Caveat: Liberate Wide Normal

I am better at acquiring books than reading them.

That is not to say that I do not read. . . I have been reading a lot, lately. I am finishing Charles Mann’s book, 1491 (review: not bad, but mostly stuff I have read or learned elsewhere), and I keep craving more history books. I have several novels in progress as well as my standard half-dozen philosophy texts, but those all seem to move very slowly (I spent 2 hours on several pages of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, this morning), whereas I seem to zoom through history.

I took the subway the full hour and a quarter into Gangnam (infamous Gangnam, Seoul’s Hollywood and Times Square and Beverly Hills and Park Avenue, mashed up together), not because I particularly like it there, though it is interesting, but because I remain convinced that the Gangnam branch of Kyobo Mungo (a sort of Korean book superstore, run by a life insurance company) has the best-organized, most diverse selection of foreign books in Korea.

I was partly inspired to do this because I rearranged my shelves in my apartment yesterday, and ended up with – lo! – free shelf space: . . . must. buy. books.

As usual, I bought books that I might not actually read. But some things I probably will read were included, too.

Walking up to Sinsa station for the subway home (just to walk it – it is maybe 2 km from the Kyobo tower to Sinsa), the air was remarkably clear, despite the hot, muggy conditions, and the mountains at Bukhansan were jagged and starkly beautiful as I was looking north up Gangnamdaero – normally one hardly notices the peaks lurking across the river in the haze.

I am writing this as I ride the subway home – sharpening my phonetyping skills, clearly indispensible for life in the 21st century. The man across from me has a shirt that says, in gold cursive letters on black cotton-polyester: “Liberate Wide Normal.” What did someone believe this might mean, such that it merited citation on a shirt?

[daily log: walking, 4 km]