I forgot to blog this, in the press of personal events, goodbye parties for a coworker/friend, and the madness of grading, but I wanted to mention that I went to an art gallery opening last week, and the art was pretty cool. If you’re interested in a show of art by a young Korean artist who is decidedly experimental and interested in womens’ issues but also in taboo-shattering, check out Everything Is Fake. (Here’s the map.) The show runs till this Sunday…
I’m grading final exams from my Media English course — where, unlike what the title might suggest, we didn’t just use media to boost English. Instead, we looked at issues ranging from copyright, User Created Content (or User Generated Content) online, censorship in media, the power of one medium to supplant another, the politics of (ostensibly) non-political films, and so on. Personally, I thought it was a great class, but the real proof is in the pudding. And though the students drafted the majority of the final exam — with excellent, excellent questions — the final question was mine. There’s …
Sometimes, you’re grateful just to catch the skyhooks as they scream past. [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/iJpJL4ccHSo” width=”425″ height=”344″ allowfullscreen=”true” fvars=”fs=1″ /] You’re pushing the limits of your reactor engines, but you need to catch this ride. It’s the only one that will pull you out of this fucking sinkhole of a gravity well, where everything weighs too much, where the world is pulling at you all the time. The skyhook is coming now, howling through the upper air, and the shiver passes through your body, the chilling sensation of hope riding along on brilliant, insanely ancient machineries and your own brutally perfect …
To those of you who are teaching here, and given to shooting your mouth off, let this be a lesson… Something funny happened this semester in one of my classes. A student was complaining about one of her first foreign teachers, who taught her English while she was in middle or high school. (I can’t remember which.) This foreign teacher said some things that, at least as the student recounted them, were pretty ignorant and obviously not wise things for a Western adult to say to a Korean kid. The funny thing that that the student ended her rant with, …
This afternoon, a music professor from my university took a few of us out for lunch. I was invited along because I’d edited the biographical info for her new CD’s liner notes; the other two professors had translated the lyrics of some English-language songs on the CD to Korean for the liner notes, and coordinated the whole process. Anyway, she took us out for lunch at this amazing little place in Bucheon, the name of which I will have to get. The food was all made with special herbs and leaves and plants grown in places like Kangwon Province and …