In maudlin moments, I find myself speculating that I have been some kind of “tragedy magnet” in this life.
This is ridiculous, of course. My life is perhaps more tragic than the lives of some others, if one wants to inspect it on those terms. But it is still so much less tragic than many, many lives. It’s just a life.
Humans, collectively, are perhaps better conceptualized as tragedy magnets than any individual. We perceive tragedy, and that allows us to draw tragedy around us like a proudly worn, tattered cloak.
13 years ago this week, my wife Michelle committed suicide. We were separated, but talk of divorce wasn’t at that moment on the table. It was a complicated time, and painful.
In my more self-punishing moments, I could imagine that I brought her suicide on, myself. Or that she and I, together, brought that tragedy on ourselves. After all, she and I chose the lives we were making… or failing to make.
But then life went on, after that.
In that same kind of self-punishing moment, I wonder how much of my current cancer (now that the doctors are calling it that without circumspection) is the result of “incorrect thinking.” I don’t mean that I’m conceptualizing this newly discovered illness as a kind of punishment for sins, because I don’t believe in sins – but rather, I’m talking about psychosomatic processes: a somatic expression of my broken psyche.
Of course there are senses in which this is true. There are senses, though, in which it is not true.
Scientifically – medically – psyche plays a role (via the way that stress impacts the body, if nothing more), but there are many other factors: genetics, pollution in the environment, bad habits of diet or tobacco (when I was much younger, if referring to me specifically) or lack of exercise, or even random stray cosmic rays zapping just the wrong molecules of DNA at just the wrong moment.
But cumulatively, my psyche has a job to do, too, and so I sometimes imagine I’ve brought this onto myself.
Should I just let it run its course? Is this creature meant to be fought?
Such a futile thing: to purchase a few more years, of uncertain quality, in exchange for a price of a vast amount of treasure and energy and willpower and yes, pain. I really don’t like pain.
Below, an utterly random and definitely unseasonal picture from my archive: the frozen Lake in Ilsan in January, 2009.
Those footprints in the snow on the frozen ice… There I go.
The doctor said: “You have cancer.” Well. No ambiguity, there.
It’s cancer of the tongue, possibly lymph, too. What stage? “It’s a gray area.” We can’t know what ‘stage’ until surgery – that will include exploratory surgery and excision of lymph area on left side of neck.
Surgery will be in 2 weeks. Depending on how bad things look once they’re inside, looking around, it could be a simple 2-hour surgery or up to a 7-hour long surgery, including tracheotomy and extensive reconstruction after excision. Just to be clear: they will be removing some portion of the back of my tongue, and putting what’s left of it back together again, regardless of the other aspects (i.e. lymph etc.).
I will miss at least one month of work. Because of my relative “youth,” prognosis is good as far as recovery of functionality: speaking, eating, tasting. Still, I’m not sure what kind of “speaking teacher” I’m going to be, after this. Curt is being very kind.
There’s some irony, to be a linguist with tongue cancer…
Following surgery and recovery, radiation is standard for this type of diagnosis. Six weeks of daily radiation, starting probably in August at some point.
Statistics: survival rate is about 65%.
Insurance: with Korean National Health Insurance my copay will not exceed 5%. At that, probably still in the thousands of dollars.
Work: I need to find a short-term (one or two month) replacement. I will remain an employee of KarmaPlus.
Later, I can wax philosophical or journalistic or literary.
I’ve decided to do a series of Korean tongue-twisters, in the same way I have been doing aphorisms and proverbs.
저기 가는 상장사가 헌 상장사냐 새 상장사냐?
저기 가는 상장사가
jeo·gi ga·neun sang·jang·sa·ga
There go-PRESPART table-merchant-SUBJ
헌 상장사냐 새 상장사냐
heon sang·jang·sa·nya sae sang·jang·sa·nya
old table-merchant-OR new table-merchant-OR
Is that table-merchant there an old table-merchant or a new table-merchant?
Actually, I have zero percent confidence about the choice of “table” as the meaning for 상. My tutor and I figured the merchant was selling something, and 상 has a lot of possible meanings – assuming it’s a merchant.
The fact that it stumped a native speaker means I don’t feel bad about this. Table merchant makes some sense – maybe not nowadays, but I can easily imagine in olden times a man with some of Korea’s little wooden tables strapped to his back, going from town to town selling them at the 5-day markets.
Here’s my little table at right, that I bought from a streetside table merchant (or was it a more generalized housewares vendor?) in Suwon in 2010. I have no idea if he was an old table merchant or a new one.
I feel a sort of apprehension: tomorrow I return to get the results of my biopsy and probably get a CT scan. I received a text message this morning on my phone from the hospital:
WAY JARED 님의 정확한 조직 검사진단을 위하여 검사가 추가 시행될 예정입니다.
