Tuesday I had a full day of classes, well, from noon to 7pm; and today, I had an empty day but had some things to do, especially getting my ankle looked at. Oh, yes, sprinting across the Sydney airport on Monday morning, as well as the cold weather in Melbourne, resulted in a recurrence of the tendinitis in my left ankle. Which sucks. But it’s getting better, with hot packs and pills and so on.

I’ve written a few posts that I’ll be putting up over the next few days: about the conference and WorldCon I attended in Australia; some reviews of different Australian and Belgian beers I had in Melbourne; some other stuff too. But for today, I have some class planning left to go, and other things to do, so this shall have to suffice.

Probably wasn’t as much of a crash and burn as it felt like, but I was still a littler disappointed. Will be spending part of tomorrow morning cutting bits of my second (too-long-to-read) paper (to be presented Saturday afternoon) and assembling something of a script for that talk… and maybe a Powerpoint, though we’ll have to see about that.

Anyway, some of the other stuff I saw, such as the morning keynote address by Tom Moylan, a discussion of the work of James Hansen, a short presentation on the utopianism inherent in the disciplinary construction of architecture and design, and some of the analyses of Kim Stanley Robinson’s work that I heard — as well as a short chat with the man himself, and his final address at the end of the day — were worth the while.

I also had dinner with another conference attendee, Andrew Frost — whom I know from long ago on the Culture List (the [tenuously] Iain M. Banks-related mailing list). Wish I could have made it back for his presentation today, as well as John Clute’s closing address, but appointments and all made it impossible. It was great to talk with Andrew, though.

Since I’m flying out on Monday — and dubious about my ability to get there by 10 am on Sunday — I asked not to be on the  two crossed-out panels. My name’s still on the program on the website, though, so the Sunday morning one is still, er, potentially happening…

Sat 1300 Rm 214: (A) 1. SF and cultural studies in the Korean classroom

(This is an academic paper about exactly what the title says.)

Sat 1500 Rm 219: Cyberpunk and the city

The city seems an integral part of the cyberpunk genre – but how necessarily is it? What are the core tropes and themes of cyberpunk, and how might they be expressed outside of the urban environment? How far can you stretch the cyberpunk setting before it snaps?

Russell Blackford, Marianne De Pierres, Charles Stross, Gord Sellar

Sat 1700 Rm 219: The Fermi Paradox

The great physicist Enrico Fermi asked “Where are the aliens? Why didn’t they get here long ago?” This is a huge puzzle since the universe is so old that it is difficult to understand why they have not already visited Earth, or at least made their presence known out in space. This is the Fermi Paradox. Have we made any progress untangling it?

James Benford, Gord Sellar, Dirk Flinthart, Alastair Reynolds

Sun 1000 Rm 207: The problems with first contact;

Sun 1300 Rm 203: Make room! Make room!

Weren’t we all supposed to be overcrowded and starving by now? (RAH, “We’ll all be getting hungry by and by.”) What

happened? The projections of the 50s and 60s and 70s were very clearly quite wrong, but does that mean that there are no 

risks for the future? A discussion about the projections we can make now, what we actually know, what we surmise, and what 

we might do to change the darker realistic projections.

Gord Sellar, Sam Scheiner, Cristina Lasaitis

Sun 1600 Rm 203: Virtual bodies: shifting realities in a cyberpunk world

Cyberpunk fiction presented readers with a 21st century world where virtual space seemed to gain parity with the physical world. A quarter-century past Neuromancer, how accurate have the predictions of the 1980s’ most significant SF genre become? From William Gibson and Neal Stephenson to World of Warcraft and social media – has science fiction become science fact?

Gord Sellar, David Cake, Jack Bell

Mon 1400 Rm 219: An everyday future: including popular culture in
science fiction

An everyday future: Including popular culture in science fiction

Most science fiction writers take care to present the broader culture and technology of their fictional futures – but what about

the elements many writers forget? What is the media of the future like? What are the sports? A look at the everyday aspects of

future life that can bring a science fiction world to life.

Paul Cornell, Gord Sellar, David D. Levine

Monday 1400 Room

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I also have to get some video lectures recorded and uploaded for my students for Thursday and Friday classes I’ll be missing, so it’s time I got up and got some of that done. I’ll post my WorldCon schedule as soon as I get a chance to check it!

The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego.  The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of nonbeing.  And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another.  ”Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”  But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control.  It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself.  The ego, having gone supernova, collapses into a black hole.  What we fear when we fear death is not  so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego.  That is the true horror and evil of death.  And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.

Uh… not really?At least, for an atheist who has lost others, yes, the sting is always hard when someone one loves passes into the silence, the dark. Indeed, when a loved one “passes away”: the language betrays the insight that we struggle with as a species: the fact that one has “passed” –as in, faded into nothingness–and how it clashes with the strange sensation that the person has just gone “away.”  We all go through this, and I suspect that the atheist, when he or she does, has a harder time of it, especially the first few times.

But it’s even harder for the atheist to watch the person whose life was lived under a crushing illusion. The man whose church has taught him that he is of a lesser race, yet who turns up for worship weekly, eyes full of adoration for his abusers. The older woman one knows–and don’t we all know one?–who seems, from vagues hints she’s made–never to have enjoyed sex or even had an orgasm. The elderly man who rubs religion in the face of the young, as a weapon against anyone who disagrees with him as well as a whip with which to beat himself.

And I hate to break it to Mr. Vallicella, but most atheists I know have pretty much come to terms with their future deaths…

Valicella suggests that religion comes cost-free:

What would Hitch lose by believing?

… but this is a denial of reality, for all too many pay all too dear a price for the crutch Valicella holds out.

And worst of all, there is the nagging memory. That memory that, as a child, when one actually was innocent of these ideas, these vague promises and stories, that when one spoke of this or that god, this or that afterlife, one was making it all up, that one was being initiated into another fantasy.

Take a child who has never encountered religion in any form into a room, and I tell you this: he or she will be unable to distinguish between The Hobbit and the book of Genesis–both of them seem like fairy-stories of a kind. The process of inculcating religion and “belief” is, at least for some of us–like me, a process of learning to play along, to pretend. I made the motions like everyone in church; I said the words in the order I was taught. But there was a nagging awareness that I was lying, that I did not indeed believe in any of the articles of faith in either of the two creeds we recited once a week. Not in the resurrection, not in the Church, not in the secret of transubstantiation–which just made no sense, and still makes none–or in the presence of the Holy Spirit.

It all seemed too fantastical to be true. And being made to attend church weekly only reinforced the understanding that what was expected of me was not so much to actually believe, but to shut the f*ck up and pretend to believe. I grew slowly aware of the fact that many people around me were doing precisely that, the same way people shut up and pretend to believe all kinds of things: that politician X is going to keep those promises, that the cops really didn’t intend for this or that minority person to die in custody, that those protesters really are ignorant, dirty hippies who know nothing, that we’ve reached the pinnacle of political development, that there really is no racism in Canada, and so on.

What would Hitchens lose? I know, and you know too, now: it is the dignity of the individual who says, because it is what is in his heart, the following: “No, I will not play along. I do not believe. Now get that business out of my face so we can get down to talking about the real world, and how to make it better.”

