I had one of the most terrible days I've had in a very long time, today.
Of course, being sick as long as I have been, with no feeling that it's really getting better… that doesn't help.
There's been a feeling of never-ending crisis at work, for so long I can't really say when it started any more. I know cash flow is bad. Enrollment isn't really down, that much, but it's not up, either. Unfortunately, the business model seems to have been predicated too excessively on presumed inevitable growth. I can't even judge if that's a smart way to run a business or not, but my gut feeling is that it's not.
I spent over 3 hours this evening arguing with my boss, and got home 2 hours later than usual. The argument ranged across a lot of things, but with very little resolution. I don't want to go into details. I shouldn't, even if I wanted to.
But one thing that wounded me deeply, and angered me as utterly unnecessary and inappropriate and profoundly Korean: my boss said I was acting like a child.
When is it a good time to say this to an employee?
Let's review.
If it's true that the employee is acting like a child, then it's not a good idea to complain to the employee about it, but rather, to review (in one's mind) what that employee is doing and failing to do, what that employee's strengths and weaknesses are, and assess whether or not it's worthwhile to try to retain the child-like employee. If the employee is worth retaining, by all means avoid pointing out his childish behavior, and instead try to change the focus of the conversation. If the employee isn't worth retaining, even then it might be more productive to attempt to have as grown-up a conversation as possible about that employee's failings.
If, on the other hand, it's not true that the employee is acting like a child, then to accuse him of such is a pretty bad idea, as it's downright insulting.
So either way, it's a bad idea.
From my side of the argument, and setting aside the above, I ask myself – would I rather that he was right or wrong?
If he's right – if I was acting like a child – then I just feel depressed and discouraged (in a childish way, presumeably) over my failure to behave as an adult. If he's wrong, and I wasn't acting like a child, then I feel as he's genuinely misunderstood my points and is, himself, acting childish.
Ultimately, if I try my best to look at it objectively, I suspect there's some cultural conflict going on here. Americans, in general, because of our culture of equality and upfront, me-centered communication, can seem very childish to Koreans, I think. Americans tend to resist hierarchies and overt dominance behavior, as is typical in a Korean boss, and our reactions to authority seem weird and misplaced to them. On the other hand, to Americans, Koreans seem excessively focused on hierarchies and in arguments, they try to eke out apologies and concessions of guilt from those "below" them.
This is doomed to be an unfinished analysis – at 1 AM I'm not really interested in finishing it.
Earlier today, I had an advanced middle school student tell me, during a pretty extended conversation during a break time, "I miss Woongjin." (As a note, "Woongjin" is the name of the hagwon that underwent merger with Karma a little over a year ago – so he was referring to the "old days," pre-merger.)
"Why do you miss Woongjin?" I asked.
The student was actually pretty detailed in his analysis of his feeling. "This place, now," he said, gesturing around, "is all about rules… and punishment… and yelling. Woongjin had a good feeling between students and teachers. It was fun and there was trust."
Perhaps this student's trenchant observation was in the back of my mind as I argued with the boss later.
한달이 크면 한달이 작다 one-month-SUBJ be-big-IF one-month-SUBJ be-small If one month is long then another is small. Life has its ups and downs.
Here (at right) is a meme-picture I found in onlineland.
I imagine a door labelled “happiness” where this is true – that it isn’t locked. But I also imagine they keep changing the (very ostentatious) locks that are on it, such that you repeatedly leap to the conclusion that the door might be locked, even though it’s not. It ends up all being just a sort of epistemological security theater. You have to keep reaching out and trying the door, and sometimes you tire of playing the weird game involved.
Scottish author Iain Banks has died. I thought very highly of him – he was a talented writer of diverse abilities and genres. His novels, both in the “sci-fi” category and his “mainstream” ones (although I resist using those genre categories), are quite philosophical and intelligently written.
I first ran across him not that long ago – I recall distinctly that I acquired his novel The Algebraist in a Sydney bookshop in 2008, while shopping for something entertaining to read on my return flight to Korea. I ended up a fan and a “convert,” reading some half-dozen of his books over the next several years. I came to view Banks as the sort of novelist I would like to be, if I could get around to being a novelist.
Since my novel-reading slacked off so much after 2010, I’ve read less of his writing, obviously, but I feel inspired the next time I’m in a big bookstore to browse for another of his books.
There is a guy in Japan named Tatsuo Horiuchi who makes spreadsheets using Microsoft Excel that display (and print) as original works of fine art. This quote in the write-up at a website called Spoon & Tamago was exceptionally telling:
“Graphics software is expensive but Excel comes pre-installed in most computers,” explained Horiuchi. “And it has more functions and is easier to use than [Microsoft] Paint.”
some puer tea
he came to pull out some of the small silences
that grew like weeds.
instead he pushed some poetry into the small cracks
in the pavement.
the air had turned to summer and there were
some bees; some birds.
with something hidden behind his eyes he tasted the sky
out his window.
he laughed. he grimmaced. he cried. he examined
his black pencil.
he decided to brew a small pot of puer tea;
the water boiled.
he spilled some consonants, some vowels. the poem (his life) started big;
and ended small.
just some tea in a cup like a shell cradling orange-brown water,
somewhat bitter.
This poem of mine is unfinished, but I am done with it anyway. I shall go to the doctor again, now.
