Category: Banalities & Journaling

Caveat: Charisma, Authenticity, Control

Banalities & Journaling / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work

Last night, one of my advanced students stunned me with one of those overly frank and penetrating observations that seem far-too-frequent lately:  they said that I lacked "charisma."  For a moment, I almost thought I had misunderstood.  But it was too close to the mark (vis-a-vis my insecurities about my qualities as a teacher) to be a simple misunderstanding. 

Another person recently remarked that my blog wasn't the "real" Jared.  In essence, that it lacked authenticity, I guess.  And again, guilty as charged.

Last week, the thing that had me so frustrated was a remark by my boss Curt, when he said to me something to the effect that "If you can't control your class, you must not be a very good teacher."  And, by Korean cultural standards, there are definitely classes where I'm certain I'm perceived as not being in control.  Of course, he also said that if I couldn't make the clearly inadequate curriculum work in my classroom, then I wasn't trying hard enough.

I'm not even going to try to reason through the connections between these three observations.  I don't know that any of them are inaccurate.  I also can say, from the "inside," that they aren't the whole story, but that doesn't leave me feeling any less discouraged. 

Lastly, it was announced yesterday that RingGuAPoReomEoHagWon (my employers) was going to be folded into another language academy venture just acquired by the parent holding company.  And this other language academy has a stunningly bad reputation vis-a-vis quality and management, from the little I've heard or observed.  Nothing stays the same for long.  But given how I'm currently feeling, I can almost guarantee that when the moment comes to re-negotiate my contract, I'll opt out.

Life will go on.  What's next?

Caveat: Monks About

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / My Photos

I recently came to the realization there must be a Buddhist temple in my building. Sometimes I hear chanting-like noises, and at first I thought it was a neighbor’s television – but it really didn’t sound like a normal television program. And then I saw a sign near the back entrance to my building, and that sort of confirmed it – the swastika is the standard Korean symbol for “Buddhist establishment” used on signages and maps. Here is a picture of the back entrance to my building.
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Caveat: Humilific Fun

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / My Photos / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

“Humilific” is a real word – it describes a class of Korean words (mostly verb infixes and pronouns) that are used to show deference on the part of a speaker with respect to a listener.  They are somewhat the inversion of an honorific, which are linguistically more common, and which exalt the listener’s position with respect to the speaker.  A good example of a beginner’s level humilific is the use of 저(jeo) instead of 나(na) to mean “I” (first person singular).  When I call a student’s house, and I get a parent who I can’t expect to speak English, I have a phrase of badly pronounced Korean where I say “I am the English teacher” and I use this humilific form for the “I” in this sentence:  “저는…” (jeo-neun …).
Here is a picture of a building I saw in Suwon, on top of the hill I climbed there last month when I went there, just for kicks and to provide something interesting to look at.
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And for those who feel that the price of gas in the U.S. is out of control, consider this:
pictureThat’s 1913 Korean won per liter, which comes out to about $7.25 a gallon at recent exchange rates.  The fact is, American gasoline is highly subsidized, if only indirectly – not least by that astronomical Iraq war cost, but also by military aid to e.g. Saudi Arabia.
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Caveat: Californio

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

A speech by Pío de Jesús Pico, a mestizo businessman of Los Angeles who was the last governor of California when it was still part of Mexico: 

What are we to do then? Shall we remain supine, while these daring strangers are overrunning our fertile plains, and gradually outnumbering and displacing us? Shall these incursions go on unchecked, until we shall become strangers in our own land?

So he was what has been called a Californio – a pre-U.S.-annexation Californian of Spanish or mixed Native American and Spanish descent.  Pico actually had an African great grandmother, too, from what I understand.  I've always found the history of the Californios fascinating – it's a kind of forgotten group.

He took refuge in Baja California during the war, but afterward he returned to Los Angeles and made peace with the gringafication of the region, even running for city council at one point, and building a famous hotel.  But he died a pauper because of his extravagant lifestyle and gambling habits.

Caveat: Holy Cow… uh, Brains.

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

One change I'm beginning to notice since the election of the conservative and pro-American Lee Myung-Bak as president last December:  many who oppose the new president, one whatever grounds, incorporate a certain strident anti-Americanism into their discourse.  This is logical, as South Korea's relationship with the U.S. is (and has, historically, long been) an emotionally-loaded hot-button on both the left and right.

This is nowhere more visible than the current outcry over something that was supposed to be a routine aspect of moving forward on a free trade agreement with the U.S. that was part of the president's platform: the resumption of imports of American beef.  South Korea, like Japan, had placed a ban on American beef imports back in 2003 after the incident where an American cow had been detected with BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), more commonly called mad-cow disease. 

Now that the government has moved to remove the import ban, many Koreans are in a panic over the possibility of infected U.S. beef unrestrictedly entering their markets and diets.  It hasn't helped that there have recently been other issues with the U.S. beef supply (not directly related to mad-cow but definitely related to broader food-safety concerns), such as the authorities closing down that giant processor in California a few months back when it was discovered the place was allowing clearly sick cattle to proceed to slaughter, in contravention of law.

I'm of two minds regarding the Korean public's hue and cry over mad-cow.  On the one hand, I regret that political opposition to the president and his policies, often quite legitimate, is being anchored to an issue with such flimsy scientific foundations as BSE, which is not clearly understood by any scientific community in the world, and given that no incontrovertible case of transmission of "mad-cow" from meat to human has ever been documented in the U.S. (although 3 cases of "new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease" have been found via autopsy – but that's out of a population of 300 million, and it's never been shown that BSE is the only possible source of vCJD).