검사결과는 다음 외래 내원시 수납 후 확인하실 수 있습니다. – 국립암센터-
본 검사는 6월 19일 접수한 조직으로 검사가 진행되오니 내원하실 필요는 없습니다.
Basically, it’s telling me that they want to do additional “diagnostic tests” (검사진단) and that it can be done when I come in for my next appointment (which is tomorrow morning). I don’t think this is really very encouraging, though I suppose I could conclude that it means “they don’t really know” which is better than “they’re certain.”
I have been trying to write what are called Sapphic stanzas – an originally Greek poetic form that has a long history of adaptation in English, including efforts by Hardy, Kipling and Ginsberg.
I’m not sure about the typical thematics – sapphics seem to be used for odes and narrative poetry. They are in any event considered difficult and ill-fitted to natural English rhythms, better suited to the rolling polysyllables of Greek or Latin.
Still, I think I got the metics right in this little single stanza. I like it well enough to share it, anyhow, although it’s in the category of a sketch rather than a completed work. (Poem #13 on new numbering scheme)
"A Moment."
Clouds that parse the sky with their fractal, cold hands;
Trees held captive struggling against the strong earth,
Branches dividing, air is displaced with green thrusts:
only a moment.
Something in the metrical pattern strikes me as reminiscent of Robinson Jeffers. I suppose given his background in classics, his poetry was full of such meters as these. Here are two short excerpts of his poetry, which share a theme, which is not the theme of my poem above. These are also clearly not sapphics – indeed, I didn’t really invest the energy to figure out what they might be, but regardless there’s clearly something “classical” in the metrics.
Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this thing comes near us again I am finding it hard To praise you with a whole heart. – “Contemplation of The Sword” (1938)
I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings. – “Apology for Bad Dreams” (1927)
The picture (found online) is of of Jeffers’ “Tor House” which he built by hand (in the 1920’s and 30’s) near Carmel, California.
First, my friend Peter and I met at Anguk and did some book shopping. Then we met my other friend Seungbae. Seungbae has a car, such as it is: he described his decrepit yellow van to Peter as his “Korean West Virginia Van” by which he meant to describe its origins in the Hantuckian southwest of the peninsula. It’s a kind of running bit of humor he’s had with me.
“Let’s drive to Mexico,” he announced.
So we did.
We went to Pyeongtaek, which is Korea’s Mexico. By which I mean, only, that in Pyeongtaek there is an authentic Mexican restaurant run by authentic Mexicans. Seungbae and I spoke Spanish with the owner. I’ve visited this place before, with this friend (a few years ago), but it was the first time for my other friend Peter.
I regretted not being able to enjoy spicy food, currently, but I had some bland but good tacos al pastor, and drank horchata.
Actually, we spent most of the afternoon there, talking. The part of the afternoon not spent there, talking, were mostly spent driving around. Seungbae has a very improvisational style of vehicular navigation that leads to a lot scenic detours.
Returning to north Seoul at 6 pm or so, I was struck by how smoggy it was looking. The view of the haze-shrouded highrises from the Gyeongbu expressway approaching Gangnam from the south made me feel like I was on the 405 in L.A.
Seungbae dropped us off at the Express Bus terminal in Gangnam, because it conveniently is located at the intersection of the two subway lines we needed – Peter to go home to Bucheon and me to go home to Ilsan.
After riding the subway home (another hour), I emerged at Juyeop right after dark, to capture the orangy supermoon rising over Jungangno. Why does an orangy supermoon look so small and unsuper in this photo? It was spectuclar in real life.
Here is the book I bought earlier that I’m most intrigued by: a Korean and English dictionary of Buddhist Terms.
[Update 2013-06-26: it turns out my friend Peter blogged this day, too. I think it’s novel enough to make a note of it here – it’s a chance for someone to see two different people blogging the exact same experience.]
El vanidoso
Yo sería un gran muerto.
Mis vicios entonces lucirían como joyas antiguas
con esos deliciosos colores del veneno.
Habría flores de todos los aromas en mi tumba
e imitarían los adolescentes mis gestos de júbilo,
mis ocultas palabras de congoja.
Tal vez alguien diría que fui leal y fui bueno.
Pero solamente tú recordarías
mi manera de mirar a los ojos.
Una de las caras del amor es la muerte,
en el humo de esta época eternamente juvenil.
¿Qué me queda ante ti sino la perplejidad de los reyes,
los gestos del aprendizaje ante la crecida del río,
las huellas de la caída de bruces entre la ceniza?
La propia juventud decrece
y trota la melancolía como una mula.
The Koryo High School uniform is of high quality and the Koryo High School uniform is made of high quality fabric.
