumann was a great composer, but late in his life, he began to suffer from mental problems. Paranoia, hearing voices, terrors… all the result of calcium deposits growing in his brain.

Here’s the thing: whatever romantic notions people like to entertain about madness, it clearly is not good for art. In Schumann’s case, his paranoia affected the way he orchestrated his music. He began to worry whether the first flute might miss his line, and so he had the first violin and the oboe double the line. He feared the cellos might not get their notes correct, and compensated for the possibility by having bassoons and trombones and contrabasses play the line too. (These are made-up examples, as I can’t recall the real examples I studied ages ago.)

The net result was that everyone in the orchestra played most of the time, and there was no effect from instrumentation. The music became a muddled, muddy mess. And if you’ve ever tasted a beer like that, well, you know it’s unpleasant.

So I decided that I would pull back a bit, and think about focus. I don’t have pale malt, much to my chagrin as I think it’d make a great base for a Barleywine, but I do have Vienna, Munich, and Pilsner, so I figure I can get a malty richness out of that. I wanted some dark fruitiness, so that suggests a touch of Special B malt — though not too much, as I don’t want the barleywine to get too dark. Oats for head retention, a couple of different crystal malts for sweetness, and some Belgian Aromatic malt to help the beer’s aroma, and then it’s just adjuncts (of which I will include jaggery, honey, and a little molasses — all of which will thin out the beer somewhat, though the syrup the least).

I see this as a way of allowing malty characters from the base malt to balance with a little plummy/raisiny character from the Special B; likewise, the crystal malts will darken the beer, add sweetness and a little more maltiness, plus a touch of caramel. The adjuncts I’m using in small enough amounts that they will likely add hints of flavor, but not enough to overwhelm the base. I was also planning to add the adjuncts in stepped feedings, one by one, once the fermentation seemed to have mostly run its course, but I forgot and added them at 30 minutes, so, well, anyway, that’s that. I’ll aerate well, try stirring the wort occasionally, in order to degas it, and I am pitching a large proportion of a very healthy yeast cake, so I think there shouldn’t be any problems. IF there are, I can always pitch some higher-tolerance yeast and see what happens…

The hopping is very simple, since this is an English-styled barley wine. (0.6 BU:GU is what I’m shooting for, mainly because I know the hop flavors will soften at the timescale needed to age this into perfection.)

• 13 grams of Magnum at 90 minutes
• 14 grams of Fuggles at 30 minutes (for just a hint of flavor, especially once it’s aged out)
• 14 grams of Kent Goldings dryhopped before bottling.

The fermentation will start out in a squarish 12L (~3 gallon)fermenter I have on hand; once the brew has mostly fermented out for the final time, I’ll transfer it to the 3-gallon carboy I have on hand for clearing, and leave it. After a few months, it should be ready to get racked to an empty carboy once more, the tertiary step being solely for clearing it. (Probably overnight in the bathtub with saltwater and ice.) Then I’ll reyeast it, bottle it, and forget about it till about Christmastime, if I can manage it.

For those not interested in the link above, briefly, Wonmisan Mild-Hearted Brown Hound is my attempt at Mild, using the second and last runnings of a partigyle for a barleywine.

Now, I’ve attempted to brew a mild before, using the last runnings of a partigyle, but it was extremely disappointing. Therefore, I approached this project with a fair bit of trepidation. That said, I figured that if I was using the partigyle method at a 1:2 ratio, rather than a 1:2:2 ratio as in my last attempt, and if I was using my current mash tun (and not just mashing in my brewpot) that it might actually work better.

The essence of the mild is its lightness, it’s sessionability: it is a beer that shouldn’t go too much over 4% — though there are commercial exceptions out there. It is not very hoppy, and so instead it is the malty character of the brew that is expected to shine through, a sweetness touched perhaps by a particular malt character, but not too much: while the name of the beer original was descriptive of its lacking the lactic “tang” of older, stronger beers aged in barrels (and thus infected with Brettanomyces) the Mild was a lighter, more refreshing and easily-consumed beer.

This is another of those English beers I am making for Miss Jiwaku, therefore. I figured, if I am going to make 10L of barleywine, it’s fair to make 20L (okay, actually 22L) of something she would like to drink, too.

After collecting my first runnings, I capped the mash with 200 grams of English Dark Crystal malt, and another 150 grams of Belgian Biscuit malt, and 100 grams of Gambrinus Honey malt.

The hopping, again, is simple, since Milds are supposed to have a very light, or nonexistent, hop character, and a relatively low bitterness. (I’m shooting for ~20 IBUs total, most of that coming from 10 grams of Magnum at the beginning of the 60 minute Boil, with a tiny bit coming from the 6 grams of Fuggles I’ve added at 20 minutes. I’ll also steep a similar amount of Fuggles at flameout, just enough for a hint of aroma, but not enough to overwhelm the hopefully aromatic properties of the wort itself.

I’m using Windsor dried yeast for this, because it’s supposed to be underattenuative, something I imagine might be helpful in a beer like this. You rarely hear about Windsor because people seem sometimes to find it stops fermenting in the 1.020-1.025 range; but for a Mild, that’s not a serious problem, since the beer should have a little sweetness anyway. I figured, since I have it, and since I’m making a Mild, why not try it out?

We’ll see how it goes.

So, when I finished making the Wonmisan Grätzer, I was amazed to find that almost half of the wort I’d run off from the kettle into the glass fermenter was loaded with thick, gooey proteinaceous trub. I’d used Whirlfloc! I’d chilled it to a very low temperature! WTF?

My solution was to chill it longer, though not too long. And therein lies the foolishness. I should have simply chilled the wort overnight, but I was leery about leaving it around and risking an infection: I wanted it to be fermenting as soon as possible, and had already defrosted the Kölsch yeast I’d planned to use.

So I carefully used my tiny racking cane — the one small enough to rack from 1-gallon wine jugs — to rack the clear stuff into a new fermenter, and left all the trubby crap behind. I thought about tossing it down the drain, but on second thought, left the thing beside my window, with the lid on loose, to see if it got a wild yeast infection — something I could culture up an use in some brew this spring.

I had to rush out in the morning, but when I got home, I discovered, to my chagrin, that the protein had flocculated to the bottom of the fermenter, leaving about two liters of very clear, beautiful wort — about as much as was missing from the already-fermenting Grätzer in the other container.

I thought over my options. Obviously, if I wanted to salvage the wort, I’d have to oil it, but then what? Pitch it into the already-fermenting batch? I couldn’t smell any skunkiness, but that didn’t mean something hadn’t happened in the beer. (It’d been by my window all day, and though I get bad light, it’s not like I get no light… even if the window (which is the kind of glass that doesn’t let much light through) was closed and the curtain mostly-drawn, I couldn’t be sure some very mild skunking hadn’t happened — though it smelled fine to both Miss Jiwaku and myself.

This led me to think that maybe I could just boil it up, and rack it to a small fermenter to try an alternate yeast. I’ve just done that. It’s just waiting to be topped up with water, and then I’ll pitch some yeast in. I was thinking about pitching either California Ale Yeast, or maybe some of the remaining Cry Havoc I have on hand, but since I lose nothing if this brew turns out terrible, I’m thinking about whether I shouldn’t try something a little more off the wall: a Saison yeast, maybe, or a Wit yeast. We’ll see… I have some time to decide, as I won’t be topping it up and adding the yeast until tonight or tomorrow morning, depending on how my blending and brewing go.

Anyway, there is a lesson to be learned in all this. Maybe two:

1. If a wort seems very, very trubby, don’t rush to clear it and rack it. Let it settle, chill it if possible, and then deal with after it’s cleared out a bit more.
2. If you’re brewing with wheat — like a Grätzer, which is 100% wheat — don’t be surprised if it clarifies itself more quickly and aggressively than you imagined possible. Wheat is full of proteins, yes, but they’re also heavier and like to stick together and flocculate. Stan Hieronymous (author of a whole book about brewing with wheat) has noted that wheat-heavy brews can clear out pretty well just by virtue of this fact.

Point #2 nonwithstanding, I think I’ll probably going to add some gelatin to both of the Grätzers when they’re done, mainly because (a) I want the beer to be very clear, and (2) because I want the racking process to be easier.

