UPDATE: Got ’em. Thanks to the several people (Claire, Tinatsu) who emailed them to me while I wasn’t looking! ORIGINAL POST: If anyone out there has access to either or both of these articles, I’d be very grateful for a copy. (My own employer’s library being, still, unequipped with any serious research access for Anglophones.) Drevdahl, John E., and Raymond B. Cattell. “Personality and creativity in artists and writers.” Journal of Clinical Psychology. Volume 14, Issue 2, pages 107–111, April 1958. (LINK.) Kaun, David E. “Writers die young: The impact of work and leisure on longevity.” Journal of Economic Psychology Volume 12, Issue 2, …
Tag: academia
Call for Papers: Korean Cinema Challenges and the Transformation of ‘Planet Hallyuwood’
UPDATE (28 Dec. 2010): The date was extended, so if you want in, you have a good chunk of time now! ORIGINAL POST: I just got this from Brian Yecies, and figured I’d share in case someone out there has anything appropriate on the boil: Call for Papers 2011 Special Issue for Acta Koreana (http://www.actakoreana.org) Korean Cinema Challenges and the Transformation of ‘Planet Hallyuwood’ Guest Editors: Brian Yecies, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Wollongong and Ae-Gyung Shim, School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales After the government eliminated film censorship in 1996, South Korea …
“90% of All Unsolved Murders in Kyeonggi Province Were Committed By…”
… is the beginning of sentence you know was written by a moron. It’s part of the sole comment on this article, about a Bangladeshi man who apparently killed a Korean woman half his age, which concludes with the police still trying to figure out why he did it. The comment is a priceless example of Korean netizen commentary. After claiming that Koreans need to start putting electronic bracelets on Southeast Asians in Korea–despite the fact that crime rates are much higher across the board among Koreans than non-Koreans here (this morning’s news had a litany of horrors, such as …
Like Magic
I had a student in my office last week who said something rather saddening. She was, of course, one of an endless parade of students who don’t know how to formulate a thesis, don’t know how to ask a fundamentally interesting question about the world, or rather, who haven’t been taught how one does so, but is now being required to demonstrate such skills… or so I thought. And I thought, it’s not their fault, but it does make me wonder and worry about how useful what we’re teaching them. We’re, in the collective sense. How coherent our curriculum and …
To the Guy Who Presented Before Me at the Conference Yesterday
The thing about your presentation is that, well, it depressed me. It depressed me mainly because nobody seemed to realize it was a salesman’s pitch, peppered with little bits of personal experience. No, I don’t believe you actually made that gorgeous powerpoint. No, I don’t believe you’re a serious academic. No, I didn’t hear one revolutionary idea about teaching in your talk. I heard lots of interesting things, and indeed, the technology you’re trying to sell probably has some use. But it was obvious from the outset that you were out to sell something. As soon as you posed your …
What’s Your Class’s Constitution?
I have something neat going on in one of my classes, and I wanted to post about it. One of the papers I wrote this summer was about the critique I believe is implicit in a couple of the creative projects I worked on with students in 2008-2009 — a comic book about the Goose Dad phenomenon, and a faux-documentary critiquing the cultishness of English education (and of the TEFL industry) in Korea. My argument is that while the narratives my students created was explicitly a discussion of the effect of TEFL on Korean society, it also contained a parallel, …
Monash Utopias 4 Conference/WorldCon 2010 (AussieCon 4) Review
Most of what was great about this week in Australia was personal stuff — seeing (however briefly) old friends, spending time, meeting new cool people, and of course having a brief bit of time outside of Korea, because it was about the time when I was needing a break. Also, Melbourne has some really good beer, and I highly recommend the Belgian Beer Cafe Eureka, which is down near Dockside. It was amazing. (More about that latter place in posts yet to come.) Most of what was good about the conference and convention had to do with regular conference/con stuff: …
One Down, and…
Well, I gave my presentation on The Host the other day. I didn’t read a paper, just spoke, which of course is a little risky sometimes, though usually I’m fine when I do that sort of thing. This time, the risk caught up with me, though, and there were a couple of lapses, but worse, because previous prresentations had gone overtime, I started out with less time than I ought to have had, and had to summarize the last third, on top of that essentially skipping the final chunk (about the ongoing duel between right-wing technophilic/globalization/developmentalist/minjok discourse and left-wing environmentalist/anti-American/resistance/minjung …
Write-a-Thon Results
Well, as I announced about six weeks ago, I participated in the Clarion West Write-a-Thon again this year, I think the first time since 2007. I pledged something insane: to write three academic papers in six weeks, to the point of them being ready to send out at the end of the six weeks. Well, the result was: close, but not quite, but I’m still quite chuffed by what I did achieve, and a few things got thrown into the mix that I didn’t expect, so I’m overall quite pleased with what I did manage: The first paper I worked …
Strangely Like Oulipo
So, I’m taking a break from a paper that’s almost done. Something distressing happened the other day, and while it’s sort of looking resolved, I’m still having trouble focusing. It’s interesting, though: I’m sort of performing a narrative analysis of a couple of independent creative projects that my students did in some classes I taught back in 2008-2009. The narratives of their creative works can be read not just as a generalized social critique of TEFL and its impact on Korean society, but also as an encoded, implcit critique of particular gaps in mainstream classroom TEFL practice, as well as …