Entering the Academic Borg

When you can write a jargon-filled sack of shit like:

Kim Yong Ik (1909-1996) was a pioneering Korean-American author. His use of language and close attention to local custom, whether in Korea or the United States, was married to an often nearly arid approach to culture which initially seems without judgment almost intentionally acultural while at the same time larded with cultural Golems and reference points. His work was simultaneously traditional and nearly post-modern – it stood at a diasporic crossroad where perception is crossed by praxis. It was also deceptively simple, using language carefully, typically with a strongly defined narrative center.

you might just have been in academia too long!

But, you know... props to me!

What I Did on my Bummer Vacation!

As usual, I was able to sneak off of work a bit early. I was out of the office by 2:30 and despite some showers on my side of the hills, there was no traffic to speak of - it was enjoyable, in a schedenfreudey kind of way, to see traffic backed up going the other way. I stopped at the store to purchase food and get some firewood and then it was up the coast to the campsite.

The BAG had left for the campsite the night before and had done a rather tidy job of setting up the tent. With the exception of not putting the spine into the rainflap (thus its flaccidity in the picture), the thing was solid. We fixed that right up, which was very convenient when the thunder, lightening and rain came crashing down from the heavens. It really couldn't have been better timing. We had the afternoon and evening without rain (thus the fire) but the threat of the rain kept the campground almost empty. There were something like 39 campsites of which only about 4 were occupied and the whole campsite went dead at about 9:30. The BAG, who had arrived on Thursday evening, had enjoyed the entire campground to herself.

We made a fire, ate some roast chicken, and read books until it it became to dark to read anymore. The fire started to burn down, so we hopped into the tent. Once we were tucked in the storm hit (we were largely protected by the trees) and it pretty much went away by the next morning, so we were able to have a morning fire (I drank some beer) and then headed off to Small Coastal Town for a quick looksee. Some shopping, a visit to a saloon and then it was back down the coast to our second night's lodging in a tent-cabin and a real dinner.

As usual I shot a series of cruddy pictures of nature. The light was great and the photographer was worse. ;-)

Out of a ton of blurry shots of birds I salvaged the ones you see, but I spent most of my time trying to shoot the waves abusing the kelplets which hang on to the rocks. The BAG had, the previous day, spotted a couple of beaches that had really nice tidepools, so while I shot the pictures she kept hunkering down and turning her back to the ocean. Neptune was not on my side on this particular day, and thus we headed (as a couple) down to the tent-cabin. There had been an over-booking and the place was swamped. A wedding was about to begin and there was only one guy at the front desk who was being hammered with phone-calls, people rushing up to the desk, as well as handling (sort of) registration duties. At one point he forgot to put someone on hold when he walkie-talkied his grounds crew begging them to send an iron and ironing board to a tent that was "bugging him." When he returned to the phone they started yelling at him loud enough so that it could be heard in line. I felt pretty sorry for the guy and was all smiles when I finally got to the front of the line.

The upshot of the over-booking was that we got a better cabin then we would have (YAY!) and having been at the tent cabin before, I was clever enough to have brought a power strip and electric heater. We plugged the heater and laptop in (the place has wireless!), and read the rest of the day away.

Dinner at the restaurant and then sleep.

The next day was a trip back up the coast with more pictures of tortured little kelpies. I will certainly go back and try this again when there is enough sunlight to catch the kelpies in slightly less dark form. Then we took another quick stop in Small Coastal Town for a beer (for me) and to catch the 49ers game (for me). The game was already a rout and after it we took off up a little road that we had been told returned to the freeway. It did, after a lovely little detour, and we slowly made our way up the coast and then back over the hills.

At the top of the hill we stopped for lunch at a well-known (well known enough that there is a song about it) motorcycle bar/restaurant and with some regret headed down the hill to Big City to pull out some of our camping gear and spray the crud off it.

And that, my friends, is what I did on my bummer vacation.

Call the Ewhaaaaambulance...

And then, suddenly, it all fell apart.... When I returned from my lovely vacation (pictures of which are to follow) I had a phone call from the BKF telling me I needed to call him immediately. As I had sent him an IM full of fear and loathing on Friday and had no response, I already sensed something was up...

As it turns out, the suspicion I had voiced that the BKF and I were not minimally qualified to apply for the grant as solo interpreters also somehow applied to Ewha College and, with time running out towards the deadline someone at The Academy of Korean Studies informed Ewha that they were institutionally unqualified to apply for the grant.

This is the story we were told. The real story will remain as remote and hidden as the Han cultural heart, and I will never know it.

This sudden halt is not a tragedy on several levels.

• The BKF's heart was never that deeply into this and I also found the work tedious. A few translations perhaps, but three years was going to be a grind.

