For those who haven’t checked out the latest Clarkesworld, David Charlton’s Moon Over Yodok is a really worthwhile story. Having recently read Kang Chul Hwan’s gluag memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang, I’ve been cribbing from it in my own depiction of the the Yodok prison camp, so I can’t fault Charlton for his heavy reliance on that text. It’s a worthwhile story and is one more honest look at North Korea, which I think is important in a world where so many are happy to ignore the stories that defectors have been telling us for decades about that place. And …
Category: KOREA
Government Plagiarism
Lime came and ranted briefly about how some Korean lawmakers apparently plagiarised content from Korean travel communities after a investigatory trip to Vietnam. They got caught, of course, which is how it’s in the news. What can I say? I’m not surprised. In Korea, plagiarism is widely acknowledged to be rampant. Foreigner after foreigner has told me stories of how articles, essays, magazine writing — not just student work but supposedly professional writing and even sometimes (?) scholarly work is directly plagiarized. Hell, Hyori isn’t the only pop star to be accused of ripping off foreign pop songs. (Though, with …
Forget Rain, Forget Hakwons. Parents: Think Kim Sun Wook.
Like any other Westerner in Korea, I’m completely amused, and unsurprised, by the way 비/Rain’s so-called “World Tour” is turning out to be a collossal failure. (Inadequate stage setup? I have trouble buying that, as do many others.) World popularity isn’t a nationalist-netizen-driven thing, as Rain and his promoters — and hopefully the Korean pop music industry, is painfully realizing. But there are Korean musicians who are world-class, and one of them is Kim Sun Wook, whom Lime just mentioned to me. Here’s an article on him from 2006, at KBS GLOBAL: Eighteen-year-old pianist Kim Sun-wook has won the 15th …
Joe Sample & Randy Crawford
Quite a while ago, Lime discovered that the Seoul Jazz Festival was happening (I blogged about it here) and asked me what show I’d like to see. IF you look at the program, you’ll see that it’s dominated by Japanese jazz fusion and Pat Metheny (whose music I despise), so the sensible choice was to see whatever else didn’t fit that category. She ordered the tickets, and that was that. Well, the other night, the day finally arrived, so we went and saw Joe Sample and Randy Crawford, who were accompanied by Joe Sample’s son Nicklas Sample on bass and …
News Rage
Lately I’ve been experiencing something new to me: news rage. It’s not the stories in the newspaper that get me. Rather, it’s the Korean news stories that never make it to the English newspapers that get my blood boiling. Stories about teenaged girls being raped and left to die from exposure in the cold, for example; or about a desperate family approaching cops, begging them to help find their kidnapped daughter who is in the neighborhood, and being yelled at for interrupting some fucking cop’s precious sleep — only to find the daughter the next day, raped (of course) and …
Speechmakers of Korea, beware!
Immediately on arriving in Korea, I noticed how (a) so many people seem to think that speechmaking is absolutely necessary for any function, gathering, or context, and (b) so many people seem to be bad public speakers, not making any attempt to deliver speeches that interest, involve, or relate to the audience except as something to be endured. Foreigners routinely comment on how rock bands will stop in the middle of a show and start talking… and talking… and talking… They’ll report on whole rooms of Koreans sitting in dazed, half-attentive states while some guy in a suit prattles on …
Ironic Plagiarisms
This one takes the cake. On a recent exam, three students plagiarized wikipedia. This was an in-class exam. Instead of just learning the material, the students memorized vast hunks of text from Wikipedia by rote and then wrote them on their test papers. No citation, nothing. (And, as usual, the rote memorization made it harder for them to formulate and express an opinion. Just as I’ve always warned people it will do.) Why is it ironic? The topic of the question was copyright. Two of the three students plagiarized a public domain text discussing copyright. It just doesn’t get any …
서울 재즈 페스티벌
While the selection of shows is disappointingly small — cheesy Pat Metheny, cheesy Japanese jazz-fusion, or a potentially cool concert with Joe Sample — those of you in Seoul might nonetheless might be interested in seeing something at the upcoming Seoul Jazz Festival. One interesting thing is that some of the local opening acts actually look better than some of the foreign ones. I’d much sooner see a show by Bae Jung-Eun’s trio than see her open for a trio show by Pat Metheny. But I guess I can see a Bae Jung-Eun show anytime, right? Right? Anyone know? I’m …
The Lady Down the Hall
A lady was in the building the other day, and one of the Housing guys was showing her around, apparently to give her a choice of rooms. He actually opened my door to let her look around, and then realized we’ve occupied this room, and then hurriedly apologized — to her, not to us — and showed her the place next door. I popped my head out into the hallway, and looked around. What I saw was a middle-aged Korean woman in somewhat formal, classy attire talking to this guy as he let her into the room next door to …
Now I know why…
I was wondering why my students were all so aware of those shootings in Virginia. Turns out the susopect is Cho Seung-Hui, whom they describe as a “Korean national”. I had to wonder whether he did his military service in the recent past, since the reports said that he was a Korean citizen, and since I also read that he was apparently a pretty good shooter (though he’d only recently bought the gun). I’ve seen guys come back from military service, shall we say, not quite “right.” But it seems this Koreanness is more of a label. Nobody seems to …