Help me, help me, he-he-he-he-he-help me!

This is number one in Korea right now, or close.

The girls are high school age, and all I'll say is. . .

if Simon Cowell saw this, and was then told they were number one in Korea, the universe would probably explode.

Tell Me by the Wonder Girls. Listen to the quality of their vocals (at least we know it's not lip-synching, another common occurrence here), and the choreography (I think they invented the dance craze -- and it IS becoming a dance craze here -- at a slumber party).



David Hasselhoff likes them.



Here are some girls of a little higher caliber. Not sure about their vocal chops, but I'd take them over the Wonder Girls.




Yeah. It's a good thing Cowell and his cronies aren't over here in Korea making all the pop stars cry like this dude did: It'd be full-on K-pop-calypse!



anyway, imagine walking by that first song, playing out of 30% of the shops at any given time, every day on the way home from work. Like, EVERY day. (see title again)

Pictures from Chiak mountain and a few extras.

First of all: This is Creased Comics. Some web comics are obscure, or weird, or gross, or occasionally crass, and I won't guarantee this one is ALWAYS on the up and up. . . but sometimes it gives you something so unexpected and at right angles to reality, that it just cracks a fella up.


For a web comic that's ALWAYS clean, and actually, really profound, try this one instead. It's a little nostalgic sometimes, but often it gives a really profound metaphor for the way some people see the world. It's hopeful, instead of just weird.


Littering cigarette butts is against the law in downtown Seoul now -- fifty dollar fine! To create a culture of "not littering" here in Seoul (will take a lot of work, but ) the mayor's put up little butt stations around Jongno. They're interesting, because they just curl smoke all the time. It's kind of pretty, actually, as long as you stand upwind.


Problem is, to discourage littering, the mayor also, counterintuitively, took all the public garbage cans out of downtown Seoul: "People are supposed to use the trash service in the residential areas, where they pay for special garbage bags to help fund the garbage truck fleet" . . except that instead of taking their trash home like the mayor expected, and putting it in a proper garbage bag like good, civil minded people, Seoulites are throwing it on the ground instead! Didn't see that coming! Or, here, near a street food stand, an ashtray has been adapted for another use.

I guess I admire that the mayor really did hope the best about people, rather than automatically assuming the worst, but . . . it's time to get litter off the streets.



That makes me laugh.



This is beautiful, though. Last weekend was the perfect time to climb a mountain in Korea and catch the fall colours. These are beautiful -- Chiak mountain is an hour train ride out of Seoul, and it's just goldurn beautiful. Difficult (the trails aren't as carefully maintained as the mountains in Seoul, and a bit cragged) but amazing.

We climbed up alongside a stream for a long ways.

At the peak were these kinds of towers; many mountaintops here feature big piles like this where, in ancient times, before cellphones, people communicated important news about the country back and forth using smoke signals. Think of the scene in Lord Of The Rings where the fire beacon is lit.



That's what these are for. Except in real life, violins wouldn't play.



A lot of the trees were already bare, so you can really see the shapes of the mountains -- tracing the ridgelines, the shadows of treebranches catching the sun.










At the bottom of the mountain was a temple.

Every Buddhist temple entrance in Korea (or at least most) is guarded by these four dudes. They're cool.




Also: look at the intricate detail work on the ceiling, and the lattices that support the ceiling -- the care and beauty just knocks me over. It makes me wish I'd gone to a Catholic cathedral while I grew up, and got to worship God surrounded by stained glass windows all my childhood, instead of protestant churches, which are relatively utilitarian.



I already posted this picture, but the episode with the bird was so cool I'm posting it again.


Finally, STOP THE PRESSES! it's a national emergency. . . THIS, this, THIS! makes headline -- FRONT PAGE news in Korea.

Gimchi/Kimchi is the ultimate Korean side dish -- it comes with literally, every meal. It's cabbage pickled in vinegar with garlic and hot chili sauce and a few other ingredients, according to the family recipy. It's an acquired taste, but once acquired, absolutely addictive. Kimchi in a Korean restaurant is like music in a coffee shop: if it's bad, I won't go back; if it's good, I'll probably return, especially if it has something else going for it, too.


