If I were a Torontonian, I would look at foreigners in two ways. In one way, I’d see them as invaders, because they would be speaking foreign languages and bringing foreign customs to my land. But I would also see them as bringing new life into my country, just like in Korea, where I can see so many Japanese signs in some neighborhoods, because of Japanese tourists. It makes me feel like I’m in another country. On the other hand, immigrants are developing the country because they’re making a living and having a better life after they flunked in their homeland.

And yeah, the emphasis is mine.

Here’s what my response was to that little bit of the sentence:

Why do you assume this? Do you assume all foreigners in Korea came here after “flunking” in their home country? Is “flunking” the only reason people would ever have to go abroad, and do you really think the only people attracted to Korea — the only people who would ever actually choose to live here — are those who “flunked” in their homelands? What an insult to your country!

It’s a quite sad and perplexing self-contradiction, this: so often people who say they love their country and are proud of it, also speak of it in this subtly disparaging way.

I know, I know; arguably, it’s the idea that nobody would actually choose to emigrate at all (to anywhere including Korea), rather than the idea that Korea’s a bad place to which to emigrate, that underlies her sentence. Arguably, but I’ve seen this sentiment expressed so many times, in so many ways, and more often than not the sense I get really is, “Why would anyone who was actually skilled or intelligent move here?”

The myth of how all expats in Korea were once Wal-Mart/McDonald’s/Burger King employees (not to mention unemployed, AIDS-ridden, drug-addicted pedophiles) is so widespread and deeply ingrained now that a law (which has immensely complicated immigration to Korea, not that this is a bad thing) was passed on the basis of one case of a Canadian pedophile with no criminal record.

(And yes, I do believe the Myth was the real foundation of the law, not the case of Chris Neil. Otherwise, why suddenly test all incoming E-2 visa applicants for AIDS (but not for other health conditions — I mean, testing for HIV might be fine but on its own it says something pretty weird) and why try to implement a test for THC, as was originally suggested but later abandoned?)

I’m not saying freaks don’t emigrate to Korea. (They do, in large numbers, mainly because emigration to Korea remains relatively easy compared to lots of places, and because any dolt with a BA and white skin can get an English-teaching gig.)

What I’m saying is that there is, it seems to me, a link between the myth that all foreigners in Korea came because they were losers in their homeland, and the self-image of Korean society. Or am I wrong? Do French, Chinese, and American citizens go around assuming that the only people who ever want to emigrate to their country are losers or idiots? Even Canadians, plagued by an inferiority complex all their own, don’t tend (in my experience) to assume that!

Personally, I thought it was a great class, but the real proof is in the pudding. And though the students drafted the majority of the final exam — with excellent, excellent questions — the final question was mine.

There’s a big smile on my face as I read the answers to that question: “What is the most important thing you learned this semester in our class on Media?”

So far, a few students have argued the most important thing is that they learned how powerful media is in today’s world, that it is a language that needs to be learned and understood. But one student really got me in that chunk of the brain that drives me to teach. She wrote (I paraphrase slightly), “I learned that I have some power in every situation. I can criticize something, or think about it, and that is power. Even not saying something can sometimes be a kind of power. Power is not just something that politicians or famous people have. I have power. It shocked me, and it’s amazing.”

This was something I hammered away at a few times, of course. I used the (dangerous) example of the class itself. “In this classroom, who has power?” The students, like any sane person would say, argued I did. Then I said, “Well, if one of you stood up and walked out, can I stop you? And if you all stood up together and said, ‘This is too much homework!’ could I argue with you?” They agreed, they had some power, but I had power over their grades. And then I smiled and said, “And you have power over my teacher rankings! But anyway, besides grades, what power do I have? If you really want to resist me, you can sacrifice your grades. And I can’t give everyone F, right? If you work together…”

Ha, I don’t expect a riot on campus next semester, of course. I also noted the fact that if they banded together ridiculously, I really could give them all Fs.

Another student told me about the experience of asking some other foreign teacher of hers to please not talk so much during final exams. (He did so during the midterm and she was worried he’d talk all through the finals as well.) The teacher apparently acted all miffed about it, she said, when talked to him, and she asked me what to do because she pretty much felt smashed-down by his response, which was relatively angry.

I told her I didn’t know the guy and whether he was mature or competent, but to give him a little time, and then try to make sure he understood she respected him, but just needed quiet during exams. (Not an unreasonable request.) Well, last night at a dinner with some students, she told me that during the final exam, uncharacteristically, the teacher was silent throughout the exam. “Then I realized what you said… I always have some power, in every relationship, if I can find it. If I am brave.”

Not quite Foucauldian analysis of intersubjectivity of power — thank goodness, I think the jargon alone would kill my students! — but it certainly is a step up from never having thought about it before, innit?

Pardon me, I’m just a little pleased at finding that perhaps I’m doing something right in the classroom.

(And now, for next semester, to work on creating an environment where everyone feels just that little bit more supported, so they are all more willing to speak up and contribute… it’s tough because I’m just a bit intimidating. What did one student say? “You seem like scary guy, like bastard…” [my word of the night last night] “… but you’re very generous and kind inside, secretly.”) I think that’s what was said.

Shall I let me inner kindness show a bit, then? We’ll see how it works for me next semester…

One more tiny note: I’ve found it is possible to get a little tough jargon into the class, if it becomes a focal thing. If you hammer away at it. For this semester, we had three such words:

• power
• mediated/hypermediated experience
• hyperdetermined image

These were pretty much enough for a whole semester, as we kept returning back to these concepts every few weeks to see how they applied to whatever we were looking at or listening to.

Korea has a serious suicide problem. It’s the number one killer of people in their twenties, as many blogs are eager to state. It’s the kind of thing many people think about in their youth, of course. But suicide is tragically common here, and in recent days a number of people have talked about it with me. Korean people, I mean. Young Korean people, some of them brilliant and all of them with their whole lives ahead of them.

It’s heartbreaking.

I don’t know whether it will help, but if you’re a teacher in Korea, you might take the time to find out where your university’s counseling service is, and take time from one of your classes to suggest that anyone who is feeling pain, or considering suicide, should consider talking to someone at counseling services.

If a student comes and talks to you about suicide, take it seriously. Treat it seriously. Last semester, a student in the department where I teach killed herself, and though I don’t think I knew her, I know professors and students who did. Nobody knows if they could have done anything, but surely wondering about it is haunting enough.

You might be able to make more of a difference than you think. You might be able to do someone good.

Someone asked me, “Why should I live?” Actually, the question, in a few forms, was asked to me a few times in recent weeks. If you’ve never wrestled with the question yourself, it’s hard to answer. I have wrestled with it, in times of pain, but it’s hard to answer. Sometimes I direct them to Camus’ essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus” and advised getting counseling, always wanting to help but not sure how, and aware that I am not trained to help. But these days, besides that, I speak honestly and from my heart.

I do now have something of an answer, though, to the kind of pain that sometimes brings it on. Regrets, loss, sorrow. I was at a party the other night, and while everyone was smiling and happy, so many people spoke to me of, or fought to hide, their frustrations and pains and sadnesses. There’s something to be said for the Buddhist insight that suffering is universal.

One answer I can give to this is music. The music of Steve Reich, for example, is probably the first (composed, ie. “classical”) music in the world that revealed any inkling of special relativity. Listening to this music is to gaze into the beautiful clockwork under the hood of the post-Einsteinian universe.

(Too bad Youtube cuts it off before the end.)

There is a memory I hold of this music on a rainy afternoon, taking a break from driving lessons with a girl named Melanie, whom I never dated, though I don’t know why. I’d fallen for her during middle school at band camp held in Fort Qu’appelle — don’t laugh, she was the prettiest flautist ever I did see at the tender age of 15, and the sister of my buddy then, trombonist Matthew — and we ended up pretty good friends at university during freshman year.

She started teaching me to drive a car. We sat in my family’s Hyundai one rainy afternoon, the seats folded back, this music filling the car, counterpoint to the pattering of rain on the roof and windows, and the quietness and the warm air and the comfort of having nothing to do all day.

Time passed slowly, but we went off in different directions, who knows why, and relativity set in. Though we were in the same city, it felt like we’d slipped into different light cones, different worlds. I saw her in hallways, we talked, we were still friends, but the frames of reference were forever off. Light reached each of us just that tiny bit differently, and that was simply how it was.

This is what happens in life. Someone can be a few inches away from you. You can be so close your elbows brush, that the hair on the back of your arm is touching the hair on the back of her arm, and a few days or weeks later, you are in different orbits around the same sun. You are hurtling through the spacetime of your life, toward unknown worlds and suns, and that person who was beside you on that rainy afternoon, the person who comforted you or made you laugh or cry, is hurtling off in another direction, towards other worlds and other glorious suns.