Nevertheless, I do believe strongly that there are other very strong health and environmental reasons for attempting to reduce consumption and better regulate the world's beef supply – and U.S. beef industry practices are central to this.  Factory farming of beef is neither environmentally sound, nor is it sustainable, and, likely, it will eventually be linked to all kinds of currently poorly-documented and little-understood health ills.

For these reasons, I tend to support the South Koreans' protests as being "right action for wrong reasons."  Which is pretty common in politics, in general, in my opinion.   Burning effigies of American cows – have at it!

Caveat: Eliminating the Middlemen in Government

Banalities & Journaling / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

We could just put the corporations in office, directly.  I read a sci-fi novel years ago that had such a scenario, where instead of electing an individual to the presidency, Americans voted in a corporation for a fixed term of office – essentially granting that business a contract to "run the country."   I wish I could remember the title or author.  The concept is too "loaded" (in a satirical sense?) to be effectively searched out in googleland – which is to say, every effort to describe the concept for the search engine only leads to infinities contemporary political and satirical commentary.

I was reminded of this by a clever and silly Onion video I found last night.

Caveat: Apophenism

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

Wikipedia says: "Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data."  I think this is one of the most salient features of human psychology, and a defining characteristic of postmodernity as well.  Or perhaps I'm just seeing patterns in random data?

One of the most amazing novels, Pornographia, by Witold Gombrowicz (a Polish-Argentine writer), deals with this phenomenon.  The somewhat embarrassing-to-cite title is in fact misleading – and part of the apophenic game that goes on throughout the whole novel, as it leads the reader into making all kinds of efforts to see meaning where none is to be found.  The title's relation to the novel is in fact the first apophenic movement of the novel, which continues in the same mode throughout.

Actually, the thing that made me think of apophenia  might seem surprising.  I was thinking about macroeconomics, the relationship between command economies and truly market-based ones, and all those gray areas in between.  This was prompted by a recent short article in The Economist (May 31st, 2008) that was explaining the recent government-mandated "restructuring" of the massive and fast-growing Chinese telecoms industry.  To quote the line from the article that got me thinking:  "Each time the government has arranged things to mirror the outcome produced by market forces in the West."

First, I thought, "how clever."  They get the best of both worlds (from their point of view):  command economy as well as the presumed efficiencies of market capitalism.  It's like if the proposed God of the ID (intelligent design) people had a little (or not-so-little) Darwinist laboratory running somewhere "on the side" where He (yes, He – we're talking IDers, right?) that can give Him ideas, and then He imitates it and makes it even "better." 

But then I started thinking.  First – just how random and/or market-driven is what happens to e.g. telecoms markets in the West?  And second, is it really proven that the patterns that emerge in terms of how markets are structured represent some kind of best-rises-to-the-top principle?  We presume that market economics is Darwinist and necessarily leads to efficiencies, but why would it?  Maybe the patterns we see in truly unconstrained markets (to the extent they are, in fact, unconstrained) are just manifestations of apophenia?

I think I want to add the title of "Apophenist" to some of my others.  It's a neologism, although google makes clear it won't be mine, as it's already out there.

Caveat: 도스타코스 (K-Mex?)

Banalities & Journaling / Food & Drink / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea / My Photos

I went into Seoul and shopped at my favorite bookstore – Kyobo, just north of Gangnam station (on the Green Line) in the massive Kyobo Tower, along Seochoro.  I bought some manga books, a Korean language grammar, and a novela by García Márquez entitled La hojarasca – yes they have Spanish language books at Kyobo, although the selection is only about a single shelf’s worth.
So… I was walking southward back toward the subway station, feeling pleased with my purchases, and lo! there was a taco and burrito joint.  Really.  In Seoul.  I took a picture of the sign:
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The place is called “Dos Tacos” (in Hangeul, 도스타코스 = doseutakoseu).  I went in and had a delicious veggie burrito.  It’s definitely Americanized-style Mexican food, passed through a slight but perceptible Korean filter, but it was a nice change.  I wonder if there’s a future in K-Mex cuisine?
I’ve noticed that my blog host seems to be inserting my picture uploads differently than before – it appears to be placing them inline rather than making thumbnails and linking them out.  I wonder if I like this better.  I’ll have to think about it, and try some things out.
Earlier, I had been wandering, a bit randomly as is my occasional wont, and I saw some flowers growing through a fence near a railroad right-of-way, also in the Gangnam area.  Here is a picture:
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Caveat: 뭥미?

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

A new bit of Korean youth slang: "뭥미?" (mweong-mi? said in a kind of dumb rising tone). It means something like "what the?" (as in "what the hell?") although you won't find it in a dictionary.  When I say it in the right situation to one of my classes, everyone collapses in riotous laughter.  But when I tried it out on Curt (my boss), he said "is that Korean?" Generation gap, y'know?

Caveat: Missing the Train to Trenton and Other Misfortunes

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream

I woke up from a series of stunningly unpleasant nightmares this morning.  I don't often have nightmares, actually.  Not sure what it's about.

First, I dreamed I was waiting for a train to Trenton.  I'm not sure why I needed to go to Trenton, although it's not purely random:  there was that year I lived with Michelle in Yardley, across the river from Trenton, and it was a year full of frustrations, as it was the summer I took my master's exams, which, despite my passing, were not what I had hoped for.  I couldn't figure out where I was, exactly, either.  The place I was in could have easily been somewhere in Korea.