놓친 고기가 더 크다 be-escaped-PASTPART fish-SUBJ more be-big The fish that got away is bigger. This is equivalent to “The grass is always greener on the other side.” I believe people also say something exactly like this in English, when someone wistfully says, “The one that got away…” The word 고기 here seems to mean “fish,” but normally the word 고기 is more generic than that – it means any animal flesh-as-food: 소고기 “beef” 닭고기 “chicken meat” 물고기 “fish” (literally “water meat”). But whereas for most living animals the term 고기 isn’t applied (in the same way that in English a term like “beef” or “pork” is rarely applied to living animals), with fish it’s generally the only possible word – the generic word for “fish,” even a pet fish in a fishbowl, is 물고기 “water meat.” Hence it seems to arise that 고기 can be shorthand for “fish.” Another, alternate way of reading this is that 고기 means “game” – as in “that which is hunted.” Read as such, an alternate translation of the above is the more generic: “The game that got away is bigger.”
I spent my weekend, such as it was, being antisocial. Yesterday, I turned off my phone and only came online for about 2 hours. I have been doing more writing on actual paper – being low-tech, trying to keep away distractions and keep things simple. I’m not sure I’m succeeding. I turn off my phone because otherwise I find myself compulsively looking at it, like my students, and then I pull the ethernet wire out of my computer to keep myself from surfing the web, although I keep my computer on because it’s also my music player and general self-organizer. Maybe I need to just throw it all away and live like a monk?
Sometimes I have a dream that is so strange, yet so evidently autobiographical and symbolic, that as I caress its memory traces upon awaking, I think to myself, “people will think I made this up – no one dreams like that.”
So I must aver at the outset, I really dreamed this dream.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t make it up, too. Of course, as we awake and shuffle past the curlicues of fog that shrouded our sleeping state, the memories shift and take on form as a narrative that wasn’t really present in the dream. At least some if not most of the creativity in dreaming gets applied here, maybe. I don’t think, however, that that means I made the dream up, in any intentionalist sense.
I hesitate to report it, because as dreams go it was so very strange. But I will tell it, nevertheless – because that’s one of the things I do on This Here Blog Thingy™ that almost no one else does, and somehow, doing so thus means more to me vis-a-vis asserting my bloggish individuality over this peculiar format than most of the other things I do here.
I had decided to return to graduate school. In the dream, it was clear this had been a very fast, impulsive decision – perhaps taken over a long weekend, perhaps taken while drinking soju with coworkers. I had made the decision out of frustration with the current trajectory of my life.
I was accepted into UC Irvine. Keep in mind, in my real life, I have never even visited UC Irvine’s campus, but it has a certain plausibility around it, given my Southern California links. The year I spent working in Long Beach was actually, mostly, a year spent working at a client location in Costa Mesa, only a few miles from UCI. So it wasn’t something utterly random, perhaps.
I packed my possessions out of my apartment here in Korea (where somehow all my possessions in storage in Minnesota were also crammed into my apartment). I loaded everything into my Nissan pickup truck that I owned from 2001 until 2010, and drove to UCI.
I drove. It wasn’t something strange, in the dream. Just driving from Seoul to Orange County. It took a long time – but no more than a day or two. It was like driving from Oregon to Orange County.
When I arrived at the campus, UCI was in a Mexican beach town, but a rather posh one. I suppose that’s actually a pretty accurate description of much of Orange County. It was much greener than what we think of as Mexican beach towns – the green hills around the campus resembled northern Baja in winter, when the rains make everything verdant but trees are sparse. I remember looking down a long street as I parked my pickup truck and thinking there were a lot of nice sailboats in the harbor.
I went into a large, glass-faced office tower to find it divided up into various departments. Oddly, most of the departments were “city government”-type departments – a police department on one floor, a sewer department on another, yet another area had the offices of the city bus system. There was also a retail area with some upscale shops, like the Costa Mesa mall, and a food court, and alongside the food court was the Comparative Literature department. This is the first time in the dream where I knew what subject I’d returned to graduate school to study.
I met a friendly woman at a desk, there. There were stressed out grad students dozing in very stylish-looking cubicles made of polished blonde natural wood, decorated with tasteful personal effects. The woman began introducing me to various people in the department, although remarkably, there were no professors. “The department is run as a collective,” she pointed out. One of the other students muttered something about Juche (the North Korean ideological system). Really?
I was self-conscious of being so much older than most of the students. I was introduced to a man half my age who would be my “mentor” – he had the remarkably fitting dream-name of Earnest Young. He had blond hair and a goatee. He asked me to tell him about myself. I began to tell him a rather redacted personal history, in Spanish, but after a while we ended up talking about my negative experiences with graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. At some point he said, candidly, that his Spanish wasn’t so good, and we switched to English. I had the feeling that maybe he wasn’t impressed with my Spanish and had offered to switch out of pity, but he’d said very little in the language, so I decided I was being paranoid.
We were interrupted by the woman from the front desk, who took me around to meet some of the other students. Then, I was introduced to an older woman with graying hair who was apparently part of the building’s janitorial staff, but she was being treated as a full member of the group. She was laughing at humorless in-jokes being made by a forceful younger woman with “Occupy Philosophy” written on her tee shirt.
