While grading some homework from my course on Popular Cultures in the English Speaking World, something clicked for me. I was reading through student responses to the episode of How I Met Your Mother that we watched together, and discussed. Something that really stood out for me was the way in which people talk about comedy, or entertainment in general. I’ve noticed it before, in the way many Koreans talk about music, but finally I think I put some pieces of the puzzle together. Now, I’m not 100% sure I have something here–it may be that my students are all …
Tag: KOREA
The Don’t Talk About History Law
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 …
Some Stuff to Check Out
Stories: That New Yorker story about the AD&D gaming group… what? Yes, really, and it’s pretty good, too. (Thanks for the link, was it Ben?) Some MP3s narrated by Miette: Alfred Jarry’s “The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race” and the story it inspired, JG Ballard’s “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.” Okay, this is just a book review, but I loved this book, and have had it in my mind often lately, for reasons obvious to those who are in the know, but which those who don’t know might guess wrongly about. …
Fukushima Radiation Detected in Kangwon-do
UPDATE: An English-langauge article on it is up now at Joongang Daily. ORIGINAL POST: Okay, so… don’t panic. (Yet.) But yeah, they’re detecting the first traces of radioactive xenon from Fukushima in Korea. (Source article, in Korean.) It’s been detected in the Eastern province of Kangwon, which is to the west of Seoul and over some mountains — that is, on the coast facing Japan. One claim is that the radiation circulated down into Korea after passing over Siberia/Kamchatka, which sets up a disturbing (to me) bit of evidence that, hope as we might, not everything is blowing eastward and …
Global: What It Really Means in Korea
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 …