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 …
What Have We Done?
UPDATE (16 March 2011): Well, at least someone’s finally talking about wind currents as if it’s worth considering. I’m a little dubious about how much to trust the specific claims, but at least people are now talking about it… a little. ORIGINAL POST: Well, here we are, a mere few weeks into the semester I think of as “the semester I ended up staying in Korea.” Last semester, North Korea began throwing a missile-fit (which is what happens when adult-children with missiles throw hissyfits) and bombed the crap out of a South Korean island, thereby elevating the tension in North-East …
Alley Kat, Screen Golf, and Hookers, All in One Place: Only? in Bucheon
Alley Kat Pale Ale is pretty much the only decently hoppy beer available on tap in most of Korea, and while I’m not really a hophead, I like a few glasses of it now and again. Well, earlier this evening Miss Jiwaku and I happened by a place in Yeokgok that had a big poster showing off the availability of this very fine brew, and we decided to mosey on in and try it. What we found was beyond our wildest imaginings. Miss Jiwaku described it as a “playground for ajeoshis” and that was a pretty fitting description of the …
Why South Korea is Considering a Gaming Curfew
My friend Florence Chee, who does smart-people theory about communications, mentioned on her twitter feed that there’s buzz in the air again about South Korea’s slow, loping movement toward a gaming curfew. The article she linked notes that it’s not just “extreme cases” (of the same kind that were routinely used to demonize Dungeons & Dragons back in the 1980s — guys kills his mom for being scolded to stop playing and then kills himself, for example) that justify the move, but also the more moderate example of kids who simply play all night, and therefore can’t concentrate when they …
Jah Wobble on Balance, Another Lovely Subway Encounter, and a Countdown
I was listening to Jah Wobble’s album of William Blake-inspired music, which starts with this track: Doing a little more investigation, I found a neat interview with Wobble from around the time he put that out. He talks a lot about the struggle to balance anger and integrity with the mental, emotional refreshment and grounding that one needs in order to be creative: He’s right: a certain degree of anger and honesty is energizing, but too much of it will just embitter you, and I know I’m certainly on the unbalanced side of it — and I know how it …
“Low-Quality English Teachers”
There’s a meme that’s floating about in Korea that “low quality English teachers” or “unqualified foreign English teachers” are multitude here. Well, and indeed, depending on what you consider a language teacher, and what you think the qualifications ought to be, they could be argued to be legion… but in Korea, “unqualified” or “low quality” is an ethical judgment: unqualified is often misused by Koreans discussing foreign teachers in English, as Matt points out here, and then misunderstood to mean something more like “dangerous” or “criminal” or “bad.” Of course, the facts of life in Korean society include a degree …