I bowed to the older cleaning lady and greeted her in Korean. This impressed the other students, but the cleaning lady returned my bow and offered me a large plate with exactly two orange cheezits on it. I took the plate politely, and was about to eat the cheezits when I saw that written on them were the words “아무것 없다” [“There is nothing”]. I looked at the woman with alarm, but she just smiled shyly and enigmatically, and returned to her cart of cleaning supplies and began dusting an unoccupied cubicle.
I was feeling uncomfortable by this secret message I’d received, so I put the plate of cheezits aside on the desk that had been assigned to me, and resumed my orientation chat with Earnest Young.
He was explaining that we had to teach our own classes under a sort of rotating leadership. My first class that I had to lead would be about Witold Gombrowicz [this is very significant in the context of this dream, but very hard to explain – Gombrowicz is connected in my mind with the problem and aesthetic of apophenia]. There were some administrative details I didn’t understand, but I decided to let it slide for now.
Then I looked back at the plate of cheezits after a few minutes and there was a very small sculpture of a monkey gazing at the cheezits, as if it was hungry. The monkey turned its head and met my eyes intelligently. I shivered, feeling a sort of nervous, conspiratorial fear, as if the universe had shrugged and uttered, “Gombrowicz, indeed.”
I was tired. “Where will I sleep?” I asked.
The earnest Mr. Young glanced at me, surprised. “Oh, you don’t know. We will probably assign you to ‘Camp One.'”
I asked for an explanation. “We take the collective nature of our undertaking very seriously,” he explained, earnestly. Apparently, they lived like Occupy protestors, in large recycled Army tents in the modernist plaza outside the building, where there was a large sculpture in the style of Picasso’s amazing work in Daley Plaza in Chicago [That sculpture is a recurring character in my dreams].
“The views of the mountains are excellent,” the young Earnest pointed out. “And the outside air is invigorating.”
I shrugged, but remembered a problem. “I don’t have a sleeping bag.”
He looked at me, eyes bugging out, as if to say, ‘how could you neglect to bring something so important as a sleeping bag to a comparative literature graduate program?‘
I apologized, and mumbled something about how Penn had obviously habituated me to a different sort of graduate program, altogether.
He grinned, forgiving me. “Yeah, we don’t follow that old Penn style. We’re progressive.”
I nodded, and added for no apparent reason, “Like Columbia?”
“Maybe. I haven’t been there. This is a different world,” he said, gesturing around. The signs were in Korean, now, in the food court, and a large number of people were emerging from what was clearly a Seoul subway station stairway. Yet peering out a large window I could still see the green hills and the harbor with sailboats in the distance. So I had to agree it was a different world.
“I’m really tired,” I finally said.
“You’ll get to sleep, soon. But first, we’re meeting to watch cartoons.” He described a restaurant or bar location across the street from the tents where I would be staying. “Let’s meet there in about 30 minutes.”
“What are we watching,” I asked.
He waxed enthusiastic. “Oh, it’s a fabulous new program,” he exclaimed. “It’s called ‘pork the orkville opiates.'”
This title for a cartoon was so bizarre, so incongruous and yet hilarious, that I began to laugh.
I immediately woke up. Am I the only one who has noticed that a dream state cannot sustain an active, laughing subject? Do I begin to “sleep-laugh” in actual fact, when these dream-laughs occur?
“Orkville,” by the way, isn’t just some random name. When I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, I had a collection of stuffed toys that were perhaps intended to be alligators, but they stood upright and came in unusual colors, like blue and red and yellow. I had decided that these were definitely not alligators (even then, alligators!), but rather “orks.” My mother, a fan of Tolkien before Tolkien fandom was a thing, asked me if Orcs weren’t horrible, brutish and unkind creatures. I told my mother in no uncertain terms that no, those were “C-orcs, spelled with the letter ‘c’.” My orks were “K-orks, spelled with the letter ‘k’.” I clarified that K-orks were, in fact, vegetarians, and lived a communistic life in an amphibious riverine utopia named Orkville. I drew several maps and wrote a constitution for the place. I later invented a language for them, with an abjad writing system. I had one Ork named Barnabus York, and another named Merriweather Shadow. They were metaphysical detectives. I drew geneologies for them stretching back 50 generations, to show they were related.This was when I was 7 or 8. I was smarter when I was a child.
Even now, I’m still feeling rotten. I’ve been on antibiotics for two weeks now, and the earache pain is intense most of the time. I don’t know what the solution is. Will have to shop for alternate medical care next week, I’m thinking.
I came home from work exhausted – Saturday is my busiest day, in fact, for work, at least in terms of class-load. I made some late lunch for myself and crashed on my sofa, intending to read, and suddenly I was asleep.
I had turned on streaming NPR on my computer before sleeping, and so I awoke to a man being interviewed on BBC’s World Service. He said – if I remember correctly:
“Who knows about money? It flows like the spirit.”
This struck me as incredibly profound, to hear this said in the moment of waking up.
The man being interviewed was Daniel Libeskind, a Polish/Israeli/American architect, quite popular these days in the skyscraper-building set (e.g. New York’s WTC 2.0 “Freedom Tower” and other projects such as Seoul’s Archipelago 21). He went on to discourse on why he didn’t feel a need to apologize for working with totalitarian regimes, as a child of Stalinist Poland, in which I heard an implicit equivalence between China the West (one which I’m sympathetic to hearing, in point of fact, in certain moods).
