Go, Mo-Sa, Go, Go!

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past day thinking about how my story “The Broken Pathway” needs to end. Mo-Sa, the focal character, has been coughing and sniffling rather impatiently as I’ve struggled to figure this out, and finally, looking through older drafts, and at what I did with what was once his cat, Nabi (“Butterfly”, a common name for cats in Korea, for who knows what reason) — now it’s a shabby little brown thing, an apparently stray mountain cat who leads him right to the big what-the-hell-is-that early in the story — and at one other …

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The Wrong Guy

I’m probably the wrong guy to be teaching about punk rock & the Sex Pistols. The most wrong guy that could ever be found, perhaps. But I’m doing it anyway, and boy am I grateful that I ordered that Greil Marcus book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. And that I didn’t get rid of it the first time I tried (unsuccessfully) to read it. I may actually meander my way through the whole thing sometime soon. It’s interesting, if a bit circumstantial at points. UPDATE: As if on cue, I came across something at Antti’s site, …

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The Speech Contest, Semester 2

I helped adjudicate a speech contest today. It hurt. Okay, I was paid for the time, but the rate was negligible considering that what I was paid for was precious time from my life, which I cannot and will not ever ever get back. Plagiarism is very much alive and well, even in the relatively good school where I work. The other foreign prof I work with and I had been talking last semester about a crackdown on it, and some of our Korean co-workers agreed, while others didn’t think it was fair on students who, ostensibly, “don’t know better.” …

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Bamboozled Redux

I just watched the Spike Lee movie again, and I gotta say, it really got me… again. I don’t get what people had against this film. The only thing I can think is that it cuts close to too many uncomfortable, sad, embarrassing truths on (all?) sides, maybe? I see those cartoons, those skits, the long set of clips at the end of the movie, and then I think of how blacks, whites, and other people are portrayed in the media in the country where I live, and I wonder: will my students get what the hell I am talking …

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Wasn’t it Erasmus…?

Wasn’t it Erasmus who said that whenever he got a little money, first he bought books, and then, were there a little left over, food and clothes? Yes, it seems it was, well, sort of. It’s a mangled quote always attributed to him, at least, and we like it that way, don’t we? Well, I used to be like that. No longer am I quite so spendthirft with books, nor even so much of a hoarder as I used to be, but after several hours of packing — mainly books — I am convinced that the most considerable part of …

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