UPDATE (7 Feb. 2012): I decided to just go with pitching some Kölsch yeast from the already-krausened Grätzer. It seemed easier, and it seemed like a decent way of comparing the effects of kettle caramelization, since the smaller batch got boiled for a longer time (and more vigorously) than the bigger one; it’s a noticeably darker color, therefore, and I’m curious how that affects flavor. So the same yeast seemed like a way of checking that out.

UPDATE (8 Feb. 2012): Er… wow. I should have used a blowoff tube… Ah well, there’s still about half a liter left!

However, there’s one thing that makes it hard for me to get along with him, something it’s hard to put my finger on exactly because, well… it’s the same thing that makes it hard for me to get along with a lot of young Korean men around his age. It’s things he comes out with on occasion, in part, but I think it’s more the problem of communicating with someone who lives in a world where the kinds of things he says can simply be said, without a moment’s consideration.

Things like, “I’m not racist! I like hip-hop!” or “I just don’t like gay people, okay?”

Now, before you rush to remind me that people in Canada say stupid shit like this all the time, pause for a moment. I’m talking about someone who works in a field where dealing with non-Korean/non-white people and with openly homosexual people would be pretty hard to avoid. He’s university educated, and thoughtful and generous in a lot of ways… as long as you’re not black (or Middle-Eastern, or maybe Southeast Asia), or gay, or otherwise somehow too far along the difference scale for him to effectively grok you.

Both Miss Jiwaku and I have talked about this with him, she more gently and I more bluntly. In discussing his desire to go abroad and study more, I said something along the lines of, “You know, if you go there, there will be people who look at you and judge you just by your face. I know you’ve never experienced that, but do you think that feels good? Because that’s what you’re doing when you say you don’t like gay people — it’s the same.” Miss Jiwaku was gentler, pointing out that if he continues to say the kinds of things he’s said about gay or black people to us once he goes abroad, it will hurt his career — most people in his field will think of him as stupid and probably as an asshole.

What we haven’t said, and what I struggle with, is the fact that I don’t quite think of him that way– I mean, as an asshole… but I also struggle not to do so. I mean, he’s young, and he’s inexperienced. I suspect he’s never had a gay friend, or sat down and talked to an actual black person. He doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, and the things he says are well within the range of acceptable things to say for a lot of Koreans, sad as that may be. At the same time, he is generous and he has integrity — or at least, he has been generous to us, and shown us integrity. Neither of us is gay or black or any of the other things of which he presumably disapproves.

I am writing this post after having stumbled upon an old post I wrote, one that was, essentially, a rant about the general social acceptability of certain bigotries in South Korea today. It was a bloody-minded lashing out against all of that, daring homophobes to put their money where their mouth was and stop using digital  computers if they hate gay people so much — after all, we wouldn’t have them if it wasn’t for Alan Turing.

Of course, that is engaging in one of those things I hate — using a celebrated individual to exonerate a group when that group rightly needs no exoneration — but there’s another problem with it… which is, saying things like that just shuts people’s minds; it gets their resistance up, and good luck to you if you think you can get them to change their minds by criticizing them. Even getting people to rethink their attitudes by criticising their ideas is hard enough.

I’ve been thinking about why I have been writing such things — firing more and more angry, trenchant salvos off into the void — and I think that, besides the usefulness of a pressure valve to me personally, it helps me let off steam from work. After all, it’s one thing for you to encounter a bigot out there in the world, out in life. But classrooms are not life, and it’s far from unusual for me to run into a student who seems to think it’s all well and good to criticize Jews, blacks, women who behave in any way other than the wholesome expectation set upon them, white foreigners, “the Japanese” (each of these in one huge, easy-to-generalize-about monolith) or any number of categories of people. Richard Morgan attributes his penchant for violence in his writing at least in part to all the pent-up rage he repressed during his years of teaching ESL, and hearing people say the most nasty, bigoted things in a context where it was his job to be friendly, supportive, and to encourage them to speak more, as long as they use English.

Well, I don’t teach TEFL much anymore, but I am in a position where similar rules apply: I can call students on these things, but I have to do it in a way that makes it clear I’m attacking their statements or ideas, not them themselves. (And I have to constantly remind them of this, of course.) Perhaps the same dynamic has entered my blogging that Morgan describes in his fiction wrtiting, I’m not sure, but I do know it makes for a pretty boring blog. (Well, except for those few people who like to read the rants of expat teachers — I know one or two of those, but no more.)

But it’s also, I think, a kind of laziness. It’s so much easier to write what I wrote:

If you hate gay people so much that you’re willing to throw one out of school for daring to talk about himself honestly–breaking the rules of the religion you claim to bloody represent, and yeah, I did my fucking catchecism so don’t try to play that bullshit with me: there’s no “ostracize and cast out the kid” in “love the sinner, hate the sin”–then at least have the decency to repudiate all the gay influences on Western civilization.

Give the modern world back to those of us who appreciate it, and go live in the arid, joyless desert of your wildest fantasies.

Such as: get rid of your digital computers. Back to the abacus! Oh, didn’t you know? Alan Turing, widely considered the father of digital computing, was gay. Yep, queer, gay, homo, whatever nasty word you have in Korean for that. And nobody’s even apologized yet, apparently, for the way he was hounded to death by the British government. Who now look like scum for what they did to him.

And give us back the Sistine Chapel. Yeah, yeah,  Michelangelo successfully defended himself against the charge of homosexuality at some point or other, if I remember right. So do lots of gay people, and the  rumors that surrounded him were pretty powerful, and pretty persistent. Who knows, but… just to be safe, and considering his art has so many naked men in it… you’d better hand it over.

Oh, and literature. You have no idea how many major authors were and are homosexual, or bisexual, or whatever, do you? Well, I do, and I’m telling you: there will be big holes in the history of literature. Hell, statistically speaking, I’m pretty sure some of those who were inspired to write the Bible were something other than what we moderns delineate as heterosexual. Ooh, didn’t think of that, did you? Nah, you probably even think (erroneously, I might add) that the Bible referred to homosexuality often, or always did so negatively, right? Uh… no.

I could go on. But hey, if you feel like making a clean breast of it, that’s a start. I’ll bother with the rest of the list once you show enough conscience to follow through with that.

But I know you won’t, and that’s why you need to wake up your slammed-shut little minds and cut it with the persecution. If you want the fruits of all humankind to be allowed into your life, you need to stop punishing a few for being different… not just because those few contribute too, but because you are enjoying the fruits of all humankind, and it behooves you to be a bit more fucking civilized.

… than to say, something like this:

Look, I know that what you said is something that doesn’t seem wrong to you, doesn’t seem objectionable. I know that most of your friends wouldn’t bat an eyelid, but I do. I do, and most of the people of a comparable level of intelligence and education where I come from would more than bat an eyelid: they’d write you off as hopeless, or at least as stupidly blunt. They’d wonder whether you were a religious zealot, or whether maybe this kind of bigotry is just common in Korea; they would probably get a bad impression of you and your society. And they would very likely not bother to talk to you again.

And by the way, even those who share your views would, at a comparable level of intelligence and education, phrase what you said differently. They would say something less straightforwardly unselfconscious; they might say, “Well, I think people have the right to do as they please, but I’m a Christian, and… well, we’re not comfortable with homosexuality,” or something like that. Yes, yes, we have loudmouth bigots too, of course we do, but very few of are actually well-educated or intelligent… and those who are, tend to be using that kind of talk to appeal to the poorly-educated, ignorant, and/or stupid for their own political or economic gain.

The thing is, that latter kind of talk is the kind that does get people to think. Not the hopeless ones, but a lot of people aren’t necessarily hopeless. The latter approach means it’s possible to talk to this person, it’s possible to respect them while telling them, “Look, I’m asking you to rethink your attitude about this…”

The screaming, ranting indictments, unfortunately, most of the time just make nothing happen — they do me no good, they do my readers (most of whom I assume are in the choir to which I preach) no good, and it’s not like I talk this way in real life.