Viejitas come here with paper bags to gather greens.
Espinaca, verdolagas, yerbabuena . . .
I scramble over the wire fence
that would have kept me out.
Once, I wanted out, wanted the rigid lanes
to take me to a place without sun,
without the smell of tomatoes burning
on swing shift in the greasy summer air.
Maybe it’s here
en los campos extraños de esta ciudad
where I’ll find it, that part of me
mown under
like a corpse
or a loose seed.
– Lorna Dee Cervantes
I remember 280 from my childhood, as we used to drive the 350 miles down from Arcata to Woodside (La Honda) which would generally lead to using some portion of this highway for the last stretch in San Mateo county south of San Francisco (although stretches of 280 weren’t even completed until the mid 1970’s I don’t think). The Woodside of my childhood wasn’t the exclusive enclave of Silicon Valley bazillionaires that it has become now, but rather at that time it was the eastern edge of a sort of South Bay hippie hillbilly zone lurking among the redwood forests west of Palo Alto. That’s what drew my parents there, of course.
I think the 280 of this poem is the northern terminus in the gritty neighborhoods of the South-of-Market part of San Francisco, which weren’t, then (when the poem was written or when I was a child), what they have become, now. South of Market in San Francisco before the 1990’s was poor, ghetto, barrio, and bleak. I remember this, because although we lived nearly 300 miles away, San Francisco was the only city in my childhood. It was, simply, “The City.”
무는 말 있는데 차는 말 있다 bite-PRESPART horse have-CONN kick-PRESPART horse have [Where] there’s a biting horse there is a kicking horse. “Birds of a feather flock together.” It means that bad person associates with other bad people. Once again, the googletranslate version (as of today) is hilarious:
Biting the end of the car, which is the end.
I want to write a novel with this as the title.
The picture at right isn’t meant to encapsulate this proverb – it’s merely a strange horse-person image I found in an online image search.
I did something that haven’t done in many, many years: I read a book from front-to-back, linearly, in less than a week. I spent the greatest part of my unexpected day off, today, finishing it, having just started it on Monday morning – today was Korean Memorial Day, but with a late night at work last night and work bearing down on me again for tomorrow, I had nothing planned.
Furthermore, it was a novel.
Mostly, these days, I read history or philosophy. It’s been a very long time since I finished a novel or any piece of fiction (except some short stories) in less than half a year. Inevitably, at any given moment, I have maybe a dozen books “in progress,” and the majority of them never get finished at all in any conventional sense, because I read them the way some people surf the internet, essentially at random.
So I felt a little bit surprised, myself, with how I compulsively sat and paged my way through this 500-page book, not once looking ahead, not once skimming past a slow-moving section. This behavior may have had more to do with my circumstances: I continue to be painfully sick, thus not feeling healthy enough to go out exploring much; and I continue to feel a grinding dissatisfaction with my life as-it-is (e.g. with work and studies) that pushes me into a more widely-ranging and totalizing escapism than I’ve been wont to practice so much in recent years, maybe.
You’re wondering, what was the book that I read? I’m not even sure I can strongly recommend it. Superficially, it’s been characterized by others as a “steampunk fantasy western” which is basically a way to say it’s several genres mishmashed together. It had moments when it reminded me of something almost like one of the Latin American magic realists’ alternate worlds, or maybe those Nabokovian parallel Earths of lesser-known works like Ada or Pale Fire, but minus the utterly unequalable virtuosity of that old Russian’s prose. It’s definitely not to the level of anything like those. Further, I agree with those reviewers who felt that the ending was rushed and unsatisfying, but I’m willing to forgive it.
There’s a lot going on politically and philosophically, and the protagonists are mostly unlikable – yet nevertheless ambivalently complicated, which I find makes a book more compelling and interesting in some strange way. I find myself wanting to see them self-destruct, or find some epiphanic solution to their problem, or save the world despite themselves. Then when they mostly fail I get to feel good about my ability to have judged them accurately.
That makes it sound terrible. It wasn’t. I liked it. I may even look for the sequel, allegedly recently released.
Scientists have been taking pictures of hydrogen atoms. Or looking at them, anyway, using imaging technology – it’s not really photography at this level, but I assume these false color images are based on data being collected, which makes them pictures at some level of abstraction – they’re graphs of what the atoms and their electron clouds look like. Let’s not forget that a photograph is a photograph – a graph of light.
The bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and flies. My wall is loosening; honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned On our uncertainty; somewhere A man is killed, or a house burned, Yet no clear fact to be discerned: Come build in he empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood; Some fourteen days of civil war; Last night they trundled down the road That dead young soldier in his blood: Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare; More Substance in our enmities Than in our love; O honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.
– William Butler Yeats (part 6 from a 1923 longer poem "Meditations in time of Civil War").
Note that the word "stare" here is an Irishism for the bird called starling, I think. And the civil war in question is the Irish war for independence from the UK.
I really like this poem. It combines something deep and symbolic with a very immediate observation of nature in the moment.