Of course, he can’t bring himself to believe, it is not a Jamesian live option, but suppose he could.  Would he lose ‘the truth’?  But nobody knows what the truth is about death and the hereafter.  People only think they do. Well, suppose ‘the truth’ is that we are nothing but complex physical systems slated for annihilation.  Why would knowing this ‘truth’ be a value?  Even if one is facing reality by believing that death is the utter end of the self, what is the good of facing reality in a situation in which one is but a material system?

The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego.  The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of nonbeing.  And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another.  ”Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”  But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control.  It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself.  The ego, having gone supernova, collapses into a black hole.  What we fear when we fear death is not  so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego.  That is the true horror and evil of death.  And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.

The answer, of course, is that this is the belief which, at least for Hitchens, has allowed him to live his life as he had, free not only of the nagging humiliation and hypocrisy and all the rest that it would have cost him to get through life as a religious man. (I’m not saying all religious people are necessarily hypocrites or humiliated, mind you — I have no access to their minds, and some experience leads me to believe that for some who do get the ideas drilled in as children, young enough I mean, they truly do believe and don’t need to fake it.)

According to Valicella’s post, one would be led to suspect that the main reason for having any sort of religious view, or belief in an afterlife–

(and why is it that the two–the idea of a god or gods, and the idea of an afterlife–are always yoked to one another, anyway?)

–is to comfort those who end up facing death head on, or contemplating it. (Truly, a large minority at best, I suspect.) If that’s so, then reverse the cost-benefit analysis: what religious beliefs (and practices) are worth a little comfort before the end? Circumcision? Female circumcision? Being stuck in restrictive or ridiculous clothing all of one’s life? A constant sense of crushing guilt that infects everything one does or feels? Bizarre injunctions against many sexualities and sexual acts? Ten or five or one percent of one’s lifelong income? The hours of one’s life spent standing in the pews listening to clerics talk about stuff that most aren’t listening to (or taking to heart) and the rest already know about yes as well as the cleric? Living under a theocratically-enshrined sexism that is unacceptable in any other institution in modern societies? Living (as many women are expected to, and many long had no choice but to do) without any control of their reproductive capacities?

(And I’m not even bringing up the pedophile clerics, the corrupted monks, the system violence that every religion has been implicated in.)

Is that worth it, for a little comfort at the end? Valicella’s argument seems a rather poor remix of Pascal’s Wager: you’re not even gambling on the chance for eternal life, but rather against one’s own emotional and intellectual reserve in the face of reality.

Dignity, Mr. Valicella. That is what Mr. Hitchens would lose. We are, all of us, destined eventually to the silence, to dust, to being forgotten. Literary posterity may be a pose, but everyone knows in the long run, we all get forgotten. (Even Napoleon has been, a caricature of a short man in a funny hat with his hand in his shirt standing in for memory that many thought would ring out through the ages.)

The trick is to face all that with a smile, or at least stoically, and not to fall to one’s knees, weeping. We get a run at it, at least; a chance to enjoy, and to better the place for others, through words and acts, but never through beliefs alone. Facing the void, the hardest thing — and the most inspiring — is to grin and say, “Well, I had a good run, and I expect you lot to do your best at having the same.”

Or, to say, as Oscar Wilde did (not quite at the end, but close enough),  ”This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has to go.” To laugh? Yes: to laugh in the face of what you cannot defeat. But it can only defeat you, if you have unreasonable expectations. Live pretending, and death will fill you with terror. Live honestly–believer or not–and you see it coming a mile away, and know what the deal is, and what can horrify you?

Honestly: the cancer seems more horrifying than the death it brings. Because the cancer makes a pain and sorrow out of life, where death just punctuates the end of a life that is, one hopes, savored as best as a human can.

… and I don’t know if I can write it so it comes out that way.

But it’s a good song, isn’t it?

And yeah, I first heard it on Weeds, and couldn’t get it out of my head then.

Here’s some vintage Korean SF action… well, for a broad definition of SF:

Apparently the show is now retro-hip enough for indie rockers Go Go Star to do a musical (and cosplay) tribute:

Another version of the song, with better video:

As for me, I’ll be off to Melbourne for the Utopias 4 conference hosted at Monash University and WorldCon — I’m presenting (different) papers at each. I’ll post my schedule as soon as it’s finalized, in case anyone wants to meet up.

#

You wonder, how could a cowboy be so much like the zen monk in that strange book your auntie from San Francisco sent you?

He rides up as the sun is coming up, serene on his old stallion, a faint half-smile on his face, and dismounts. Hoisting the saddle off the horse’s back, he rubs the horse down and smiles at you. It’s the only greeting he ever gives anyone, but friendly enough.

You ask him, finally, how he got that way. Zen, you say, and you wonder if he knows the word, even.

But he just smiles his smile a little less faintly, and gives you a look like, “A former life,” but instead he says, “Long story. Sit down, lemme tell it.”

And he takes a cup of coffee from you, strong and black and steaming, and he says, “When I was working out on the Paulson ranch, at first I was just glad to have any work. I worked the harvest, I fed the pigs, I roped cattle. And one day, I found a wild horse, a stallion, out in the field. I figured, alright, I’m going to run him in, tame him. Sounds like a nice side project.”

He smiles, glancing over at his horse. “Not this boy,” he says, patting old Bucker on the noise. The horse snorts. “It was another horse, black and huge and scary as hell. I’d never broken a horse before. But I watched the old guy who broke him in, and the next time a wild horse was around, I gave it a shot. And what do you know, I was pretty good at it.

“And then, one day, the old guy who’d tamed horses for the ranch at the time, he retired, and I took over part-time. I was still feeding the pigs, cleaning the barn, whatever. Now, breaking horses, we didn’t do it often, but once  in a while was enough for it to be my thing. A wild horse came in, they’d call my name.

He sips the coffee, sniffing at the steam before he swallows. “S’good,” he says.

You thank him, and he sees you’re eager for him to go on, so he winks and says, “Well, it lasted a little while, before old Paulson’s daughter come up to me and says, ‘We need you to take on cleaning the barn, let Jimmy do the wild horses.”

“And I’d never heard of Jimmy before, never even saw him. When he was breaking horses, I was cleaning the barn. And the thing is…  the reason she gave was …

“She told me that basically, the handles on the barn doors were too high up for Jimmy to reach, I think it was. Jimmy was short. Now, a short man can break a horse, mind you, but the sounds I heard… well, Jimmy took that phrase, ‘breaking a horse’ a little too literally. You’re not supposed to just let ‘em run wild; and you’re not supposed to really crush their spirit, neither.

“No, you’re sposed to just find a way to show the horse that it can be, and wants to be, ridden. You get close to it, talk its language with your face, your body. You ease it into tameness.

“The thing is, I loved it. I really loved it. It was like… like whiskey on a cold fall night by a campfire. It was like watching the sun go down across the big sky with the sound of guitar and singing in your ears. It was something I loved to do. But Jimmy was doing it, because the handles of the doors to the barn were…”

His look isn’t wistful, it’s not angry, you realize. It’s just… puzzled.  People had paid money for the horses he’d brought over. Very good money. Jimmy’d never broken a horse before, but the barn doors. It’s good, how it still don’t make sense to him. If it did, that’d be wrong somehow.

