All languages have onomatopoeia: words like “woof woof” (a dog barking), or “whirr” (a spinning thing or a dragonfly), etc. But Korean (and apparently Japanese, too) possesses an abundant class of words known as phenomimes and psychomimes. These are words that use “sound symbolism” (q.v. in wikipedia) to represent concepts that aren’t, per se, auditory, but in a symbolic way. Most of the Korean ones include a great deal of reduplication and vowel harmony – in fact, it could be argued that these are actually some fossilized productive reduplicative semantic feature of proto-Korean, and not really “phenomimes” or “psychomimes” at all – it’s all in the definition of those concepts, I guess. Most of them are adverbial, in syntactic terms.
I love these things. They’re one of the reasons the Korean language is magical, for me.
Some examples, from my “bible” (Korean Grammar for International Learners, by Ihm Ho Bin et al.):
반짝반짝 [ban-jjak-ban-jjak] sparklingly
슬슬 [seul-seul] gently
주렁주렁 [ju-reong-ju-reong] richly, with fullness
흔들흔들 [heun-deul-heun-deul] shakily
옹기종기 [ong-gi-jong-gi] closely together
방긋방긋 [bang-geut-bang-geut] broadly [as in a smile]
드르르 [deu-reu-reu] excellently, smoothly
부둑부둑 [bu-dok-bu-dok] damp-dry, a bit damp mostly dry
[Update: I have blogged about this topic again with many more examples, 2012-06-04 and 2012-10-19. I have also modified this original post somewhat since it’s one of the number one draws of my blog from the broader internet, when people google “phenomimes” and “psychomimes” with “korean”, and I have been crosslinked, too.]
[Update 2 (2015-10-08): I decided to create a consolidated list of examples, which I can update periodically.]
Category: Less Banal Than Usual
Caveat: up to page 9 – empirical syntax?
Twice before, I’ve referenced my efforts to read a recently-acquired book entitled Understanding Minimalism (Hornstein, et al.). In my last entry about it, I’d made it up to page 5, and I was making some initial complaints.
Now I’ve progressed to page 9, and I’m regaining some positivity about why it is I decided to try to undertake reading this book. I have long felt that the “traditional” Chomskyan approach to syntax theory is epistemologically naive. It relies far too much on a sort of ideologically blinkered introspection with respect to the “syntactic evidence,” and thus disregards the real linguistic production that’s out there in the “real world” – with all its strange, un-sentence-like constructions, incompletions, ellipses, mispronunciations (or typos, in text-based communication), etc., ad nauseum.
All these things are fully understandable, and “typical,” unsophisticated native-speakers rarely are able to enunciate, much less elucidate, judgments of “grammaticality” such as abound in most linguists’ efforts at syntactic theory (as I discover, almost daily, when trying to get Koreans to help me understand their language, in my own efforts to acquire it).
So this “minimalist project” is appealing to me because it promises a return to empiricism. Here is a quote from page 9, spanning the end of one paragraph and the beginning of another, that expresses something I’ve wished I could do myself, before (if I was actually a linguist and not just a dilettante):
…one minimalist project would be to show that all levels other than LF [Logical Form = representation of meaning in the brain] and PF [Phonological/Phonetic Form = actual spoken language passing through the air] can be dispensed with, without empirical prejudice. More concretely, in the context of a GB [Government and Binding]-style theory, for example, this would amount to showing that D-Structure (DS) and S-Structure (SS) [DS and SS are components of “traditional” Chomskyan syntax, e.g. Government and Binding and antecedent theories] are in principle eliminable without any empirical loss.
I remain suspicious about what level of empiricism will be achieved – there still is a reliance on “introspective judgments of grammaticality” which I always have disliked. And worse, there is the mere fact of labeling the “internal representation” end of any linguistic faculty as a “Logical Form.” The problem with this conception is that it flies in the face of most of what we understand from neurology or empirical psychology: human brains don’t do much logic, on the inside. “Logic” such as is used in LF engines in syntactic theory is artificial, external, mathematicized, philosophical. It’s precious Montague semantics and beloved lambda calculus. Such things may have some “real” correlates in neuronal/synaptic architecture, but I don’t think we’re going to make much progress with the “brain as logic engine” model – if we were going to make such progress, we’d also be making progress with artificial intelligence (which is simply the inversion: “logic engine as brain”) – which we’re most definitely not.
I would prefer a more neutral conception of the “internal representation,” that doesn’t betray such preconceptions – as the term “Logical Form” does – about how it might actually work. Semantics strikes me as by far the shakiest of the foundations of contemporary linguistic theory – we really don’t seem to know a lot about how semantics work.
What is meaning? In passing, I will return to pointing at Taylor’s important work, Linguistic Categorization – which addresses the important intersection between semantics and what one might call meta-syntax – what do we really know (as unreflective speakers, not as epistemologically well-grounded linguists) about the grammaticality of what we are saying?
Caveat: A Single Day’s Journal [less incomplete than before]
I don’t love every incidental of my job. I fear and distrust the caricature of bureaucratic malevolence that is my vice principal. My principal seems to judge his staff largely on the basis of their skill as volleyball players, rather than on their competence as teachers – and because of this, I rate as a liability rather than as an asset, in his view of the school organization. The administrative office has epically bungled my housing situation, and I have consequently endured interminable and yet untellable travails of minor expense and mild inconvenience. Some of my coworkers are either so shy or so xenophobic that I dread interacting with them. And of course, the Korean Communication Taboo frequently imposes its unexpected and unforeseeable frustrations.
Oh, yesterday, I had a really difficult day. I ended up grumpy and frustrated. The thing is… I’ve been having some really good days, and feeling really good about my job, lately. So yesterday was frustrating because it felt like a major loss of progress, a major step backwards. The sixth graders during the regular morning classes were being rude, rowdy, and there was nothing my coteacher or I could do to bring things back under control. I felt like a lot of the problem was that my coteacher and I don’t know how to “use” each other effectively, and I blame myself and my lack of experience for that.
So. Hard day.
Yet, despite these issues, and despite yesterday, the fact is that my “on the ground” work, in the classroom, has been going simply great. I am not a perfect teacher, I’m sure. I’m probably deficient in many ways, that I can’t even perceive. But I have fun. Even yesterday, I had great fun with my afterschool classes, where I have a lot of autonomy and control.
Mostly, I really like my job, in a sincere and deep-felt way, and I derive immense satisfaction from my interactions with the children and even many of my coworkers.
On this most recent past Monday, for some reason, I felt this even more strongly than usual. As I arrived home after a tiring yet overall satisfying day, I had this weird, unwonted, utterly guileless thought: “I like my job.” The several days since then haven’t gone so smoothly, but regardless – perhaps this is a kind of pep-talk to myself – I’ve decided to make a little journal of Monday’s minutiae, as a record of a “typical” good day in my current career.
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[Monday, October 18, 2010]
I awoke at 5:20, roughly. I have an alarm set, always, but most days, I wake up before the alarm. I wake up very slowly. I think about things. I doze, and let the “snooze” feature of my alarm earn its keep. Finally, at about 5:45, I get up, turn on the electric kettle, and get out some instant coffee. I love brewed coffee, but I’m a deeply lazy person, especially first thing in the morning, and I love convenience much more than brewed coffee. For that reason, I use instant coffee. I need the caffeine more than any kind of spectacular taste.
I put on something warmer to wear. I still keep my window wide open 24/7, and the nights, these days, are cool. Under my cover, I don’t need extra clothing, but up and about, I feel the slight chill. I open my little netbook computer, and begin to wonder what I will write in the blog. I write some fragments of dreams in my more private journal, and I open a text file of a story-in-progress, in the off chance that I’ll think of what to put next. Not likely, but it’s perhaps good to be optimistic, right?
I surf to my most typical websites: LA Times, The Atlantic magazine, Facebook. What’s happening in the world? I find an article in a blog, that interests me, and follow links to something new. I record notes in my “websurfing journal” – mostly just pasting links with one- or two- word observations or snippets of thought. I am an unrequited but unrepentant scholar, at heart.
I drink some coffee. This morning, I decide to have toast for breakfast, with my approximately four cups of coffee. I generally have either toast, or, if I’ve got left over rice, I’ll have a Korean breakfast of rice and kimchi.
I finally choose something to put into my blog – many times, I have things partially or even completely “pre-written” in my journal, and I just copy and paste them into the blog. Other times, I just write it out, right at the moment, in the box on the administrative website. This morning, I do the latter, pasting in a long quote from a blog site I have open.
I motivate myself, finally, and jump up. I brush my teeth, use the bathroom, shave, shower, get dressed. Pretty fast. As usual, I’ve put off motivating until the last possible moment. I rush out the door at 7:30. I’d committed myself to getting to school early, this morning, because there is a lesson plan I promised my coteacher that I would to put together for our 6-2 class (6-2 means 6th grade, 2nd classroom). I’m really running rather late, this morning. I live just under 2 km from the bus terminal. I have to jog the whole way, to make it on time. Casually, I can walk the distance in about 16 minutes. Marching “quick time,” I can make it in 12, which is my normal pace. Today, I made it in 8 minutes. So, I don’t miss the 7:40 bus. Oh well… I needed the exercise.
I listen to my mp3 player on the bus. I’ve got a folder with some tracks by Brit alterna band, Muse, looping. I’m particularly fixated on a track called “Map of the Problematique” (which sounds like the name of a chapter in a book of contemporary literary criticism). I look out the window at the stunningly beautiful although unspectacular, rural scenery of my world. I read random pages in my Korean dictionary. I’m not sure this really helps me that much, but I’ve always been a compulsive consumer of reference materials, and at least this way, I’m staying topical vis-a-vis my desire to improve my Korean.
I arrive at work at around 8:15, after walking the just-under-one-kilometer length of Hongnong’s “high street”, from the town’s bus terminal.
I step into the still silent halls of the school, I switch out of my street shoes and into my one dollar plastic sandals, greet the school caretaker, and go down to the new English classroom. I hate this new English classroom: it is stark and uninteresting, when viewed from a child’s eye, and it fails to take into account myriad details of the sorts of things real teachers actually need or use: no bulletin boards, bland and generic decoration such as might be found in a high-end travel agency, poorly configured storage space with unused bookshelves but zero closets. Numerous gadgets, but no rainbows. It is the embodiment of that philosophy of education that holds that technology and military-style organization can make up for poor leadership and a lack of teaching skill and a lack of teaching “heart.” Which isn’t to say I believe my coteachers or myself lack teaching skill or “heart”.. .but I often suspect that the school’s administration feels this way.
I put together a lesson plan for the 6-2 class that involves a gameshow concept that I’ve been riffing on lately. I’ve been using it in some of my afterschool classes: give an “answer,” Jeopardy-style, and wait for the kids to come up with a question. Pay out “cash” (my ubiquitous play money) for good “questions.” The kids seem to like it, and the 6-2 class is exceptional, in that they’re much better behaved than the other two sixth grade classes, and therefore my coteacher and I had agreed that they “deserved” something more fun.