아는것이 병 know-PRESPART-fact-SUBJ sickness Knowing [is] sickness. “Knowing is sickness.” It sounds like it could be the title of a Kierkegaard book. There’s another proverb in Korean that is exactly opposite: 아는것이 힘 know-PRESPART-fact-SUBJ strength Knowing [is] strength. “Knowing is strength.” This sounds more like the title of something by Lenin. It’s interesting to reflect on how these two opposite possibilites start quickly to take on ideological resonances in my mind. The nominalizing ending -는것 is extraordinarily common. Not only is it used to construct a sort of periphrastic present tense with the copula (-이다), but it also seems to serve as a kind of periphrastic gerund (where the actual gerund is -기 and the more nominalizing -ㅁ). Both proverbs are missing an explicit copula after the second noun phrase, but I think it’s implied by the subject marker on the first. This strikes me as similar to the Russian present tense copula, which is normally absent in actual Russian, and merely implied by the case endings of the nouns.
I sometimes go and look at a website called feedjit, which allows me to “watch” people as they visit my blog’s web address (i.e. raggedsign.blogs.com [UPDATE: this address is no longer the valid address of my blog, effective late 2018]). It can be interesting to see what brings people to my blog – what sorts of google searches or links they’re following.
I’m honestly not sure why I’m interested in this – perhaps it’s merely a weird sort of vanity, like my students who keep checking to see if their friends have sent them messages on their phone. Certainly, it’s not that I’m interested in “optimizing” my blog or getting more visitors – that’s not at all what this blog is about. So I’m not actually doing anything with the information revealed. I don’t actually have a clue as to what this blog is about.
Well this morning, at just before noon, I saw something truly weird: a North Korean visited my blog. I did a screenshot, unable to believe it was true. Here it is.
I noticed the person probably typed into google something in English combined with the Korean proverb “망건 쓰자 파장된다,” which I wrote about in a blog entry from last year in February. That’s the specific blog entry that google sent them to.
I wonder what the North Korean is looking for? I doubt very much he or she found it on my blog. It’s possible it’s not even really North Korea – it could be a spoofed web address being produced by some proxy server with a strange sense of humor. I don’t know enough about how that stuff works to judge. But nevertheless I feel like this is some weird momentous milestone in the blogular history.
El otro día fuí a la gran librería Kyobomungo en Gangnam, donde había pedido un libro hace unas semanas y que por fin había llegado. Cuando voy a esa librería me gusta echar un ojo sobre su colección de libros en español – a veces me encuentro con alguna novedad inesperada.
Así fue esta vez. Descubrí en un rincón una media docena de libros para niños, y espontáneamente decidí comprar uno. Me gusta la literatura infántil, aunque últimamente he dejado mi costumbre de intentar leer libros para niños en coreano.
De todos modos, el libro que compré me era algo entretenido. Se titula El maravilloso puente de mi hermano, por la autora brasileña Ana Maria Machado. Pues es traducido, pero traducir de portugués al español no es algo tan insólito.
Me gusta el gato negro de cara blanca que le sigue al niño en sus exploraciones.
Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow– You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of the golden sand– How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep–while I weep! O God! can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp? O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream? – Edgar Allan Poe
I have been sick for almost a month now. I've been to the doctor 4 times since I finally overcame my Korean-doctor-phobia, but I'm not really getting better so far. I'm not sure what's going on. Some kind of infection that the antibiotics are fighting, I presume. On the plus side, 4 visits to the doctor, plus lots of meds, and I haven't yet managed to spend 30 bucks in copays. That's national health insurance for you. But maybe you get what you pay for?
모기 보고 칼 뺀다 mosquito see-AND sword draw-PRES See a mosquito and draw a sword. This means to get angry at nothing important
I like googletranslate’s version, though: “Subtract mosquito looking knife.”
In the comic frame below, the phrase at left is a slightly more grammaticalized version of the same proverb (remember, grammatical particles in Korean are often optional), while at the right the character is saying 아까운 내 피를… 넌 죽었다! [my precious blood… you’re dead!].
Normally I don’t like to “follow up” on blog posts with related blog posts. I have a sort of aesthetic philosophy of “maximal divergence” that I try to follow.
But after my last post about Korean-Russian folk singer Yuliy Kim, I started exploring a whole fascinating world of Korean-Russian musical talent. I discovered Viktor Tsoi (Виктор Цой). This Korean-Russian, born in Leningrad in 1962 (and thus in the same cohort and generation as Medvedev and Putin, interestingly) was quite the phenom in the perestroika-era Soviet Union. One of his songs became an anthem for the protesters who eventually ended the anti-Gorbochev coup and thus ended the Soviet Union and placed Yeltsin in power.
This guy is awesome. He’s all 80’s angst and a master of all kinds of voices and genres adapted to the derivative late Soviet rock scene, Tsoi ended up dying at a very young age, in 1990. I like this guy so much I just downloaded two of his albums.
What I’m listening to right now.
Виктор Цой, “Песня Без Слов.”
Текст:
Песня без слов, ночь без сна,
Все в свое время – зима и весна,
Каждой звезде – свой неба кусок,
Каждому морю – дождя глоток.
Каждому яблоку – место упасть,
Каждому вору – возможность украсть,
Каждой собаке – палку и кость,
И каждому волку – зубы и злость.
Снова за окнами белый день,
День вызывает меня на бой.
