Read & Watched & Listened

This list spans June and the first half of July 2007.

READ:

1. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs.

   Fascinating, disturbing, and surprising. It has the usual disclaimers from locals, but what I found unusual and particularly inspiring was her continuous reminders of the kind of horrific objectification that was forced on female slaves in America, on the downright moral and sexual depravity of white masters. What was striking was that she spoke less in abstract terms, instead slamming home her point with specific examples from her life, which were enough to turn my stomach. She wrote this just around the the time of the American Civil War, and I have to wonder why Frederick Douglass’s work, which was more circumspect in many ways, has even now more political and academic freight than this book. And I especially have to wonder how it came to be in an academic library in Korea.

2. What Mad Universe? by Frederic Brown

   This book was recommended to me by Vernor Vinge as something I should read as a point of comparison to a novella he gave me some feedback on. It was a bizarre novel, but quite fascinating, and hilarious in parts. It’s basically a what-if about a magazine editor who wakes up in an alternate universe where some of the wildest fantasies in his SF magazine are actually true: Venusians walking the streets, warlike conditions where cities are fogged-out at night to prevent attack from orbit… all kinds of neat stuff here. It was such a fun read that I am eager to check out some more of Brown’s stuff sometime in the future.

3. A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan’s Germ Warfare Operation by Daniel Barenblatt

   Unlike some of the books I’ve read lately, this one just made me angry, disgusted, and skeptical about power. It’s not just about the germ warfare and human medical experimentation that Japan performed (mostly) in Manchuria and China; it’s also about how, after the war, the US military helped to cover up these horrifying acts in order to have access to the results of those experiments, and to get informed, experienced input from Japanese scientists involved in these crimes against humanity for the construction of an American biowarfare program. It details how this aid helped Japanese war criminals guilty of atrocities end up in powerful academic positions in Japan after the war, and in great detail describes the kinds of experiments performed, and the disease outbreaks in China what followed some of the worst. But the real story is about the kind of amoral bargaining that happened after the war, where the Japanese crimes were considered less evil when performed on their neighbours. Finally, it offers some answers as to how some in Japan came to be in denial of Japanese crimes against humanity both before and during World War II, and how America’s military helped make this denial easier to promulgate.

4. Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov

   I brought the Foundation trilogy with me to Korea when I first came over, thinking that I would probably run short of English-language books and finally force myself to finish the trilogy, after forcing my wat through the first book, Foundation, with great disdain. I have to say, Foundation and Empire is a better book than I remember Foundation being. I still don’t think it’s a masterwork: maybe I’m just coming at it too late, but vast galactic empires collapsing like Rome, surrounded by space-barbarians, and secret-societies trying to keep man alive through the dark ages that follow… it just seems a little hackneyed to me. That said, I did find the Mule thing interesting. I saw it coming a mile away, but it did, at least, entertain me.

   However, the fact that I didn’t dive into Second Foundation immediately also tells you my enthusiasm for Asimov’s early work remains lukewarm.
   
   

5. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

   Frantz Fanon was a Martinique-born, French-trained psychiatrist who ended up in Algeria, working the local anti-colonial  independence movement. This book is the second of his works that I have read, and I found it a hard read at points, but very much worth the effort. The main point of the book is discussing the process of decolonization. In one of his documentaries — I think it was in  his 2007 BBC2 documentary The Trap – What Happened to our Dream of Freedom— Adam Curtis paraphrased Fanon as having claimed that violent revolution was necessary psychologically for the colonized man to demolish his colonial identity and rebuild himself. It’s true, in a sense, but Fanon was also expressing something about the emasculation of colonial identity, and his discussion of the relationship between colonized elites, colonial powers, and the mass people was fascinating.

   It’s also interesting to apply the logic of the book to Korea, as an example. Quite a few things in Fanon’s discussion of a colonial power that had not used violence to cast off its occupier’s shackles, and quite a few things about the psychology of a culture stuck in the transition between colonial and independent modes, seemed to ring true to my experience here. The continual labeling of things as “Korean traditional” and attendant anxiety about modernity; the obsession with the past, and especially the intertwining of colonized elite with colonizer; the modes of relationships between elites and the common people, and even some of the specific points he makes about the way governance occurs after colonization all seem to ring somewhat true with how things happened in Korea. It’s not a perfect fit, but nonetheless it’s a fascinating comparison, one rich enough with both harmonies and with loud enough dissonances to be worth at least a paper, if not a dissertation, by someone. Probably not by me, though.
   
   

6. Fantasy Magazine, #5 (December 2006)

   This was a good read; I especially enjoyed “Bear Lake” by Margaret Ronald, “The Dead Girl’s Wedding March” by Cat Rambo, and “A Garden in Hell” by Richard Parks, but Fantasy has a consistently good standard of stories in its pages. I’m just wondering when I’m going to see something again. I heard the last issue went to press, but I haven’t gotten a copy yet. I do know that changes are afoot, since I have something forthcoming, but that’s all I’m going to say about that.

7. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

   Someone commented on the fact I had actually read an Oprah book. It’s actually my second, the first being Toni Morrison’s Beloved, though I think I read it before the novel was Oprah-ized. In any case, it was a gripping read, powerful and painful and different from other post-holocaust stuff I’d read since it takes place soon after a Total War, and presents what it, honestly, a big picture of hopelessness in which a small gleam of hope is kept alive by a man and his son. (The ending is a not a burst of hope, but really just the continuation of the glimmer, on a slightly bigger scale. The world is still totall shot, and nothing is about to change that.) I can see why people are raving about it. It’s a great book. Why aren’t more full-time SF writers writing books that, like this, are able to grab mainstream and so-called “literary” readers?

   On the other hand, it also seems to bolster the mumblings I’ve heard lately that American SF and the American imaginary in general is dark, cloudy, and bleak, while all the visionary, hopeful, excitingly futuristic SF — the SF in which a real future is worth living in — is coming out of Britain.

8. TheMa Rok Biographies by Seo Giwon, translated by Kevin O’Rourke

   This book didn’t do much for me, and I think I mostly finished it because it was so short. If it had been long, I doubt I’d have persevered. I’m not sure whether it was the translation that caused my lack of interest, or whether a different translation might have gotten me more interested in the content, but I suspect it’s a combination of both. I also have a vague suspicion that the original was bitingly funny, or at least more bitingly funny than the version I read. But being unable to read the original, I’ll just have to say the text I read didn’t much excited me.

9. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin

   This took me weeks to get through. Martin’s masterpiece, the distillation of a career of research and reporting on North Korea, it’s a powerful assault against all those voices telling us not to take seriously what North Korean defectors tell us about the regime they fled. Martin’s experiences in North Korea are interesting, but it’s his presentation of dozens of interviews with defectors — and his discussion of them as a whole — that really makes this book fascinating. As Martin points out, defectors in the past were rarer, and perhaps more prone to being coached into false statements by the South Korean security and intelligence organizations, which were, we can all agree, extremely paranoid during the dictatorships in South Korean. But since the famines in the North, the floew of defectors — and the general consistency of what they describe — paints a picture which we can no longer credibly, in good conscience, deny as the fabrications of Southern politicos and security officers.

   This book is a powerful antidote to anyone — such the work of that major American Korea-scholar who shall remain nameless here — who thinks that sympathy for the North Korean system and  defense of it against Western criticism is warranted or even sane. Generalized distrust of North Korean defectors and refugees is outdated, yet I hear it — all too often from foreigners here, who are all too quick to respond to criticism of North Korea with defense of the country and criticisms of America, a typical left-wing intellectual kneejerk reaction which, while I appreciate the sentiment, makes no sense when it amounts to defending the abomination that is North Korea.
   
   

10. She Dreams in Red by Alexis Kienlen

    The debut collection of poems by a one-time classmate of mine, She Dreams in Red is an enviable first book. Alexis unveils hidden worlds, one by one, section by section, poem by poem. The sections that spoke strongest to me were the poems about “Chinese Cafe,” which seemed to me to be about being of mixed background and living in Canada, and the sections about Indonesia and Mongolia, which recounted familiar experiences of being an expatriate, a foreigner and knowing oneself as a foreigner as well — a contrast to the halfway-foreigner feeling I know I grew up with living in pokey Saskatchewan with parents who not only didn’t share a culture of origin with the locals, but also didn’t even have a single culture of origin in common with one another.

    As always, with poetry, it’s going to take another reading or two for me to really know how I feel about each poem, but I can say that parts of Indonesia made me laugh for all their familiarity, and parts of Mongolia hit me like a stone in the belly, and that’s what poems are supposed to do, if you ask me.

WATCHED:

1.  Irma Vep

   Meh. Maybe it was just too French for me, but it didn’t do much for me.

2. 미녀는 괴로워 (200 Pounds (sic) Beauty)

   This film struck me as weird because it amounts, basically, to a defense of a woman’s choice to have plastic surgery in order to have any chance at a real career and at love. Seriously: it’s wholehearted in its defense of a woman’s need to live up to society’s sexist, media-honed insistence that women do their best to look like supermodels. For all the disclaimers about how it’s what’s inside that counts, the film offered not one iota of crticism against that social environment, or the issue my students are often writing about, which is the insanity of the fact this actually does affect one’s job prospects. Also, the fat-girl-turned-beauty was so exaggeratedly fat that it was a strawman: most of the Korean women I’ve known who considered themselves “fat” weren’t even a third of the size of the fat woman in this film. All in all? I couldn’t help but scratch my head. Plastic surgery is rampant, and public opinion is pretty supportive of it in general. What’s with all the spirited defense of it?

   Oh, and I wish SOMEONE in Chungmuro (the Korean version of Hollywood) would take a damn English class. 200 Pounds Beauty is embarrassingly awkward. Hell, I’ll consult on Konglish titles. For cheap!

3. 알