This is simply how life is. It is not something to regret, because it is not something to control. Why should we regret what we cannot control? It is life. Gravity is the weakest of the forces in the universe, but is also utterly crucial. It is the driving force of the beautiful clockwork of the physical world, and to fight it is futile.

Gravity always wins.

I don’t regret that nothing happened between Melanie and me besides those Sunday afternoons in the rain. They’re a symbol to me now of the kind of grace one must have in all separations, in all goodbyes — even the biggest ones, the hardest ones — and indeed the kind of wholeness that must also survive into hellos and into new orbits with different suns and worlds.

There is joy in surrendering to the pull of gravity, in settling again into the hurtling and the darkness and even the temporary cold. In colder coldness, in darker darkness; when deeper orbits and gravitational bonds have been broken, one must find the taoist-like acceptance of the old man who falls into the river and relaxes, letting it carry him away instead of fighting for his life.

(Like my friend Mike says, quoting Bruce Lee, “You need to be water, my friend”:

… and as cheesy as the soundtrack is, as mystico-kung-fu as he makes it sound, there’s a profound insight there too.)

A comet must accept the blinding light and darkness and cold and hot in alternation. The asteroid must grow to love the abrasion of its fellows against it all the time. The planets must learn to love the nearness but never-touching of their moons.

We are not all suns and planets and comets and asteroids. We are, most of us, simply dust motes, floating in an immenseness so grand we can never even imagine its scale.

Here, there is still me; and somewhere there is still her, in her light cone; and there is always this music.

The universe teems with dust. You are not alone, even when it feels that way. Even when you think you are. You are multitude. You are everywhere.

Yet if hydrogen weighed just 1% more, our physical universe would not be as it was, as Paul Davies notes in his little book, The Last Three Minutes: Conjectures About The Ultimate Fate Of The Universe. That the Big Bang happened is, for us, functionally, a miracle. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes at the end of The Black Swan, that you were born instead of all the millions of other people who could have been — that your mother and father made you, and not one of those other people who could have been born, is a miracle.

You are a fucking miracle.

That’s my answer. You are a fucking miracle.

If you must weep, weep for joy. Weep for the blessing of being, of being you. You are a fucking miracle.

Say it out loud: “I am a fucking miracle.”

Yes, yes, you are.

We were in my office, setting up for a video shoot for that class of mine that’s making a mockumentary about an English cult operating in Korea (yes, a metaphor for the hakwon system and English-mania in general) and suddenly a pack of students I’d never met — freshmen, I guess — burst into the room with a chocolate cake and exploded into song.

If you don’t teach in Korea, the details I can share are that there’s a teacher’s day song, that the students sing the whole thing (even if you’re not able to understand the words) and they clap on beats one and three. (Koreans clap on one and three for everything, which means they sing “Happy Birthday” in 6/4  (and add a clap on 5) instead of in 3/4 as a waltz, the way we do.) While they sing, it’s a test of your inventiveness, or your cool, as there’s nothing you can do but stand and smile and wait for it to finish.

The prof in the French department said after she got her cake (the first of several) she told the class, “I’m going to thank you in the French way,” and gave each student the kisses on the cheeks that are common in French culture for hellos, thank yous, and the like. Unfortunately, my culture of origin is dour and boring and all I could do was thank them kindly. That I did, and they took off, leaving us with a cake and nothing to eat it with. Of course I shared it with the students — I’m not gonna bring it home and eat it all!

Anyway, I got a few other interesting gifts: some ddeok (rice cake) from the university, and a huge package of ddeok from an older student in one class. I also got a lovely and gigantic basket of flowers from student I taught in 2006, pictured below:

Teacher's Day Bouquet

Anyway, the most entertaining gift — in terms of attached notes — was one that read, “Teacher! Please put this strap-on anywhere you like and think of me.” While the gift was actually a wrist-strap for a cell phone, I was very amused by her use of the word “strap-on.” I’m not about to explain the error, but that won’t stop me enjoying it. The strap is pretty nice, though, and is on my phone right now. (It’s green, and has a little plastic head with a professorial face on one end.)

Not bad, for a teacher’s day. Ah, and with the gift certificates I got from the student society, I got a shower curtain and some new towels for when I work out.

It’s amazing what happens when someone really, really thinks that, say, “traditional” means “good.” For example (and yes, this is a paraphrase):

After reading the essay, I think that we can’t say Japanese radio in Korea was good for Korea. Yes, it allowed us to create a popular music of our own, at a time when intellectuals were insisting that traditional (court) music was the only “pure” Korean music. But since that music was influenced by Japanese pop music of the time, we can’t really say it was a way of resisting Japan. But since it had specifically Korean emotions and ideas expressed in it, we can think of this music as “traditional” anyway.

It’s not “subversive” because it is [unlike Korean traditional music] Japanese-styled, but it is “traditional” because it’ [subversively] presents specifically Korean and even anti-Japanese sentiments and emotions.

Huh?

On the more helpful side, the panel discussion for the essay, though, was quite interesting, and the panelists did a relatively good job — as much as one could expect of undergrads — of picking out Robinson’s point, which was that by looking at the development and governance of radio in colonial Korea, we get a better sense of the complexity of the colonial experience: elites losing their hold on society, the masses finding means of subverting Japanese power and the power of Korean elites at the same time.

The following week, the main things I decided to highlight were:

1. … the spit-and-baling-wire nature of actual coloniesm including Korea under Japan: that is, the fact that regardless of Japan’s stated intentions and policies, the realities of running a colony dictate that the left hand often has no idea what the right hand is up to. (For example, assimilation policy or no, the authorities running radio broadcasting in Korea ended up transmitting not just lots of Korean-language content, but even Korean-language content seemingly at odds with imperial policies, like subversive pop songs and programs on the preservation of the Korean language!)
2. … the fact that, while everyone seemed so absolutely certain that every move by Japan was calculated to assimilate Koreans, the vast majority of subscribers for a long, long time were Japanese. I dared to suggest that perhaps broadcasting radio in Korea in actuality had as much to do with either providing the comforts of home to Japanese who’d come to Korea to govern the colony (just as USFK TV in Korea has much more to do with proividing TV entertainment for American troops here than assimilation of Koreans into the American popcultural hegemonic sphere), or to do with more abstract notions of what a “modern” or “developed” state required — telegraphy, radio broadcast, and so on.

All in all, it was a very interesting discussion, but also one in which extreme care had to be exerted — not the least by me. While I often found myself surprised in grading students’ reaction papers — ah, the endless rhetoric of “fighting against Japan” where Robinson demonstrates that things were, for some or even many, never quite so clear-cut as that — and even some hints of seeming paranoia surfaced. (One student went so far as to question Robinson’s respect for Korea because he chose to use the official Japanese terms that were in use during the colonial era by the Japanese government instead of translating them into Korean! I imagine Robinson has heard all manner of such stuff before, but I’d like to hear his response face-to-face with any student who said that to a man who’d spent his academic life studying Korean history.)

Personally, I find it’s very difficult when any comment that doesn’t support the status quo description of the past — black-and-white, oppressor-and-oppressed, manifestly decomplexified — is likely to be interpreted as pro-Japanese by at least a few people. So I was very careful, and also did my best to point out analogies with things today that showed the world is — and has long been — more complex than most of us usually imagine. That’s one of the reasons why, several years ago, I consciously decided not to pursue any general form of “Korean studies.” Looking at SF in Korea is one thing, but once you start looking at history, you start banging into unquestionable, immobile doctrines and (at least from some quarters) all kinds of assumptions about how much you can ever understand as an outsider, and life is too short for labouring against that whilst working to undersand ever better — or, my life is too short for that, anyway.

On the positive side, some students found the discussion thought-provoking and got a different look at history, sometimes in ways that surprised them. (At elast a few said they’d never thought about history in this way before, and were happy to have gotten a different perspective on the past and the role of media technology in their country’s history.) More than a couple raised the question, on their own, of whether some Koreans in the past might have embraced Japanese popular culture the way many Koreans embrace American popular culture today, and when they spoke of American media exportation in terms of “hegemony” I had fun raising questions about the ethics of “Hallyu”, the so-called “Korean Wave” that swept much of Asia in the past decade or so, resulting in the popularization of Korea media — especially TV — in places like China, Vietnam, and Taiwan.

Well, Nalo and Jetse both blogged for the occasion, among, I’m sure, many others.