The only word that gave me a problem here was 원단. I’d already heard from a Korean tutor that the word means fabric, but my efforts to confirm that with a Korean-English dictionary failed – none that I consulted online include “fabric” as a meaning for 원단. But the meaning is right there in the Korean-Korean dictionary: 원단 (原緞) -옷 따위를 만드는 데 원료가 되는 천 (which translates roughly as a good definition for fabric). The hanja are different for this 원단 than the ones found in the Korean-English dictionary, too. Sometimes I think that mostly what I’m learning with all my efforts at study is not the Korean Language, but instead the shortcomings of Korean-English dictionaries. I decided not to research what the actual Goryeo High School uniform looks like. I only found one Goryeo High School in Korea, which is located in the city of Gwangju. I may have even walked past it at some point during my perambulations in that city when living down in Yeonggwang in 2010~11, since Gwangju was the closest major city. I was surprised that there is only one high school with the name Goryeo, since there is a very famous university called Goryeo, and since the name “Goryeo” itself is one of the many names for the country called “Korea” or “Corea” in western languages, arguably one of the oldest names, and undoubtedly the name from which the western name for the country derives. Anyway, I hope they have nice uniforms at that high school, made with high quality fabric.
I remember it vividly. My heart was racing and I heard it in my ears, and then it stopped. It was stopped a long time – it felt like several minutes but I don't know how long it really was.
I experienced the "seeing the white light up a tunnel," but even as it was happening I felt that I understood it scientifically, and so I contemplated its neurophysiology: the back of my brain was losing oxygen and shutting down first, and that is the center of the visual field, hence as the neurons shut off the visual field percept shifts to "nothing" – i.e. whiteness – and this whiteness spreads as the area of oxygen-deprived neurons expands.
I thought about many things. I considered becoming religious and rejected it, in that moment. I replayed memories, bits of my life. I had a sort of debate with myself – I can't say if I won or lost that debate. Both, maybe.
And then I heard a voice – my own voice – which said: "you're not done yet." My heart started again. I had the distinct impression that I had become a ghost – an idea which recurs to me occasionally even through the present day.
This episode is not invented or fictionalized in any way. There are a lot of surrounding circumstances that I'm less willing to share so transparently about that point in my life, but the core near-death experience was real and transformational.
From that time until now I have been living on borrowed time: "my bonus round."
I had to go to work early, because of an open house for parents. Not a lot of parents came, but some. Still, I never have much to do at these things – mostly it’s homeroom teachers meeting with them, after the director and sub-director make their talks. But they like to have me available, in the event some parent has a question or a complaint or a request, and I’m genuinely happy to be available for that – I sometimes enjoy playing a guessing game by myself, to figure out who is who’s parent, matching faces I’m seeing to the familiar faces of my students in my mind.
After this, we had a hweh-shik (회식, normally romanized as hoe-sik but that’s one case where the revised romanization is pretty inadequate to pronunciation and so I’m willing to break the rules) – the typical Korean business lunch or dinner. Hweh-shik lunches are more fun for me than hweh-shik dinners, normally, because less alcohol is involved.
We went to 보양 삼계탕 [boyang samgyetang], a fairly upscale samgyetang joint on the west side of Ilsan, with a really lovely view down a tree-lined boulevard of the Kintex convention center, in one direction, and the Goyang city stadium in another direction.
I normally really like samgyetang, which is a kind of whole-chicken-in-rice-and-ginseng-soup concoction, but both because of the sheer volume of it and the complicated spices and dismemberment of it, I really didn’t want samgyetang (remember that currently, because of my illness, eating is painful, for me). I’ve been preferring to stick to soft, squishy, somewhat bland foods, lately. I special-ordered some black sesame seed rice porridge, 흑깨죽, which was earthy and delicious. I also drank a cupful of ginseng liqueur by accident, thinking it was tea. I almost choked, and who knows how that will interact with my percocet. I survived and felt OK afterward.
Then it was back to work for a long afternoon and evening of mostly correcting things at my desk and playing around with various ambitious curriculum idea documents on my computer, which may never go anywhere but they help me to feel useful. I don’t have a dense teaching load on Fridays even on the normal schedule, and with the current test-prep schedule for the middle-schoolers (for first semester pre-summer vacaction final exams), I have even less.
I lurked at my cramped desk in the crowded staffroom and drank a lot of 보이차 [bo-i-cha = puer tea], of the teabag variety as opposed to the loose-leaf kind I like to make for myself at home. I cleaned my computer files. Next week will be plenty busy, because one of my coworkers is going on a short vacation and so I will be filling in quite a few of his classes. So I decided to just not be too stressed about not having a lot to do this day.
During my last class, I made the students do their homework during class. They don’t like this – but that’s my “punishment” when they all come to class with incomplete homework. So we were looking at a question to the tune of “Do you do volunteer work?” that was in their workbooks. One boy, Sangjin, wrote, “I don’t do this work.” That was his entire answer – it was supposed to be a short paragraph.
I asked him about it.
“I don’t do this work,” he insisted, refusing to elaborate.
“You’re not a volunteer, ever?”
“Yes.” Korean students inevitably say “yes” to English negative questions where native speakers might be inclined to say “no” or try to be less ambiguous by saying “right” or “correct.”
