Serendipity DooDah!

Just dorking around on the intarwebs trying to find contact info on my beloved Kim Yong-ik and, lo and behold, the Korea Journal has placed their archives on the web and there are 6 "new" pieces. Three are some kind of retread, so it may be that Kim was starting to coast in his late life. In any case, I'm excited to find them and the pieces are:

"Andy Crown" - Published in Nov. 1987: This is a pretty bad retelling of the "They Won't Crack It Open" story with the US lead cast as a Black Man. Nicely, this re-writing supports my contention that Kim is most effective when least overtly political.

"The Gold Watch" - Published in March 1989: This one is new to me and I will have to read it before comment.

"The School Bell" - April 1990: This is a chapter from "The Happy Days" (1960) published as a short story.

"The Smuggler's Boat" - March 1965: This is new to me, even though it is by far the oldest of the stories found here.

"Village Moon" - December 1983: This is a part (although a quick reading seems to catch some substantial differences) of the play "The Moon Thieves" which was written prior to 1982.

"Village Wine" - December 1983: A new one; a play featuring a US soldier in a Korean style house.

South Korea - B-Boy Badness!

South Korea r3wlZ the breakdance scene

And it seems pretty much true. Almost any event you go to has some kind of B-boy competition and there are hip-hop dance studios all over the place. Korea is pretty serious on dance and song anyway, so this particular combination seems to make a lot of sense.

From the article:

June 26, 2008 | This summer, the United States is reaching new heights of dance fever as TV shows like Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance" and MTV's "Randy Jackson Presents: America's Top Dance Crew" have returned to the airwaves. MTV's runaway hit is considered especially cutting edge, showcasing hip-hop dance groups from across America. But if MTV really wants the best dance crew, it should be looking in South Korea.

"Of the top six or seven crews in the world, I'd say half of them are from Korea," says Christopher "Cros One" Wright, 33, an American dance promoter and b-boy who was recently in Suwon, South Korea, to judge the second annual global invitational hip-hop dance competition, called R16, that was held at the end of May.

Analytics?

He died in a "funny" car crash?

How much analysis could there be?

The Retardation Report

Saturday was all about lunch with Jong Kyu. He took us to a lovely joint in Sintanjin which served duck. Duck upsets my stomach, but I like the taste of it. Since the other option was eel, which the OAF was loath to try, I took one for the team and enjoyed it very much. JK's English is very good and he kept us quite entertained all afternoon.

On Sunday I set out with the OAF and the guy who lives upstairs. They were in search of books, I was in search of DVD's and DVD cases. We all found what we were looking for.

Today I hooked up with my Korean instructor and took her back downtown to the place I'd found the DVDs. It also had a ton of computer and technology shops, but a student had warned me that it could be "tough" if I didn't bring a Korean speaker. So we purchased me a lovely Korean/English dictionary and I decided to go look for a cable for my iBook. While their, which was across from the place I bought DVD's on Sunday, someone started yelling something about "Gayang-dong." Turns out they were yelling it at me as I had, magically, managed to leave my Alien Registration Card there the day before. Losing your ARC is a thing not to do and I was lucky I decided to go back there and look for more computer stuffs. I probably would have discovered I'd lost the ARC when a cop asked me for it...

Not where your waeguk wants to be.

I also bought a nifty printer/scanner/copier and was so happy that I didn't even mind that on the way back the cabbie yelled at me because he didn't like the fact I had said "BPU kachuseyo" and then given him left/right directions that ended up leading somewhere else than BPU. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say, since addresses don't work in Korea and there are no notable landmarks around my Daejeonian Love Pad.

Oh well.... still a grand day.

The Damage Done

Some 10 days after the event these are the bruises on the OAF's inside elbow. She still can't straighten the thing out, but we're working on it.

By which I mean she's doing no rehab at all, and I'm drinking heavily. ;-)

Paper accepted at "ENGLISH and ASIA: First International Conference on Language and Linguistics 2008"

In world-record time the folks at this conference got back to me and accepted my proposal for a presentation on Kim Yong-ik. This is in Malaysia around the time of my birthday and the only possible snag is if BPU will let me get away for it.

Well, I'll quit if they don't, really. This is a paper about a Korean author by the employee of a Korean University. I'm part of the wave, baby! ;-)

And it is pretty inexpensive to get there. The conference is 200,000 won and if I were (unlikely) able to get the whole week off the whole thing (flight and hotel inclusive) would be about 1.3 million won.

