Okay, this isn’t a song about Iksan, but it does bring back memories of the days when I lived in a small place with, um, limited entertainment facilities, and was surrounded by Westerners mostly just as bewildered about what to do with themselves in their free time. (And for you LJ readers, yeah, I embedded the video below on my site, but you’re missing nothing if you follow the link.)
Category: KOREA
I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young Ha Kim (Translated by Chi-Young Kim)
Having read and very much enjoyed the Portable Korean Library translation of “The Photo-Shop Murders” and especially “Whatever Happened to the Guy in the Elevator,” I went into this book expecting something dark, funny, and entertainingly disturbing. Kim scores on about half of those expectations: this “novel” (at 120 pages, it’s more of a novella, really) is somewhat disturbing and rather dark. There are entertaining and funny moments, but I was in fact a little bewildered by the book. It certainly didn’t seem to me to be written by the same person who’d written “Whatever Happened to the Guy Stuck …
Education Fever: Society, Politics, and The Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea by Michael J. Seth
I’ve decided to stop doing the “bookdumps” I’ve been doing, where I briefly review a ton of books, and instead give individual reviews — however brief they might sometimes be — their own individual posts. I’m starting with the Hawai’i Studies on Korea series hardback Education Fever: Society, Politics, and The Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea by Michael J. Seth, an academic text about the history of education, attitudes towards it, and its development in South Korea. This book should, in my opinion, be required reading for anyone who’s coming to work as a teacher of any kind in …
Seumniette?
I’m somewhat mystified, but had to share: Lime just informed me that, among Korean fans of the TV series Lost, in online discussions the character Juliette, is (sometimes: see the comment section) referred to as 슴리에트 “슴리엣”, which for those of you who can’t read Hangeul sounds like “Seumniette.” The “n” sound is a liason between the m in “Seum” and the “l” in “-liette,” so the latter half of the name, “-liette” obviously taken from the character’s name, but “seum” requires a little explanation if you don’t speak Korean. It’s the second half of the word “gaseum” (which could …
Anyone Seen It?
I have a feeling that the Season 1 DVD of this show (video below if you’re not reading this on LJ — a promo for This American Life, the TV version of the show) would be an excellent resource for courses in Intercultural communication or even just listening and discussion. (Even if I’d have to go to the trouble of ordering it myself — word came down from the office that one of the DVDs I’d requested couldn’t be bought because it’s not available in Korea, and just this week, the Essay-Composition textbook I settled on for my Essay Writing …
A Shift
I got a significant surprise the other day when checking out the enrollment in my various classes. (Actually, I got a few, but one especially big one.) For certain core classes in my department, the class limit is 30-ish, but for a number of content-course electives the class limit is 80 students. (My impression is that this isn’t actually a limit, so much as a split point — 85, 105, or even 125 students technically can enroll, but above 80, the class can be split in half, at the professor’s discretion. Unfortunately, this means the class will be split and …
Love Detector Phone Test and Voight-Kampff Job Interviews
So there’s a new service available in Korea through cell phone operator KTF that will supposedly analyze voice patterns to see whether a lover is honest, attentive, passionate, or whatever. The first response most people have is one I share: yeah, right. As in, I doubt we’re quite at the point where such an analysis can reasonably be made from a single cell phone call. But that’s not such an interesting observation. I mean, someday we doubtless will be at that point. We’ll be able to analyze voice prints (and other peripheral sound, like breathing patterns, for example) and compare …
Bananagirl Wins the Prize
Back in the days when I still played with Dabang Band, we used to joke about hiring telephone girls to dance for one of our shows. You know, the girls in vinyl skirts who get hired to dnace when new phone shops or hardware outlets open. (See here or here for examples. There’s girls with a dancing soju bottle here, too.) I never took the idea seriously, but seeing the video below, I now think Dabang should have permanently hired on a troupe of such young ladies, contracting them always to wear blonde wigs and zebra-print hot pants. (And a …
삼거리 극장 (The Ghost Theater, aka Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater)?
UPDATE (17 Feb 2008): I have a copy on its way. Lime ordered it for me. Last time we checked, it wasn’t available anywhere, but now it is. Whee! Ever since I heard about this film, I’ve wanted to see it, but I’ve never seen it on any shelf, or advertised here, and it’s never available at Yesasia.com. And yeah, it does exist — there’s even a trailer here er, here: And yeah, in one way, it looks like another Fox Family, a film I hated in the theater (though it grew on me later), but even if the ghosts …
Nonfunctional Systems & The Art of the Avoidable Cataclysm #1: The Namdaemun Arson
An anonymous editorial in the Digital Chosunilbo asks: The pain of the Korean public will not be easy to heal. Watching the face of the nation disappear into flame, Koreans acutely felt the fear that the country they believed had grown into an economic powerhouse may be just a mirage floating above the desert sand. What would foreigners living in Seoul call Korea now? How can they trust in this country after seeing what has happened? The following is my first attempt (in what I imagine may become a series of attempts) to answer that question. The longer I’m in …