“I wondered if anyone ever thought about moving the barn door handles down, you know; pulling them off and nailing them back on a bit lower, so Jimmy could reach ‘em and all. And then I just stopped wondering, and cleaned the barn. Found a lasso hanging on a hook, and practiced with it a bit. Roping cans of paint, roping saddles and door handles and all kinds of things. I’d never had occasion to learn that skill, it was incidental, but I did.

“The lasso, it’s about this, what did you call it? Zen? It’s just you know, thinking about where you want it to go, and letting your body put it there. That’s all. It’s how people get born, how people get from one coast to the other, how people find their way home at night. It’s simple. Your body knows, deep down inside your bones, how to get that lasso wherever you want it. You just have to let your body put it there. Get out of the way and the rope goes.”

He pats his horse again, looking out at the horizon now that the sun is mostly up, the brilliant pink and gold of the sky fading to heartbreakingly clear blue, and he turns his face toward you and smiles.

“So then… when I was good and ready and didn’t need no more practice with the lasso, I got up on my horse, and I rode ‘er off Paulson’s farm. Didn’t shout, didn’t shoot nobody, didn’t do nothing but shake hands, say see you later, and get on my horse and go. An’ I ain’t looked back since, no boy. I didn’t get to tame horses for a good while after that… but I also didn’t have to stare at door handles wondering how nobody could think to move them. I didn’t have to stare at the feedbags for the horses, and wonder if that was what it looked like in there, sawdust mixed in with their food. I didn’t have to hear Jimmy breaking horses all wrong.”

You know how the rest of it goes, and he knows it, doesn’t tell the rest on account of that. How long it took, you don’t know, can’t guess. But he got back to bringing horses over, eventually. How it must have felt to ride off the Paulson farm, after all that time cleaning the barn. And though you know he’d never have done it, you wonder — because so many men would have stayed on, cleaning the barn and staring at those goddamned door handles — how it might have gone if he’d just shut up and kept cleaning the barn.

Out on the field is a tree, one that got broke a few years ago, in the winter. Only tree for miles around, so that when people pass it they make themselves a wish, and it got piled down with snow, and then it rained. Snow and ice, and then the weight brought the tree down. Strangest thing. And it’s still growing, but bent, broken and wrong, like fingers on the hand of man who never grasped a lasso, never got up on that horse and rode off.

And then you glance at the door handle.

And then you look at your own hand, and know.

Of course, asking me such a question is dangerous. Dangerous in two ways, mind:

1. I sometimes have some pretty idiosyncratic views about books, and about historical issues that are worthwhile, and
2. I haven’t read many, many books in the subject, so I may overlook some gems as well as recommending some books that have become dated but were important for me when I read them.

So anyway, I figured that I would put my lists up online, and others could–if they feel so inclined–critique the lists, suggest other books, and so on. The idea is to build up a nice list of worthwhile books. Hell, I’ll even throw in a fiction list, too, since there’s some pretty worthwhile fiction (and a lot of the fiction I like gives one a different perspective on history as it is presented in mainstream history books).

Two caveats: first, all the books I’ll recommend are available in English, either originally or in translation. The friend who made the request doesn’t/can’t read Korean. And second, I’m trying to stay away from books that are too academic, like, for example, the collection of essays titled Colonial Modernity in Korea (edited by Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson) or Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, And Legacy by Gi-Wook Shin. Great books, both of them, but reading them is, more often than not, somewhat serious work.

SOUTH KOREAN POLITICS AND HISTORY:

1. Korea: Tradition and Transformation: A History of the Korean People by Andrew C. Nahm. Actually, this is the book about which I’m most dubious. It’s one of the first I read here, and gave me a solid background–or so I thought–on a lot of the pre-20th century history… which, believe it or not, is (I think rather unfortunately, in terms of ancient regional enmities) quite relevant to modern Korean history. I recommend this mainly because I don’t know of an alternate general history text to recommend. Just take it with a grain of salt, especially in its handling of 20th century history: Korean historians are notoriously revisionist and nationalist (and therefore simplify and monolith-toting) in their treatment both of pre- and post-Korean War peninsular history.
2. The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies by Michael Breen. I’ll be honest, I read Breen’s book after I’d been here about four years, and was ready to hate it from the start. The title itself–”The Koreans,” a phrase that all but screams a monolithic picture of this place and its people, and is often heard coming from the mouths of the most ignorant expats here–turned me off immediately. And the book does have problems, of course–but show me a book that doesn’t. For all that, there are lots of insights here, and he covers a bunch of things that aren’t covered very well at all in other books I’ve read, such as why the so-called IMF crisis happened.
3. Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience, 1900-1950 (The Missionary Enterprise in Asia) Donald N. Clark. This book is one I haven’t yet read, but was highly recommended to me by Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling (and this blog itself deserves to be on a recommended reading list for understanding Korea, actually). I have flipped through the book, though, and it is what it claims: a look at the experience of Western expatriates living in Korea from 1900-1950 or so. Matt’s quoted from the book on a number of occasions, and it has given me a sense of the book’s vast richness and detail.
4. Faces of Korea: The Foreign Experience in the Land of the Morning Calm by Richard Harris is also a book about the foreigner’s experience in Korea, but it focuses on a very diverse range of people who live in Korea as expats in much more recent history, ie. around 2004 when the book came out. I’ve heard people also recommned his Roadmap to Korean, which is a kind of culture-focused guide to the Korean language. I’d say the latter is definitely for newcomers, as when I got to it (after about three years here) very little in it that I felt was valid was also unfamiliar to me. Someone interested in this same kind of tumbling look at Korea through interviews, but focused more on Koreans, would probably enjoy J. Scott Burgeson’s (not unproblematic, but interesting nonetheless) collection of interviews and writings Korea Bug: The Best of the Zine that Infected a Nation.
5. The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War by George Hicks, and
6. Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korean Relations by Katharine H.S. Moon. My explanation of these two books is set together as one for a reason: you shouldn’t read the first one (which is about the enslavement and sexual exploitation of Korean women by the Japanese during WWII, and their pariah status in Korea afterward) without reading the second (which deals with the post-Korean War extension of this exploitation of Korean women by both the Korean government and the US military). Both books have their problems, but they complement one another well, and reading each will help you see the blind spots in the other more clearly. Warning, though: both books are heavily researched and it shows. But they’re quite readable and worth the look.
7. Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyong the Darkness of the Age by Jae-Eui Lee, translated by Kap Su Seol and Nick Mamatas. The Kwangju Uprising and subsequent massacre there is, I think, the central and primary trauma of contemporary Korea. (In fact, I suspect that all of the railing against Japan we sometimes see is, in fact, a sublimation of rage and horror at the things that happened under Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan, the dictators who ran Korea for nearly thirty years.) Yes, some people will object to this book. Well, and some people in this country actually believe the lie that Kwangju was a Communist infiltration. This book is an eyewitness report by someone who was there and lived it, and while that doesn’t make it completely “true” or trump all objections, it does give the book a profound value. You might supplement it with the photo book 광주는 말한다 어느 사진기자가 본 5-18항쟁과 6월항쟁 by Shin Bok Jin, if you want to see for yourself what it looked like out on those streets that May–the film (or the photos, I can’t remember which) ended up buried until it was safe to publish the photos, long after the fact, and while the book is only in Korea, the pictures are worth many millions of words.
8. The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (Revised and Updated Edition) by Don Oberdorfer. This is a very readable exploration, in great detail, of the many ups and downs of diplomacy, provocation, and downright weirdness between North and South Korea, from the 1970s until about the time of the book’s publication.
9. Sources of Korean Tradition, Vol 1: From Early Times Through the Sixteenth Century and Vol. 2: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries by Ch’oe Yongho, et. al. These are books that collect translations of documents related to Korean history and culture. They are, as far as I’m concerned, one of the few places you’ll see explicit discussions in English of certain parts of Korean history… for example, the tradition of slavery that continued less than a decade shy of the beginning of the 20th century. They’re great for leafing through or looking up specific topics of interest.
10. Education Fever: Society, Politics, and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea by Michael J. Seth. I am recommending this book to someone who is teaching here in Korea, but an understanding of the education system in general is important in a society so obsessed with schooling and “education.” Of course, I find myself wishing that John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling was available in Korean translation and widely read, but if you want to know why the system is how it is, and how it got to be this way, this is the book you want to look at. (In English, anyway.) The only problem is… it’s expensive, and not even in a lot of university libraries here.
11. I know, I know, it’s a top ten list, but… Korea’s very fond of bureaucracy, and I cannot help but add that I think Franz Kafka’s The Trial is something of a handbook to dealing with it in a manner more stoic than I’ve ever managed.