But I did not let Lady Lovelace go unnoticed on her special day: when one of my students claimed (today, in Media English) that the “first computer” was the Eniac, we had a little talk about how “computer” used to mean people who did computations, and touched on abacuses, slide rules, and then people Babbage, Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, and Alan Turing. (Eniac was “the first general-purpose electronic computer,” says Wikipedia. Those adjectives mean something, and most of the students’ English is good enough to grasp the fine points of that difference.)

(The fact that the “first programmer” was a woman seemed to impress some of the students in the class–a class mostly made up of women–though in all honesty Turing’s sad fate seemed to surprise–and shock–them somewhat more.)

There was just too much, and I didn’t have time to put together a powerpoint for that — nor did it feel like I’d be doing much of a service to my students if I failed to touch upon the real themes I’m trying to work in this class: Media and Power, Media and Social Change, Media and Technology. But I found a solution…

So I decided to focus on those themes, and what followed was an excellent two-hour lecture on four media technologies and the ways in which they changed the world, connected to one another, and profoundly affected the lives of everyone present:

• the printing press (touching on the technological power of the book, and how cheaper and faster reproduction facilitated massive social, political, technological, scientific, and religious change in Europe)
• the phonograph (its originally intended purpose — to capture the voices of “great men” — and how it transformed not only the music business — move over, manuscript publishers! — but also radically changed the nature of music, performance, youth culture, dance, and more)
• the radio (how it evolved from the phonograph, how it was developed by many people working in different places, how it was commercialized, and how quickly so many people grew dependent upon it for news and entertainment; we also briefly discussed Orson Welles’ broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which we’ll be looking at more closely later on in the semester)
• the cinematograph (ie. the film camera, and its invention, the novelty factor it enjoyed at the beginning and how people learned to view films as unreal imagery; its use in propaganda and advertising, to whatever degree those can be split up; its inherently constructed vocabulary and its absolute control of imagery, as we saw by reading a few still still shots from Full Metal Jacket.)

The homework for the class was for students to pick out a media technology I hadn’t touched upon — the telegraph, the World Wide Web, the telephone, the handycam, the walkman — and to discuss its history and impact on the world, society, culture, and more. I’m betting most groups will end up discussing some aspect of the Internet, predictably, but the trick is that I’ll require each successive group who contributes their findings to say something the other groups haven’t said yet.

(By the way, one of the most enjoyable moments was a side trip into the oddities of Edison’s lab. The students responded well to the fact that some of the most important technologies in their lives are the result of very unusual people who did very unusual experiments — the sorts of people who, if many people had known what they’d been experimenting with in their labs, would likely have been widely dismissed as freaks or weirdoes, heretics or crazy people.)

On Thursday, a student panel discussed Michael Robinson’s essay “Broadcasting in Korea 1924-1937: Colonial Modernity and Cultural Hegemony” on the power and politics involved in Japanese  radio programming in Korea during the colonial era. There were some deeply interesting comments — some of them predictable, some not — and one of the things I’ll have to unpack is the term in the title, “Colonial Modernity” since one of the panelists loudly decried the very notion, I suspect without quite grasping what it’s supposed to mean.

All of which very nicely ties in with one of the themes of the course, which is that media is not simply something made by other people for our consumption, but a tool of power, and one that students themselves can use for their own ends. Which is why, when we turn to advertising next week, I’ll be assigning them the homework of producing a professional-quality advertisement for any product (of any kind, even an imaginary one), for any medium of their choice, from scratch. (ie. No trawling the Internets for images to steal and use, no stolen ad copy… it must be completely original, and use some of the techniques we’ll discuss in class.)

My lecture/discussion on Tuesday will focus on the grammar and vocabulary, and the implicit messages, in a series of advertisements, and the principles of psychology used in advertising. I’m going to try find an appropriate scene in one of the episodes from Season 1 of Mad Men as a starting point, and then hold a discussion of a few specific advertisements, probably starting with something tame and and finishing with one of these ones. (The latter ads stuck out in my mind from the discussion in the comments for this post at The Grand Narrative, by the way.)

On Thursday, a panel will discuss specifically gender, sex, and audience in Korean advertising. That should be interesting, and I’m curious what kinds of ads they’re going to pick out for their discussion. (Most panels don’t get the freedom to show anything like an image or video in class, but this group, given the nature of their subject, will be allowed to use the computer to show a few ads to the class for the purposes of discussion.)

The fact they used this song, and this celebrity, in this commerical, suggests one of these two possibilities:

1. They figured most people don’t know what “I like big butts” means. Which is maybe plausible, since I find most Koreans who aren’t really high-level in English translate whichever Korean word indicates both (is it 엉덩이? That’s the one I learned first and remembered because I heard it so often, so I assume it’s the most common) as “hip” to indicate both hips and butt. Or…
2. Korean culture really does have an extremely different sense of what “big butts” means. Sir Mix-A-Lot would probably be amused.

My guess is maybe both are true.

It’s telling that my main reaction to that video was when they do that chicken-leg move, about 17 seconds in, and I’m thinking, “Damn! How come I can’t do that stretch?” (Because it looks exactly like a leg stretch my swimming instructor taught me, but which I’ve never been able to do correctly.)

Bonus: the best ever renditions of that song (and yeah, I know I’ve posted them before, but…), the first brought to my attention by the estimable and wonderfully mad Tina Connolly:

And the latter being the scarily Vegas Richard Cheese:

Which brings me to this video, which I’ll definitely have to show my students:

Given how popular Friends is here and given how in my Media classes this year, we’ll touch on the formation and negotiation of genres at some point along the way. Show ‘em this video and ask, “What kind of TV show would you expect with this version of the theme song?”

And, okay, Richard Cheese and SF geekery? You probably have seen this, and I’m so not into Star Wars — really! — but one can’t help but be amused at the intricate fondue of all these varieties of cheese:

And yes, by the time this gets published, I’ll really be in some kind of orientation meeting. I don’t know whether any of it is going to be in English, or how much point there is to me being there. (Most of the other new profs are bound to be Korean, and those who aren’t are already out of the country.

But, ah well. I’ll be in a suit with a tie. I clean up alright. Maybe it’ll be interesting. I’ll have my laptop with me. Maybe I’ll comment on this post from the meeting, even. Especially if it’s all in fast, academic-sounding (difficult to follow) Korean. I have an appointment in Seoul at 4pm, so I hope the luncheon thing afterwards doesn’t go too long.

UPDATE (Later that day): The meeting was all in English — the Korean-language meeting was held yesterday — and several departments and offices had worked very hard to prepare  for holding said meeting in English, including a booklet with phone numbers for every department… phone numbers leading to an English-speaking contact person, no less. (ie. The kind of accomodation I never even expect in my own sense of an optimal situation!) I was extremely impressed! Absolutely thrumming with a sense of my own newly expanded evil powers to plot against students’ free time a sense of possibility and opportunity and that kind of good stuff.

Meanwhile, I was a couple of minutes late. Horrid, bad, argh! All I can say is, I hate shoelaces, especially when they break at the wrong time.

Sometimes you really do end up with students in your class, or friends you meet in other ways, who have these names that are just, well… they’re things you can’t help but grin at, because you’re an Anglophone and because people should just not be named that sort of thing.

Like Miss Yum.

Okay, really, it was Miss Yeom, but it was pronounced yum, as in, what people say when they see food they want to eat. Or what a certain kind of guy would say when he sees a girl he wants to… well, you get the idea. (And Koreans innately get the idea too. A man who is given to uncouth comments, and who sees an attractive woman, might exclaim to his friends that she “would be delicious” and it’s a reference to her sex appeal. The word “delicious” is so often used in food that it’s obviously metaphorical. She was a very pretty young lady, very stylish and so on… meaning, the kind of woman you could easily imagine some guy grinning and saying, “Yum!” when he saw her.

Well, I’d been training my students to begin their presentations by introducing themselves in a formal manner, and on this one particular day, Miss Yeom stood up and said, “Good afternoon, I’m Miss Yeom and I’m happy to have this chance to talk to you about…” (etc.)

She asked me, at some point later on, why I was grinning at the beginning of her speech, and I honestly told her, “Well, I think when you introduce yourself, you ought to use your whole name. That is, say ‘Miss Naehwa Yeom,’ [NOT her real name] because otherwise, it sounds funny. It sounds like saying, ‘Miss Delicious’ [but I said that in Korean] which sounds weird when you introduce yourself that way. It’s not your fault, you have a fine and wonderful name in Korean, but in English it’s a little unusual-sounding, and you can avoid people being distracted by giving your full name.”

