It’s quite a challenge to teach some of the stuff I’ve been covering in my Popular Cultures course this semester. We just finished with “The Warrior Archetype” section of the course, and it was funny how aware of World War II my students were, and how much less they knew about The Great War, aka World War I. We had a look at the first scene in the pilot episode of Rome — because I had a copy of it — and discussed the romanticization of warrior types in modern depictions of antiquity and the older verse depictions they’re mostly …
Month: May 2008
Welcome, Asimov’s Readers!
I guess some people might visit after reading my story in the July 2008 Asimov’s SF, which has gone out in the mail (though I’m sure it isn’t on newsstands yet) titled, “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues.” I hope you enjoyed it, though I guess if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have come here. Anyway, welcome to my site, and feel free to have a look around if you like. A lot of my recent posts here are about current Korean political stuff, but if you dig, you can find all kinds of other stuff. If you’re like to …
Mad Cow Update
As I’ve said before, it’s worth listening to what scientists say. I’m willing to listen when the Professors Kim of Hallim University say that their research findings have been wrongfully exaggerated by those who oppose US beef. Others online have pointed out how unfortunate (yes, truly) it is that Koreans aren’t (yet) up in arms about other issues that need serious attention, from traffic fatalities to avian influenza — which is true, and I really wish people were. We’ve got H5CN1 in the neighborhood now. (To that I’d add reforming police service, which right now is almost as useless as …
Free Speech? F*ck You, Citizens!
How is a democracy supposed to work when citizens can be criminally prosecuted for disagreeing with the government? It’s too bad that there’s nobody left outside Korea who can pressure the government here to actually allow criticism, differing opinions, and so on. But hey, when the major governments of the world are convinced they have God on their side… The national prosecution and police say they are going to criminally prosecute people involved in spreading so-called “mad cow horror stories” (gwangubyeong goedam) on the Internet, in addition to prosecuting the organizers of candlelight protests against imports of American beef. A …
Translations from the Maggot’s Lair Marmot’s Maggoty Comment Lair Hole
I wager most commenters over at Marmot’s don’t imagine this much attention is paid to what they say. (Then again, I can’t imagine most would care, but…) Someone out there seems to have translated the comments thread at Marmot’s Hole for the discussion on the beef import policy protests I’ve discussed in recent posts. (I guess this might explain some of the new traffic I’ve been getting from what, judging by the usernames, look like Korean users I’ve never met before. I was wondering how that happened, and thought it might be my new story that’s in the July issue …
Hanbok Beijing, T-Shirt-and-Jeans Seoul
There was a very strange moment the other day that I meant to post about earlier, but forgot about because I was sidetracked into issues of foreign exchange students in Korea, especially Chinese ones. One of my students wrote a fascinating essay on the effect of Korean popular culture and Hallyu (the so-called “Korean Wave”) on Chinese society; her argument, essentially, was that many young, urban Chinese are absolutely crazy for Korean pop culture, and that this is a bad thing because they’re essentially jettisoning their own traditional culture and so on. I’m not sure whether it was alarmist or …
“Big Waves” Kill 9
Article here. There were kids around. Some of them saw their own parents swept out to sea. South Korea’s weather agency had forecast there would be strong winds and high waves in the area but did not issue any advisory… Er, did not bother, perhaps, might be a fairer description? What’s the point of having the tech and forecasting if you don’t put the word out? I mean, we even had hail advisories in my hometown, and we had hail, like, once every few years at most. I’m not saying Korea ought to be exactly like Canada. I’m saying it …
The Positives of Foreign Students Around (And How to Maximize those Benefits in Korea)
I’m in the middle of a pile of essays in my composition class, in which approximately one out of four students is from China, and an incident in class last week came up that I wanted to post about. (I was grading the essay that we discussed in class crit last week, which I’ll discuss in a moment.) I posted last week about the violence that broke out in Seoul among Chinese students at the Olympic Torch/Free-Tibet rally. As Brian in Jeollanam-do noted, the Korean government’s handling of the situation has been, in some cases, disappointing, for example declining to …
Pahwakhe Podcast is Up
The audio podcast of the first story I ever sold, “Pahwakhe,” is now online at PodCastle. It’s very flattering to have joined some pretty illustrious ranks in the Escape Pod/PseudoPod/PodCastle family. I’d like to offer a big thanks to Rachel Swirsky for giving the story a spot at PodCastle, to Sean Wallace and Paul Tremblay at Fantasy Magazine for being the first to give the story a shot, and to C. G. Furst for his reading. When you have a quarter of an hour to spare, go check it out!
Seoul Demo, 2 May 2008
UPDATE (3 May 2008): The demonstration on the 3rd sucked. As usual for 21st century Korea, when something is good, the first thing that happens is microphones and a sound system are brought in, random yahoos blab into the microphones (or, worse, sing) for hours on end, and the crowds end up becoming an audience, not participants. I wandered off, disappointed, when some teenaged boy was onstage cussing out Lee Myung Bak, and snapped a few more shots of the crowds who turned out, but nothing too special. (I’ll upload them later.) Lime and I ended up going for dinner …