There are a couple of posts I could write about this, so I’m going to try and combine them, groggy-headed as I currently am, into one. Groggy-headed? Ah, well, you see, I was up late last night. Apparently Wednesday was the deadline for funding applications for publications for the coming year. Essentially, professors submit their research plans for the year, specifying one paper that they intend to research and publish, where they plan to do so, and so on. The problem is that nobody told me, and nobody told the one secretary who usually communicates this stuff to me. The …
Series: SF in South Korea
Worth Reading, March ’09
I don’t link online fiction enough, but I found a few links at The World SF News Blog, which I mentioned in an earlier post. Here’s a great story at Strange Horizons by Shweta Narayan. Here’s a very interesting essay about SF (or its relative lack thereof) in the Arabic world, by Achmed A. W. Khammas. It’s particularly interesting in relation to relatively (though not exactly) comparable status in Korea, and its pinpointing of cultural and historical causes for the scarcity.
No Surprise
It comes as no surprise to me to hear (as I have heard tonight) that one of the most queer-friendly sites in the Korean internet is a site hosted by a major Korean SF-author. Not because I think there’s a link between SF and alternative sexualities (though this author has addressed that set of issues in fictional form in the past) but because — howsoever certain authors may seem to contradict this notion (here’s a response) — in my experience, and for those people who are likely to be thinking individuals, SF simply accustoms them to thinking about the world …
Korea Society Talk on Robo Taekwon V
Plenty of SF readers who come through here aren’t necessarily interested in Korean history and culture in general, so it’s unlikely they’d be listeners to the Korea Society Podcast. However, for those who have an interest in global SF and pop culture, there’s a podcast you might want to check out over there. It’s a recording of a talk given way back in February 2008 by Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park, a prof at Notre Dame. The talk is titled “Our Toys, Our Selves: Robot Taekwon V and South Korean Identity.” (That’s a direct link to the MP3, so if you …
“SF in South Korea Today” — Article Live
For those following my on-and-off series on SF in South Korea, I just got an email from Jetse de Vries that my article summing up my recent gleanings on the topic, and also including a certin amount of the information I got from an “interview” I had with Jeong So-Yeon at Sobaeksan, has gone live at Shine Anthology’s blog. You can see it here.
Guest Blog on Global SF & Translation @ Apex
I was invited to write a guest blog post for Apex a little while ago, and it’s now up. It’s about global SF, culture, and translation, with some attention to Korean SF and horror in the cinema, and it’s titled “On the Translation of Dreams.”
Party Last Night
I am not going to talk about the party I was at last night, except that it was nice to see Sanghoon and Rira again, and good to meet several new people including Dr. Kim Kyu-hyun, and a few others. I wish I’d known they were likely to leave early-ish, so I could have talked to them more… especially since I have a funny vague feeling I was intended to talk to someone I didn’t (much). One of the “few others” I met was a guy I recognized, but couldn’t place where I recognized him from until someone mentioned Youtube. …
Orcs!
One of the fascinating things that keeps coming up in my Korean lessons is the generation gap. It’s not that I was unaware of this before, but my tutor has made a careful point of noting when she shows me a word that older people either won’t find appropriate in speech, or which she considers a “young people” word. One example is 찌질하다, which is a word I can’t quite translate into English. My tutor explained it as something that someone would say to a friend who is acting like goof or a geek, but at a party a few …
Star Wars: 스타워즈 프로젝트 컴필레이션 (2008)
Quite a long time ago, K-indie insider helikoppter of Indieful ROK emailed me to let me know about an album she figured I’d be interested in. The reason she thought I’d be interested was, you see, my ongoing series about SF in Korea. (How she stays on top of music in Korea is something everyone paying attention is amazed by, considering she’s not actually in Korea. Such is the power of the internet… and strong passions.) Now, this is going to be delicate. See, there’s such a thing as genre-media-inspired music in the West. It’s called filk, and it generally …
Outsider Writing
Now that I’m back in Korea, and have a free morning, I’m just catching up on some blogs and fiction online and so on. I ran across a very interesting post at Aliette de Bodard’s blog, titled, Writing cultures: insider vs. outsider, about the various advantages and pitfalls faced by authors writing about a specific culture either as an insider, or as an outsider, for a Western audience (as in the dominant SF-reading audience, for example). It’s worth a read, including the comments, especially if you’re interested in my thoughts on the subject.