They forget that 35% still can. . . and that young Koreans don't want to learn how to make Kimchi with their moms because the pressure to excel in school is so great that taking an entire weekend away from studying is unthinkable (and making kimchi IS a whole-weekend-long process). It actually IS a shame, because there are a lot of unique family kimchi recipes that are getting lost in the past as kids move to the city and get office jobs where they couldn't be bothered to learn how to make kimchi anymore, but even so, if I learned that Canadian men were losing the skill of backyard barbeque, I'd put that on page six, not page one: there are much worse threats to Korea's heritage and history (brand name invasions, all-consuming study binges and the test culture, mass urbanization) than the fact women are forgetting how to make Kimchi (funny, too, how it's never mentioned that 99% of MEN can't make kimchi.)


I'm well.

Gotta shower now.

Love you all
Bye
Rob

Chiak Mountain is hard.

I climbed Chiak Mountain in Korea, and it was hard. Two days later my legs still hurt. Matt and I climbed it together, climbed down, and at the most AMAZING bibimbap I think I've ever had.

Anyway, here's a picture -- Matt and I were eating cashews at the peak, and a bird came by, checking us out, and we broke up a few cashews and held them out, and here came chickadee orange, to store something away for the winter.

Feeding a wild animal is SO cool. (Just stick with birds -- not bears.)



More pictures later. Classes now. My schedule stinks this month.

this makes me miss my mother AND my brother. Especially my brother.

yeah, it's late for mother's day, but it sure made me laugh.

I'm still working on the moral authority post. Decided to do my homework instead of just posting unfounded generalizations and assumptions.

love you all
love you mom
love you dan

watch it. it's funny. I'll put it up there with "To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With" by Bill Cosby as two of the best pictures of real sibling-hood out there.

Stub with interesting link.

I've been thinking a lot lately about soft power and moral authority, and how it applies in a few different instances. I'll expand on this when I have time, but for now, read this article from SALON.COM, and think about the importance of moral authority when one claims to be fighting a war for freedom.

by the way: I changed the format for how you leave comments on my blog;
is there a technical problem with it (comments not getting published), or are people just not commenting?

Probably the defining issue of my generation:

Yes, it's a rehashing of Pascal's wager. . . but it's worth watching, folks. (and he has some follow-up videos that answer that argument and any of your other objections -- look up wonderingmind42 on youtube to see the others) he has some valuable things to say, and he's a high school teacher, so he's good at taking scientific stuff and making it understandable to the lay-person.

I know, why don't you write about why you love to write/why you write, and what you like about literature? Your own philosophy of your art.

Just hit play and start reading. Soundtrack!



I said in the comments of my books post that the person who found my intentional error got to pick my next topic,

Mel won the contest, finding the intentional error and being kind enough not to mention the numerous typos. That’s right: Hamlet was written by William Shakespeare, not Victor Hugo.

Mel’s question was “Why do you write?”

Why SOME people write:

For legacy. Nobody remembers England’s top swordsman in the year 1603, but everybody remembers Billy Shakespeare was writin’ him some plays. Some pretty good ones, too.

It’s validating, even gratifying to see one’s name in print – if you go to the TWU Library, you can look up and read my honours thesis: something I wrote is in a library! That’s pretty cool, isn’t it? It proves that I exist, in a way.

But here’s my real answer: why do I write?

In my second year of university, I bought a bunch of pocket-sized notebooks, and began carrying a notebook and two pens everywhere I went. Still now, nine years later, I always carry pens and pocketbook. The book catches phone numbers and appointments and, more importantly, little things that I notice around me.

You see, if waking up early helps a person feel (and thus BE) more productive, and having regular quiet time helps a person feel (and so become) more spiritually centered, and keeping a dream journal helps a person remember more of their dreams, then journaling helps me feel like I’m paying more attention to the details of life, and inevitably, I DO notice more, simply from the habit of writing down what I see.

It’s not for posterity, that’s for sure: having all those notebooks cluttering my shelf was never the goal -- and going over old journals has rarely borne fruit in the idea department – maybe two grains of wheat in a pile of chaff. In fact, during my second year in Korea, I lost the journal of my entire first year in Korea, in a food court. It was gone forever, but I wasn’t really upset:

The greatest benefit of keeping a journal, I realized then, is simply being the kind of person who is in the habit of noticing, and who respects his own thoughts and observations enough to write them down. The habit of noticing may lead to realizations, and even self-knowledge; it may not lead anywhere except to wonder, and that’s OK, too, but by conditioning myself to be receptive, I become more of the person I want to be – one who sees the world like a child, as a place spilling out wonder from hundreds of tiny cracks that nobody notices, or that everybody else also notices, but promptly forgets (I don’t actually think I’m that special – I just think I entertain thoughts and observations that other people dismiss – my filter’s on different settings, is all).

