Welcome, Asimov’s Readers!
Posted on May 9, 2008
Filed Under writing | 2 Comments
I guess some people might visit after reading my story in the July 2008 Asimov’s SF, which has gone out in the mail (though I’m sure it isn’t on newsstands yet) titled, “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues.” I hope you enjoyed it, though I guess if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have come here.
Anyway, welcome to my site, and feel free to have a look around if you like. A lot of my recent posts here are about current Korean political stuff, but if you dig, you can find all kinds of other stuff. If you’re like to find some tracks of me playing saxophone, pop over here.
In the sidebar, you can find links to more stories online (including the text and podcast of “Pahwakhe,” which was drafted in the same week of Clarion West, or my Greg Egan fanboy tribute “The Egan Thief” at Flurb), as well as lists of my forthcoming fiction… including another story in Asimov’s. My bio is here, and if you’d like to know more about “Lester Young…” I’ve got some background on when and why I wrote it here.
(To my regular readers, I’m going to leave this stickypost up for a while, as well as adding a link to the Fictionwise version in my sidebar under “Published Stories,” when it becomes available, for those who might want to check it out but don’t want to order the paper version.)
Forced Upgrade In Progress
Posted on May 14, 2008
Filed Under Korea, ubuntu | Leave a Comment
I may not be blogging as much as usual for the next few days… I’m working on an upgrade of Ubuntu on my computer, and I hadn’t planned for it, or set aside time for it.
See, I was trying to install the Linux version of HWP (the Korean wordprocessor that gets the widest use in Korea, and which everyone else hates because that program’s proprietary format, .hwp, is the standard here, but other wordprocesses don’t handle it very well). I’m trying to install this because I’m suddenly in a position where I can’t just advise people to re-send the file in .doc or .rtf. These days, I need to be able to open, work on, and save files in .hwp format.
So I found a few (slightly different) tutorials, and just what do you think happened?
Oh yes, somehow it absolutely destroyed my installation of Ubuntu. I’m not even sure what got broken, but suddenly Synaptic, Firefox, and even the terminal interface wouldn’t load at all! It was like all I had left working was GUI, and that was, well… not enough.
Yes, yes, my installation was long ion the tooth anyway, version 6.06 and probably screwed up in several different ways by my having run Automatix — external devices were always mounting funny, for example — so I should have upgraded long ago, and while installing Ubuntu is far from a headache, I didn’t need even a few small extra tasks right now. Even better, the reams of data I backed up on one of my external drives mostly looks invisible to my new install of Ubuntu — or, rather, looked invisible to the new installation after I ruined it by trying again to install the HWP app.
At least the files on that external hard drive are visible from the installation of Linux Mint I’m running on my smaller, throw-it-around laptop that I bring on trips and so on, though. Nothing was lost, indeed, not very much data at all: I’m a great data packrat, and I back up the most important files in ways that would seem paranoid to anyone who’s never lost the archive of all his writing or photos over the last N years.
So now, it’s just a case of getting an install of Ubuntu 8.04 running and back up to normal. You know, so I can input Korean text, view Youtube videos, play DVDs, process RAW images, and so on. The lovely thing about installing Ubuntu is that it takes only a few minutes. The unlovely thing is the work it takes to get back to normal is somewhat more argh, you haven’t gotten around to setting up a separate partition for the /home directory.
(Even though I have to say, it’s getting better… a few versions ago, I had a hell of a struggle just to get the monitor to display anything other than horrific jagged lines and guck! These days, it’s the luxury stuff one has to work to get… and not all that hard, I’ll admit, except, of course, for the blasted HWP app!)
But all in all, I’m feeling relatively unscathed… it’s just my time that I’m feeling short on at the moment, what with all kinds of school stuff to do or get done or start, and some writing stuff I was just getting into, and so on.
Ah well, it’s for the best… otherwise I might never have gotten around to upgrading!
UPDATE: Aha! And it was all so easy… once I found the right instructions.
I’m not sure if the crazy symbolic links I set up before reinstalling it helped, but there’s a repo you can add that’s listed on the page linked just above. It’s a Gutsy repo, but it works for Hardy Heron too. Now I can open HWP files in Linux…
That’s enough for today. Tomorrow, I’ll install Abiword, Nabi (or some other input device software to allow Korean input), some Roman and Korean fonts, get the multimedia working, set up few other necessary applications, and… well, and then we’ll see. I still want to migrate my /home directory to a separate partition, and it seems like now is a good time to do it. Or, maybe not now, but sometime on the weekend, perhaps.
