driving ol' Dixie down

My coworker at the Golden Goose asked me my opinion on the whole "Confederate-flag thing." This is with reference to whether South Carolina should take down the Confederate flag (a.k.a., The Stainless Banner, among other names) in the aftermath of the recent shooting by racist nut Dylann Storm Roof (apparently pronounced "rofe") at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina (Wiki writeup here). Before I talk about the flag, though, let's back up and deal with some prior issues.

As I told my buddy Tom regarding the fate of Mr. Roof: "I say fry him. I don't give a shit that he may have been off his meds." What do you do when a bear wanders into town and kills nine of your people? Do you negotiate with it while thinking, "After all, it's just a bear; it's only following its instincts"? Not at all: you shoot the bastard—you bring it down, and that's how you stop more killings from happening. (This is, by the way, the best and only necessary argument for the death penalty. Screw the notion that capital punishment deters other people: it deters the only person who matters, i.e., the killer himself.) As I've noted before in writing about suicide and depression, these mental conditions may constrain our human freedom, but they don't eliminate that freedom. Even the most depressed person in the world is ultimately responsible for his or her actions. Freedom is always constrained in some manner; like water, it inevitably follows certain channels as it runs its course.

I told my coworker, regarding Roof, that the good folks at Emanuel—many of whom openly forgave the killer—were much more noble than I would have been in their place. Dylann Roof would have received justice from my bare hands had he killed either or both of my little brothers. I simply don't have it in me to forgive certain things, and in Roof's case, I would gladly pull the hangman's lever, or the rifleman's trigger—or would twist his head until I heard and felt his neck bones pop—and sleep soundly that very night.

Getting back, though, to the "Confederate-flag thing": as I also told my coworker, I'm technically a Southerner, having been born and raised in Virginia. That said, I've never felt particularly Southern. Other Virginians will note, jokingly, that this is because of my long-time proximity to Washington, DC: northern Virginia has never been "real" Virginia by most Virginians' reckoning—this despite the fact that I lived in Mount Vernon, on what used to be the property of George Washington himself—and who, if not President Washington, is the ultimate Virginian? So because I've never felt all that Southern, I can't say that I feel any twinge of regret or despair, or even nostalgia, at the thought that South Carolina might, by forever lowering the Stainless Banner, finally put aside an odious part of its past and move forward into this modern century.

I recognize that others feel differently, and part of the reason for this has to do with the power of symbols. Symbols operate on agreements (see my post on the supposedly pagan symbolism of the Christmas tree), and they also accumulate history. Think about the swastika: it may rotate differently depending on whether it's a Nazi swastika or a swastika coming out of ancient Indian culture, but the symbol has a powerful resonance in both the West and the East—all thanks to agreements as to how to view the symbol, and to the accumulated history of tradition that naturally accretes around the symbol. So I, along with many Northerners and most black folks, view the Confederate flag as a symbol that still echoes with the racism and oppression of the past. Other Southerners ignore this dimension and focus solely on how the flag represents "Southern culture," a notion with which I have little sympathy.

This brings me to an article by William Cawthon that I saw via Malcolm Pollack's fine blog. Malcolm's post is brief, but the article itself is dauntingly long. I spent an hour slogging through it during my lunch break yesterday, but I still failed to finish it. Not that finishing it was necessary: the author, a Southerner himself, repeatedly utters the same self-pitying refrain—the South's defeat turned everything upside-down; the North swept in and began systematically replacing Southern cultural notions and values with Northern notions and values; the South is steadily disintegrating. Alas for the poor, dying South. In that vein, Malcolm seems to be arguing, the taking-down of the Confederate flag is part and parcel with the continued dismantling of Southern history and culture.

Two things impressed me—negatively—about Cawthon's article: (1) he complains about the steady loss of Southern culture but provides almost no examples of what elements of that culture are worth saving, and (2) his article makes only the barest mention of slavery, which makes everything he does say in the article utterly beside the point. He claims, for example, that the South was economically more robust than the North before the Civil War. I almost laughed: the South's economy was largely founded on a booming cotton industry that was driven by slave labor! (Read more here. This is telling: "By 1850, 1.8 million of the 2.5 million enslaved Africans employed in agriculture in the United States were working on cotton plantations.") Is Cawthon really that blind to the irony of what he's saying? While lamenting the demise of his culture, the author offers us no reason to believe it worth saving. And out of 5,824 words, the author uses some form of the word "slave" (enslavement, slavery, slaves, etc.) only six times. Slavery is an issue that he actively avoids.

(In the interest of fairness and full disclosure, I should note that, having lived out in the sticks and having known country folk, I can think of a list of reasons to preserve certain aspects of Southern culture—perhaps a subject for another post. Most of the folks I knew while living in Front Royal were good, kind, and hard-working. It is, perhaps, condescending to say this, but the people I knew would have been horrified by the notion of owning a chattel slave. That said, there are also, even now, rotten undercurrents to that culture which, in an ideal world, would be rooted out and eliminated. Conservative churches in Front Royal, for example, aren't all that friendly to, say, gay couples looking to become members.)

There are Southerners who still maintain that the Civil War wasn't fundamentally about slavery: it was about states' rights. That may indeed have been an issue, and I don't think Cawthon is wrong to mention that issue in his article when he complains about Northern steamrollering of Southern ideas and values. But for Cawthon to elide the role and importance of slavery is a dirty move on his part, and I refuse to accept it.

My Golden Goose coworker, during an idle moment in the office, pointed out the so-called "cornerstone speech" given by the vice-president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, on March 21, 1861. Stephens lays out the South's convictions, and its motivating principles, with grim and appalling clarity:

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.

Stephens, speaking with the implied authority of Jefferson Davis, says above that slavery is indeed a central issue—if not the central issue—in the coming conflict, and that the black man is most assuredly inferior to the white man. Southerners who shy away from this are shying away from their then-leaders' own words. Stephens also makes abundantly clear that he sees slavery as right, just, and an integral part of what makes the South the South. Is it any wonder, then, that black people nowadays—and non-black Northerners, too—might see the Confederate flag as a symbol of hatred and oppression?

So I can't get all that exercised about the taking-down of the Stainless Banner. I'm happy to see it go. And it's about damn time.

As for whether the South is really withering away, Wikipedia has this to say:

In more modern times, however, the South has become the most integrated region of the country. Since the late 1960s black people have held and currently hold many high offices, such as mayor and police chief, in many cities such as Atlanta and New Orleans.

[...]

Historically, the South relied heavily on agriculture, and was highly rural until after 1945. It has since become more industrialized and urban and has attracted national and international migrants. The American South is now among the fastest-growing areas in the United States.

[...]

The arrival of millions of Northerners (especially in major metropolitan areas and coastal areas) and millions of Hispanics means the introduction of cultural values and social norms not rooted in Southern traditions. Observers conclude that collective identity and Southern distinctiveness are thus declining, particularly when defined against "an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, real, more unified and distinct". The process has worked both ways, however, with aspects of Southern culture spreading throughout a greater portion of the rest of the United States in a process termed "Southernization".

Upshot: Mr. Cawthon's piteous whingeing notwithstanding, the South's going to be around for a very long time yet. It's not going anywhere, and by some measures, it seems actually to be thriving. If anything, southern red-state economies are proving, with Texas as a prime example, to be more robust than blue-state economies like California—a state that's managing itself into the ground thanks to over-regulation and a business-unfriendly climate. Perhaps like Germany, the South will reach a point where it repudiates its ugly past and begins to share only its good, positive, constructive aspects with the larger land.*

One last note: I see that Republican Senator Mitch McConnell has come out in favor of removing a prominent statue of Confederacy President Jefferson Davis and placing it in a history museum. I think this is a good thought, and it evokes the compromise that I personally envision: the removal of hateful icons and symbols doesn't mean their total erasure: erasing the past is never a good thing. We have to remember our mistakes if we're to have any hope of not repeating them. This is why Auschwitz and Buchenwald still exist; it's why Washington, DC, hosts the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Any Jew can tell you about the vital importance of memory. Put the past aside, forgive if you must, but never forget.

And that applies to a certain flag as well.

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*Some readers might scoff at the idea that Germany nowadays is sharing only its positive qualities with Europe, especially given its own problems with race relations and immigration. From the perspective of someone in Korea who shares Koreans' frustrations with Japan's repeated attempts to change or erase its past culpability for countless depredations, I'd say that Germany has been remarkably forthright in its acknowledgment of and contrition for its past deeds. Germany now stands as one of two or three economic powerhouses in western Europe and is doing what it can to keep the Eurozone afloat, with little help from indolent Mediterranean sun-belt siesta cultures like Greece, Spain, and—obliquely—Portugal, all of which probably should be jettisoned from the common currency before the entire ship sinks.


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ululate!

It is now confirmed that famed and infamous Hollywood composer James Horner has died in a plane crash. Horner was 61.

