Category: KOREA

Seoul Subway’s Not Very Brilliant Energy Conservation Method

gordsellar7 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading

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

gordsellar4 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading

Thoughts on the MBC Clip and the Facebook Reaction

gordsellar7 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading

So-Se-Ji

gordsellar5 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading

Our Twisted Hero by Yi Munyol, Trans. Kevin O’Rourke

gordsellar0 Comments

I haven’t read a lot of Korean fiction lately. Of course, I haven’t read a lot of fiction lately, so that is part of why. But after a conversation in which this book came up, I decided to pick it up and try again, after having set it down twenty pages in, a year or two ago. I’ve been ill this weekend, and needing a break from grading, so I’ve read two short novels so far, of which this is the second. Our Twisted Hero is quite transparently an allegory of the process of dictatorship — especially the cult-of-personality type …

Continue Reading