So, Then… aka Squee
Posted on May 13, 2008
Filed Under writing | Leave a Comment
The subscriber issues of Asimov’s July ‘08 issue are out, and apparently there’s a review of my story in it coming in Locus… I’ll be waiting a while for my copy, but the gist is here. And it’s been a springboard to at least one discussion of jazz SF already at the Asimov’s board. Is it impolitic to jump in on such a discussion? I would like to inform Redmarvel that the fate of the cowboys will not always be a mystery, if I get my way… but wouldn’t want to make people feel like they can’t bash the story if they wish!
new free music
Posted on May 12, 2008
Filed Under music | 2 Comments
Free, and DRM-free, music:
- The new Nine Inch Nails album, “the slip”.
- via BoingBoing, hip-hop/bluegrass mashup madness: Gangstagrass
Worth checking out…
Could I Get a Class To Do This?
Posted on May 11, 2008
Filed Under esl & other teaching, books read 2008 | Leave a Comment
I wonder. Saw a link on Boing-Boing for the product of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project, a graphic novel titled Shake Girl which is online for free here. Read it in one sitting. True story. Very sad. Good stuff.
Make me wonder whether I could get my students to do something that good in a semester. Too bad I don’t have an elementary writing course anymore, it’d be a cool project. Perhaps I’ll pitch it for next semester, though I think it’s too late to get approval for such a thing, and this is my last semester here.
Flashmobsters
Posted on May 11, 2008
Filed Under writing | Leave a Comment
The flashmob is not new, but flashmobsters? Googling shows I’m not so brilliant as I thought — the term’s been used before online, but that won’t stop me writing about the potential criminal uses of flashmobs by organized crime, especially when they have the advantage of working in a city where everything, including law enforcement, has been privatized.
Yeah, it’s political SF, since the current administration is privatizing almost everything here, and yeah, it’s set in Seoul. Lots of young male and female twiggi — that’s a Korean word that often has a connotation rather like what people tend to mean when they talk about “miscegenation” — who have Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipino, and other heritage, and whose safest and most gainful employment opportunities are in meta-organized crime. Lots of jabs at the current administration, but also some wider social critique.
We’ll see where it goes. I’m kind of trying for 4000 words — would like to submit to Clarkesworld — but you never know, I have fragments from an abandoned novel back in the old days that would work well with this — privatized cops, quasi-reunified post-DPRK-collapse Korea, and all — so it may end up being a bigger project. Though one that shall have to wait its turn: I have other stuff to do this summer, and other projects waiting impatiently in the wings.
It’s Not Just the Lateness of Industrialization: How and Why Korean SF Doesn’t Quite Work
Posted on May 11, 2008
Filed Under books&authors, films&tv, Korea, SF | 10 Comments
I should be grading in-class essays, but my guilt at not yet having done so has been assuaged by the fact that another professor in the department, someone above me, confessed to not having graded her midterms either, and not feeling the slightest bit badly about it!
So among all the other insanity of the last week, I also spent some time working up a couple of abstracts for a conference that I think I have no realistic shot at, mostly because I’m not an “official” Korea studies scholar, but at least one of my abstracts was for an essay in my own field, and in one I may be perhaps best equipped of anyone to write. It’d be neat to present a paper in Fukuoka to a bunch of specialists, so why the hell not? If they take me, it’s an experience. If they don’t, I lose nothing. So I’m glad that James inspired me to give it a shot.
And as I say, I don’t believe there are many people who could fill in this area as I could. Well, there was this Korean guy I met least year who had done a Ph.D. in the US years ago in the field of SF literature, but the last I heard he was too busy trying to extort money out of childrens’ textbook publishers to actually do anything like real academic research.
In any case, I did up a couple of abstracts, and tried to upload them. The one I’d like
The question, dear readers, is why Korea lacks a really vibrant SF-genre literature for adults, either in translation or in some native form. When you ask Koreans about this, they often answer with the same sophistication as your average bookseller in North America: that is, they conflate SF and fantasy and even, to some degree, horror. There is at least one major fantasy author worth noting, whom I’m told popularized the concept of the “zombie” here. (Lime’s a fan: she recently almost ordered second-hand copies of his whole series,퇴마록 (Toemarok), and bemoaned the fact that the film version was so horrible, since she thinks I would enjoy it if only I could.