School starts, and we go to the 6-1 class first. 6-1 is not the class of angels that 6-2 is. There are rowdy elements, but it’s not the “Welcome Back Kotter” basket case of academic rejects that 6-3 is, either. It’s the “middle” group. We have a hard but treadmill-like class, reviewing the ridiculous memorization material that the county education office mandates for the English curriculum. I’m not philosophically opposed to memorization, per se, but the stuff put out by the education office is so devoid of context, and so full of mistakes and unnatural, non-native-speaker-style language, that it almost defeats its own purpose. I try to keep my criticisms of this to myself, but it can tend to sap one’s enthusiasm, when required to focus so much on such poor curriculum.
Then, the 6-2 class is – lo and behold – canceled. This is the way things go, when working in Korea. Last minute changes with no warning, for no clear reason. There’s an upcoming sixth grade assembly, and the 6-2 teacher wants to focus their time on preparing, rather than have an English class. I respect the 6-2 teacher a lot – her class is not a group of angels just by virtue of fate or coincidence, obviously – I assume there’s something in her teaching style and classroom management skills that has created this behavioral miracle. For this reason, I don’t resent or in any way criticize her cancellation of the class, even to myself – it’s her judgment call. But I’ll miss the positivity of that particular group of kids, and I’m not sure when I’ll get to use the lesson plan I came in early to put together.
So I have a free period, after recess. I spend the time preparing for my afterschool classes. I go online to check my email, but only briefly – the new classroom configuration is not hospitable to lurking and web-surfing. In this respect, I wonder if there was some intentionality on the part of the administration, because they were in some way trying to discourage this kind of behavior on the part of their English department. But I doubt it. Nothing about the new classroom spells out “planning” or kid-centered “intentionality,” to be honest. It’s the sort of classroom that someone who doesn’t work with children would come up with. That isn’t far from the truth, I expect.
At 12:30, we have lunch. Lunch is always one of my favorite times of the day, even when the food is of dubious quality. I love seeing all the kids, hyper and yet somehow managing to stay within the behavioral constraints of feeding themselves. They grab their steel trays, chopsticks and spoons, and go past the lunch ladies scooping out rice and soup and kimchi and a few other random things. They zigzag in weird patterns as they emerge from the food line, trying to find the row of tables where their particular class has been sited by their homeroom teacher – each time it’s different. The homeroom teacher may or may not be paying any attention whatsoever. You can learn a lot about homeroom teachers by watching how they manage their kids in the lunchroom. Some sit with their kids reliably, and inspect trays. Others join other teachers and seem unaware their kids are in the lunchroom. I’m not sure either pattern represents something optimal – I could seen benefits to both approaches. But it’s interesting to watch, sociologically.
I don’t remember what was actually given to eat, on Monday. The kimchi has been atrocious, lately – a byproduct of a national cabbage shortage crisis. It ends up meaning that the lunchroom is skimping on quality, I suppose. Unlike the kids, the adults don’t get served by the lunch ladies – we have our own line where we serve ourselves. I try to fill my tray in such a way that I know I confidently empty my tray completely. I like that feeling of closure of having an empty tray at the end of lunch – I hate seeing how much food is wasted, to be honest. Koreans, having been a nation on the verge of starvation 50 years ago, have become very cavalier with how they throw around food, I think. It makes me a little bit sad.
I love lunch because dozens of kids say a soft “hello, teacher” as they walk past me. I always try to say hello back – although sometimes it makes me feel like a greeter at a party. After lunch, kids will chase after us (the four English teachers – we always eat lunch as a “team,” which seems to be nearly unique to our department, and I’m not sure where this tradition comes from or who came up with it) and say “hello” or ask the random, peculiar questions that ten year olds can come up with, given very limited English. “Do you like tigers?” “I’m a crazy monkey!”
I have adopted the Korean habit (not universal, but definitely encouraged and broadly popular) of brushing my teeth directly after lunch. I stand at the hand-washing sinks that are outdoors in the courtyard, next to the English classroom. The result is that I always have an audience of between two and twenty children, when I brush my teeth. When I finish, I talk to any that are around. To the first student: “Hello. What are you doing?” “No.” Haha… “no” meaning “I have no idea how to answer this question you’ve asked me.” “Are you playing?” Quiet, shy, vigorous nod of the head. Second student: “Teacher! Teacher! That boy is crazy!” “Yes, I see that.” Confident, cheerful, vigorous nod of the head.
I go back to the English classroom, and discuss ways to improve the sixth grade class with my coteacher. Not much progress has been made here, obviously. But we keep trying. “We must work hard to learn to be better teachers,” she always says. I agree. She’s right. It’s why I respect her, even in her mistakes.
The afterschool classes are always what I look forward too. Even the hyperactive, difficult-to-control first graders. The first grader class starts at 2:30.
[… uh oh… out of time. I will post the rest, later… ]
[OK. Look, here’s the rest – as of 2010-10-22 07:00]
No lesson plan I’ve ever made has survived an encounter with these children. They’re more difficult to manage than a herd of cats. If I look away from any given student, odds run about 70% that that kid will be hitting, jumping on, racing against, or mischievously distracting another student. No matter which student. That’s just the way it works. Yet, despite this, they’ve grown on me. A lot. And I can feel confident that although sometimes I yell or lose my cool with them, they seem to like me, and look forward to my class.
The plan today was to read a little story in this series of ultra-beginner-level story books. The stories literally consist of a single sentence repeated with different nouns, which are shown in photograph illustrations. Today, the sentence is: the x is up in the tree. We had a parrot up in the tree. We had a lizard up there. We had a cat, I think. There was an ant, which, looking at the picture, I thought was a spider, until Ji-min officiously corrected me. I admitted my mistake. Then we did a little bit of TPR (I give commands like “hands up!”, “sit down” etc.) while I took roll-call. Lately I’ve been not using my little paper cut-out tokens with their names on them, to take roll, partly because I’ve reached a point where I know 90% of their Korean names and it’s easier for me to just tick them off from my list.
After the TPR, I get them in a chair, and I pass out some animal puppets. This never goes smoothly. About half the students immediately become weirdly transformed into hopped up crack addicts when they see the puppets, and they crowd around grabbing and pawing for them to get the “best” ones. The other half hold back and look on their peers disdainfully, almost preternaturally like bored teenagers. But as soon as the first riot dies down, they come up in a second wave and gather the dregs. Any puppets unselected by the students are to be seen lying on the floor like the detritus of an epic battle with Noah’s ark as the setting.
So I begin the plan: we’re going to role-play this little storyline. “The X is up in the tree.”
Here, look: I’m a tree. Here’s a hippo (holding puppet at my shoulder). “Repeat / 말하세요 [mar-a-se-yo = please say]: The hippo is in the tree.” The students get the conceit, because the immediately begin to debate the possibility of a hippo in a tree, in Korean. Oh, that’s funny. Definitely.
Now, volunteers? One student raises her hand: Ji-min. Much better English than the rest, and very serious, a lot of the time, but sneaky, too. She comes up to me. She has a mouse puppet, I think. She puts the puppet at my shoulder, while I pretend to look like a tree. “The mouse is in the tree,” I say. She repeats, easily. But something’s going wrong. The other students are racing forward. There will be no turn-taking, here. All the animals want to get into the tree, at the same time. Uh oh.
I decide that I have to go with the flow, here. I am tackled by 20 first graders with animal puppets, all wacking me (*gently*) as they try to attain the best real-estate in the “tree.” I begin to sink to my knees, and the game becomes: knock down the tree under the weight of elephants, lions, bears, cats, dogs, ducks, monkeys, etc., who all want to be in the tree. But I think. Hmm… maybe someone else would like to be the tree. So I get them all sitting back in their chairs, more or less, and I ask for volunteers, again. It’s the boy named Jeong-an, of course. He’s sees the possibilities, already. I even have a little corollary to Murphy’s Law, that I coined: instead of “If it can go wrong, it will,” it goes “if it can go wrong, Jeong-an will appear.” But he’s a cute kid.
The kids get excited when they realize I’m going to let them repeat the tree game, this time with one of their own as victim, and that it’s not a one-off moment of fun. I’m thinking to myself that the main concern, here, is to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. Different kids have different levels of tolerance for being wacked (*gently*) by animal puppets until they’ve collapsed to the floor in fits of giggles, while everyone’s yelling vague variations on “The X is in the tree.” But that’s what we do. The similarity to trying to teach first graders American-style tackle football is more than passing.
Time goes quickly. My next class is already lurking in the halls, peering in through doors and windows in amazement at the kinds of fun my first graders seem to be permitted to get up to. Finally, I release the first graders with a last “Hands up! Bye” – which is a little routine of mine. The third graders are a little bit moody. They suspect (accurately) that they’re not in for as much fun, because Ms Ryu has me on a mission: we’re trying to put together a little English-language musical that’s coming at the beginning of November, and so for that, we need to practice, practice, practice.
The practices never go super smoothly. The kids know their lines pretty well, already, but the issue is a matter of focus – there is too much “down time” between each individual kid’s lines, and during that “down time,” attention tends to wander. Fast. And far. The musical is a variation on Peter and the Wolf (it’s the same thing I attempted over the summer, but now, with more support from Ms Ryu and the kids’ homeroom teachers, and knowing it will be “real,” on stage, in a couple of weeks, the kids are taking it more seriously).
There are a bunch of wolf characters, and while I’m working with the wolf characters on something, I turn around to see that my duck (So-hyeon – a diminutive and innocent little “angel” who goes by Angelina) is viciously assaulting my sheep (Je-won – who insists his English name is Barack, much to my delight). And a few moments later, when I’m working with these animals in Peter’s menagerie, several of the wolves decide to have a spa, and begin lounging on stage left playing with each other’s hair. But who can complain? They’re good-spirited kids, and at least, unlike the first graders, they notice when I’m yelling at them to stop, most of the time.
Finally, at 4:10, Peter, the wolves, and their animal friends file out, and the advanced class files in. It’s still on the books as the sixth grade afterschool class, but at some point, the original definition broke down, because my sixth grade class has exactly one sixth grader who attends regularly, at this point. And then it has about three fifth graders, a fourth grader, and a third grader. I think what’s happened is that the kids mom’s who either believe or want to believe that their kids are the best at English in their school, should be “with the sixth graders” because that, naturally, would be the most advanced class, which is where little Gil-dong or I-seul needs to be. It’s a lot like hagwon biz, that way: the parents decide the level of competence of their child, overriding any judgment on the part of the teachers or administration. And parents’ judgment of their kids ability will tend to be infused with a little bit of – shall we say? – vanity. Which is not to say that my advanced class isn’t pretty advanced. These kids are pretty good, definitely.
In my advanced class, we’re making “diaries.” Not really diaries – I’m modeling myself on a kids’ book I bought back in the US last fall (at my niece and nephew’s school book sale in suburban Denver), called Junie B’s Essential Survival Guide to School. It has a sort of “kids view” of life at school, with sections on school supplies, school transportation to and from, school personalities, etc. So I’m having the kids make their own versions, one chapter per class. The chapter in progress today is “How to go to school” – focusing on transportation. But I encourage the students to get whimsical, and I love some of the results. Nam-su writes that he goes to school by ant – and he draws a picture of a stick figure standing on the back of about a 100 tiny ants. Da-yeon writes that some days, she goes to school “by Simpsons,” and she draws extremely accurate depictions of Bart and Lisa, but with new jobs working as a pair of draft horses drawing a chariot. And Challie (Charlie? – I can’t ever remember his Korean name, I hate to admit) draws a great little picture of a character teleporting into school “by brain.” Awesome.
