Curt taught me this aphorism while we were in the waiting room the other day. It may be something associated or of frequent occurance in the military – which is essentially a universal experience for Korean males. The way Curt explained it, however, he implied it was Buddhist. It makes equal sense in both contexts.
avoid-FUTPART able not-have-PRESPART pain-be-IF rather enjoy-IMPER
If pain is unavoidable just enjoy [life].
Of course. To the best of my ability.
I said it to the doctor as we were concluding our interview. He said something to the effect of, “I never met a foreigner like you before.” I guess I was pleased by that, in a strange way.
Yesterday was what the South Koreans call 육이오 [yuk-i-o = six-two-five], which is to say, June 25th, which is the anniversary of the day North Korea launched its massive surprise invasion against the south, that led to the 3 year-long Korean War. It’s not really a holiday, but it’s a day of rememberance. A day to reflect on “national tragedy.”
For me, it was just a regular day. A morning, running errands, and an afternoon teaching four elementary classes and preparing some speaking test results.
Oh, and I had my cancer diagnosis confirmed and spent an hour discussing survivability statistics, neck and tongue reconstructive surgery, tracheotomies and the length and frequency of radiation therapies.
I guess the contrast feels striking to think about.
I’ve been really diligent about making video records of all my students’ speaking work, the last few months. There are more than 100 videos posted now at my other blog [UPDATE: this link still works in 2023 – very surprising!] – which is a work blog for my students and their parents, mostly – it’s not getting much use, yet, but it was meant to be a start of something.
One side effect of this is that I have some sort of video record of almost every teaching day. So for yesterday, I made and posted 3 videos.
First, with some younger ones where I was not their regular teacher, we did a “story reading” class. We made “books” (illustrations) and then they read the story. They hammed a lot for the camera, too. If you watch nothing else, watch the last 12 seconds of this video.
Next, I gave a speaking test to an earnest but low-intermediate level group of older elementary kids. They weren’t really that happy about it, as you can tell – but some of them are still getting used to my teaching style and I only see them once a week.
Last, I gave a debate speech test to my most advanced elementary kids. They really always impress me with their strong effort, research and thoughtfulness. These 3 minute speeches are completely from memory.
So… you’re not seeing me in these videos. But it’s nevertheless a kind of video record of a single day of my work. I guess I feel like it’s an affirmation that despite my emerging situation, I can hang on to a kind of normalcy.
I have about 20 students and former students who are friends on facebook. I knew that posting my health status there means that that information will become available to those students. Fortunately, I don’t think Curt is specifically uncomfortable with students knowing my status, but we both agreed it wouldn’t be something generally announced, either.
It didn’t take long, though, for my students to find out, since they are always checking their smartphones for any signs of novelty in their worlds.
Last night I got a kakao message from a student who had apparently seen my facebook posting. I’m actually impressed she took the time to figure out what my post was about, as she’s only an intermediate-level student. She deserves bonus credit just for that!
She made promises to always do her homework if I get healthy. Which is cute and charming and amazingly beautiful in its kidlike naivety. She concluded “Please comebake [come back] healthy teacher.” My heart is rended as I feel so happy from this sincere message.
How I’m perceived is so much different than how I perceive myself. Not just by students.
Last Sunday, my friend Peter told me that I was “one of the most consistently positive foreigners” he’d met in Korea. Really? He said my blog made me seem gloomier than my actual persona. Yet from the inside, if anything, it’s the opposite: my blog is more positive than my actual self. But I’ve remarked on that before – I guess I’m pretty good at keeping positive in social settings.
I awoke with incredible nausea this morning. I know it’s not anything directly related to my illness – I haven’t even started any treatment or serious medicine. It is, without a doubt, essentially a “gut level” emotional response to my emergent reality.
In maudlin moments, I find myself speculating that I have been some kind of “tragedy magnet” in this life.
This is ridiculous, of course. My life is perhaps more tragic than the lives of some others, if one wants to inspect it on those terms. But it is still so much less tragic than many, many lives. It’s just a life.
Humans, collectively, are perhaps better conceptualized as tragedy magnets than any individual. We perceive tragedy, and that allows us to draw tragedy around us like a proudly worn, tattered cloak.
13 years ago this week, my wife Michelle committed suicide. We were separated, but talk of divorce wasn’t at that moment on the table. It was a complicated time, and painful.
In my more self-punishing moments, I could imagine that I brought her suicide on, myself. Or that she and I, together, brought that tragedy on ourselves. After all, she and I chose the lives we were making… or failing to make.
But then life went on, after that.
