Last night, Lime and I watched a film I’d requested last semester for my Anglophone Popular Culture course, Wag the Dog (1997), and a couple of things hit me. See, the thing is, all this watching Korean SF movies and thinking in terms of the Korean adaptation of foreign genres or narratives to a Korean context has impacted how I watch American and other foreign films now, and I was asking myself how or even whether Wag the Dog could be retold in a Korean context. I haven’t seen many political films here, I’ll admit; The Host (2006) doesn’t feature …
Category: KOREA
Trope Salad and Penis Guns and Indie SF Films… No, Really.
There it is. I hereby coin it. I googled it, and found only this, and that’s an email address for which even the cached page it was contained on was somehow empty. So Trope Salad is mine. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “You can have it. But what does it mean?” What it means is that I am trying to have fun while working on an academic paper. Always a dangerous route. What it signifies is the phenomenon wherein someone who knows absolutely jack squat about SF, or seems to know jack squat, treats it as a kind of …
Bwi~! and Buyeo Wives, &c.
That’s a word I think I made up myself, in Korean. At least, I’ve never heard anyone else say it, though Lime told me it sounds like the mopey protestation of a five-year-old. 븨~! This word is occasioned because my Sado Seja story did not make it into the Datlow/Mamatas anthology Haunted Legends. I’m sure competition was fierce, though, and they’re good editors. If only Nick had had the time to savage the story, I’d have learned a lot, I imagine. (But who has time?) Anyway, I’m going to do what I often don’t do… send the story out immediately. …
Great Neal Stephenson Talk
I’m a few months late, but here’s a great Neal Stephenson talk that addresses the whole SF/genre/what-is-SF dichotomy/argument/blabber in a rather interesting way: let’s talk about the people who consume SF, versus the people who consume “everything else” — which he jokingly calls “the Mundanes.” It takes a while for the video to load, but if you’re impatient, you can see it here. Adrian at mssv posted about the talk here… it seems he was there! And Adrian’s observation about Stephenson’s concept of everyone having an “Inner Geek” (as a way around discussing the link between intelligence and SF media/consumption) …
Upgraded, Listserv Added
Testing the status of the blog after upgrade. I’ve just upgraded the site to WordPress 2.6.1, which means a few plugins and things will probably need sorting in the next day or two. Excuse the mess, and please bear with me, as other commitments (especially working on a certain academic paper due next weekend) is taking up most of my time! By the way, I’ve installed a mailing list function. It’s really intended for people who read a story, like it, and pop over to my website. That is to say, most regular readers won’t necessarily need to sign up, …
Seoul 2008 SF&F Festival Report
Seoul 2008 SF&F Festival Report I promised a report on the micro-con I mentioned here and attended last weekend, but it’s taken me a little time to get the photos I wanted to post along with it. (This text was written on Monday, but I didn’t get through the photos until today.) The set I’ve uploaded to Flickr can be seen here. I had a good time at this festival, which was organized by the JoySF fanclub. There were a number of events, including screenings, lectures, and hanging around in the dealer’s room. The Festival was held at the Seoul …
Word Processing in Ubuntu in Korea
I used to have a lot of trouble opening files, as the two favorite formats among students are .docx (What do you mean you can’t open it? It’s MICROSOFT!) and .hwp, the propreitary file format for the word processing application most widely used among Koreans… but used by nobody else on earth. (What do you mean, you prefer formats used globally and accessible from multiple programs?) I’m running Hangeul 2005, but there are instructions for the 2008 version here (or here, recommended at Marmot’s), and as for .docx files, a simple tweak should render your OpenOffice capable of opening those …
The Supreme Irony
Just a reminder, folks. If you’re here on an E-2 visa, it is indeed illegal for you to do editing work on the side. And from what I’m told, you don’t even need to be paid for it to be illegal enough for you to get into trouble: doing things on a volunteer basis still requires you to register with the local immigration office. (I had it direct from the Jeonju Immigration Office bigwig: even if you choose to volunteer at an orphanage, you need permission from your employer and you need to register with the Ministry of Justice — …
Last Bit on This Discussion
The wider discussion that The Korean and Rob have sparked off continues with two more recent posts on the subject, here and here. Along the way, a very interesting post was contributed by Matt, that reads almost like a “bitching expat blog” roundup, except all the complaints were made by foreigners in Korea a century or more ago, long before blogs ever existed. I loved this post, and I wanted to link it, but I had it in my head that I’d be posting it with another installment: that’s not going to happen, so I am posting the link as …
Reading The Host in Context, Part 2: How I Read The Host
NOTE: The following is a continuation of my earlier post on Reading The Host in context. You should probably start at part 1 first, and proceed here afterward. Though I have trawled through the books I’ve recently read for over a half an hour now, I cannot now find the passage that sticks out in my mind where an SF critic points out that American readings of Gojira, while they tend to correctly grasp the political subtext of the film — anxieties about nuclear weaponry, loss of colonial territory after the war, the threat of American power — miss out …