Category: KOREA

I’m’na Teach Yo Ass, and Yeah, You Welcome…

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Friday last week was Teacher’s Day, but the day always takes me by surprise. Actually, it would have taken me by surprise anyway — my students sprung the biggest ambush on Thursday. We were in my office, setting up for a video shoot for that class of mine that’s making a mockumentary about an English cult operating in Korea (yes, a metaphor for the hakwon system and English-mania in general) and suddenly a pack of students I’d never met — freshmen, I guess — burst into the room with a chocolate cake and exploded into song. If you don’t teach …

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I’ve Got You Under My Korean-English Dictionary

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A lot of Westerners I know balk at the way Korean high schools regulate all kinds of things in their students’ lives — hairstyle and coloring, an absence of piercings, and so on are all required at most high schools. Kids with hair that is too long risk having their hair cut on the spot by some teachers, and even corporal punishment. That’s right, a boy can get a whupping, because his hair is too long. A girl can if she’s suspected of dyeing it. (Heaven help those who are born with brown hair.) But what kills me is when …

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Muddlings Both Helpful and Not-So-Helpful

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First, the not-so-helpful: It’s amazing what happens when someone really, really thinks that, say, “traditional” means “good.” For example (and yes, this is a paraphrase): After reading the essay, I think that we can’t say Japanese radio in Korea was good for Korea. Yes, it allowed us to create a popular music of our own, at a time when intellectuals were insisting that traditional (court) music was the only “pure” Korean music. But since that music was influenced by Japanese pop music of the time, we can’t really say it was a way of resisting Japan. But since it had …

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“SF in South Korea Today” — Article Live

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This entry is part 25 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

For those following my on-and-off series on SF in South Korea, I just got an email from Jetse de Vries that my article summing up my recent gleanings on the topic, and also including a certin amount of the information I got from an “interview” I had with Jeong So-Yeon at Sobaeksan, has gone live at Shine Anthology’s blog. You can see it here.

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Korea Society Talk on Robo Taekwon V

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This entry is part 24 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Plenty of SF readers who come through here aren’t necessarily interested in Korean history and culture in general, so it’s unlikely they’d be listeners to the Korea Society Podcast. However, for those who have an interest in global SF and pop culture, there’s a podcast you might want to check out over there. It’s a recording of a talk given way back in February 2008 by Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park, a prof at Notre Dame. The talk is titled “Our Toys, Our Selves: Robot Taekwon V and South Korean Identity.” (That’s a direct link to the MP3, so if you …

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No Surprise

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This entry is part 23 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

It comes as no surprise to me to hear (as I have heard tonight) that one of the most queer-friendly sites in the Korean internet is a site hosted by a major Korean SF-author. Not because I think there’s a link between SF and alternative sexualities (though this author has addressed that set of issues in fictional form in the past) but because — howsoever certain authors may seem to contradict this notion (here’s a response) — in my experience, and for those people who are likely to be thinking individuals, SF simply accustoms them to thinking about the world …

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Ada Lovelace Day

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Argh! I missed it–unsurprising, since I’ve been deluged with work and email, and since I also spent more than an hour after a long string of classes today, helping some students figure out how to find  an angle for their article for the magazine we’re working on. (So if I haven’t replied to an email, it’s coming soon, dear reader/correspondent.) Well, Nalo and Jetse both blogged for the occasion, among, I’m sure, many others. But I did not let Lady Lovelace go unnoticed on her special day: when one of my students claimed (today, in Media English) that the “first …

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Media, Power, and Technology: The Themes of My Media English Course

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So, I was thinking about what to do with the real intro lecture to my Media class, last week. (Yes, it was week three of the semester, but as one student put it to me the other day, “We don’t think of the first week of school as the first week of classes. You know how we change classes and shop around.” The first week of real classes is Week 2, and in Week 2 I led a discussion about personal opinions and experiences of Media, of course. So I was casting about for what to do with my Week …

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My Research Plan Application (Argh!) and a New Korean SF Organization (Yay!)

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This entry is part 21 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

There are a couple of posts I could write about this, so I’m going to try and combine them, groggy-headed as I currently am, into one. Groggy-headed? Ah, well, you see, I was up late last night. Apparently Wednesday was the deadline for funding applications for publications for the coming year. Essentially, professors submit their research plans for the year, specifying one paper that they intend to research and publish, where they plan to do so, and so on. The problem is that nobody told me, and nobody told the one secretary who usually communicates this stuff to me. The …

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The SOAO Workshop @ Sobaeksan

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This entry is part 20 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Well, I have some good news in terms of my SF-writing, but I can’t post that at the moment — I’m waiting for the news to go official — so I’ll post about something related, and which has been awaited. In February, I was invited by Mr. Park Sang Joon to attend the SOAO Workshop hosted by KASI (The Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute), and while I posted photos at Flickr, and a few here on my site, I never really discussed the workshop. It’s been several weeks now, but I’ll do my best to reconstruct my experience, as …

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