Я чувствую, закрывая глаза, –
Весь мир идет на меня войной.
Если есть стадо – есть пастух,
Если есть тело – должен быть дух,
Если есть шаг – должен быть след,
Если есть тьма – должен быть свет.
Хочешь ли ты изменить этот мир,
Сможешь ли ты принять как есть,
Встать и выйти из ряда вон,
Сесть на электрический стул или трон?
Снова за окнами белый день,
День вызывает меня на бой.
Я чувствую, закрывая глаза, –
Весь мир идет на мня войной.
Here is a tribute to Viktor Tsoi by a Korean group called 윤도현 밴드 [Yoon Do Hyun Band], where they sing that famous perestroika anthem translated into Korean.
윤도현 밴드 [Yoon Do Hyun Band], “Группа крови” (корейский вариант).
Yuliy Kim (Юлий Ким) is a rather famous Russian folk musician, who became popular in the 70’s and 80’s as a “subversive,” performing concerts and making music in opposition to the Soviet authorities. He is also, interestingly, ethnically Korean and was born in the Russian Far East. He worked for some years in the 50’s or 60’s as a school teacher in Kamchatka (the part of Russia across from Alaska, more or less).
There are several hundred thousand ethnic Koreans still living all over Russia, and an equal number in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia (notably Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, to where they were deported by Stalin in 1937).
What I’m listening to right now.
Юлий Ким, песни об Израиле (Songs about Israel).
Like a lot of Russian folk music that was tied to the opposition in the communist era, it’s tightly intertwined with various Russo-Jewish traditions. So that’s how you get a Korean singing about Israel in Russian. The Koreans and Jews in Soviet Russia have had similar histories in some respects, not least in their having been persecuted on an ethnic basis for perceived congenital disloyalty. Kim’s father was executed by the Stalinists not long after his birth, for example.
Here is a picture of Kim with Yuri Koval in 1964, that I found on a Russian-language blog.
I was composing some englynion (englyns – a Welsh poetry style conceptually similar to haiku). Most are terrible, but here are two I liked. (Poem #9 on new numbering scheme)
my walking is like talking. stories told
to the earth. old stories sing
new from my footsteps. walking.
the ant pushes against stone with small feet.
its silent creeping alone,
until finally it finds home.
Here is a picture I took the other day (a rainy day) looking toward my building – it’s the tallest one in the center in the farthest distance. I live on the seventh floor. Ilsan has rapidly become summery.
오늘의 나를 완전히 죽여야 내일의 내가 태어나는 것이다. 새로운 나로 변신하려면 기존의 나를 완전히 버려야 한다. 너는 네 자신의 불길로 너 스스로를 태워버릴 각오를 해야 하리라. 먼저 재가 되지 않고서 어떻게 거듭나길 바랄 수 있겠는가? – 니체
This past week, my boss has been even more gnomically obscure and dyspeptically cryptic than usual. One night a few days ago, during a break between classes, he was taping up some of his characteristic aphorisms in a prominent place by the door out of the staffroom, printed in large print on bright goldenrod paper. In Korean, of course.
I said, as is my wont, “What’s that?” I sit close to the staffroom door, so I was just making conversation while he taped his papers up.
At first he was dismissive. “These are not important,” he said. By which he normally means they’re not important to me – being in Korean, I suppose.
But then he reconsidered. “Do you want to understand these?”
I nodded, dubiously.
“Then read them. They could change your life.”
“Gee thanks,” I remarked, though my sarcasm is often lost on the Koreans around me. “Can you send me an electronic copy? That makes it easier for me to research them.”
He did. So I spent some time the last few days puzzling through some boss-sourced aphorisms.
Lo and behold, I found myself attempting to read Nietzsche, in Korean (see above, at the top of this blog post).
You might think, with all the Nietzsche I’ve read, that I’d be able to figure out the source of the quote – the quote only said “니체” [ni-che = Nietzsche] and didn’t specify a book or volume. But after a lot of effort at translation, I’m clueless.
The text is definitely Nietzschean in character, and the snippet my boss shared is quite popular on Korean blog sites, but it’s never properly attributed, that I’ve been able to find. I decided to not try to find the source any more, and just give as workmanlike a translation as I can manage.
오늘의 나를 죽여야 today me-OBJ die-CAUSE 내일의 내가 태어날 수 있다. tomorrow I-SUBJ born-POSSIBLE “I must die today in order to be born tomorrow.”
오늘의 나를 완전히 죽여야 today-GEN me-OBJ completely die-CAUSE 내일의 내가 태어나는 것이다. tomorrow-GEN I-SUBJ born-PERIPRES “I must die completely today in order that I am [re-]born tomorrow.”
새로운 나로 변신하려면 new-PPART me-ABL transform-CAUSE 기존의 나를 완전히 버려야 한다. existing me-OBJ completely discard-INTENT-PRES “To transform into the new me I am ready to discard the [currently] existing me completely.”
너는 네 자신의 불길로 you-TOPIC your self-GEN flame-ABL 너 스스로를 태워버릴 각오를 해야 하리라. you REFLX-OBJ burn-off-FUTPART resolution-OBJ do-INTENT-TRY “You must resolve to burn off yourself in your own flames.”