BONUS: FIVE BOOKS ON NORTH KOREA

1. Pyongyang : a journey in North Korea Guy Delisle. This is a graphic novel, and a glimpse into the life an expat foreigner living in Pyongyang for a year. Delisle specializes in finding the humor in the batshit-insane (his second book of this kind is about living in Myanmar for a year or two while his wife was there with Doctors Without Borders). It won’t tell you so much about the lives of North Koreans–Delisle was carefully shielded from anything like that–but it’s an interesting glimpse of the madness, nonetheless.
   
2. The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-hwan. The first book is a horror show, the memoir of someone who grew up in a North Korean gulag, being punished for the ostensible crimes of his… I can’t remember if it was his father or grandfather. It was a whole family deal. Quite depressing, and of course limited in the light it sheds on DPRK in general, it is full of interesting detail and is painful… and thus, I guess, also rather moving.
3. The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters by B.R. Myers. This is a short, basic analysis of “official culture” in North Korea. There are some parallels with the South, and a lot of divergence. Myers analyzes the official culture of the North in terms of its dominant mythologies, which makes this easy-to-read and at times even amusing, even as it baffles.
4. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Bradley K. Martin. Does Martin have an agenda? Yes: he wants to know what it’s like up in North Korea. So he interviews huge numbers of people who “defected” form or, rather, fled North Korea. Of course, the people who flee are going to be negative. But that’s a cheap dismissal I’ve heard too many times to buy as sensible. Like every book on this list, it has an angle, but it also has a ton of detail. It’s a huge text, though.
5. North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea by Andrei Lankov. This book was just okay, in terms of the interest it generated as I read it, but I’m not one for book that collect short columns from newspapers. Nonetheless, if I remember it right Lankov spent time up in North Korea as a student (an exchange student from Russia, no less) and he saw a lot of things that nobody else has written about in English. It’s worth the price of admission, but you might not tear through the book. Then again, you might.

KOREAN LIT:

I won’t pretend this isn’t idiosyncratic, but I also find the Korean fiction that I respond to most, in terms of mainstream fiction anyway, is the stuff that I feel I’m also glimpsing history through. But I’ll also throw in a few oddities for reasons explained in each text’s blurb.

1. The Dwarf by Cho Se’hui, translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton. The so-called “Miracle on the Han,” as the rapid economic development of Korea during the 60s-80s is often termed in praiseful tones, was far from a miracle for many. Published in the 70s, The Dwarf looks at how things worked out for a few specific groups of people: a “midget” or “little person” and his family (the metaphor is obvious in terms of their economic status), his neighbors, and some rich and powerful South Koreans. It’s not pretty, but it is powerful. Ah, and it’s really more a set of linked short stories than a novel. The Korean title of this book is, “The Dwarf Who Tossed a Little Ball.”  I’ll also add that there is something about the Fulton translation which doesn’t come across in other translations I’ve read, which gives this novel a sort of proto-SFnal feel. The stories have some very odd (and somewhat SFnal-sounding) titles, but that’s not all… there’s something about the grit and awfulness and the way characters find a way through that feels almost — but not quite — cyberpunk. I have been meaning to finish this book, as I really have enjoyed the parts I have read. Soon, sometime soon.
2. A Distant and Beautiful Place by Yang Kwi-ja, translated by Kim So-Young and Julie Pickering. This book is, as far as I’m concerned, of a familial relation to The Dwarf, dealing as it does with the same sort of people, but set in the 1980s… and, interestingly, at least in part in my very neighborhood. (There’s a story in it set on the mountain where I go hiking, and a freshwater spring mentioned in passing is still there, still being drunk from by hikers.) Wonmi-dong, a district of Bucheon City, is the focus of the tale (the original book is titled Wonmi-dong Saramdeul, ie. The People of Wonmi-dong) and it is, in effect, a receptacle for all those who, in the 1980s, simply couldn’t manage to stay in Seoul, mostly for economic reasons. There’s a lot of grinding poverty and pain here, but also glimpses at history — the trauma of Kwangju Rebellion, of long decades of dictatorship and control, and so on. Great stuff, though again a book that’s taking me years to finish as it’s short stories, and, well, often somewhat bleak.
3. Photo Shop Murder by Kim Young-Ha , translated by Jason Rhodes. This is one of those Korean Portable Library of Short Fiction books, and it has two killer stories. The second tale, titled, “Whatever Happened to the Guy in the Elevator” is a work of comic brilliance. Sadly, I did not care for the novel of Kim’s that was translated first — I Have the Right to Destroy Myself — but I thought these stories were remarkable.
4. The Wings by Yi Sang, translated by Ahn Jung-hyo and James B. Lee. Yi Sang is the Korea’s Japanese Colonial-era’s answer to Jack Kerouac: the beatest of the beat, his very penname means “weird” in Korean. His tales here present, well, freaks: losers whose lives are out of their control, who are forlorn and lost, with a lot of anxiety about sexuality, identity, and even their grasp on reality. In one, a guy’s wife is selling her body to get by, and he chucks the money into a toilet–never quite sure why, or scared to admit he knows why. Bizarre stories, by a Korean author widely regarded as important, even by those who aren’t crazy about his work.
5. Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology edited by Bruce Fulton. I’ve only dipped into this, but it has a lot of stories that people seem to have read as part of their education. The things I have read have been quite worth the time.
6. The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea by JaHyun Kim Haboush. This does fit into literature, but only in the sense of how “life-writing” comes into and goes out of vogue in literary critical circles: it could as easily fit into history if one wanted. The book is a translation (with commentaries) on the memoirs of Lady Hyegyong, the child bride of the child prince who grew up to be Korea’s most horrifyingly insane (and brutally murdered) Crown Prince, a fella named Sado Saeja. I’ll put it this way: he was something of a Korean John Wayne Gacy, but he lived in the palace and in the end, to spare his family, his father the king ended up ordering him to step into a rice chest and be locked inside… in the middle of summer… and remain inside until death. The memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong were political tracts aimed at, well, political ends: the rehabilitation of her husband’s memory as a victim, the protection of her son (who would later become a king himself), and a puzzling through of what in the world could have made her husband lose his shit so badly. It also has glimpses into the courtly life, and the superstitions of the time, as well as being a great read. Ought to be made into a movie, really. Or a stage play. (Admission: I have written a ghost story about it, but hey, it’s a fascinating moment in Korean history.)
7. The Last of Hanako by Choi Yun. A couple of dark short stories — the title story is about a mysterious Korean woman living abroad, and the other (a piece titled “The Grey Snowman”) is about a young Korean woman who’s fallen in with the wrong (political) crowd, these are just spellbinding little stories.
8. Between Sound and Silence: Poems of Chang Soo Ko by Chang-Soo Ko. This award-winning book is a collection of poems, I think my favorite collection of Korean poems in translation, and it was translated by the author himself! I reviewed it here.
9. Norwegian Wood by Murakami Haruki. I’ve never actually read this, yes, Japanese book. I only recommend it here because, while it is not Korean literature, it’s one of those books almost every Korean you’ve ever met will have, for some inexplicable reason, read. It’s like how Roger Zelazny’s a god-king here in SF circles. I’m not sure exactly why this novel, of all Murakami novels, is the big popular one. (I much prefer The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and After the Quake myself, or even Underground.) Another such book is Hesse’s Demian, which seems to be Korea’s Hesse book (where, in my experience, Siddhartha is the English-speaking world’s favorite Hesse book). Aaaaaanyway…
10. The Korean SF collection (in English translation) at Crossroads.co.kr. The quality of the translations is nothing to write home about, but this is the only extant collection of Korean SF in translation to date, which makes it worth checking out if you have any interest in SF (as the friend who made the inquiry does have). 