“It’s because you have a cold heart,” I teased.
“Oh no. I’m lazy.”
He grinned and made one of those silly two-hands-cupped-together-in-the-shape-of-a-heart gestures popularized by Korean celebrities.
When I was back in the staff room, my collegue Kwon-saem (the middle school division bujang, a Buddha-like figure who spends long periods of time playing Windows Solitaire at his desk) came over and stuck the text of a poem or song in front of me.
“Can you translate this?” he asked, good-naturedly.
It was in Italian.
“Maybe,” I shrugged. “Do you want me to?” I grabbed it back from him and handily translated the first two lines on the fly. Italian can be like that, for me, given my strong backgrounds in Spanish
and French and Romance Philology.
He was surprised – I wondered if he was testing me or if he had been joking. He laughed. “You are genius,” he surmised, in his laconic way.
I was pleased, and he and I spent about 20 minutes slapping together a translation into English using the googletranslate, which he then worked on rendering, in turn, into Korean. I never did figure out why he was working on it – it’s an Italian pop song from the 1970’s.
My mood was swinging up and down a lot, today. I’m sure it’s partly this feeling that life is being turned upside down while continuing through the same rhythms and habits as always. But I had a sort of breakthrough moment while walking home, that maybe it’s the percocet, too. It’s a pretty strong, opiate-derived painkiller (and believe me, I’ve been needing it).
What I’m listening to right now.
Matia Bazar, “Stasera Che Sera.”
Lyrics:
Stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me poi respirare il profumo del mare mentre dal vento tu ti lasci cullare fare il signore o il mendicante non scordarsi mai pero’ di essere anche amante stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me stringere il sole nelle mie mani toglierti i raggi come ad un albero i rami per circondare il tuo viso in calore non per fare un petalo intorno al suo fiore Na a ria na na na ria na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na a stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me spegnere il germe del nostro gioco sazi d’amore ma contenti di poco chiedere all’aria i suoi tesori e cosi’ nel chiuso puoi sentirti sempre fuori stasera “stasera” che sera “che sera” restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me fare il conteggio dei giorni passati sapere adesso che non sono sciupati e che tu sei sempre viva e presente ora come allora tu sei mia nella mia mente Na a ria na na na ria na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na a stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me…
In my young ones class (Stars 반), this month we have been practicing a play called “The Wolf and the Five Little Goats.”
I made video of our practice yesterday. At first I had intended to make this the final version and edit it so it came out well, but the girls don’t really have it memorized yet and they were still deciding how they wanted to arrange their scenes, so this is just a kind of running practice. They are progressing well, though.
I know it’s really hard to understand what they’re saying – they have a sort of on-going chatter in Korean wrapped around their fairly decent reading of the lines of their characters in English, but it’s very focused and on-task – they’re mostly discussing how to do a given scene and where to arrange themselves.
I love to see my students “take charge” of their own learning process, which is clearly what’s going on here: I’m just a guy with a camera, while they are deciding what to do, how to do it, and the pace of things. This makes for a classroom setting that is very chaotic from a traditionalist perspective, and some teachers find it scary to contemplate running a classroom this way, and other teachers will probably contend that no actual learning is going on – “they’re just playing” was a remark directed to me by a Korean teacher once, after witnessing this type of classroom. But if there’s one thing that I can feel confident of: they are internalizing the English dialog from this play at a level that is hard to achieve otherwise at this age.
We have done previous plays and they have echoed lines from those plays in appropriate contexts months later. One example – although it’s not in the text of the play we’re working on now, toward the end the goats push the wolf into the well (you can see the girls acting it out): the two girls pushing say “push, push!” and “push harder” – which are some lines from a play we did quite a while back. They improvised it at the appropriate moment in our current play.
I really like the series of books that we’re working with for these – they suit my feelings about good ways to do dramatic arts with low-proficiency young learners.
To show what these materials look like, here is the front cover (at right).
Here are our eight characters. This also is part of what makes the girls’ performance interesting: there are three of them playing eight characters and do so with a remarkable level of sophistication. Watch, especially, in the video when the girl in the light pink dress is playing both the wolf and one of the baby goats behind the door.
Here are some pages from the book so you can get a feel for it (you can click to enlarge them and see the lyrics to two of the songs).
If you’re teaching 1st/2nd/3rd graders at low or medium level EFL in Korea, I highly recommend this series, called Ready Action! by publisher A*List E*Public. It’s worth noting, too, that this publisher, A*List, is the same one responsible for one of my favorite series of speaking and speech-giving textbooks for more advanced elementary learners available in Korea, called Speaking Juice.
Here is a video by the publisher supporting the first song in the script – a little bit annoying but interesting to see.
