UPDATE (18 Sept 2008): As Charles notes in the comments, the website now loads in Firefox, and even in Linux! I suspect this is a result of my having emailed a brief comment about it to the convention director, who emailed me just now to check if it was working for me after the fix. :) In any case, it was fixed impressively quickly, though the PDFs apparently remain inaccessible to on a Windows installation without Korean language installed. I’ll post here if and when that gets fixed, and pull my mirror file below.
Forecast: scattered posting ahead. I’ve got a dogpile of editing to do, and then I’ll be continuing to distill my rather thorny paper. That link might not work for you, because the filename contains Hangeul and I don’t know whether PCs without Korean installed will be able to access it. (If not, download it from here!)
The title for this congress contains the phrase “Interfacing With the World”… ironically (if unsurprisingly) the congress website itself may not load unless you’re using Internet Explorer in Windows, and I’m not sure that the download link for my paper (which is at the top of page five of the papers list, here) will work if you’re using a PC without Korean language installed.
Sigh.
(I will provide a Hangeul-free link to my paper below, for anyone out there interested in downloading it and unable to get at the Korean website… I’ll host it here unless/until they “fix” this “problem.” Ahem. The paper is titled, in horrid undergrad style:
Good lord! What a horrible title!)
Yep, this is my analysis of a bunch of post-2001 Korean SF films. I have to turn that into a “talk” so, well, um, I’m gonna be busy the next few days.
In other news, my Graphic Novel producing-class has landed itself with a topic and a working title: “Goose Dad.” The story is shaping up to be, in a very general way, about the effects of English-education mania in Korea, and the phenomenon of the “Goose Dad” — that is, families where the father stays in Korea and works, and the kids (often accompanied by their mother) ends up living in an English-speaking country for a length of time.
The party line is that such decisions are made as a “sacrifice” by the parents for the children’s sake, but my students confirmed, in class discussions, my suspicion that a certain number of couples who decide to go this route do so either to put off divorce, or because of the nasty mother-in-law problems a number of women face here, or, at least, that many of these marriages essentially go down the toilet as a result of this choice. (A couple of firsthand stories about acquaintances were quite a lot more sordid than anything we’re going to put into the book — doctors shacking up with room salon girls, airline pilots popping by for help on yet another love letter for yet a different girl.)
So far, they’ve figured out that Dad is seeing another woman — a relatively smart but independent woman approaching marrying age — and that Mom is has been living (under a great degree of social isolation, except for her fellow Korean mom expat friends) in some English-speaking country for a long time with the kids, of which there are two. One kid is quite well-adjusted to living there, independent, resourceful, and fitting in, but growing increasingly Westernized and distant from Mom (adding to her loneliness); another kid is having a hell of a time, not picking up English, and struggling with his or her own loneliness and other issues.
As I said, “We need to really challenge, if not torture, these characters!” Mom, for example, senses that something is up with Dad, and guesses there’s another woman, and grows reluctant to call. Maybe there’s a breast lump lying in wait for her, too. Maybe Dad’s girlfriend wants to get married with him. There’s likely to be a tongue surgery flashback, as well, though hopefully someone else’s kid. The kids aren’t as close as they used to be, what with one not fitting in and the other doing so well. And so on…
It looks like it will be an interesting book… the only problem is, time. We’re at the end of week 3 already, thanks to Chuseok, with not much done! We’ll need to have a script done in a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping by late November, all the images will be done and we’ll be working on getting the website set up.
As for art, I am not quite sure how we’ll do it; I’m considering suggesting we use photographs — heavily photoshopped and indeed maybe HDRI photography — the cartoony effect is not a bad thng in a cartoon, right? — and actors (including class members and anyone they can recruit) into it… but we’ll have to see.