먼저 재가 되지 않고서 firstly I-SUBJ become-SUSP not-AND-THEN 어떻게 거듭나길 바랄 수 있겠는가? how be-reborn-GER-OBJ hope-FUTPART possible have-FUT-SPEC “[If] I don’t first finish how could I be reborn?”
As long as we’re on a Nietzsche kick, here’s another quote I rather like.
What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest
loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once
again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought
and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal
hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the
dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that
demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?
I awoke this morning from a very simple, unfortunate dream.
My uncle was driving a big old-fashioned school bus. This is true-to-life – he bought an old school bus when I was maybe 13 or 14 and renovated it into a kind of do-it-yourself motor home. These were called “hippie buses” in my experience, but my uncle wasn’t really a hippie. More a kind of anti-hippie.
But anyway, it was realistic enough to be riding with him in an old school bus. I was sitting on some makeshift seat on the passenger side, and he was driving. We were driving on a dirt road in Guatemala. This departs from realism, since mostly when I was with him we were in Washington State or Idaho – although often enough it was on dirt roads. It was clearly Guatemala, outside the windows – I recognized streets and things from when I stayed in Quetzaltenango in November-December of 1989.
The dirt road was climbing a steep mountainside, with a cliff embankment dropping off to one side. There was an old man walking in the road, pulling a hand-drawn cart or wheelbarrow. My uncle swerved to avoid hitting the man, and the bus’ wheels slipped off the edge of the embankment and everything began to move in slow motion as the bus began to tilt and roll down the mountainside. We were going to die.
My uncle said, matter-of-factly, “So. That’s it.”
End-of-dream.
I didn’t take or save any pictures of my time in Quetzeltenango. But here is a picture I found with a simple online image search, of the main plaza, much as I remember it.
한 가랑이에 두 다리를 넣는다 one pant-leg-LOC two leg-OBJ put-PRES [Someone] is putting two legs in one pant-leg.
This might be the slapstick of proverbs. Or the comic relief. I guess the idea is that a person gets nervous and tries to put on pants and fails, putting two legs into one pant-leg. It’s a bit like Laurel and Hardy… or the picture at right. The word 가랑이 means “crotch” or “inseam” in the dictionary, but I could see it being extended to the idea of the pant-leg. I could never understand why in English, a pant-leg couldn’t simply be called a “pant.”
y es fuego que no resiste mi cuerpo que en continua renovación
de juventud de carne y de espíritu es un y es mil
insaciable sed…
– Nahui Olin
Carmen Mondragón (que se llamaba con el seudónimo Nahui Olin) era una poeta y artista mexicana, activa en los años 20 y 30, pero vivió desde 1893 hasta 1978.
“Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.” – Nietzsche, The Dawn.
I have many shortcomings, I know. Although I consider “reliability” to be something I need to work on, I don’t see “trust” as exactly the same thing as reliability, although they are clearly related or interconnected to each other.
“Trust,” to me, means keeping specific (explicit) promises as well as fulfilling people’s ethical expectations, e.g. to respect things like boundaries, privacy, etc. Reliability is more about fulfilling implicit promises that go above and beyond general ethics, especially on an ongoing basis. I have mostly tended to view myself as trustworthy but not always reliable – perhaps partly because I’m not very good at figuring out other people’s expectations of me (implicit promises), but also because reliability seems more open ended and I’m not as good with open-ended commitments as I am with narrow commitments. If I say, “I will do X tomorrow,” X gets done. If I say, “I will do X every day from now on,” X may get done for a while but over time I will fail.
…trustworthy in the short term, I guess, if not always reliable.
Today I had two people convey to me that they basically didn’t trust me. Whether this arose in conjunction with issues of reliability or not, I can’t really figure out. Neither used those words (“trust” or “reliability”) – in both cases, the communication was fraught by the language barrier that arises so often for me. I think I understood their meaning, however – neither was a case where there was a lot of room for misunderstanding.
So people don’t trust me? Coworkers? Students?
This makes me miserable.
Needless to say, it was a crummy day. There have been times when I have let people down. I think I’m pretty good a admitting those mistakes. I’ll own up to them and apologize and hope that I can be forgiven. I really don’t feel, from what I understand at this point, that either of these cases, today, were examples where I “earned the lack of trust” (so to speak) that was communicated to me. These things today, they feel undeserved.
So I come online and start ranting about it, but I do so in unfulfilling, vague generalities because, god forbid, I further erode any possibility of trust.
Sitting in our staff meeting yesterday, I saw this phrase on my agenda. I thought it was something profound – some aphorism or exhortation or effort at being philosophical or metaphorical or deep. But it’s not. It’s just telling us not to sit on the desks while teaching.
열정적인 강의- impassioned-be-PART discourse
책상에 걸터앉은 수업 지양토록 desk-LOC straddle-PART class try-not-to-do-discussion “Be an energetic teacher- try not to sit on the desks during class.”
Sure. Fine. I don’t normally sit on desks during class.
This is perhaps an exhortation to other teachers. Big brother is watching (literally – the classrooms have CCTV, you know). I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to understand it, though – because I thought it was something important, set apart as it was under “Special remarks by the director.”I didn’t know what 지양 meant, and as a result, I thought it would end up meaning more than it did. I had to ask someone about the meaning of that vocabulary item – the Korean-English dictionary has “sublation” but… wtf?
