It was a strange sort of whirlwind weekend, I guess. Zooming up to Ilsan and back in just under 36 hours … was fun, but I feel tired. Plowing through a 400 page novel added to the slight sense of vertigo.
I had fun at the event, though mostly I was people watching, rather than interacting. I received gifts – I think Koreans like to give gifts at their parties to the guests – often cheesy, but still well-intentioned. This is a trait, if I recall correctly, that Koreans share with hobbits. Hmm… I mean that in a nice way.
I shall never have to buy a hand towel, in this country, as long as I can be invited to a social event every few months. And this time my hand towel was arranged to look like a cake (left, below). Here’s a picture of my haul of gifts.
I also got some tteok (rice cake – right). It comes in many different forms, but I love it when it’s just these featureless bricks of slightly sweet, slightly grainy, sticky rice meal. Maybe like a cross between polenta and elmer’s glue. It’s perhaps one of the most abstract foods imaginable. The sort of thing that one day will come out “food dispensers” on a spaceship. And it’s delicious.
And I won a pretty nice bowl (with lid – center), too, in a sort of contest. I won it because I was the person who had “traveled farthest” to come to the event – two times over, counting, on the one hand, my status as sole foreigner, and therefore technically from outside of Korea, and on the other hand, my having come just that morning from Jeollanam, which was pretty far even within Korea.
Speaking of towels, when I was in my hotel room this morning, getting ready to leave, I absently tossed my towel down on the coffee table, and look what it did:
It stood up like that, for no apparent reason but its own inherent stiffness. Almost eerie – I’ve never seen a towel do that.
I finished reading the novel, Life of Pi. I don’t know if I like how it ends – I didn’t find it necessarily uplifting. Just vaguely ambiguous. But it’s still a pretty good book. And it’s the first time I’ve read a novel straight through, that way, in years.
I stopped by the Kyobo Mungo in Gangnam, which has, in my opinion, the best selection of English language books I’ve seen anywhere in Korea. I browsed for a while. I bought a book on syntactic theory. I’m not sure what made me do this. I had been reflecting the other day, on my very strange tendency to derive some kind of weird, abstract yet at the same time visceral pleasure in my contemplation of the most abstruse aspects of Korean grammar, and thinking, well, that’s always the part I liked best about studying linguistics, too. So, what the heck? Maybe I should get a book on general syntax and see if it’s interesting to me, after so many years.
If nothing else, it will provide me with an opportunity to become annoyed with Chomsky again, who still seems to dominate syntactic theory, even now – he’s moved on from GB (“Government and Binding” Theory [take that, Foucault!] which I spent a small amount of time with in a graduate-level syntax class back in the late 1980’s, when it was the latest concoction to emerge from Chomsky’s brain) to something called “minimalism.” Hah.