The advanced class is small and well-behaved. There are no hyper children in that group, really. So it’s a nice kind of calming, “cool down” class for the end of the day. I let the kids leave at 4:50, and begin to clean up. Between the chaos of the first graders and the rearranged desks of the third grade class, there’s a lot to do. I operate in a “borrowed” classroom, that belongs to my colleague Mr Choi, so I feel obligated to try to leave it in reasonably decent condition. And I always bring so much paraphernalia to class: puppets, paper, crayons, attendance folders, etc., that it takes two or three trips back down to the English classroom to get everything moved back. I put the desks back in neat rows, and try to pick up the worst of the trash on the floor, and put the redistributed pens and pencils in neat piles on one of the side boards (who knows where these pens and pencils come from – I suspect that the kids “steal” them from inside the desks of the second graders whose homeroom this is).
Mondays and Fridays, because my last class ends at 4:50 and because I then have to move my stuff back to the English classroom and get it put away, I sometimes miss my regular 5:15 bus back home to Yeonggwang. I can tell from the clock that that will be the case today, so I don’t even bother trying to race to the Hongnong bus terminal, but decide to wait a little bit longer and then catch the 5:40. I go online and check my email, and do a google search for some kind of online “list randomizer” – I’m looking for something that can be used to entertainingly select kids at random from a list. My coteacher already has such a tool, but I keep thinking “there’s got to be a better way.” I find a few candidates to investigate further, later. Sometimes, though, I think going “low tech” and going back to a cup with pencils with names on them would be best. If teaching in a Korean public school classroom is having any major, profound effect on my teaching philosophy, it’s that more and more, I am becoming “anti-technology.” I just don’t think gadgets and technology make for better teaching. They tend to distract the children from the interpersonal interaction, which in language learning is especially important. Maybe there are ways to use technology that aren’t so distracting, but I’ve yet to see good examples.
I walk down to the bus terminal and get on the bus for home. The bus is utterly empty except for me and one old lady. I suspect it’s too early for the power plant commuters (who mostly tend to commute on company-owned buses anyway, if they don’t have their own cars), and too late for the school workers. And who else commutes away from Hongnong at the end of the day? It’s an end-of-the-line kind of town.
I listen to tracks by Talking Heads on my mp3 player. There’s a track called “Found A Job” that I absolutely think is one of my favorite music tracks of all time. The lyrics are both concrete – telling a story – yet also philosophically complex, raising interesting issues about popular culture. And I love the rhythm and music, too, perhaps partly because it’s always a bit of a nostalgia trip for me. The summer that I was living in my car, traveling from Duluth across the Upper Peninsula, in Ottawa and finally in Boston, I had only three (3!) cassettes that worked in my decrepit Sony Walkman that I’d wired into a rube-goldberg car stereo for myself: Talking Heads More Songs About Buildings and Food, Psychedelic Furs Mirror Moves, and David Bowie Space Oddity. So all the songs from those three albums are engraved upon my brain at a very deep level, I think.
A bunch of middle schoolers and high schoolers get on the bus at Beopseongpo, and I always get some low-grade entertainment out of their efforts to pretend to be cool and not notice there’s a foreigner on the bus (or, on the other hand, the blustery, “Hello! How are you?” that they will sometimes deliver). When we arrive in Yeonggwang, I set off across the bus terminal bus-parking-area, and enter the warren of market stalls behind the terminal. I can see the old ladies swatting flies laconically as they squat behind their buckets of octopi and raw fish. I love to watch the still-alive crabs trying to escape from their buckets, which are already filled with soy sauce and chopped onions. Do they realize they’re soup? It’s poignant.
I go out the “secret” back way from the market, and up the grade, through the corner of the main market area, and then behind the Co-op grocery (축협하나로마트 [chukhyeop hanaro mateu]) and across the vast gravel parking lot where the every-five-days market is held. I slip between two buildings and cross the rotary (traffic circle), climb the hill (not steep) past the various apartments, past the “Glory Tourist Hotel” and finally behind the gas station to my building.
I am inspired to call my mom. I don’t do this as often as I should. It’s not that I don’t like talking to my mom. I get stuck in routines, and my attention wanders away from getting around to it, a little bit. And then I’ll remember, but when I remember, it’s not a good time to call, or I’m too busy to be able to sit down and call. Queensland is only an hour ahead of South Korea, and neither celebrates Daylight Savings concepts, so I don’t even have the “time zone excuse.” I remember the complexities of calling from Chile to the US, where the time zones lined up, but both countries have daylight savings time, but on opposite seasonal schedules that don’t quite match up. So depending on the month, I was either same time, one hour ahead, or one hour behind Minneapolis. It was like a speeded up version of continental drift.
So anyway, it’s been a long time since I talked to my mother. And it turns out she’s got company coming for dinner. So we don’t talk long. Hopefully, I’ll call her again before too much time goes by. I decide I need to use a few of the tomatoes that are over-ripening on my shelf, and in a moment of culinary inspiration, I create grilled cheese sandwiches stuffed with tomatoes and horseradish sauce (which also seems to be on the verge of going bad in my fridge). Hey, that’s pretty tasty.
I end the day by listening to Minnesota Public Radio online, and begin the initial draft of what becomes this narrative. I fall asleep earlier than usual – maybe around 10:00. I guess I’m tired.
I’m still not sure this little daily journal is in final form. I’ll keep tweaking and making small changes, I expect. Stay tuned. Or not.
Caveat: Three Minute Fiction
I overheard a fiction-writing contest on NPR, the other day, and something made me sit down and write a story in response to the contest.
The problem: I can’t enter the contest, because it’s only for residents of the US, which I’m not, currently. Whatever. It was just a moment of weird inspiration – I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts, lately.
The parameters: the story must be 600 words, and, “The Story must: (i) Start with the first line: ‘Some people swore that the house was haunted.’ and (ii) End with the last line: ‘Nothing was ever the same again after that.’” So here’s my three-minute ghost story.
Some people swore that the house was haunted.
The new house was probably haunted from the start. From the day it was built, on the edge of the forest, there was a moodiness that would settle upon anyone who spent more than a few minutes near the modest, blue-tile-roofed farmhouse that squatted at the edge of the forest.
Perhaps it could be blamed on the man who built it. Mr Choi was a taciturn man. He would sit on the stoop in the evenings, smoking cigarettes and scratching himself. People said one could overhear him talking, frequently. But he lived alone.
He’d inherited the land from his parents, who had died in a bus accident on the new expressway, ten years ago. He’d come back from the city, bitter and scandalously divorced at forty. The storekeeper said that he thought that if he built a new house, he could attract a second wife.
Sturdily constructed, it was unxpectedly made to look traditional. Mr Choi was the type of man one would expect to go for a fancy, Western-style house: a flat roof, concrete walls, topiary bushes in a row in front and a satelite dish. Perhaps it was an homage to his deceased father, who’d been a skilled craftsman and builder. The house had a curving roof with rough-hewn eaves of raw wood, and sliding doors, almost like a temple building, but simpler.
People said the man had chosen the spot for his house badly. There were some graves, in among the trees on the hillside. There are graves everywhere, in Korea. Ancestors are thick on the ground.
These graves were Mr Choi’s ancestors – including his parents. Perhaps he’d forgotten about his grandmother. She had been a terrible, frightening woman. Rumor said that during the war, decades ago, she’d collaborated, and had been responsible for the deaths of several dozen villagers. Because of her, no one completely trusted the Choi family, even now. The Chois didn’t go to church, either. They really weren’t good, modern Koreans.
It was the pastor’s wife, Ms Sung, who swore that the new house was haunted. She would point out that the Choi family had been shamans, generations ago, before the Japanese, and that Mr Choi probably still practiced secret, pagan rituals. He had placed some wooden jang-seung – the traditional, carved, protective totem poles – at the turning to the driveway to the house. Probably, his father had made them. “Superstitious,” the woman spat.
All anyone saw him doing, though, was working his fields. And talking to himself, sometimes. e made a peculiar farmer – some noted that he was supposedly well-educated, with a university degree. Supposedly, he had led a student strike, at the end of the dictatorship.
People dismissed the gossip, for the most part. They just left Mr Choi alone.
Then, one spring evening, several of the older women were walking along the road by the house. The sun was already behind the hills, making the sky orange and pink. The air was full of smoke from burning the stubble, after cutting the spring barley. The earth was muddy and red-black, dotted with flecks of gold.
The women had paused their conversation. Suddenly they heard shouting, very clearly. The women turned and stared at the house, across a field of freshly planted hot peppers.
Mr Choi came running out of his handsome house, his hair flying. He ran off among the trees, waving an axe. The women saw him strike at one of the burial mounds repeatly with the axe, weeping.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
Caveat: The English Teacher K
Yes, another Kafka reference.
I go to work yesterday, only to find out I don’t need to be there. The groundskeeper asks me “오늘 수업 있어요?” (“have class today?”) and I say I don’t – I knew that. But I thought I still had to be there. I’m not quite sure how to phrase that, in Korean. Then he asks me why I’m there. No one else is around. I go to the classroom I’d been using for my summer classes, just as a place to hang out and a computer to sit down at. I text some coworkers, and await their response.
Finally, they text back that, indeed, I didn’t need to be there. I contemplate feeling angry, but decide that “showing up for work when you don’t need to be there is better than NOT showing up for work when you DO need to be there.” Hmm, what to do?
I walk back down through the courtyard. There are some children, hanging out. “Hi kids,” I say. “Why are you here?”
Big googly eyes, showing utter non-English. Yeah… how would you feel, if some guy spoke English to you, after a wonderful, month-long summer vacation? I recognize the little girl from a fourth grade class, from the end of July. So I ask, “학교에 왜 왔어요?” (“to school why came?”)
“그냥,” (“just whatever”) she answers. Big, pleased-looking smile. Kids do this, in Korea. They come to school when it’s not in session, just to hang out. That’s especially interesting, when the school’s been transformed into a giant construction zone – two workmen carrying bags of cement trundle past us.
I poke my head in the teacher’s workroom, one last time. My colleague Mr Lee is there. Look of utter surprise. In Korean, he begins something to the effect of “why are you here?”
“오늘 일하야 하지 않아요… 잘 몰랐어요.” I know this is bad, awkward Korean, but he tilts his head and grins in understanding – its message makes it across the barrier. (“today work not have to… didn’t know”)
I leave the school. I have a free day. Completely unexpected. Well, not completely. I remember thinking on Friday… I’d thought, what are the chances I show up on Monday, and it turns out I don’t have to be there? But when I’d asked a coworker on Friday, they’d said, “no kids Monday, but yes we have to work.”
I decide to take the bus to Gwangju. Maybe hang out in a Starbucks or something. I do that sometimes. Got to support that Starbucks stock in my 401K, right?