In that same kind of self-punishing moment, I wonder how much of my current cancer (now that the doctors are calling it that without circumspection) is the result of “incorrect thinking.” I don’t mean that I’m conceptualizing this newly discovered illness as a kind of punishment for sins, because I don’t believe in sins – but rather, I’m talking about psychosomatic processes: a somatic expression of my broken psyche.
Of course there are senses in which this is true. There are senses, though, in which it is not true.
Scientifically – medically – psyche plays a role (via the way that stress impacts the body, if nothing more), but there are many other factors: genetics, pollution in the environment, bad habits of diet or tobacco (when I was much younger, if referring to me specifically) or lack of exercise, or even random stray cosmic rays zapping just the wrong molecules of DNA at just the wrong moment.
But cumulatively, my psyche has a job to do, too, and so I sometimes imagine I’ve brought this onto myself.
Should I just let it run its course? Is this creature meant to be fought?
Such a futile thing: to purchase a few more years, of uncertain quality, in exchange for a price of a vast amount of treasure and energy and willpower and yes, pain. I really don’t like pain.
Below, an utterly random and definitely unseasonal picture from my archive: the frozen Lake in Ilsan in January, 2009.
Those footprints in the snow on the frozen ice… There I go.
The doctor said: “You have cancer.” Well. No ambiguity, there.
It’s cancer of the tongue, possibly lymph, too. What stage? “It’s a gray area.” We can’t know what ‘stage’ until surgery – that will include exploratory surgery and excision of lymph area on left side of neck.
Surgery will be in 2 weeks. Depending on how bad things look once they’re inside, looking around, it could be a simple 2-hour surgery or up to a 7-hour long surgery, including tracheotomy and extensive reconstruction after excision. Just to be clear: they will be removing some portion of the back of my tongue, and putting what’s left of it back together again, regardless of the other aspects (i.e. lymph etc.).
I will miss at least one month of work. Because of my relative “youth,” prognosis is good as far as recovery of functionality: speaking, eating, tasting. Still, I’m not sure what kind of “speaking teacher” I’m going to be, after this. Curt is being very kind.
There’s some irony, to be a linguist with tongue cancer…
Following surgery and recovery, radiation is standard for this type of diagnosis. Six weeks of daily radiation, starting probably in August at some point.
Statistics: survival rate is about 65%.
Insurance: with Korean National Health Insurance my copay will not exceed 5%. At that, probably still in the thousands of dollars.
Work: I need to find a short-term (one or two month) replacement. I will remain an employee of KarmaPlus.
Later, I can wax philosophical or journalistic or literary.
I’ve decided to do a series of Korean tongue-twisters, in the same way I have been doing aphorisms and proverbs.
저기 가는 상장사가 헌 상장사냐 새 상장사냐?
저기 가는 상장사가
jeo·gi ga·neun sang·jang·sa·ga
There go-PRESPART table-merchant-SUBJ
헌 상장사냐 새 상장사냐
heon sang·jang·sa·nya sae sang·jang·sa·nya
old table-merchant-OR new table-merchant-OR
Is that table-merchant there an old table-merchant or a new table-merchant?
Actually, I have zero percent confidence about the choice of “table” as the meaning for 상. My tutor and I figured the merchant was selling something, and 상 has a lot of possible meanings – assuming it’s a merchant.
The fact that it stumped a native speaker means I don’t feel bad about this. Table merchant makes some sense – maybe not nowadays, but I can easily imagine in olden times a man with some of Korea’s little wooden tables strapped to his back, going from town to town selling them at the 5-day markets.
Here’s my little table at right, that I bought from a streetside table merchant (or was it a more generalized housewares vendor?) in Suwon in 2010. I have no idea if he was an old table merchant or a new one.
I feel a sort of apprehension: tomorrow I return to get the results of my biopsy and probably get a CT scan. I received a text message this morning on my phone from the hospital:
WAY JARED 님의 정확한 조직 검사진단을 위하여 검사가 추가 시행될 예정입니다.
검사결과는 다음 외래 내원시 수납 후 확인하실 수 있습니다. – 국립암센터-
본 검사는 6월 19일 접수한 조직으로 검사가 진행되오니 내원하실 필요는 없습니다.
Basically, it’s telling me that they want to do additional “diagnostic tests” (검사진단) and that it can be done when I come in for my next appointment (which is tomorrow morning). I don’t think this is really very encouraging, though I suppose I could conclude that it means “they don’t really know” which is better than “they’re certain.”
I have been trying to write what are called Sapphic stanzas – an originally Greek poetic form that has a long history of adaptation in English, including efforts by Hardy, Kipling and Ginsberg.