Anyway, I was not near the platform and the train was pulling in.  I ran to catch the train, but I realized I had dropped an important list.  The list was written on a long piece of tissue, like from a roll of toilet paper.  Wind blew it under the train, and I couldn't bring myself to board the train without the list.  The train pulled away, and waiting on the other side of the tracks was a woman in a grey Oldsmobile – like Michelle's old, generic-looking (85?) Oldsmobile.  The woman scolded me for missing the train.  I realized the list was still blowing away in the wind, and I had no chance of catching it.
 
Then I was having a different dream.  Things were not clear at all – more a gestalt of images than any kind of comprehensible plot line.  I was in the mountains of Guatemala, trying to drive one of those recycled 60's-era school-buses they use for public transit there.  True to form, there was a Virgin Mary on the dashboard and blinking Christmas lights around the front windows.  But my passengers were a group of my students from the hagwon, and one of them was on some kind of Quest.  You know, the sort of thing that involves dragons and swords of power or stuff like that.

But we'd managed to misplace some of the other students, and we were looking for them.  And there was something in flames, and the road was bad and had donkeys in it, and women with bundles of coffee or something stumbled around in the periphery. And then I lost control of the bus and jumped away, only to watch it carom to the bottom of a hillside and knock over a tree.  And my students were all standing around me, crying.

And then I was having a different dream.  I was trying to find someone's house, driving my old 1965 VW Bug around something that was like a cross between Los Angeles and Seoul.  And I came to this really bad neighborhood. Maybe more like Mexico City at this point.  And I drove down this dead-end street that was very steep, downhill.  And I parked my Bug at the bottom, and got out to knock on the door of this house, but it was the wrong place.  And then I went to get into my Bug, but I remembered that the starter was broken (Which was common with that car), and that I would have to roll-start it.  But the problem was that I'd parked almost at the bottom of the hill, and it was a dead-end.

I decided to try to kind of roll it crossways at the end of the street, but as I started pushing it, it dawned on me that there was no barrier at the end of the street, just this gaping deep chasm.  And suddenly I realized I was going to roll my car right into the chasm.  And the brake wasn't working.  And stupidly, rather than just jump away, I thought of trying to get in front of the car to stop it.  And so the car pushed me right off the cliff, and I fell into the chasm with my car above and behind me, and I crashed at the bottom and was crushed by my VW, and I woke up breathing very fast and scared.

Caveat: The Franchise

Banalities & Journaling / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I am enfranchised.  Meaning, I can vote as a U.S. citizen, despite being, currently, a resident of South Korea.  But here's something interesting:  if I were living in Puerto Rico, instead of South Korea, I would lose my franchise – despite the fact that Puerto Rico is part of the U.S., while South Korea clearly isn't.   Why in the world is this the case? 

I mean… I know why it's the case – it's because of Puerto Rico's "special relationship" with the U.S. (i.e. the fact that basically it's a colony).  But all the same, there's more than a little bit of irony in the fact that by adding Puerto Rican residency to an otherwise enfranchised U.S. citizen causes that citizen to forfeit his or her franchise.  It's like the federal government grants the status of convicted felons, gratis, to the whole island.  Weird.

Caveat: The Ironies of Theoretical Physics

Banalities & Journaling / Science & SciFi

I'm reading a book by Lee Smolin, entitled The Trouble with Physics.  It's an interesting book – one of those layman's accounts of all kinds of weird and interesting things about what's going these days in the world of theoretical physics.  A "popularization" I guess it's called.  Partially, it's a rant (though a largely courteous one) against the domination of string theorists in the current world of physics academia.

Anyway, I re-learned something I remember learning before, and for some reason it struck me as incredibly funny.  The graviton (an as yet not-well-documented fundamental particle which is the "carrier" particle of gravitational force, much as a photon is a "carrier" for electromagnetism) is a necessarily massless particle.  That's right – the graviton is massless.  Isn't that… funny?

Caveat: 헐!

Banalities & Journaling / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I’m not sure exactly what it means, but I feel that I’ve come to understand its linguistic pragmatics quite well.  The word is “헐” (roughly pronounced as a long, drawn out “hol”).  I may be wrong, but I think that its literal meaning may be close to “broken” or “busted.”  But in terms of pragmatics, it seems to be used very similarly to the way youth culture in the U.S. uses the word “dude!” as a kind of general purpose exclamation of surprise, interest or dismay.   I’m trying to pronounce it authentically and use it appropriately, and a few times my students have been quite amazed and pleased at my having used it.  헐!
Today was a day of contrasts.
I had one extremely terrible, horrible class – a group of lower-level elementary students who just wouldn’t behave.  I finally had a loud, verbal tantrum and set them to copying sentences, I was sooo frustrated.  I almost never resort to these sorts of make-work “punishments” that are next best thing beating the kids with a stick (which is completely out of the question as far as I’m concerned, regardless of what my colleagues may do).
But I also had a fabulous class for the debate topic, with the lowest level middle-schoolers.  The debate question was “Are pets a good idea?”  –  fairly elementary question, but about right for their level.  And they all wanted to say “No, they’re not.”  So we improvised, and they had to debate against me – I would make a little speech, then one of them, then I would, then another, then I would, and another.  And I selected two of the students to be “judges” and placed a handicap on myself, since I allowed the judges to only score me up to 5 points, whereas they could score their peers up to 10 points.  It went very well, and the students won.  It was pretty cool, and I could tell they were having fun and actually learning something.
Then I had an interesting occurrence in my TP cohort, where I’ve been forced to give up the “debate program” in favor of a very dry, boring text that’s intended to prep them for the iBTOEFL (internet-based TOEFL) speaking section.   They were moaning and complaining about the boringness of the book, and I was trying rather lamely to defend it (and failing, as I really at heart agreed with them).  And then, after the class was over, they were standing around in the lobby area on between-class break and the six girls lined up in a row in front of the counter, and Pete was standing behind it, and I heard my name (Je-re-deu-seon-saeng-nim) and something about textbooks in Korean, and, lo and behold, they were holding a rebellion:  they were collectively requesting to Pete that their class with me be returned to the debate curriculum.  I couldn’t help grinning and I’m certain Pete saw my expression, and so I ran away and decided to let their complaints have their effect.  And maybe, just maybe… I’ll get to go back to teaching something that I want to be teaching them.  I’m excited.
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Caveat: And So On