So, I think I’ve stumbled onto a resolution, not just for 2012, but for the future in general — instead of ranting, get the shovel and do the work. Dig, and if I have rage still, let it go into the fiction I write.

The fare Sibum provides covers the four spiritual food groups — humor, seriousness, discipline, humility — and is therefore wholesome and nutritive.

Knowing David, these words could as easily have been either criticism or praise — or even both — though I think in this case it is the latter. What I’ve read of Sibum’s work in the past — alas, limited so far only to his 1998 collection The November Propertius, though I have other collections sitting on my desk right now (ah, late to so many parties, it seems) — absolutely did cover those four spiritual food groups of Solway’s… but The Pangborn Defence adds another group to them, which I struggle to name.

I think I might call it in-the-worldness, for what I find different in this book is its worldliness — not in the sense of that boring old divide between the sacred and the secular, so much as in its responsivity to the world. Sibum seems to have provided his own answer to the question, “What does it take to get poets to shake their fists at power?” His answer seems to be: The Bush Administration.

Well, not that alone. Reality TV; the rise of capitalist globalization; but also, one senses, the creeping on of the years, the visible collapse one witnesses less in one’s own life than in the lives of one’s friends and enemies, as their hair grays and their marriages collapse and their bad habits continue on into the shadow years.

Friends and enemies: the cover of the book features a mason jar containing military helicopters sweeping down towards a  paddock of sheep — shades of Black Hawk Down in the Lake District, I find myself thinking as I see the image closer up, at the front and back of the book. The opening poem is titled Salvo, and the rest of the poems are composed, primarily, in a kind of epistolary mode — though, it must be noted, the way the author of The November Propertius would write epistolary poems, pressing the language like grapes to extract every drop of sweet dark richness.

These letters are far from gentle, and one or two feel as if composed to one’s enemies; whether figurative or imagined, a number of the recipients receiving scathing treatments. But there are also letters that seem friendlier, in that harsh and brutally honest way that sometimes is possible with those rare, honest-to-goodness friends one occasionally makes.

Among the poems in this slim book (67 pages, though I’m not complaining: it seems a fine length for what it contains), the most outstanding to me were “Lunar Cycle” and “Answering Crow”, characters that come to life with all their wonderful weaknesses and foibles but also, and much more importantly, reflecting the relationships Sibum’s narrator has (or understands himself to have) with them in the world. His letters to them are littered with references to pubs, to women known to them in the past, to character flaws and idiosyncracies that Sibum’s narrator recognizes and embraces.

Even without reading Sibum’s comments about the book elsewhere, it seems immediately apparent that these characters are based on real people, pseudonyms of a kind… though the only one I can say for sure is “Doctor O” in the first long poem of the book, “A Suite for the Good Doctor O” — which I believe refers to Eric Ormsby. There are hints regarding the others in this short but thoughtful interview, but only hints, though I also have a sneaking suspicion that Pangborn is a figure standing for Solway himself, in the political mode he seems to have entered somewhere later in the last decade, and not just because of Solway’s vague resemblance to the comic actor of years gone by, but also because of these lines from the (relatively short) poem “The Pangborn Defence”:

… Can politics rehabilitate politics
In the guise of blondes of liberal causes, of law and order shills?
We’ll never know, and Pangborn, you’re no help.
The way you whistle and stamp your feet,
This cafe your mission-field, mission hopeless,
It gets you ridicule–it terrifies me your loyal
Opposition…
…
True, you’re honest, and honest, oh, you’re target-rich,
Wearing out your welcome among the sadists,
your tears flinty, your ducts sacks of salt.
…
Go, Pangborn, go, be our savior in a rough patch,
Lead us from a pharaoh’s pique,
To a fantasia of milk and honey so that we might lick
Honey from the wings of flies.
–Go, Pangborn, my boost these words
Fatal to gallantry, open to surprise.

And, indeed, it’s probably a good thing that the pseudonyms are opaque to most readers, for there are also poems that read much more like assaults — bringing those helicopters to mind — such as “Caesars and Presidents for Avrila Lee” and “Gilded Curls.” These poems bristle with harsh judgment, with a kind of roughness that feels like an attack at times — and the Black Hawk choppers in the mason jar on the cover, on the frontispiece and at the back of the book, come to mind once again, as does the opening poem, “Salvo”, wherein Sibum lets loose a blasting attack:

SALVO

Quote me, you hosers, the notion that life
Can’t defeat the wise man, the one who’s prepared,
And I’ll respond in the negative and bring
Chaos theory through your doors.
Disparage fortune as a flaky goddess,
Whim of some poet’s capering caprice,
And to the drift that chance tosses at us,
I’ll say, ‘Patience, you’ll get your innings.’
So now rain and thunder. Now the downpour,
And the leaf-heavy branches lift and fall
And hiss, so many sweepings of castanets.
They’re beyond philosophy’s reach:
The roses blooming against the brick.
But it’s as if something in the American mind
Would gut the flowers of their intricate hells
And build camps of detention in the emptiness.

– From The Pangborn Defence, by Norm Sibum

The language, the focus on American politics and warfare, the contrarian dialog with friends — so much of what spins around, realized in much finer and particular details throughout the book explodes first here.

There is disgust and rage in these pages, but a salutary one: The influence of Pound on Sibum’s work was apparent to me in The November Propertius mainly for his juxtaposition of the ancient and mythical with the quotidian world of waitresses and drunk pals, as well as in his treatment of language; here, though, he has gone further, he has made his work overtly, unapologetically political.

With The Cantos, that move was in many ways disastrous, but I dare to think it is less so with The Pangborn Defence. Happily, though Sibum has brought his poet’s tatty shoes to the streetcorner and mounted a soapbox, we find to our relief that he has come out not in praise of the Mussolinis of our day, but rather to condemn them; and the weary, unhopeful tendency here gives way, just often enough, to rage that that feels pent up, that one gets at least this much: one is not alone, in one’s own horror and disgust at how the century began.

Sounds good to me, so I decided to make some. Thing is, that’s a more involved proposition than I first imagined.

Thing is, there’s no smoked wheat malt on the market — definitely not in Korea, anyway. So if you want to make something like this, the only way to do it is to smoke your own. This sounds like a pain in the ass, but in fact, if I’ve learned anything while teaching, it’s that one should always try to see a pain in the ass as an opportunity. If you have to smoke malt yourself, it gives you the chance to set the level of smokiness wherever you prefer, to choose what kind of wood to use for the smoke (and thus what kind of flavor you’ll get) and so on… and it’s a way of learning how to smoke stuff at home.

For this purpose, I picked up a copy of Smoked Beers: History, Brewing Techniques, Recipes by Ray Daniels and Geoff Larson. While some of the books in that particular series have been less than useful to me, I have to say that Smoked Beers is outstanding — but I’ll try review it on its own later. I just wanted to note that I used the book in figuring out how to make this beer.

Note: there is a cheat, if you want to make a Gratzer without home-smoking, and apparently one used by Polish brewers too: that is, to simply make the beer with a portion of smoked barley. But if you’re not crazy about the beechwood smoke used in Weyermann malts, then home smoking sounds like a good option: you can choose other woodchips for the smoking. Why not try apple wood, or cherry, or hickory, or mesquite… or a blend? There are a ton of possibilities.

Originally, when I was planning this brew, I thought I’d try a single five-gallon batch of beer using one specific kind of smoked wheat malt, but when I started asking myself questions about specifics, I found myself torn. Hickory, I thought, would be tasty; so would mesquite. And what about apple wood?

Finally, I realized the thing to do would be to try a few different kinds, in series, which suggested that small batches might be the way to go. That decided, I was left with one small question: how to smoke the malt?

Well, after a little searching online, I found one possible solution: I could build myself a smoker out of a cardboard box. There’s a tutorial on how to do it over at Instructables.  While it’s probably not a great long-term solution, I do get the feeling that it’s not a bad way of gettin’ ‘er done for a small experimental batch of beer; something I could probably spend an afternoon using to smoke a few different kinds of wheat malt with a few different types (or blends) of wood chips.