And here’s a bonus book recommendation for the person who asked, since I think he might like this book especially, even though it’s not really politics or history like he specified:

Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music, and Internet Culture by Mark James Russell. This isn’t a book of literature, but it is a book about pop culture, a field that has become part of literary study. There are all kinds of books and articles out there looking at Korean film, at telecom or in Korea, at Korean culture, but this is the best one for an overview of Korean pop culture in general, in terms of roots and history, industry, and recent shifts and changes felt in the past decade or so… and he manages to do it in such a way that you feel he’s telling you the coherent story of a cultural development. Disclosure: he’s a friend… but he also knows his stuff.

In any case, if anyone has other books to recommend, objections to books on this list, or other thoughts, feel free to hit the comments section with all your might! As I said, I hope this is not just a list for the friend who asked, but for anyone interested. Your suggestions will help provide a better picture of what’s out there, beyond what I happen to have read or looked into.

And it’s even worse when it’s nine at night and a couple of people come in wanting to sample the beer, just see what it’s like, and they’ve clearly just eaten dinner and tell you so, and you say, with the smarmiest look possible, “Well, I don’t sell draft beer without anju,” as if you’re talking to some hakwon teacher or something, and to top it all off, the anju on your menu is a ridiculously overpriced joke — even moreso than the regular overpricing of mediocre-to-bad food that anju often is, and even more unappretizing…

That’s wrong. Hakwon teachers aren’t, as a class, a lower order of life, nor do they deserve to be treated with disrespect. Some hakwon teachers are fine people, and some are losers.

If it helps at all, it’s just that the 21-year-olds who I never see except in a drunken state of some kind, and often talking loudly about the bodies of young women passing by (as if nobody in Korea speaks English, least of all young women)… those are the idiots who stick out in one’s memory so much more vividly. Or in my memory, anyway.

But hell, I have friends who teach in hakwons. Anyone who speaks to them as if they were second class citizens would piss me off to no small degree.

And what’s ironic is, I have one hakwon-teaching friend who’s likelier to be treated with respect than I am, on any given meetup: he dresses up (for work, it’s required) while I usually turn up in jeans and a T-shirt (because, living on campus, I can change out of my work clothes before just about any outing).

If you’re a Westerner in Korea, one little eye-opener is to dress the opposite of usual one day. If you’re usually dressed informally, dress up one day and go out: people will assume you’re a businessperson or a professor. If you’re usually dressed up, then dress down, and people will assume you’re a “lowly” hakwon teacher.

(For those of you playing along outside Korea, hakwons are basically what we know as “cram schools”, very loosely akin to those schools I’ve seen in movies — don’t know if they’re real, we didn’t have any I knew about in Saskatoon — where Chinese-American or Jewish-Canadian kids might have been sent to after school to learn Chinese or Hebrew. [I hear stories about such places -- are they still around? Were they common at some point?] Except you can learn cartooning, science, math, Japanese, art, cooking, and all kinds of other stuff at them. But a huge proportion of the hakwon market is English study. And to teach in one, all you really need is a BA in any subject… any subject. And since getting to Korea is so relatively easy, this means a lot of young people coming to teach for a year or two and pay off their student loans; it means a certain number of young men who come to prolong their adolescence, as well… which group I’m quite happy to disparage, as I do anyone who is an adult but refuses to act like one.)

Well, I worked in a university language center for a while, so technically I’m not sure if I’ve ever worked in a “hakwon” the way most people mean — our work involved kids and adults, but only 4 hours of class a day — but I know that for all intents and purposes, I was a hakwon teacher then. And became a professor in a flash (as, with an MA, I was overqualified for the job, in Korean terms). I was the same person before that job change as I was after.

But I apparently am no longer the same person, having absorbed (and grown my own amount of) derision for the hakwon teachers of the world, unfairly. If I’m going to avoid using the word “ajeoshi” and “ajumma” the way Westerners so often do — strictly as a pejorative — then I’m definitely going to avoid using “hakwon teacher” that way too.

ADDENDUM:

I have a third annoying thing: lads. You know, man-boys. Guys who are 28 or 31 but seem to want to be 19 forever. They keep their hair short, but then gel it and make it stick up like they just got out of bed twenty minutes ago. This is style? Give me a f*cking break.

I know, I am turning into my father. At 36, already. Wow. But one of these man-children was ahead of me in line at the bookstore and when he finished his business and turned around, and saw a white face behind him, he said — in the most obnoxious tone ever, “Hey, buddy!” No, Iamnotyourbuddygrumblegrumble.

However in this case, I’m referring to the kind of information requested by a major Korean company that shall remain nameless and the questions in their application form.

Now, I must repeat, the company must remain nameless, though I can mention a poem I’ve seen around, about the company, by Ann A. Crostic:

Solemn, the wiseness of old and
Ancients has make the very nice ripe fruits.
Men and also maybe women remark on the deliciousness
Scintillating in its sparklingness.
Up, up, up, upup,
Never down. Never look down.
Good company is hard to finding.

Being of sound mind and body, and loathe to give up both, Miss Jiwaku wasn’t eager about the prospect of working for such a corporation, of course: everyone she knows who enters those ranks goes mad soon enough. Not in the Lovecraftian sense, so much as in a Stepfordian kind of way.

In any case, the intermediary company through whom she was corresponding by said anonymous corporation told her that to be considered, she’d have to submit a little more information to be added to the company’s application form.

Yes, application form. I was shocked to see application forms when I arrived in Korea, having believed that once one had computers and inkjet printers, the whole world had moved on to resumes and forgotten all about crappy application forms filled out by handscrawling.

