Last night my friend brought me chicken soup [update: very delicious] and a kale smoothie [update: not delicious, but hopefully healthy]. I'm grateful. A coworker is trying to get me to drink something called "noni juice" which I guess has some antioxidant properties. It's generous of him.
A lot of people have a lot of different ways to show kindness and nurturing. I have to get better at showing gratitude and not being cynical and negative about the curative properties of all these things. My own ideas about what sorts of medicine work or don't work and how they work are likely just as idiosyncratic.
I've been sleeping a lot lately. That's probably good.
Koreans say, "take a rest" – not really idiomatic English for someone who is sick, but somewhere in the long line of English education in Korea they've been taught that this is the appropriate thing to say to someone who is sick, and so it's now become an integral expression in "Korean English" that I've heard even native English speakers saying..
I’ve decided to do a series of Korean tongue-twisters, in the same way I have been doing aphorisms and proverbs.
칠월칠일은 평창친구
chil·wol·chil·il·eun pyeong·chang·chin·gu
7-month-7-day-TOPIC Pyeongchang[a city]-friend 친정 칠순 잔칫날 chin·jeong chil·sun jan·chit·nal mom’s-home 70th-birthday banquet-day July 7th [is my] friend from Pyeongchang’s mom’s 70th birthday party. I’m not sure if ~친구 친정 here ends up meaning “friend’s mom’s” or “friend’s (at her mom’s house).” Or maybe it could even mean something like “friend’s mother-in-law”? The phrase is too sparse on those optional grammatical particles I like to lean on.
Pyeongchang is where the 2018 Winter Olympics are scheduled to take place.
Boltzmann's entropy formula is S = k log W. I ran across this somewhere, and decided I wanted to understand it.
I failed to understand it, but I read about it for quite a while, skipping over the equations for the most part. Then I found some new blogs about various things and then I found this video about God and Nature instead, a blog called Preposterous Universe.
A while back in my young ones class I was doing a lesson where I have the kids draw their own version of the story we’re working on. I call this lesson “making a book” and normally when I do this type of lesson the kids enjoy it. But this group of kids was a little bit restless and feeling whiny that day.
“Too hard!” one of the girls moaned.
“못해” [I can’t], another whined.
They seemed to be overwhelmed with the idea of replicating the story that appeared in our story book on blank paper.
So I took matters in hand.
I said, “Look, I can make this book in 5 minutes.”
“Five minutes!?” the kids chanted together. “Nooo.”
“I can. Watch.”
I began to sketch rapidly, and lettering the story from memory.
“Waa. that’s funny.”
I stopped after about 4 minutes. The kids were inspired, now, and began doing their own rapid-sketch versions happily.
As those who are regularly reading my blog know, I've been having some persistent health problems. If you don't want to read more about that topic, stop reading now. Don't read what follows and then complain that I am "over-sharing." Thank you.
I had a biopsy this morning. Maybe I'm fortunate that I live within a few kilometers of one of the best cancer hospitals in Korea. The preliminary diagnosis is that I have a "clearly malignant tumor" at the back of my mouth (near the root of my tongue), but it seems "early stage." They took a (very painful) biopsy this morning, and I will return next week for more tests.
Over the last several weeks, it has become increasingly difficult to eat comfortably – it has become painful to chew or swallow. I will look at it as an opportunity to lose some weight. Fortunately, so far, it doesn't affect my ability to talk – that would be quite terrible, since talking is my livelihood (being a language teacher, and all). Uh… knock-on-wood.
I went with my boss and friend Curt. Sometimes, his Buddhism shows through strongly: he said, as we were driving back, "Don't worry, Jared. Life is nothing."
I said I agree with that philosophy, but that living it is more difficult than believing it.
One effect this development is likely to have: I have suddenly been forced to set aside completely any thought of not renewing my contract in September. Why? Because working at KarmaPlus and staying in Korea is my Health Insurance. I spent $50 today but without insurance it would have been several hundred easily. And in the US, based on what I know, it would have been $1000 without insurance.
