Category: KOREA

Cosplay’d

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Bizarre photo, I know. Miss Jiwaku suggested I pose with these two, probably because she found it amusing to see Koreans dressed this way; we were both quite surprised to see a costume like the woman on the left is wearing being used at all in Seoul, much less for a commercial property,on a Friday afternoon, in a mall. Cosplay is not a common thing in Korea — at least, not if you mean cosplay as in the costumes associated with manga or other superhero/SF/fantasy stuff. I’ve only seen it a couple of times, and this, the second time, it …

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Names That Ain’t Workin’

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When I first arrived in Korea and ran across one of those names (I think it was Beom Seok (read: Bum Suck) and mentioned it to other teachers, I was horrified by the story I heard of some kid in a hakwon class whose teacher giggled at his name, which indeed was something that sounded like “Bum Suck”; push came to shove and finally, when the parents found out that the name brought, to English speakers, images of someone sucking on a bum, they changed their kid’s name. I mean, talk about trauma. This isn’t an urban legend, as far …

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English Made Difficult…

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Last week, I happened to stop by the little used book shop area at my local train station and picked up some funny little books because, when I opened one, it was so mindblowingly awful and hilarious and sad all at the same time. The books are all by one author: a guy named Robert Bahk (1923-1991), about whom I’ve found very little online—though, you know, I haven’t searched too hard. His bio says that he did some school in the USA, and attended some Ivy League school—attended, yes, but no mention of graduation was made in the bio I …

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Essay Comments Triage

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The funny thing is, in one of my classes, almost every student made a serious effort to write a creditable, intelligent essay. Even those who I think missed the mark still made an effort. In another of my classes — one of the writing courses — there’s a kind of relentless bleah, f*ck-it, whatever attitude that persists from semester to semester. Though we have hour-long critique sessions wherein student work is discussed, as often as not the work comes back pretty close to how it originally was drafted. Even when everyone else has recommended a rewrite. Even when everyone including …

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Why I Think Korea’s “Not Really Confucian” (And That Saying It Is Doesn’t Help Things…)

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UPDATE (20 min after posting): Okay, the title of this post is probably a cheat for something much more complex I’m trying to say. This is a blog. Sue me. ORIGINAL POST: Today a student dropped by my office to discuss an academic project she’s working on, and we got into a discussion of whether we can lay blame for various patriarchal ills in modern Korea at the feet of Confucianism. During this discussion, I confessed that I don’t think we can. Or, rather, that I think blaming Confucianism is, like blaming Christianity, simply a lazy shorthand. This is not …

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More Random Pop Culture Stuff

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The more times I teach this American Pop Culture course, the more I begin to find other ways it could be taught. One way I’m thinking is that I could simply take seminal films — The Godfather,  Annie, Tootsie, Do the Right Thing, King Kong — and then explore all the various cultural dimensions that wouldn’t be apparent to students coming at them from outside Western culture. But I like the way I’m teaching it now, with lots of readings and so on. I have a very interesting observation on one of the books I’m reading for the course, but …

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Stuff of Interest (From Papers I’m Grading)

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While grading essays, I always encounter things that are interesting. I’ve decided to make note of a few of them, for a record if nothing else. In my English & American Popular Culture course, we’ve been focused on early-20th century American pop culture, but the students have written essays about late-20th century pop culture.  (This is a way of giving them a chance to attack issues we haven’t discussed, as well as  a way of giving them more time to research what they want to discuss in their final papers.) Anyway, some of the interesting moments, ideas, and thoughts that …

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Wackiest Korean Book I Ever Bought

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This entry is part 31 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

If you’re curious, I found the wackiest Korean book I’d ever seen this past weekend  at the Kyobo Bookstore in Gangnam, and got myself a copy while I could, because I don’t imagine it’s going to sell too well and will likely end up sold off for cheap before long, at which point it’ll be easier to find hunting in discount book stands (in one of which Miss Jiwaku and I found several books of translations of Lovecraft stories this past winter, for example)… but who has time for that? The book is titled 도해 쿠툴루 신화 (Zukai Cthulhu Shinhwa) …

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“Jazz? Yes Please… As Long as There’s No Actual Jazz or Colored Folks!”

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UPDATE (17 April 2010): I feel I ought to clarify one thing, but if I put it here, it won’t make sense, so I’m adding it to the end of the post. ORIGINAL POST: There’s isn’t quite a sign up at the Incheon Airport saying that, but there might as well be. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but I was talking with a student I know about this. He was scrambling for a topic to do with Korea reception of Western popular culture (past and present) and I asked him who the most famous American rapper is in Korea. Who is it? …

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Prime Time Genre and Cultural Difference in Narrative Construction — Or, The Theme of Work in Western TV

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This week is hectic in part because the biannual Student Presentation Contest is coming up. It sounds more, er, voluntary than it actually is: a contest lends at least a little more of an air of excitement to what is a graduation requirement: every student must give a ten minute presentation to the department. Well, no, not to the department, but to an audience. It turned out that if we actually ran the contest these days the way we did originally, there would be something like 450 minutes of speeches back-to-back, or run over two days, and no human being …

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