The little details? They can fill a life up, I’m convinced, with wonder and texture, differentiating one day from the next, or, if unnoticed, their absence can leave a life blank and indistinguishable from day to day. I love my day-to-day existence. Ask anybody who sees me every day.

In summary: I write because it makes me into. . . I won’t say a better person, but it makes me more and more of a person I’d like to be around.

Then, once it’s enriched my own life, why do I write about it and share it? Well, if you see a beautiful rainbow, you point it out to your friends, don’t you? I hope to publish. . . maybe this would be like sending a picture of a really great rainbow to a photography magazine, or putting it on your wall, so even more people can go “well goldurn, that’s a purty rainbow.”

I have another conviction: that every human has a deep desire to know and be known. We yearn for connection. Whether it’s because we long for the closeness we had with God in the Garden of Eden, or because our transcendent soul reaches through dharma to pull us back toward harmony with the true nature of things, or because we’ve been genetically imprinted to be social creatures by aeons of natural selection favouring the humans that work better as a unit, the fact remains that communion with others is a fundamental desire for almost everyone.

Writing is a way to know and be known.

I can know myself by writing – the directions stories take reveal something about myself, and the important things in my life. It’s a common phenomenon for people to discover that the simple act of talking, or writing a problem out often gets them over the hump of solving, or coming to terms with it. In my own life it has certainly been true that the communications I have with friends near and far have helped shape my self-knowledge. I can also share, and connect, and maybe we won’t feel so lonely, if we know that we were both deeply touched by a John Keats poem, or a Salinger novel.

Next question: why stories, then, Roboseyo, Rob, Roboseyo? Wanting to tell a story has little to do with noticing life’s details and trying to be as awake and aware and mindful as possible. Wouldn’t poetry do nicely for that?

Ah, that’s true. Poetry does nicely for little details and textures in life, and poetry was an important outlet for me all through my schooling. But. . .

Arthur Lee and Love: Alone Again Or -- again, hit play and read on.



First of all, I love stories. Love, love, love, LOVE stories. It’s my conviction that stories are the most powerful way to learn something – that’s why cultural values are transmitted through folk tales, myths, fables and morality tales (if you don’t believe me, read a book of Korean folk tales notice how the different values praised in Korean vs. Western folk tales exactly parallel many significant cultural differences.) People understand nihilism better after reading “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” than after reading a hundred pages of Nietzche. Holy texts use stories: every place you go searching for meanings, you find stories, for better and for worse.

The same way humans crave connection, I believe humans crave narrative – narrative gives MEANING, a purpose to the connections. A quotation from the Jewish Theological Seminary says, “A human life is like a single letter in the alphabet. It can be meaningless. Or it can be part of a great meaning.” We all want our lives to be part of a greater meaning. We want the random events of our lives to be part of a greater meaning, too. The story of us can be part of a great metanarrative like

“The Victory of Reason over Superstition”
“Humanity Careens Toward Ecological Disaster”
“Preparing for the Second Coming”
“Rising From The Ashes Of The Korean War”;

we also fit our lives into smaller narratives like
“The Courtship of Deb and Brad,”
“The Rude Guy at Work”,
"How I Learned to Stop Grieving and Love My Life"

and we even remember and define events and relationships with micronarratives like
“That Crazy Night Piper Tricked Me Into Drinking Bacardi 151,” or
“My Failed Attempt to Become a Tea Expert"
“The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With X”.

Scientists say the universe is made of atoms. My old Professor Szabo once said the world is made of stories, and I say the universe is made of meanings. Sometimes the meaning is as simple as "It is what it is", but reaching for meanings is our greatness. We're the only onese who could imagine ourselves improving our lot (another kind of narrative) rather than resigning ourselves to a life of hunting and being hunted.

So, Roboseyo, what are you trying to accomplish when you write?

I’m fascinated by stories, and by people, and the choices people make. Choices don’t appear in a poem, nor do characters (a poem is too focussed to ever catch more than a single gesture, a single facet) – you need a story for more than that. And if I can add some of the wonder of life’s little details and the poignancy of a person making an important choice, and the honesty of a character who seems to really breathe . . . well, that sounds like the makings of a pretty good story, doesn’t it?