I’ve decided to do a series of Korean tongue-twisters, in the same way I have been doing aphorisms and proverbs. 앞뜰에 있는 말뚝이 ap·tteul·e itt·neun mal·ttuk·i front-yard-LOC be-PRESPART hitchingpost-SUBJ 말맬 말뚝이냐 mal·mael mal·ttuk·i·nya horse-tether-FUTPART hitchingpost-be-OPT 말안맬 말뚝이냐 ? mal·an·mael· mal·ttuk·i·nya horse-not-tether-FUTPART hitchingpost-be-OPT Is it [the horse?] tethered to the front yard hitching post or not?
I could see this conversation taking place in one of those popular Korean historical television dramas. Scene: the one guy runs into the palace, and the other guy asks, “Did you come on a horse?” and the other guy says “Yes my lord,” and then the first guy asks, “Is the horse tethered to the front yard hitching post or not?” – maybe because they need to plan an escape.
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.
– D.H. Lawrence
A friend quoted this to me some time a few years back. I finally have got round to posting it.
I saw an article (hattip to Sullydish) that talks about some study that shows that legoguy facial expressions have been getting angrier over time. This is … interesting, and utterly plausible. I would not place myself in the camp that views this as some kind of reflection of our society’s broad decline or somesuch – at worst, I think it merely reflects Lego Corporation’s growing cynicism vis-a-vis the global toy market and their role in popular culture.
I have always loved Legos. I’m too old to have played directly with Lego minifigures myself as a child. My own legos were simpler than what the toy series later became. But the minifigures came out in time for my younger brother to have had many of them, and later, my stepson had a large collection, too.
At one point, I invented some very elaborate stories about a Lego civilization called Legotopia with my stepson. I even wrote some of them down in the mid 1990’s, but a lot of those things I wrote down during that period were lost because of the disasterous Hard Drive Failure of 1998.
I recall that I had drawn a kind of map of Legotopia, which included a large city called Legoville in the center, and then various surrounding kingdoms and lands, such as a County of Towers (lots of Lego towers and a medieval theme), a Duchy of Roses (lots of pastoral Lego creations on the old Belleville theme), as well as a kind of “wild west” called Castle Pass. It was all more of a universe-creation project than it was a germ of a novel or series of short stories.
I always vividly imagined these lands and places populated by seething masses of undifferentiated “legoguys” with their quotidian struggles and triumphs. I’ve always called them “legoguys” (even the “girls” are called legoguys) – I’m not sure if the original coinage is mine or my brother’s. I made an emperor in Legotopia who went by the moniker of Legoguy XVII – as a proper name, appropriate to the leader of their grand civilization. He was the most generic-looking legoguy I could find in my stepson’s collection.
I still have a (very small) collection of Legos, which I have on occasion shared with some of my students (like the large Lego alligator that lives on my desk at work). Informal survey: I currently own 6 legoguys; two of them are angry. The picture I snapped just now, above right, shows one of them, battling a legogator.
Last night my friend brought me chicken soup [update: very delicious] and a kale smoothie [update: not delicious, but hopefully healthy]. I'm grateful. A coworker is trying to get me to drink something called "noni juice" which I guess has some antioxidant properties. It's generous of him.
A lot of people have a lot of different ways to show kindness and nurturing. I have to get better at showing gratitude and not being cynical and negative about the curative properties of all these things. My own ideas about what sorts of medicine work or don't work and how they work are likely just as idiosyncratic.
I've been sleeping a lot lately. That's probably good.
Koreans say, "take a rest" – not really idiomatic English for someone who is sick, but somewhere in the long line of English education in Korea they've been taught that this is the appropriate thing to say to someone who is sick, and so it's now become an integral expression in "Korean English" that I've heard even native English speakers saying..
I’ve decided to do a series of Korean tongue-twisters, in the same way I have been doing aphorisms and proverbs.
칠월칠일은 평창친구
chil·wol·chil·il·eun pyeong·chang·chin·gu
7-month-7-day-TOPIC Pyeongchang[a city]-friend 친정 칠순 잔칫날 chin·jeong chil·sun jan·chit·nal mom’s-home 70th-birthday banquet-day July 7th [is my] friend from Pyeongchang’s mom’s 70th birthday party. I’m not sure if ~친구 친정 here ends up meaning “friend’s mom’s” or “friend’s (at her mom’s house).” Or maybe it could even mean something like “friend’s mother-in-law”? The phrase is too sparse on those optional grammatical particles I like to lean on.
Pyeongchang is where the 2018 Winter Olympics are scheduled to take place.
Boltzmann's entropy formula is S = k log W. I ran across this somewhere, and decided I wanted to understand it.
I failed to understand it, but I read about it for quite a while, skipping over the equations for the most part. Then I found some new blogs about various things and then I found this video about God and Nature instead, a blog called Preposterous Universe.
A while back in my young ones class I was doing a lesson where I have the kids draw their own version of the story we’re working on. I call this lesson “making a book” and normally when I do this type of lesson the kids enjoy it. But this group of kids was a little bit restless and feeling whiny that day.
