05/7/13

About that MBC Parody Video

A good long time ago, James at The Grand Narrative urged me to write about the things I discuss below. I thought it was a good idea, but relented at first, thinking that maybe I might get fired the way Gerry Bevers was for posting about Dokdo.

Then I got busy, and stayed busy.

Then I left Korea. And here we are.

But this video came up again, where I live now, as part of a discussion about sexism and racism in Korea, and I realized that I’d never gotten around to it, and that I should. Because I learned a few things from the experience, including things I think both Koreans and expats in Korea (perhaps especially the latter) ought to think about.

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04/14/13

Interview by Tate

I only vaguely remember answering these questions, for good reason: Tate’s ESL Travel Chronicle interviewed me last year but I must have missed when the interview was posted. Here it is, for the curious. (Funny reading this, now that I’m no longer in Korea.) Since it’s mainly about my life in Korea, and not about my writing, I’m just posting it to the blog, and not to the interviews section of this… wait, that’s gone missing. Er… well, anyway.

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04/9/13

Korea in English-Language SF

Over at Gusts of Popular Feeling, everyone’s favorite archives-trawler Matt has a post about about “the first SF story involving Korea” and a few other such tales from the Galaxy/Amazing Stories era.

I’ve left a comment clarifying that “the first SF story” should be qualified as “the first English-language SF story” and also noting that depending on how you define “SF,” one might consider Jack London’s Star Rover the first in the English language.

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03/20/13

The Case of Park Chorong-Chorong-Bitnari, and the Anthropomorphization of Humans

Caveat: I’m going off some of Mrs. Jiwaku’s (perhaps hazy) memories, and my own (imperfect) reading of some articles online, through a language barrier. I welcome corrections, as therefore there may be some mistakes in my understanding, or misreadings, or details that are off…

A few years ago, I began writing this post, though I didn’t know what I wanted to say about it. Now, I think I do know, and it unsettles me. The story is somewhat disturbing, though I don’t do “trigger warnings.”

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03/19/13

Horror and Culture: Anglo/American, Korean, and Japanese Perspectives

Note: This is another post from lat semester, when I was teaching a film class. I am not teaching now, but the thoughts seemed worth posting. (Because right now I’m too busy to write much new for the blog, but feel I should post more often than I have been.) The post is definitely not intended to be any definitive discussion, just interesting notes from a small class discussion.

I had an interesting discussion in my class today about horror across the three cultures represented in my Understanding Anglophone Cultures Through Film course: Korean, Japanese, and Anglophone.(1)

We watched the Korean film <<여고괴담>> (Whispering Corridors 1), Juon: The Curse (Part 1); and the little-known but (in my opinion) excellent The Haunting of Julia, also published at one point as Full Circle. (The film is based on Peter Straub’s novel, which in different editions also has borne each of these titles.) I haven’t read the book–I kept seeing a copy in a huge used bookstore near my apartment when I was in undergrad, but when I saw the movie and decided I ought to read it, the thing finally had been snapped up by someone else, doubtless someone who’d also seen the film on the Showcase channel late one night. However, I’ve seen people say it’s easy to tell that the book was Straub’s first (horror) novel, so maybe I didn’t miss much… I don’t know.

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03/15/13

Armed Cinema Drone Needed, and Also Warm Bodies

Attention preservation notice: This post is mostly about assholes in a cinema. A little bit about the film Warm Bodies, but mostly about the morons who sat beside me. These morons:

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03/15/13

Seoul Comics World Convention #114 (December 2012)

Note: This is a post from late December. I was too busy to finish writing it, so I’m posting it a bit late.

Those following my SF in South Korea series have no doubt been wondering why I haven’t posted anything new in a long time. The fact is, not much has happened as far as I’ve heard about. I do have some reviews of older SF movies that Miss Jiwaku and I have dug into–specifically, Half-Moon Mask (Mask Bandal) and Wooraemae–but I’d rather talk about those once I’ve seen the whole series, and in both cases, that’s a lot of DVDs to get through.

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03/13/13

On Academic Ecologies, Career Planning, and Worldbuilding,

At my goodbye party last week, we were talking about the future collapse of the TEFL industry when brute-force autotranslation gets good enough that most people will only study foreign languages the way that some people still do math by hand. (I mean without a calculator–that is, out of academic requirements, a sense of old-fashionedness, or rare personal impetus to do so.)

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03/11/13

The Suwon Revelation

After spending seven of the past eleven years in the Yeokgok district of Bucheon City, not living there has been full of surprises. Even though I tried to resist it, I developed a habit of mind wherein I conflated Yeokgok with Korea generally, just as I conflate Seoul Subway Line 1 with the whole system.

Well, like riding Line 6 for a while, staying in Suwon for a week has been a revelation. For one thing, people don’t look us up and down, or scowl nastily at us the way the used to in Yeokgok, or on Line 1. They don’t constantly comment or seem to pass judgment… and if they do, they don’t show it, which is all one can ask for.