I’m not sure about the typical thematics – sapphics seem to be used for odes and narrative poetry. They are in any event considered difficult and ill-fitted to natural English rhythms, better suited to the rolling polysyllables of Greek or Latin.
Still, I think I got the metics right in this little single stanza. I like it well enough to share it, anyhow, although it’s in the category of a sketch rather than a completed work. (Poem #13 on new numbering scheme)
"A Moment."
Clouds that parse the sky with their fractal, cold hands;
Trees held captive struggling against the strong earth,
Branches dividing, air is displaced with green thrusts:
only a moment.
Something in the metrical pattern strikes me as reminiscent of Robinson Jeffers. I suppose given his background in classics, his poetry was full of such meters as these. Here are two short excerpts of his poetry, which share a theme, which is not the theme of my poem above. These are also clearly not sapphics – indeed, I didn’t really invest the energy to figure out what they might be, but regardless there’s clearly something “classical” in the metrics.
Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this thing comes near us again I am finding it hard To praise you with a whole heart. – “Contemplation of The Sword” (1938)
I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings. – “Apology for Bad Dreams” (1927)
The picture (found online) is of of Jeffers’ “Tor House” which he built by hand (in the 1920’s and 30’s) near Carmel, California.
First, my friend Peter and I met at Anguk and did some book shopping. Then we met my other friend Seungbae. Seungbae has a car, such as it is: he described his decrepit yellow van to Peter as his “Korean West Virginia Van” by which he meant to describe its origins in the Hantuckian southwest of the peninsula. It’s a kind of running bit of humor he’s had with me.
“Let’s drive to Mexico,” he announced.
So we did.
We went to Pyeongtaek, which is Korea’s Mexico. By which I mean, only, that in Pyeongtaek there is an authentic Mexican restaurant run by authentic Mexicans. Seungbae and I spoke Spanish with the owner. I’ve visited this place before, with this friend (a few years ago), but it was the first time for my other friend Peter.
I regretted not being able to enjoy spicy food, currently, but I had some bland but good tacos al pastor, and drank horchata.
Actually, we spent most of the afternoon there, talking. The part of the afternoon not spent there, talking, were mostly spent driving around. Seungbae has a very improvisational style of vehicular navigation that leads to a lot scenic detours.
Returning to north Seoul at 6 pm or so, I was struck by how smoggy it was looking. The view of the haze-shrouded highrises from the Gyeongbu expressway approaching Gangnam from the south made me feel like I was on the 405 in L.A.
Seungbae dropped us off at the Express Bus terminal in Gangnam, because it conveniently is located at the intersection of the two subway lines we needed – Peter to go home to Bucheon and me to go home to Ilsan.
After riding the subway home (another hour), I emerged at Juyeop right after dark, to capture the orangy supermoon rising over Jungangno. Why does an orangy supermoon look so small and unsuper in this photo? It was spectuclar in real life.
Here is the book I bought earlier that I’m most intrigued by: a Korean and English dictionary of Buddhist Terms.
[Update 2013-06-26: it turns out my friend Peter blogged this day, too. I think it’s novel enough to make a note of it here – it’s a chance for someone to see two different people blogging the exact same experience.]
I remember it vividly. My heart was racing and I heard it in my ears, and then it stopped. It was stopped a long time – it felt like several minutes but I don't know how long it really was.
I experienced the "seeing the white light up a tunnel," but even as it was happening I felt that I understood it scientifically, and so I contemplated its neurophysiology: the back of my brain was losing oxygen and shutting down first, and that is the center of the visual field, hence as the neurons shut off the visual field percept shifts to "nothing" – i.e. whiteness – and this whiteness spreads as the area of oxygen-deprived neurons expands.
I thought about many things. I considered becoming religious and rejected it, in that moment. I replayed memories, bits of my life. I had a sort of debate with myself – I can't say if I won or lost that debate. Both, maybe.
And then I heard a voice – my own voice – which said: "you're not done yet." My heart started again. I had the distinct impression that I had become a ghost – an idea which recurs to me occasionally even through the present day.
This episode is not invented or fictionalized in any way. There are a lot of surrounding circumstances that I'm less willing to share so transparently about that point in my life, but the core near-death experience was real and transformational.
From that time until now I have been living on borrowed time: "my bonus round."
I had to go to work early, because of an open house for parents. Not a lot of parents came, but some. Still, I never have much to do at these things – mostly it’s homeroom teachers meeting with them, after the director and sub-director make their talks. But they like to have me available, in the event some parent has a question or a complaint or a request, and I’m genuinely happy to be available for that – I sometimes enjoy playing a guessing game by myself, to figure out who is who’s parent, matching faces I’m seeing to the familiar faces of my students in my mind.
