I just finished Notes of a Native Son other night. It’s not on my currently reading list because I’ve only included personal reading, not research for work, on that list. You know, I’m not sure I have so much to say that’s useful, but I think this is the first nonfiction book I’ve read in a while that really blew me away. The essays in it are powerful, illuminating, and brilliant. There’s a sharp intelligence in them that is not at all impeded by the palpable anger that suffuses parts of it, nor by the palpable regret and sorrow that …
Month: September 2006
Whee!!!1!
Yes, I finally went to the library today and got myself access to the OED online, and to Nature online, and all kinds of other resources online. It’s a lovely thing to be able to trawl through ten years of the finest of science publication, and wander through the best English dictionary on the planet, all for free. A lovely thing. And other cool news: I was told I can enter Seoul University’s open stacks with only an ID card. I don’t need to be studying or working there, I just need to bring some ID. I wonder if interlibrary …
Upcoming book on expats in Korea
Over at Galbijim there’s a post on a book project. The content (including text and photos) is to be produced by expats living in Korea and reflecting on various aspects of their lives here. We’re looking for selected articles written by 30-40 expats living in Korea, where they write about something unique to the culture that they love. For example, I’ll probably write about falling in love with galbijjim for the first time, the culture street in Daegu full of galbijjim restaurants, etc…Someone else might want to write about their hobby and cultural experiences with Korean archery. Or their enjoyment …
The Minstrelsy Lecture
Yeah, they got it. What was interesting was just that they missed layers of stuff. After I lectured a bit on the history, we watched a segment of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, and then watched it again with them noting “stereotype” characteristics, and then, when I noticed that most students had only listed a few, we went through it bit by bit and I excavated things like the watermelon stereotype, why a certain comment was sexual humor and sports humor and jailhouse humor all rolled into one, and some of the iconic characters and types in the lineup of dancers accompanying …
Get Outta Here, Beanpole
A listmate from a discussion list for the magazine I write a column for, Cahoots, posted a link to an interesting article: Reuters carried a story titled Ban on skinny models shocks fashion world. The logic is not simply that teenagers emulate what they see on the runway, and go bulimic or anorexic as a result… but rather, it’s just that they want to portray “healthy body images” at the government-sponsored Madrid fashion week. You know, you have to sit back and think about just how dysfunctional your civilization is when the demand that its iconic representatives of womanhood (which …
Windows Has Given Itself a Nasty Death-Infection of Some Kind, AKA the hal.dll bug…
Well, my desktop PC was working a week ago, though the connection to the Net was dead. (Someone apparently cut the LAN cable during the renovations in the building where my office is located.) But last week I went in to print some files, and discovered that, all of a sudden, the damned thing was refusing to boot up. Some kind of hal.dll file in the System32 folder is ganked, and I haven’t been able to make it work again. The recovery CD and boot CD aren’t working. I’m getting close to the point where I’ll have to sigh and …
Current Positional Adjustments
New semester adjustments: There’s some new kind of antivirus apps on the uni PCs. They do such lovely things as prevent you installing the apps you need and nobody else needs, like apps that play both sound and subtitled for ripped DVDs that have not been released in Asia. There’s a workaround, sort of. But I hope it stays worked around long term. There’s some kind of SQL thing running on all the PCs too, and you can’t log out of it without a password of some kind. Ack! I’m trying to slow down my speech again. Having been out …
Bamboozled Redux
I just watched the Spike Lee movie again, and I gotta say, it really got me… again. I don’t get what people had against this film. The only thing I can think is that it cuts close to too many uncomfortable, sad, embarrassing truths on (all?) sides, maybe? I see those cartoons, those skits, the long set of clips at the end of the movie, and then I think of how blacks, whites, and other people are portrayed in the media in the country where I live, and I wonder: will my students get what the hell I am talking …
… San Peu-ran-shi-seu-ko~~~…
UPDATE (11/09/2006): There are a number of factual errors in this post, as to the derivation of specific Korean pop-music words. Check out Charles’ comment (appended to this post) for more info. Yeah, just goes to show you that you can’t take it for granted when people explain something to you that they actually know what they’re talking about, as I was assured of the derivation of these words more than once, back in my Iksan days. Shrug. Actually, that’s an exaggeration. The title of this post, I mean. Tonight, on the way home from the grocery store, I decided to …
On Appropriation, Race, Popular Culture, and Dorky White Asiaphiles
So I happened upon this blog post at reappropriate, and it got me thinking. To be honest, I didn’t trawl my way through all the comments that followed the post, but I did read a fair number of them. I was tempted to respond with something snide about how young people are so apt to map their personal anger into statements about the entire world, couched in politics for the greater safety from criticism and negative response. But I decided that, as generalizing and as mistaken as parts of the post are (in my opinion), it’s unfair to respond in …