No, Korea has a vibrant and rather entertaining — if somewhat derivative — literary and cinematic fantasy life. Fantasy tropes (including cutesy swords-and-idealized-history stuff) are common in video games, in daydream sequences in otherwise mainstream films (My Sassy Girl is a famous example among others), and in fantastical films ranging from Arahan (where chop-socky kung-fu mysticism meets modern-day Seoul) to the stupid but funny Sisily 2km (where gangsters and rural-types mix it up with ghosts). Fantasy and horror work adapt quite well to the Korean aesthetic, and to Korean narrative-styles, and to the politics and culture here. Horror, especially, seems to be a good fit: films like the Yeogo Gwedam (”High School Girl’s Ghost Story”) series evoke the horrors of the school system and of teenaged girls’ lives; the oldie-but-goodie 301/302 that explores the alienation inherent in apartment-block life, especially by women; Gidam (”Epitaph”) exploits the remaining (or renewed) Korean anxities about Japan and its colonial past in Korea to horrific effect; R-Point combines military drama/action with horror; Eolgul Eobneun Minyeo (”Faceless [Beauty]”) pushes the kind of “subjectless body” notion that James at Grand Narrative has been exploring to its extremes by exploring the eros/thanatos horror of a beautiful woman with Borderline Personality Disorder. The list could go on and on, but it’s unnecessary. Everyone who’s interested knows that Korean horror, even when it’s not brilliant — cinematic horror so rarely is — works like horror, functions, does what it needs to in order to get the job done. Likewise, fantasy works well enough to be recognizably functioning as fantasy does in other incarnations of fantasy abroad, whether it’s a film that is all-in-all fantasy, like Arahan or The Ginkgo Tree Bed, or just brief asides like the swordfight daydream scene in My Sassy Girl. Likewise, there is a native tradition of ghost-stories and fantastical mythology in Korea that, like fantasy anywhere, can be plugged into the plot-coupon structure so popular in fantasy, or the inevitable-doom plotline so universal in horror films, that even when they aren’t great, these kinds of genres can be viably handled in a Korean context. Even in historical or mainstream dramatic films, fantasy can be woven seamlessly into the action as it was in downright magical-realist scenes in Oasis and The Barber of Hyoja-dong.
I’ve come to the opinion that the same is not quite true of cinematic SF in Korea. All of the “SF” films I’m thinking of have come out since the turn of the century, and all of them are flawed in ways that go beyond the quality of the plot or storyline. Watching films like 2009: Lost Memories and Yesterday and Natural City, you get a sense that the kinds of things the filmmakers are trying to say are not actually SFnal, or indeed, that the stories themselves are on some level anti-SFnal in ways that cannot simply be attributed to the derivative nature of a lot of Korean cinematic SF.
(Hollywood SF, too, is often profoundly anti-SFnal, at least, for someone literate in the genre. SF in the media is often doing things that nobody could get away with doing in books anymore, because the territory Hollywood likes to hang around in was, in literary circles, all strip-mined barren fifty years ago.)
Yet SF itself — the SF pervasive in the Anglophone world, and in Western Europe — has permeated into Korean society. Some of the things in the news — from Dr. Hwang’s crazed promises to cure all illnesses, to the government’s unfortunately unrealistic, but openly-declared plan to put robots out on the DMZ as automated/autonomous guardians, and in homes as nannies and English tutors — are so unrealistic, so unreflective of real science, that one would expect them to be explicitly cribbed from Hollywood SF or Golden Age paperbacks.
But it likely isn’t from Golden Age paperbacks, at least. SF novels and short stories have been translated in Korea, but never in as great numbers as one might hope, and never so successfully that the genre has actually taken root here. For all the films made over the last ten years since Korean films “became good,” there hasn’t been one film that has embraced the underlying tenets of SF so completely as to succeed on the terms upon which SF internationally is judged. (Likewise, most SF films, with the exception of Bong Joon-ho’s recent blockbuster The Host, have performed weakly or even dismally at the box office, so it’s not as if these failings are necessarily lost on filmgoers here.)
Of course, Korea is not unique in lacking a deep-rooted SF tradition, as well as a functional literary SF scene. Literary critics interested in SF have long noted that outside of Britain and Britain’s onetime colonies, outside of Western Europe and Japan, SF just isn’t that popular, and not many people are writing SF. It is, perhaps, not surprising that SF is undergoing a boom in China these days, with literally millions of regular magazine subscribers and readers into the genre. China’s SF scene is vibrant in terms of consumption, at least — whether Chinese authors are making a living writing the stuff, I don’t know, but the history of SF in China has been one of booms and busts, not just neglect. Ironically, from what I’ve read, the place with the most analogous situation to Korea is Hong Kong — amateurism, lack of interest, a sense that it’s kid-stuff and not worth the effort.
SF has been enjoying booms in other places, too, from what I’ve read — India, some claim — yet in Korea, it’s still kind of stuck. I think the older explanation, based on the observation that industralization and modernization arrived too recently to have provided fertile ground for the genre, is outmoded. I think there are specific cultural, historical, and other reasons for this phenomenon, and that’s what I plan to explore this week in a few posts that will become the basis of my paper, should it be accepted for presentation.
(But even if it’s not, this is worth thinking about.)
keep looking »