I don’t have photos of the process right now, but it’s pretty simple, and next time I’ll make sure to get some and update this post with it. When I do this, I’ll try get photos of the whole process, so that others can see. I have a few little variations on the cardboard smoker box  design, since I want to smoke the malt as cool as possible. (Which is an  advantage of the cardboard smoker design: it’s not optimal for heat, and with a few adjustments should allow for relatively cool (or even slightly chilly) malt-smoking, if used in the winter.

One final note: for this first Gratzer, no matter how close I tried to get it to the traditional style, there was one barrier: the oak smoke! I haven’t seen oak-smoking chips available in Korea, though I did manage to get some compressed oak sawdust, a slow-burning smoking wood product available from Japan. The problem is that when the compressed sawdust burns, it burns very slowly, and produces only a relatively small amount of smoke. Combine this with the fact that I unwittingly used half of the one brick of the stuff I had smoking almonds for Christmas, and the fact that I realized (too late) that my ash screen was not letting enough smoke up into the grain, and what I was left was a bunch of very lightly smoky grain, and some other smoke woods, and a dilemma: which smoke to use?

I went with a blend of about 60% hickory, 40% mesquite, and then, in desperation, threw in a half of a stick of walnut sawdust when the grains still weren’t adequately smokey. In retrospect, I probably overdid it a little, but that’s fine, because I learned another lesson: unless you have really good grain screens, smoking grain is a lossy proposition. (I used baskets of wicker, which let through a lot more of the crushed grain than I expected.) I started out with 1.65 kilos of grain, but ended up with something closer to 1.2 kilos of the stuff… which means my Gratzer will only be about 70% smoked wheat, and 30% plain wheat malt…

That’s probably not a bad thing, though: of the wheat that got smoked, some of it got quite hot, and I’m worried the enzymes might have been denatured. And anyway, the malt is intensely smokey, so  I think this might help balance it a bit.

The recipe is simple:

• 70% Smoked wheat malt
• 30% Wheat Malt
• Target OG: 1.035 | Target FG: 1.008
• Mash schedule:
• • 30 minute rest at 50°C
  • 60 minute rest at 65°C
• 60 Minute Boil:
• Hopping:
• Czech Saaz: ~30 IBUS at first wort
• Czech Saaz: 5-6 grams at 15 minutes
• Yeast: Kolsch, fermented at 16°C

Today, I’m making a ~12L batch, because that’s how much I can fit into my spare little square glass fermenter, and because it seems adequate for a test batch, and because, hey, why not?

UPDATE: 5 Feb 2012: Argh! I left the trubby beer-like stuff in the first fermenter after racking everything clear into the second one, thinking the trub had, after about four hours of chilling, settled as much as it would. More fool me — I came home to discover it had settled out amazingly, leaving probably another couple of liters of wort on top, clear as could be hoped for. But I’d left the lid on loose, since I’d vaguely thought of using the trubby wort as a medium for capturing wild yeast. Live and learn, I suppose.

(As an aside, the comment by Stan Hieronymous somewhere or other about how all-wheat beers can, potentially, clear out more quickly and easily since there’s more and heavier proteins comes to mind. This beer sat by a window, but the window was almost completely closed, and besides, it was on a warm floor — heated by ondol piping — and yet the proteins settled out anyway!)

Well, but on opening the container, it doesn’t smell skunky, and this beer is pretty highly hopped, so I’m willing to imagine that maybe it escaped the danger of skunking unscathed. I happen to have a small (1.5L) wine jug I’m not using, which will fit most of that extra wort, so… I suppose I’ll try racking it into a pot, boiling it for 15 minutes (and red-adding a little more Saaz at the beginning of the boil — just enough to add some flavor that would be lost) and then racking it into the jug with some other yeast — maybe a California ale yeast. If it’s a write-off, nothing lost to me; if it’s not, it’ll be fun to compare the results of the two yeasts.

Bulk Aging or in Need of Blending, Needs To Be Dealt With Soon:

• Miss Jiwaku’s Old Ale: aging in a keg for ~8 months. Have a Sour Pale Ale to rack onto the cherry-fruit dregs, if the dregs are indeed still good. (It has a somewhat acetic smell, but not an off-putting one.) The beer itself needs to be racked into bottles, possibly needing to be dosed with fresh yeast as well.
• Wonmisan Sour Pale Ale: this brew was soured prior to boiling. It needs to be racked onto the cherry-fruit dregs in the keg. (The keg needs a new seal as well.) The current keg can be cleaned and used for serving fresh beer.
• Miss Jiwaku’s Oatmeal Stout: Needs to be bottled, to clear out the keg. Probably ~ 1 gallon of beer left. But first need to check carbonation level.
• Fruitcake Ale: the clove is too forward on this beer, so it needs to be blended prior to bottling. Another Xmas beer, but one that turned out well, except for the too-forward clove. Thinking of recarboying it with some fruit syrups, or blending with a liquor (such as cognac) to smooth it out a little. Needs experimentation.

Bulk Aging: Should Be Dealt With This Month:

• L’Agent Secret Saison: I have a gallon or two of this stuff upstairs, in the attic, into which I pitched the Wyeast Lambic Blend. No pellicle the last time I checked: it can be left alone.
• Apple cider: This is fine in the keg. It should be ready to serve in a few months. I may have to dose it with campden tablets, and backsweeten with apple juice… we’ll see.
• Wonmisan Sour Saison: This was supposed to be an Xmas beer, but I decided it needed to be funked up a bit with some Brett C.  I guess maybe next Xmas? It’s really not too early to get a head start on that, I suppose. It is in a keg, and was spiked with Brett C. in January. It will need to remain in the keg until sometime this fall, at which point it can be bottled.

Fresh Beers Needing Serving Kegs:

• Wonmisan Brunner: a Northern Brown Ale in secondary that needs to be bottled. Need this keg clear in order to put the Wonmisan ESB into secondary.
• Wonmisan ESB: this beer is ready to move to secondary. Only thing is, with a nice big yeast cake like this, I want to make a barley wine. Should wash the yeast once before doing so, though.
• Wonmisan Belgian Pale Ale: This beer hasn’t yet finished fermenting. Once it has finished, needs to go to another carboy for secondary, as I’m trying to get it to go clear. May have some Brett in it — I pitched Wyeast Trappist Blend into it, and the primary Belgian yeast did nothing, but there is a funny look to the remnants of the yeast that remain on the surface late in primary fermentation; I’m tempted to leave it alone and see what happens, though of course that will use up a whole carboy!

I was trying to do up a schedule for everything I need to do, but it got really confusing just doing it as text. I’ve done up a table, instead, and it seems to work better… now, if only I can keep to the table and do all the things I need to do in February! (See below for the table!) Oh, and Miss Jiwaku and I did the blending experiment, and found that, for our palates, the following blends work well: Lichtenhainer / Sooper-Sekrit Ale:

• 2:1 ratio of Lichtenhainer: Sooper Sekrit Ale works best. Less, and the Sooper Sekrit has no effect. More, and it loses the smokiness and sourness a touch too much.

Fruitcake Ale / Fenian Raid:

• 1:1 ratio seems to work well. Less Fenian Raid and the spice in the Fruitcake Ale seems to dominate. More Fenian Raid and the particular spice character gets lost.

I will likely eyeball it, when it comes time to actually blend, but knowing the approximate ratios is a big help. And now, the crazy table!

Brewing Tasks, Feb. 2012

1. In the last 48 hours or so, I’ve remodeled the site extensively, with a lovely new theme by Presswork. I think the site looks a lot better now than it has in years — at least, on my Ubuntu system and Miss Jiwaku’s huge-assed Mac monitor — and the change in decor has gotten me feeling like blogging a bit more again. Of course, I’m working on getting the older posts sorted into categories and tagged.This is not a small job, since I spent the first few years of my blogging without any tags; once I discovered them, I kind of stopped using categories. And then I started using both in different ways. With almost 4,000 posts racked up on this blog, organizing is not a small task. It will likely be ongoing for some time…  so pardon the mess, please. Some things just aren’t ready to go up (such as, for example, the soundtrack for The Music of Jo Hyeja) and other things still need some updating to render them more useful, such as the front page.
2. I’ve been surprised, in looking back over posts, at how interesting some of the old ones were. I’m looking for a way of highlighting older posts. I’m not sure whether I want to post them to the front page occasionally, do something automated (like a “one year ago today… two years ago… three years ago…” plugin) or just have a “possibly related posts” list of links to similar posts  following individual posts. Thoughts?
3. Is there anything missing from the site as you see it? I’ve removed a few things, and moved others generally. (For example, my blogroll is now on a page of its own, which you can access under the HOME menu in the top navbar.) If you see any issues, let me know!