Banalities & Journaling / Quotable

I recently found out that the new president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, is exactly one day older than I am.  This is very weird – the idea that someone my age is the president of something like Russia.  I suppose Obama is only a few years older, too, should he win the presidency in the US.  That's an odd thing, when world leaders start being people who are one's contemporaries.

Quote.

 "A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order." – Jean-Luc Godard

Caveat: Orange Moon Over Ilsan

Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

I was walking home and saw a very vivid orange moon.  I took this picture but it didn’t come out very well.  The moon was very bright and very orange.
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I had a class today where none of them did the homework.  This is normally a very devastating and difficult issue… but somehow, their refusal to work is of a different quality from previous experiences of this problem, as I actually enjoy these kids in class a lot, they can be funny, and are often engaged and interested during class.  They’re just unmotivated with respect to homework, I guess.
So, today, I got a clue that there might be some “reverse-status” peer pressure, too – i.e. pressure to do badly.  This is common with teenagers in the States, but not something I’ve seen much of here.  The reason I think this may be occurring with this group is because it turned out, well into the class, that one of the students had, in fact, done her homework, but had apparently been embarrassed to show it to me.  I saw she was copying an in-class exercise from a paper that suspiciously looked like the homework, and I got down in front of her and pulled the paper out, and she actually pulled back, before letting me see it.  Lo and behold, it was the homework, and it was actually very well done!  So all of her peers had zeros, and I gave Eunjeong a 100%.  And she seemed sincerely unhappy with this.  Very… odd.  Kinda sad.
Here is a picture of an oldish building (or rather, design-to-look-oldish) I saw in Seoul recently, coming down a steep hill on side street, south of the river.
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Caveat: Wandering in a straight line

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

I was listening to the U2 song "The Wanderer" just now – the one Johnny Cash sings vocals, and there's this vivid post-apocalyptic image of a man walking down an "old eight lane" highway.  I was thinking of that book I read a while back, The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  Then I was thinking of Wim Wenders' movie, Paris, Texas.  One of the greatest movies.  How it opens:  the amnesiac Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) walking along through the Texas desert, in a sort of mindless straight line, clearly disturbed, obsessed, broken.

I feel like that man sometimes.  Just walking through the world in a line, no longer with any purpose except to move forwards.  Wandering, in a straight line.

And so then I was thinking of other movies I love, and I thought of Fitzcarraldo (by Werner Herzog).  I looked it up on wikipedia, and discovered a wonderful quote by the director:  he described himself as a "conquistador of the useless" in discussing the fact that rather than use special effects, he actually moved a real, giant steamship over a hill in the making of the movie (which is about moving a giant river steamship over a hill in 1890's Peru).

Caveat: E is for Effort

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream / The Wonders of Work

Another thing that happened at that depressing teacher's day dinner last Thursday was when Grace said "E is for effort."  This was in response to someone (was is Curt?) asking her what she thought of my teaching.  It was said very positively, and she said some other positive things about me and other teachers, too, but upon reflection, I feel as if it's a classic example of being "damned through faint praise."

It's weird for me, actually.  In most everything I've ever attempted in life, if I get a less-than-stellar review, the qualification has generally been something on the order of "very talented, but not the best effort."  Consider, above all else, my fiasco in the PhD program at Penn.  But more recently – the unpleasantness in Long Beach as a database programmer and administrator, and now this teaching experiment – the reviews have been inverted:  "great effort, but, well, with respect to talent… no comment."  What does this mean?

On the one hand, it's because I keep pushing myself to try new challenges.  And, specifically, to try things where I know that I cannot fall back on my innate "Mr Professor" academic talents, such as administrative jobs and this very socially oriented teaching job.  But on the other hand, is it some change that comes with getting older?  Am I getting stupider?  The talent isn't there anymore?  So it's effort, or nothing. 

Regardless, one thing neither Grace (whom I most respect) nor any of my other colleagues take the time to say is:  great teacher.  And, of course, there are where my insecurities lie, too.  I was watching a cheesy Korean comedy in which a mom tells her daughter that teaching is easy – anyone who is a role model to others is a teacher.  I'm trying to figure out what this means – I have an intuition that it will help me to understand Pete's perspective regarding misplaced idealism, maybe.