“Too hard!” one of the girls moaned.
“못해” [I can’t], another whined.
They seemed to be overwhelmed with the idea of replicating the story that appeared in our story book on blank paper.
So I took matters in hand.
I said, “Look, I can make this book in 5 minutes.”
“Five minutes!?” the kids chanted together. “Nooo.”
“I can. Watch.”
I began to sketch rapidly, and lettering the story from memory.
“Waa. that’s funny.”
I stopped after about 4 minutes. The kids were inspired, now, and began doing their own rapid-sketch versions happily.
As those who are regularly reading my blog know, I've been having some persistent health problems. If you don't want to read more about that topic, stop reading now. Don't read what follows and then complain that I am "over-sharing." Thank you.
I had a biopsy this morning. Maybe I'm fortunate that I live within a few kilometers of one of the best cancer hospitals in Korea. The preliminary diagnosis is that I have a "clearly malignant tumor" at the back of my mouth (near the root of my tongue), but it seems "early stage." They took a (very painful) biopsy this morning, and I will return next week for more tests.
Over the last several weeks, it has become increasingly difficult to eat comfortably – it has become painful to chew or swallow. I will look at it as an opportunity to lose some weight. Fortunately, so far, it doesn't affect my ability to talk – that would be quite terrible, since talking is my livelihood (being a language teacher, and all). Uh… knock-on-wood.
I went with my boss and friend Curt. Sometimes, his Buddhism shows through strongly: he said, as we were driving back, "Don't worry, Jared. Life is nothing."
I said I agree with that philosophy, but that living it is more difficult than believing it.
One effect this development is likely to have: I have suddenly been forced to set aside completely any thought of not renewing my contract in September. Why? Because working at KarmaPlus and staying in Korea is my Health Insurance. I spent $50 today but without insurance it would have been several hundred easily. And in the US, based on what I know, it would have been $1000 without insurance.
I’ve decided to do a series of Korean tongue-twisters, in the same way I have been doing aphorisms and proverbs. This first one is one I mentioned before – in 2007. 내가 그린 기린 그림은 Naega geurin girin geurimeun I-SUBJ draw-PP giraffe drawing-TOPIC 잘 그린 기린 그림이고, chal geurin girin geurim-igo, well draw-PP giraffe drawing-be-CONJ 니가 그린 기린 그림은 niga geurin girin geurimeun you-SUBJ draw-PP giraffe drawing-TOPIC 잘 못그린 기린 그림이다. chal motgeurin girin geurim-ida. well can’t-draw-PP giraffe drawing-be The giraffe drawing that I drew is a well-drawn giraffe drawing, but the giraffe drawing that you drew is a not-well-drawn giraffe drawing. I remember that 그린 [geurin] caused me some confusion, way back when, because the stupid online Korean-English dictionary says it can mean “green” (i.e. that it’s a Konglish term), but that’s not really what’s going on. It is, instead, a past participle (or relativized form, “~ that ~ V-ed”) of the verb 그리다 [geurida = draw]. It’s frustrating to think that I have been studying Korean for 5 years since then, and I’m still so very bad at it, that I can’t say this tongue-twister much better now than I could then. Sigh.
I have made it a “public” blog on naver (Korean web portal) platform, now, which increases its accessibility for students and their parents, since it is within the cultural firewall that surrounds the Korean internet.
[UPDATE: This is all quite out-of-date. The website, jaredway.com, is still active but much transformed – since around 2018 it’s been my personal “identiy” site: stuff like my resume, a summary of interests, etc. But the “blog” I created for my work-related postings, in Korea, on the Korean platform, is still there! That is: https://blog.naver.com/jaredway]
I like the Beastie Boys. I don’t like all Beatles, but I definitely have a soft spot in my heart for their Yellow Submarine. So this mash-up seemed awesome.
Normally I enjoy the linguistics blog called LanguageLog immensely, but today a post by Victor Mair left a sour taste in my mouth. Doubly. Originally, I was going to post my complaints about his post as comments to the LanguageLog blog, but my past efforts to join the community at LanguageLog have been utterly ignored – I’m not the right sort of linguistics geek, apparently – so I decided to rant here, instead.
Firstly, Mair was posting one of his frequent examples of Chinglish/Konglish/Japanglish (which sometimes goes under the generic epithet of “Engrish” but that seems awfully Japanese-centric as a term, at least phonologically speaking). But the example he was sharing was from a sign posted in a Japanese lavatory, which said in English “Tap water may be used for drinking water.” Mair seems to think there is something wrong with this bit of English. But, at least in my dialect in of English, it’s quite common to use the preposition “for” with the same meaning as “as” – hence the sign’s text is equivalent to “Tap water may be used AS drinking water” which makes complete sense. The sign’s only linguistic crime might be stylistic – its slightly repetitive in its deployment of the noun “water.”