I have an ambivalent relationship with Horner's music. On the one hand, the man was capable of weaving together seemingly disparate strands of power and subtlety into a coherent, harmonious whole. You can hear both of these dynamics at work in the scores Horner prepared for, say, "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" or, much later, for "Apollo 13." On the other hand, Horner was a shameless self-cannibalizer—brazenly recycling themes, tropes, rhythms, and leitmotifs from previous movie scores in what can only be interpreted as sheer creative laziness. I heard the Klingon theme running through Horner's score for Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Commando," for example, as well as through James Cameron's "Aliens." Parts of the "Genesis Countdown" theme from "Star Trek II" were audible in Horner's music for Ron Howard's "Cocoon." The list of sins goes on.

But when Horner produced original material, it was undeniably majestic, and other composers seemed to crib from him, as I'm pretty sure Richard Gibbs did in crafting some of his themes for the "Battlestar Galactica" miniseries. Gibbs was definitely channeling Horner's "Braveheart." "Apollo 13," mentioned above, is some of Horner's best and most inspiring work. I have the album, which sits alongside his scores for "Star Trek II" and "Star Trek III." The "Brainstorm" soundtrack features moments of mystery and glory. The score for "Titanic" was, of course, memorable.

And now, it seems, James Horner is dead.

Despite the man's creative flaws, he was a composer that I had grown up with, whose music marked me deeply. I'm only a couple degrees of separation away from him, too: my brother Sean, a professional cellist, has an extremely talented violist friend named Katie who actually worked with Horner on one or more of his film scores. I wonder what that must have been like. But all of this is to say that I'll miss the man and his music. Very much.

RIP, Mr. Horner.


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two strikes, one hit

After finishing my Tuesday work in Daechi-dong, I went over to the Seoul campus of Dongguk University to collect some paperwork and to drop other paperwork off. While I was in my office, I met a coworker—we'll call him Ampersand—who told me he was shopping around for a new place to live. He said that, for now, a yeogwan would be fine, so I told him I'd take him over to the Jongno 5-ga neighborhood where I had stayed a couple nights on the recommendation of a former coworker.

Amp and I taxied over to that neighborhood, but when I told him that we'd be heading into a back alley, he suddenly betrayed a great deal of trepidation, which I found amusing. We walked into the alley, and Amp started muttering, "Damn... this is filthy..." Now, I'm actually okay with a certain level of squalor (witness my multiple stays in the pube yeogwan), but Amp was apparently unready for even this rather modest level of trashiness. We passed the juicy girls; we passed the bars; we passed a few shadier-than-usual love motels. The buildings' façades had been redone since my last visit, so I ended up skipping past the yeogwan I had stayed in, but when I asked Amp if we should turn around and look for it, he said, "Naw, man. Let's go back to the main street."

So we headed out of the alley and back into the world. At that point, breathing fresher, less whore-y air, Amp felt a bit better and asked me whether I'd eaten dinner. I said no, so Amp said we should step into the soondae-guk restaurant right next to us. It looked like a nice place, so I shrugged and said "Why not?" The blood-sausage soup, laced with stringy beef, turned out to be fantastic, and was a great deal at barely $5.60 per large bowl. Good call on Amp's part. I paid, despite my colleague's protestations, so he insisted on paying the fare for our next cab ride, which was over to my old neighborhood from last semester, right in Chungmuro 5-ga. I wanted to take Amp up to the Hyundai Residence, a building just up the street from my former yeogwan. I had visited the real-estate office there months ago to ask about the cost of an apartment in the building. Amp said he'd like to see an apartment if possible. When we got to the front desk, the two harried clerks told us there were no apartments available—just hotel rooms. This contradicted what I'd heard from the real-estate office, but the night manager said, "I'm just the night manager; come back during the day and somebody higher up can help you better."

So my two attempts at hooking Amp up with a place to stay turned out to be a bust. The only high point of the evening was that soondae-guk restaurant, which was truly memorable. Amp and I walked back to Dongguk's campus, collected our stuff, walked back down to the street, and parted ways. Amp was intent on having a beer in Itaewon; I was tired and wanted to catch the 7119 bus from Gwanghwamun back to Goyang.

At least I got a good bit of walking done.


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holy fuckhole, Batman! [probably NSFW]

A friend of mine said he had recently sent out, on eBay, for a new case for his cell phone. When the package arrived, he opened it and found himself looking at the following:

I've heard that some of those silicone vaginas are molded from the cooters of actual porn stars. I guess this somehow aids the imagination. Instead of thinking about the fact that you're fucking something cold and utterly unresponsive, you can imagine you're banging the queen of all whores. Delightful.

My friend received an embarrassed message from the eBay seller once the mixup was made known. The phone cover is now on its way, and my friend is free to do whatever he wants with the fuckholes. Moral: life is like buying shit on eBay. You never know what you're gonna get.


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another step forward in the F-4 visa saga

My brother David was kind enough to do an end-run around the incompetent VitaChek people and obtain Mom's death certificate from a DC office. David and I both wondered why it was that a DC office would have Mom's document; I conjectured that it was because Mom had died at Walter Reed Medical Center, which is a military facility and thus an arm of the federal government. Not that the mystery interests me at all: the only thing that matters is that I now have a copy of Mom's document. Well, technically, David has a copy of the paper document, while I have a scanned copy of same (thanks, again, to David's hard work).*

So with that out of the way, the next step is to obtain Mom's naturalization paperwork. The guy at the US Embassy in downtown Seoul told me to Google "USCIS FOIA" to find the webpages devoted to explaining how to obtain naturalization documents. There's a form to fill out, G-630, along with plenty to read both on the website itself and in downloadable documents, like the well-hung, 25-page Freedom of Information Act Request Guide. I've got plenty of homework ahead of me.

I'll be aiming to obtain "certified true copies" of Mom's naturalization papers; based on the USCIS site's explanation, this sounds as though the papers get apostilled, which is exactly what I'm going to need if I'm to show this paperwork to Korean Immigration.

So, to review:

1. I have a copy of my birth certificate.
2. I have a copy of my Korean family register.
3. I have a copy of Mom's death certificate.
4. I'm going to get a copy of her naturalization papers.

Once I have (4), I can apply—I think—to Korean Immigration for the F-4 visa. How long that process will take, I have no idea. Days? Weeks? Probably the latter. At a guess, I'm not going to be able to jump ship over to the Golden Goose at the beginning of August, so I'm anticipating having to spend an extra month here in Goyang/Ilsan. That's a bit of a pain in the ass, because leaving Ilsan would mean recovering the 3 million won I had deposited to establish the rental contract. I had been looking forward to that windfall this August. Instead, it appears I'll be relying solely on my last gasp of Dongguk University income (my contract with Dongguk ends on August 31, my birthday). I may be barely squeezing by in August.

Another side effect of all this rescheduling is that I'm going to have to redraw my budget. That's a big cause of old-man-style grumbling, but there's no way around it. Not to worry, though: it's just a matter of shifting figures around on my Google Docs spreadsheet.

But first things first: send in the application for Mom's naturalization papers—yet another offering to the ever-hungry gods of bureaucracy.

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*VitaChek only just got around to sending me their own copy of Mom's death certificate, so we're going to end up with two hard copies. I told David to scan and send me an image of the VitaChek version because I'm curious to see how different it looks.


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in pictures

Here's the statistical phenomenon I've been talking about:

As you see, we seem already to have peaked.

So I can stop writing about this shit now.


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dying down?

I think we've maxed out on the exaggerated number of unique visits to my blog. I've got about three or four hours until the end of this 24-hour period, and SiteMeter is registering only 1,803 unique visits as of this writing. I had flirted with 3,000 visits yesterday, but today I'll be lucky to hit 2,000. Perhaps this is the beginning of a downward trend. If so, I'm glad. This whole experience has been very strange, to say the least.


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on the street

This past Friday, I had dinner with my buddy Tom. We had intended to hit Seorae, the galmaegi-sal (grilled, boneless pork chunks) restaurant that Tom had introduced me to last year. To our horror, we discovered that the entire block where Seorae used to sit had been torn down. No more Seorae. And that sucked. So Tom switched to Plan B: another grill house called, patriotically enough, Uri Nara. We sat down to a modestly sized plateful of raw, trimmed beef galbi (rib meat without the rib bones, in this case), and it was pretty good. Not as good as Seorae would have been, but good enough to stop the hunger pangs. Tom's an ice-cream hound, so it's our postprandial ritual to head over to the local Baskin Robbins to sit down to cups of ice cream—a huge pint in my case, and two scoops in Tom's case.

After dinner, we went our separate ways, at which point I took the following selfie in my favorite part of town:

So that was how I capped off my ultra-busy Friday. Exhausted, I trudged over to Gwanghwamun and took the 7119 bus back to my neighborhood in Goyang City (nice to know that such a bus exists). I had promised myself that I'd finish everything up on Saturday, but Saturday—very monsoony—came and went with nary a thing done. So I'm finishing up what I can tonight, then likely taking a trip over to the Seoul campus on Monday to physically turn in some last bits of paperwork and clear out my desk for the next chump to occupy it. After Monday, it's Goodbye, Dongguk! and Goodbye, teaching! for the next little while. A very different life, and lifestyle, awaits me on the other side of this sweaty summer.


