Lime just emailed me this, with the following explanation, which I didn’t need, but which some readers may appreciate (for LJers, the video is here): He’s a korean, the thing he says first is this : Rachmaninoff had big hands, but I have small hands, korean. something like that. enjoy!
Category: KOREA
Small Indeed, This World
I ‘Heart’ You, originally uploaded by studentoftheology. I got a funny surprise when, checking out Jodi’s blog, I saw this picture in a post of hers. Who knows what strange set of connections brought Jodi to this photo, but this was a student of mine, not long ago. (She took a public speaking class with me, and I still see her around the University sometimes.) I shall have to remember to call her by her English-teaching name, “Shine”. UPDATE: I’m told by the teacher who posted this picture that I am indeed correct. Well how about that?
Sugungga, Translation and Translatability, and Something Weirdly Beautiful
Sugungga (Soo-goong-ga, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the standard form of Korean romanzation, which is as opaque as pinyin to those who cannot read Hangeul) is a pansori, of which I recently bought (a 3-CD set) and to which I have been listening. Yep, that’s the cover to the right. Don’t click that link yet. Read it later. For now, bear with me. People say that this form is “Korean traditional opera” (always “Korean traditional”, not the other way around as we’d say in native-speakers’ English). I understand why they compare it to opera, of course — …
On Expat Whining, A Change of Heart, and Retooling
So, I’ve come to this place where I am now reading Michael Breen’s The Koreans and Scott Burgeson’s Korea Bug, and nodding my head at their assertions that, after all, Korea’s okay. I don’t know why, but sometime after coming back from Canada, something changed in my mind, and I stopped seeing everything annoying that happens to me as some kind of bad portent or revealing hint to the puzzle that is this society. The unraveling of this puzzle is something that infects many an expat’s mind while living here. After all, as Bug puts it, Korea is weird. That …
Yeosu Immigration Detention Center Fire
Well, a fire yesterday at an Immigration Detention Facility in Yeosu killed nine people being held there, and severely injured eighteen more yesterday, reports the Korea Herald. Most of those being held were apparently Chinese, and there are some accusations that the number of casualties is higher than it should have been because officials didn’t release the detained foreigners quickly enough, and because fire safety precautions were substandard, both in terms of the materials used in the beds in the cells, and the fire-responsive security system: The nine deaths occurred in the closed rooms filled with toxic fumes from the …
Suicide In Korea
Yesterday evening while walking around, Lime and I passed a TV that was showing news of yet another celebrity suicide, not this one but apparently another, a singer. She mentioned that the singer’s suicide really surprised her, more than the movie-actor’s girlfriend and the actress’. I asked her, “Why did she do it?” and she told me that it was apparently depression, and that this was the apparent cause of the other suicides that have been happening lately. “Huh, but why were they depressed?” I asked. She turned and said one of those one-liners that was halfway a joke, but …
“Daughters…” !!!
UPDATE (9 April 2013): A quick update, since I stumbled upon this post while trying to clean up the site database. This book never got published, unfortunately… apparently there was no market for a children’s book preaching that girl children are not a disappointment. Which is probably a good thing, but it makes me sad because the book was really a good, sweet, gentle one, and I was proud to have helped translate it. ORIGINAL POST: Well, today, while I was headed to the post office to mail back some some student assignments, I stopped by the main office to …
“Crystal Methuselah” redraft requesting runway clearance
Today I’ve divided my time between working on an almost-total rewrite of my long-ago (July 2006) flash piece “The Crystal Methuselah”, and writing comments onto the last remaining Form Mastery Projects I never got around to in January so that I can mail the whole blasted lot of these things out either Friday or Monday. As for the Form Project stuff, all I can say is that someone is busily, merrily, having students read and study Edward Said’s Orientalism and then letting them loose on Asian film… and some of my more politically-inclined students are missing the point that (a) …
John, Beer Pen, Pool, Expatriat(ism)e, Sleep, Shinchon Pianos, White Cranberry Chocolate, and Back Pain
Couldn’t think of a good title, so it’s kind of a summary of the post. Yesterday I met with my friend John, whom some might know as Ritu‘s husband. I’d just finished my course of antibiotics and was eager to test whether or not my prostate is back to normal, which was a good thing, as we went out for a few beers and caught up. For having a pint of Guinness on draft, I was rewarded with a Guinness pen! Hmm. It writes okay, too. It’s too bad I have no depth perception, or I’d have volunteered to have …
Lovecraft.co.kr
Okay, not quite, but it was cool to encounter this Korean blog on which a bunch of Lovecraft-related stuff has been translated to Korean. And, yes, you can see my lamer post in English asking whether the person’s bilingual and whether there’s a significant SF community in Korea that could be hooked up with. :)