I wonder. Saw a link on Boing-Boing for the product of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project, a graphic novel titled Shake Girl which is online for free here. Read it in one sitting. True story. Very sad. Good stuff. Make me wonder whether I could get my students to do something that good in a semester. Too bad I don’t have an elementary writing course anymore, it’d be a cool project. Perhaps I’ll pitch it for next semester, though I think it’s too late to get approval for such a thing, and this is my last semester here.
Month: May 2008
Flashmobsters
The flashmob is not new, but flashmobsters? Googling shows I’m not so brilliant as I thought — the term’s been used before online, but that won’t stop me writing about the potential criminal uses of flashmobs by organized crime, especially when they have the advantage of working in a city where everything, including law enforcement, has been privatized. Yeah, it’s political SF, since the current administration is privatizing almost everything here, and yeah, it’s set in Seoul. Lots of young male and female twiggi — that’s a Korean word that often has a connotation rather like what people tend to …
It’s Not Just the Lateness of Industrialization: How and Why Korean SF Doesn’t Quite Work
I should be grading in-class essays, but my guilt at not yet having done so has been assuaged by the fact that another professor in the department, someone above me, confessed to not having graded her midterms either, and not feeling the slightest bit badly about it! So among all the other insanity of the last week, I also spent some time working up a couple of abstracts for a conference that I think I have no realistic shot at, mostly because I’m not an “official” Korea studies scholar, but at least one of my abstracts was for an essay …
Twelve Hours Later
Curious about the state of SF in China these days. Allow Joel to fill you in at Twelve Hours Later. Definitely my most exciting find online this month.
Lest My Rage Seem Misspent
UPDATE: There’s no more reason to be cautious now, so I’ll just come out with it, and hope Google gets used in the hiring process in Korea soon. The seemingly-alcoholic, clearly racist, sexist, and scummy foreign English teacher I discuss in the post below is named Patrick Stewart, who worked in South Korea at the Catholic University of Korea during 2008. (I think from 2007-2009, or maybe from 2006-2008?) I know personally of at least three cases in which he sexually harassed female instructors at our university, the Catholic University of Korea, including very late at night at their apartment …