But no, in Korea the application form is alive and well. Perhaps part of the reason is because the kind of information giant, multinational corporations want to know is so frigging batty. No, really. Miss Jiwaku’s writing something up about it, and the gags headings she’s using are things like, “Is It Korean-Grown?”, “Is It Organic?”, “Is It Fair Trade?”, which gives you a sense of the way the questions made her feel. A brief sampling:

• list your brothers and sisters, and their places of employment
• how old are your siblings?
• what is your father’s job?
• is your mother a housewife?
• what is your height?
• what is your weight?
• what is your religion?
• are you the descendant of a war veteran?

Personally, I was surprised they didn’t inquire as to bust:waist:hip measurements and blood type, as well as favorite movies and books, but I guess there’s only so many ridiculous questions one can fit onto a single-page application form.

As she notes in her writing on the experience, the practice of asking such questions as part of the hiring process isn’t just discrminatory: it’s flat out unconstitutional, according to  Article 17 of the Korean Constitution — which claims that the privacy of no citizen shall be infringed.

Well, I’m no citizen, but I must admit that for every full-time job I’ve had in Korea, I’ve been asked my religion (it tends to be assumed I will have one, and since I have the paperwork, I simply answer, “Baptized Catholic” as it’s easier than trying to get into a rational discussion about it); for my current job, I was asked about my marital status as well, and it was, rather transparently, a clear attempt to make sure I wouldn’t be hopping into bed with freshmen.

Still, the above seems insanely invasive. I suspect none of those but perhaps the last one would even be legal (let alone actually asked) for most hiring procedures where I come from. And while I’m not where I come from, and shouldn’t expect it to be the same here as there, the fact Miss Jiwaku found it ridiculous is a little evidence that this is, while perhaps common enough here, not something one should just shrug off as “Korean culture.”

I get that. If little hole-in-the-wall places didn’t make people buy food, they’d go out of business in no time, plus given the local genetics (in terms of capacity for alcohol metabolization), it makes sense to insist people consume something that will help moderate how much they end up drinking. Okay, anju. Fine, anju.

But when you’re running a bar selling imported beer on tap for something like thirty or forty bucks a pitcher, it’s a scam.

And it’s even worse when it’s nine at night and a couple of people come in wanting to sample the beer, just see what it’s like, and they’ve clearly just eaten dinner and tell you so, and you say, with the smarmiest look possible, “Well, I don’t sell draft beer without anju,” as if you’re talking to some hakwon teacher or something, and to top it all off, the anju on your menu is a ridiculously overpriced joke — even moreso than the regular overpricing of mediocre-to-bad food that anju often is, and even more unappretizing…

Well, then, frankly you’re an asshead and there’s a good reason why your little bar is empty on a Friday night in the middle of a hot summer in a neighborhood that, if not bustling, is far from quiet. You probably think, “Oh, if I don’t insist on people buying anju, I’ll go broke!” Ah, but the irony is that with a little less insisting on anju, probably more people would come… and you would, most likely, sell more food and beer in the long run.

For example, I would have made the trip across Seoul to return, if your German draft beer was any good. I would have advertised your place on my blog, I would have posted appealing pictures, I would have raved about the beer. I would have sent more business your way.

So, Mr. Anju-insister, not only did you screw yourself out of my business that night — and chances  are, I’d have dropped $40+ bucks on beer just to try some of those exotic imports you sell —  and on subsequent nights, but you also screwed yourself out of all the business that might have come your way as a result of me being impressed. I won’t pretend I’d have gotten you millions of won of business, but maybe a million in total might have rolled in, eventually, because of return visits from me, recommendations to friends (like the local online homebrewer community of which I’m a member, people eager to try good foreign beer), and random people reading my review. All that free advertising, pal… gone.

I was not impressed. I was unimpressed. I was, in fact, the opposite of impressed. So, here’s the review you get, Mr. Anju.

NOTHING.

And the photo of your nice, glistening mugs of tasty beer?

This could have been a snap of your beer.

This could have been a snap of your beer.

How about a picture to help those seeking your less-than-prominent, and probably difficult-to-locate establishment?

This is not a picture of the bar in question.

This is not a picture of the bar in question.

Hell, I’d probably have even posted a map of your bar, to help people find their way so they could trade their money for your overpriced, if rare, beer:

No map here; move along, folks.

No map here; move along, folks.

Yep, that’s how it goes. No free advertising for you, Mr. Anju-insister. Wow, you lost out on, what, the equivalent of maybe $9 of profit from some crappy fruit assortment, is that what you think? Ha!

And instead, I’ll just say that I’ve been loving the apple cider at the Wolfhound Pub.

And this reason becomes even more apparent on watching the M. Night Shyamalan adaptation travesty, which I did the other night. I mean, even the creators of the series backed away carefully when asked what they thought of it. You know, that means it’s really bad. Well, it was.

The funny thing is that I happen to agree with a lot of the incidentals that people have brought up in their film reviews, such as their comments on the moronic and whitewashing casting (and when not whitewashing, the races were fiddled around for no reasons; and the extras were of the original race in the series, but the main characters weren’t… for no apparent reason beyond Shyamalan’s ego — way more about that whole mess here); the horrible slowed-down bending and the resultant boring action scenes; the use of voice-over in lieu of compelling plotting; wooden acting and awful script; the jump from locale to locale; the cheesy heroic that somehow, in a very sexist way that Katara in fact decries in the first episode ever — in the first scene of the show! — ends up backburnering her; the constant dialog saying only, “Let’s X” followed by narration of “Then we decided to X” followed by characters doing X; the crappy, pointless 3D; the gloominess and absence of fun — and the latter, for me was almost the main thing.

Well, yeah, all of that…

But to me, more egregious than all of those things — except maybe the racist casting and the assumptions that seem to underlie it — is the major thing I like about Avatar: The Last Airbender, and which I think I only realized because I’d been watching episodes of the Muppet Show: it’s one of those shows that, when you watch it, you’re taking a trip into the world of children.

This is not calling it childish, mind. “Childish” is the insulting word adults use to put down a behaviour in children which, if they paid attention, they’d have to admit plenty of adults to as often as, or more often than, kids do.

No, traveling into the world of children is quite the opposite of that: it’s letting go of that bigotry and moving into a child-centric space, a place where a child’s view of the world is not immediately dismissed as in normal everyday life, but rather validated, explored, and widened in a healthy and encouraging way that urges children to look more broadly, without telling them that to do so, they must throw away their capacity for glee, joy, and fun.

I figured this out, funnily enough, rewatching The Muppet Show, where the muppets are very, very clearly mostly kids — and I mean little kids — who have taken control of a theater and, by extension, the TV. When I was a kid, I found that much of the day, whatever was on TV was for adults, but when The Muppet Show came on, that was for us, for kids. For me. I could relate to Fozzie wanting to go out and make jokes, except his jokes were, well… amateur. Everything the muppets did was amateur, in the same way kids who dress up and put on plays are being amateur. The Carol Burnett episode (maybe the fourth or fifth I watched after my renewed interest in the series) drives the message straight home, especially when she is trying to sing during a dance-a-thon and Gonzo starts calling out different dance styles:

(See Burnett’s scene starting at about 5′30″.)

