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 …
Month: May 2008
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 …