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2,857

The previous 24-hour period (my SiteMeter seems to track hits from 1PM to 1PM every day, despite my having set it to the Korean time zone) saw me receive almost three thousand unique visits. Since these visits aren't resulting in anything new, like a pile of comments from strangers, I'm beginning to think it may be best to call these hits "phantom visits," because they're that insubstantial.

The initial faux-excitement at receiving an inordinate number of visits has disappeared; I'm just waiting for this anomaly to blow itself out. That might not happen just yet, though: barely two hours after the previous 24-hour period ended, I've got almost a thousand phantom visits. If anything, this indicates a pattern of acceleration, not decline.

I can almost hear the acceleration in my head. It sounds like a jet engine being cranked higher and higher, and eventually, something's going to explode.


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the statistical hypertrophy continues

The previous 24-hour period, according to SiteMeter, ended with 1,594 unique visits. It's the next day, and as of this writing, I've already got almost 600 unique visits. I think I'm going to break a thousand yet again. Very bizarre.

There is no way in hell that this blog got discovered by someone influential—someone who turned around to his own followers and said, "Dudes! You gotta read this guy!" As much as my ego would love for that to be true, I know I'm the victim of some weird cyberspatial fluke. It feels a bit hollow, to be honest; it's almost as though I had paid money to a service to bump up my hit stats. Meanwhile, Blogger's much more sober site tracker is registering only 154 hits for today. It's enough to make me wonder how it is that Blogger is ignoring all the extraneous hits while SiteMeter is failing to do so. Hmmm.

UPDATE, 7:48PM: 1,017 unique visits. Over 400 such visits in about 2.5 hours, or about 160 visits per hour. I've noticed that, when the hits happen, they tend to come from one particular place, then another, then another. In each case, I'll get a bajillion hits from the same IP address, then the hits will start coming from a different IP, and so on. This tells us something about the anomaly, I think: it seems to be jumping from server to server, with a focus on driving hits (presumably just) to my site. Why I would be named the Chosen One is beyond me. In fact, I'm starting to wonder whether this isn't actually some sort of attack directed against me—an attack that's only now gathering force. I'll be curious to see whether we beat yesterday's high of 1,594 visits. How high can this go before something finally explodes?


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a bit of grade-related psychology

Since yesterday morning, I've been bombarded by student requests to know grades. The kids have no sense of timing or decorum; they hit me during mealtimes; they message me after midnight. One pushy student was rude enough to message me again fifteen minutes after his first texting. His second text contained an animated cartoon that said, in Korean, "I'm shocked! I haven't heard anything back yet." Really fucking rude. "Please be patient," I texted civilly in response. I was on the bus at the time, and although I was technically able to access his grades through my cell phone (I've stored all that data on Google Drive), looking at grades on a tiny screen is a bitch for these steadily oldering eyes.

One thing I've noticed, though, is that the students who suspect they're getting "A"s and "B"s are much faster to ask after their grades than are the students getting lower grades. I imagine that we all have a gut instinct when it comes to whether the sword of Damocles is going to fall. I can understand why a self-aware student who knows his or her own mediocrity would hesitate to ask about that final grade. The worst, though, is when a student with an unaccountably high opinion of him- or herself comes to learn that, no, s/he didn't get that hoped-for "A" or "B," but has instead been slapped across the face by the raw steak of a "C+." D'oh. Whom the gods destroy, first they make proud, and there is oh-so-much self-delusion among my students.


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site-traffic spike

In this blog's heyday, before 2008 (which is when I temporarily abandoned this blog to go on my cross-country walk), my blog enjoyed about 350-400 unique visits per day, according to SiteMeter. I like SiteMeter because it seems to be conservative in how it counts visits; Blogger has its own built-in site-traffic monitoring system, but if I were to trust Blogger, I'd believe I was receiving far more hits—something on the order of 480 unique visits per day.

Ever since I came back to this blog, after Mom's death in early 2010, my traffic has been fairly stillborn. Currently, I'm averaging about 82-90 unique visits per day, which is a fourth of what I used to get. So I've been limping along.

Today, however, I came home from an all-day visit to the Seoul campus of Dongguk University and was shocked to discover that my traffic total was 860 visits and counting. None of this makes sense, and I can only assume it's a quirk—a mistake of some sort. I don't seem to be getting hits from a famous blog that linked to one of my posts; such an acknowledgment would have been nice, but it's a bit much to ask for. (I did once get an Instalanche, and I also once got a halfhearted shout-out from Steven Den Beste. Those miracles happened years ago, however, and are part of this blog's faded and ever-fading glory.)

I think it's safe to assume that the anomaly will peter out and things will revert to normal within the next twelve to eighteen hours.

How I know this is an anomaly: in the few minutes since I began writing this post, my hit count has gone from 860-something to 902. At the same time, the "visits in the last hour" count is registering only three visits. Something's not adding up, and I mean that literally: the hourly hits don't match the rapidly increasing total.

So yeah—this will straighten itself out by the morrow, I'm sure. In the meantime, I'll look at my inflated numbers and dream a little dream of minor fame.

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UPDATE: SiteMeter is now more accurately registering the number of visits per hour. I'm going to easily surpass a thousand visits before the clock turns over. Most of my visits are coming through (1) Mike's blog, Naked Villainy; (2) a Google portal in Norway; (3) a Google portal in Sweden; and (4) one other portal whose ID I didn't catch because the hits from Naked Villainy have now buried it.

UPDATE 2: Blogger, for a change, is more conservative in its hit count. This post, for example, has received only three hits, by Blogger's count, since it was published.

UPDATE 3: As of 10:21AM on Saturday morning (6/20/15), I'm up to 1,240 unique visits. According to Blogger, however, this post, the post you're reading, has received only 17 hits. It's weird to think of Blogger as having the more sober site tracker, but there we are.

UPDATE 4: 11:50AM, and up to 1,455 now. I'd love to hit 2,000, but the numbers don't seem to be ratcheting up quite that fast.


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don't oversimplify the issue

I'm at Dongguk's Seoul campus right now; I've accomplished items 1, 2, and 3 on my to-do list (see previous blog entry), and am taking a quick break before I finish grading my students' finals (I got through half of the load last night before calling it quits).

Saw this BBC article on evolving pronunciation and noticed that it made this unsound claim:

pronunciation is not a matter of right and wrong but merely fashion

First, I'll note that I'd insert an "of" before "fashion" to maintain parallel structure. More important, though, is the content of the claim, which I contend is absolutely incorrect. I'm not even speaking as a prescriptivist, here (which I'm not, as I've written before). Just think about it for moment. Is the author of the article seriously maintaining that there's no right or wrong at all when it comes to pronunciation? If that's so, then I can look at a word spelled T-R-U-C-K and pronounce it "philodendron." What's to stop me? This puts us in the realm of Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty:

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'

Change Humpty Dumpty's "use" to "pronounce," change his "mean(s)" to "sound(s)," and you've got this article. To be charitable: the author is likely referring to small variations in pronunciation, but that doesn't absolve him of the sin of making a stupidly over-broad claim about language. Language is an evolving system of agreements, yes, but there's also a right way and a wrong way to go about using it. Otherwise, beautiful words like "To be or not to be" could easily be read as "Smoking banana in ass not utile."


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one final spasm

I've got thirty-eight tests to grade and record tonight. Tomorrow, early in the morning, I head off to the Seoul campus to take care of all my end-of-term obligations in one final paroxysm of effort. Tomorrow, I have to:

1. turn in a letter of resignation.
2. turn in a copy of my bank book.
3. pay a W300,000 tax-related fee (bullshit—no other college has ever asked for this).
4. enter my kids' grades into the system and publish them.
5. upload my "portfolio" and write up my end-of-semester observations.

That last item is a weird ritual that some Korean colleges engage in: teachers must write up a sort of self-evaluation that covers how classes were taught, what seemed successful, and what might be done differently next time. As I had done back in Daegu, I asked the Dongguk Seoul campus staff whether anybody bothers to read our self-evals. The overwhelming consensus: no one does, so this is purely a masturbatory exercise. The "portfolio" refers to a set of electronic documents that we must upload to the campus database—documents like copies of our midterms and finals, a color version of our attendance sheets, etc.

Although I'll miss my students, I'm happy to leave Dongguk inasmuch as it's an overly bureaucratic school. The amount of paperwork that's required of us teachers is ridiculous, and it serves little to no purpose. And that's why I'm going to try to get everything done tomorrow by 6PM, after which I'll be free and clear to begin my new life as a (gasp) non-teacher.

But you never know: as the characters said repeatedly in "The Bridge on the River Kwai," there's always one more thing to do. I have a sinking feeling that Dongguk University, with its unceasingly grasping, Lovecraftian tentacles, won't let go of me quite that easily.


