Tag: KOREA

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young Ha Kim (Translated by Chi-Young Kim)

gordsellar0 Comments

Having read and very much enjoyed the Portable Korean Library translation of “The Photo-Shop Murders” and especially “Whatever Happened to the Guy in the Elevator,” I went into this book expecting something dark, funny, and entertainingly disturbing. Kim scores on about half of those expectations: this “novel” (at 120 pages, it’s more of a novella, really) is somewhat disturbing and rather dark. There are entertaining and funny moments, but I was in fact a little bewildered by the book. It certainly didn’t seem to me to be written by the same person who’d written “Whatever Happened to the Guy Stuck …

Continue Reading

Education Fever: Society, Politics, and The Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea by Michael J. Seth

gordsellar8 Comments

I’ve decided to stop doing the “bookdumps” I’ve been doing, where I briefly review a ton of books, and instead give individual reviews — however brief they might sometimes be — their own individual posts. I’m starting with the Hawai’i Studies on Korea series hardback Education Fever: Society, Politics, and The Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea by Michael J. Seth, an academic text about the history of education, attitudes towards it, and its development in South Korea. This book should, in my opinion, be required reading for anyone who’s coming to work as a teacher of any kind in …

Continue Reading

Seumniette?

gordsellar4 Comments

I’m somewhat mystified, but had to share: Lime just informed me that, among Korean fans of the TV series Lost, in online discussions the character Juliette, is (sometimes: see the comment section) referred to as 슴리에트 “슴리엣”, which for those of you who can’t read Hangeul sounds like “Seumniette.” The “n” sound is a liason between the m in “Seum” and the “l” in “-liette,” so the latter half of the name, “-liette” obviously taken from the character’s name, but “seum” requires a little explanation if you don’t speak Korean. It’s the second half of the word “gaseum” (which could …

Continue Reading

Hwansang Teukgeup

gordsellar1 Comment

I think I spelled that right. Tonight, Lime and I were riffing on the theme songs of TV shows we watched as kids. She recognized far more of mine than I did of hers, which is only to be expected — English-language media got aired here more than Japanese or Korean shows got aired in Canada (with the notable exception of Astroboy, and, technically, Sailor Moon, though the latter came onto TV — or returned to TV, maybe? — only when I was too cool for cartoons). Anyway, amid us singing the theme songs for the Smurfs, the Flintstones (“They …

Continue Reading

Bananagirl Wins the Prize

gordsellar13 Comments

Back in the days when I still played with Dabang Band, we used to joke about hiring telephone girls to dance for one of our shows. You know, the girls in vinyl skirts who get hired to dnace when new phone shops or hardware outlets open. (See here or here for examples. There’s girls with a dancing soju bottle here, too.) I never took the idea seriously, but seeing the video below, I now think Dabang should have permanently hired on a troupe of such young ladies, contracting them always to wear blonde wigs and zebra-print hot pants. (And a …

Continue Reading

삼거리 극장 (The Ghost Theater, aka Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater)?

gordsellar2 Comments

UPDATE (17 Feb 2008): I have a copy on its way. Lime ordered it for me. Last time we checked, it wasn’t available anywhere, but now it is. Whee!  Ever since I heard about this film, I’ve wanted to see it, but I’ve never seen it on any shelf, or advertised here, and it’s never available at Yesasia.com. And yeah, it does exist — there’s even a trailer here er, here: And yeah, in one way, it looks like another Fox Family, a film I hated in the theater (though it grew on me later), but even if the ghosts …

Continue Reading

Nonfunctional Systems & The Art of the Avoidable Cataclysm #1: The Namdaemun Arson

gordsellar10 Comments

An anonymous editorial in the Digital Chosunilbo asks: The pain of the Korean public will not be easy to heal. Watching the face of the nation disappear into flame, Koreans acutely felt the fear that the country they believed had grown into an economic powerhouse may be just a mirage floating above the desert sand. What would foreigners living in Seoul call Korea now? How can they trust in this country after seeing what has happened? The following is my first attempt (in what I imagine may become a series of attempts) to answer that question. The longer I’m in …

Continue Reading

Passports and Immigration and “Low Quality Foreigners”

gordsellar8 Comments

Well, headaches averted, really. So far. I’ve been a bit of an ostrich, not paying attention to the whole Korean news/expat blog scene, and it came up and bit me in the back end last night. I came across these posts — like this one — that bespoke a big change afoot in Korean visa renewal procedures. The last I’d heard, those living here didn’t need to worry about that, but this sounded more complicated. Things like having to fly to Canada every time I get a different job, for example, or needing a criminal record check for March 1st. …

Continue Reading

용산 멍청이, aka “You Can’t Run Linux on Laptops”

gordsellar4 Comments

UPDATE (8 March 2013): Yeah, as it turns out, I ended up keeping the laptop: he couldn’t install Linux, IIRC, but I figured out a way, and it was handy for dual booting, when I occasionally needed to use a Korean installation of Windows XP. However, the purchase was still a rather dumb one, and as a rule I avoid purchases like this one… to a fault, as I failed to get a new portable computer before leaving Korea when, all told, I probably should have picked one up. Ah well… ORIGINAL POST: Yongsan Electronics Market is famous for cheap(ish) …

Continue Reading

Eight Days

gordsellar6 Comments

The title of this post has nothing to do with how long I haven’t posted here — though it may well be 8 days — but with my newest story project. I’m finally writing a story about (edit: Crown) Prince Sado, aka Sado Saeja. He’s a particularly unusual case in the Joseon Dynasty, whose story is told in more (prosaic) detail here. As far as monarchs who lose their minds, he’s quite an odd (unusual) one. I haven’t managed to do much writing in the last couple of weeks — some last-minute-emergency-hurry editing has dropped into my lap, and I …

Continue Reading