I’ve decided to do a series of Korean tongue-twisters, in the same way I have been doing aphorisms and proverbs. This first one is one I mentioned before – in 2007. 내가 그린 기린 그림은 Naega geurin girin geurimeun I-SUBJ draw-PP giraffe drawing-TOPIC 잘 그린 기린 그림이고, chal geurin girin geurim-igo, well draw-PP giraffe drawing-be-CONJ 니가 그린 기린 그림은 niga geurin girin geurimeun you-SUBJ draw-PP giraffe drawing-TOPIC 잘 못그린 기린 그림이다. chal motgeurin girin geurim-ida. well can’t-draw-PP giraffe drawing-be The giraffe drawing that I drew is a well-drawn giraffe drawing, but the giraffe drawing that you drew is a not-well-drawn giraffe drawing. I remember that 그린 [geurin] caused me some confusion, way back when, because the stupid online Korean-English dictionary says it can mean “green” (i.e. that it’s a Konglish term), but that’s not really what’s going on. It is, instead, a past participle (or relativized form, “~ that ~ V-ed”) of the verb 그리다 [geurida = draw]. It’s frustrating to think that I have been studying Korean for 5 years since then, and I’m still so very bad at it, that I can’t say this tongue-twister much better now than I could then. Sigh.
I have made it a “public” blog on naver (Korean web portal) platform, now, which increases its accessibility for students and their parents, since it is within the cultural firewall that surrounds the Korean internet.
[UPDATE: This is all quite out-of-date. The website, jaredway.com, is still active but much transformed – since around 2018 it’s been my personal “identiy” site: stuff like my resume, a summary of interests, etc. But the “blog” I created for my work-related postings, in Korea, on the Korean platform, is still there! That is: https://blog.naver.com/jaredway]
I like the Beastie Boys. I don’t like all Beatles, but I definitely have a soft spot in my heart for their Yellow Submarine. So this mash-up seemed awesome.
Normally I enjoy the linguistics blog called LanguageLog immensely, but today a post by Victor Mair left a sour taste in my mouth. Doubly. Originally, I was going to post my complaints about his post as comments to the LanguageLog blog, but my past efforts to join the community at LanguageLog have been utterly ignored – I’m not the right sort of linguistics geek, apparently – so I decided to rant here, instead.
Firstly, Mair was posting one of his frequent examples of Chinglish/Konglish/Japanglish (which sometimes goes under the generic epithet of “Engrish” but that seems awfully Japanese-centric as a term, at least phonologically speaking). But the example he was sharing was from a sign posted in a Japanese lavatory, which said in English “Tap water may be used for drinking water.” Mair seems to think there is something wrong with this bit of English. But, at least in my dialect in of English, it’s quite common to use the preposition “for” with the same meaning as “as” – hence the sign’s text is equivalent to “Tap water may be used AS drinking water” which makes complete sense. The sign’s only linguistic crime might be stylistic – its slightly repetitive in its deployment of the noun “water.”
But what really annoyed me was when he decided, parenthetically, to devote several column inches – perhaps even a column foot or two – to the rant of an anonymous colleague against South Korea’s “Revised Romanization.” I suppose I shouldn’t complain – for my part, I’ve ranted more than once against Martin’s version of the Yale Romanization (which the cited ranter at LanguageLog prefers).
Certainly I can’t stand the old McCune-Reischauer system that existed in various incarnations prior to 1999. McCune-Reischauer was the romanization I learned when I first studied Korean (as badly as I did) in the early 1990’s, and with some modifications it is the system that North Korea still uses today.
What I found more odd was the reason (or reasons) this anonymous scholar bases his/her objection on. He/she claims the romanization of ㅓ as “eo” and ㅡ as “eu” under the revised system are linguistic “embarrassments.” Fine – I happen to agree. But when mapping a 14 vowel system to the five vowel symbols of the Latin alphabet, compromises are inevitable. To speak briefly of Martin’s romanization, in what way is “ceng” as a romanization of 정 (RR “jeong” IPA /t͡ɕʌŋ/) not an embarrassment, too?
For someone like this anonymous ranter, with supposed linguistic training, it seems remarkably naive. All romanization systems for Korean are going to involve tradeoffs, and the tradeoffs made with the revised system as adopted and promulgated by the South Korean government, as I see it, were focused on two objectives: 1) the system should be as easy as possible for non-speakers to “get close to” the expected pronunciation, or, at the least, habituate themselves to it over time; 2) the system should avoid all diacritics and special symbols (this is a major drawback of the popular McCune-Reischauer system, which has “ŏ” and “ŭ” for ㅓ and ㅡ respectively, among other frustrating diacritic and “apostrophe” rules). This latter requirement against diacritics is, in my mind, what led to the two “embarrassments” mentioned. Clearly digraphs were required, and settling on what digraphs to use for which vowels was going to involve some level of discomfort.
I seem to be the only Westerner with any background in linguistics who prefers the Revised Romanization over any of the alternatives. I would speculate that it is because of my background in computing and programming (and hence ASCII) – the rise of technology and the internet were part of the justification in 1999 for the revised system’s rejection of diacritics – they wanted a system that was transparently “ASCIIable.” In this way, I have a great deal of sympathy for the perspectives of the 1990’s committee – they wanted to move toward a romanization system that maximized their advantages vis-a-vis the inconveniently roman internet. It was of a piece with other government-directed manipulations of Korean cultural content oriented toward a remarkably forward-looking post-industrial policy.