That was cool, she got it and thought it was funny, and made a habit of introducing herself in a less distracting or embarassing way. But sometimes, it’s not so easy. For example, one young lady I hung out with for a while, whose name was Mi Seok. Pronounced “me-suck”. Which, you know, is the kind of name that just summons up bad American military films about Vietnam. (”Me love you long time,” rings a bell.)

I never, ever told her about why her name might provoke giddy jokes, and it’s not just because we teetered on the brink of getting involved: I had the sense there was no point in telling her, and that it might just make her feel badly. I’d heard stories of kids being told their name, especially a name like “Beom Seok” (Bum Suck), was laugh-out-loud funny (in an unfortunate and demeaning way) in English. I’d heard stories of parents legally changing their children’s names when they found out.

Well, it’s one thing when you’re dealing with kids, of course, and usually I’d just ignore the cultural disconnect, or even some of the Korean-specific teasing. (Though when So Yeon, Sae Yeon, and Ji Hyun sat together in a row and a boy in class pointed out that they were So-Sae-Ji–which sounds exactly how Koreans pronounce the word sausage–I have to admit, it was comic brilliance and I never let that one go.)

But those of you out there, who teach adults, and who teach more than just language–who work on  stuff like intercultural communication, on business communication, that sort of thing: do you come out and explain why someone’s given name sounds incongruous to a Westerner? Do you spill the beans about how someone’s name sounds like an off-colour joke in English, like the invitation to suck on someone’s backside? What workarounds do you suggest? An English name? (I’m usually quite hostile to the idea of English names, but when someone’s name sounds like a dirty joke in English, it looks more expedient to me.) A contraction of the name? (Mi Seok becomes Mimi or something?) Do you just tell them and then insist they know the joke, but ignore it or laugh along and have a sense of humor about it, but keep using the name in all English interactions?

It’s a tough question, and I wonder whether most teachers have a policy about it, rooted in some kind of philosophy of cross-cultural respect balanced with expedience and so on, or whether people play it by ear, or just have an honesty-first policy… I’m really curious.

As for me, I definitely play it by ear, which is why I never tell little kids if their names sound like hilarious things in English, and why I only ever tell adults I think will (a) encounter people with whom this might come up, or (b) who seem likely to “get it” while (c) seeming unlikely to be overly hurt, offended, or distressed too much by the surprise.

How about you?

I stumbled once again upon a really funny little  error that totally changed the meaning of the title of one essay. It should have read:

A Few Words About Nora Ephron’s “A Few Words About Breasts”

… except the student seemed to have felt as if the repetition was objectionable (good instinct, really!), and instead came up with this unintended piece of comedy gold:

A Few Words about Nora Ephron’s “Breasts”

… which may not strike one as funny until one thinks of those quotes as “scare” quotes, meant to contest the meaning of the word as it is used in context. Well, if they’re not Nora Ephron’s “breasts,” then what are they? What are we to call them?

Oh no! Now the Black Eyed Peas song that I heard yesterday, while working with my students on the last huge marathon of work on our upcoming graphic novel Goose Dad, comes to mind:

Yes, that’s a remix. The first original version I ran across is “not available in my country.” And which country is “my country”? And why would a Black Eyed Peas video be blocked in Korea? Argh! Big Media is So Dumb. Or is it the Korean government? The original video is unavailable but every remix, plus tons of live shows, are easily available. Just… dumb.

Oh no, wait, maybe it’s just Youtube? The video is available via Dailymotion, which has a Korean localization. (You can see it here, but I’m not embedding it as nobody needs to hear that song twice in a row. Trust me: it’s like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story.)

Anyway, there you go: now I have another student essay title wobbling through my (yes, feverish) mind:

A Few Words about Nora Ephron’s ‘Lovely Lady Lumps’

… running through my head as the title of an essay likely deserving either of a A+ or an F. (Or both.)

(Yes, feverish: I have a baaaaaad cold. Not deathly, but nasty.)

So this paper I just graded, it’s probably the most best piece of writing I’ve seen from an undegrad student, Korean or otherwise, in the decade since I started teaching writing. (And I’ve seen a lot.) There are holes, of course — problems with parts of her argument, or things that she’s assuming, or moments where she somewhat uncritically takes for granted this or that author’s claims.

But considering how she produced this paper as the rewrite of a significantly different paper, I was shocked and amazed at how, well, competent and intelligent it was. Even in the parts I disagreed with. It’s the kind of paper you’re surprised too see an undergrad producing, even a really smart undergrad. And yes, it’s fairly clear she did indeed rewrite it. There’s just enough of the EFL awkwardness — not “errors” per se, just a vague sort of awkwardness in word choice or structural tendencies — and just enough of her original paper throughout for that to be absolutely clear.

One thing I’m particularly glad to see is how some of the techniques I was teaching in class really sank in. For example, the practice of quoting a source: that is, you don’t quote people because people who publish their ideas are by default right and authorities to be appealed to as “proof,” but rather because you see interesting or important ideas expressed in a very clear and powerful way by people whose credibility on a given subject can at least be attested to on some level, and because quoting them provides you with an opportunity either to agree and expand on those ideas, or to dispute them. This student was constantly expanding on the arguments she agreed with, and also using quotes as a spring board to allow critique of the ideas she disagreed with!

I’m so happy that I’m going to give credit to the writer whose insights and techniques helped change the way I teach writing: Gerald Graff’s book Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind is an outstanding book for anyone who is even a little bit frustrated with how undergrads can simply not get some of the basic, simple things that are fundamental to academic writing, academic thought, and academic exchange.

(Like, why they have no idea why citing sources is so important, or why they can’t seem to grasp why we quote other people in our writing, or how to get them to see what academia is, which is, really, a great big huge exchange of ideas, disputation, disagreement, amplification, and so on. Well, it’s more than that, but let’s try to see the Ram and not get hung up on the Ravana.)

Some of what I did this semester in my writing course was like in past semesters, but one of the things I changed was how I got students to interact with texts. I had them write a text arguing one side of an argument. Then I had them randomly exchange with classmates, and had them write a new text, one which quoted or paraphrased the ideas of the first student, but also included a response of some kind. They could agree and amplify on some area of the previous author’s argument, they could disagree and explain why, they could cite conflicting evidence: for each of these moves, I provided them with a template, like this one:

TITLE: ________________________

The general argument made by AUTHOR X in his or her work, ____________________________, is that _____________________________________. More specifically, X argues that ________________________________________________________________________. She/He writes, “__________________.” In this passage, X is suggesting that ____________________________. In conclusion, X’s belief is that ______________________.

In my view, X is wrong/right, because___________________. More specifically, I believe that ___________________________________. For example, ____________________________. Although X might object that ___________________________, I maintain that ___________________________________. Therefore, I conclude that __________________________________________.

That’s taken directly from Graff’s book, and it’s really interesting because what it does is models a way of stating in writing a summary of someone’s for the purposes of presenting one’s own disagreement with those ideas. For those of us who are really bookish, or who have been in university for years and years, this is something we either don’t remember having had to learn, or else it’s something that came naturally to us.

In years past, I would probably have seen this kind of teaching by template as unfairly confining students to a specific kind of writing, and as something that they would end up being dependent on, but this was, it turns out, an underestimation of my students. The reality is, as usual, that some of them internalized it and moved past using an explicit template, while retaining the basic structure or, well, technique that the template modeled. Meanwhile, among those who failed to internalize it and move past it, some at least produced better work by using a workable model of disagreement, while a couple (as usual) pretty much ignored the whole thing and kept doing what they were doing before they enrolled in the class.

So now I see template exercises as something akin to practicing scales: a really useful way of developing specific technical moves or skills in writing. I’ll definitely be working up some (loose) templates to use as exercises in my upcoming “Magazine Writing” course next semester.

(The purpose of which is less to get students to become competent magazine writers and more to get them competent at writing interesting, clear, structurally solid texts on subjects that they are interested in, with the theory that (a) good academic writing is easier to learn when you’re able to do those things, and (b) that a lot of the writing they’ll do outside of university will require these portable skills.)

Back to the Graff: while I suspect it’s probably not going to be useful to most people who are teaching writing courses in Korea — lots of writing courses, after all, focus on grammar, sentence structure, and pulling together a workable paragraph — anyone who  is working in a context where they’re trying to get students to step up to that higher level where they can write in an academic, intellectual manner, this book has some invaluable insights and comments.

(And if you’re working to address the gap between what professors expect, and what students think professors expect, then you definitely want to read this book. Doubly so if you’re a non-Korean, as there’s probably an even bigger gap between your expectations and what students assume you expect and take for granted.)

