It took way longer than expected, but I finished stocking my blog with scheduled posts through March 22, two days after I'm back from the walk, which ought to give me plenty of time to create even more scheduled posts. In terms of what's done now:
- I've got all scheduled Substack material ready to go through the end of April, except for my long grammar posts in The Profound, which is part of my paid content. Those posts go through March 21, the day I get back from this upcoming walk. Oh—March 20 is the first official day of spring. Anyway, once I'm back from the walk, I need a few more days to make posts through April. I can do two to three per day.
- I've now got scheduled posts done for my blog through March 22.
So—starting Tuesday (technically today), I'll spend a few days working on creating more quizzes to supplement my Substack curriculum, then move over to the movie review book. It occurs to me that, when this grammar course is finally done, it's going to be massive. But I don't see a short way around it without cutting more corners than I already have.
Until around April 20, I'll also be working on my movie-review book, and I've thought of some possible lessons/courses for teachers so I can finally break into making videos. One idea, inspired by a bad video I've scheduled (about a "common sense" quiz) is for a course on quiz/test design. Another idea is for a grammar course aimed at Koreans who keep messing up their English grammar. 95% of the mistakes I hear from Korean learners of English are grammar-related—this despite the fact that a lot of Koreans will boast about how thoroughly they study English grammar, with some even brashly claiming to know English grammar better than most Americans. And frankly, there may be some truth to that claim if the incompetence I've seen among certain EFL teachers in Korea is any indication. You can't, as an English teacher, get away with nonsense like saying, "Well, it's just doesn't feel right to write it that way" or "It's smoother if you do it this way." Bunch of horseshit. When I started teaching SAT grammar at the tutoring center where I worked, I quickly realized that my kids, many of whom were gifted, would require real, concrete reasons to justify this grammar over that grammar. For me, there was no room for bullshit. If that job had paid about three times as much, I'd have stayed in Virginia and forgotten Korea.
Well—back to the grind, then, though for the moment, I'm going to take a break and keep watching Kingdom, a Korean series (only two seasons...?) about zombies back in the days when Seoul was known as Hanyang. I'm finding the zombies a little confusing: the first zombies seem to have originated from the victims' consumption of a "resurrection herb" called a saengsacho/생사초/生死草, or literally a "life-death-herb." But after that first "Patient Zero" was infected, the resultant zombies could infect others simply by biting them, after which they multiply like typical zombies. Oh, and these zombies are "runners," not "shamblers." Like a lot of people, I do find it interesting to juxtapose zombies with ancient Korea, but I don't understand how the zombies went from originally being the eaters of a plant to being infected by bites. Is it the blood chemistry? Can I expect this ever to be explained? There's a potentially interesting idea, here, regarding generations of zombies that have different traits and properties from each other, but I have a feeling the show won't be exploring any of that. The living are still fixating on the old "Those corpses aren't really dead!" trope. Anyway, expect a review when I'm done.
Don't expect Kingdom to make sense. It's not a serious zombie show, as far as I'm concerned--the zombies merely serve as allegory. I don't want to spoil anything, but there is something that happens at the end of the first series that made me give up on the show. I never watched the second series, although friends of mine who have seen it have told me that it was more about the politics of the time than zombies.
ReplyDeleteTriggered by your word "allegory," I went hunting for information on "the zombies in Kingdom are an allegory" and found myself utterly absorbed by this Substack essay from someone named Eleanor Johnson. It struck me as very perceptive regarding several issues she brings up, including the question of the role of class in the horror genre:
DeleteThen I took a big step back in my mind from this film, and I started thinking broadly about class and monster horror. The vampire genre tends to be aristocratic, no question about that. It has been for a long, long time, like, thousands of years....The witch genre is usually about the proletariat; witches are almost invariably old, wicked, poor women, who live in hovels. But the zombie genre—particularly since George Romero mainstreamed the idea of a zombie horde—has been a weirdly kind of democratic horror genre. The monsters aren’t just aristocrats, but they can be; they aren’t just the poor, though they can be poor. Zombies can be anyone. Zombie is an everyman horror genre, a genre that ruptures the fiction that social stratification is natural, or that it confers some kind of permanent ontological safety on the people at the top of that stratification. Anyone can be a zombie, so look out: undeath is coming from you, whether you live in a palace or whether you live in the streets.
Johnson didn't perceive whatever it was that had turned you off at the end of the first season; she went on to watch and appreciate Season 2 (I finished Season 1 last night). But her essay is well written and almost makes me feel as if she's said, more eloquently, anything I might have wanted to say in my own future review.
The very notion of a zombie was, even back in old Haiti, supposed to be an allegory for slavery, from what I gather: Slaves were alive but dead—toiling, shambling, and unfree, the picture of suffering, terrible hunger, and constraint. Side note: It's interesting how, these days, a zombie might represent a slave, but a slave can be a metaphor for a working stiff: a "wage slave."
What, exactly, were you thinking about when you contended that the zombies of Kingdom are an allegory? Something general like "they represent the corruption of the rulers and the hunger of the people," or something more specific in the sort of 1:1 symbolism that allegory is known for?
Ah—information on Eleanor Johnson from the AI god:
DeleteEleanor Johnson is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and author of Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (2025). She created the Substack "Eleanor's Horrors," where she publishes weekly essays analyzing the intersection of feminism, medieval studies, and horror cinema.
That explains her eloquence and thoroughness: She's one of you creatures! I note with amusement the use of quotation marks for her Substack's title.
Honestly, it's been so long since I've seen it that I probably can't speak too specifically about the allegorical nature of the zombies.
ReplyDeleteI am curious what you thought about the series finale, though. Were you cool with the twist or did you find it to be BS, like I did? I hesitate to write more for fear of spoilers for anyone who might not have seen it yet.
Are you referring to (I'm now writing elliptically) the reveal about the pregnancy? Or was it something else?
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