Such a need has been utterly obviated by subsequent generations of technology, all now mostly based on the well-designed unicode system, which means that the Korean internet has begun to be mostly in unicode hangeul rather than any romanization at all. But in the 1990’s nobody could have predicted technology solving the ASCII dilemma so quickly and easily, and so, from the perspective of the committee desigining the Revised Romanization, their motivation to reject diacritics was exceptionally strong and very understandable.
Personally, quite early on I was able to overcome my discomfort with the digraphs “eo” and “eu” by reminding myself that they were no more “weird” than the very common use of the digraphs “oe” and “ue” for “ö” and “ü” in some European languages. Those examples are equally opaque, phonologically, yet widely accepted, and the underlying principle of the digraphs in both cases is almost the same – thus it could be understood that in the revised system, they’re using an “e” to mark the “missing” diacritic of McCune-Reischauer. In fact, without any inside knowledge, that’s how I suspect the committee choosing the digraphs saw it.
It’s good to see that important, important work is being done in this area of semantic analysis: “geek” vs “nerd” at the blog slackpropagation. I think the author (with some commenters) has a point in realizing that using Twitter as his data source possibly limits and no doubt skews his results. As he mentions, it would require work with the Ngram corpus or suchlike to be more thorough. Nevertheless, I appreciate the attention to detail in his work.
귀신 듣는데 떡소리 한다 ghost hear-CIRCUM rice-cake-sound do-PRES [It] makes a rice-cake sound that ghosts hear. Apparently Korean ghosts like rice-cake, so if you make rice-cake
noise near ghosts, they are happy. Hence, “Music to one’s ears.” I’m not really sure what “rice-cake noise” might sound like, though – Korean rice-cakes are kind of doughy and keep quiet for the most part.
Periodically I watch the Daily Show or Stephen Colbert at the Comedy Central website. About a year ago Comedy Central became really reliably consistent in delivering little TV ads during the intermissions of their streaming video. The ads were annoying but I could hardly begrudge them.
At first, mostly I was seeing ads for other Comedy Central programming. Then it branched out to include MTV programming, and lately, they’re really dropping this truly obnoxious product/program (I can’t even figure out which it is) called “game trailers.”
In general, the ads were painfully repetitive and didn’t seem at all “targeted” – they mostly made me remember late-night infomercials on 1980’s cable.
Then suddenly, about a month ago, things got interesting. My Comedy Central streaming video ads turned Swedish. Seriously.
Is this an effort at geo-targeting gone horribly wrong? Is it something meant to be funny? Do other people watching Comedy Central online get Swedish ads, or only people in Korea, or only me?
Regardless, I like the Swedish ads a lot more than the previous fare. There are quite a variety of them, and I have always enjoyed advertising more when it’s in a language I don’t really understand. It becomes quaint and culturally intriguing, that way.
Above, a screenshot of an ad for some express train service. The tag-line is: “Ju fler som åker, desto billigare blir det.”
Thinking of good names for blogs is a bit like thinking of good names for rock bands. It's fun to do, even when you have no blog or rock band currently in need of a name. Occasionally, I stumble across a phrase or name where I think, I really wish I were using that name. But, my blog already has a pretty good name (it's memorable and unique, anyway), so I just think I'll use it as a motto, instead. Here's what occurred to me today as a potentially great blog name:
A newsletter for the voices in my head.
It's maybe a little bit long, but you could make an abbreviation; regardless, there are some great blogs with long names – I'm thinking of Stop Me Before I Vote Again, for example.
Anyway, I like this one I thought of enough that I might add it to my list-o-mottos at left, anyway.
Quite some time back, I translated (or, rather, attempted to translate) a list of 108 Korean Buddhist affirmations, which I had initially encountered on a Buddhist
television channel in early 2010, but then subsequently
researched and found online.
After having finished that little translation project more than a year and a half ago, I have finally decided to put the complete list in a single place (instead of being scattered through 108 blog entries, using the “create page” functionality of my blog host (a “page” is different from a “post” in that it isn’t a dated entry but a sort of stand-alone entry).
Here is my newly-created page of the 108 affirmations with translations.