But what really annoyed me was when he decided, parenthetically, to devote several column inches – perhaps even a column foot or two – to the rant of an anonymous colleague against South Korea’s “Revised Romanization.” I suppose I shouldn’t complain – for my part, I’ve ranted more than once against Martin’s version of the Yale Romanization (which the cited ranter at LanguageLog prefers).
Certainly I can’t stand the old McCune-Reischauer system that existed in various incarnations prior to 1999. McCune-Reischauer was the romanization I learned when I first studied Korean (as badly as I did) in the early 1990’s, and with some modifications it is the system that North Korea still uses today.
What I found more odd was the reason (or reasons) this anonymous scholar bases his/her objection on. He/she claims the romanization of ㅓ as “eo” and ㅡ as “eu” under the revised system are linguistic “embarrassments.” Fine – I happen to agree. But when mapping a 14 vowel system to the five vowel symbols of the Latin alphabet, compromises are inevitable. To speak briefly of Martin’s romanization, in what way is “ceng” as a romanization of 정 (RR “jeong” IPA /t͡ɕʌŋ/) not an embarrassment, too?
For someone like this anonymous ranter, with supposed linguistic training, it seems remarkably naive. All romanization systems for Korean are going to involve tradeoffs, and the tradeoffs made with the revised system as adopted and promulgated by the South Korean government, as I see it, were focused on two objectives: 1) the system should be as easy as possible for non-speakers to “get close to” the expected pronunciation, or, at the least, habituate themselves to it over time; 2) the system should avoid all diacritics and special symbols (this is a major drawback of the popular McCune-Reischauer system, which has “ŏ” and “ŭ” for ㅓ and ㅡ respectively, among other frustrating diacritic and “apostrophe” rules). This latter requirement against diacritics is, in my mind, what led to the two “embarrassments” mentioned. Clearly digraphs were required, and settling on what digraphs to use for which vowels was going to involve some level of discomfort.
I seem to be the only Westerner with any background in linguistics who prefers the Revised Romanization over any of the alternatives. I would speculate that it is because of my background in computing and programming (and hence ASCII) – the rise of technology and the internet were part of the justification in 1999 for the revised system’s rejection of diacritics – they wanted a system that was transparently “ASCIIable.” In this way, I have a great deal of sympathy for the perspectives of the 1990’s committee – they wanted to move toward a romanization system that maximized their advantages vis-a-vis the inconveniently roman internet. It was of a piece with other government-directed manipulations of Korean cultural content oriented toward a remarkably forward-looking post-industrial policy.
Such a need has been utterly obviated by subsequent generations of technology, all now mostly based on the well-designed unicode system, which means that the Korean internet has begun to be mostly in unicode hangeul rather than any romanization at all. But in the 1990’s nobody could have predicted technology solving the ASCII dilemma so quickly and easily, and so, from the perspective of the committee desigining the Revised Romanization, their motivation to reject diacritics was exceptionally strong and very understandable.
Personally, quite early on I was able to overcome my discomfort with the digraphs “eo” and “eu” by reminding myself that they were no more “weird” than the very common use of the digraphs “oe” and “ue” for “ö” and “ü” in some European languages. Those examples are equally opaque, phonologically, yet widely accepted, and the underlying principle of the digraphs in both cases is almost the same – thus it could be understood that in the revised system, they’re using an “e” to mark the “missing” diacritic of McCune-Reischauer. In fact, without any inside knowledge, that’s how I suspect the committee choosing the digraphs saw it.
It’s good to see that important, important work is being done in this area of semantic analysis: “geek” vs “nerd” at the blog slackpropagation. I think the author (with some commenters) has a point in realizing that using Twitter as his data source possibly limits and no doubt skews his results. As he mentions, it would require work with the Ngram corpus or suchlike to be more thorough. Nevertheless, I appreciate the attention to detail in his work.
귀신 듣는데 떡소리 한다 ghost hear-CIRCUM rice-cake-sound do-PRES [It] makes a rice-cake sound that ghosts hear. Apparently Korean ghosts like rice-cake, so if you make rice-cake
noise near ghosts, they are happy. Hence, “Music to one’s ears.” I’m not really sure what “rice-cake noise” might sound like, though – Korean rice-cakes are kind of doughy and keep quiet for the most part.
Periodically I watch the Daily Show or Stephen Colbert at the Comedy Central website. About a year ago Comedy Central became really reliably consistent in delivering little TV ads during the intermissions of their streaming video. The ads were annoying but I could hardly begrudge them.
At first, mostly I was seeing ads for other Comedy Central programming. Then it branched out to include MTV programming, and lately, they’re really dropping this truly obnoxious product/program (I can’t even figure out which it is) called “game trailers.”
In general, the ads were painfully repetitive and didn’t seem at all “targeted” – they mostly made me remember late-night infomercials on 1980’s cable.
