Let’s see, today I: graded most of a huge pile of exams (some with quite a surprising degree of insight, including a few analyses of the peculiarities of American social anxieties as encoded in the TV show Lost; others, rather disappointing) critiqued a student article for the campus magazine (about the decline of open-air traditional markets in South Korea) wrote some content for an English textbook (essaylet title: “Spider Silk and Gecko Tape”) But most exciting, I: proofread the galley proofs on my second story to appear in Asimov’s SF in 2008: “Dhuluma, No More.” Yes, exciting! Really! It’s not …
Category: KOREA
Forced Upgrade In Progress
I may not be blogging as much as usual for the next few days… I’m working on an upgrade of Ubuntu on my computer, and I hadn’t planned for it, or set aside time for it. See, I was trying to install the Linux version of HWP (the Korean wordprocessor that gets the widest use in Korea, and which everyone else hates because that program’s proprietary format, .hwp, is the standard here, but other wordprocesses don’t handle it very well). I’m trying to install this because I’m suddenly in a position where I can’t just advise people to re-send the …
Could I Get a Class To Do This?
I wonder. Saw a link on Boing-Boing for the product of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project, a graphic novel titled Shake Girl which is online for free here. Read it in one sitting. True story. Very sad. Good stuff. Make me wonder whether I could get my students to do something that good in a semester. Too bad I don’t have an elementary writing course anymore, it’d be a cool project. Perhaps I’ll pitch it for next semester, though I think it’s too late to get approval for such a thing, and this is my last semester here.
It’s Not Just the Lateness of Industrialization: How and Why Korean SF Doesn’t Quite Work
I should be grading in-class essays, but my guilt at not yet having done so has been assuaged by the fact that another professor in the department, someone above me, confessed to not having graded her midterms either, and not feeling the slightest bit badly about it! So among all the other insanity of the last week, I also spent some time working up a couple of abstracts for a conference that I think I have no realistic shot at, mostly because I’m not an “official” Korea studies scholar, but at least one of my abstracts was for an essay …
Lest My Rage Seem Misspent
UPDATE: There’s no more reason to be cautious now, so I’ll just come out with it, and hope Google gets used in the hiring process in Korea soon. The seemingly-alcoholic, clearly racist, sexist, and scummy foreign English teacher I discuss in the post below is named Patrick Stewart, who worked in South Korea at the Catholic University of Korea during 2008. (I think from 2007-2009, or maybe from 2006-2008?) I know personally of at least three cases in which he sexually harassed female instructors at our university, the Catholic University of Korea, including very late at night at their apartment …
Romans and Pirates and Dental Hell
It’s quite a challenge to teach some of the stuff I’ve been covering in my Popular Cultures course this semester. We just finished with “The Warrior Archetype” section of the course, and it was funny how aware of World War II my students were, and how much less they knew about The Great War, aka World War I. We had a look at the first scene in the pilot episode of Rome — because I had a copy of it — and discussed the romanticization of warrior types in modern depictions of antiquity and the older verse depictions they’re mostly …
Mad Cow Update
As I’ve said before, it’s worth listening to what scientists say. I’m willing to listen when the Professors Kim of Hallim University say that their research findings have been wrongfully exaggerated by those who oppose US beef. Others online have pointed out how unfortunate (yes, truly) it is that Koreans aren’t (yet) up in arms about other issues that need serious attention, from traffic fatalities to avian influenza — which is true, and I really wish people were. We’ve got H5CN1 in the neighborhood now. (To that I’d add reforming police service, which right now is almost as useless as …
Free Speech? F*ck You, Citizens!
How is a democracy supposed to work when citizens can be criminally prosecuted for disagreeing with the government? It’s too bad that there’s nobody left outside Korea who can pressure the government here to actually allow criticism, differing opinions, and so on. But hey, when the major governments of the world are convinced they have God on their side… The national prosecution and police say they are going to criminally prosecute people involved in spreading so-called “mad cow horror stories” (gwangubyeong goedam) on the Internet, in addition to prosecuting the organizers of candlelight protests against imports of American beef. A …
Translations from the Maggot’s Lair Marmot’s Maggoty Comment Lair Hole
I wager most commenters over at Marmot’s don’t imagine this much attention is paid to what they say. (Then again, I can’t imagine most would care, but…) Someone out there seems to have translated the comments thread at Marmot’s Hole for the discussion on the beef import policy protests I’ve discussed in recent posts. (I guess this might explain some of the new traffic I’ve been getting from what, judging by the usernames, look like Korean users I’ve never met before. I was wondering how that happened, and thought it might be my new story that’s in the July issue …
Hanbok Beijing, T-Shirt-and-Jeans Seoul
There was a very strange moment the other day that I meant to post about earlier, but forgot about because I was sidetracked into issues of foreign exchange students in Korea, especially Chinese ones. One of my students wrote a fascinating essay on the effect of Korean popular culture and Hallyu (the so-called “Korean Wave”) on Chinese society; her argument, essentially, was that many young, urban Chinese are absolutely crazy for Korean pop culture, and that this is a bad thing because they’re essentially jettisoning their own traditional culture and so on. I’m not sure whether it was alarmist or …