One thing I have wondered about is if these affirmations were natively Korean, or if they derived from some older tradition. There is definitely a tradition in the wider Buddhist sphere of creating lists of 108 affirmations, prayers, or other types of things, but I haven’t run across this particular list of affirmations (I mean in terms of the content of their meanings). I don’t have the linguistic ability to research very thoroughly or effectively, though. If the Korean 108 affirmations came from somewhere, they were likely mediated through classical Chinese, about which I know nil. I’m a little better with Pali (the Prakrit language of the core Buddhist scriptures – only in that I can muddle through the abjad and/or find romanized versions that are vaguely decipherable or provided with translations), but I haven’t seen anything like this list in Pali.
I recently learned that China acquired Buddhism from the Gandharan civilization – which was the Indo-Hellenic civilization in the upper Indus valley and the Kush (i.e. modern Northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan). This is interesting to think about, as it leads to scholarly speculation as to the level of influence between classical Greek thought (I’m thinking here of the same currents of Platonist and neo-Platonist thought that so strongly influenced the New Testament) and the evolution of Mahayana Buddhism (i.e. as practiced in the “North”: China, Korea, Japan, etc.) as distinct from Theraveda Buddhism (i.e. as practiced in the “South”: Sri Lanka, Burma, India, Thailand, etc.). The so-called “Esoteric” Buddhism of Tibet and Bhutan is a third strain that has its own history.
I took the picture below in June, 2010, visiting 원효사 (Wonhyo Temple) near Gwangju.
기둥을 치면 들보가 울린다 post-OBJ hit-WHEN crossbeam-SUBJ ring-PRES When you hit the post, the crossbeam rings.
This refers to the post and crossbeam of an old-style house (한옥 = traditional “Korean house”). I visualize that by hitting the post you could get a sort of tone from the crossbeam, in a well-constructed house. It seems to mean that you can achieve a better result by going at something indirectly. Don’t tackle problems head-on. I would do well to take this advice.
Swá ðá maélceare maga Healfdenes singála séað· ne mihte snotor hæleð wéan onwendan· wæs þæt gewin tó swýð láþ ond longsum þe on ðá léode becóm, nýdwracu níþgrim nihtbealwa maést.
So then over the sorrow of the time the son of Half-Dane continually brooded; the wise hero could not turn away woe; that strife was too strong, hateful and enduring, that on the people came fearfully cruel, violent trouble, the greatest night-evil.
Tolkien dated the poem to the 8th century – and this was Tolkien’s specific area of expertise, as he was a professor of English Philology. Other scholars have thought the poem Beowulf to be younger, but certainly it is at least 1000 years old.
I like the poem because it offers a window into such an ancient, different world, but I like it mostly as a fabulous exemplar of language-change. Presumeably, the first and second texts, above, are the same language, separated only by 1000 years of history. But what makes a language a language? And in that vein, in what way is, for example, the “Korean” of today the same language as the “Korean” used in the Silla Era (pre 900 AD)?
Apparently this meme-picture is all the rage on China’s internet lately. It juxtaposes a shot of Xi and Obama during their recent summit in California with a classic picture of Pooh with bouncy Tigger.
I had one of the most terrible days I've had in a very long time, today.
Of course, being sick as long as I have been, with no feeling that it's really getting better… that doesn't help.
There's been a feeling of never-ending crisis at work, for so long I can't really say when it started any more. I know cash flow is bad. Enrollment isn't really down, that much, but it's not up, either. Unfortunately, the business model seems to have been predicated too excessively on presumed inevitable growth. I can't even judge if that's a smart way to run a business or not, but my gut feeling is that it's not.
I spent over 3 hours this evening arguing with my boss, and got home 2 hours later than usual. The argument ranged across a lot of things, but with very little resolution. I don't want to go into details. I shouldn't, even if I wanted to.
But one thing that wounded me deeply, and angered me as utterly unnecessary and inappropriate and profoundly Korean: my boss said I was acting like a child.
When is it a good time to say this to an employee?
Let's review.
If it's true that the employee is acting like a child, then it's not a good idea to complain to the employee about it, but rather, to review (in one's mind) what that employee is doing and failing to do, what that employee's strengths and weaknesses are, and assess whether or not it's worthwhile to try to retain the child-like employee. If the employee is worth retaining, by all means avoid pointing out his childish behavior, and instead try to change the focus of the conversation. If the employee isn't worth retaining, even then it might be more productive to attempt to have as grown-up a conversation as possible about that employee's failings.
If, on the other hand, it's not true that the employee is acting like a child, then to accuse him of such is a pretty bad idea, as it's downright insulting.
So either way, it's a bad idea.
From my side of the argument, and setting aside the above, I ask myself – would I rather that he was right or wrong?
If he's right – if I was acting like a child – then I just feel depressed and discouraged (in a childish way, presumeably) over my failure to behave as an adult. If he's wrong, and I wasn't acting like a child, then I feel as he's genuinely misunderstood my points and is, himself, acting childish.