• Just the translation of this work has been incredibly useful for my upcoming conference paper. "Yi Saeng Peers Over the Wall" is the very first piece of Korean fiction and can thus be fairly said to be sui generis in one sense, but also archetypal in a more important way. And YSPOTW is rife with themes and plotlines of diaspora and return (heck, I might even nick that line for my conference paper) and thus will provide a lovely historical and literary background and echo for my argument.

• Similarly, having translated all the poems in YSPOTW, I know have a much better idea of what Korean poetry is about, and this will help me greatly in at least one of the pieces of literature I am reviewing for Acta Koreana.

• It was was just plain cool to do.

• Lurking out there like a vast subterranean follower of Cthulhu, there is the very Korean issue of face and obligation. The work I have done here should have certainly increased my balance on the credit side of these things. This would be an incredibly rude thing to say aloud to a Korean, but it is nonetheless true and when I tote up all the cool shit that went on around this (now) clusterfuck, that may be the most important thing that happened.

Monday, the day after this news, the book of Korean Poetry came and it was a slender enough volume that I could take it to a bar with the Master's Thesis from which it derived, and in the time it takes the Tennessee Titans to beat the living crap out of the wretched New Orleans Saints I could read and compare all the duplicate poems (73 out of 90) as well as make more notes on this review. I now have 4 pages of notes (not counting marginalia in the book) and will let it sit for a week or so. When the time to write comes, the writing should come easily (although just saying that is putting the worst kind of hex on things!).

I also finished "Three Generations" by Yom Sang-seop .

This book began just horribly, in a storm of Korean social structure and trite political posturing that would make any reader from the US grind their teeth in frustration. In fact the BKF is Anglicized enough that this happened to him. He handed me the book with the "bad news/good news" explanation, "I started this book, but by the time I got fifty pages in, I realised it was the kind of book you should read."

Nice, buddy!

But as it went the social structure became part of the novel and the trite political posturing (and otherwise somewhat cardboard characterizations at the outset) became something like two obvious black lines standing up on either end of a canvas - the framework for a clever, subtle and always changing representation of a bamboo grove. Yom's characters grew and changed throughout the book and at the end there were no easy solutions. The end was even something of a cliffhanger. I may just write a review of this thing for the hell of it, to fix its meaning in my head.

Anyway, all of this also helped to blunt whatever kind of blow the loss of the potential Ewha gig might have been. It was never in our hands, I suppose, so we never lost it.

On to the next motel!

Even Satan Doesn't Want Maggie Thatcher

How is this evil bitch still alive (And isn't Giulani revealing his fucked up evil self - and while we're at this, isn't the woman on the left about due to take some time off from the Botox that has sketched her face in permanent rictus? -DANG.. betcha 20 bux that "face in permanent rictus" is a non-Google phrase!)

Elvis put it best..
I saw a newspaper picture from the political campaign
A woman was kissing a child, who was obviously in pain
She spills with compassion, as that young child's
face in her hands she grips
Can you imagine all that greed and avarice
coming down on that child's lips

Well I hope I don't die too soon
I pray the Lord my soul to save
Oh I'll be a good boy, I'm trying so hard to behave
Because there's one thing I know, I'd like to live
long enough to savour
That's when they finally put you in the ground
I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

When England was the whore of the world Margaret was her madam
And the future looked as bright and as clear as the black tarmacadam
Well I hope that she sleeps well at night, isn't haunted by every tiny detail
'Cos when she held that lovely face in her hands all she thought of was betrayal

And now the cynical ones say that it all ends the same in the long run
Try telling that to the desperate father who just squeezed the life from his only son
And how it's only voices in your head and dreams you never dreamt
Try telling him the subtle difference between justice and contempt
Try telling me she isn't angry with this pitiful discontent
When they flaunt it in your face as you line up for punishment
And then expect you to say "Thank you" straighten up, look proud and pleased
Because you've only got the symptoms, you haven't got the whole disease
Just like a schoolboy, whose head's like a tin-can
filled up with dreams then poured down the drain
Try telling that to the boys on both sides, being blown to bits or beaten and maimed
Who takes all the glory and none of the shame

Well I hope you live long now, I pray the Lord your soul to keep
I think I'll be going before we fold our arms and start to weep
I never thought for a moment that human life could be so cheap
'Cos when they finally put you in the ground
They'll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down

A comical argument for Leavology

From the excellent http://xkcd.com

Not found on Google Reduxulusneous-osity

Yet more of my attempt to make Google perfect by posting phrases it has not yet assimilated.

The missing phrase
"my pain was never enough to keep her love alive"
came from a re-writing of an Elvis Costello lyric:
My tears were never enough to keep that girl alive
I think my version more closely describes what makes some girls tick.