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destinies determined

Just finished grading my second set of final exams, plugging the scores in, calculating final semester grades, and mapping those natural percentages against the accursed artificial curve. I've told my students not to write me grade-grubbing emails beseeching or demanding grade changes; such pleas will fall on deaf ears. I've done what I can to minimize the impact of the curve, but inevitably, some students are going to get burned.

So let's talk about the burned students—those crispy critters.

In the Monday class:

• Two students with natural "A"s will be receiving "B+"es.
• Three students with natural "B+"es will be receiving "C+"es.
• Two students with natural "B"s will be receiving "C+"es.

That's seven people affected—afflicted—by the curve. In a class of fifteen, that's almost half the class that'll be coming away very unhappy. Can't say I blame them, but I really hope they don't turn around and blame my ass for this, because it ain't my fault.

In the Wednesday class:

• Four students with natural "B"s will be receiving "C+"es.

That's not as bad a situation as Monday's class is, and Wednesday's class has nineteen people in it, so 4/19 is a smaller fraction of unhappy campers than Monday's 7/15.

Tomorrow, I've got my last two classes, both of which have nineteen students. My goal is to grade all thirty-eight exams, enter all final grades, then go to Dongguk's Seoul campus on Friday to take care of all my end-of-semester obligations. Friday promises to be an insane day; I'm going to try to be on campus by 9AM, and I plan to work until 6PM to get absolutely everything done.

In other news: my Thursday classes were lackadaisical in their text-messaged responses to my attempts at organizing two end-of-term parties, so both parties have been canceled thanks to an overall lack of enthusiasm. The kids have only themselves to blame, but at the same time, my wallet is quietly breathing a sigh of relief.

It's been an insane week. Saturday can't come soon enough.


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because of vs. due to

The "because of versus due to" issue comes up as an actual grammar point on the American college-entrance exam, the SAT (there's now a new version of the test, which has been significantly redesigned, so I'm now out of date). It's an interesting issue, and to be honest, it's one I wasn't aware of until I started teaching at YB [not its real name], the tutoring/test-prep center where I faced off against squirmy young people from grade school to high school, from early 2011 to mid-2013.

Most people—me included—tend to think that because of and due to are more or less interchangeable:

The outdoor orgy was canceled due to rain.
The outdoor orgy was canceled because of rain.

Most of us probably have an intuition that due to is used when we're formally stating the reason for something. Because of, meanwhile, looks and feels less formal. As it turns out, however, the distinction between these two locutions doesn't exactly follow our intuition.

Here's the rule of thumb that I learned: use the phrase due to only if you can replace it with the phrase attributable to without committing a grammatical faux pas.

So:

The outdoor orgy was canceled due to rain.
The outdoor orgy was canceled attributable to rain.

Putting attributable to into the sentence makes it obvious that it's ungrammatical. Nix the due to and use because of:

The outdoor orgy was canceled because of rain.

Let's try another set. Which is correct?

a. His hand strength was largely due to his constant, furious masturbation.
b. His hand strength was largely because of his constant, furious masturbation.

In this case, (a) is correct: leave the due to in. The phrase "was largely attributable to" makes grammatical sense, and as you now see, the reason we use due to in this case is that there's a verb, "was," almost directly in front of the locution. (The verb would be directly in front were there no intervening adverb.) Due to is functioning suspiciously like a predicate adjective.

So now you know the due to/because of rule of thumb. May all your future linguistic success be due to your constant, furious masturbation.

ADDENDUM: the wise and powerful Mignon* Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, notes the "attributable to" rule of thumb as well. She associates the rule with Strunk and White.

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*As with the "Imperator/Imperatrix" problem I noted in my review of "Mad Max: Fury Road," the name "Mignon" is based on the masculine form of the French adjective meaning "cute." The feminine form of mignon is mignonne. Kind of ironic that a woman who has devoted her life to correct grammar should be cursed with a grammatically incorrect first name. (Or has she been compensating all this time?) Another woman cursed with a grammatically masculine name: Cher. Ideally, it should have been Chère. If we could turn back time, if we could find a way, we might be able to rewrite history and name the woman properly.


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the adventures of my buddy Mike

A letter from Mike to his wife and children:

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Dear Family,

Kevin has very kindly been chauffeuring me all over the place. We stopped in DC for a bit, and I snapped this selfie in front of the White House:

We then flew to Europe to go walk around old buildings. Bumped into Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman while were were there. Didn't know they were back together.

We were in a rented car, so we drove down to the Mediterranean coast and hit a beach. A nude beach, of course. But the people were friendly. Wish you were here, honey!

We ditched our rental to get into a special car that can travel through time. Somehow ended up at the Battle of Falkirk. That promised to be exhilarating, but I think we got a little too close to the action. Kevin ended up with an arrow in the throat and a sword in the groin; I got an axe full in the chest. That kinda' sucked. Anyway, it was worth the selfie.

Kevin and I both died of our wounds, but we found ourselves on the threshold of heaven. In the pic below, that's the Divine Presence glowing behind me. Pretty cool, right?

So, yeah, we're both dead, and neither of us will be back anytime soon. We've decided we'll just hang here and wait for you guys to catch up. Laters!

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Happy 46th, Mike. Just a bit of weirdness to celebrate your special day, which—based on your binge tweeting—also coincides with the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta.


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"theological whimsy"

Dr. Vallicella, over at his blog, had been discussing the notion of whether "World + God = God." He took time out to address a comment made by blogger and commenter The Big Henry, criticizing Henry's numerical analogy. (Read this post to learn the details.) I stepped in to comment and left the following remarks:

I don't know what Henry had in mind when he made his analogy, but it sounds at least somewhat consistent with something I'd read, once, in a textbook on philosophy of religion.* In the textbook, the metaphor of an infinite bookshelf is used: imagine a bookshelf that stretches forever to your left and to your right. On this shelf is an infinity of books that alternate between red and black covers, i.e., every other book is black, and every other book is red. That's the setup for the thought experiment.

If I pluck a single book, of either color, from this shelf, how many books remain on the shelf? An infinity of books! In that sense, perhaps we can say that "infinity minus one is still infinity." If I were somehow able to remove all the red books from the shelf, how many books would I remove? Why, an infinity of books. And how many books would still be on the shelf? An infinity! So it may be legitimate to say that, at least in this case, "infinity minus infinity equals infinity." Were I to add an infinity of green books to this shelf, such that the books now alternated "black-red-green, black-red-green, etc.," how many books would be on the shelf? An infinity! So perhaps "infinity plus infinity equals infinity," too.

I don't know, but perhaps it's to this additive oddness that Henry is referring, and as for "God is not a set," well... no matter what analogy we try to use when talking about God, it's a safe bet that, in any "God:X" analogy, God is not an X.

Henry replied with this comment:

Kevin,

That is essentially the infinity I had in mind when I offered my analogy for Bill's consideration. And, indeed, Bill is correct in noting that I had not considered Cantor's work on the concept of infinity. Bill's claim that, "Since Cantor we have an exact mathematics of infinity", however, is questionable. As the greatest mathematician of all time (Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss) noted, "Infinity is nothing more than a figure of speech which helps us talk about limits. The notion of a completed infinity doesn't belong in mathematics".

The analogy I suggested was not meant to imply that God is humanly conceivable by any analogy. From the only philosophy course I ever took as an undergrad (philosophy of religion) I remember that God's attributes are deemed to be "wholly other". That is to say (to use another mathematical analogy) if human attributes are real numbers, then God's are complex numbers.

Finally, in the spirit of Bohr's response to Einstein, if God wants to be a "set" or any "X" you care to mention, God can be whatever He wants to be.

It was that final sentence about God that snagged my attention. So I wrote:

[slightly edited for style]

Henry,

"God can be whatever He wants to be."

Fascinating theological claim. My inner Sunday-school student wants to accept this unquestioningly because, after all, God can do anything.

But can He really?

What if God says to Himself, in the spirit of Rachel Dolezal's claiming to be black, "You know... I want to be a deer. And you know what else? I think I am a deer! So be it!" So God transforms Himself into a deer, and does so in such a thorough, complete way that He is now wholly a deer, i.e., an animal with no deific attributes at all, which further means that God now lacks the ability to turn Himself back into the God of all creation. At this point, having only a deer's powers of cogitation, God is no longer in a position to say about Himself, "Well, shit... now I'm a deer. What the hell do I do?" Even that thought is beyond Him.

If God's omnipotence includes the ability to become something less-than-God so completely that God loses His God-ness, then the claim that "God can be whatever He wants to be" can be true only once. Otherwise, if God turns into a deer but retains the deific power to revert back to being fully God, then God has not truly become a deer in full: He's kept an ontological escape clause.

I realize you were just being playful with your Bohr/Einstein remark, but I saw an opportunity to engage in some theological whimsy. Apologies.