I study Korean for a few hours – mostly vocabulary – something I haven’t done in such a focused manner in quite a while. Then I think, really, I should go find the immigration office. I have this pending bit of bureaucracy that needs finishing: I need to get a “multiple re-entry” stamp to go with my visa, for the event that I decide to travel outside of Korea – so far, I haven’t felt like traveling outside of Korea, and the soonest plan to do so would be next February, but having a free day during the work-week, in Gwangju, is pretty rare, so I might as well try to take care of it, right?
I log onto the internet using free wi-fi, and go to maps on naver.com, to find the immigration office. It’s not where I thought it was – good thing I looked. I walk around downtown Gwangju, then take the single-line subway out to Hwajeong station, and walk through this very much under construction neighborhood to the immigration office. As I arrive, it begins to rain. Why is it that every time I arrive at an immigration office in Korea, it begins to rain? I’m serious, I’ve been here 3 years, and this always seems to happen.
When I get into the immigration office, the place is more internationally chaotic than a Los Angeles branch of the California DMV. There are at least 50 dispirited-looking people in queue (taking little numbers) ahead of me, playing with ballpoint pens and forms. Sitting in chairs and standing around, enjoying the airconditioned office, away from the stunning humidity outside.
I hear vietnamese, tagolog, russian, english, chinese, some-other-language. Ah… nevermind. Maybe I’ll try to figure out how to do this online? Or come back some other day, when half the foreign population of Jeollanamdo hasn’t got business at the immigration office.
I go to E-mart (Wal-mart, since Wal-mart abandoned the Korean market some years back, the local partners re-branded as E-mart, but it’s still basically Korean Wal-mart). The sky is beautiful, as I walk. Clouds scudding.
I find some good Australian cheddar cheese for sale, there, unexpectedly. I buy a new shirt. I go to the bus terminal, nearby, and have a “toseuteu” (“toast,” which really means a grilled egg sandwich). I go back home.
Strange, directionless day, yesterday.
Oh… I just had a strange, strange thought. What if you sat down to read Kafka’s The Castle, but you were given one bit of information before you started: “The Land Surveyor K is a bodhisattva.” Wouldn’t that utterly change the meaning of the book?
Caveat: The Hongnong Alcohol Blacklist
I have just returned from the worst 24 hours I’ve ever spent in Korea. Well, maybe there were a few 24 hour periods back when I was a soldier in the US Army stationed at Camp Edwards, up in Paju, (DMZ/Munsan/Ilsan) that were worse. But I’m just sayin.
My biggest mistake was that I’ve recently been relaxing my formerly teetotaller approach to alcohol – since my trip to Japan, when I made the breakthrough realization (or recollection – call it “personal historical revisionism”) that one of the reasons I managed to learn Spanish effectively in the 1980’s was because I wasn’t adverse to falling under the influence. It lowers inhibitions, which is a big issue with language-learning.
But this school that I work for – well, they’re a tribe of “college-frat-party”-worthy binge alcoholics. And that’s not my thing. Never has been my thing – even when I was doing my own share of binge-drinking myself, back in college.
Maybe I’ll give a detailed breakdown, later.
Let’s just say, I was witness to manifold unkindnesses, and became depressed, despondent and angry. I was in tears when I got home to my tiny Yeonggwang apartment. I haven’t been there, in quite a while – in tears, I mean.
I hold it all in: the anger, the tears. Bottled up. And then it comes out, when I can finally get alone, even though the drunk moment has passed. Alcohol sucks. And I’ve always been a weepy, grumpy, judgmental drunk – I know this about myself.
Hell. I know I can never renew at this school – alcohol reveals depths and truths about people, and although there are many kind and wonderful people working at Hongnong Elementary, none of those kind and wonderful types are the ones running things – the manager-types showed their true selves pretty effectively, as far as I’m concerned. And not in their own favor, frankly.
I will survive this contract. I can avoid the management types, mostly. But they are cruel, unkind people, who furthermore insist on excusing their cruelty as “tradition” and “Korean culture.” Fine. I know, confidently, that there are other types of Korean culture: types that don’t require cajoling people to get drunk, that don’t require laughing at (not with) underlings, that don’t require groping female employees.
Mr Kim (remember him? – the PE teacher) was actually among those who were pretty kind to me. He seemed a bit disgusted with how out of control the alcohol games got, too. He explained to me, mostly in Korean (with a dictionary in hand), that we should make a Hongnong Alcohol Blacklist, and that the first three members included certain highly placed individuals in the school’s administrative staff. I laughed at that, and he was sullenly pleased that he’d managed to make a joke across the cultural and linguistic divide.
Okay. That’s enough.
Looking out the window of the bus, coming home, I saw a cloud with a silver lining. Literally. Korea is a beautiful country. And there were enough “off to the side” kindnesses shown to me in my sadness, today, that I know better than to give up on the humanity of Koreans. Generalization and stereotyping are almost always really bad ideas.
Here’s a mountain or two, that I saw.
Caveat: 또 심심해?
Yesterday at lunchtime, after I finished eating at the cafeteria, I was sitting in my classroom doing some last-minute changes to my lesson plans for my afternoon classes (which I teach on my own). Normally, a tribe of sixth-grade girls comes in and watch music videos on the computer during this stretch of time, but since I was monopolizing the computer, they quickly found something else to do and somewhere else to be, except for the two girls who were formally tasked with lunch-period cleanup duty for my classroom.
Then a first-grade girl appeared beside my desk. It was the same girl who had spent a good 30 minutes loitering in my classroom last Friday – she’s one of the enrollees in my first-grade afterschool class, but since the first-graders get out after lunch (they have no fifth period), these kids often have nothing to do while they wait for fifth period to end so their class can start.
Anyway, this girl has ZERO English. She doesn’t even know the alphabet thoroughly. But she’s clearly quite smart, in my opinion, and very earnest, too. I appreciate that she’s managed to figure out that I actually am able to understand her, if she takes the time to slow down her Korean and repeat herself to me with patience. That’s rare (or nigh impossible) to find in even adult Koreans, to be honest.
She appeared beside my desk.
[The following reported Korean is from memory, and any errors in the grammar or vocabulary on the girl’s part are the result of my poor Korean Language skills combined with my bad memory, rather than things the girl might have said in that way. On the other hand, reported poor Korean Language on my part is probably exactly what I said.]
The student: “뭐이예?” Staring intently at my screen, and hopping up and down slightly.
Jared: “Lesson plan.”
The student: “이멜?”
Jared: “No. Work.”
The student: “오오…” Heavy, dramatic sigh. “또 심심할 것 같아…”
Jared: “Bored, again?” She made wide eyes, so I added, “오늘 다시 심심해?” She had complained of boredom on Friday, too.
The student, giggling: “예. 또 심심해.”
Jared: “Don’t be bored! 심심하기금지!”
The student frowned.
Jared: “뭘 하기 좋겠어?”
The student shrugged. She looks around the classroom speculatively.
Jared, realizing he needs to print something in the staff room: “C’mon. Let’s go.”
The student says something I don’t understand, looking puzzled as I pop out my USB drive from the computer and move out the classroom door. So I add, “가자,” and gesture her to follow me.
The student: “어디 [something something]?”
Jared: “Office. Printer.” She doesn’t understand. Emphasizing the slightly different Korean pronunciation of “printer,” I add, “프린터 피료해.”
The student: “아아… 교실에서 프린터 없으니까…”
Jared: “예, 마자. You’re my assistant.”
The student looked very pleased.
We arrived at the office, and I inserted my USB drive and printed my two pages. I point her to the printer, and she went over and collected them. She carried them right in front of her, looking down at them proudly as if they were her own achievement. She walked all the way back to my classroom that way, as if carrying a religious chalice.
When we got back to the classroom, she raced to my desk and placed them squarely on the corner, ceremoniously, and looked up at me grinning.
Jared: “My assistant. Good job! Thank you.”
Sixth-grade girls, in unison: “Oh. Cute!
Caveat: Return to Ragged Point
Some who know me really well know that Ragged Point, California, holds a special place in my personal biography / cosmology.
Ragged Point was the place where, in November, 1998, I reached my lowest point. And where I then took a decision to take an ethical responsibility for my own life and my own being, once and for all. It was a sort of atheist epiphany, where I realized I truly was alone in the universe, but that that wasn’t as bad as it seemed like. “Born-again atheist”? Sounds funny. But it hoves close to the truth.
It’s where I got the name “raggedsign” from, that you see applied to my online identity here and there. The sign at Ragged Point… is deeply significant – like Saul, on the road to Damascus: but for this Saul, all there was to be seen was my own soul, laid bare.
It’s not always been smooth road, since then. I’ve not always done perfectly with the goal I set for myself that night. The first months and years after were exceptionally difficult, and Michelle’s suicide in 2000 was another low that felt like an inversion, in so many ways, of Ragged Point.
Anyway, part of my traveling, in general, is about seeing new places. But part of it is also about revisiting, paying a sort of homage to, old places. Important places. Re-integrating all the disparate places that patchwork together to form the narrative of my immanent selfhood.
This current trip back from Korea, all this driving around, has been especially like that. It’s almost only that.
So today, I’m returning to Ragged Point. It’s up the road a ways from San Simeon, on the central California coast. I’ll probably sit and gaze at the ocean for a long time.
Later, I’m having lunch with Wendy, my stepmother (well, ex-stepmother, technically, but still a very important person in my life and one of my most important role-models, growing up). She lives in San Luis Obispo, currently.
Overnight, up to tomorrow, I’m driving to Roseburg, Oregon. My aunt Freda passed away while I was in Alaska, and I’ve decided to go to her memorial service, there. It will give me a chance to see relatives I haven’t seen much of. And I’ll be re-integrating the length of California, along the way.
I took the picture below right at the county line between San Luis Obispo and Monterey counties, a few miles north of Ragged Point on Highway 1. The ocean that you can see is at least 500 feet straight down that cliff under the tree.
Caveat: Traveling Alone
Last night felt like a disaster.
I was already feeling moody and gloomy after my ferry ride back to Korea. Riding the ferry wasn't like a boat ride (which I love). Because it was a high-speed hydrofoil (I've only ever ridden a ferry like that a few times before), you can't go out on the decks, you basically sit strapped in your seat for 3 hours. I should have signed up for the 10 hour regular ferry, maybe. Riding the ferry was like sitting in a taxying airplane for 3 hours. And while on the ferry, they showed a really depressing tear-jerker movie about some little boys with cancer. It was a Korean movie, with Japanese dubbing, but it was pretty easy to follow the plot. Lots of emotional, teary moments. I actually get pretty strongly affected by such things, I think.
So I was moody. And I was returning to Korea, which was a bit like coming "home" but not really. Partly because I'm always going to be an alien in Korea, no matter how long I spend here. But also because I'm only going to be traveling around a bit, and then really leaving to return to the US. So I was feeling melancholic because it was a bit like it was going to be a goodbye tour.
