I was very gratified a few weeks ago to learn of Simon Scott’s comments about by story “Sojourn”, one of the stories from the 2020 collection City of Han that he discussed in a review in Kyoto Journal. He begins this way: In this era of extreme global hypersensitivity to race and national narratives, it […]
Last semester, a student of mine gave me a paperback copy of the English translation of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. It was a very kind gesture, and I appreciated it very much. This whole culture of gifting professors–sometimes before exams, which is a little uncomfortable, but more often after–is rather nice. I’ll […]
In the past few weeks, I’ve seen a few movies I thought were pretty good, though not as good as a lot of people seem to think. Indeed, even Miss Jiwaku has been more thrilled with them than I’ve been. The three I’m thinking about were: Limitless, Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, and Cabin in […]
I guess I blinked a week or two ago, as I missed Cabin in the Woods’ very brief release in Korea. This suggests it was a probably a good film, since good films here are rarely shown more than a week. Resignedly, Miss Jiwaku and I schlepped it down to the local cinema to watch 연가시 […]
Those who know me well can guess that my feelings about this book are, but they might guess for the wrong reasons, so I’ll just come out and say it: I have nothing against fiction with deities in it. Hell, I’m reading Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, and if you can find a modern English text (except […]