Ultimately, if I try my best to look at it objectively, I suspect there's some cultural conflict going on here. Americans, in general, because of our culture of equality and upfront, me-centered communication, can seem very childish to Koreans, I think. Americans tend to resist hierarchies and overt dominance behavior, as is typical in a Korean boss, and our reactions to authority seem weird and misplaced to them. On the other hand, to Americans, Koreans seem excessively focused on hierarchies and in arguments, they try to eke out apologies and concessions of guilt from those "below" them.
This is doomed to be an unfinished analysis – at 1 AM I'm not really interested in finishing it.
Earlier today, I had an advanced middle school student tell me, during a pretty extended conversation during a break time, "I miss Woongjin." (As a note, "Woongjin" is the name of the hagwon that underwent merger with Karma a little over a year ago – so he was referring to the "old days," pre-merger.)
"Why do you miss Woongjin?" I asked.
The student was actually pretty detailed in his analysis of his feeling. "This place, now," he said, gesturing around, "is all about rules… and punishment… and yelling. Woongjin had a good feeling between students and teachers. It was fun and there was trust."
Perhaps this student's trenchant observation was in the back of my mind as I argued with the boss later.
한달이 크면 한달이 작다 one-month-SUBJ be-big-IF one-month-SUBJ be-small If one month is long then another is small. Life has its ups and downs.
Here (at right) is a meme-picture I found in onlineland.
I imagine a door labelled “happiness” where this is true – that it isn’t locked. But I also imagine they keep changing the (very ostentatious) locks that are on it, such that you repeatedly leap to the conclusion that the door might be locked, even though it’s not. It ends up all being just a sort of epistemological security theater. You have to keep reaching out and trying the door, and sometimes you tire of playing the weird game involved.
Scottish author Iain Banks has died. I thought very highly of him – he was a talented writer of diverse abilities and genres. His novels, both in the “sci-fi” category and his “mainstream” ones (although I resist using those genre categories), are quite philosophical and intelligently written.
I first ran across him not that long ago – I recall distinctly that I acquired his novel The Algebraist in a Sydney bookshop in 2008, while shopping for something entertaining to read on my return flight to Korea. I ended up a fan and a “convert,” reading some half-dozen of his books over the next several years. I came to view Banks as the sort of novelist I would like to be, if I could get around to being a novelist.
Since my novel-reading slacked off so much after 2010, I’ve read less of his writing, obviously, but I feel inspired the next time I’m in a big bookstore to browse for another of his books.
There is a guy in Japan named Tatsuo Horiuchi who makes spreadsheets using Microsoft Excel that display (and print) as original works of fine art. This quote in the write-up at a website called Spoon & Tamago was exceptionally telling:
“Graphics software is expensive but Excel comes pre-installed in most computers,” explained Horiuchi. “And it has more functions and is easier to use than [Microsoft] Paint.”
some puer tea
he came to pull out some of the small silences
that grew like weeds.
instead he pushed some poetry into the small cracks
in the pavement.
the air had turned to summer and there were
some bees; some birds.
with something hidden behind his eyes he tasted the sky
out his window.
he laughed. he grimmaced. he cried. he examined
his black pencil.
he decided to brew a small pot of puer tea;
the water boiled.
he spilled some consonants, some vowels. the poem (his life) started big;
and ended small.
just some tea in a cup like a shell cradling orange-brown water,
somewhat bitter.
This poem of mine is unfinished, but I am done with it anyway. I shall go to the doctor again, now.
놓친 고기가 더 크다 be-escaped-PASTPART fish-SUBJ more be-big The fish that got away is bigger. This is equivalent to “The grass is always greener on the other side.” I believe people also say something exactly like this in English, when someone wistfully says, “The one that got away…” The word 고기 here seems to mean “fish,” but normally the word 고기 is more generic than that – it means any animal flesh-as-food: 소고기 “beef” 닭고기 “chicken meat” 물고기 “fish” (literally “water meat”). But whereas for most living animals the term 고기 isn’t applied (in the same way that in English a term like “beef” or “pork” is rarely applied to living animals), with fish it’s generally the only possible word – the generic word for “fish,” even a pet fish in a fishbowl, is 물고기 “water meat.” Hence it seems to arise that 고기 can be shorthand for “fish.” Another, alternate way of reading this is that 고기 means “game” – as in “that which is hunted.” Read as such, an alternate translation of the above is the more generic: “The game that got away is bigger.”