The hotel I found and checked into seemed alright, at first. But it was really unpleasant. I should have run the other way when I found a complimentary can of RAID in the closet. And there was a neon sign outside the window. And the air conditioner didn't work. Etc., etc. I'm too stubborn (or stingy?) to just write off the money spent on lodging and find something better, and I'm too shy, especially with my disappointing language skills, to argue about things or complain about things to the management. Being a loud, complaining customer is really hard for me.
I got fixated on having some bibimbap for dinner (since I'd come back to Korea). So I found a place that sold bibimbap and ordered some for take out (포장해 주세요…). They clearly understood what I wanted, but apparently weren't the sort of place accostomed to giving take-out. They tried to insist that I stay and eat, but… I was feeling melancholy, as I said, and was really fixated on just taking it back to my room and eating in my private gloom. I was remembering many meals of take-out that I would get from the place near my apartment and take back to eat alone. I really don't like eating in restaurants alone (except maybe fast food joints), I always feel uncomfortable. That's why when traveling alone like I am, I tend to eat a lot of take-out and carry-out type things (although still trying to avoid too much fast food — at least American-style fast food).
So anyway, the woman at the restaurant was actually having a conversation with me. And at one level, I was surprised, because she was attempting to do it in Korean, and I was attempting to answer in Korean, and it was going back and forth, although with some (a lot of) confusion. Why was this surprising? Because this almost never happens. It's one reason learning Korean is so difficult: Koreans don't like to try to talk Korean with foreigners. They must think it's impolite, or frustrating, or … who knows what. It had already happened to me more than 5 times just in the short time between disembarking from my ferry and getting to this restaurant: I attempt to start some kind of exchange in Korean, and I get this bewildered, puzzled look in response, as the look up and realize I'm a foreigner, and they either couldn't understand what I'd said, or that they could but it wasn't the expected English (which they often can't understand either, but at least they understand why they can't understand).
It's so different from Japan. The Japanese always talk to you in Japanese. Even after they see that you're a foreigner. They only ever switch to English if you explicitly ask them to, or persist with several answers in a row in English. Because of this, while in Japan I had more "conversations" (such as they were) in Japanese over 10 days than I could've had in Korea over several months. That was another depressing thing about Korea, coming back from Japan. How can I ever learn Korean when Koreans refuse to speak Korean with me? Perhaps the contrasting Japanese behavior displays a sort of underlying cultural arrogance (it's a bit like the French are reputed to be, right?), but from a language-learner perspective, it makes things so much easier.
Here I was, then, having this "real" conversation in Korean with a Korean restaurant lady, and she's badgering me to eat in her restaurant, and I'm being stubborn because I have this fixed idea that I wanted to eat my bibimbap alone in my crummy hotel room. So she starts chatting about other things as the kitchen staff prepares my take-out. I'm American, yes. I was in Japan, and came back. And wow, most of it is in Korean. I'm feeling mildly please. Then she says, hey, you've got a bit of a paunch. Pointing at my gut.
Now… this is typically Korean, too. This business of openly and flatly commenting on the physical characteristics of strangers. Not always positively, either. "Gee, teacher, you have a lot of gray hair," is something I've heard more times than I can count. And not just students… strangers on the subway, or whatever. I know and understand that for Koreans, it's a way to make conversation – once you get past the awkward first steps (the must-knows: age, place of origin), all topics are open game. It's not meant to be offensive, although I suppose even Koreans would agree it's kind of "low-brow" to make random, negative observations about the physical characteristics of just-met strangers.
So I grinned and agreed. Too much bibimbap, I tried to say. I don't think I said that right. She seemed annoyed I'd returned to the topic of the food (which was a lost battle, for her). And then my food was ready, and I said thank you very much and took it back to my hotel room. They had their revenge, however — there was neither spoon nor chopsticks in the take-out bag (although it was quite delicious and was exactly what I'd been craving). Nevertheless, I ate it guiltily. Because of the paunch.
I've always felt like I could stand to lose a bit more weight, and that just hammered it home. I watch my quantity of food intake pretty carefully, normally, and I walk everwhere. Living in Ilsan, I even fell into and out of and into and out of the habit of going jogging. At my best, I'd go 3-4 times a week, other times, I'd miss a few weeks.
But I've maintained my weight pretty well since losing all that weight back in 2006-7. Still, I could stand to lose more, right? And, I've got a bit of a paunch. Probably, traveling around, despite the huge amount of walking everywhere, I've gained a bit, because I don't have the same kind of discipline for intake: I see something delicious in my touristic meanderings, and I buy it and eat it.
So that made me depressed, as I lurked in my stuffy, mildew-smelling hotel room and tried to go to sleep. I was feeling all kinds of remorse: for deciding to leave Korea (although that's reversible); for failing to learn Korean (this is my hugest bugaboo, probably, given it was always one of the main "reasons" for coming here in the first place); for failing to watch my weight; for not just giving in to the restaurant lady and eating in her restaurant, like she wanted; for trying, yet again, to travel alone, even knowing that rarely works out well for me.
And why is it, anyway, that I travel alone? Well, because that's who there is to travel with. Michelle and I had many things we used to fight about. But we were amazingly compatible, when traveling together. Those were the wonderful times. We never fought about things related to traveling: if we fought while traveling, it was about other things (like that unforgettable knock-down-drag-out argument about Aristotle vs Plato on the drive back from Winnipeg to Minneapolis, one time). We had the same way of traveling: no plan, just go out and look and explore. I miss traveling with Michelle very much. And now, like most of my life, I travel alone. Because traveling is too important to me, and too much fun for me, not to do it; but traveling alone sometimes really depresses me, too.
Caveat: Reflections on (of) Glass Houses. And the Future.
Here are some disorganized reflections of mine on the subjects of facebook, the internet, the panopticon, and the glass houses. An extension to some initial thoughts I posted on February 6th, in reaction to an article in the guardian.
The web’s “transparency” has two aspects. There is the “taken” or “stolen” transparency (meaning that it grants organizations or individuals a power to spy – cf. a concept such as Foucault’s panopticon prison, which is carrying the problem to a philosophical extreme). This is something that people fear. But there is also a “granted” or “given” transparency, which is fundamentally empowering, in my opinion – especially when viewed as an opportunity for those who hold power of any kind to “come clean” vis-a-vis those over whom they exercise power. Or, at a more personal level, it is the power recognized from time immemorial in the liberating nature of confession.
In terms of potential, this power of revelation/confession trumps the power to monitor (panopticon). Governments and organizations are in glass houses, now. They try to throw up barriers and blinds, but it’s a losing battle, at best. There is a man in China who is in prison because some exec at Yahoo! (or group of execs, more likely – corporate ethical lapses are so often the consequence of groupthink) had an ethical lapse vis-a-vis the Chinese government, but, the truth remains… we KNOW about that man in prison. In past times, a similar man, in a similar prison, would have disappeared completely, and we’d only have known of his situation by extrapolation from the situation of others whom we’d heard about. Recall the many “disappeared” victims of past dictatorships. Such total “disappearances” are, erm, disappearing in this new internet-enabled world. Everything gets documented.
Bushcheneyian tyrants will always find ways to harass us, and they will be assholes, regardless of the technology available. Quakers, freethinkers and resisters were blacklisted by the CIA, the FBI, not to mention King George III, long before there were internet servers. Cheney and his secretive, Nixonian ilk are a fading breed… a failing adaptation. Or is this overly hopeful?
Perhaps if I believed in such a thing as divine providence, I’d be more inclined yearn for such a divine providence to be controlling our internet infrastructure, but there’s nothing divine: there’s only Al Gore – a deeply flawed human at best (and Al Gore’s not really controlling the internet, obviously, but he’s a good proxy for the human collectivities that ARE controlling it, and he’s an amusing proxy, too, since he “invented” it).
Broadly, my primary assertion is that the internet as a whole, and facebook in particular (mostly seen as a somewhat more intensely managed version of the internet as a whole), are AT WORST forces of an ethically neutral value, and AT BEST they offer the potential for radically transforming our human ethical space, mostly due to the eerie powers of grassroots transparency.
Partly, I’m thinking in terms of evolutionary psychology. Humans evolved an ethical space in which LYING and DECEPTION (including self-deception!) were easy strategies, and therefore those things were (and still ARE) also quite frequent. The direction in which technology is taking us has the potential to transform the social evolutionary pressures that led that way. Perhaps I’m guilty, here, of transhumanist (q.v.) thinking – which in general I find vaguely worrying. Be that as it may.
Writers like Tom Hodgkinson worry that facebook (and the internet in general) are primarily technologies that accentuate this potential of deception, and worse, that they can even facilitate oppression. That’s a very pessimistic view, and it will lead down the path toward luddism. Of course, all technologies present us with grave dangers: the warmongers and the kleptocrats will always be beating plowshares into swords, wherever and whenever they “need” them, and using campaigns of deception and spying to discover the weaknesses of their enemies.
My feeling is that the people who most fear the internet are the sorts of people who fear things in general, and that the people who extoll the internet are the sorts of people who extoll things in general – in other words, whether we fear the future or extoll it has more to do with our own inner selves than with aspects inherent in world-changing technologies.
There have always been future dystopians (once called millenarians, for example). There have always been pie-in-the-sky optimists regarding the future of the human condition. What’s true – or reasonable – must fall somewhere in between.
Caveat: Borrarlo de tu vida!
I step out of my building at 1:05, running late for a second day in a row. I try to operate in a happy medium between insolence (always late) and subservience (never late), thus reflecting my dissatisfaction with my management on the one hand and my guilt-driven work-ethic on the other. Two days in a row is perhaps pushing the insolence direction.
The day is overcast, and that lifts me. Heaven is closer when the sun is hidden. I’m weird, that way. I remember a day, during one of my aimless wanderings in Mexico. I was about 20, and I was walking along the side of a highway, I think on the outskirts of La Paz, BCS. That’s one of the hottest parts of Mexico – tropical desert. The sun was beating down on me like an angry Pharaoh, and I vividly recall thinking to myself that there was something malevolent in it. I wanted to stand there at the side of the road and shake my fist, like a madman in a movie. Perhaps this is merely the result of having grown up in a place where there was so little sunshine. The sun comes to represent something alien, unknowable, not always an entirely welcome visitation. I don’t know.
When it’s extremely cold and also sunny, it’s an odd thing. The earth is ignoring the sun. “I’ll be cold, anyway,” she argues, and shrugs a pale, frozen shoulder. I feel close to the land when the weather is like that. And when there are clouds, I am close to heaven.
Anyway. It’s a mild day (as overcast tends to be).
Linkin Park kicks in on my MP3 player. I turn up the volume and start the walk to work. I refuse to take a taxi, even when I’m running late – on average, it only takes me 7 more minutes to walk the 2.x km than to go flag down a taxi and drive there through several inevitably long waits at red traffic lights. And it gives time to reflect. And I need the exercise.
Why am I late today? It’s kind of embarrassing – I was reading some of my own old blog posts. There was a moment of self-revelation, reading a post from April, 2006 (Caveat: angst). Not particularly deep, but it put me into one of those introspective fugues for half an hour. I won’t quote my own writing… that seems indulgent – go read it if you’re really curious. I think you’ll see what I found striking about it: I listed a series of alternate futures for myself, and one of them is exactly true. That’s… disorienting. I’m not normally very good at predicting my own future.