The other thing I can’t stress enough is that group workshops really do help students, even EFL students, to improve their writing. Because of the range of skills and viewpoints you get from a classroomful of peers reading their work, students get a huge amount of useful feedback. But more importantly, by looking at their peers’ work, students can really develop some critical reading skills which, over time, they can start applying to their own writing.

The one warning I must offer, though, in terms of workshops, is that one must beware the slack tendency. That is, a lot of students will do critiques in earnest until someone starts missing class, or turning up at crit sessions with six-word crits like, “It was really good. That’s all.” As soon as that happens, the bar gets lowered, so an instructor must be very careful about how he or she goes about assigning crit work and assessing the crit component of the class. I’m thinking that written critiques submitted in duplicate — one for the prof, and one for the student whose essay is being critiqued — is how I’ll handle it in future. Hell, that also provides even more writing practice for the students doing  the crits, so it can’t hurt! (And it gives me something tangible to grade, which translates to more effort from those students whose main motivation is grades.)

I can imagine many classes won’t be up for critique sessions, since after all, many people who cannot produce a decent written critique will also struggle to verbalize their criticisms of peer work when talking face to face in class. But that said, crits are a great way to run a writing class for TEFL students above a certain level of writing ability. And it’s not necessarily as high a minimum level as you might think…

My Listening & Speaking course, which was essentially a Conversation course with a few listening exercises thrown in, especially has a pile of assignments I need to tabulate, in the form of CD-ROMs on my desk, plus the odd file on my computer from students who (for some reason) couldn’t extract the file, couldn’t burn it to CD, or whatever. (I think next semester, for bookkeeping purposes, I’m going to demand they burn their work to CD-RW, and keep a copy on file; after completion of a task, I’ll return the CD-RW but I’ll demand a final archive of everything at the end of semester so I definitely have a record to check.)

I’m relatively pleased with the results for that course — Listening & Speaking — by the way, consider that I used a totally new grading structure. The problem with grading assignments in a speaking and listening course is not that the grades are subjective, because to be honest, almost all useful grading in a language course is on some level subjective. You can set up specific skills or tasks, specific “grading rubrics” as those studying pedagogy like to call them, but not only is the rubric, in the end, subjective — you have to prioritize skills and pick and choose them, and no matter what methodology you focus on, no matter how much theory supports you, the reality is that three hours a week is really unlikely to result in increased fluency, accuracy, or whatever it is you’re grading. At least not over a single semester.

But my approach, this semester, was to acknowledge the subjectivity, make students take part in the subjective process of evaluating work, and to break the homework down into stepped gradations. That is, to make it like a game of Super Mario Brothers. If you’ve never played the game, I’ll summarize it this way: you have to complete a task on each “level” of the game to proceed to the next one. If you don’t beat level 1, you cannot beat level 2. Level three only comes after level 2.

(Actually, in the game, if you know the shortcuts, you can skip levels. And in fact, there were probably one or two students would would have benefitted from skipping a couple of levels, but not many, so I didn’t bother with that sort of thing.)

Instead of levels, there are a series of tasks that students must complete. In the end, I wound up with a series of 8 tasks. Students start with an F for their homework grade, and work themselves up the grading ladder. The first tasks being completed buys them a D, the second, a D+, and so on, all the way up to A+. (The final task, unlike the others, is of their own devising, but must target specific weaknesses of theirs and must be approved by the instructor.) Just like in Super Mario Brothers, there are things that are “certain death” — which, in other words, guarantee you will be deemed as having failed to complete the task — and things that will make you more likely to succeed, like catching the magic[al] mushroom or glowing star.

The positives of this system, besides students having a pretty good idea of where most of their grade will come from and what it currently is, kicked in about halfway through semester. I found students suddenly understood the process of task evaluation better, and were challenging themselves more strenuously. Most of the tasks were tough, but not in a way related to their English level: they were tasks that even someone with poor or middling English could complete: the difficulty was more in terms of preparation, having the guts to do the thing required, and self-motivating.

A few examples include:

• telling the class a funny story about one’s own experience
• recording oneself ranting about a topic of one’s own choice and posting the video to Youtube
• creating a single segment of a radio show akin to This American Life, but dealing with the student’s experience, or with Korea, for a program titled “This Korean Life”
• videotaping, documentary-style, a trip around town wherein the student speaks only English regardless of how people react; the student is supposed to actually try get things done, like getting a haircut, withdrawing money from the bank, buying shoes, etc.

I found that students did become much more self-aware of the quality of their own work, and much more positively critical. That is to say, they weren’t moping about, saying, “It’s not good enough!” but rather, saying, “I think I can do better!” A couple of times students actually were the first to speak, and said things like that, during group discussions of various task evaluations.

The main problem was time limits. Most of the class dawdled, and since I told them that it was up to them to stay on track with their projects and tasks for class, the end result was that most of the class stayed in lockstep with the others. A few students tore ahead, though even those few ended up submitting three or four tasks at one time near the end of semester. This is, obviously, to be avoided. Therefore, next time I think I’ll set up a time-limit for the completion of a task. For example, students have two weeks to complete a task; if they succeed, the clock starts again for the next task, and if they must repeat the task, the clock starts again, this time with one week allocated. (If they repeat twice, they must either do a special task in order to retry, or else they must go back to the beginning, I’m not sure.)

Introducing a timekeeping element means I’ll need to track their progress carefully — taking notes not just about who has completed which task, but also when each task was completed. It also reduces the necessity of self-motivation in some senses — since the clock, an external motivator, is suddenly in play — but I’m hoping that the stakes involved will trigger a degree of self-motivation on a different level. (Since the motivation will be one of quality, in order to avoid repetitions and “special tasks” following too many failed repetitions.)

On the side, the “cocktail party” final exam was good for a few reasons. The first was that students performed much better than I expected, not only managing to hold interesting conversations but also to complete their randomly assigned conversational tasks. They seemed to be more motivated by having a good informal chat with classmates than by the idea that they would be evaluated at some point on their performance.

What this says to me is that a “cocktail party” would probably be better as a class event, instead of as an examination. In fact, another thing it proves to me is the power of taking conversation practice outside of a classroom. A fake cocktail party is as contrived a setting as a classroom, of course, but the thing is that it’s (a) unusual to students (some of them had never been to such an event before in their lives), and (b) not all contrived situations are equal: the contrivance of having purposeful, meaningful, and authentic conversation in a classroom, a place where for most students purposeful, meaningful, and authentic conversation never happens, is powerful simply because it’s not in a classroom.

So one thing I’m thinking is that it would be really nice if we could get a classroom somewhere set aside for one of the two hours a week that my next Listening & Speaking course meets, and have that one hour a week in a room with no desks, no front and no back, just couches and chairs and maybe a hot water pot and some tea. I suspect no such classroom exists, but maybe there is something around. Failing that, maybe I can commandeer a few disused couches and rework the setup of my office. (Unfortunately, some of the old couches in our housing unit were trashed by the Facilities people last semester. They would have come in handy. Ah well…)  I suspect that such a classroom would be useful for to other courses as well, especially if it were set up to have a TV or a computer with a projection screen.

Something to ask around about, I suppose. I kind of doubt it’ll happen, and I kind of suspect my office will become this dreamed-of space, but it can’t hurt to ask, right?

Ah well, for now, I’m busy with other things. I have a department website, a webzine for the campus English mag, and a comic book site to set up and design, some grading to finish up (by next Wednesday) and of course some Christmas preparations to which I must attend.

All of which means that I suppose I should end this post now.

Of course, for a long time, many Anglophone writers simply assumed that the dominance of America and of the English language would go hand in hand. If you look at a lot of older SF, you see that assumption — hand-in-tentacle (or choose another member, if you prefer) with the assumed dominance of white males — runs deep within the genre.

Even there, of course, there was some projection about the future of the language. As far back as the days of Gernsback’s pulps, authors have been throwing neologisms into the mix. (I’m not so sure about before that, though you can see it is a fair bit less common in, say, the works of H.G. Wells or Jules Verne.)

Neologism — the coining of new, imaginary words for new, imaginary things — is a major feature of contemporary SF, but the thing is, when you sit back and think about it, it’s not used to convey linguistic change of the kind that actual linguists talk about. Like, for example, the Great Vowel Shift? That sort of thing is totally filtered out of most SF, so that when linguistic change actually takes center stage, this fact becomes starkly apparent. The best known example of this is Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, a novel set in a post-nuclear holocaust Britain, millennia after the final war, where civilization has collapsed completely (and language along with it). Here’s the opening of the novel, taken from a comment by Hoban himself on how he came to write that way:

On my naming day when I come 12 1 gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing Ue that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrd he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on I end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, ‘Your tern now my tern later.’ The other spears gone in then and he wer dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all yelt, ‘Offert!’