I spent my weekend, such as it was, being antisocial. Yesterday, I turned off my phone and only came online for about 2 hours. I have been doing more writing on actual paper – being low-tech, trying to keep away distractions and keep things simple. I’m not sure I’m succeeding. I turn off my phone because otherwise I find myself compulsively looking at it, like my students, and then I pull the ethernet wire out of my computer to keep myself from surfing the web, although I keep my computer on because it’s also my music player and general self-organizer. Maybe I need to just throw it all away and live like a monk?
Sometimes I have a dream that is so strange, yet so evidently autobiographical and symbolic, that as I caress its memory traces upon awaking, I think to myself, “people will think I made this up – no one dreams like that.”
So I must aver at the outset, I really dreamed this dream.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t make it up, too. Of course, as we awake and shuffle past the curlicues of fog that shrouded our sleeping state, the memories shift and take on form as a narrative that wasn’t really present in the dream. At least some if not most of the creativity in dreaming gets applied here, maybe. I don’t think, however, that that means I made the dream up, in any intentionalist sense.
I hesitate to report it, because as dreams go it was so very strange. But I will tell it, nevertheless – because that’s one of the things I do on This Here Blog Thingy™ that almost no one else does, and somehow, doing so thus means more to me vis-a-vis asserting my bloggish individuality over this peculiar format than most of the other things I do here.
I had decided to return to graduate school. In the dream, it was clear this had been a very fast, impulsive decision – perhaps taken over a long weekend, perhaps taken while drinking soju with coworkers. I had made the decision out of frustration with the current trajectory of my life.
I was accepted into UC Irvine. Keep in mind, in my real life, I have never even visited UC Irvine’s campus, but it has a certain plausibility around it, given my Southern California links. The year I spent working in Long Beach was actually, mostly, a year spent working at a client location in Costa Mesa, only a few miles from UCI. So it wasn’t something utterly random, perhaps.
I packed my possessions out of my apartment here in Korea (where somehow all my possessions in storage in Minnesota were also crammed into my apartment). I loaded everything into my Nissan pickup truck that I owned from 2001 until 2010, and drove to UCI.
I drove. It wasn’t something strange, in the dream. Just driving from Seoul to Orange County. It took a long time – but no more than a day or two. It was like driving from Oregon to Orange County.
When I arrived at the campus, UCI was in a Mexican beach town, but a rather posh one. I suppose that’s actually a pretty accurate description of much of Orange County. It was much greener than what we think of as Mexican beach towns – the green hills around the campus resembled northern Baja in winter, when the rains make everything verdant but trees are sparse. I remember looking down a long street as I parked my pickup truck and thinking there were a lot of nice sailboats in the harbor.
I went into a large, glass-faced office tower to find it divided up into various departments. Oddly, most of the departments were “city government”-type departments – a police department on one floor, a sewer department on another, yet another area had the offices of the city bus system. There was also a retail area with some upscale shops, like the Costa Mesa mall, and a food court, and alongside the food court was the Comparative Literature department. This is the first time in the dream where I knew what subject I’d returned to graduate school to study.
I met a friendly woman at a desk, there. There were stressed out grad students dozing in very stylish-looking cubicles made of polished blonde natural wood, decorated with tasteful personal effects. The woman began introducing me to various people in the department, although remarkably, there were no professors. “The department is run as a collective,” she pointed out. One of the other students muttered something about Juche (the North Korean ideological system). Really?
I was self-conscious of being so much older than most of the students. I was introduced to a man half my age who would be my “mentor” – he had the remarkably fitting dream-name of Earnest Young. He had blond hair and a goatee. He asked me to tell him about myself. I began to tell him a rather redacted personal history, in Spanish, but after a while we ended up talking about my negative experiences with graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. At some point he said, candidly, that his Spanish wasn’t so good, and we switched to English. I had the feeling that maybe he wasn’t impressed with my Spanish and had offered to switch out of pity, but he’d said very little in the language, so I decided I was being paranoid.
We were interrupted by the woman from the front desk, who took me around to meet some of the other students. Then, I was introduced to an older woman with graying hair who was apparently part of the building’s janitorial staff, but she was being treated as a full member of the group. She was laughing at humorless in-jokes being made by a forceful younger woman with “Occupy Philosophy” written on her tee shirt.
I bowed to the older cleaning lady and greeted her in Korean. This impressed the other students, but the cleaning lady returned my bow and offered me a large plate with exactly two orange cheezits on it. I took the plate politely, and was about to eat the cheezits when I saw that written on them were the words “아무것 없다” [“There is nothing”]. I looked at the woman with alarm, but she just smiled shyly and enigmatically, and returned to her cart of cleaning supplies and began dusting an unoccupied cubicle.
I was feeling uncomfortable by this secret message I’d received, so I put the plate of cheezits aside on the desk that had been assigned to me, and resumed my orientation chat with Earnest Young.
