Not mine. This is from my wife. It happened in Sejong City. I wrote the following the day it happened, which was 7 September 2018. It is kind of heartbreaking and sad and pathetic and crazy and strange all at once. It deserves to be the opening scene of a novel or feature film, really. Ha, my wife interviewed for a job today. Most ridiculous interview story I’ve heard so far. It’s advertised as a gig basically working on screenplays for films and TV here. She shows up and it’s the second in command of the company, because the …
Category: KOREA
The Second-Hand Textbook
Ah, cheaters… they shall ever be with us. True story, this, and recent, too—from the course I taught in winter semester, which finished in late January. Names have been omitted for obvious reasons, and there’s a little follow-up on my philosophy regarding cheaters and how to deal with attempted cheating in a class. Enjoy:
Which Way the Wind Blows
One of us must know which way the wind blows, right? So I launch Twitter on my phone, and see this: Hey, someone followed me! I wonder who that is? Er…
Bedside What? (Part 2)
Well, we went back to see the doctor this afternoon. (That post from earlier today? It was from last week, but some blog maintenance issues prevented me from posting it till today. And yeah, the blog stuff is sorted out. See how nice and fast it loads? No? Er, well, Google sees. Google knows.) The doctor was a lot better today, for whatever reason. He actually made eye contact with my wife, for one thing—it was minimal, but it did happen a couple of times for a moment or so. He barely looked in my direction, but he made an effort, …
Bedside What? (A Totally True Story)
We took our son to the doctor last week. It was the weirdest doctor’s appointment I’ve ever been to, seriously. We’re actually seeing the doctor again today. I’m curious whether he’s still going to behaving like Rain Man, M.D. Anyway, I did it up as a little script, because it was the only way I could prevent myself from launching into, er, obnoxious editorial commentary on the experience.
Old Movie Promo Posters in Korea
In Korean cinemas, upcoming and currently-running films are advertised using handouts (available on a stand within the cinema) that are A4 printouts of the film’s poster on the front, with a writeup and some still frames from the film on the back. Maybe these exist in Canada now too, but I’d never seen such a thing before I arrived here, years ago. As long as I’ve been here, these flyers were always just a re-texted version of the film poster, with the title in Hangeul. (Sometimes, the title really is just “in Hangeul”—not translated, just written using English words in …
Nimrod, in Translation
Happy Chuseok, everyone. If you don’t know what that means, I’m talking about the Korean Autumn Harvest Festival. Some people mistranslate it as Korean Thanksgiving, but it’s not a great translation in my opinion. So… I’m going to geek out about a similar funny Korean-English translation glitch I ran across recently, mostly because it was fascinating.
Pansori Translations
Apparently I missed it when it happened, but a professor named Choe Tong-Hyon spent five years translating all the various versions of of Korea’s traditional pansori to English. At the time, a post on Seoul Stages mentioned that these translations were immediately posted to the Jeonju Sori Festival website. By some miracle the link (here it is) still seems to be working as of this morning. If you’re interested in pansori, but maybe not enough to go out and hunt for old published copies that might cost you more money than you want to pay, then you should grab ’em …
Travel Writing, Real and Otherwise: The Blazing World and La Russie en 1839
A couple of passages from books I’ve read recently, and then some thoughts on each. The Lady now finding her self in so strange a place, and amongst such wonderful kind of Creatures, was extreamly strucken with fear, and could entertain no other Thoughts, but that every moment her life was to be a sacrifice to their cruelty; but those Bear-like Creatures, how terrible soever they appear’d to her sight, yet were they so far from exercising any cruelty upon her, that rather they shewed her all civility and kindness imaginable; for she being not able to go upon the …
Kate J. Sim on Foreign Men and Sexual Violence in Korea (Or, What Happens When You Study Critical Theory But Not Statistics)
Update (31 March 2017): Matt over at Gusts of Popular Feeling of course beat me to the punch on this, though I didn’t see his post until just now. His numbers are different from mine: he remembers to include numbers for U.S. servicemen (which I didn’t: they’re probably about 20,000 in the Seoul area, but that’s an estimate he gives, and makes a marginal difference), and he’s using a different source and criteria for tourist data (I went with all Europeans, Oceanians, and Canadians/Americans, since Koreans tend to assume anyone white is “American.”) Despite these differences, Sim’s argument still looks ridiculous. But Matt …