The woal thing fealt jus that littl bit stupid. Us running that boar thru that las littl scrump of woodling with the forms all roun. Cows mooing sheap baaing cocks crowing and us foraging our las boar in a thin grey girzel on the day I come a man.

It’s not so rough when you read only a few paragraphs, but after a while you start to feel like you’re reading Middle English. It’s parseable, but just barely. This makes the book a very unusual specimen: most SF novels don’t actually fictionalize the extrapolation of linguistic change in this way. People ten thousand years from now, and aliens, are often depicted speaking modern English, but with other stuff thrown in.

This is mainly for convenience, though in cases where people from the deep future — say, time travelers — speak perfect 20th century American English once they’ve arrived in the past, it’s a cheap, lazy, and annoying oversight. But in the majority of cases, people would not be willing to read a book with all the dialog written in a barely understandable language, so authors rarely have any other choice (or inclination), and where the story is set in the deep future, or even the near future, it’s actually quite natural to tell it in modern English, with changes thrown in where appropriate. (It’s as natural as rendering conversations held in a foreign language in English when speaking to Anglophones.)

The point, though, is that neologisms in such stories actually punctuate points of difference from the (real-world) present time. In other words, it’s kind of like how Westerners in Korea will throw in words like ajumma or soju without stopping and explicitly explaining their meaning as they tell stories about Korea… or, how writers like Kipling made a habit of tossing in a few non-English words to color the setting and give the story an exotic flavour. (No mistake, mentioning Kipling, as his effect on early SF was arguably significant. There’s even an anthology of Kipling’s SF out there, though I haven’t gotten my greedy hands on it yet!)

One of the most neologism-heavy books ever written is John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, a fascinating novel by an amazing British novelist. (Brunner is often credited as the guy who seems first to have envisioned computer viruses, if you can imagine that, in another novel titled The Shockwave Rider. He calls them something “worms”, actually.) Anyway, I remember reading a paper on neologism in Science Fiction Studies years ago, which broke down the usage of neologism in a group of novels. What it found was unusurprising: the overwhelming majority of neologisms in SF are for nouns, especially objects (as opposed to people and places). Hail, Gernsback: they’re often gadgets. A familiar example from Star Trek is the “dilithium crystal.” What is a dilithium crystal? It’s a whoozit whatsit gadget. A future-object in need of a (scientific-sounding) name.

Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, though, took this trend to a new height, using the biggest pool of neologisms including nouns for people, nouns for places, verbs, and adjectives (if not adverbs — I can’t remember, and I can’t find the paper online at the moment). A couple of examples mentioned in the book’s page at Wikipedia include:

“codder” (man), “shiggy” (woman), “whereinole” (where in hell?), “prowlie” (an armored police car), “offyourass” (possessing an attitude) and “mucker” (a person running amok). A new technology introduced is “eptification” (education for particular tasks), a form of mental programming.

I really wish I had the paper on hand, as there are some fascinating charts indexing the use of types of neologisms and so on. Granted, some of Brunner’s coinages don’t quite ring true –  they don’t sound, to my 80s/90s-raised ears, like words people would actually fall into using — but they do paint a really vivid image of a world stretched to the seams. (And a book that is outstanding for more than just this: its use of the “Innis Mode” of jumpcuts between characters in a huge cast, its constant quotes from the very entertaining (fictional) books of Chad C. Mulligan, and the quality of intensity, storytelling, and imagination behind it all make it a masterpiece.)

In more recent work, a few more interesting discussions of the fate of English itself come to mind. One is more common, and has appeared in a number of books, though perhaps because of its (acknowledged) indebtedness to Stand on Zanzibar, David Brin’s Earth comes to mind. Again, I haven’t got the book on hand, but I recall that in an early scene, a major character is talking to a minor one in a dialect of English that is called “Simglish,” for “Simplified English.” The notion is that, in order to facilitate the learning of English, a consciously modified form of the language, with greater regularization and simplification, is developed in order to make its acquisition by nonnative speakers easier.

Which, again, is something Roboseyo mentions specifically in his comment. He links it to the decline of American power in a world where English has achieved enough penetration or standardization as the lingua franca to drown out any incentive that might exist in promoting another language — say, Mandarin Chinese — to displace it, the way English did French. (And there are SFnal futures where Mandarin does become the new lingua franca, or at least the language of the elite. I seem to remember skill at Mandarin being an important part of elite life in the Chinese-dominated world of Maureen McHugh’s brilliant China Mountain Zhang. Not that Americans can’t/don’t speak English anymore, but if you want to get a good education, you need to go to Beijing, and for that…)

Another alternative, though, is that English languishes on into the future as it is. This is something I see more easily happening, since I foresee a lack of incentive to simplify English on the part of both Anglophones and non-Anglophones. That is, Anglophones would probably feel just as uneasy about this as people from other cultures would feel about meddling Anglophones coming in and “fixing” their languages to make them easier to learn, while the English-capable elites in non-Anglophone countries actually value the difficulty of acquiring the English language; it’s one of those things that keeps them on top, at least in certain societies, Korea among them. (Can you imagine the reaction of Korean elites if Simglish were to supplant English on the college entrance exams?) So I really don’t think any substantial, “official” form of simplified English as a global auxiliary language will emerge, though creoles and dialects (like those we see in India or or the Caribbean) certainly could.

In such a world, though, there’s another, gloomier possibility, which is that English, in languishing on, is impacted by its role as a global language. In Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire — which, like the other novels mentioned above, is among my favorites — there are two interesting things I remember. One is the impact of political correctness on English, wherein somewhere along the way, Anglophones have stopped using our old-fashioned Anglophone names for countries and started using the native terms used by people from those countries. (In other words, we’d be calling Korea “Daehan Mingook” or “Hangook” instead of “South Korea” or “The Republic of Korea.”

Then there’s the effect on English itself of its role as lingua franca, most stunningly put forth in a comment by a poet of Eastern-European origin (I can’t remember which country he’s from) about how there’s no more poetry written in English, because of how “all the poetry simply fell out of the bottom of the language” (or something like that — this is a paraphrase) as a result of its being the lingua franca for so long. I really wish I could quote the line, but I haven’t got the book here in Korea with me. (Though if someone gives me the line, I’d be happy to edit it in here. Same for any other quotes you might want to work in.)

An interesting example of a rather different lingua franca appeared in the film Code 46, where the standard language is basically English, but with a mishmash of other languages ground deeply in. (Wikipedia lists “English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Italian, Urdu and Mandarin,” for the record.) On some level, I thought this “global pidgin” was more about styling the film, but there is at least a little reason for it: the film describes a world where globalization has been carried to its extreme in a number of different ways, including scenes of all white (ie. European-descended) factory workers in China and strict emigration rules because of global health management concerns.

In the longer term, the visions tend towards the leveling of language as a medium for communication. Just as literacy goes out the window in Holy Fire (the neo-young protagonist marvels at the idleness of youths sitting around and reading paper books in Europe), in the long run technology trumps the inefficiency of language, as foreign tongues can be either uploaded into minds, or acquired at great speed, or, in my favorite imaginings of the future by Greg Egan, technological retooling of the human species makes the universalization of language possible, for example in Diaspora where the uploaded consciousnesses and computer-spawned AIs are all speaking the same language as a matter of course.

Sure, in the same novel, differences of language between homo sapiens are nothing compared to the differences of language and difficulties of communication between different self-modified clades of posthumans. Diaspora has a fascinating little section on the diversity of human subspecies and how communication between then, as a matter of communication between radically different minds in radically different brains, requires intermediaries who bridge those psychobiological differences. But in other texts by Egan, the universality of language as a medium for communication is assumed — once we’re uploaded, language translation and language access become trivially easy unless one consciously attempts to make it difficult. (Say, by confessing love in the form of an obscure mathematical analogy.)

The elimination of all barriers to communication is, of course, a powerfully utopian vision, though one that feels particularly white/western to me: for many people in our world, language is an important part of their identity, and the crucible of their culture. If language barriers are leveled, what happens to culture barriers? Or subcultural barriers, for in Egan’s postbiological worlds we find a profusion of different sects, groups, and other organizations who sometimes go so far as to retool their own consciousnesses to believe, behave, or think in specific, and nonstandard, ways. The “universal” is something that any well-trained reader immediately looks warily upon: is the universal simply the “naturalized” white, Western value set? Or are cognitive-cultural constructs integrated into the “universal” language so that they are immediately comprehensible to all? Or does temporary (or permanent) self-modification become a part of what it means to speak and to hear others’ “languages”?