After this, we had a hweh-shik (회식, normally romanized as hoe-sik but that’s one case where the revised romanization is pretty inadequate to pronunciation and so I’m willing to break the rules) – the typical Korean business lunch or dinner. Hweh-shik lunches are more fun for me than hweh-shik dinners, normally, because less alcohol is involved.
We went to 보양 삼계탕 [boyang samgyetang], a fairly upscale samgyetang joint on the west side of Ilsan, with a really lovely view down a tree-lined boulevard of the Kintex convention center, in one direction, and the Goyang city stadium in another direction.
I normally really like samgyetang, which is a kind of whole-chicken-in-rice-and-ginseng-soup concoction, but both because of the sheer volume of it and the complicated spices and dismemberment of it, I really didn’t want samgyetang (remember that currently, because of my illness, eating is painful, for me). I’ve been preferring to stick to soft, squishy, somewhat bland foods, lately. I special-ordered some black sesame seed rice porridge, 흑깨죽, which was earthy and delicious. I also drank a cupful of ginseng liqueur by accident, thinking it was tea. I almost choked, and who knows how that will interact with my percocet. I survived and felt OK afterward.
Then it was back to work for a long afternoon and evening of mostly correcting things at my desk and playing around with various ambitious curriculum idea documents on my computer, which may never go anywhere but they help me to feel useful. I don’t have a dense teaching load on Fridays even on the normal schedule, and with the current test-prep schedule for the middle-schoolers (for first semester pre-summer vacaction final exams), I have even less.
I lurked at my cramped desk in the crowded staffroom and drank a lot of 보이차 [bo-i-cha = puer tea], of the teabag variety as opposed to the loose-leaf kind I like to make for myself at home. I cleaned my computer files. Next week will be plenty busy, because one of my coworkers is going on a short vacation and so I will be filling in quite a few of his classes. So I decided to just not be too stressed about not having a lot to do this day.
During my last class, I made the students do their homework during class. They don’t like this – but that’s my “punishment” when they all come to class with incomplete homework. So we were looking at a question to the tune of “Do you do volunteer work?” that was in their workbooks. One boy, Sangjin, wrote, “I don’t do this work.” That was his entire answer – it was supposed to be a short paragraph.
I asked him about it.
“I don’t do this work,” he insisted, refusing to elaborate.
“You’re not a volunteer, ever?”
“Yes.” Korean students inevitably say “yes” to English negative questions where native speakers might be inclined to say “no” or try to be less ambiguous by saying “right” or “correct.”
“It’s because you have a cold heart,” I teased.
“Oh no. I’m lazy.”
He grinned and made one of those silly two-hands-cupped-together-in-the-shape-of-a-heart gestures popularized by Korean celebrities.
When I was back in the staff room, my collegue Kwon-saem (the middle school division bujang, a Buddha-like figure who spends long periods of time playing Windows Solitaire at his desk) came over and stuck the text of a poem or song in front of me.
“Can you translate this?” he asked, good-naturedly.
It was in Italian.
“Maybe,” I shrugged. “Do you want me to?” I grabbed it back from him and handily translated the first two lines on the fly. Italian can be like that, for me, given my strong backgrounds in Spanish
and French and Romance Philology.
He was surprised – I wondered if he was testing me or if he had been joking. He laughed. “You are genius,” he surmised, in his laconic way.
I was pleased, and he and I spent about 20 minutes slapping together a translation into English using the googletranslate, which he then worked on rendering, in turn, into Korean. I never did figure out why he was working on it – it’s an Italian pop song from the 1970’s.
My mood was swinging up and down a lot, today. I’m sure it’s partly this feeling that life is being turned upside down while continuing through the same rhythms and habits as always. But I had a sort of breakthrough moment while walking home, that maybe it’s the percocet, too. It’s a pretty strong, opiate-derived painkiller (and believe me, I’ve been needing it).
What I’m listening to right now.
Matia Bazar, “Stasera Che Sera.”