A track from The Who’s Quadrophenia shuffles onto my player. Last night I received a puzzling yet wonderful email from a former student, Jeong-eun. She was in one of my most advanced elementary classes at LinguaForum, and was one of the most interesting, intelligent, introspective 5th graders I have ever met. Without being at all “nerdy” – that’s a difficult combination to pull off. Anyway, she was saying she had fond memories of the class and adds, “Teacher, with us you always laughed and never showed even when you had hard time.” Which is pretty good English, too.
But she also says an odd thing, about that “now you are going away so I am very sad.” Does she know something that I don’t? I wonder to myself. And this brings me back to my current never-quite-resolved dilemma: am I going to stick it out with hellbridge (my current employer) to the end of my contract? Or am I going run away? (metaphorically speaking… I would try to negotiate a fair-to-all-parties letter-of-release if I decided to quit). Which brings me back to that blog post from almost 3 years ago, and my friend’s comment about me being a “serial quitter.” Hmm.
I see a tiny girl, maybe 7 years old, in pink jacket, confidently riding her bike on one of the pedestrian paths that grid Ilsan between the blocks of apartment towers. Standing up on the pedals, and holding a cell phone in one hand, and coming to an adroit stop at a red light at a crosswalk. I feel an odd mixture of admiration and envy. Envy? Sometimes I yearn to just do all of life OVER again. But just at that moment, the Mexican rock-en-espanol group Control Machete is playing their song Amores Perros (title song to an amazing movie, by the way), and they declaim into my ears with an angry growl, “… la codicia… borrarlo de tu vida!” (… envy… erase it from your life!). Interesting synchronicity, there.
As I approach the last turn in my right-angled zig-zag trip to work, a track by Absurd Minds shuffles into my headphones. Something more recent, a teutonic-toned goth/industrial electronic bit. And the decisions and exhortations are deferred. To work. To grading, and into that insufferably hot, stuffy, staff room. The annoying pesterings and chaotic emendations of the middle-managers, and the dipped heads of deference: 네, 부원장님 (Yes, Mr. Assistant Director), in non-confrontational tones.
And then, a few hours with the kids, absorbing their reflexive optimism, to see me through another day.
What I’m listening to right now.
[UPDATE 2011: youtube embeds added as part of background noise; UPDATE 20180603: youtube embed repaired due to link-rot]
Caveat: Ragged Point, 1998
The following is a fairy tale.
He parked the maroon Pontiac on the side of of highway one just north of Ragged Point, California, facing the setting sun and the vast, swarming, grey Pacific. He'd driven it down slightly into the bushes, so it wasn't entirely visible from the highway. He'd bought 100 tablets of diphenhydramine and a liter of vodka. He began swallowing the pills with swigs of vodka, and watched the sun sink into the banks of fog rolling off the sea.
He managed to swallow more than half the tablets. He went lightly with the vodka, because he didn't want to throw it all up, like that other time. This was meant to be the end.
There was a very quiet period. There was crying. Impotent anger at the world.
Then it was dark, and he felt his heart accelerating. Had minutes passed? Hours? "This is it," he muttered.
He perceived his heart beating very strongly, he began to black out, feel dizzy. Nauseated. "Shit."
He felt his lungs laboring. He was burning up. He saw nothing but blackness, he heard a buzzing. And his banging, angry heart, leaping in his chest.
He started to scream. Or would have been screaming, but his lungs were out of his control. Was he even breathing? This really was it. Death. Such a vivid experience. But… oh, and there's the white light. Let's analyze this, he thought. Let's think this through. The heart has stopped. It has? It really has. The chest is tight. He felt numbness creeping up his limbs. Shit, no heart. Really.
So what's the white light? Perfectly logical, he reflected. The brain is losing oxygen, right? So… the part of the brain farthest from the heart shuts down first, right? And that's at the back… the visual cortex. The center of the field of vision is processed at the part of the brain farthest back, farthest from the oxygen-supplying blood.
And, so… what if, logically, the "default" signal is "whiteness"–light–not darkness? Then, as the brain "died," the whiteness would spread out in a circle from the center of the field of vision, as the neurons in the visual cortex went "offline." The white light, the tunnel with the light at the end, approaching the white light… these are merely the brain trying to make sense of the fact that the visual cortex "dies" from the center outward.
Yes, he was really thinking exactly these things, as he lay dying, in the driver's seat of the maroon Pontiac parked in the bushes off of Highway One at Ragged Point.
And then he felt some kind of seizure… it was remote from his "self," because all his limbs and body felt numb. But some kind of banging. And the heart still not beating. Hasn't it been an awfully long time? The white light is so big. His brain was dying.
Always a fan of black sarcasm, he decided on his last words, to himself, as a committed agnostic. "Unto you I commend my spirit," he quipped, to a god who'd never once answered him. And only a stunning silence, at that moment, was the reply, too. But he himself spoke the next words, instead. He himself answered, "aww, fuck this. You're not done yet!"
And he felt his heart start beating wildly, and he felt his lungs gulping air, and he somehow managed to pop the door open, and roll out of the seat of the car and onto the damp, dewy grass outside and bang his head on the gravel.
And time passed. And stars were whirling overhead. And the journey began. It was the night of November 17th. He was… nowhere. On Earth. Alive? He began to walk away from Ragged Point.
Maybe not alive. He walked through a tree. He saw bench, but could not sit on it.
"I'm a ghost," he decided.
He saw some approaching headlights on the highway, and so he went down and stood in the middle of the road. The car went through him.
Definitely a ghost. Like Pedro Paramo, in Juan Rulfo's tale, he meditated. Pedro went down into Comala, and didn't know he was a ghost. He talked to the spirits he met there, including his dead father.
The man climbed a hill, passing through brambles that he didn't notice, and noticing the spirits of other dead people around him. Spirits? "Are we all dead here, together?"
Somewhere in among some trees on a hillside, he found a spaceship. And down the steps of that spaceship, he saw his uncle.
"So you're dead too?" he asked. His uncle shrugged. Said nothing. Offered nothing. Walked away down toward the highway again. He followed. It was an arduous journey. Just a month ago, he'd been on his uncle's land in Alaska, but that hadn't been the right thing to do. The wilderness was very lonely, and loneliness… oh, loneliness.
He walked for a long time.
The stars whirled in the sky. Cars and trucks passed through him. He was a ghost.
He found some other ghosts, living in a hole beside the highway. They did not talk. They were ghosts. He did not talk, either. He lay on the cold pavement and waited for something to happen. He watched the sky, and began to wonder about the voice that had spoken, so angrily, in response to his hubristic sarcasm. "You're not done yet." Done? It had been his own voice. Full of strength.
It was at this moment that he realized it was true. There was no god. It was all illusion. Wishful thinking. Having become a ghost, he ceased being agnostic, for there was no longer any need to hedge bets. A nihilistic certitude gripped him. It was a warm, comforting nihilism, such as he'd never felt before.
He remembered he'd been following his uncle. But… where had that man gone? It was hard to stand up. Hard to peel himself off of the cool pavement.
The stars whirled in the sky.
He fell down and felt a moment of pain. A moment of doubt, about his ghosthood. Ghost.
He cried, for a long time. He couldn't find his uncle.
He was a ghost.
The stars whirled in the sky.
But… the sky in the east was turning pale green, the hills of the California coast. Was he going to spend his eternity here, on the edge of the world, as an atheistic ghost?
He sat on some gravel beside the road, but no cars came by. The sun was rising. He felt cold, but not terribly.
He saw a convenience store. Because he was a ghost, he decided to go through the wall. But the wall… was solid. He sat down on his butt, and laughed. Not a ghost, after all?
Then what? Where was he? He sat on the curb in front of the convenience store, which appeared abandoned, now, in the clear morning light. There were no more spirits wandering the empty highway. A truck barreled past.
"Shit," he muttered. Still alive. Not done yet.
He stood up, and brushed dirt off his shirt. He stood beside the road, and stuck his thumb out at the next car that went by. Several cars later, a pickup truck stopped and a man asked if he was OK.
"No," he answered. "I need to get into town." He didn't make too much conversation after that, but alluded to an imaginary car problem.
The pickup truck driver dropped the man off in Cambria. He realized he'd somehow covered more than 30 miles from where he'd parked his maroon Pontiac at Ragged Point, but only 5 or so of those miles had been in the man's pickup truck. Had he walked 20-something miles among the ghosts in the night?
He called his father collect, and explained what had happened, elliptically. He bought a bus ticket to San Luis Obispo, with the last of his cash, and his father collected him there. His father took the man to the emergency room to make sure he'd survived his ordeal more or less intact. Then the father had the man committed to a "mental health facility" in Alhambra.
The man descended into a catatonic depression, then. He kept dreaming he was back at Ragged Point. But he wasn't done, yet. The November air in Southern California always smells of honeysuckle and asphalt. That's the smell of… not being done, yet.
A series of ECT sessions broke the catatonic depression. Six years of therapy and antidepressants mostly banished the darknesses that had always haunted him to the corners of his mind. He had a semi-successful career, even. But he was restless. He kept wandering.
Ten years later, he dreams about Ragged Point. About the stars whirling in the sky. Sometimes, he speculates that he is, in fact, a ghost. Still, he's not done yet.
Postscript.
I think he managed to swallow about 60 tablets. That would make well over a 1000 mg of diphenhydramine. Doses above around 800 mg are generally considered potentially fatal, and combining it with another CNS depressant such as alcohol increases risk considerably. It was not, perhaps, the simplest or most painless way to try to go, but it had been well-thought-out. A previous attempt, at a motel in Maryland, had been ill-considered and unsuccessful… too much alcohol, and not enough sleeping pills, had led to vomiting and unconsciousness, but had never had much of an actual risk of death.
The wikipedia article on diphenhydramine points out, regarding the "recreational" use of the drug, that "people who consume a high recreational dose can possibly find themselves in a hallucination which places them in a familiar situation with people and friends and rooms they know, while in reality being in a totally different setting." This correlates well with the man's experience at Ragged Point. Regarding the actual potential of death… high overdoses are generally accompanied by symptoms such as tachycardia, hyperpyrexia, and seizures, all of which the man remembers vividly.
Speculation on the part of the hospital intake staff the next day was that he'd induced a minor heart attack in himself. Whether his memory of his heart actually stopping was a hallucination or a real experience is anyone's guess, but it does match well with the expected profile of an overdose at the level he attempted; wikipedia says, "considerable overdosage can lead to myocardial infarction (heart attack)."
Caveat: Commodities vs Knowledge Products
I was reading an editorial in the Fortune magazine dated September 15, written by Geoff Colvin, entitled “Brains vs. Brawn.” He was pointing out the way that raw materials and low-tech, mass-produced commodities (e.g. gold, petroleum, steel, food) have been massively outperforming knowledge-based, intensely engineered/designed/creative products (e.g. computer chips, luxury automobiles, movies) in terms of prices, over the last decade. He argues that despite this, he remains committed to an apparently earlier elaborated prediction that over the long-term, knowledge-based products are a much better investment prospect.
