Tag: history

Ancient Tourist Traps and Military Textuality

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I’ve recently read some really good books, and am working out just what I want to say about them, but in the meantime, I’ve just started on a biography by Adrian Murdoch’s titled The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World. Julian is, basically, as the book suggests, the last great pagan emperor of Rome, which… well, given my occasional musings on how European history might have been different had paganism resisted being steamrolled by Christianity–perhaps, by more effectively co-opting elements of it, in the way Christianity actually did to paganism–the topic excited me. Two …

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Despite All the Nostalgia for the 1980s…

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… that seems to be cropping up these days, it’s not a post-80s world we live in. It’s in the shadow of the Baby Boomer Generation that we dwell, today: their politics, their economics, their morality, their paradigm. This insight I ran across on the Ivebeenreading blog in a post about a piece elsewhere where Kent Jones “takes after Quentin Tarantino for a poorly thought-out slam of John Ford.” It’s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; …

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More on the Gin Craze

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This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Gin Lane & Soju-Ro

A long time ago, I started a planned series of posts that didn’t go very far, drawing some parallels between the England of the Gin Craze era (the early 1700s) and Korea in the first decade of the 21st century. I’m still not feeling like continuing it, but I am reading up on the Gin Craze (right now, working my way through Patrick Dillon’s wonderful Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva–The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze) as I continue working on a short story set during that period, and a number of things have struck me as fascinating. So fascinating, indeed, …

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Anti-English Spectrum vs. the Asiatic Exclusion League

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For those who think that the Anti-English Spectrum fanatics are bad, well, I agree. I personally think they’re a significant part of the reason why Korean society, which used to be pretty positive towards Westerners on a one-on-one level, has gotten increasingly hostile with every passing year I’ve spent here. (And yes, I’ll stand by that statement, in terms of my subjective experience, though I’ll also admit some of that has to do with my neighborhood and personal disenchantment.) I’d also say it’s part of the reason a video like this one (yes, it’s the MBC “Shocking Truth About Relationships With Foreigners” …

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In Times of Upheaval

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Interesting details gleaned from Tania: Memories of a Lost World by Tania Alexander (daughter of the infamous Moura Budberg, about whom I have posted before, many times, all the way back to 2006, as part of a story I am once again about to begin revising, after finishing a draft in 2010): during World War I, what was Russian high society doing? There were no official parties or embassy balls for the duration of the war, but right up to the  October 1917 Revolution it was possible to maintain the outward appearances of social life, and restaurants and gypsy taverns …

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The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan by Christopher Benfey

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This book should be required reading for all who want to talk about Korea’s constant, deep-seated anxiety regarding the lack of a place in the Western imagination held by South Korea, and many Koreans’ jealousy of the place that Japan and China have in the Western mind, the foolish attempts to “brand” Korea and market the country onto the imaginative map of Westerners, and so on. What Benfey’s book shows is that Tokyo and Kyoto were not built in a day, and certainly not just in the 20th century. We might remember history as if Americans got interested in Japan …

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Links of Interest

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I’m about to go judge a public speaking contest, but I wanted to note these links: World War II London Blitz Diary 1939-1945: someone is posting Great-Grandmother Ruby Thompson’s diary from during the Blitz in London. Very cool reading, interesting and, you know, detailed in ways that are worthy of note to people researching the time. (I found the link helping a student find resources for WWII London life, for a story she’s writing.) This post on the Women’s History Network Blog has a neat discussion of “Career Novels in the 1950s” — a kind of juvenile-oriented novel for girls …

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The Don’t Talk About History Law

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It’s really hard to talk about Langston Hughes in the context of the Harlem Renaissance without touching on not only his interest in the Soviets and their system, but also touching on why a number of African-American intellectuals (Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and many others) were drawn to “revolutionary” ideas, and to Communist ideology — after all, after hundreds of years of things not getting too much better, of pretty constant material, cultural, and social oppression and marginalization, I think it’s not hard to see why some African-Americans would have felt that a sudden, forceful reorganization of society would be the …

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Global: What It Really Means in Korea

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In Korea today, one of the great buzzwords is “global”: you hear about “inbound globalization” at educational institutions, you hear about “global marketing,” you hear about “global outreach.” The word “global,” has attained a kind of buzzword status but as one of my students pointed out last semester in a public speaking exam — he gave a speech on the subject — global almost always really means, “Anglo-American.” (Note: by this I mean, English-language of the American subtype. I don’t mean in the sense some Americans seem to mean when they say “Anglo-American”, ie. British American or something.) There’s an …

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Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze by E. Taylor Atkins

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I cannot actually post my review of the book here — a review I’ve just finished, finally, though I got the book in late November. I can’t because I’ve actually just finished writing the review and need to send it to the Japan Times, for whom I was asked to review it. However, there are a few points I think are interesting, and worth mentioning here, not only because they didn’t fit into my review but also because they will probably interest readers of this blog who find the Korea-related or expat stuff interesting. If you’re one of those, read …

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