I should note that, technically speaking, nothing I wrote above invalidates Henry's claim that "God can be whatever He wants to be." The modal can refers to potential. If we think spatiotemporally, and if we assume God does exist, we can further safely assume that God hasn't exercised His prerogative to become a deer just yet: that remains a potential action. The fact that God can perform this action only once (because becoming a deer means abandoning the universe) doesn't undermine the notion that God can become whatever He wants to become. The claim becomes invalid after God's first—and only—transmogrification.

[NOTE TO NEW READERS: I don't believe in a literal God of the Bible. I am, in fact, about as far from being a classical theist as it's possible to be. At the same time, I wouldn't call myself an outright atheist, either; I prefer to call myself, in the language of nondualism, a nontheist. Ultimate reality is apophatic—ineffable, inexpressible—in nature. Even saying that much about ultimate reality is saying too much, and saying it misleadingly.]

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*Stairs, Allen, and Christopher Bernard. A Thinker’s Guide to the Philosophy of Religion. New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2007.


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all set

It took several hours of toil, but I've gotten my final exams prepped for the students for this coming week. As was true with the midterm (I believe in keeping the testing format consistent), there's a speaking section and a listening section. The speaking section is a five-minute, one-on-one interview; the listening section involves answering questions based on audio segments: five semi-involved interview questions, twenty quick listening questions. The students know they're on a timer and being recorded, and that they'll lose points if they hesitate too long and go overtime (unanswered questions = lost points).

For the interviews in each level, I placed ten sets of interview questions onto a single sheet of paper, in table form. Each box of the table is numbered: 1, 2, 3, etc. The students will come into the classroom one at a time (the other students have to wait in the lounge) and will be asked to draw a card with a number on it. This randomizes the process. If a student picks "2," then I ask them the five interview questions in Box 2 of the table:

1. VOCABULARY: define [word] or use [word] in a sentence.
2. GRAMMAR (A): Form a question or statement according to [learned grammar rule].
3. GRAMMAR (B): Answer an "if"-conditional question with an "if"-conditional sentence.
4. TOPIC: Quickly answer a "What do you think" question based on a chapter topic.
5. TOPIC: Quickly answer an "advantages/disadvantages" question based on a chapter topic.

These are Level 1 kids, so this segment of the exam isn't meant to become an involved, abstruse discussion about heavily philosophical matters. I'm looking for quick answers, correctly executed. I told the students that, unlike many of their English teachers, I do actually care about the structural correctness of their utterances: they need to worry about things like word order, dropped articles, correct tense control, and so on. It's not enough merely to "convey essential information," as the oral-proficiency school's mantra goes.

I like the oral-proficiency school inasmuch as it drives students to produce when they might otherwise be silent, but where the school fails is in not correcting erroneous output. So much stress is placed on producing, producing, producing that students are allowed to get away with misspeaking—to the point that, after years of such schooling, they begin to form bad speech habits that calcify and become nearly impossible to unlearn by the time the kids reach my classes. This is why history keeps repeating itself when Koreans learn English: we expat teachers never bother to correct them properly, and native-Korean teachers of English often lack the skills to make corrections themselves. Fortunately or unfortunately, native-Korean teachers are usually the first English teachers these students have.

My exam reflects my pedagogical philosophy. It's a modest thing, of course; there's nothing special about formatting my final in the way I have. But one of the things I've stressed over the course of this semester has been correct output: don't just convey the basic info; convey it well. And that's a large component of this test.

Good luck to the students this coming week. I'm morbidly curious to see how the grade landscape is going to change. My Monday class—which is full of my highest performers—is going to suffer the most, I think: several students will drop from "A" to "B," and more students will drop from "B" to "C" because of the curve... unless this exam succeeds in naturally whittling away those extra "A"s and "B"s. My other three classes were more stoic about facing the ugly reality of the curve, but we'll see how stoic they are when they get their actual letter grades. I'm expecting several plaintive emails, with much weeping and gnashing of teeth.


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well, that settles that, I guess

It appears I don't have Asperger's or any other condition on the autism spectrum. I took a test and these were the results:

A friend of mine tweets, on occasion, about being "an Aspie," i.e., someone with Asperger's (in English, we don't pronounce "Asperger's" the French way;* instead, it sounds like "ass burgers," both repellent and vaguely delicious). She recently wrote that she's never been officially diagnosed with the condition, but she's taken online tests and they seem to match her own internal assessment. Her mention of online tests is what led me to look those tests up. So I found one and took it, as you see above.

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*The French verb asperger ("ah-spair-zhey") means "to squirt" or "to spritz/sprinkle" a liquid. Sprinkling a powder, as when you're dusting a cake with confectioner's sugar, is a completely different verb: saupoudrer, which has the root poudre (powder) in it.


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Ave, Fred!

Journalist Frédéric Ojardias tweets:

Trop fermée, trop lente, fuyant les médias, déconnectée, mal entourée... la présidente sud-coréenne dans la tourmente...

Translation:

Too closed off, too slow, fleeing the media, disconnected, poorly staffed... the South Korean president in turmoil...

I tweeted back to Fred:

Avant de lire "la présidente sud-coréenne," j'ai cru que vous parliez d'Hillary Clinton.

i.e.,

Before reading "the South Korean president," I thought you were talking about Hillary Clinton.

The parallels certainly are interesting to consider. Nota bene: this isn't to say that a female leader will necessarily be less competent than a male one: there are far too many examples of male incompetence for that to be true, and there are plenty of examples of strong, competent female leadership (Margaret Thatcher comes to mind, and Angela Merkel nowadays, to name two). But President Park and Hillary Clinton both seem to be following a pattern. Both come from entitled backgrounds; both have known only privilege, and both do seem to be living inside a reality-defying bubble marked by secrecy, oversensitivity, and lack of clear, decisive communication with the public. What would an HRC presidency look like? It'd probably look a lot like what we're seeing in South Korea. And that's a good reason to worry.


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"yes, maybe" to a party or two

My final two classes, this past Thursday, halfheartedly said yes to having jjong-parties, but we were completely unable to decide on a proper date, time, and location. The fourth class, my loudest, was particularly obstreperous: "Will there be alcohol?" several students asked breathlessly. Mortified, I blurted, "No!" My questioners sagged, then loudly declared, "That's not a party!" Eventually, even these rebels were convinced that it might be possible to have a party without the Devil's brew. We didn't have time, in either class, to discuss the matter further, so I told everyone I'd create a Kakao Group and we'd continue talking via text message before the final exam next week.

So, shit. My wallet will be taking a hit after all, and I'll just have to brace for impact.


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ululate!

The great Sir Christopher Lee is dead at 93. Probably best known for his early, iconic work as Dracula, Lee went on, in his later years, to play SF/F roles like that of Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequels (Lee's scenes were among the best in those lame films) and Saruman the White in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, thus earning him the affectionate moniker "Count Dooku the White."

Lee's Saruman is the subject of a hilarious YouTube parody video titled "Trolling Saruman," which you can watch here. For background, though, you need to view the original Russian "Trololo" video on which the Saruman parody is based: "Trololo" is, from what I gather, Russia's answer to Rick-rolling.

But the quirkiness doesn't end there. As you might imagine, Lee didn't just have an impressive speaking voice: he had an impressive singing voice that he sometimes put to strange uses, as in this bizarre musical number with—of all people—Alan Arkin in 1983's Australian production, "The Return of Captain Invincible."

Lee lent his voice to the dragon-like Jabberwocky (it should have been called the Jabberwock; "Jabberwocky" was the title of Lewis Carroll's poem, not the name of the monster) in 2010's "Alice in Wonderland." He also spoke excellent French (radio interview here, all in French), with only the barest trace of an accent, and had French-speaking roles in French movies (e.g., the so-so action film "Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse").

As far as I can tell, Lee was active almost all the way up to the end of his long and storied career. He did claim, in his 90s, that he had been having trouble flying long distances for certain engagements, but he was a tough old bird, a World War II veteran who mostly served in British military intelligence, even once surviving a bombing. A bit on the darker side, Lee has said he did work with the British SAS, although he never went into detail as to what, exactly, that meant.

The world will miss Mr. Lee's deep, subterranean voice, his unforgettable screen presence, and his exemplary perfectionism. There's a moment in "Attack of the Clones" during which Lee's Count Dooku is fighting Ewan McGregor's Obi-wan Kenobi, and Dooku breaks into a crazed, gleeful smile right before he wounds Kenobi twice. For just that moment, Lee seemed to be the only actor actually having fun on set, and I'll always be thankful to him for that: no matter how silly the role was, Lee always put his heart into it.