The missing phrase
"I'll have that with extra pain"
Came from reading "Procrastination---Now With Sand"
On the excellent "Academic Cog" website and somehow thinking of the Spurlock Documentary "Super Size Me"
I thought, surely, that some emo kid would have used this phrase in complete seriousness. But I was wrong.

Along the same line there was no
"I'll have a side of heartbreak"

while
"Suicide a la carte"
checked in with a modest 4 instances, which somehow bolsters my faith in the creative whininess of the human race.

Over at Warriorsworld they asked..

What print have you purchased..

for me it was this one..

Writing a Couple of Reviews

for Acta Koreana.....

Dear Mr. NAME REDACTED,

Thank you for kindly offering to review Choi Jongyoll's Sky Nest and Cho Se-Hui's The Dwarf for Acta Koreana.

I personally think it would be interesting to have an English major's perspective on these two works, so I will have the review copies sent out to you straight away.

For inclusion in the January 2008 issue of Acta Koreana, it would be helpful if your reviews could reach us (as e-mail attachments) by 1 December 2007.

I would also be grateful if you could send a short e-mail to this address to let us know when you receive the books.

This is not a paid gig, but will certainly help pad out my meagre Korean CV.

The first is on Sky Nest by Choi Jongyoll - this is a compilation of poetry, and reading and reviewing this can only help me if the BKF and I continue along on the Korean lit/poetry translations. And since I found a pdf of the actual poems, I can begin before I even get the work!

More fun should be The Dwarf by Cho Se-Hui which seems to be a very important work in a Korea and focuses on things that should be easy to ramble on about, you know, industrialism, capitalism... dwarves! ;-)

Just Me and the BKF vs. The Pansies at Harvard...

Spent another long slog with the BKF this weekend. Friday night in a hotel where we worked from about 5:45 to 10:00 on a new piece that the Koreans had sent him. I had been unaware this had been landing because, well.. no one had warned us. BKF opened his mail when he got to my hotel and there the thing was. Not only there, but in the extremely “only freaking Koreans use it” .hwp format. Which there is really no way to open in the rest of the world. This was unfortunate, because BKF and I were, just at that time, in the rest of the world.

Finally we made phone contact with our person at the Korean University and a .doc version was sent. We also discovered something we should have thought of – we aren’t just going to be in a “reputation qeueue” with Korean Universities, but with international ones as well. Our Korean contact named a few schools who were expected to apply – BKF and I quickly ran over who was a shoo-in – Harvard, UCLA, Berkeley, probably someone in England (does Oxford have such a program?). In the end we figured that the 10 slots would probably be split about evenly between Korean and international universities. We still think our Uni has a chance, it is very prestigious, but it is intimidating to think of actual “scholars” working on this project. It makes the amount of time BKF and I can currently apply to translation, and our poor research resources (Google, Empas, and Naver) seem woefully inadequate. Then there is the additional fact that neither BKF or I are technically qualified for the positions we will fill. I imagine there will be some “putative” experts and we will be ghostwriting. This would be an issue with me if it meant my name would not go on the published work. We’ll have to wait and see.

LOL. Look at that! I just jumped from “we can’t get the job” to “I’ll quit if I don’t have it my own way!”

The new translation was an academic cover letter for our piece. It drove BKF crazy because it was repetitive and academic in that “go over every point three times and dig out significance” way. We had also been told that the thing was “two pages” when it turned out to be almost 1,600 words when “turned into” English. Thankfully it did not include any footnotes. BKF alternated between translation, drinking beer, and swearing and flailing his arms in the air when he got to a point that he felt had been adequately covered three times before. We called it an evening and decided that if I could I would get another night at the hotel, since working there was substantially quieter than working at his house, with the chillun and the family there.

The rest was ESPN and one more beer, ;-)

OPUS MAGNUS? Statistically, it had to happen.

Holy Crap.... Berkeley Breathed (Perhaps Breathed Berkeley? Who could know with an obvious alias like that?) has finally hit "funny" again!

Bloom County was one of the trustworthy comics of something sort of getting back close to my childhood. When Bloom County went away? It hurt, and I embarked upon a 20 year alcoholic spiral which resulted in the great job I have today, lying to the kiddies of Big City for about 100k a year. The return of Breathed (Berkeley? Panted? Oxford? Really, someone being arrested on "Cops" could come up with a better pseudonym) Opus sounded great but it was normally stupid.

But this one has great inking (I particularly like the semen being squeezed from Opus - I imagine it is coming out of all his orifices.) and more than one risible notion ('do what you're told or end up in Guantanamo' is clever, but perhaps too close to the truth for satire?).

I count about 4 punchlines in this one comic .. which means I shouldn't have to read Opus again for the several years I might spend in Korea...