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02/22/13

Seoul Cthulhu Festival of Film: 28 Feb 2012

UPDATE (8 March 2013): This event was a huge success, selling out all the seats in the cinema to a very appreciative audience. We’re happy it was so well-received, and hope that it will inspire the organization of similar such events in future! I’ll post photos when I get the chance…

ORIGINAL POST: Fans of H.P. Lovecraft in Seoul will not want to miss the upcoming Cthulhu Festival of Film in Seoul. The evening will feature three film adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories: one Korean, one German, and one American. There will be subtitles for all films, to accommodate both Korean-speakers and English-speakers.

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02/21/13

How to Know When to Leave Korea… (Now, With Context)

So, this got posted the other day. Apparently I wrote it months ago, and forgot I’d written it, but I’d also preset it to publish a week before the end of February:

When you start having dreams that blend the military elements of the Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers with the more annoying features of your neighborhood, with you in the armored battlesuit bounding and leaping over the puke-riddled sidewalks and raining down nukes on the insane drivers, and plugging shells into the idiots who hork and spit everywhere so the sidewalks are stained and look like a sewer, and then, after waking, think to yourself how nice it would be if you could do that… it’s time to leave Korea.

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02/15/13

Smooth? Are You Kidding?

Okay, okay, I’m foolish. Fine.

I was hoping out last couple of weeks on campus would be smooth sailing. Today, while in Seoul sorting out some paperwork, I encountered a really nice guy–a cabbie who was in his seventies, who was a real character. He was a cabbie who seemed to also fancy himself a comedian, with photos of all kinds in his cab. Some he used to communicate, some for comedic effect. I swear, he put on glasses with a fake nose just to make me laugh. He wasn’t that funny but his effort and friendliness were endearing. His last words when I left the cab were, “Please, have happy memories,” and I couldn’t help but think that I ought to try.

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02/8/13

“How My Mother Sees My Friends” and “How Others See ‘My Couple’”

Found, by my wife, on a Korean website–and not the kind of site you might imagine. You can click the image to open the full-sized version, for a better look:

This was uploaded, of all places, to a DIY website–a place where people who do stuff like make soap, candles, and that kind of thing hang out.

If you looked closely, I’m sure you caught the two disturbing things about it: first, that “How I see myself” is full of images of white people… but secondly, that image about “How my mother sees my friends” is… yep, a group of black people.

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01/30/13

Meditations on Junk, #1: Ugly Koreans/Ugly Americans

I’m flipping through Min Byoung-Chul’s Ugly Koreans/Ugly Americans. (Which is, by the way, insanely overpriced on Amazon.com.) It’s a sort of typical book in Korea, basically intellectual junk crammed full of East vs. West generalizations and “explanations” by a Korean who doesn’t himself quite grasp what he’s taken upon himself to explain.

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01/5/13

Normal Sadism, Weak Boundaries, and Social Unhappiness

I was having a discussion with someone about life in Korea–someone who feels pretty much like I do about it–and something interesting crossed my mind. It’s the concept of “normal marital sadism” that was coined by the therapist David Schnarch to describe the very common form of emotional sadism that seems to develop in a lot–a lot–of marriages. He published an article on the concept back in May of this year, in Psychology Today:

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12/31/12

Eleven Years…

By the way, it’s been eleven years since I landed in Korea. Okay, really, I arrived on 30 December. It’s still 30 December in a lot of the world, so I’ll just ignore the fact I’m a few hours late on Korean time.

Yeah, it’s been eleven years since I flew across the Pacific Ocean for the first time, arrived in Incheon International Airport, and took a bus down to ~~Jeonju~~ Iksan, to be met by someone I’d never met–but whom I’d heard about through my friend Joleen.

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12/31/12

On that Stack of Essays I Got Through a Few Weeks Ago…

Out of a small stack of essays, I gleaned the following interesting insight that I’d never thought of myself:

It’s possible to argue that the main difference in the conception of the uncontrollable in Greek Mythology and Bible stories is that, for the Greeks, human problems were often a result of the gods and their machinations, while for the ancient Hebrews, humans were just as often responsible for getting themselves into a heap of trouble, out of which God would sometimes bail them, if they were good.

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12/23/12

New (Free) Essay On Gaming, Education, and Agency in Korea, Published in The WyrdCon 2012 Companion Book

For those interested in RPGs, their use in language and other teaching, and what I see as the potential political subversiveness of RPGing in Korea, you might want to check out my newest essay, which is included in the WyrdCon Companion Book, which was just published the other day.

WyrdCon is an annual American convention focused on Interactive Storytelling–which includes LARP, ARGs, and more. I’ve never attended (or even larped, really), but the editor for the non-academic section of the book, Aaron Vanek, invited me to contribute an essay after reading what I wrote about Dread and my return to gaming.

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