Lyrics:
Stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me poi respirare il profumo del mare mentre dal vento tu ti lasci cullare fare il signore o il mendicante non scordarsi mai pero’ di essere anche amante stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me stringere il sole nelle mie mani toglierti i raggi come ad un albero i rami per circondare il tuo viso in calore non per fare un petalo intorno al suo fiore Na a ria na na na ria na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na a stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me spegnere il germe del nostro gioco sazi d’amore ma contenti di poco chiedere all’aria i suoi tesori e cosi’ nel chiuso puoi sentirti sempre fuori stasera “stasera” che sera “che sera” restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me fare il conteggio dei giorni passati sapere adesso che non sono sciupati e che tu sei sempre viva e presente ora come allora tu sei mia nella mia mente Na a ria na na na ria na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na a stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me…
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.
– D.H. Lawrence
A friend quoted this to me some time a few years back. I finally have got round to posting it.
I saw an article (hattip to Sullydish) that talks about some study that shows that legoguy facial expressions have been getting angrier over time. This is … interesting, and utterly plausible. I would not place myself in the camp that views this as some kind of reflection of our society’s broad decline or somesuch – at worst, I think it merely reflects Lego Corporation’s growing cynicism vis-a-vis the global toy market and their role in popular culture.
I have always loved Legos. I’m too old to have played directly with Lego minifigures myself as a child. My own legos were simpler than what the toy series later became. But the minifigures came out in time for my younger brother to have had many of them, and later, my stepson had a large collection, too.
At one point, I invented some very elaborate stories about a Lego civilization called Legotopia with my stepson. I even wrote some of them down in the mid 1990’s, but a lot of those things I wrote down during that period were lost because of the disasterous Hard Drive Failure of 1998.
I recall that I had drawn a kind of map of Legotopia, which included a large city called Legoville in the center, and then various surrounding kingdoms and lands, such as a County of Towers (lots of Lego towers and a medieval theme), a Duchy of Roses (lots of pastoral Lego creations on the old Belleville theme), as well as a kind of “wild west” called Castle Pass. It was all more of a universe-creation project than it was a germ of a novel or series of short stories.
I always vividly imagined these lands and places populated by seething masses of undifferentiated “legoguys” with their quotidian struggles and triumphs. I’ve always called them “legoguys” (even the “girls” are called legoguys) – I’m not sure if the original coinage is mine or my brother’s. I made an emperor in Legotopia who went by the moniker of Legoguy XVII – as a proper name, appropriate to the leader of their grand civilization. He was the most generic-looking legoguy I could find in my stepson’s collection.
I still have a (very small) collection of Legos, which I have on occasion shared with some of my students (like the large Lego alligator that lives on my desk at work). Informal survey: I currently own 6 legoguys; two of them are angry. The picture I snapped just now, above right, shows one of them, battling a legogator.
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..
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 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]
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
I sometimes go and look at a website called feedjit, which allows me to “watch” people as they visit my blog’s web address (i.e. raggedsign.blogs.com [UPDATE: this address is no longer the valid address of my blog, effective late 2018]). It can be interesting to see what brings people to my blog – what sorts of google searches or links they’re following.
I’m honestly not sure why I’m interested in this – perhaps it’s merely a weird sort of vanity, like my students who keep checking to see if their friends have sent them messages on their phone. Certainly, it’s not that I’m interested in “optimizing” my blog or getting more visitors – that’s not at all what this blog is about. So I’m not actually doing anything with the information revealed. I don’t actually have a clue as to what this blog is about.
Well this morning, at just before noon, I saw something truly weird: a North Korean visited my blog. I did a screenshot, unable to believe it was true. Here it is.
I noticed the person probably typed into google something in English combined with the Korean proverb “망건 쓰자 파장된다,” which I wrote about in a blog entry from last year in February. That’s the specific blog entry that google sent them to.
I wonder what the North Korean is looking for? I doubt very much he or she found it on my blog. It’s possible it’s not even really North Korea – it could be a spoofed web address being produced by some proxy server with a strange sense of humor. I don’t know enough about how that stuff works to judge. But nevertheless I feel like this is some weird momentous milestone in the blogular history.
El otro día fuí a la gran librería Kyobomungo en Gangnam, donde había pedido un libro hace unas semanas y que por fin había llegado. Cuando voy a esa librería me gusta echar un ojo sobre su colección de libros en español – a veces me encuentro con alguna novedad inesperada.
Así fue esta vez. Descubrí en un rincón una media docena de libros para niños, y espontáneamente decidí comprar uno. Me gusta la literatura infántil, aunque últimamente he dejado mi costumbre de intentar leer libros para niños en coreano.
De todos modos, el libro que compré me era algo entretenido. Se titula El maravilloso puente de mi hermano, por la autora brasileña Ana Maria Machado. Pues es traducido, pero traducir de portugués al español no es algo tan insólito.
Me gusta el gato negro de cara blanca que le sigue al niño en sus exploraciones.