The adult guest stars on The Muppet Show are not immediately in charge, and while they might briefly try to assert control, but they can never really be in control. Eventually, the little buggers will always win out, and any adult who goes into their world has to learn to dance to their beat. There’s a lesson there for adults, for parents and teachers in particular. The Muppet Show takes place in a children’s world, and it’s a great place to visit, at least for a half hour at a time, not the least because it’s full of kids putting adults in their place.

Avatar: The Last Airbender doesn’t work in quite the same way — there are dark themes in the background, a war and destructive imperialists and pain and suffering — but there’s also Aang, who isn’t so sure about this saving the world stuff, but also isn’t the whiney, weepy child of the Shyamalan film — instead, he’s a mad little genius, eager to enjoy his childhood by going penguin sledding, or koi-surfing, or a million other things. He’s a kid who wants to embrace life, and by doing that, he (and his friends, who are all children) get closer and closer to saving the world.

And that, that is what I feel is the thing most missing in The Last Airbender: beyond Shyamalan’s obvious lack of interest in or love for the original material — I barely know it myself, but even what I know shows the film to be wrongheaded — it is his utter inability to take us to, to think of going into, to even notice that the story, properly done, is a trip into a world with growing shadows and darkness, yes, but one seen through children’s bright and hopeful eyes.

What baffles me is that people keep giving him money, after so many of his films have been garbage — an offense not just against audiences, but against the institution of the cinema. When someone like me is sitting there in the audience thinking, “I could make a better adaptation than this crap!” it may well be arrogance, but… CGI is getting cheaper all the time, and fans are getting more and more creative all the time. Sooner or later, Hollywood is going to look like the old Kremlin, a mad and unsustainable dream of centralized control of a culture.

And one that was, we shall hopefully task and shake our heads, implacably hostile towards children. Because, frankly, that’s what this remake is: hostile towards kids. I’m not saying it should have been Disneyfied, but… it’s as if Shyamalan looked at the original and saw only “childishness” to be purged. More’s the shame, and more’s the pity.

But until then, could someone just get Shyamalan (who clearly did not get it at all) exiled from Hollywood? Please?

Oh yeah, Ray hates the Internets. Too bad. Still, wonder if maybe someone’s shown this to him.

Weirdly, though, I’ve never really been into the man’s work. I did like the book set on Mars, and Fahrenheit 451 was better than a lot of stuff we read in school, but… I dunno. Maybe I wasn’t mature enough, or something? I suppose I should give him a try again someday.

UPDATE: Hat tip to Matgb, who informed me on LJ that Pharyngula (among others) has a post up about it. And Charles Tan says he found it “stupid and wonderful” according to this souce.

My attention turned to Anthony when I was in Portland last year, and saw a copy of her novel Cradle of Splendor, about a Brazilian space program, and figured I’d like to read it side-by-side with Ian McDonald’s recent Brasyl. I figure two non-Brazilians might latch onto commonalities, and I’m interested in how being an outsider affects one’s depiction of a culture or place.

(For example, among expats here in Korea, there are a set of shorthands that are common and immediately comprehensible. This, in turn, shapes a lot of expats perceptions about Koreans and Korea.)

Anyway, according to Wikipedia Anthony rose to prominence quite quickly during the 90s, and then published her last book with Ace, Flanders. It was, most decidedly, not SF. Then she went off to write film scripts. Apparently she finished a novel in 2006 but it has not yet seen print. I’m dreadfully curious to see what it is, and can’t help but wonder why it’s not out yet, given Anthony’s reputation. I think she might be remembered in something of a hurry if the book did come out, but then, maybe not… it was 1998 when Flanders saw print, which means it’s been a long time.

Ah well, I am lucky at least to have a bunch of her books to read: the only one I’ve actually read is the brilliant, strange, and wonderful Brother Termite. (Which Jim Cameron apparently wanted to turn into a film, but never did.)

Here is not only the lengthiest, but also the most recent, interview with Anthony that I’ve found online so far.

The first interview was conducted and translated by my friend Hong Insu, a translator (he did part of The Hard SF Renaissance) and prominent Korean SF fan, now missed by many (as he is in grad school in Arizona). The interview appears in a “mook” — apparently this is some kind of neologism of Japanese origin for something between a magazine and a book, ie. magazinebook — titled Miraekyung (”Futuroscope”), published (as I understand it) by the Seoul SF & Fantasy Library.

The English-language version hasn’t been published anywhere, so here it is, in PDF format — all 16 pages of it. If you want to read it in Korean, you’ll need to track down the new 미래경, which is issue #2… ahem, here’s a hint.

The second interview is by Ko Jangwon, an SF critic (and author of several books on SF). He’s posted the interview on his blog in both Korean translation (at the top) was well as in English (scroll down halfway). It’s pretty long too, so you might want to pace yourself with these things. (Similar ground is covered on a few points, but they’re different enough that I’m linking them both at once.)

• The Great Dictator
• The Muppet Movie
• You Only Live Twice (James Bond 007) & The Manchurian Candidate* (1962 version, not 2004)
• American Zombie
• The Godfather* & Brighton Rock
• Jungle Fever
• A Scanner Darkly
• The Stepford Wives
• His Girl Friday & Jackie Brown*
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail
• Brassed Off
• The Lady Vanishes & The Birds*

Films individually marked with an asterisk (*) are to be watched outside of class. The list is unbalanced, to be sure: far too few British films, even if we count 2001 and the James Bond as “British” to some degree (Clarke’s involvement in 2001; Bond being of British origin). Some might seem unlikely choices — The Muppet Movie, for example, though I want to use it to get a discussion going about kids’ entertainment in the English speaking world; or A Scanner Darkly as a way of getting at subculture, counterculture, and drugs in an American historical/cultural context — and there are other films I’ve considered  including, but haven’t done. Are my students better served by being shown Almost Famous or The Godfather? Should I swap in one of the Star Trek films — or even Harold and Kumar Go To white Castle —  for A Scanner Darkly? Some part of me really wants to show them The Revenge of the Nerds or Police Academy or maybe Airplane or something. American Zombie seems minor compared to many films, though it opens up the possibility of talking about politics differences between protest culture and “issue” politics in the US as compared to Korea. Finally, some part of me wants to show them one of those crazy Beatles movies, maybe during the same week as A Scanner Darkly. But I’m also wondering whether I wouldn’t prefer to include, say, Brazil in place of A Scanner Darkly… which would up the content of UK films in the list, but would also mean missing the whole 1960s drug culture/counterculture thing.

It’s a tough job… I rather wish I had a  full year of classes in which to show films. Year-long courses do exist at the Universities I attended in Canada, but in Korea they seem not to — perhaps because of the long break between each semester, I’m not sure. I can think of many more films I’d like to show, but cannot. In one sense I’m approaching this the way the film class I took as an undergrad was taught: my prof, Don Kerr, selected a bunch of films most of us would never have gone and seen outside of the context of his class, including some on my list: Wings of Desire, His Girl Friday, The Lady Vanishes, and Brassed Off. Part of the point of the course is giving students a chance to watch films they likely wouldn’t otherwise look at, hence the inclusion of, say, Brighton Rock and Brassed Off and Jungle Fever. There is a bit of idiosyncracy — I mean, as with a reading list in a lit class, I’m going to teach films I like and think are worth seeing because they are exemplary films, while also being useful windows into culture and history — but I think that’s natural.

Anyway, I’m curious what reactions people have to this list… feel free in the comments section.