But, hey, I think it’s kinda funny, so I did up a new one, up-to-date with my life now. For your geeky pleasure:

Click on the image to see the full-resolution PDF file...

For those who would like to try this for themselves, Mr. Gone has a whole slew of interactive World of Darkness character sheets online, for now anyway.

For me, Wraith was the best game around, though, as Matthew McFarland notes in the course of a neat little summary of the game, it’s a bit like black licorice — you love it or you hate it.  It was dark, but intelligent, and I remember the guy who first introduced me to the White Wolf Games series describing it — quite rightly — as D&D for grad students in philosophy. Well, I don’t know about that, but the undergrads in literature who made up most of my main gaming group sure had fun with it.

And like Matthew, I have very positive memories of the first group I played this with. The characters were a good mix: an abused housewife whose husband had pushed her into a form of self-defense that “took things too far” and ended up a widow; a former Soviet spy living in hiding in Canada, whose former partner (whom she had to betray to escape the USSR a decade before) had died and begun haunting her; a wealthy old businessman whose life was slowly falling apart in the wake of his wife’s death; and, I want to say, a feminist professor who had accidentally run over one of her students on the way to class. (That last player dropped out after a month or two, so I can’t recall her character as well as the others.)

It was fascinating times: watching my ex (who played the former Soviet spy) burst out of the bathroom in a fit of method-roleplaying, makeup all in disarray and playing a skinridden human victim to the hilt, was a shock. The woman who played the abused widow/husband-murderer always got deep into character, playing with compassion and empathy but also with a hard edge of guilt and sorrow, and often made us shudder. The rich man’s player had never played an RPG before, but he got into it so well when we were playing that eventually I started taking hints from him on how to make the game even creepier. (I remember once his character reaching to turn on a radio, then hesitating… the next time he came home to an empty house, the radio was on, and playing his recently-dead wife’s favorite song.) All these characters were brought together by their bereavement support group… which is to say, it was an unusual Wraith campaign in that all the characters were mortals.

But it was a great one, and I long to run another game like it, with a group as responsive and imaginative, again someday. Not for now — I don’t have time — but someday.

When that day comes, it probably won’t be Wraith I’ll be running, mind you: all my (many, expensive) White Wolf books got lost when I left Canada for Korea: a friend shipped them to my parents’ home, but they never arrived, and I learned this too late to make an insurance claim. I suppose I could always get the PDFs and run it using an iPad… but I have several other games I’d like to try, including both Orpheus and Geist: The Sin Eaters — two games descended from Wraith — and the SFnal White Wolf game Aeon: Trinity. But even so, I think it’s Wraith that always had the best supplements. Not just Charnel Houses of Europe, either: I think Wraith: The Great War is an excellent book, as I mentioned here.

Ooops, another post about that group is here. I leave the above as it stands, mainly because I find the shift in my memories interesting. Also, because that’s the first post in a series about RPG games I have played in the past, and what the hobby meant to me. Here’s hoping I’ll have more to write about it again someday…

A debate won’t be possible until people actually recognize there’s an issue about which disagreement is possible; given how my students react when I recount experiences like this one or this one — almost always with unbelieving shock, as if this kind of thing never happens in Korea anymore — I think it’s gonna be a long, long time till such a debate even begins.

And of course, then people will have to be willing to debate. It’s not that I haven’t any Korean friends: I have a number who are quite free of apparent racism, or who do their best; I have friends whom I can call on that kind of thing, and they get it and understand — and they can call me on crap I say or do, too. They’re a solace, but in the abstract sense: they’re not people I feel I can call for support when I am experiencing racist treatment, not just because I feel they couldn’t do anything anyway, but because I’ve noticed a widespread conflict-avoidant tendency that is most pronounced in the nicest people I’ve met here. I get the sense that maybe conflict-avoidance is the way they managed to get through life in a society where the rules are pretty much in favor of the insensitive or the downright callous. I have trouble imagining any of my Korean friends (not including Miss Jiwaku) standing up to a drunk shouting at me on the subway. I know for a fact that several times when push has come to shove in a professional context, the wagons have circled and left me on the outside, even with those who I like to believe are sympathetic. Sympathy often costs a lot more here than it does where I’m from. So does getting into a real debate.

(And I realize now that, for all my discussing these problems, blogging about racism online has never fixed racism offline. I also realize that one thing I don’t do enough is to write about my friends — Korean or otherwise. Going through old posts and tagging them, I realized I used to write about my friends a lot, but now I don’t do it so much. I shall have to start again.)

Anyway, I have feeling the big changes that would proceed from any “Racism Debate” in Korea won’t be coming before I’m a senior citizen. (And I’m in my late 30s now.) I could be wrong — things sometimes change quickly here — but I think some things change faster than others, and there are a number of debates (the status of women being one) where the line is moving very, very slowly.

While I do plan on cleaning up the mess eventually, I have a month of holidays left and I don’t intend to spend it all on this. I don’t think there’s a lot of activity in my post archives — unfortunately, since, as I’ve begun going back to tidy up, I’ve discovered how interesting stuff I posted to my blog was in the old days — but I figured I’d mention this just in case. I figure if I take one whole day per month to work on it, I can get it done by the end of the year… which is better than twelve days of a 28-day month, right?

Later chapters are less powerful, in my opinion, in part because of the way Zielenziger presents the social problems he chooses to tackle. Many, such as the falling birth rate, the lingering (relative) conservativism among men, the precipitously-declined birth rate, and the national obsession with conspicuous consumption of brand name-goods, are presented as if they were uniquely Japanese phenomena, when anyone who was in Korea at the time could have noted that many of the same issues were also of concern, and often more severe, in South Korea.

Indeed, Zielenziger’s brief discussion of Korea is outright laughable: he praises Korea for doing so much better than Japan in so many ways, but those of us better-acquainted with the situation here recognize the vast majority of his assertions, and the assertions of his Korean interviewees, as flat out wrong. While Zielenziger managed to find those Japanese who were willing to be critical of Japan, those he spoke to in Korea seem much less willing to be critical… or, perhaps, excited to convince the world how much better Korea was doing than Japan. (This is even more apparent in hidsight, as many of the social problems Zielenziger discusses in terms of Japan have increasingly worsened in Korea.)

Of course, part of the reason for this blind spot is the apparent absence of hikikomori in Korea. While the theme of the dysfunctional shut-in has appeared from time to time in Korean films, I have never heard, anecdotally, of a single case of a Korean hikikomori. That said, there are vast numbers of young Koreans who, while they do not lock themselves into their bedrooms and expect their parents to support them, refuse to get a job or go to school, and indeed opt out of society only out to hang around in PC-Bangs, comic book salons, or at home (and online). Still, since for Zielenziger the hikikomori is an emblem for what he sees as Japan’s greater problem — a kind of all-encompassing self-isolation of sorts — this technical difference is crucial for his text; it is probably less crucial for an understanding of the general social malaise that has arisen in Northeast Asian metropoli generally, as well as among young modern people worldwide.

Indeed, I think Zeilenziger’s application of the notion of a “lost generation” of Japanese is profoundly applicable to South Korea. It’s hardly a coincidence that the very group of people here who are most prone to suicide are those who are considered, by Korean standards, “young” — the under-40 crowd. (Recently, it was announced that suicide was the top killer for everyone in Korea under 40, if you hadn’t heard.) Interestingly, the bottom third of the cover of the book seems, in the background, to be a photograph of a ceremony on the Japanese “Coming of Age Day” (成人の日), and yet he spoke not at all of how this ritualistic recognition of adulthood factors into the malaise he describes as near-universal among Japanese youth.