Not bad for a vacation and work trip.

ah... the rather poor (I have to start writing these things sooner than the day of the deadline) abstract is here:

Kim Yong Ik: Unimagining “Asian American” Through English

Kim Yong-Ik, a Korean by birth and English writer by trade attempted to avoid questions of empire, orientalization, language and literary theory by declaring autonomy from them. Kim was avowedly anti-political, extra-theoretical, and purposefully resistant to ethnic, political or theoretical placement. Kim publicly argued that his work was not concerned with contested terrains, and purposefully wrote in a dispassionate and narratively simple and concrete style. His writings, antithetically to his confessed approach, obsessively concerned themselves with issues attendant to cultural clash: oppression, the state of the outsider to the state, disconnection, diaspora, and the dream of coming to a “home” that was not contested; a home of ancestral imperials and not imperialists. This tension between language use and content essentially mirrored the tensions that Kim was describing between the United States and Korea.

Focusing on “They Won’t Crack it Open,” (The sole remaining work of Kim’s in print) this paper will discuss the arc of Kim’s individual works, literary oeuvre, career, and life and to what extent his approach gave him the freedom to write, to what extent it clashed with his written work and, finally, to what extent he found himself Occidentalized by his self-aware extra-theoretical approach.

Shaking off Rust?

I sent another abstract out today. For a conference on "Englishes." I have a couple more to send.

Then got an email from BKF that we may have a book translation gig. Not much pay, he says, but that is a big "Who Cares" from my perspective. The first time we get a book published, with our names on the inner-sleeve, we have hopped into another circle of the translating game.

The KLTI folks also sent me a lovely email saying they plan to work with me again. I hope this is true. Since BKF is hard at work at the annual competition the KLTI run for translators (I await the polishing bit in a month or so) it seems like things might be converging.

My next step is to contact Udam Kim in Seoul, and see if I can follow up on my Kim Yong-ik work.

And I SWEAR ;-) tomorrow I join the gym so I can continue to get fit. This typhoon season isn't going to wait on me.

Sunday...

After waking up at noon (the OAF was ill AND snoring all night long, so we took turns sitting up in the living room), we headed out for a walk.

It was a beautiful day in SouthCentral and we headed to the Community Center, so I could try to hook up with some Korean language lessons. This worked out poorly, but out the door we ran into another instructor from BPU and headed to Starbucks for coffee. He had worked in Japan for 14 years, so was interesting to me in terms of a paper I'm working on, and was pretty entertaining.

Then it was off to take a picture where the OAF had busted herself up and she gave it a thumbs down.

Then off to eat some galbi and a trip to the WA bar...

a slow walk home and the OAF crashed out from her illness. I sit here listening to the lovely chaos of the Korean
neighborhood through my open sliding door.

It could be worse and it often has. ;-)

Sunday's Best: Reason #11 to love Korea

You walk on the mountain trails outside the city and every so often you come across a mini-gym, just sitting there in a clearing. Totally cool.

Slow Blogging Week and my Teaching Schedule

ME AND MY STUDENTS

I wasn't very attentive to my blogging as this was finals week here in Korea and all my students were in rare "ohmygodyoumeanIwillgetGRADEDforthis?" form....

As though the previous 14 weeks never happened and the syllabus had been written in Greek. My office mates are receiving the same kind of response, my favorite so far being the woman disputing an absence in week six (now 9 weeks ago) by saying, "remember, I was wearing a red sweater and red hat?"

I received about 100 emails, which all had to be graded, and since I gave participation credit for visits to my office hours I had about 40 office hour visits. All in one week and that in contrast to the 4 or so that I had for the previous 14 weeks. Students, if they're the future of the planet, we may just be doomed.

SCHEDULE

My schedule for summer is working its way into a better thing. I have been moved “up” to the English Learning Center and will be teaching an immersion class five days a week for three weeks. Tuesdays and Thursdays will be a bit of a drag.. a class at nine and then another one at one, but that’s a small price to pay. It will give me a chance to get my administrative work done while in my office. On the other three days I will get a chance to go to the gym and work out. The happy days of weight-loss by application of soju are just about over, so it’s time to pull the next card out of the deck.

Later in the semester I will be part of the “teacher training” program. This program gives local teachers who need to teach in English as part of their classes a chance to learn from us (supposedly the pros). I will be teaching reading and writing, which couldn’t be better if I had been allowed to create my own schedule. This should look good on my resume, either for Seoul next year or for the United States the year after.

There are several large empty blocks in my schedule and I note, with horror, that there are two kidz academies still out there. I hope these twain shall never meet (Note - I have already been give one week of kiddies to cover for an instructor who will be on vacation. Crap!).

I will also say that I had underestimated the amount of work that goes into class preparation. Teaching is still one of the easier gigs in the world, but my idea that it was just sauntering into the class and doing a bit of the old “Dead Poet's Society" shtick? That was a bad idea.

UPDATE ON ELBONICS

It looks like he OAF will NOT have to have elbow surgery which is splendid news. She does need to keep the cast on for another week, which bummed her out, but that’s very little time if everything turns out ok.

We plan to do a cheesy video this evening, so clear your internet-viewing schedule for that thrill-ride.