To Egan’s credit, he doesn’t quite simplify these things: he postulates that “languages” or voluntary states of thought will differ so radically — much more radically than is possible among humans with the same basic hardware — that communication will only be possible when easy, quick self-modification is possible. (Something akin to installing a plugin on your mind so you can understand what some deeply self-modified mind or group of minds is thinking.) He doesn’t whiten or simplify things, and in fact, in some ways, he recomplexifies them by showing just how much more pronounced differences can be once humans are in conscious control of their cognitive and biological hardware. (Another example, in Schild’s Ladder, involves what amounts to the complete and total on the fly customization of human sexual reproduction, so that partners voluntarily, and unconsciously, self-modify so as to fit one another perfectly, but in a way that makes traditional notions of “sex” and “gender” quite, er, inapplicable.) But this is an awareness and sensitivity I think is perhaps less pronounced in other works where communication across languages is automated.

In any case, this discussion of the future of English in science-fiction is far from exhaustive. What are some of the futures of the English language that have surprised you most in SF novels you’ve read? Or, if you’re an English teacher and not an SF fan (or are both) what do you think the fate of English is going to be in the next century or two? This is one of those cases where the SF and the Korean/TEFL sides of my blog can actually intersect, so I’m quite curious about what various readers will have to say!

And by the way, I’m aware that I’ve left out another fascinating branch of SF, which is, tales in which alien languages are learned by human beings. It seems tangential here, but it is nonetheless fascinating. If you’re interested in that, then as a starting point I recommend Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. (No, the link is not to the story, which is not available free online, though a few others are. But hell, buy the book, Ted deserves the royalties!) Oh, and if you prefer reading it in Korean translation — or giving one of the best SF collections of the last ten years to a Korean you think will like it — it’s available here, too. (A good translation, as well, says Lime.)

If you’re too cheap for that, you [redacted], you could always try H. Beam Piper’s short story “Omnilingual” which is free in many formats here.

But wait, before you go off, really: share your thoughts on this topic!

• Some much-needed documents are on their way here.
• I received my copy of Interzone 219, with some very fine art illustrating it., and a cheque for my story, too.
• My students in one class — the graphic novel class — volunteered to work during the first week or so of post-semester break, in order to do a good job finishing up their project, rather than rush through and do a so-so job before exams. I was quite stunned. They jokingly asked for extra credit, but the best I can do is give them a pizza party or take them out somewhere. Something like that.
• I’ve finished tidying the student-made subtitles for Such a Long Journey, the film we’re watching tomorrow evening in the make-up class. And a damned fine film it is — the “Real Mommy-Daddy kiss” scene is precious, yes, but I like it anyway, and the Tower of Silence scene is just… wow. If only the DVD had subtitles on it. Or even captions. Since there weren’t, and since I ordered it for the class, I had the students do up subtitles. I knew it’d be a lot of work

  We’re discussing the first couple of chapters of the book in class next week, basically looking at what happens to “historical novels” in a multicultural society — I’m going to argue that Such a Long Journey unfolds chunks of what is now, for a considerable enough segment of Canada, “Canadian history” in that it’s the history of a segment of Canada’s population, and that one of the real features of multiculturalism in its literary incarnation is that it blurs all the boundary lines like what it means to be Canadian, or how far the roots of “Canada” can be imagined to reach. After all, it’s relevant to the larger whole of Canada because Canada is impacted by its Indian presence; and for that matter, that it also is relevant to Korean history to the degree that there is an Indian presence here, however marginal and disrespected in general it may be at the moment.

  Note to self: I really must get around to reading A Fine Balance at some point. (Let alone more recent novels… I’m okay with being a decade and a half behind.)

• I’m mostly on top of my work-related tasks. Some tabulation to go, yes, and some writing assignments to check-mark and comment on, but otherwise I’m mostly in the home stretch.

I’m still going to be too busy to do much creative work until January, but I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I see the Island, and its banks are fair… wave of school-work, take me there.

(Extra points to the first commenter — on my site, or on LJ — who can name which poem by which poet I horridly bastardized above.)

Guess what still hasn’t been fixed — not in nearly two months!?!?

Yup, it’s been leaking, unaddressed, since we moved out. What method of maintenance is that? The, “Let it collapse, for all I care, I don’t have to live in there,” method? This is somewhat disturbing as I live upstairs from that apartment. I don’t know whether there’s a risk of foundation-cracking in winter, but I do know that come spring, that apartment is going to be a fungal spore-farm.

(Which is something I really don’t want to have festering right below my own apartment.)

I’m not sure whether calling the Housing Office to point out that the maintenance guys are utter morons will help. But I think I might call over to point out that half the bedroom floor, part of the kitchen, and a segment of the office are slick from the drip, and that the closet looks pretty much ruined. You know, say, “Were you guys ever planning on fixing that leak? Because we’re moved out, and all… and it’s still leaking, and the floor is completely wet…”

At least now I know we made the right decision in moving: it’s pretty obvious how important Maintenance felt it was to get that leak fixed. To which I can only say that now it’s clear to me why there are so many signs of the building falling apart, like cracks in the foundation and walls and so on.

Now, I am glad that we’re not living in there… but I do worry about the building in general. Anyone know what kind of effect prolonged water seepage has on (presumably cheap) concrete? I’m guessing it’s not good.

Someone I know recently told me how she has learned to take pleasure in refusing requests that make no sense. There will always be some people who will ask you to do something — often some work for them often unpaid. It’s all in how they ask, though. Sometimes I’m willing to do a favour for a friend, sometimes I’m glad to pitch in on a project for a good cause.

When someone who is neither a friend nor a representative of a good cause, though, I’m likely to just say no, or to attempt to do so. Like this afternoon, when some random professor called me. I have no idea how he got my cell phone number — I should have asked, so I could reprimand whoever gave it to him — but I do remember meeting him, once. It was at lunch. I was eating with a another foreign professor, and this older Korean guy sort of sauntered up and plonked himself into a seat at our table, uninvited and very obviously unconcerned by the fact he was interrupting a spirited conversation.

Then he sat there for a few minutes, making boring small talk in such a way that made it totally clear why he was really there: he knew that his one foreigner contact on campus was leaving soon, and was looking to make another. When someone who is liable to try use you turns up, well, if you’re at all experienced in meeting such people, you can sense it. I sensed it, and it was with relief and annoyance that I asked “Who is that guy?” when he scurried off again a few minutes later.

Well, you knew he would call me eventually, and that day was today. “Hi, I’m [unrecognizable name] from [department I'm not connected with].”

“Sorry, who are you?” I say, glancing at the number on my cell phone. Campus number, but blocked line, so I can’t know who it is. It’s always a random number.)

“I’m [still-unrecognizable name] from [department I'm definitely not connected with]. We met last semester with your friend [foreign prof who is now gone].”

“Uh, okay. I don’t remember, sorry.” (Actually, I do remember, and I don’t wanna talk to you anymore, pal.) “Anyway, what’s up?”

“I want to see you.”

Just like that. I’m supposed to believe that this guy has suddenly, on a Tuesday afternoon six months after an awkward 2-minute long introduction-and-conversation, felt a deep hankering to see me again.

Right.

“I’m sorry? What for?”

“I would like to have lunch with you.”

“I see. Well, you see, these days, I’m so busy I don’t even have time to spend with my friends, actually. I barely leave my home except for class, because I’m working so much.” He’s making awkward sounds, but it’s basically true. One outing in the last two months, I think it was. One outing. And this guy wants my time? “So, anyway, I’m very busy. But what did you want to talk to me about?”

“Oh, well… actually, I want you to edit my course syllabus.”

“I’m sorry, your… syllabus?”

The University is having professors teach courses in English next semester. A great number of them are nervous about this, from what I’ve heard, and I can understand their anxiety. I can’t quite understand the need to have someone proofread a syllabus, though.

“Yes, I’m, teaching [random course] in English, and I would like you to edit my syllabus.”

Now, this is not my job. This is so not my job. My job is teaching 12 hours of class a week, prepping said classes, grading their work, holding office hours, co-editing a student magazine, maintaining a website for my students and courses, working on some website stuff for our department, doing some part-time proofreading for the Department of International Academic Affairs, and more. Those things are my job, plus, come March, academic research as well. After that, my free time goes into my relationship with Lime, my fiction writing and occasional columns, and my health. In that order, unfortunately — the health and writing need to even out.