RIP, Sir Christopher. You'll be missed.

yours truly on YouTube

Tis a rare thing for me to venture onto video. I don't consider myself particularly photogenic: I look tolerable only from one very specific camera angle; otherwise, I'm just another frumpy American walrus in a long line of frumpy walruses. That said, here's a dialogue-free video that is destined to become a classic on the order of PSY's "Gangnam Style." If I don't have a million views within 24 hours, I'll be utterly flabbergasted:

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incredilunch 2: incredidinner

I made another batch of oi-kimchi—an even better batch this time—and paired it up with the remains of my chicken curry. The photos below show this evening's dinner, prepared in almost the same way that I had prepped yesterday's awesome lunch at the Golden Goose. Hover your cursor over the images to read the captions.

I had been hesitant to make this curry at first: normally, I add peas. This time around, all I added were diced carrot, cubed potato, garlic, onion (minced), and basil (along with heavy cream, ginger, chili flakes, and a bit of salt). Didn't miss the peas at all.

Another fine meal.


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je m'en foutisme

An -isme in French is an "-ism." The expression Je m'en fous roughly translates as "I don't give a fuck." (Some would translate it more weakly as "I don't give a shit/damn," but much depends on context.) The attitude of "don't give a fuck"ism is je m'en foutisme in French.

I'm halfway through Week 15, the penultimate week of the semester, so I'm ready for this academic nonsense to end. I was a sweaty mess by the time I reached my classroom, so I took out my trusty handkerchief and made it into my infamous bandanna:

Today's kids were less exercised about the whole grading-curve thing than my Monday kids had been, which was a relief. I had resigned myself to suffering loud, lusty outrage from the rest of my classes because I'd assumed the Monday class was a bellwether for what awaited me. Not so, but the one similarity between my Wednesday kids and my Monday kids was that neither group wanted to do an end-of-term party. Today, the reason wasn't so much anger at the grading curve as it was a lack of desire to come back to campus the week after exams, when the only reason to come back would be to attend the party.

I could understand that: if I were a student, and if I had no reason to see my classmates except to join them at a party, I wouldn't want to come, either. Generating esprit de corps among Korean students who don't know each other is a difficult business in the best of times. Unless the entire group goes through some harrowing situation, the kids aren't going to bond easily or deeply. As an introvert, I get this. Solidarity, as a feeling, is often hard to conjure up.

While it's disappointing that yet another group really doesn't want a party, my wallet is quietly breathing a sigh of relief: parties take funding to happen—at least, they do if you're planning to throw any sort of decent party. Even if I'd arranged a potluck, with the students bringing the supplies, I'd still have brought my own supplies, and that would have cost money. If my final two classes also say no to having parties, I may be off the hook, monetarily speaking.

Not that I care. Je m'en fous.


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incredilunch

Awesome lunch today, brought from home: my spicy chicken curry, a pile of rice, and the rest of my oi-kimchi. I swear, oi-kimchi is a perfect match for curry: just plop some cukes on top of your dish, scoop the curry up with some rice, and it's instant Kevinth heaven. Today's lunch was probably the best lunch I've ever eaten at the Golden Goose. Normally, I go out for Burger King or Subway, which generally means I'm spending around W12,000. (That's about the price of a Whopper set plus a chicken sandwich; at Subway, that's the price of a foot-long, a soda, a bag of chips, and one or two cookies.) The cost of today's lunch, if we think of portions as a fraction of grocery purchases, was probably less than half that.

I had to apologize to the front-office ladies, though, because I knew the curry would be obnoxiously pungent. They smiled and said not to worry, but after I'd finished my lunch, I passed by the front office and walked into a wall of air-freshening spray: the girls had done their best to kill the aroma emanating from the room with the microwave. I don't mind curry that much, but it does have a sort of musky, stinky-armpit aspect to it that some Koreans find unpleasant. (Even more unpleasant for most Koreans is straight-out cumin, which is likely why Mexican food has taken so long to gain a purchase on the peninsula.)

Anyway, it was a lunch to remember. Glad I made it. Glad I ate it.


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unhappy campers

As one of my former coworkers once noted, Koreans have a saying about themselves: they boil up quickly and cool down just as quickly. Matt Van Volkenburg (not sure whether there's supposed to be a space after the "Van"; most Dutch names have a space, as in "van Gogh," et al.) runs a blog titled Gusts of Popular Feeling, which riffs off the same notion: collectively, Korean emotions tend to billow, bluster, and becalm themselves.

I saw this in class today. It's the first day of Week 15, which means it's final-exam review time. Today's class, my Monday kids, had the Buddha's birthday off, so they were a week behind my other three classes. Today, then, we finished Unit 10 of our textbook—the final unit. When I announced that we were now officially done with the book, there was much cheering, which made me smile. We transitioned into talking about end-of-semester matters: the final exam and final grades. For the grades-related discussion, I handed out a sheet that showed some hypothetical scenarios (rather closely reflecting the actual reality of my classes) for how I might handle such-and-such grade distributions. None of my classes is a perfect bell curve at present, and that's doubly true for my Monday kids, whose class is top-heavy with way too many "A"s, even after I took many students down a peg for their mediocre pecha-kucha work. So I told them outright that, given the lack of "C"s, I'd likely have to shunt some "A"s into the "B" range, and some "B"s into the "C+" range to satisfy the curving requirements.

As you can imagine, the kids weren't happy to hear this, and the joyful end-of-textbook mood evaporated almost instantly. This was a bit frustrating for me, because I'd been harping on the reality of the grading curve since the first day of class, so it's not as though any of this was a surprise. One girl in particular said loudly, "That's not fair!"—which is, as I reminded her, the very same thing I'd said during Week 1, when I first explained the curve and made my hatred of it known. "Can I talk to your head teacher?" she asked desperately. I said I'd be happy to email my supervisors, but that I already knew what answer they'd give. (Full disclosure: I did indeed email my supervisors about two hours ago, and the prompt reply was exactly what I thought it'd be: stick to the grading policy.) When it finally came time to talk about whether we were going to have a jjong-party, i.e., an end-of-term celebration, the students were too dejected and resentful to want one. So—no party, then. So be it.

It's sometimes hard to remember that, in Korea, college students really are kids. They aren't considered young adults in quite the way that American college students are.* Korean students—and adults, too—are moody and mercurial: gusts of popular feeling, indeed.

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*This isn't to say that American college students act maturely. I saw way too many counterexamples as a Georgetown undergrad to believe that.

I think I've told the story, on this blog, about a guy in our freshman dorm, a Texan dude named Jim, who got puking drunk and vomited all over his dorm room—while his roommate had been trying to repaint the old, peeling walls. I was the only one who stood up to help the roommate, Dave, clean Jim's mess up, so I saw firsthand the horrid mixture of puke and paint that Jim had flung everywhere. Jim ended up in detox, then in rehab, and he eventually turned into a model student, but this took time.

Then there was JT, who got drunk one night, snuck into the Healy Building with some friends, and ended up falling, outside, from one stone balcony onto another. JT cracked some ribs, punctured a lung, broke a leg, and cracked his head. No one found him for 22 hours; anoxia and edema actually led to brain damage, and when JT finally came back to us, he was literally a different person: his voice was different, his speech cadence was completely off, and he'd ditched his boilerplate college-jock fashion sense for the late-80s equivalent of Goth.

I could dish about one of my roommates, who shall remain nameless. This guy fucked everything in sight. He was constantly juggling three to six "girlfriends." Fuckholes, more like, because that's how he saw women. Another guy, Bob, broke his neck over Christmas break after getting into a bar fight. The other dude apparently tossed poor Bob over a chain-link fence, which is how he broke his neck. Despite his neck brace, Bob was out hitting the bars—and removing his brace—the moment he was back in DC, and he ended up very loudly fucking a visiting female student in his dorm room. The grunts and cries were memorable.

Sometimes the Korean brand of social and sexual immaturity, with all its kindergarten-style moaning and groaning, has a sort of charming innocence about it.


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colliding reminiscences

This weekend, we're commemorating both the 71st anniversary of D-Day and the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, 26 years ago.

In 1986, during the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, I went to France as part of the Nacel foreign-exchange program at the behest of my French teacher, Mrs. Landgrabe. She saw potential in my French ability; I was the best student in her classes, and she didn't want to see that talent go to waste. The Nacel program isn't a simultaneous exchange: it has more of a "building cultural bridges" emphasis in that the American student lives with a French host family one year, and le correspondant français lives with the American student's family the following year (which is approximately what happened). My French, up to that point, had been purely academic in nature, i.e., unnatural, stilted, "classroom" French. A month in France, living with a family that spoke little to no English, was a trial by fire, and my French improved by leaps and bounds. By the end of that month, I was thinking in French instead of merely translating. My French Papa noted this with approval: "Tu parles plus vite; tu cherches moins les mots," he said. I don't think I'm there any longer, given my general lack of practice, but I used to be able to fool French folks into thinking I was a native speaker. Once, while hosting a French couple in the States, the husband said to me, "Parfois on oublie que vous n'êtes pas français!"—Sometimes we forget you're not French. Quite a high compliment.