The hackneyed plot is always one of those ethically dubious stories about someone deciding to get into the time machine and kill Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Mao, or whoever.

They do so because they are supposedly moral relativists and believe that killing one psychopath is better than letting that psychopath lead a society into the mass murder sanctioned by governments led by psychopaths like Pol Pot, Mao, and Hitler.

The moral absolutist, however — say, the traditional Catholic — would argue that killing Hitler, Mao, or Pol Pot is still murder. If mass murder is a crime or sin, so is the murder of an individual, however depraved.

I’ve never heard of a story where someone decides to simply cripple the political career of these individuals. Say, being at the right place at the right time and making sure Hitler ends up as a quadriplegic, or even just an amputee short one leg, but with a voice that cannot be used for oration. Mao, blinded and morbidly obese, would not have become the Chairman we remember. Pol Pot, had he ended up locked away in a loony bin or kidnapped in Thailand or shipped off to France, would never have managed to lead Cambodia into its insanity.

Of course, the question remains whether we’d have seen the same kinds of horrors despite such intervention, and again, this is a question SF has dealt with.

What I haven’t seen dealt with, yet, is the bigger question of what it is in human nature that makes us so susceptible, prone — indeed, in the aggregate, eager — to be led into insanity by complete assholes. And what, equipped with a time machine, someone — moral relativist or absolutist alike — might decide ought to be done about that.

There was a family in which the son had some kind of respiratory problem. He’d just had minor surgery and was recovering. His mom and younger brother had brought him in, and I can only guess that the father had been out with his buddies, drinking, because he seemed to show up all of a sudden and start shouting at people. Yes, shouting: it was a good ten minute screaming match right in front of the check-in desk, where the nurses were working, including such wonderful standbys as, “Twenty minutes! We’ve been waiting twenty minutes! How dare you make us wait!” and, to an intern trying to calm him down, “How old are you?”

(”How old are you?” seems, in such contexts, to be the local version of the globally familiar asshole’s response to anything: “Who do you think you are?” It’s a testament to the way things work here with security guards that the dad was able to stay there, in front of the counter, shouting for ten minutes, and that he was not, at any point then or after, removed forcibly from the hospital, despite his disturbing a few dozen other patients and a dozen or more staff. The security guard (and some EMTs) just sort of stood there, letting the doctor argue and hoping it didn’t escalate.)

Meanwhile, not far away from this scene, a woman wept over the child that had just died minutes before in the ER, and this moron was shouting that he didn’t want to wait anymore, it was time to go him. (”Recovery time from minor surgery? To hell with that, I wanna sleep!”)

The transformation apparent in the family was amazing every time the father showed up nearby. When he wasn’t around, they were talkative, compassionate, and very clearly close and affectionate. The son who’d had his surgery, a high school boy, was proud of having been calm during the procedure and reassured his mom that he was okay. The mom was supportive and sweet to her son, and the younger brother, while a bit distant, seemed like a normal person.

As soon as the dad showed up, everyone else in the family lowered their heads (in that way that you know, in all primates from gorilla to human, means the potentially violent member of the tribe is nearby), and spoke only when spoken to, in hushed and anxious tones.

The son essentially played a fatherly role to his drunk father, and the father acted like a teenager. At one point, he was saying, “I’m gonna go get a snack,” and the wife asked, “Have you eaten dinner?” He just said, “I dunno, whatever, gonna get a snack.” Then he came back and offered some to his son, who gently and in a very adult tone pointed out he couldn’t eat since he was in recovery. The younger son, when the father was around, fled to the nearest chair, which (not coincidentally) happened to be exactly as far from the rest of the family as possible without seemingly like he was trying to distance himself.

The dad finally decided he’d had enough, and showed up at the side of his son’s cot to announce that mom and dad were going home. The son who was in recovery pointed out that the next day was the first day of school (or, I’m guessing registration day?), and he couldn’t miss it. The dad said, “Feh! Don’t go! We’re going home. Come on…” He did not like it when his wife pointed out that their kid had just had surgery and it was wrong to leave him alone in the ER overnight. Then the dad hung around, commanding family members to do things and complaining, basically until we left.

It was very clear that everyone in the family was both afraid of, and disgusted by, the dad. It was pretty clear, too, that this was not just a new feeling based on new behaviour. When you see that sort of family, you can’t help but wonder why the wife puts up with it. This old song ran through my mind:

Which pretty much argues that regardless of whatever victimhood abused women have a claim to, they also have responsibility and are complicit in their abuse when they stay in that situation. Is that simplifying? Yes, it is… for example, the mom in the family I saw last night has crossed eyes, and is in her forties. Given the job market, given her age, given the status of women in Korea, it’d be, financially, very difficult for her to leave, even if she decided that staying was doing her and their children too much harm. So yes, it’s the system, it’s the sexism, and so on…

Except I don’t think that’s quite true. On seeing the effect the man had on the rest of the family, it’s hard not to think in terms of emotional and psychological harm. Looking at the sons talk to their father, it was pretty clear that they both hated him and the wife was absolutely miserable whenever he was around. What I’m saying is I’m not sure whether the economic difficulties they’d face absent the father would actually be anywhere near as painful or damaging as the psychological difficulties they face because they stay with him.

All of that, of course, is universal. We see it all over the world. This story could, with minor changes (like replacing, “How old are you?” with “Who the !#&% do you think you are?”) unfold in ERs all over the world.

But the next day, as Miss Jiwaku talked with a female friends she knows about a relationship gone sour — the friend’s boyfriend said an unthinkably hurtful thing to her, but she’s still with him — two things hit me: the first is that some people simply internalize a sense of not deserving better. Of course, we know this, but… what to do about it? As their conversation unfolded, it became clear that people overturn such internalized beliefs only when they themselves are good and ready. Which is quite frustrating, but also simply self-destructive. A lot of decent people consign themselves to emotional hell — and, in turn, consign themselves to largely unproductive, unfulfilling, and unhappy lives —  such adjectives also describe well the childhoods of their kids. When you multiply out the lives lived in misery, what you get is… well, I doubt many kids from such homes do things like study science, go into the arts, or even become innovative businesspeople. You get people who are permanently treading water in their personal and professional lives, unless and until they get some therapy or, perhaps, revenge on their abusive parent.

If “Just Do It” is Nike’s distillation of the American way of thinking — hey, if there’s something you want to do, get up off your ass and just do it! — then Korea’s response seems to be “Just Bear It” and that’s a revealing, and saddening, realization to face.

The other realization was that is is precisely why I think the whole “bear it” meme that is so widespread in Korea is also so toxic. Pretty much everytime someone I know is doing something against his or her better judgment, something he or she clearly ought not to be doing — working a job he or she absolutely hates, coddling an abusive or infantile parent, turning down a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or studying a subject for which he or she feels no interest — you can usually find a number of people have told the person that it’s important to “just bear it” — ie. bear with it, put up with your dissatisfaction, ignore your instincts, and do the thing you know you shouldn’t.

In any case, we left the hospital quite late at night; the family was still there, and as we left, I wondered what to wish for them. I don’t think wishing harm to people is necessarily wrong, depending on the circumstance, but any fate I can imagine would translate to improverishment for the others. On the other hand, maybe losing him in a car accident (or an amuptation or something) it’d be the most freeing moment of their lives, even if they didn’t realize it till later. It’s a sad, sad situation.