I also believe that writing is an act of hope: hope that it IS possible to connect with another person, to write and be understood, to read and understand, to find a way for two minds to (partially) be one. It is an act of faith in humanity, that we CAN reach each other, and maybe even improve each other’s lives. Sometimes it takes a bit of courage to believe that, but I think writers must.

Of poetry, John Keats said once that “I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night’s labours should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine upon them” – John Keats, letter to Richard Woodhouse, 17/10/1818

He didn’t write to have people pat him on the back and say, “You’re a great writer” – he was given over to the beauty of the world he saw, and the best way he could express it was to write, regardless of who read it later.

Those moments of beauty and insight, those moments of choice and truth, are the ones we live for.

Sometimes, I think the job of a writer at its purest, is to get the hell out of the way – characters and images and stories come, and a humble writer, committed to serving the story, will interfere as little as possible as the story takes its most perfect form. This requires a self-critical eye, or, I prefer saying, the ability to listen to one’s own writing, and encourage it (like a parent to a child) to become its best self. If I try to control it too much (like a protective parent), the story will never be bigger than my own limited abilities, but if I can get lost in the wonders of the moments and characters I want to create, maybe I’ll move out of the way enough that they can take the step from my mind and/or senses, onto the page, without getting cluttered by my own ego.

(For a great example of a humble storyteller, watch Million Dollar Baby or Unforgiven – Clint Eastwood is a very humble filmmaker, willing to step out of the way and let a story tell itself; exactly the opposite of Martin Scorsese, whose films are great, but always seem to be saying “Hey, look at this guy! He sure is a great filmmaker!”)


Here’s a long quote from Flannery O’Connor, the subject of my University Honours Thesis, and one of the most influential writers in my life:

”People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable. The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won't survive the ordeal.

"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience. The lady who only read books that improved her mind was taking a safe course--and a hopeless one. She'll never know whether her mind is improved or not, but should she ever, by some mistake, read a great novel, she'll know mighty well that something is happening to her.

Any questions?

Read this.

I like it.

I see a dance craze coming on!

This song is called Twiggy Twiggy by the Pizzicato Five (think I spelled that right).

I think bossa nova (that's what this is, right?) is my favourite rhythm for a song -- a fast bossa nova is the one that makes me want to dance EVERY time.



Other songs that make me want to dance every time I hear them:

Hey Ya

Home For A Rest

Soul Bossa Nova (surprise!)

anyway, Mel won the game of "Spot the Intentional Error" on my last post, so she got to choose the topic of my next post. She wants me to write about "why you love to write/why you write, and what you like about literature? Your own philosophy of your art."

that'll take a little time to stew before I'm ready to post it, so until then. . .

pictures!



It's a bit hard to spot, but this, about an hour climb up the mountainside, was a little stand where somebody was selling instrumental cassette tapes. HALFWAY UP THE MOUNTAIN!

Blew my mind, made me laugh. A lot of older gentlemen like to hike with a tape player around their necks, so maybe this is where you can recharge, in case youve already been through your first tape once or twice, and need new accompaniment on your way down the mountain.

This is on Surak Mountain, a mountain near my old home in Nowon (second year in Korea).

It's a pretty impressive mountain, but Matt and I slammed it on Saturday morning, going all the way up and down in just under three hours. Two years ago, this mountain would have taken me four hours, maybe four and a half. Improving one's time by a third doesn't sound that impressive, until you consider that the bulk of that's steep up and downhill, and that causes heartrates to climb and out-of-breathness to occur. Fact is, it was a flippin cold day; we HAD to move fast or we'd freeze in the rock-face winds.
We climbed this. It IS as steep as it looks.
And this was the payoff.
Leaves are changing; that's why EVERYONE's heading for the mountains these days.

As I said before, persimmons are ripe. Girlfriendoseyo and I wandered into the tea garden, and saw trees just sagging with ripe persimmons. It was a beautiful contrast of colour, dark sky against vivid orange fruit. The pictures are small. . . I think the cameraphone automatically decreased the photo size to compensate for the low light. . . if that makes any sense.



It's finally gone over the edge: this picture is a bit blurry, but it's an ad for soju. The soju girls are probably the most photoshopped models in Korea (other than the LaNeige models). . .

this one looks so touched up, I wonder if they even had to pay the original model anymore? Looking at this one, I thought they might have just generated her digitally, rather than even bothering with a model.