I guess getting an E for Effort is better than being told I suck, across the board.  And I know that at least most of my colleagues like and respect me, at least at some level – there's the business of being nicknamed "professor" – just like at every other single job I've ever held.  But Grace's comment…  Pete's denunciations of my misplaced, inappropriate idealism (and I'm really not sure what this means, except that he's clearly perceived my excessive perfectionist tendencies and he feels – probably accurately – that these tendencies have no place in the world of hagwon teaching)…  these things have me singularly gloomy, this weekend.

It was deeply, darkly overcast and raining all day today.  A rich, textured, rainy sky, like the most gorgeous, reliably rainy August afternoons in Mexico City, although cooler than that.  I lazed around the apartment and tried to study my Korean.  I walked to the Homever store and, behold, there was Land-O-Lakes brand Pepper Jack Cheese for sale, imported from Minnesota.  I bought some, for the nostalgia of it. 

The nostalgic mood continued when I got back, and I listened to Cat Stevens for several hours.  That's a trip back in time, for sure.  I read a volume of the Deathnote manga (or manhwa as it's called here – long-format graphic novels) – these stories and related movies are so popular with teenagers here, I started reading them as an effort to have another useful basis to show some knowledge of their world and interests, but have found them appealing and interesting reads in their own right. 

Caveat: Teacher’s Day

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work

Thursday was "teacher's day."  I'm not sure what this means, and it wasn't really that serious an event.  But several of the students gave gifts, and a few of the parents brought things too, and after work we went out for 생선회 (saeng-seon-hoe – sashimi i.e. raw sliced fish), apparently an occasional tradition.

Several of the teachers got pretty drunk – that's a very common tradition on "after work outings" and one reason why I've been careful to remain a teetotaller here – that's the easiest way to avoid getting into embarrassing situations, as happened Thursday night, when Pete got pretty plastered and proceded to launch into a diatribe against me and my idealism.  I felt embarrassed on his behalf, and self-conscious on my own, and it sort of brought to the surface the major tension that has existed between us. 

There's no resolution.  I don't know what's going to happen.

Here's what one 4th grade student wrote in a little note to me for teacher's day – it was the only handwritten note I received, and it was more touching than all the little pieces of soap and canned coffees and cloth flowers:  "JARED  Hi!  I'm a Jinhyun Celebration teacher's day (Shiny Jinhyun)".

Caveat: The Quest for the Google-Killer

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable / Science & SciFi

In the world of internet search technologies, there has arisen a trend where people are constantly looking for the "google-killer" – the "next big thing" in search algorithms or interfaces that will finally vanquish google's market dominance.  There are problems with this quest, that render it somewhat unpredictable if not quixotic:  first of all, google is a moving target, meaning they are constantly innovating their algorithms and methodologies behind the scenes;  second, google, like many other large technology companies, has realized that brand-image is king, and as such, that marketing and design trump genuine innovation and genius (in this, they've learned well from Applecorp).

The technological problem of finding a better "search engine" is daunting, as we are right at the borders of AI (artificial intelligence).  Thus, the next step seems to require real breakthroughs in natural-language- (and/or web-meta-language-) processing and interpretation.  So-called "semantic webs" come into play – and somebody has to build these huge semantic databases, "tag" them appropriately (i.e. figure out how to automate the "tagging" process), and then spider through them effectively and rapidly. 

A recent offering seems to go in the right direction: powerset.com.  Right now, it's limited to a small, largely well-formed subset of the World Wide Web – namely, my own favorite haunts at wikipedia.   But its ability to make sense of my "natural English" questions and find appropriate articles is pretty amazing.  Try it out.

I'm listening to Jason Bentley on KCRW – he's playing The Black Ghosts' "Here It Comes Again." Great track… Jason Bentley rules.

Quote. 

"I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." – President U.S. Grant, on the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, in which he served as a decorated junior officer.

Caveat: Shades of Gray

Banalities & Journaling

I saw beautiful overcast skies today.  Not a slate, even color, but dozens of solid shades of gray, with sharp fractal boundaries between them, each distinct and quite visible.  A tortoiseshell sky recorded on black and white film.

I opened my 4 dollar umbrella (that I bought from a streetside vendor when I lost my pricier one a month or so ago) because I we feeling raindrops – but it didn't really rain as I walked to work.  I noticed on the umbrella there was written:  "it's a rainy day. "  Clever. 

I feel moody today. 

Caveat: Gnostic Dreams on Buddha’s Birthday

Banalities & Journaling / Less Banal Than Usual / Life is a Dream

A dream I had.

Out of the blue, I got an email (or was it a phone call?) from Oviedo.  The infamous Oviedo – the professor who'd sponsored me into the PhD program at Penn, and who'd then been so disappointing as an adviser, and who had devastated me so completely with his statement upon the conclusion of my qualifying exams by saying "frankly, we passed you because of what we expected from you, not because of what you actually did."  This tidbit of condescension had been the "last straw" that had caused me drop out of the program in 97.

So Oviedo wrote (or said?) "what are you doing?"  Not very complex or interesting communication, but given who was saying it, a loaded question.  I answered back (via email) that I was seriously "looking into" going back and completing the PhD, but in linguistics, not Spanish.  This was a lie, but I couldn't bear to say the truth.  In the dream, the truth wasn't at all clear, though – I wasn't necessarily working at what I'm working at in my waking life. 