He was explaining that we had to teach our own classes under a sort of rotating leadership. My first class that I had to lead would be about Witold Gombrowicz [this is very significant in the context of this dream, but very hard to explain – Gombrowicz is connected in my mind with the problem and aesthetic of apophenia]. There were some administrative details I didn’t understand, but I decided to let it slide for now.
Then I looked back at the plate of cheezits after a few minutes and there was a very small sculpture of a monkey gazing at the cheezits, as if it was hungry. The monkey turned its head and met my eyes intelligently. I shivered, feeling a sort of nervous, conspiratorial fear, as if the universe had shrugged and uttered, “Gombrowicz, indeed.”
I was tired. “Where will I sleep?” I asked.
The earnest Mr. Young glanced at me, surprised. “Oh, you don’t know. We will probably assign you to ‘Camp One.'”
I asked for an explanation. “We take the collective nature of our undertaking very seriously,” he explained, earnestly. Apparently, they lived like Occupy protestors, in large recycled Army tents in the modernist plaza outside the building, where there was a large sculpture in the style of Picasso’s amazing work in Daley Plaza in Chicago [That sculpture is a recurring character in my dreams].
“The views of the mountains are excellent,” the young Earnest pointed out. “And the outside air is invigorating.”
I shrugged, but remembered a problem. “I don’t have a sleeping bag.”
He looked at me, eyes bugging out, as if to say, ‘how could you neglect to bring something so important as a sleeping bag to a comparative literature graduate program?‘
I apologized, and mumbled something about how Penn had obviously habituated me to a different sort of graduate program, altogether.
He grinned, forgiving me. “Yeah, we don’t follow that old Penn style. We’re progressive.”
I nodded, and added for no apparent reason, “Like Columbia?”
“Maybe. I haven’t been there. This is a different world,” he said, gesturing around. The signs were in Korean, now, in the food court, and a large number of people were emerging from what was clearly a Seoul subway station stairway. Yet peering out a large window I could still see the green hills and the harbor with sailboats in the distance. So I had to agree it was a different world.
“I’m really tired,” I finally said.
“You’ll get to sleep, soon. But first, we’re meeting to watch cartoons.” He described a restaurant or bar location across the street from the tents where I would be staying. “Let’s meet there in about 30 minutes.”
“What are we watching,” I asked.
He waxed enthusiastic. “Oh, it’s a fabulous new program,” he exclaimed. “It’s called ‘pork the orkville opiates.'”
This title for a cartoon was so bizarre, so incongruous and yet hilarious, that I began to laugh.
I immediately woke up. Am I the only one who has noticed that a dream state cannot sustain an active, laughing subject? Do I begin to “sleep-laugh” in actual fact, when these dream-laughs occur?
“Orkville,” by the way, isn’t just some random name. When I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, I had a collection of stuffed toys that were perhaps intended to be alligators, but they stood upright and came in unusual colors, like blue and red and yellow. I had decided that these were definitely not alligators (even then, alligators!), but rather “orks.” My mother, a fan of Tolkien before Tolkien fandom was a thing, asked me if Orcs weren’t horrible, brutish and unkind creatures. I told my mother in no uncertain terms that no, those were “C-orcs, spelled with the letter ‘c’.” My orks were “K-orks, spelled with the letter ‘k’.” I clarified that K-orks were, in fact, vegetarians, and lived a communistic life in an amphibious riverine utopia named Orkville. I drew several maps and wrote a constitution for the place. I later invented a language for them, with an abjad writing system. I had one Ork named Barnabus York, and another named Merriweather Shadow. They were metaphysical detectives. I drew geneologies for them stretching back 50 generations, to show they were related.This was when I was 7 or 8. I was smarter when I was a child.
Even now, I’m still feeling rotten. I’ve been on antibiotics for two weeks now, and the earache pain is intense most of the time. I don’t know what the solution is. Will have to shop for alternate medical care next week, I’m thinking.
I came home from work exhausted – Saturday is my busiest day, in fact, for work, at least in terms of class-load. I made some late lunch for myself and crashed on my sofa, intending to read, and suddenly I was asleep.
I had turned on streaming NPR on my computer before sleeping, and so I awoke to a man being interviewed on BBC’s World Service. He said – if I remember correctly:
“Who knows about money? It flows like the spirit.”
This struck me as incredibly profound, to hear this said in the moment of waking up.