I’m not an economist. I’m an English teacher in Korea, with a training in linguistics and Spanish Golden Age literature. But I adamantly disagree. I think it should be obvious that over the real long term, commodities will always go up in price, but there is no such clear guarantee with respect to the prices of intellectual property (i.e. knowledge-based products). The reason is simple: we will not ever run out of the products of our intellects, collectively speaking. There is no underlying scarcity. You can keep making more ideas, art, designs, inventions, indefinitely. It’s historically cumulative. Meanwhile, commodities are physical things, and we are en route to running out, if not right away, eventually, for everything: gold, oil, iron, food. Or whatever.
It seems elementary that the solution to reconciling the conflict between market capitalism’s requirement for never-ending growth and the world’s evident physical limits is to always increase the “knowledge” component of our economic activity, while limiting and creatively reducing our need for and consumption of physcial commodities of all kinds. The additional advantage of this process, which comes almost as a side-effect, is that people seem actually to prefer “knowledge-based” (i.e. creative) labor. This is the inevitable rise the creative classes.
But from a strictly “futures” – which is to say, investing – standpoint, it seems to me that the place to make bets is on those same commodities that I believe so strongly we should be working to limit the consumption of. And, to reference that very much under-appreciated, 19th century, amateur economist, Henry George, all commodities and therefore all our society’s future wealth comes from the control of real estate (broadly interpreted to include oceans and even “outer space” in today’s day and age). George used this to argue that land was the only thing the state should or could legitimately tax. I’m not sure I agree–I don’t completely understand it. But it makes a weird kind of sense.
The picture is of a waterfall near my mother’s home in Australia. A taxable waterfall?
Caveat: Syntax in the Rain
I step out of my building at about 12:45. It's raining, but not too hard.
I start listening to my MP3 player as I wait to cross the street in front of my building – this is always the longest crosswalk wait, as the street is busy and the light is on a very long timer, and there are always police around, so jaywalking seems less attractive than at other points on my route. Once I crossed against the light, only to see a group of about 10 policemen marching in a line on the sidewalk directly opposite me, and the last one in the line looked at me directly and made a menacing face, though he didn't do anything – maybe because they were in a formation or going somewhere important. The borough police station is just up at the main corner, after all.
My MP3 player is playing Radiohead. I've been thinking about languages. Well, aren't I always thinking about languages? Lately, when people I meet ask me things like, "so, what are your hobbies?" I have been answering, "studying languages." And… I've been meeting alot of people, lately, what with the new job and all. It is true that studying languages is a major hobby of mine – not that I'm really that good at it – but it's not that common that I come out and state it as a part of introducing myself. After all, it's very eccentric – like so many things about me.
So, I had this thought, just now. The reason I like Korean is the same reason I like LISP. This may take some explaining. LISP is a computer programming language. It has a reputation for being elegant but eccentric and difficult, but it was the first computer programming language that I truly felt "at home" working with, and I much prefered to to something like BASIC or Pascal, which were the other programming languages I experienced and worked with in the 80's. In the 90's, I didn't do much with computers, and the only thing I worked with extensively was HTML and derivatives like DHTML, mostly for hobbyish pursuits.
Then in the most recent decade, I became a database hacker, and SQL became my dialect of choice, although I've done some work also with trying to learn OO-languages, such as C#. But I was essentially married to SQL, to the extent that I would attempt to solve network-admin type problems with SQL scripts (using extended dialects that allowed such things, like Microsoft's T-SQL or Oracle's PL/SQL). These efforts, though often successful, would tend to make the more traditionally-minded colleagues around me laugh and shake their heads.
Throughout it all, however, I have always thought that LISP was a truly beautiful and elegant language, like an abstract mathematical object. SQL is grubby, messy, and "evolved" – meaning that it grew to its present standard slowly and through trial and error, and it lacks the systematic beauty of something like LISP, I think.
Obviously, no human language is "designed" in the sense that LISP is. Nor is it, practically speaking, abstract – obviously. But there is a weird, complex elegance to the underlying grammatical patterns of Korean that remind me of LISP, in a strange way. It somehow reveals a potential about a different way of conceptualizing grammatical relations that I find fascinating – but it's very hard to explain. I need to refresh my grounding in syntax universals, deep structure, Chomky's "Government and Binding" (a creepy name for a grammatical theory, don't you think? especially coming from a self-declared anarchist like Chomsky), things like that. But I genuinely like the Korean language in the same way I like LISP – it's eccentric and fascinating and elegant and magical.
Rasputina starts on my MP3 player. I turn off the commercial "broadway" and begin walking up the footpath between the highrise apartment buildings. The trees are so green, and there aren't many pedestrians.
So many people ask me, why are you single? Actually, not just Koreans (where, culturally, it's a pretty typical question to ask someone), but even westerners that I meet here. And I never have a good answer for them, except something meaningless and vague, in the spirit of, "well, I guess I prefer it." But the real reason is tied to the notion above – my interest in, and commitment to, things that are eccentric. Being eccentric is difficult. It's not likely I will find people with whom I have things in common, at a deep level. And I'm not the sort of person to go into a relationship with someone with whom I don't have much in common, I guess. I am resigned to, and, in fact, comfortable in my loneliness, at this point.
A Japanese pop group, Round Table, starts "Let me be with you." It starts raining harder. Much harder. But… I like the rain. It always puts me in a weirdly low-key cheerful, optimistic state of mind. It may be the clearest indication of my birthplace's impact on my spirit. Those redwood trees… the eternally protective, sheltering greyness of Humboldt's summer, and the calm embrace of the Pacific Northwest winter rains. Cloud cover and rain are comforting things, to me, whereas I find bright, sunny skies vaguely oppressive and dispiriting. Water is the stuff of life – when it's raining, the stuff of life falls from the sky freely. Each raindrop, a gift from heaven. Innumerable.
Ruben Blades begins singing "Adan Garcia" – which is about disappearances during the dirty wars in Central America in the 80's, I think. I dodge puddles and wait for the crossing signal. I think about the eccentricity of listening to 80's Spanish-language protest music while standing in the rain in a Korean upper-middle-class suburb. Has it ever been done before? I find the idea that it makes me unique appealing.
Now I'm listening to Depeche Mode. The hard, hard rain continues, and my lower half is getting quite wet, below the protective perimeter of my umbrella. I love rain like this, but I begin to feel anxiety about showing up at work dripping like a wet dog. It's inevitable that social anxiety can wreck otherwise happy feelings about something. I get a sympathetic smile from a woman escorting her child, going the opposite direction, both huddled under one not-large-enough pink umbrella and bravely stepping through the rivers on the pavement.
-Notes for Korean-
context: I have been browsing my hardcore grammar book, Korean Grammar for International Learners, by Ihm Ho Bin et al. This is a truly excellent reference grammar for the Korean langauge, it's a translation of an academic work written in Korean, but with lots of supporting "translation-to-English materials" so it really stands as an independent reference work – it's the only reference grammar of it's kind that I've seen amid much searching and browsing in bookstores. It has received some negative reviews from other foreigners trying to learn Korean, but I think that is because it is linguistically sophisticated – I can barely understand some of it, and I have a degree in linguistics, so I could see how it could be intimidating to someone with no background in formal syntax.
내다=do all the way, finish thoroughly
this is a "terminative" auxilary verb; the preceding verb is in the minimally inflected form e.g. -어/-아/-여 (depending on vowel harmony)
경찰이 그 물건을 찾아 냈습니다=(police-SUBJ that item-OBJ find-INFL finish-PAST-FORMAL-DECLARATIVE)=the police found the item
so:
물건=thing, article, item; also 품 (I like the hanja for this: 品 – looks like a little pile of boxes, a good symbol for "thing")
context: deciphering korean-language websites
직통=direct service (as in a train)
매진=sold out
예약=appointment/예약하다=make a reservation
조회=inquiry
명함=business card (?)
context: surfing the web
this site has amazing vocab lists: https://21cseonbi.blogspot.com/
진짜=real (I know this… but I keep forgetting how to spell it)
Caveat: Love is not that special
I finished watching the episodes of 1%의 어떤 것 toward the end of last week, and immediately began a new series, called 쾌걸 춘향 (translated as Delightful Girl Choon-hyang). I'm trying to figure out why I've been enjoying these romantic/comedic dramas as much as I have – above and beyond the insights to Korean culture. And I made a realization because of the rather weighty tradition behind this new one I've started.
Delightful Girl is based on a traditional Korean story called 춘향가 (chunhyangga), which is part of what's called the pansori storytelling tradition – in essence, a kind of epic/lyric oral literature. The plot of the story, just like the 1% story I was watching last week, revolves around frustrated love and romance in the broader context of Asian/confucian social systems and values. And I suddenly realized, I've been enjoying these stories for years – they are extraordinarily similar to the almost hundreds of "framed stories" found in the Cervantine corpus: girl meets boy of different social class, or under some unusual circumstance; love gets frustrated by conflicts involving parents, in-laws, or social mores and taboos; weird coincidences happen that alternately encourage or frustrate the relationship; everything ends happily-ever-after. And Cervantes was just echoing the likes of Petrarch and Boccacio and the vast content of the Spanish Golden Age drama.
My hypothesis: culturally, Korea is experiencing the equivalent of Europe's renaissance and baroque, alongside modernity and postmodernity, all at the same time! That may be too bold, but I taste the germ of a fascinating comparative cultures / comparative lit paper exploring the parallels between renaissance drama and literature and the contemporary Asian television drama.
And my profound quote of the day: in the 2nd episode, the character Han Dan-hee says to her boyfriend Pang Ji-hyuk, over french fries, "They only need a moment. Love is not that special. Crush on an eye, on ears, and then you get the feeling. That's love."
Caveat: Ugly American Cows
My friend Bob asked me in an email about what it’s like to be an American in Korea right now. I realize that, if you look at U.S.-based news coverage of the events here, you’d think things were suddenly pretty bad. And I will admit that I definitely am careful about what I do and where I go on the weekends – avoiding places where protests occur, like downtown Seoul (I haven’t gone near downtown in almost a month except a quick shopping trip to pick up some presents for my students on rainy Sunday early afternoon).
But it’s not really that different, for me, as a foreigner, than it was before the recent explosion of protest and anti-Americanism. Which is to say, there are inevitably people who seem hostile to westerners, or at the least, suspicious. With strangers, however, there’s nothing on me or about me that brands me as, specifically, an American (as opposed to some other type of anglophone westerner, such as a Brit, Australian, Canadian, etc.). But the other thing, which I think I’ve noted before, is that I really think this whole anti-American-beef / anti-American-trade-agreement is much more about dissatisfaction with the recent downturn in the global economy – which America is experiencing too – and about frustration with Lee Myung-Bak’s imperious young presidency.
“Compassionate” and reformist conservatives all over the planet are in trouble with their unfaithful publics, these days: Bush, Sarkozy, LMB, and Howard (who was recently thrown out by the Australians). People get worried when the entrenched social safety nets get threatened too much, on the one hand – especially when economies turn South. But also, what all these figures have had in common is an imperial style that wears thin fast in the face of scandal and evidence of mismanagement. Not that I think liberals necessarily do any better. But there just seems to be some unifying characteristics, is all.