So having sent the email, though, I felt guilty.  I communicated some with some other professors (ex professors) but none of them had "real" names.   They were "dreamland" ex professors, I guess.  One of them invited me over to London.  Somehow, in the dream, London was close by – but I needed mountain-climbing gear to get there.  So I went shopping for mountain-climbing gear, around Seoul.

I was on this side street, looking for a store that sold what I needed, and ran into Oviedo in person.  He seemed very sinister.  He wanted me to come with him, to visit some people "in the department."  I waffled, and made an excuse about there having been water damage at the school (not true, and how was this an excuse?).

I ended up with some other people – coworkers from Burbank, maybe.  I got a handwritten note from someone who claimed to be a "production designer" for a linguistics PhD program.  What the hell is that?  Like it's some kind of movie, not a graduate program.

I ended up on the same side street where I'd just evaded Oviedo, only to find myself in some kind of basement apartment, in a brownstone that sort of resembled the one on Kimbark at 62nd, that I'd lived in on Chicago's south side in 85 (although the apartment I'd lived in there had been on the 3rd floor, not the basement).  The apartment was unfurnished, but there were quite a few people there, kind of milling about like there was supposed to be a party, but nobody could find it or knew what was going on.

At this moment, "Dan" showed up.  "Dan" (always in quotation marks) is a recurring character from my dreams.  He doesn't recur often, and he does not seem to be related to, or derived from, any specific "real" individual, although in facial appearance he seems to resemble a composite of several guys I knew in high school who used to hang out with a guy named Dan – but the actual guy named Dan (who was palely blond and wide-eyed) plays no part in the appearance or personality of this dream "Dan."

The dream "Dan" is a dark-haired, powerful, swarthy, mysterious character.  He is a bit like a Hindu deity – he seems to be able to conjure additional limbs, eyes, and other body parts on demand.  Also like a deity, he is difficult to look at directly – a bit like an Escher painting, or a burning bush in the wilderness.  Once, in a very vivid dream I had in the early 80's, he was aboard a starship, and battled General Jaruzelski (the nefarious Polish communist dictator) in singular combat, and "Dan" was just a blur of rainbow light.

The last time he put in an appearance in one of my dreams was several years ago, at the least – and it had been only a vague one, a sort of flickering visitation from the edge of something else.  The last time he played a key role in a dream was when I first returned to L.A. from Alaska in 98.

Here, now, he was once again the star of the party.  I always feel apprehension and jealousy about "Dan."  And this was added to, in this instance, by the fact that he arrived with a beautiful woman at his side.  She looked like a Korean television drama star, very urbane and self-assured, with a sly smile.

But, the woman turned out to be the "production designer" who'd sent me the note earlier, and she came up to me immediately, making me feel very self-conscious, and offered to "have a look at those leaks" (the ones I'd used as an excuse when avoiding Oviedo earlier – how did she know about that?).  I was alarmed.

We walked over to the kitchen area of the apartment, and there were some decrepit cabinets with peeling white paint, and with evident water damage around the baseboards, which she pointed to expansively, while a crowd began to gather.  I felt weirdly embarrassed – somehow my lie turned out to be true, and this was just proof of the original lie.  Then "Dan" came over and said something like, "maybe it's time…."

The woman herself looked alarmed, now, and giving me a strange grimace, she opened one of the cabinets, revealing a sort of hidden passage, and climbed inside, pulling the door shut behind her.  "Dan" gave me a kind of sinister wink – and grew Oviedo's beard for just a split second – a sort of hollywoody CGI special effect, very scary, but typical "Dan" stuff.

"It's the aliens!" screamed someone at the party – one of the witnesses.  Maybe Joanne, from Burbank.

That's when I woke up, in a puddle of sunlight, much later than I normally wake up.  Covered in sweat.  My window was wide open, my bed is right below it – sometime during the night, I'd opened it up, but I didn't remember doing it.  It smells like summer.  Someone is banging on something down in the courtyard below my window.  I get up, get some toast to eat, put on water to heat for instant coffee.  I sit back down on my bed, feeling strange.  Today is Buddha's Birthday (a sorta holiday, observed here in Korea based on the lunar calendar).

Feeling cold, suddenly.  I shut the window, just as a cloud covers the sun.

Caveat: Cooking Shows

Banalities & Journaling

For some reason, I've got a cold again.  Cough cough, sneeze sneeze.

I watched Korean television today – there seemed to be this long-running marathon of some cooking show.  There were two guys:  an older, professorial type who seemed to be in charge, and a younger guy who often did slapsticky things and seemed to really enjoy actually eating the various things that they made.  It was cool to see them making this very European-looking meal including pasta with seafood, something with potatoes and cheese, etc., then digging in with chopsticks. 

Caveat: The Joys of Pronouns

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics

I have book I bought, called Survival Korean Vocabulary, by Bryan Park.  I like to browse through it when I have some minutes to kill, as it organizes over 6000 words thematically and provides very idiomatic-seeming sentences in which each word is used, so it's a good way to "surf" the language and try to acquire some new words, at least for passive recognition.

So in there I found the following quotable line, in one of the little "tip" boxes the author provides:  "Unlike in English, Koreans don't enjoy using pronouns."  I think this is true.  But it's a wonderful way to phrase the concept.   As if English speakers derive some frisson of pleasure from pronoun usage.