Having read his sections on Korea carefully, I feel it hard to take quite so seriously a lot of his assertions about Japan. A wiser researcher, engaged in such comparison, would have found a startling series of similarities, whereas one gets the impression Zielenziger based his conception of Korea’s difference on the basis of some self-congratulatory talk by a few Korean “experts” and how much he appreciated his weekend-trips to Seoul.

All that said, I suspect Zeilenziger probably does offer some useful insights regarding Japan; but more importantly, this book is probably good reading — in the vein of the cautionary example — for expats in Japan and Korea alike: many of us engage in the same kind of armchair (or cocktail party) philosophy as Zielenziger, and his text is a shining lesson of how severely one can get it wrong when one starts engaging in comparisons with the unknown, or when one gets attached to the idea that the culture one knows best is somehow uniquely flawed.

One last thing: after all the buildup, the last few chapters — especially the final one — seem to want to offer some hope… and yet conclude in such a way as to suggest Zeilenziger saw none, without his coming right out and saying it directly. I found this part of his analysis particularly troubling, in part because of the responsibility I see for one describing problems. That’s not to say I fault him for not solving Japan’s problems in fifteen pages or less, but rather I feel let down by a conclusion that, in lieu of suggesting what might sprout through the cracks in the foundation, we get a tight-shot of one foundation crack in particular, and zoom in, and cut.

The good news is, I love my new template (courtesy of PressWork) and I think it makes my blog much more readable and professional-looking. (And it’s much easier to tinker with settings as well, thanks to the theme’s frontend.)

I’ve wanted to change my template for a while now, not only to get rid of pages that aren’t useful, but also so I could reorganize categories and also the navigation system for the site. For a while I thought about using a magazine theme, but they tend to focus on images, whereas my blog is text-centric.

Not only that, but some people told me they liked having my main blog the way it is — posts about brewing, books, writing, and life in Korea all jumbled together. But I’ve also wanted to set things up so that people just looking for fiction to check out, or brewing posts, or reviews of brewing books, could do that easily. I also wanted to have an excuse to spend the ridiculous amount of time necessary to slim down the categories on my blog from way more than I’ll ever use, to seven or eight useful categories (with tags doing the heavy lifting in terms of subcategorization).

So anyway, if you start poking around some of the links up above, you might find they don’t work yet. Give me a couple of days to get all of that sorted out, and I’m sure you’ll be pleased with what you see. (I frankly cannot get everything working behind maintenance mode, so like it or not, I have to go back to normal mode to finish the tidying anyway!)

(Of course, I haven’t read everything out there. But the books I have read have constantly had these problems.)

The cover of Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb bills the book as a #1 International Bestseller, but I have to wonder how or why this happened. I don’t fault her writing skills — while I’m reading a translation, it’s easy to see she knows how to structure a story and to give a character a voice — but I think an important part of what didn’t work for me in this book was its pervasive ennui. This is something I’ve found with other writers, particularly French-language writers I’ve read recently, and it never seems quite to work with me. Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (which I discussed here), which I read last year, was drowning in a kind of dully misanthropic ennui, and it reminded me of a certain kind of poseur one meets in Creative Writing programs, who are all about mocking and putting down everything, but who never finally seem to stand for anything themselves. Not that all fiction needs to be moralistic or didactic, but I kind of feel that an author who doesn’t stand for something, ends up with work that stands up for nothing at all.

Nothomb’s little novel isn’t as bleak as that, and it has moments that are beautiful, or which shine and shimmer. There are also, I have to say, moments that strike me as quite real — not earnest, but believable and perhaps only mildly exaggerated — especially in her exchanges with Miss Mori Fubuki. I swear, I have had such exhanges myself during my time in Korea, encounters where what seems like self-evident logic to me, confronts what seems like perversely-inverted logic on the part of occasional Korean interlocutors.

Occasional being the operative word, though. Nothomb apparently has published another book about this period of her life, in which she was entangled in a tentative romance with a Japanese man, titled Tokyo Fiancé. When I saw this, I thought to myself that this was precisely what Nothomb’s novella Fear and Trembling was missing… something to balance, to intertwine with the bizarre relationships and ridiculousness of her working life at the Yumimoto Corporation. In a surreal novel, things kind of stop being so absolutely surreal unless you jump back and forth between the surrealism and something less, well, bizarre. But Nothomb’s novella does very little to hint at her life outside of the company, at relationships with Japanese that are more rewarding or fulfilling — or, in fact, more sane.

There is a point, about halfway through the book, where she launches into what could be called the Standard Expat Social Problems Rant. The particular rant Nothomb unleashes concerns the misery that, according to her, Japanese women must endure. People who have  lived abroad will find this quite familiar, having heard such rants in expat bars, read them online, and indeed having in all likelihood unleashed at least a few such rants themselves. (Goodness knows I have.)

The problem with the Standard Expat Social Problems Rant is not that it’s necessarily wrong. Outsiders often see social problems in a society in ways that locals don’t — and that goes for non-Westerners visiting Western countries, too, not just TEFL teachers holed up in Asia. Nomthomb’s rant sounds depressingly familiar to me because it rather parallels some of the miseries Korean women I’ve known have complained about, or, more sadly, have failed to see as symptomatic of bigger social problems. (A case of talking about bad apples, and refusing to see more pervasive underlying causes for the fact there are so many bad apples, or, for example, oppressive mother-in-laws.)

No, the problem with the Standard Expat Social Problems Rant is that it’s dull, especially for someone who’s heard them before. Doubtless, for those who are living isolated from expatriates, it is interesting: a glimpse of another culture, a slice of life from the other side of the Earth. So maybe I’m just not in Nothomb’s target audience.

But I don’t think that’s the only problem I had with it. It’s not just that I’m an expat. See, the problem with the Standard Expat Social Problems Rant is that it usually happens in an echo-chamber — the expat bar, the expat blogosphere, the small social circle of foreign professors at a particular university, or whatever. There may be some diversity, but more often than not, a group of outsiders from a relatively homogenous background (even one as broad as, say, Anglophones) will tend to trip on the same problems, be mortified by the same attitudes, and be frustrated by the same sorts of experience. They tend to echo one anothers’ experiences, and a consensus develops, one that — more often than not — grows without the input of any local people, except perhaps those dissenting wives, girlfriends, husbands, drinking buddies, or rare locals who’ve grown up abroad and “get” what the expats are on about.

In Fear and Trembling, every Japanese person seems to be a sort of clown: Mori Fubuki is a gorgeous tyrant who is sadly not even bright enough to grasp when she is being mocked to her face. (While I’ve known Koreans who were unable to grasp sarcasm, they have tended to figure out someone was messing with them.) Mister Saito ends up being a saintly inmate in a hellish asylum. Mister Omochi… well, she calls him “The Obese One” and he is as cardboard as they come, alternately shouting at people and stuffing his face. Only “God,” the president of the company, seems at all human, but he is distant and barely appears in the tale.

There are moments where Nothomb breaks through this wall, and presents characters — especially Miss Mori Fubuki — as human. At one point, when the woman is humiliated in front of her coworkers, Nothomb’s narrator puts aside her resentment and annoyance and sympathizes with Mori… which, of course, turns into yet another apparent lesson in how Japanese people are totally alien and you’d be an idiot to try to relate to them as you would other human beings, or something close enough to leave me uncomfortable with the outcome.

As I’ve said, the expats I’ve known in Korea have uniformly hated certain aspects of Korean society; but they tend to balance their lives so that they can also see the non-insane, non-ridiculous parts of Korean society and culture. Many long-term expats here partner with or marry Koreans; many have hobbies that help them bridge the culture gap, or form friendships with specific Koreans that help them to stop holding Korea at arm’s length constantly. That’s not to say they don’t struggle; many still end up bitter and many still decide to leave… and I recall one conversation I had with several men who’d been here for more than a decade wherein pretty much everyone talked about Korea as a place they truly wanted to leave, if only they could. But for all the crap they are confronted with, they also seem to find things that balance it out.

This is what is absent from Nothomb’s book, and while you could argue that she didn’t want to talk about, I think the absence of her life outside of work — her justification of it, within the text, nonwithstanding — dooms the text to dealing only shallowly with that which is professes to describe.