Then suddenly, about a month ago, things got interesting. My Comedy Central streaming video ads turned Swedish. Seriously.
Is this an effort at geo-targeting gone horribly wrong? Is it something meant to be funny? Do other people watching Comedy Central online get Swedish ads, or only people in Korea, or only me?
Regardless, I like the Swedish ads a lot more than the previous fare. There are quite a variety of them, and I have always enjoyed advertising more when it’s in a language I don’t really understand. It becomes quaint and culturally intriguing, that way.
Above, a screenshot of an ad for some express train service. The tag-line is: “Ju fler som åker, desto billigare blir det.”
Thinking of good names for blogs is a bit like thinking of good names for rock bands. It's fun to do, even when you have no blog or rock band currently in need of a name. Occasionally, I stumble across a phrase or name where I think, I really wish I were using that name. But, my blog already has a pretty good name (it's memorable and unique, anyway), so I just think I'll use it as a motto, instead. Here's what occurred to me today as a potentially great blog name:
A newsletter for the voices in my head.
It's maybe a little bit long, but you could make an abbreviation; regardless, there are some great blogs with long names – I'm thinking of Stop Me Before I Vote Again, for example.
Anyway, I like this one I thought of enough that I might add it to my list-o-mottos at left, anyway.
Quite some time back, I translated (or, rather, attempted to translate) a list of 108 Korean Buddhist affirmations, which I had initially encountered on a Buddhist
television channel in early 2010, but then subsequently
researched and found online.
After having finished that little translation project more than a year and a half ago, I have finally decided to put the complete list in a single place (instead of being scattered through 108 blog entries, using the “create page” functionality of my blog host (a “page” is different from a “post” in that it isn’t a dated entry but a sort of stand-alone entry).
Here is my newly-created page of the 108 affirmations with translations.
One thing I have wondered about is if these affirmations were natively Korean, or if they derived from some older tradition. There is definitely a tradition in the wider Buddhist sphere of creating lists of 108 affirmations, prayers, or other types of things, but I haven’t run across this particular list of affirmations (I mean in terms of the content of their meanings). I don’t have the linguistic ability to research very thoroughly or effectively, though. If the Korean 108 affirmations came from somewhere, they were likely mediated through classical Chinese, about which I know nil. I’m a little better with Pali (the Prakrit language of the core Buddhist scriptures – only in that I can muddle through the abjad and/or find romanized versions that are vaguely decipherable or provided with translations), but I haven’t seen anything like this list in Pali.
I recently learned that China acquired Buddhism from the Gandharan civilization – which was the Indo-Hellenic civilization in the upper Indus valley and the Kush (i.e. modern Northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan). This is interesting to think about, as it leads to scholarly speculation as to the level of influence between classical Greek thought (I’m thinking here of the same currents of Platonist and neo-Platonist thought that so strongly influenced the New Testament) and the evolution of Mahayana Buddhism (i.e. as practiced in the “North”: China, Korea, Japan, etc.) as distinct from Theraveda Buddhism (i.e. as practiced in the “South”: Sri Lanka, Burma, India, Thailand, etc.). The so-called “Esoteric” Buddhism of Tibet and Bhutan is a third strain that has its own history.
I took the picture below in June, 2010, visiting 원효사 (Wonhyo Temple) near Gwangju.
기둥을 치면 들보가 울린다 post-OBJ hit-WHEN crossbeam-SUBJ ring-PRES When you hit the post, the crossbeam rings.
This refers to the post and crossbeam of an old-style house (한옥 = traditional “Korean house”). I visualize that by hitting the post you could get a sort of tone from the crossbeam, in a well-constructed house. It seems to mean that you can achieve a better result by going at something indirectly. Don’t tackle problems head-on. I would do well to take this advice.
Swá ðá maélceare maga Healfdenes singála séað· ne mihte snotor hæleð wéan onwendan· wæs þæt gewin tó swýð láþ ond longsum þe on ðá léode becóm, nýdwracu níþgrim nihtbealwa maést.
So then over the sorrow of the time the son of Half-Dane continually brooded; the wise hero could not turn away woe; that strife was too strong, hateful and enduring, that on the people came fearfully cruel, violent trouble, the greatest night-evil.
Tolkien dated the poem to the 8th century – and this was Tolkien’s specific area of expertise, as he was a professor of English Philology. Other scholars have thought the poem Beowulf to be younger, but certainly it is at least 1000 years old.
I like the poem because it offers a window into such an ancient, different world, but I like it mostly as a fabulous exemplar of language-change. Presumeably, the first and second texts, above, are the same language, separated only by 1000 years of history. But what makes a language a language? And in that vein, in what way is, for example, the “Korean” of today the same language as the “Korean” used in the Silla Era (pre 900 AD)?
Apparently this meme-picture is all the rage on China’s internet lately. It juxtaposes a shot of Xi and Obama during their recent summit in California with a classic picture of Pooh with bouncy Tigger.