Caveat: 뺑끼

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

The word of the day:  뺑끼 (bbaeng-ggi).  I don't know what it means, exactly – my students seemed to feel it was important that I learn it – they emphasized the spelling of it and the emphatic pronunciation.  Sometimes I can't tell if they're pulling my leg, or messing with me in some way.  So I didn't just want to take their word for what it meant.

I couldn't find in the naver.com dictionary I use, nor was it in the dictionary in my phone.  I googled it, and found it in another online Korean dictionary called zKorean.  And also, it was in a long list of words titled:  "틀린 말 바른 말" (teul-lin mal ba-leun mal = "wrong talk right talk").  I'm assuming it's either slang or somehow not-quite-correct Korean.  The one dictionary said the meaning was "paint."  My students insisted the meaning was "lie" (as in, to tell a lie).  I could see how one meaning could shade into the other, in slang terms.

Caveat: Acts 3:15

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

Sometimes people spot me and hand me pre-prepared, hand-written Bible tracts, in English.  I think they must have a little reserve supply along with all their Korean language preaching stuff they carry around, just waiting for a Oegugin to come along to give it to.  So, in neat, meticulous handwriting, in photocopy, I have:  "You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead.  We are witnesses of this."

What should I do with this information?

Caveat: Holiday. Laziness. Baseball?

Banalities & Journaling

Today is a holiday.  After my trip to Suwon yesterday, I'm feeling unmotivated to go exploring today, especially given the vast crowds I'm bound to encounter out and about, anywhere I might go.  So I'm having a lazy day at home.  I cleaned my bathroom.  I've been reading an adolescent-lit book, a novel called Warriors by Erin Hunter – about feral cats living and fighting and stuff, sort of a la Watership Down.

I turned on my television, and found myself watching – yes, actually watching – a Korean baseball game.  Normally I don't watch sports on television.  Normally, I find baseball exceptionally boring.  Perhaps the combined factors of my own strange state of mind and the fact of baseball being played and announced in a foreign language so enthusiastically caught my fancy.  The teams playing were the Doosan Bears and LG Twins, both sharing the same home stadium at Jamsil, which was the 1988 Seoul Olympics baseball venue.   The pitcher for the Twins was a guy named Oxspring, from Australia, of all places.  I didn't know baseball players came from Australia.   I liked the fact that the name was hangeulized on the back of his uniform:  옥스프링 (ok-seu-peu-ring).

Footnote to the above:  I did go out, just now.  The "La Festa" (pronounced Ra-peh-suh-ta) shopping mall two blocks away was indeed crowded – it looked like Times Square, or the State Fair.  I didn't even bother trying to go into a store – there were sales like mad, and lines to go into popular ones.  Good to see everyone having so much fun.  It is strongly breezy, clear, sunny.

I saw a cat someone had tied to a string, sunning itself and licking a paw and washing its face, behind a cooler on the sidewalk from which a woman was selling icecream.  Six soldiers in freshly pressed, highly starched, bright green-brown-black-spotted fatigues – on leave for the holiday I expect – were chatting and smoking cigarettes nearby.  The cat watched them warily, and ignored the fact that I had stopped to look at it.

Caveat: 저는 오늘 수원에 갔어요

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea

Today I went to Suwon.  This once-upon-a-time walled city is now a bustling exurb of Seoul with almost a million inhabitants, and is the capital of the province of Gyeonggi, which is where I live.  Gyeonggi is a horseshoe that wraps around Seoul on all sides except the direct west, so although I live northwest of the city, Suwon is directly south of the city, and the subway journey took slightly over two hours.
It was a grayish, overcast day – perfect for exploring, as it was neither too hot nor too cold.  I got off at the Hwaseo subway station, and walked, mapless, east and south until I found the north end of the old city walls.  Then I climbed the hill called Paldal along the walls on the west side, and finally drifted down to the south gate and worked my way out to the train station (and the main Suwon subway station).  By then, it had started to drizzle.
I took the train back to Insadong and bought my weekly fix of magazines.  Then I came back to my humble abode, and prepared myself some delicious gimchibokkeumbap – the best I’ve made for myself so far.
I was surprised to learn today that it is possible to go much further than Suwon on the subway – you can actually go as far as Cheonan on a subway ticket. Cheonan is in the next province south from Gyeonggi, called Chungcheongnam (South Chungcheong, but actually mostly to the west of “North” Chungcheong).  This would be like being able to go to Richmond, VA on a DC metro ticket, or like being able to go to Madison, WI on the Chicago Ell.  And it means that you can traverse nearly a third of the country’s north-south length on the Seoul subway (looks like well over 100km on the map).  At this rate, they could eventually cover the whole country in a single subway system.  That would be cool.  I would ride it.
Here are a few pictures from Suwon.
A parapet.
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A wall.
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A path.
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The south gate.
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Caveat: Al menos una locura por año

Banalities & Journaling / Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Quotable

«Si yo no hiciera al menos una locura por año, me volvería loco».  This is a quote from from Vicente Huidobro's poem, "Altazor."  Roughly translated: "If I didn't do at least one crazy thing each year, I'd go crazy."  The only thing I might change, in that sentiment, is to increase the frequency – maybe one crazy thing per week would be better.

Huidobro was a truly magnificent poet, and one of my personal favorites.

