Tag: KOREA

Linkery, Linkery…

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I have a huge list of links marked “to post” which, to be honest, I find kind of daunting. I used to post links a lot more, but lately my blog is mostly devoted to housing my ongoing project, Blogging Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, along  with occasional posts on SF or Korea-related issues. But I have had a few tabs open on my browser for over a week, which seem worth posting to me, and having been delayed for my critique group’s meeting by an annoying fridge-related disaster (though less delayed than another member), I am now sitting in a …

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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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Koreanizing Lovecraft (on a Budget)

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This entry is part 13 of 15 in the series Making "The Music of Jo Hyeja"

I’m still thinking this over, since I first mentioned it last January. Had an interesting talk on a couple of weekends ago with some of my Korean SF-fan friends about Lovecraft, the contents of which surprised me. I though ol’ H.P. was popular here, given that a large number of his works had been translated and published — in some cases, there are collections containing some of the same stories, worked over by different translators, put out by different publishers, even. But I was told that Lovecraft hasn’t really caught on in any appreciable way, which also makes it hard …

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Some “Interesting Videos” From (Or Related To) Japan and Korea

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Note: I’m cleaning out link folders — folders full of stuff marked “to post,” and will probably post a pile of goodies every week for a while… First of all: while I’m not really nuts for anyone’s pop music, the ardent praise and fandom of K-pop has always baffled me. K-pop has always struck me as a boiled down version of a watered-down version of Western and Japanese mainstream pop junk. Which is to say, I don’t usually have much nice to say about American and Japanese pop music either, though sometimes… well, sometimes you at least end up hearing …

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Heatstroke (Not the Music)

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No, not the piano piece I composed as an undergrad, when I didn’t know how to write music for piano. I mean actual heatstroke. I’m probably not heatstricken right now, but I sure felt like I was in the very early stages of it this afternoon: I was headachey and hot and needed to sit somewhere cool and where I went to buy water there was no cold water, and and and… (Hence, this rambling post. Though, also, I am testing whether my Twitter account is going to repost with the right image from now on.) But we finally found …

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Celebrity Suicides, Netizen Trolling, and the “Success” of the Real Name System

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In 2006, when I moved from where I used to live to the place I live now, I changed jobs, and suddenly I was able to understand what my students were trying to say about current events in classes. I taught a lot of conversational English and composition-type courses at the time, which meant I began to pick up on news and online memes in Korean society, because students would be repeating claims, arguments, and points almost verbatim. One of the earliest of these memes that I encountered was related to the “Real-Name System,” a then-proposed (and since-implemented) method for …

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Debito Arudou’s “Micro-Aggressions”: What Really Drives the Highly Sensitive Expat Crazy

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UPDATE: I’ve been thinking about this post, and I think the HSP concept may be just as flaky as the notion of “microaggressions” (at least as Debito Arudou presents it); it seems to me there’s a simpler explanation possible, which is this: many, many of the people whom I’ve known in Korea who were constantly dogged by the drive to understand why certain kinds of behaviour were so common here, were humanities majors. Humanities majors, when they actually are properly trained, tend to be analysis machines, and just as nature only punishes the most extreme of extravangances in phenotype (the Irish …

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Blackface, Korean Media, and the Context of the American Vaudeville Show

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Apparently, there has been an explosion online regarding an incident in which Korean performers donned  blackface for a performance over the Lunar New Year: Yeah. And this isn’t all that rare in Korean media. In fact, Matt over at Gusts of Popular Feeling hits the highlights with an excellent and carefully-researched history of Three Decades of Blackface in Korea, though it’s not an exhaustive history — he doesn’t get into every example. Just the big ones, and especially those in programs (as opposed to in advertisements). Like, for example, the all-Korean production of Roots here. Yeah, seriously. Go give it …

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What Debate?

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Bryan Kay’s article, “South Korea’s Racism Debate,” amuses me mostly because I don’t think there’s really all that much of a debate going on at all. When Miss Jiwaku has tried, with some of her Korean friends and acquaintances, to talk about the issue, she’s had a pretty disappointing success rate: often, she runs into the usual justifications, evasions, or dismissals that any non-Korean can tell you about. She’s lost friends over it. What’s more heartbreaking is that some of those friends wouldn’t even empathize about the crap she’s had to put up with herself — the intersection of sexism and …

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Ruler of the Your Own World (네 멋대로 해라) — The Halfway Point

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During my first few years in Korea, I asked Koreans I knew what was the best South Korean-made TV show they’d ever seen. I would hear different answers from different people, but one consistent answer I got from people who cared about and consumed a lot of movies, films, and books, was the recommendation that I check out 네 멋대로 해라, a TV program that aired back in summer/fall 2002 (and which, in English, got titled Ruler of Your Own World.) Somehow, though, my other (very brief) experiences with Korean TV dramas kept me skeptical. I don’t care for the kind …

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