One of the things I remember best about that first-ever trip to France was driving from the Nantes region, in Bretagne (Brittany), up north to Normandy. I worked arduously on a farm for ten days (great way to learn farming vocabulary), and during that time, we visited one of the plages du débarquement, the beaches where the Allied forces landed on D-Day during Operation Overlord. It was a solemn experience. According to Papa, we were technically on US soil—a gift from France to the Americans. Looking out into the waves, we could see the remains of the telephone-pole-sized wooden posts that the Germans had placed in the water as a baffle against the incoming wave of Allied troops. It was easy to imagine the war. We stood among ghosts.

Fast-forward to 1989. I was in college, spending my junior year in Europe. 1989 was an action-packed year, globally speaking: Tiananmen had happened only a few months prior to my arrival in Nice for a présession universitaire (a way to get us Yanks acclimated to the European way of running university classes; Georgetown University had us French majors all assigned to different countries to study, but we all began in Nice before dispersing); the présession happened in September; by October, I was in Fribourg, Switzerland, studying at the Université de Fribourg. A month later, the Berlin Wall suddenly opened up, then Romania imploded and the Ceausescus were put up against a wall and shot right at Christmas. Not a bad year to turn 20. I remember marveling at a lot of video: Tiananmen was impressive, mainly because of the now-iconic image of "Tank Man"; the bodies of the Ceausescus, staring sightlessly after having been shot, were a haunting sight. As for the Wall, well... I went to Berlin with some Georgetown classmates, but that's a story I've already told several times on this blog (here, for example), so I won't rehash it. 1989 was when I truly began to have a sense of the interconnection of world events. I was living with a Swiss host family while taking courses in Fribourg; my French again improved by leaps and bounds, and my knowledge of western European geography also improved. I spent Christmas with my French host family, and we watched Romania's free-fall into chaos on the family TV. By 1990, when I returned to the States, I was still young, but a bit more worldly.

It's interesting to ponder where Franco-American relations have gone since D-Day. In some ways, things have remained the same, but in other ways, that relationship has severely deteriorated. And how about post-Tiananmen China? Well, with China's recent ferry disaster, we're reminded how tightly controlled the Chinese media have always been. As I once mentioned on this blog, I tutored a Chinese student who knew nothing about Tiananmen or Tank Man before I showed him the pictures on my laptop. The Chinese government had done an effective job of wiping the past clean away, which is unfortunate.

So much for the past. Heaven only knows what lies ahead.


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what's up, Carey?

Carey Mulligan is a dimple-cheeked little pixie who first came to my attention in the drama "An Education." She's a very talented actress, and on that level, I admire her greatly. But all it took was two viewings of two different sessions of Mulligan on "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" for me to begin wondering what she's like in real life (first and second viewings). Ferguson, who's off the air now, ran his show as a sort of light-improv comedy, marked by wacky stream of consciousness and often-hilarious non sequiturs. Occasionally, the laughter seemed forced (as when he had Aisha Tyler on; Tyler, perennially gorgeous, is funny on her own, but it was obvious that she and Craig had decided to turn their banter into a standup routine on the spot), but more often it was quite genuine, as when Ferguson found himself breathless while doing an interview with Robin Williams.

If you watch the two above-linked interviews with Mulligan, however, you'll notice right away that the poor girl is completely out of her element: she has no idea how to respond to anything Ferguson does or says; all she can do is retreat into giggle fits. It's enough to make a man wonder how she'd act on a date with an especially witty gentleman: would she be this tongued-tied in real life? Would she have so little to say? Is she really that much of an airhead? Perhaps she was just nervous to be on Craig's show. After all, not all actors take to Ferguson's style that well (watch Craig crash and burn with the great Anthony Hopkins, who often seemed just as off-balance and uncomfortable as Carey Mulligan did), and Ferguson ended up having to keep up both ends of his conversation with the little waif.

So I came away thinking that Ms. Mulligan is a fine, fine actress, but a bit of an airhead in real life—a suspicion I have about many actors, actually: they're shells in search of personalities, which is what makes them so good at inhabiting roles. If anything, Mulligan's manque d'esprit on Ferguson's show reminded me of some of my socially awkward Korean students, who often find themselves with nothing to say after they've done exactly the required amount of partner work: they do the obligatory Q&A, then they giggle nervously and clam up.

Anyone home, Carey?


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all caught up, Mr. Martin

This morning, a bit before 7AM and after having stayed up all night to finish, I came to the end of the final chapter of the fifth book of George RR Martin's epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire. So as far as the books go, I'm now officially caught up. All that remains is the HBO adaptation. But here's the thing: I've seen clips of the HBO series—enough clips to spoil a few plot points from the books—and I'm really in no rush to watch the show. It could be that I'm being a sphincter-puckered purist about the matter, but from the video clips I've seen, the HBO series pretty much mangles the story, and does so right from the beginning.

Case in point: A Game of Thrones, the first novel in the ASOIAF series, begins with a prologue that depicts a group of men from the Night's Watch: the older Gared, the younger Will, and the also-young Ser Waymar Royce, the only true knight in the group—cocky, arrogant, and derisive when he hears the stated fears of his companions. They eventually encounter a group of Others, also known as White Walkers—tall, pale beings with intense blue eyes that have the power to create wights—undead—from corpses. Ser Waymar foolishly confronts the Others and is promptly slaughtered, after which he's revived as a wight. Gared, a veteran but unmanned by the sight of this supernatural carnage, very understandably abandons his duties—an act punishable by death. Will climbs up a tree and witnesses Ser Waymar's death. When he climbs down, thinking all is safe, Ser Waymar rises as a wight and kills Will, leaving only Gared, now a deserter, to tell the tale of the return of the Others after several thousand years. Gared is eventually executed by Eddard Stark, lord of Winterfell. Lord Stark hears Gared's tale of the Others but doesn't believe him. In the HBO version of things, Ser Waymar is indeed killed, but Gared is beheaded next by a White Walker, leaving Will to abandon his duties. Lord Eddard (the ever-dying Sean Bean) executes Will after hearing his story.

That's a pretty significant change of details, I think, and I further think it qualifies as "mangling" the story—right from the beginning. Sure, if you zoom back to an abstract level, not much has changed: there's a ranging by the Night's Watch; the Others appear and kill two people; the remaining person deserts and is eventually executed, but not before telling his story of the return of the lords of the undead. In the abstract, the same story is being told, but to me, the devil is in the details, and the details are very, very different.

The HBO series contains completely non-canonical events. There's a video clip titled "Brienne vs. The Hound" that depicts a vicious fight between Brienne of Tarth and Sandor Clegane, a.k.a. The Hound. Not in the books. Another clip shows Daario Naharis, the mercenary lover of Daenerys Targaryen, fighting a champion outside the gates of Meereen. Also not in the books: in the novels, Daenerys's champion is not Daario but the huge and humorous ex-gladiator Strong Belwas, who always refers to himself in the third person ("Strong Belwas wants liver and onions or someone must die"). A third clip is titled "Jaime and Bronn vs. Dornishmen," depicting yet another fight that never appears in the books, and following a mission (Bronn and Jaime go to Dorne, presumably to kidnap Myrcella Lannister) that doesn't happen in the books. Another scene shows Arya Stark acting as a serving girl to Tywin Lannister, who displays a cold sort of courtesy without realizing who and how important she is. In the books, the two are never shown meeting. A related clip, "Bronn and Jaime vs. the Sand Snakes," depicts yet another non-canonical battle. A very recent clip shows the deaths of two favorite characters, Ser Barristan Selmy (a.k.a. Barristan the Bold) and Grey Worm, the leader of the Unsullied. Both Ser Barristan and Grey Worm are alive by the end of the fifth book, A Dance with Dragons. Same goes for Jojen Reed, who gets killed by a wight in the HBO version but is still very much alive in the novels.

Fans of the HBO series will be quick to argue that, given HBO's schedule and budgetary limitations, there's little choice but to condense and otherwise alter Martin's sweeping vision in ways that remain faithful in spirit to the books. HBO partisans can also argue that Martin, because he's a consultant for the TV series, has essentially given his blessing to these alterations, so the changes in story aren't as evil as all that. This is analogous to what happened to the Harry Potter stories: JK Rowling was quite involved in the making of the movies, and the movies were a super-condensed, super-altered version of her books. I'm not convinced, though: I think HBO could have been much more faithful in its rendering of the novels (indeed, from what I've seen on YouTube, the HBO show occasionally contains verbatim lines of dialogue from the books) instead of haring off on utterly alien tangents.

I may eventually watch the HBO version, but for now, I feel that watching it would distort the book's narrative in my memory. This distortion has already begun, in fact: I can no longer imagine Ser Barristan the Bold without imagining Ian McElhinney, the surprisingly spry actor who plays him on TV (assuming those action sequences didn't involve a CGI replacement). Whenever I think of Brienne of Tarth, I see Gwendoline Christie (her hilarious interview with Craig Ferguson is here). Same goes for Eddard Stark: I can't envision Eddard without thinking of Sean Bean. I do, however, experience some mental static when I compare actress Michelle Fairley to my mental version of Catelyn Stark. Fairley's a handsome woman, but in my mind, Catelyn has smoother, less angular features, although her face can still harden into resentfulness whenever she sees Jon Snow, Eddard Stark's son by a different woman.