I’m not saying I wish she’d found a way to talk about the positives; I just wish the book had painted a picture where Japanese people were capable of being something other than clownish, predictably baffling victim-fools. I guess I wish there had been even just one truly sympathetic character in the novel, for whom the sympathy didn’t eventually pay off as a setup for a final state of incomprehensibility.

Well, maybe I just didn’t get it. Nothomb is one of Belgium’s most popular writers worldwide. Perhaps the fault lies with me, I say, snickering to myself that now I am playing Nothomb’s game of fake submission to authority.

Nah, I do get it. It’s just not my bag.

kleindarkgods

I’m not sure, personally, which is my own favorite, but I do know I originally bought the hardback when I was living in Canada — and sought out a paperback last year — in order to read “Black Man With a Horn,” an explicitly Lovecraftian story that references (in passing) an image on a John Coltrane album cover, but also tells the story of an aging writer friend of Lovecraft’s who is, in the late 70s, tracking down a man for a series of murders… a man from a Malaysian tribe mentioned to him by a missionary fleeing Malaysia; the connection to Lovecraft being that the tribe is among those monstrous Cthulhu-worshippers mentioned somewhere in the Cthulhu Mythos. Klein does wonderful work here in depicting an aging B-list (if that) horror author doomed to live and die in Lovecraft’s shadow, and also builds up the horror quite well.

That doesn’t mean it outperforms the other stories in this collection. And while I’d love to explain why, my discussion of “Black Man With a Horn” above demonstrates why I shouldn’t do this: it’s pretty difficult to talk about a Klein story without getting into a plot dissection, and  the problem with doing that is that I don’t want to spoil them for someone coming to them for the first time —  since, honestly, I want to recommend this collection to people!

So I’ll zoom out, for this review, and talk about more abstract and general thoughts regarding these four novellas.

For me, style is an important aspect of what Klein does in these novellas. He is definitely writing in a Lovecraftian vein at times, especially in “Black Man With a Horn” but also, I’d say, in “Children of the Kingdom” (I’d swear there was a Mi-go reference in there someplace). And yet Klein’s narrative voice is quite removed from Lovecraft’s, his prose very modern, his characters’ voices very much of their time and place. Klein doesn’t wax florid, doesn’t trowel on the adjectives the way Lovecraft does; his voice is different, and yet he manages to invoke Lovecraft and his cosmic horror aesthetic very effectively.

Their time and place, by the way, is generally New York City in the late 1970s (or maybe the very early 80s at the latest, in one or two cases). Actually, that’s not quite true: one tale splits its time between a plane over the North Atlantic, and Florida — and yet New York seems to come up in each story; in “Black Man With a Horn,” the story that happens up in the air and in Florida, New York turns up only in memories of the times the narrator spent with H.P. Lovecraft there, during his short stay in Brooklyn. As Victor LaValle notes in a brief piece on the book, this is a very urban sort of horror —  three of the four novellas are for the most part set in cities. LaValle notes that this was new to him, when he read it, and while I can’t say the same (when I was growing up, authors were writing horror set in metropoli), I have to say that Klein uses the urban setting to great effect, and it feels very real and lived-in. This is one thing I’ve often envied horror writers — they can write stories set in places where millions of people have really been, and rely on that sense of familiarity to heighten the estranging qualities of their fiction. Especially, in “Children of the Kingdom,” Klein’s use (in 1979) of the Blackout of 1977 as a moment that is horrific in itself — and it really was — but also as supernaturally charged, is a brilliant move. In Klein’s work, the horrors of the real world and the supernatural fantasies are inextricably tied together.

There’s also the complexity of the horror in his tales. I am usually not a fan of the horror tale that features a writer, whether working or blocked (ie. someone suffering from writer’s block), as its narrator — it’s been done and done and I am not interested anymore — but Klein does something interesting with this in the latter two novellas. In “Black Man With a Horn” —  an explicitly Lovecraftian Mythos tale — Klein satirizes the pulpy Lovecraftian pastiche subgenre with a narrator who knew Lovecraft himself, and spent his whole writing life in the man’s shadow. It makes fun with (maybe, rather than of) the very thing that it also does itself. But the narrator here is a man who is no longer writing, whose creativity is gone, and who is haunted by his association with Lovecraft and the mediocrity of his own career. In “Nadelman’s God,” the protagonist has realized he is not a talented poet and also stopped writing — unless you count ad copy — but a crass and dreadful poem he wrote in his youth ends up playing a crucial role in the tale (after, amusingly, being turned into a heavy metal song).

What I find interesting about both these tales is the way that creative, artistic, and literary failures are in some sense powerful — whether in the gnostic sense where the artist is the only person truly equipped to summon up evil, or at least to understand it when it appears. In fact, there is a writer-figure in “Children of the Kingdom” who is in some sense a failure: a Costa Rican who has written and published interpretations of the gnostic text The Gospel of Thomas, but who has failed to get them translated into English and published in America. As in the other stories, this writer gets details wrong, but he is closer than anyone to understanding the true nature of reality for most of the novella.

Given Klein’s very limited output, one cannot help but wonder whether his fascination with failed writers (or writers who fail to live up to their own expectations, and give up) might be linked to his own struggles in writing. As a writer myself, I can definitely relate. But somehow, there’s something also fascinating in itself about this focus on literary failures: nowhere to be seen is the by now stereotypical best-selling author who can’t poop out his latest bestseller, and the book is much stronger for it. A dark power really does lie in one’s failings, in unfulfilled aspirations, and Klein seems to map those over onto the supernatural very effectively, and sympathetically too. (Failure is not judged here as it would be conventionally, and it seems to ring with mystical power in a way like how many think of artistic “success.”)

Race is another interesting thread in the book, especially prominent in two of the novellas — “Children of the Kingdom” and “Black Man With a Horn” — and I have to say, it’s handled in a way that unsettled me in ways I suspect Klein mostly intended, though I think this is one of the aspects by which we get a sense that the book has aged. Not badly, mind; somehow, it works. No doubt Klein is, in his characters’ fear of non-whites (the neighborhood Blacks and Hispanics in the former novella, and the Malaysian tribe known as the Tcho-Tcho in the latter), poking fun at Lovecraft’s notorious bigotries; but he also uses the racism as a kind of leaven in the horror, a kind of unsettling human awfulness that blends with and multiplies the supernatural elements of the horror. In other words, the fear of ethnic conflict, or of the supposedly-exotic, is quotidian, but it is also scary and horrific, in the same way an old house, even sans ghost, can be unsettling and disconcerting.

That said, I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like this done more recently. I suspect it would be hard to do what Klein does, effectively, today. I don’t think that there aren’t people who see themselves as liberal and fair-minded, but who harbor, quietly, fairly racist attitudes; of course there are, and I’ve read enough writing by them online, as well as enough responses to them by those who see through the self-justifications, to know that this kind of self-contradiction is rather common. In the narratives we consume today, liberal white guilt mingles with reflexive racism mostly in satirical contexts (I’m thinking of Liz Lemon on 30 Rock) than in being a naturalistic effect in a character; usually, when a character is a racist, he or she is well aware of it, doesn’t feel awkward about it, and so on. That character might be to some degree sympathetic, the way Daryl Dixon manages to become during Season 2 of The Walking Dead, though as he becomes more sympathetic he also seems to become less openly bigoted, with his actions contradicting moments of apparent racism.

(In a similar way, I get the sense that that the narrator of “Nadelman’s God” is a remorseless ad-man was a similar kind of shorthand for evil in the 1970s, perhaps in a way that doesn’t quite compute today unless its carried to a satirical extreme; we like Don Draper, and it takes something as nuts as Thank You For Smoking before we start to see the ad man as truly evil in nature… but remember Bill Hicks’ anti-marketing rant/routine? That sort of disgust seems to have gone out of fashion, now that we’ve decided to hate CEOs and bankers instead.)

I once told one of my classes that one of the things white liberals fear the most is being called racist, or, worse, discovering racist attitudes buried inside their own minds. (I know that I myself have occasionally obsessed about the question, when stupid things pop out of my mouth, forcing me to ask myself where those words came from.) In fact, I recall some discussion online that I read long ago, but can’t find now (was it part of that whole RaceFail thing? it feels like I read it much earlier than that…), which emphasized how it’s more strategically useful to talk about racist ideas than to call someone a racist — in part because white liberals tend to freak out and derail the discussion when they feel they’re being labeled “racist.”