The man being interviewed was Daniel Libeskind, a Polish/Israeli/American architect, quite popular these days in the skyscraper-building set (e.g. New York’s WTC 2.0 “Freedom Tower” and other projects such as Seoul’s Archipelago 21). He went on to discourse on why he didn’t feel a need to apologize for working with totalitarian regimes, as a child of Stalinist Poland, in which I heard an implicit equivalence between China the West (one which I’m sympathetic to hearing, in point of fact, in certain moods).
Viejitas come here with paper bags to gather greens.
Espinaca, verdolagas, yerbabuena . . .
I scramble over the wire fence
that would have kept me out.
Once, I wanted out, wanted the rigid lanes
to take me to a place without sun,
without the smell of tomatoes burning
on swing shift in the greasy summer air.
Maybe it’s here
en los campos extraños de esta ciudad
where I’ll find it, that part of me
mown under
like a corpse
or a loose seed.
– Lorna Dee Cervantes
I remember 280 from my childhood, as we used to drive the 350 miles down from Arcata to Woodside (La Honda) which would generally lead to using some portion of this highway for the last stretch in San Mateo county south of San Francisco (although stretches of 280 weren’t even completed until the mid 1970’s I don’t think). The Woodside of my childhood wasn’t the exclusive enclave of Silicon Valley bazillionaires that it has become now, but rather at that time it was the eastern edge of a sort of South Bay hippie hillbilly zone lurking among the redwood forests west of Palo Alto. That’s what drew my parents there, of course.
I think the 280 of this poem is the northern terminus in the gritty neighborhoods of the South-of-Market part of San Francisco, which weren’t, then (when the poem was written or when I was a child), what they have become, now. South of Market in San Francisco before the 1990’s was poor, ghetto, barrio, and bleak. I remember this, because although we lived nearly 300 miles away, San Francisco was the only city in my childhood. It was, simply, “The City.”
무는 말 있는데 차는 말 있다 bite-PRESPART horse have-CONN kick-PRESPART horse have [Where] there’s a biting horse there is a kicking horse. “Birds of a feather flock together.” It means that bad person associates with other bad people. Once again, the googletranslate version (as of today) is hilarious:
Biting the end of the car, which is the end.
I want to write a novel with this as the title.
The picture at right isn’t meant to encapsulate this proverb – it’s merely a strange horse-person image I found in an online image search.
I did something that haven’t done in many, many years: I read a book from front-to-back, linearly, in less than a week. I spent the greatest part of my unexpected day off, today, finishing it, having just started it on Monday morning – today was Korean Memorial Day, but with a late night at work last night and work bearing down on me again for tomorrow, I had nothing planned.
Furthermore, it was a novel.
Mostly, these days, I read history or philosophy. It’s been a very long time since I finished a novel or any piece of fiction (except some short stories) in less than half a year. Inevitably, at any given moment, I have maybe a dozen books “in progress,” and the majority of them never get finished at all in any conventional sense, because I read them the way some people surf the internet, essentially at random.
So I felt a little bit surprised, myself, with how I compulsively sat and paged my way through this 500-page book, not once looking ahead, not once skimming past a slow-moving section. This behavior may have had more to do with my circumstances: I continue to be painfully sick, thus not feeling healthy enough to go out exploring much; and I continue to feel a grinding dissatisfaction with my life as-it-is (e.g. with work and studies) that pushes me into a more widely-ranging and totalizing escapism than I’ve been wont to practice so much in recent years, maybe.
You’re wondering, what was the book that I read? I’m not even sure I can strongly recommend it. Superficially, it’s been characterized by others as a “steampunk fantasy western” which is basically a way to say it’s several genres mishmashed together. It had moments when it reminded me of something almost like one of the Latin American magic realists’ alternate worlds, or maybe those Nabokovian parallel Earths of lesser-known works like Ada or Pale Fire, but minus the utterly unequalable virtuosity of that old Russian’s prose. It’s definitely not to the level of anything like those. Further, I agree with those reviewers who felt that the ending was rushed and unsatisfying, but I’m willing to forgive it.
There’s a lot going on politically and philosophically, and the protagonists are mostly unlikable – yet nevertheless ambivalently complicated, which I find makes a book more compelling and interesting in some strange way. I find myself wanting to see them self-destruct, or find some epiphanic solution to their problem, or save the world despite themselves. Then when they mostly fail I get to feel good about my ability to have judged them accurately.
That makes it sound terrible. It wasn’t. I liked it. I may even look for the sequel, allegedly recently released.
Scientists have been taking pictures of hydrogen atoms. Or looking at them, anyway, using imaging technology – it’s not really photography at this level, but I assume these false color images are based on data being collected, which makes them pictures at some level of abstraction – they’re graphs of what the atoms and their electron clouds look like. Let’s not forget that a photograph is a photograph – a graph of light.