It'll be interesting to see where Martin goes next in The Winds of Winter, which isn't out yet. A Dance with Dragons brings us right to the edge of official winter in the Seven Kingdoms—a fact that probably has little relevance for the hotter parts of Martin's planet—places like Dorne, Asshai (I swear, whenever I see that word, I think "asshat"), the Dothraki Sea, Braavos, and the various cities of Essos that Daenerys had conquered, like Yunkai and Astapor. Still, winter is relevant in the northern reaches of Westeros, especially as one gets closer to the Wall. Stannis Baratheon may already have been frozen enough for his small army to have been defeated by Roose Bolton at Winterfell (Ramsay Bolton's nasty letter to Jon Snow makes this claim, at least).

With Ser Barristan alive in the books and dead on film, I wonder what sort of story-level contradictions will begin to develop as both the HBO series and Martin's books now progress in roughly parallel fashion (at this point, HBO has pretty much caught up with Martin's ambitious narrative). My understanding, from watchers of the show, is that HBO tried its best to be more literally faithful to the books in the early seasons, but as the show progressed, it began increasingly to go its own way, such that it has now become something of its own thing. (Ramsay Bolton's taunting of Theon Greyjoy with a long link of pork sausage—this after Theon's privy member had been cut off—was yet another event not found in the books.)

Things certainly aren't going well for Jon Snow by the end of the fifth novel: he's been betrayed by some of his men and has been stabbed three-and-a-half times (the first knife attack merely grazes his neck thanks to Jon's quick reflexes). I suspect, though, that Martin is too invested in this character to let him die: Jon Snow, if he dies, will likely be resurrected by fire-priestess Melisandre, who seems to have a potentially prurient interest in Snow (the HBO series has her actually making salacious advances on Snow; the books are much more coy about her intentions toward the teenager). In the meantime, I expect that Snow's wildling counterpart, Tormund Giantsbane, a man incapable of hiding his feelings, will find Snow's betrayers, tie them to stakes, and roast their entrails while they're still alive. As a wildling, Tormund is ostensibly Jon Snow's enemy and only a grudging partner to the fragile peace between the wildlings and the Night's Watch, but it's obvious that Tormund has an avuncular love for the boy and would move mountains for him.

A Dance with Dragons ends very much in medias res. Fleets are converging on Meereen, bringing people who want to either align themselves with Daenerys or steal her away for themselves—Tyrion Lannister and Victarion Greyjoy among them. Will Dany ever decide to head back to Westeros to claim the Iron Throne? Will Tyrion ever find himself in a place of safety, happiness, and justice? Will Arya Stark, currently in Braavos and mastering the deadly arts of the Faceless Men who worship the Many-faced God, have a chance to meet up with her siblings: Sansa, Bran, and Jon Snow? And what of Lady Stoneheart, i.e., the resurrected Catelyn Stark, who is almost a wight herself? How will her children react to her existence? Will Daenerys figure out the secret of riding a dragon without using magic to command it? Will Aegon Targaryen become a true rival to Daenerys's claim to the Iron Throne?

One thing seems certain: when the series is finally done, it won't really be done: if Martin's narrative teaches nothing else, it's that nothing in life is guaranteed, and plans always, always go awry. This is, I suppose, a decent reflection of the real world, but Martin will be taking a big risk when he writes his seventh and (supposedly) final novel, A Dream of Spring: there's potential, here, to piss off most of the readership if the story ends unsatisfactorily, with too many loose ends. But we have years to go before we find out the end of the saga. Until then, it's enough to wait for the sixth and penultimate book, The Winds of Winter, and hope it's as interesting as the previous five have proved to be.


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Yankee-style Chinese cashew chicken and shrimp, redux

Americans, through no fault of their own, think Chinese food pretty much comes down to turd-shaped egg rolls, Dumbo-eared wontons, and bite-sized chunks of pan-fried, stir-fried, or breaded food slathered in a evilly sweet sauce made mostly of cornstarch. I tend to think this is because the Chinese, being practical, immediately distorted their own food to suit (their perception of) American tastes, and they haven't looked back since. The Chinese seemingly care little about cultural ambassadorship—not in the way the Koreans care about presenting authentically Korean food to the non-Korean masses.* Following Bruce Lee's advice to "be like the nature of water," the Chinese reshaped their food to fit the American cultural container. In fact, it's almost impossible to find authentic Chinese food anywhere outside of China. Strange but true. Watch this awesome TED vid and learn more.

Anyway, when I make Chinese food, I adhere to the Yankee stereotype of it, as I did tonight in making my Yankee-style Chinese cashew chicken and shrimp with mushrooms. I took pics of the whole process, which I now submit for your delectation. Hover your cursor over each image to read its caption.

One remark: I normally make my sauce with whisky. I went to the local store to snag some el-cheapo liquor, but the cheapest whisky on hand was W50,000. I happened to glance over my shoulder at the rack holding all the vinegar and other potions, and a two-dollar bottle of Korean mirim (the Japanese call this mirin, a type of rice wine used in food prep) was staring intently at me, beckoning me over. I gratefully plucked it off the shelf and considered myself lucky: paying two dollars instead of fifty dollars is a bargain in my book. The sauce, by the way, turned out just fine, and it was a splendid, rib-sticking dinner.

POST SCRIPTUM: I've done this dish before, hence "redux."

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*This is especially true when you have online personalities like the burly 50-something Hausfrau-cum-ajumma Maangchi (mangchi means "hammer"; I don't know why she doubles the "a" in her maaniker; it's not a prolonged "ah" sound).
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working for a living

This shot was something of a target of opportunity:

I liked the interplay of light and shadow, so I risked snapping a sunward-facing shot of the construction workers who are building another studio-apartment building right across the street from where I live. Of the six or seven lots that were empty when I arrived in Goyang City back in late February, two or three currently have construction going on. The place is filling up. Empty ground always, always gets snapped up by someone.

What I don't understand is: with space at such a premium in Korea, how do developers get away with building such short, midgety buildings? None of the structures in my neighborhood is over five stories tall. What a waste! With the constant, relentless pressure of an ever-expanding population, you'd think Koreans would be into stacking as many floors as possible onto a given footprint. But, no: instead, developers just build these dinky, flimsy little boxes that probably won't last more than twenty years before they'll be cracked and worn beyond repair. I always find myself scratching my head.

Maybe this is a massive ploy by workers' unions to keep construction workers perpetually employed. Anything's possible, especially on this bizarre little peninsula.


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epidemiologically speaking

With Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) on the march in a couple dozen countries, including South Korea, people are starting to feel a bit paranoid. Not that I can blame them: in Seoul, the subway system is a huge vulnerable point when it comes to the spread of communicable disease: it's often packed, warm, and humid—the perfect playground for bacteria and viruses looking for a new home. It doesn't help that so much of the Korean public fails to cover nose and mouth when sneezing, or that that same public thinks a flimsy surgical mask is enough to prevent the spread (or the inhalation) of airborne pathogens.

My hope is that the South Korean government, and various private firms, will respond intelligently to this situation before it becomes a true crisis. MERS is a coronavirus like SARS, and South Korea weathered SARS just fine. Personally, I'm not too worried, but as I said, I do understand some of the paranoia. No one wants to be trapped inside a sardine can with a bunch of coughers who won't cover up.

Some interesting MERS-related info:

• MERS probably comes from Saudi Arabian camels.

• MERS doesn't seem to be all that communicable.

• WebMD kindly provides a MERS FAQ. Go thou and read.


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shrimp crunches: I take the plunge

I had to know.

So I made a big deal, today, of buying a pack of shrimp crunches (saeu-ggang in Korean)—the chocolate-covered monstrosities that I had blogged about earlier. They're called "choko-saeu" (ChocoShrimp) in Korean, and as it turns out, nothing has been done to blunt the salty, shrimpy taste of the crunches: they're simply dipped or dunked or soaked in a layer of surprisingly strong dark chocolate.

The first crunch was revolting. The class laughed as I put it in my mouth, chewed, and made a face. But the second and third crunches... weren't that awful, really. I had written, in that earlier post, that it was possible for the artificial shrimp flavor and the artificial chocolate flavor to combine in a non-vomitous way, and it turns out I was right. I still can't imagine dipping a real shrimp into chocolate fondue, but these crunchy, crackery bits of salty and sweet weren't that bad in the end. They weren't great, either: I have no desire to go back and buy another package. The only value I'd get from eating a second package would be entertainment, given how morbid the concept of shrimp plus chocolate is.

The students were also curious to try the abomination, so I let them each pluck a single crunch from my bag. Opinions varied, and I made the gustatory experience into an exercise: describe the taste to your partner.

As I tweeted some time back, though, shrimp-with-chocolate is an actual thing.


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