Or maybe I’m just reading the wrong books? Lots of the SF I’ve read is by white males, and so maybe it’s not so surprising that a lot of it doesn’t engage with this stuff. (I am trying to diversify my reading, mind you, but until I leave Korea, I’ll be focusing on reading the books I have on hand. There are plenty of female and POC authors, including some I plan on reading next month, but I’ll admit the SF shelves in my house are in fact dominated by white male authors, and that’s as much a symptom of my trying to catch up on older SF as anything else.) Anyway, I’d be curious to see if this fits with others’ sense of how we use or depict racism in the course of character building.

At any rate, I highly recommend T.E.D. Klein’s Dark Gods. It’s a classic for a reason, and well worth your time. Oh, and thought it is (as of 29 Jan 2012) incomplete, this review of the book goes into much more depth and hits a lot of notes — such as regarding Klein’s engagement with the canon of weird fiction in general — that I wanted to in discussing the book. I feel the same envy as the reviewer over there, towards Klein’s work.

So anyway, the recipe is the same as the Pale Ale recipe I used for the brewing contest a while back, because I was relatively happy with it — with the one exception that I’m using a newer thermometer and so it’s probably going to actually be mashed at the right temperature this time. I’m going for 71°C for the mash, which should keep the beer nice and malty, something I want in both halves of this double batch.

I can summarize the grist for each half simply:

• 4kg of Pilsner Malt
• 250g of Melanoidin Malt
• 250g of Vienna Malt
• 200g of Caramunich II
• 200g of Carahell

Between the Melanoidin and Vienna, there should be a rich graininess, and between the two kinds of caramel malts, there should be a residual sweetness as well. Or this is what I hope for.

Unfortunately, I can’t use the gigantic boil pot I bought just yet — it doesn’t balance properly on the two-burner stovetop I have, and which I’m now looking to replace so I can do double boils — so I’m going to be boiling the two halves of this brew separately. That does, however, mean I can hope them differently, and don’t need to stress about the fact I’ll be dumping a little clear Belgian Candi Syrup into the Belgian one.

For the ESB, I’ll be putting in 15 grams of Magnum at 60 minutes, plus 14grams at 20 minutes, 14 grams at 10 minutes, and some more Fuggles or Kent Goldings (don’t have East Kent) for dry hopping. The total IBUs will be around 36 or so, and this yeast will go onto a cake of Safale S-04, English ale yeast.

For the Belgian Pale, the hopping will be a little milder — 30 grams of Hallertau Tradition whole hops at 60 minutes (which will be about halfway through the boil — I’m going to try for 120 min for this boil!) and 28 grams of Czech Saaz at 15 minutes, for a total of just around 30 IBUs. I’ll pitch the Wyeast Trappist Ale Blend into this brew. The Belgian yeast I have on hand is limited at the moment, though, so I figured I’d pitch something I’ve been hanging onto for a while, my Wyeast Trappist Blend. The Trappist Blend is a bit old, so I have some other yeast on hand just in case it it doesn’t work. (I know, I know, I could make a starter, but I’m short on time and energy these days, and still haven’t got a stir plate rigged up yet.) If it fails on me, I think I’ll pitch either Safale T-58 or maybe some of the Forbidden Fruit yeast I have left over from a Wit I brewed not long ago. I really liked what the Forbidden Fruit did in my Wit, after a long aging period, and I’m expecting a long aging period anyway — the Trappist Blend is likely to require a good 3-6 months anyway — so I figure this is not a bad substitute, with the bonus that with the Forbidden Fruit, I could bottle it sooner and forget about it, instead of having it take up a carboy.

Of course I’ll be using whirlfloc as usual —  a tab for each half batch at 15 minutes, and a good long rest as well, since I’d like these beers to clear up properly.

I was hoping to blend some of my Northern Brown ale with the Fruitcake Ale I made last month: having left the latter on the fruit and spice a bit too long, it got a strong clovey flavor that is less overpowering when the two beers are carefully blended. But I just discovered my CO2 tank is empty, so I’ll need to fill it tomorrow before I can open up kegs and then recarbonate them. I’m thinking maybe this weekend, I’ll get some of that done… and, who knows, maybe I’ll get a chance to make a mead I’ve been thinking about making, too!

UPDATE (27 Jan 2012): Well, the ESB was fermenting before the Belgian Pale finished boiling, so that’s something. They’re both now in the cool room, and my long wait has begun…

UPDATE (27Jan 2012, evening): The ESB is fermenting furiously despite quite cool temperatures, with what I’m guessing is in excess of 150-180 bubbles in the airlock each minute!

The Belgian, however, is still inactive. I saw a thick white foam on the surface today, when I woke up, and assumed it was a krausen, but on second thought I’m pretty sure it’s just remaining foam from when I very violently agitated the wort last night. I’m not surprised, given that the yeast smack pack was approximately a year old, but this does remind me that I need to start doing starters, as well as resurrecting some of the other smack packs I have sitting around waiting to be used. I’ve agitated the wort again, and am hoping it takes off in the next 24 hours. If not, I’ll start thinking about pitching something else in there, along the lines I mentioned above.

UPDATE (29 Jan 2011): Well, the Trappist Blend yeast must have been dead, as there was absolutely no activity for 48 hours, so I went ahead and pitched another yeast into the carboy, and it began fermenting within 5 hours or so. Which yeast? That’s a good question, and I’m not sure of the answer. It’s either Safale T-58, or Wyeast Forbidden Fruit. I’m not sure because the yeast samples were from the Young Sisters’ brews, and by the time we bottled those beers, it was unclear to me which one had gotten which yeast, as well as whether they’d gotten mixed up along the way. In any case, I think it’s Safale T-58, but I guess we’ll just have to see. The brewing room is a bit cool, and I think I should put a little heater in there, on very low, just to warm up the ambient temp a bit, now that the ESB has mostly fermented out and the Belgian is fermenting furiously… and throwing off wonderfully fruity esters at the moment, not all of which are going out of the airlock, I hope!

UPDATE (5 Feb. 2012): Just racked the ESB to secondary. The gravity was 1.008. Also, the S-04 yeast flocculated remarkably — it was packed to the bottom of the carboy like thick sludge, unlike a lot of yeast cakes I’ve seen. Quite remarkable, really. I’m impressed. It was a pain the ass to move it into jars, since I’d already racked all the beer out and couldn’t pump it. I ended up flaming the mouth of the carboy and pouring it out. Still, it should be in fine shape two days from now, when I brew up the barley wine it will end up in.

UDPATE (8 Feb. 2012): The ESB was so damned clear that I went ahead and racked it to a keg. Might as well get a head start on conditioning it for the meetup next weekend, as well as dry-hopping it. In the end, it seemed to ferment out to 1.006, which is lower than I’d hoped, but I had a thermometer issue during mashing that I hope I can sort out this month. Still, it’s a gorgeous color and tastes good, if a bit dry. I’m hoping the dry hops can help complexify the flavor a bit. Next time I’m going to put more crystal malt, which I think is the main deficiency in the recipe.

Will rack the BPA to secondary tonight, as fermentation activity seems mainly to have petered off. I’m hoping to crash cool it in the secondary carboy early next week, so I can rack it to a keg then, but I should take a gravity reading before I plot any such mischief.

UPDATE (8 Feb. 2012): The BPA finished out at a stunning 1.004, much lower than the ESB, but then, I may have let it sit for longer before heating it high enough to kill the enzymes. (I didn’t mashout.) Oh, or maybe it’s the approximately half-pound of clear Belgian Candi syrup I added… anyway, I expected it would be dry, but I am surprised it got this dry! That’s not a criticism, though: I think it’ll be great served on tap, though I am tempted to oak it slightly. I’m not sure which yeast it was that gave it the fruity, sweetish character it has — whether it’s the Wyeast Forbidden Fruit or Safale T-58 — but I am pleased with the character and will be reusing the yeast cake again soon.