parcours général

[A few updates appear at the bottom of this post. Heh. Bottom.]


My buddy Mike, a murdering bastard, describes the delight of plunging happy, loving beings into the inferno:

He razed the homes of three extended families[,] and insured that the family members died a fiery death. Indeed, as they tried to escape your Maximum Leader kicked them back into the inferno with his boot-clad foot. As the charred bodies smouldered, the Villainettes were allowed close to look at the carnage.

Kathreb notes something I've been saying as well: the presence of scandals in the Korean media is actually a good sign, an indication that people are at least making the effort to clean house. Read her excellent post here. At the end, she notes:

Despite, or perhaps because of, the recent corruption scandals it seems that Korea is on the right path. But it is critical to remember before criticising Korea for its corrupt society that other countries, though they might have a long history of democracy, pride themselves of their checks and balances, or just think they are honest systems[,] still face a constant fight against corruption and always will. Koreans and outside observers should keep this in mind and not hold Korea to an impossible standard.

And now: competing views of women!

One view of women is that they're attractive sperm repositories, or that one woman is (look for the post titled "She Come Round Here, Just About Midnight..."):

But this resident was different. Very, very different. This was one of the sleekest, sexiest black girls on the face of the Earth. In her heels, she was nearly six feet tall. She's perfectly slender in the places that matter and richly full in the places that matter more. Plus she is possessed of a British accent, but not British teeth. I know this because she's a very nice girl, with a smile for everyone she sees. To say that she is something of a celebrity to everyone in this building with a penis is an understatement too mighty for words. And this is a building that literally vomits beautiful women on a Saturday night.

Another view of women is that they're delightfully unattainable (or that one woman is):

All thanks to a sassy girl from the countryside who had literally blown our hair back with her bitchy, hip-switching, heel-clicking superpowers. If the X-Men were real, she wouldn't need a costume or special equipment. Just an endless supply of Twincake™ compacts, a short skirt, and a stocked shoe closet, and she'd be ready to drop in the middle of the most scorched-earth, super[villain]-laden, final Battle of Doom. With a laser-sharp, sidelong look, a single hair flip, eyeroll, and hip-switch, she'd have bodies flying away and falling before her in all directions. If she were to add a sly sneer to top it all off, the effect would probably be nuclear. This girl was, quite literally, the bomb.

Jelly's foodblog runs from ch'apch'aebap to seafood to boshint'ang. Now that she's got a camera, you've got pics!

Dr. Vallicella offers a hilarious summation of all the problems with Continental philosophy (from which postmodernism has largely sprung)-- in a single, marvelously tortured paragraph. Check it out.

All of Charles's posts at Liminality are must-reads. His newest post, a meditation on the subgenre "flash fiction" (of which my "100 Below" shorties may be a part), is no exception. However, I noted with some consternation the pre-Einsteinian cosmology evident in this part of Charles's essay:

To be perfectly honest, I don’t like the term. “Flash” (like “sudden) is a primarily temporal term rather than a spatial term—that is, it indicates something that is very sudden or brief. It also, at least in my mind, draws a connection with flash mobs. For flash mobs, the word is appropriate, as these events happen very suddenly and (generally) last only briefly. But I don’t like the term when applied to fiction. If you take it as meaning that the story is written in a flash, you do a disservice to the writer’s care and effort. If you take it as meaning that the story is read in a flash, you do a disservice to the attention of the reader.

Wherefore this separation of space and time!? What happened to the space-time continuum, Charles, you-- you-- UNRECONSTRUCTED NEWTONIAN?!

Elsewhere, Charles expresses my own feelings about most poetry:

Yet many would-be poets throw a bunch of angst-ridden words onto the page, giving them as much thought as they might give to, say, brushing their teeth or watching the evening news. Is what they produced poetry? No, it’s crap. Verbal diarrhea.

Precisely the point I was trying to make with the poems in my book (a more detailed explanation of my poetry can be found in this interview). Crap. Crap, crap, and yet more crap. Dress it up with lettuce and tomatoes and vinaigrette, and it's still just crap. Having given up on the prospect of ever writing real poetry (viz. much of Langston Hughes and certain powerful passages of Shakespeare), I, much like that drunken minstrel Barry Manilow, write the songs that make the whole world shit.

In the meantime: Go to the Charles, thou sluggard! Consider his ways, and be wise!

I would be remiss not to mention two posts by Jeff at Ruminations in Korea. The first post is about the joys and dangers of biking; the second is about the ugly realities of North Korea-- something South Koreans seem unwilling to face.

Is it my imagination, or is there something of a mini-renaissance happening in the Koreablogosphere? Along with the constant wave of new K-bloggers, many of whom are writing quite well, we seem to be seeing a reenergized Old Guard. Of course, a few of us look to the horizon and secretly hope for the End Times to draw near, so that we might witness the return of Incestuous Amplification, by far the funniest (and arguably the most bitter) Koreablog ever.


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