Caveat: Blossomdrifts

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / My Photos / Quotable

I was walking to work and saw a large “drift” of pink tree blossoms on the sidewalk. Here is a picture.
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“If you want to have a clear conscience, reflect on the good feeling you have toward your fellow man, but for heaven’s sake don’t do anything about those feelings. Don’t get involved because once you do you’ll be faced with conflict and decisions and the continued possibility of making mistakes.” – Robert Trebor.
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Caveat: Speaking in Caves

Banalities & Journaling / Less Banal Than Usual / Life is a Dream / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

It was an unhealthful-feeling weekend. I had an upset stomach or something in that vein. So I didn’t do much.

I had a repeating dream, both Saturday night and again last night. It was one of those very peculiar, semi-abstract dreams, kind of like dreaming a short excerpt from a philosophical novel. The kind of dream I deserve, given the sorts of things I sometimes read or think about, I suppose. But it wasn’t terribly coherent. Prominent in the dream were references to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I won’t try to explain it here – you can browse wikipedia for an explanation.

I am not a Platonist. But revisiting the Allegory of the Cave is not something unexpected in the life of my mind – I first met Plato’s Allegory on the pages of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I first read when I was 15, and re-read my first year of college. The book had a profound influence on me – arguably, it has been one of the most influential books I have read.

Platonism and I have had other encounters, and many of my acquaintances and friends have been put off by my almost militant stance against it – especially given the fact that I’m careful to make clear I don’t even fully understand it. But it’s all part-and-parcel with my anti-transcendent take on epistemological topics more generally. Most notable, perhaps, is the unforgettable, inconclusive argument I had with Michelle over the “nature of reality,” which began fairly early in our relationship.

It was in the spring or summer of 94 – before I went off to Chile for 6 months that fall. We were driving back from Winnipeg, through a thunderstorm somewhere in North Dakota. We had been visiting Michelle’s friend Gerry, who was one of the few of Michelle’s friends for whom I felt a certain affinity – he had been a graduate student in Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, and Michelle had gotten to know him when he’d been a T.A. for a general education philosophy-type course she took. So, having been visiting with Gerry out on the Manitoba prairie over the weekend, philosophical topics were in the air.

Already, I knew Michelle was a hardcore Platonist. Though she wouldn’t have been comfortable using that term. Aside from not liking “labels” of that sort, anyway, she wasn’t really very comfortable with philosophical language, despite her strong inclinations to thinking about such things, and her capacious abstract intelligence.

So we argued. Plato versus Aristotle – roughly. It was, in some ways, one of the most painful, unrelenting arguments she and I ever had. It lasted the entire drive back to Minneapolis, and it never really ended after that – we were still having that same basic argument – different in vocabulary and tone, but substantially the same content – on the phone a week before she departed in 2000. It was quite central to her exit: that there was a place, beyond, where she better belonged. So much so, that in some weird sense, her suicide was an eerie sort of exclamation point – an irrefutable concluding remark – to the argument.

And Platonism inevitably comes up in a discussion of Spanish Golden Age literature. The Church was necessarily Platonist – one could argue that one of the great works in post-Plato Platonic philosophy is the New Testament, after all, and medieval and renaissance philosophers were committed to the relationship. But part of the Erasmian humanist philosophical current emerging in Europe in the proto-enlightenment that was nurturing in repressive, 17th century Spain, included a significant redicsovery of Aristotle. And for writers such as Cervantes, the struggle between the two currents is never far below the surface.

And dreams and cave allegories merge in a work such a Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño. In that vein, I’ve always been rather preoccupied by the coincidence of the names of the protagonists of Cervantes’ Persiles and Calderón’s drama: Sigismundo/Segismundo. Their namesake, a 6th century Burgundian king, seems to have been sainted by the Church mainly to acknowledge the dubious accomplishment of his having felt so guilty about murdering his son that he decided to retire to a monastery. Which makes him, in my thinking, perhaps the patron saint of feeling guilty?

So what was the dream? It didn’t really have a plot, although Michelle and Sigismundo both put in appearances (representing the excessively, woundingly real and excessively, woundingly fictional, respectively?). And I was in a cave. And some people were worshiping shadows, and speaking in tongues. Glossolalia. Or maybe, more likely, a xenoglossic manifestation, because I seemed to understand them, although they didn’t understand themselves or each other. Hmm, is this about my work situation, again? If so, it’s an ironic inversion of some kind.

I asked myself… does speaking in tongues, in a cave, constitute a special case of “speaking in caves”? Let’s call it grottolalia. This question, and answer, were actually a component internal to the dream, and both mornings I awoke with that neologism rolling awkwardly around in my head: grottolalia. A good Freudian could have a field day with this. But I’m strictly Deleuzional – post-Freudian, right?

The dream doesn’t seem terribly significant, does it? Not much plot, just a sort of ambient sense of philosophic unease. But the fact of its repetition is discomfitting.

My anti-transcendentalism remains central to my philosophy – of a piece with my unremittingly materialist view of the universe. But it’s perhaps more fragile now than it has been.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: Best Planet So Far

Banalities & Journaling

This planet is the best one I've been to. Really.

It was a stormy, cold rain when I left work this evening.  Like a Humboldt or Valdivia winter rain, ripping at the umbrella and scattering the sodden blossoms from shaking trees. 

A very long week at work. More later, I guess.  I'm tired.

Caveat: Allegations of Entertainment

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work

Or… Entertaining alligators.
I have expanded my alligator collection, much to the joy of my younger students. I guess it gives us something to talk about in class.
Here is the original alligator, waiting to chomp someone’s finger, and, much smaller, a little one kind of to the side closer to the computer.  That’s my desk at work.
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