So… I don’t think the protests are so much anti-American as they are anti-LMB and anti-Bush and anti-globalization. But Korea relies more on globalization than almost any other country – certainly among the world’s top 20 economies, it’s among the most dependent on external markets. China depends just as heavily on external markets, if not more so, but the immense size of the country and its population means that it’s inevitably more resilient (I think… I theorize) to global shocks and shifts.
Anyway. All of which is to say, I don’t feel, for example, any notable increase in hostility toward me from either strangers or from acquaintances. Those who are hostile to me are hostile for the same reasons they were before, and are in any event a minority.
On the other hand, I would not want to be an American cow in Korea, these days. That would be… scary. Very scary. The mad American cow is like this eerily reviled symbol, now. But what it stands for is as much a cypher of Korean government indifference as for anything specifically American.
Keep in mind that Koreans believe some unusual things – their weird, wired, webophilic culture has embraced all sorts of urban myths as fact, accentuating and exaggerating things that, on objective analysis, seem patently silly. I remember learning last fall, for example, that a plurality of Koreans believe that it is possible for an electric fan to kill a person while they sleep, merely by blowing on them. Here is a blog on the subject of “fan death.”
I don’t think that paranoia about American beef products is quite in the same mythical category as fan death, but I think it provides a context for understanding how unsubstantiated scientific “facts” about some given health risk can be transformed by a very large, tightly-networked culture into a fearsome reality and lead to mass protests. The main thing that is surprising to me is not that so many people have developed such an inordinate fear but rather that the current Korean government has proven so remarkably inept in managing the situation. They seem weirdly incompetent and naive with respect to forces that their recent high-speed technological bootstrapping of their society have unleashed.
I like to point out – as mildly and nonconfrontationally as I can when talking to people – that FAR MORE people have died in the recent protests about mad cow disease in South Korea than have EVER died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human version of mad cow that is presumeably caused by it), not only in Korea (where no one has died from it), but in the U.S., too (where only 3 people have died from it). In fact, the only country where there has ever been more than a few cases reported of vCJD is the U.K., which is where mad cow first exploded and was identified as a cause, and where subsequent changes in meat processing and cattle raising techniques have basically shut down the avenue for perpetuation of the disease.
Caveat: Carbon Amortization
I was reading an article about Priuses in the New York Times (online) that caused me to think, once again, about something I find very troubling about all the discussion of reducing the carbon footprints of the automobiles we drive, about legislating improved mileage and/or offering incentives to buyers of lower-carbon-footprint cars. And it is this: what about the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process? What about other environmental impacts of new cars? Bear with me, while I try to think this through.
Suppose I have a Hummer. It’s a nice, ecologically disastrous beast, with a very high carbon footprint, that I bought in a solipsistic moment some years back. I don’t know enough to actually assign a meaningful number to its day-to-day carbon footprint, but lets say its daily value is “10.” So, one morning, after a long talk with some friends, I wake up feeling guilty, and decide to buy a Prius. So I buy the Prius – and lets say, for the sake of argument, that its daily carbon footprint is “2” – i.e. it puts out 20% of the ongoing emissions as the Hummer.
But what was the carbon footprint of manufacturing the Prius? Is it unreasonable to imagine it might be some rather large number compared to the daily value? I mean, just the delivery from manufacturer to dealer is going to be some largish multiple of the daily footprint, e.g. 20 or 50, right? There’s steel, engine, tire manufacturing. And farther back, there’s high-paid executives and designing engineers at Toyota and their contractors, sitting in air-conditioned offices over years, making the Prius a reality. ALL of that is part of the vehicle’s carbon footprint. Is it unreasonable to imagine that the carbon footprint of the creation of that new Prius might not be, say, in the 1000’s? 10,000’s? What if I go out on a limb, and guess, say, 8000 “units”?
The consequence is as follows: I’m reducing my personal carbon footprint, by switching from Hummer to Prius, by 8 units per day. But the Prius’ manufacture entailed a footprint of 8000. So, that means I will have to own the Prius for 1000 days before I “break even” in terms of carbon footprint. That’s almost 3 years! Wouldn’t it be better for the environment to urge people to KEEP their current cars longer, rather than switch out to lower-footprint vehicles? This would be true regardless of the type of vehicle they currently own.
And I understand very well, I just pulled these numbers out of a hat, and the analysis could be extremely mistaken. But what I wonder about, is why don’t you ever see anyone doing this kind of analysis, in the media? And there are other issues – the Prius has a contingent of non-carbon-related environmental issues, around its high-tech manufacturing processes, and its massive array of batteries – these are not in any way resolved. What about battery disposal? What about the toxics involved in battery and plastics manufacture?
I cannot argue that in terms of real, long-term life-of-product carbon footprint, my father’s 1928 Ford Model A is lower than almost anything else on the road (or, er, in storage, at the moment), because of its under 20 mpg and “dirty” exhaust. But it nevertheless represents maximizing the utility of the manufactured object vis-a-vis its intended purpose. The carbon footprint of the car’s manufacture has amortized for 80 years now! Meanwhile, that self-righteous bastard driving the 2008 Prius, which replaced his 2005 Corolla, which replaced his 2000 VW, which replaced his 1992 Chevy, etc., etc., has left a landscape strewn with massive-manufacturing-footprint disposed-of vehicles. If he had kept each of his earlier vehicles for three or four years longer than he did, and avoided the Prius completely, he’d probably do more to reduce his carbon footprint than a lifetime’s worth of Prius driving.
I’m going to call this problem the problem of “carbon amortization.”
Below, is a picture of my mom, my sister, and me, with the family car, somewhere in Oregon, 1970.
My father still has this car. He hasn’t had it running in a few years, due to financial constraints, but I know he intends to drive it many more miles – as do I.
Caveat: Englyns
I’ve been experimenting with writing englyns – these are complex, rigid Welsh poetic forms – not in Welsh, though. This is a small englyn penfyr I made:
nobody sees sky’s glimmer, the sun falls,
-nobody feels the summer-
nobody sees air’s shimmer.
Sometime back I tried writing one in Spanish, too – probably not as good. And this one is about being angry:
a veces siento enojo de perro,
ira de piedra, un rojo
enfado de hombre cojo
Traditional Welsh poetry is fascinating to me because of its demands for such highly structured forms – almost like Japanese haiku, for example. And, as Georges Perec once pointed out (and probably others), it is constraint that leads to truly innovative artistic expression, and not freedom.
I remember as one of my most productive periods of poetry-writing the time when I was experimenting with highly constrained forms such as the alexandrine sestina, with additional non-traditional constraints on such things as “characters per line” (thus I could produce completely justified poetic lines using monospace type with no additional spaces).
[UPDATE: the first englyn above was included in my daily poem series and republished on this blog on June 9th, 2021, as poem #1774.]
Caveat: Gnostic Dreams on Buddha’s Birthday
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: Speaking in Caves
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.
Caveat: Saul was on the road to Damascus…
… and something happened. He was struck by an awesome vision. But he dismissed it as a ridiculous if terrible dream. It was nothing, he thought to himself. Nothing real.
Gilles Deleuze, commenting on Spinoza, wrote, “ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation.” This has been a guiding aphorism for me for many years now. But…
Does this mean there is something like unethical joy, too? What’s the difference? Where do ethics come from – for an atheist, for someone committedly anti-transcedent?
For the secularist, “human nature” – the behaviorial consequences and maladaptations that are the unintended consequences of evolutionary psychology – these are original sin. And standing in for the apocalypse, we have environmental degradation and catastrophic social collapse, and war. But are these limiting “secular” ontologies and eschatologies any less destructive of human aspirations than the classical varieties? Wouldn’t we do better eliminating all types of original sin? Denying all flavors of apocalypse?
Or do we materialists need to build ourselves a christ-machine? Without souls, what’s to be saved?
But without original sin… with the human being decentered and meta-copernicanized… what is virtue? Is there any behavior better than any other? I feel this is so, but can’t see why.
I’m spinning. You know.
Caveat: angst
Everyone who knows me, knows that I struggle with focus. Not the narrow, task-centered, short-term focus associated with getting a piece of query code to work, or explicating a compelling bit of philosophy or literary criticism, or even with driving. I'm pretty good at that, and on rare occasions even experience that thing I've heard called "flow" wherein I get pretty much inside the current moment, zenishly.
No, the type of focus I struggle with is of that more existential, life-encompassing sort, that leads to a certain large-scale aimlessness. Many people reference it with the phrase "I haven't figured out what I'm going to do yet, when I grow up." Which becomes more ironic yet utterly serious with the increasing age of the person making the utterance. Frankly, although I have always harbored a senseless dislike for the phrase itself, it really subsumes this focus problem of mine quite succinctly. So there, I've uttered it – with a modicum of redirection, of course.
"I'm only on my fourth career, and I don't expect it to be my last." This is a phrase I have taken to using quite a bit, lately, although it's probably just as sophomoric, ultimately, as the one just discussed above. Let me try to make this more concrete: I can envision myself doing so many things that I rarely envision the same future for myself from one hour to the next, much less from one day or week or month or year to the next.
One minute, I'm dropping everything, moving to Lisbon and working on "my book." (Not sure what book that would be – obviously figuring that out would be a good, though not indispensable, first step).
Next minute, I'm going to business school full time, possibly in Europe, and then moving on to become some kind of high-powered IT manager.
An hour later, I'm traveling to Korea and finding a position as an English teacher.
Another time, I go to Tunisia, with a sincere commitment to become fluent in that beautiful language, Arabic.
I occasionally imagine sticking with my current job, gaining new skills in the area of programming, development, and database architecture.
These and many many others are all equally possible, even almost equally plausible.
Recently, I had another job interview. This time, with a fairly high-powered "guru" of the software development world, for a position I really had almost zero qualifications for but some definite degree of interest. Naturally, the context of a job interview forces one to spend a good deal of energy on working out plausible futures, which can be shared and conveyed to the person doing the interviewing.
And somehow in that self-selling moment, all the different possible futures – one specific instance of which is suddenly under a bruising, close, interactive scrutiny – become shockingly, painfully, embarrassingly and equally implausible, and I become stranded on my isle of bitter insecurity and pointless daydreaming. It all seems drowningly futile, like one of those dreams you cannot wake up from.
For the briefest of moments, I experience one of those intractable gasps of aching nostalgia for that least aimless yet really most intentionally purposeless period of my entire life: I yearn for the psychiatric ward.
Because it was so explicitly, irredeemably FUTURELESS. Which made it super-easy, from an existential standpoint.
Because the future is scary.
So I guess this is one of those flexion-points, where I might decide to step away from my current future, and toward another. But a friend (a colleague) made an observation to me the evening before the interview – really, also, an observation OF me. He pointed out (and somehow had figured this out despite missing major portions of my biography) that I was a serial quitter.
And maybe I should get over that?
The hardest future to adopt, in other words, is the one currently coming at you. Alternate futures are easier, perhaps. Am I destined to always be a refugee in my own alternate futures, in exile from my own alternate pasts?