Category: KOREA

Back to the… Wait, What?

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Well, while Typhoon Bolaven does its worst out there–and it doesn’t have me particularly alarmed at the moment, though I’m not venturing outside or anything… our neighborhood is in a panic, though, and the local mini-marts were cleaned out as you can see in the featured image for this post–I’m thinking about what the hell to do with the course I foolishly agreed to teach this semester. That course is a Foundations in Greco-Roman Mythology and Biblical Narrative course. You know, the kind of thing you spend a summer preparing a course outline and readings package for? As with most …

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Anti-English Spectrum vs. the Asiatic Exclusion League

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For those who think that the Anti-English Spectrum fanatics are bad, well, I agree. I personally think they’re a significant part of the reason why Korean society, which used to be pretty positive towards Westerners on a one-on-one level, has gotten increasingly hostile with every passing year I’ve spent here. (And yes, I’ll stand by that statement, in terms of my subjective experience, though I’ll also admit some of that has to do with my neighborhood and personal disenchantment.) I’d also say it’s part of the reason a video like this one (yes, it’s the MBC “Shocking Truth About Relationships With Foreigners” …

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Korean “Disaster” Films: 연가시 / Deranged

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This entry is part 56 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I guess I blinked a week or two ago, as I missed Cabin in the Woods’ very brief release in Korea. This suggests it was a probably a good film, since good films here are rarely shown more than a week. Resignedly, Miss Jiwaku and I schlepped it down to the local cinema to watch 연가시 (apparently known in English as Deranged, which is not the best title choice, but then, it’s not the best movie so I don’t think the foreign title’s a problem). Deranged is, just barely, Korean science fiction, so I figured I’d give it a review here. In …

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Not a Good Sign

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When, in the course of the first ten pages of a novel, the characters mostly talk about visiting prostitutes… well, that doesn’t really bode well for the rest of the novel. But it’s one of the few fiction books I’ve run across that discusses Korea from a foreign point of view, and it’s even the first of a series. Five points to anyone who’s read (and can name) what book I’m talking about. Ten points to anyone who can tell me whether it’s actually worth slogging through, or whether all that blather about visiting prostitutes actually adds up to anything …

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The Wow! Moment and Teachers’ Responsibility

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Creative Writing teachers sometimes — not very often, but sometimes — experience a Wow! moment, when they see student work of a caliber that is simply way beyond the majority of the class… a student whom they feel moved to encourage to keep writing, in some capacity or other. Or at least, a student whose talent and hard work deserves recognition. That Wow! moment is even more powerful when you’re teaching Creative Writing in a foreign language. I just finished grading my last pile for the semester — aside, perhaps, from a couple of late videos submitted to Youtube — …

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Heatstroke (Not the Music)

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No, not the piano piece I composed as an undergrad, when I didn’t know how to write music for piano. I mean actual heatstroke. I’m probably not heatstricken right now, but I sure felt like I was in the very early stages of it this afternoon: I was headachey and hot and needed to sit somewhere cool and where I went to buy water there was no cold water, and and and… (Hence, this rambling post. Though, also, I am testing whether my Twitter account is going to repost with the right image from now on.) But we finally found …

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Seoul Subway’s Not Very Brilliant Energy Conservation Method

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Oh, this is brilliantly idiotic. Like, The Onion-quality, they-wrote-this-as-a-joke type stupid. At least, if I understood this report correctly, and it isn’t bullshit. (If it news report is bullshit, or if I’ve got things wrong, please, I beg of you, tell me; relieve me of the wide-eyed disbelief and horror. Video should load below. Sorry for the auto-launch.) YTN’s news report on the subway mildew smell of summer 2012 Apparently the done thing in Seoul this year is to keep air conditioning systems set to “above 26 degrees Celsius” in order to “conserve energy.” As far as I understand the …

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Celebrity Suicides, Netizen Trolling, and the “Success” of the Real Name System

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In 2006, when I moved from where I used to live to the place I live now, I changed jobs, and suddenly I was able to understand what my students were trying to say about current events in classes. I taught a lot of conversational English and composition-type courses at the time, which meant I began to pick up on news and online memes in Korean society, because students would be repeating claims, arguments, and points almost verbatim. One of the earliest of these memes that I encountered was related to the “Real-Name System,” a then-proposed (and since-implemented) method for …

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Thoughts on the MBC Clip and the Facebook Reaction

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An article ran in the Joongang Ilbo yesterday about the recent anti-foreigner propaganda clip that aired on MBC, and which I mentioned here. Tonight, I posted a long post to Facebook, about the anti-MBC organization that has formed there. Mostly about how the organization needs to move beyond being anti-MBC if it is to achieve anything useful in the long run. What I wrote on Facebook (here) is as follows: A thought. MBC is not the source of these ideas, nor will it be the only place such crap is aired, published, or propagated in Korean society. MBC’s video isn’t the problem, it’s …

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So-Se-Ji

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Today, just a funny story from my first few months in South Korea. When I first arrived, I was teaching at the Foreign Language Center at Wonkwang University down in Iksan. That is a small city, but it was okay for my first year or so in country. At the Language Center, our teaching duties were split between kids and adults, with a usual pattern of one morning class with adults, then two afternoon classes with kids, and a final fourth hour with either kids or adults. Eventually, I settled into a pattern of teaching two adult classes in the …

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