This guy has no claim on my precious time, but he sure seems to think he does. “Oh, but… uh, it’s only two, er, two-and-a-half pages. It’s short. I need it edited…”

“Well, if you email it to me, I might be able to look at it two or three weeks from now. Or maybe after final exams. Right now, I’m just loaded down to the limit, and I honestly won’t have time to look at it. Feel free to email it, as long as you can wait for a reply.”

I say this because it’s easier than saying no, but gets the point across. Which is not, “It’s personal” but rather, “I have a job. I don’t exist here simply for your disposal.” What I really felt like saying was, “So, if I need some random document translated, or, say, I can’t deal with some shopping website because I don’t have a Korean national ID number, I can pop by your office? You’ll take care of things I need done for free? I can make demands on your time, as you are on mine?”

I’m pretty confident, though, that this guy would be taken aback at the idea of stopping to translating a document for me, or ordering something from Gmarket on my behalf. I’m pretty sure the expectation of free help goes only one way in this guy’s mind. And faced with that attitude — the attitude of a person who is basically out to use you, it’s very hard to be cordial.

I managed it, but only just.

As for why I’ve slotted this in Korea — well, I don’t know whether it’s just because of my experience, but it seems much more a common experience for me here that random peoople seem to be happy to try extract free work from me. I’ve also been offered lots of paid work, but regardless, it sometimes feels like every seventh or thirteenth person looks at you and seems to see the words “MY TIME MEANS NOTHING TO ME: ASK ME TO PROVIDE SOME FREE LABOUR” tattooed on your forehead. I know I was never asked to do any work for free in Canada, though I did end up doing some. But after a few years in Korea, I discovered that failing to say no would mean having  tons more of the same unpaid work dumped on me, and at the same time, finding my time in extremely short supply.

And it’s just not worth it. The people who respect your time and energies will understand when you decline, and they will almost always offer to pay when they can; the people who don’t respect you don’t deserve anything from you anyway. (They also don’t respect their own work, since they almost never bother to find out if you’re qualified as a proofreader or editor!)

So anyway, if you want to live in Korea, and want to have any spare time on your hands, you need to know how to say no, whether it’s directly or indirectly. No is your friend. Sometimes, No is the only thing keeping you sane, healthy, and in possession of your weekends.

I’m practicing the word in the mirror, once again.

• Everyone knows that the world leader in sex-change operations is Thailand. But did you know that the runner-up is Iran? Wikipedia says so, therefore it must be, er… plausible? Now, why is Iran so big on sex change operations? For some reason, John McCain singing, “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” comes to mind. That’d probably be the biggest mass death of transsexuals on earth. And then, sadly, one must wonder whether the Christian Right in America knows this. Shhh, don’t tell them.
• There’s a specific word in Korean for men who sit on the subway with their legs spread as far apart as possible, to the discomfort of their nearest fellow passengers. I can’t remember the word, but there is one. (EDIT: See below for more.) It also can be used to describe guys who hold newspapers so broadly as to disturb their neighbours. (The student seemed to think it was purely misogyny; unfortunately not. I’ve sat beside a few such guys on the subway and one must simply assert that, no, my knee IS going here, pal.)
• There is a video game designed to help young cancer patients understand, deal with, and overcome their illness. And it actually does seem to help them do so.

EDIT: Had to add this little graphic, it’s perfect, and relates to the second point. See the comments for more…

Jjeokbeolnam -- guys who spread their legs inconsiderately on the subway. Yes, there is a word for it in Korean. In English, we just use perfectly good four-letter words instead.

One thing worth noting is that, as in my student’s essay, the image above seems to suggest that the jjeokbeolnam phenomenon implicitly involves an imposition by men onto women — the passengers beside the guy in the middle are in dresses, and are obviously smaller than he is. So it’s seemingly perceived (at least to some degree — though let me look around a bit more before I say this definitively) as an implicitly sexist phenomenon! Interesting, considering what, at a glance, looks like a gender-neutral (사람들) verbal explanation of the issue. Or did I miss something?

That said, I should also note that the use of “nam” at the end of “jjeokbeolnam” specifies maleness. Of the various meanings “nam” has in Korean, “man” seems the obvious one here, and after all, how many women sit this way in public? So the maleness is obvious, and the term itself is not gender neutral. But interestingly, the text explanation below appears to be gender-neutral. And occasionally you see pics that show men (especially younger men) being discomfited by an older man sitting in this way. Like in this one:

Makes one wish one had one of these clips at all times on the subway. And a cell phone wavelength blocker, too.

Which makes me wonder if this is much more of a functional opposite to the word 된장녀 than any less-common word criticizing male consumer culture, or “dandyism” or anything like that?

That is, if 된장녀 is a word repudiating newfangled young female consumer behaviours, maybe the natural opposite is a word like 쩍벌남, which repudiates old-fangled older male self-conduct that is perceived by the young as sexist, oppressive, etc? (Though it’s worth noting that the latter gets only about 50,500 hits on Google, while the former gets over ten times that many. Then again, I think the latter is a newer term. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.)

It’s a thought. Makes me think of the TV show Mad Men, which someone somewhere (perhaps it was Ben Burgis?) described as a kind of low-level war between men and women, fought out in the office and the home. Good show, that one…

Forecast: scattered posting ahead. I’ve got a dogpile of editing to do, and then I’ll be continuing to distill my rather thorny paper. That link might not work for you, because the filename contains Hangeul and I don’t know whether PCs without Korean installed will be able to access it. (If not, download it from here!)

The title for this congress contains the phrase “Interfacing With the World”…  ironically (if unsurprisingly) the congress website itself may not load unless you’re using Internet Explorer in Windows, and I’m not sure that the download link for my paper (which is at the top of page five of the papers list, here) will work if you’re using a PC without Korean language installed.

Sigh.

(I will provide a Hangeul-free link to my paper below, for anyone out there interested in downloading it and unable to get at the Korean website… I’ll host it here unless/until they “fix” this “problem.” Ahem. The paper is titled, in horrid undergrad style:

Another Undiscovered Country: An Analysis of the Effects of Culture on the Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in South Korea Through The Examination of 21st Century Korean SF Cinema

Good lord! What a horrible title!)

Yep, this is my analysis of a bunch of post-2001 Korean SF films. I have to turn that into a “talk” so, well, um, I’m gonna be busy the next few days.

In other news, my Graphic Novel producing-class has landed itself with a topic and a working title: “Goose Dad.” The story is shaping up to be, in a very general way, about the effects of English-education mania in Korea, and the phenomenon of the “Goose Dad” — that is, families where the father stays in Korea and works, and the kids (often accompanied by their mother) ends up living in an English-speaking country for a length of time.

The party line is that such decisions are made as a “sacrifice” by the parents for the children’s sake, but my students confirmed, in class discussions, my suspicion that a certain number of couples who decide to go this route do so either to put off divorce, or because of the nasty mother-in-law problems a number of women face here, or, at least, that many of these marriages essentially go down the toilet as a result of this choice. (A couple of firsthand stories about acquaintances were quite a lot more sordid than anything we’re going to put into the book — doctors shacking up with room salon girls, airline pilots popping by for help on yet another love letter for yet a different girl.)

So far, they’ve figured out that Dad is seeing another woman — a relatively smart but independent woman approaching marrying age — and that Mom is has been living (under a great degree of social isolation, except for her fellow Korean mom expat friends) in some English-speaking country for a long time with the kids, of which there are two. One kid is quite well-adjusted to living there, independent, resourceful, and fitting in, but growing increasingly Westernized and distant from Mom (adding to her loneliness); another kid is having a hell of a time, not picking up English, and struggling with his or her own loneliness and other issues.

As I said, “We need to really challenge, if not torture, these characters!” Mom, for example, senses that something is up with Dad, and guesses there’s another woman, and grows reluctant to call. Maybe there’s a breast lump lying in wait for her, too. Maybe Dad’s girlfriend wants to get married with him. There’s likely to be a tongue surgery flashback, as well, though hopefully someone else’s kid. The kids aren’t as close as they used to be, what with one not fitting in and the other doing so well. And so on…

It looks like it will be an interesting book… the only problem is, time. We’re at the end of week 3 already, thanks to Chuseok, with not much done! We’ll need to have a script done in a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping by late November, all the images will be done and we’ll be working on getting the website set up.

As for art, I am not quite sure how we’ll do it; I’m considering suggesting we use photographs — heavily photoshopped and indeed maybe HDRI photography — the cartoony effect is not a bad thng in a cartoon, right? — and actors (including class members and anyone they can recruit) into it… but we’ll have to see.