Well, Fukuoka here I come. I guess my SF-writer credentials maybe came in handy this time, for one of my proposed papers — “Another Undiscovered Country: Understanding the Particularities of Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in South Korea Through The Examination of 21st Century Korean SF Cinema” — got accepted for the 4th World Congress of Korean Studies (the site seems not to work in Firefox/Linux… I suspect you need Internet Explorer & Windows to load it, as I was able to get at it on my dual boot) which is happening late this September in Fukuoka, …
Month: May 2008
“Lester Young…” Reviewed @ The Fix
What a lovely review of my story Val Grimm has posted at The Fix as part of a review of the July ’08 Asimov’s SF: Think about the first time you discovered science fiction you enjoyed; remember the wonder and joy you felt, the sort of sensation that makes you twelve years old again. Sellar conjures up that Ray Bradbury-esque golden-hour bliss with a piece which has a traditional feel but glimmers with freshness, originality, and craft…sort of like a good rendition of a jazz standard. There’s more, and you can read it all here. (I’m looking forward to when …
Big Surprises and Random News
For Inner Circle Members, only! So, let’s see: One of our department assistants suddenly quit without notifying any members of our department, yesterday afternoon at 4pm. Though I was one of the people who defended her and helped keep her in her position this semester, she decided to stick me with the crappiest class assignment possible — Monday and Friday night, as late as possible. That’s been fixed, as there was no way in hell, but it’s all a mystery. (She also stuck someone in the other English department in an unfeasible course assignment, too.) That someone else is a …
Seuma’il, Sshipal Balgaengi! (Smile, F*cking Commie!)
Over the last few years I’ve been trying to understand why so many Koreans seem to support the idea that Korea needs top-down censorship and top-down elimination of anonymity online. They often cite the abhorrent behaviour of “Korean netizens” as evidence, with the Dog Poop Girl cited as a minor example and the suicides of many pop stars who were criticized online as major evidence of the cruelty and need for firmer controls online. (Michael has a post up that pretty much says the same thing I’ve been saying since I first encountered this weird rationalization: that a pop star …
Fairness, Competition, and Roll Call (Plus Festivals and Sports Days)
Only one of the people who was supposed to lead a discussion in my morning Listening & Speaking class was there when I arrived to start class. (And I was a minute late myself!) I asked, “Are we having discussions today? Who is leading today?” And nobody said a word, so I went ahead and had someone take attendance, and then went off on a discussion tangent, about taking attendance in class. Earlier this semester, one of my foreign students wrote an essay about the abolition of roll call in University classes. Regardless of the essay’s strengths and weaknesses, some …
Linux/Nethead Injokery
I haven’t actually been working on “A Killing in Burma” lately — the semester has kind of turned into a swarm of bumblebees and I haven’t had much time to do anything besides school stuff — but I did get a little work done on my draft of “Ten Spikes and a Hammer,” a story I’m working on about, well, more WWII-era geomantic warfare as remembered by an old man in the late 80s in a rather different American from the one we all remember. (Or don’t remember, as the case may be.) But when Lime and I were puttering …
Haeinsa Security, and the Chinese Earthquake
Haeinsa is the temple where the Tripitaka Koreana, carved meticulously on wooden plates, is stored. It’s a major site in Korea as far as heritage goes. I wish I’d photographed the info plate in front of the woodblock storage area, because it was more than a little amusing. It explained how the Buddhist scriptures were carved into wood in order to concentrate the power and force of Buddhism and guard Korea against Mongol invasion. So then, when the Mongols invaded and left the carvings as ashes, they went ahead and carved it all again. Well, we ended up wandering past …
Drunken Suit + KTX = Not Fun
I’m on the KTX from Busan to Seoul now. The train actually offers an Internet connection for a flat rate of W1000 (a little less than a dollar US)… if you’re a Korean citizen running Internet Explorer on Windows, that is. Foreigners running Linux will have to have a dual boot and a Korean girlfriend to log them in. Yay for the Hub of Asia, I’m sure the whole Pacific Rim is just waiting eagerly to be denied basic access to most things! Not to mention drunken guys in suits on trains. Now, it’s one thing when you encounter a …
Stuff Going On
Been busy like mad, and traveling for the next few days, but briefly: I’m getting my students to release stuff (or let me release their stuff) online. The first in a series of projects is now up at YouTube: my Korean students considered popular stereotypes believed in Korea about foreign countries (like France, America, South and Southest Asia, China, and Japan) and then went out and asked people from those countries what they think and feel about those stereotypes. That’s how you turn a somewhat disturbing class discussion into a learning experience. More to come: remixes/creative work from my Media …
Dhuluma Proofs Done & On Tuckerization
Let’s see, today I: graded most of a huge pile of exams (some with quite a surprising degree of insight, including a few analyses of the peculiarities of American social anxieties as encoded in the TV show Lost; others, rather disappointing) critiqued a student article for the campus magazine (about the decline of open-air traditional markets in South Korea) wrote some content for an English textbook (essaylet title: “Spider Silk and Gecko Tape”) But most exciting, I: proofread the galley proofs on my second story to appear in Asimov’s SF in 2008: “Dhuluma, No More.” Yes, exciting! Really! It’s not …