Did I post these pictures already?

Anyway . . .

This is all that remains of the old bubble street shop, which gave me so much joy. . . before it got demolished.

I also saw a little prince cafe once.


Sigh.



She looks lonely. This is in the high fashion district.



next: the aesthetic of Roboseyo

Books that become old friends, some shameless begging, and a game of "spot the intentional error"

Sometimes you come across a book that will become an old friend -- one that you buy in hardcover, because you know you will read it often enough to justify having a well-bound copy.

Because I change apartments frequently, it is important to try and keep my book collection small: books take up a lot of space and weight, especially if you ever move between Canada and Korea.

Here is my list, in no particular order (other than the order in which they came to mind, which says something in itself).

The Little Prince - Antoine de St.Exupery
Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie
Ahead of All Parting - The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke - trans. by Stephen Mitchell
New American Standard Bible - breast pocket edition
The Annie Dillard Reader
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzerald
The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Franny and Zooey - JD Salinger
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Speaker For The Dead - Orson Scott Card
Mirrored Minds: A Thousand Years of Korean Verse - trans. by Kevin O'Rourke
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tsu (my translation is by Sam Hamill, and highly recommended.
The Art of Happiness - Dalai Lama and another guy.
Several of John Keats' best poems.
(with pride:)
Coraline - Neil Gaiman
Batman: the Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller
Batman: the Dark Knight Strikes Again - Frank Miller


Others that nearly made the list, or are somewhere in an anthology on my shelf, etc:
The Collected Short Fiction of Flannery O'Connor
Hamlet - Victor Hugo
E.E. Cummings - Selected Poems
Oedipus Rex - Sophocles (I once tried to write an essay on this one, and after reading it, was so impressed I didn't want to write about it: I just wanted to read it to people instead.)
amazingly enough
The Iliad - Homer (translated by Robert Fagles - thought it would be dusty and dry, but this translation is vivid, visceral, and quite stirring!)
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Where the Sidewalk Ends - Shel Silverstein

painfully absent:
Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak

if my apartment building burnt down, I'd grieve the loss of some irreplaceable things, particularly some photos, old drafts of old poems, and the painting my best friend Melissa made for me, but those are the books I'd buy again.

For a guy who loves reading and storytelling as much as me, that list is pretty darn short!


But the reason I'm writing about this is because I just reread Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
(Ender's Game, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, The Catcher in the Rye, Rilke, The Little Prince, Mirrored Minds, and the Tao Te Ching are the books end up off the shelf and in my hands most often)

My friend Tamie wrote on her blog that Seymour, from JD Salinger's works, is the fictional character she'd most like to meet.

I'm gonna add to that list, the Little Prince, and Ender Wiggin, the protagonist of Ender's Game and Speaker For The Dead.

Here's why:

Ender's story touches me deeply, because I really feel like he is the most human, most representative everyman I've ever read. He contains the genius, the potential, and the sorrow, the compassion and the viciousness, the insight and the need for redemption, that made the human condition so baffling, and all these features are displayed believably and compassionately in a character that is so human, I feel like I know him. I don't want to give away any plot points if you haven't read the books, but Ender's flawed, confused greatness is the most touchingly human portrayal I've ever seen of a protagonist in a book.

I highly, highly, highly recommend you read Ender's Game, and Speaker For The Dead: they will teach you something about compassion and healing, in a more profound way than you'd ever think, given that it's a pair of science fiction books. I think maybe there are some things that we can only learn from stories. The Talmudic Tradition, and Jesus, were onto something there.

(My other favourite everymen (everyhumans) are Holden Caulfield (Catcher In The Rye), and, though he's a little too perfect, is Jean Valjean. I love him, but I don't feel like I know him, the way I do with Ender.)

If you want to know why I love Catcher in the Rye, and especially Holden Caulfield, so much, ask.



PS: It's my birthday on Monday. I feel kind of bad doing this, but here's a low-grade, and low-class call out:

(shameless begging for my friends in Canada to send me something that can't be found in Korea. . . more shameless begging for my friends in Canada to send me something that can't be found in Korea. . .more shameless begging for my friends in Canada to send me something that can't be found in Korea. . .)

. . . please? If you really want, I'll send you some compensation.




(just in case this wasn't shameless enough already. . . )

This begging can be used as wallpaper, too.


so, uh, enough of that.

what books are YOUR best friends?