“Sublation” is not a “normal” English word – I have an English vocabulary probably in excess of 100,000 words but I never saw that word before in my life. The wiktionary has “removal, taking away” and implies it’s mostly a term for a process in chemistsry. But if one dictionary has a mistake, they all do, because they all pirate from one another and so there is really only one Korean-English dictionary in the universe, regardless of brand, which is a kind of copyright-defying, crowdsourced mess.
other words from meeting agenda
원료 = materials
연구 = inquiry (“plausibility study”? planning?)
평균 = average, arithmetical mean
성적관리 = grade admin
이상 = …and up (greater than)
특이사항 = special subject matter
보충 = replacement, supplement
결석생 = absent / nonattending student
중등부 = middle school division (i.e. of the business)
간담회 = “bull session” according to the dictionary, which I’ve been interpreting to mean “brainstorming meeting” but someone told me it means “open house” (i.e. for parents). huh.
일정 = agenda, plan
조절 = control, regulation
overheard in meeting
준비하다 = prepare, arrange
복사 = copy (how can I forget this word so often?)
타임 = borrowing of the word “time” but in the hagwon business it’s developed a meaning different from English “time”: it’s become a counter meaning “a single class session, of whatever length” so the proper translation is “session” not “time”
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” – Attributed to Aristotle, but in fact it’s by Will Durant, who is attempting to summarize some rather more complicated quotes and ideas from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. So it’s an Aristotelian idea, but the quote is not his.
Habits are so difficult to build, and so easy to break down. For as long as I have been teaching, I have been trying to build good habits of “classroom” journaling – by which I mean taking note of what works and what doesn’t in the classroom, of recording in a consistent way what the next homework is, what the next chapter is, how we did on the last chapter. All those basic out-of-the-classroom day-to-day management issues are hard for me to stay on top of. I mostly succeed, but I’ve done best where there were external structures in place to guide me. By “external structures” I mean the required lesson plans when I was at the public school, or the LBridge online “syllabus” that we had to fill out and adhere to.
In my current work environment, I have despaired of ever getting such external structures, no matter how many times I tell my boss that not just I but all our teachers and staff, not to mention students and parents, would benefit from the consistency and reliability having such structures would promote.
Having despaired of getting such a thing, I keep trying to come up with new ways to be organized, despite my inherent disorganizational tendencies. Lately, I’ve decided to try to leverage my “good habits” around this blogging thing for my work. I have started another blog. A work blog.
The idea is to post there my students’ next homework, and compile in one place the results of their work. It took quite some time to get it working the way I wanted it to, and I have been using it consistently now for only about two weeks, but I’m pleased with the results. If I can make it into a habit and stick with it, and begin to broaden its contents to include more things, it could be a major piece in becoming more organized.
Given that I’m the main “speaking” teacher (which in my curriculum means mostly “debate” teacher), I have for some time now been recording on video student work (speech tests, panel debates, etc.). The new blog offers opportunities for that, too.
So, without further fanfare, I present my new work blog: jaredway.com. [UPDATE 2013-05-30: due to some concerns about the large amount of student content on this new blog, I have set up a password protection for the site. If you’re interested in viewing this blog I will be happy to share login information with you. Sorry for the inconvenience. 2nd UPDATE 2022-10-24: I long forgot about this – the site died a natural death at the point in time when I left my teaching job in Korea, in July of 2018. But the site is reincarnated as a link to my personal/professional site, the link still works fine – it’s just not what’s being described here.]
I don’t actually like the name I’ve given to it. It comes off as a wee bit narcissistic, doesn’t it? But I already own the domain-name (which is convenient), and I wanted to come up with something memorable for my students (i.e. easy to find online, and easy to tell them about), and I was wary of overlapping my personal “brand” as a teacher with the “brand” of my employer – my goal here is not to produce or support this technology for my hagwon but for me personally, since ultimately if my employers wanted something like this, well… then they should do something like this. It’s not my job to be a “technology guy” for a Korean hagwon – it’s not what I want to do, and if it was what I wanted to do, I’d be making a LOT more money doing it.
Its primary intent is for communicating effectively with my students, and not least, for communicating effectively with myself. In only the past two weeks that I’ve been posting homework on there, I’ve used it twice to open the blog on my smartphone and see what a student’s next homework was so I could tell that student, while away from my desk. That’s convenient.
Having said that, I also see this new work blog as part of consolidating in one place a sort of “portfolio” of my work as a teacher. I will try to post my student work there as well (e.g. essays, pictures, etc.), not just videos (although as I said, as a speaking teacher, video has become a substantial component of my work).
I hope this new work blog is successful. So far I’ve only told a few students about it, but I imagine it being handy for things like telling students where to find out their next homework, etc., too. I wish my workplace would provide an environment like this that all the teachers not only could use, but were required to use. I think it would go a long way to developing a feeling among customers that we were leveraging technology effectively for improving the hagwon experience.
말이 씨가 된다 word-SUBJ seed-PRED become-PRES Words become seeds. “You reap what you sow.” But also, speak kindly, for the words you express to others will come back to you. Here is a picture I took at Kagoshima, Japan, three years ago in the Spring of 2010. It looks very exotic but I like it. I’ve been trying to organize my photo files better and that means I’ve been revisiting and re-finding a lot of old photos.
