Little corners like this are littered through the side-streets in Seoul. I had a bunch of other pictures of the city at night, but my camera just can't quite hack it.
Here's another way Japan really desecrated Korea's culture while they colonized them (for which Korea still hasn't forgiven them, cheerfully forgetting that Japan also built a lot of infrastructure, like roads and institutions that have helped Korea reach its current state).
This is a temple on a mountainside. I have NO IDEA how they got it up there -- it wasn't an easy climb -- but there are some seriously impressive temples on mountainsides here. Make a special note of the rock on the left. You'll see it again in the next pictures.
A lot of temples in Korea are on mountainsides: mountains are holy in Korea, they carry great spiritual power (just climb a mountain -- see if you disagree when you're looking across an entire valley). Colonial Japan nailed iron spikes into big rocks like this, at the most consecrated places on the mountain peaks, as an attempt to ruin the geomancy (geographic energy -- kind of like feng shui on a macro scale) of Korea's mountains, and break the spirit of the Korean people. They also outlawed the Korean language. As we all know, threaten a culture's language if you REALLY want them never to forgive you -- French Canada still hasn't forgiven English Canada for Lord Durham's report in 1838.
Here's a close-up of one of the iron spikes. It's on the bottom corner of the giant rock above, and this rock is right next to one of the most important mountainside temples in Seoul -- where the king used to come for spiritual counsel.
Another thing Japan did was slightly move a lot of the palaces and important buildings in Seoul: the buildings' locations were also chosen by geomancy, so changing their dimensions or orientations poisons the energy flow through the capital. These days a lot of these buildings are being re-oriented to their original places, or rebuilt entirely, to put Korea's colonized past behind them.
Also. . .
Chicken feet, anyone?
Hey! What's that?
In the subway station. . .
Oh. Nevermind. Nothing special.
(p.s.: I'm famous. Just a little, though. See here also. Let the pictures on the homepage scroll. This is what happens to you if you stick around in Korea long enough, and have curly hair to the right person.)
This clown took up three spots. An old man was poking him with his cane, and he still didn't wake up. I laughed.
When people get their news from the internet, with its 24 hour coverage, things get silly, with journalists clamouring for column inches on the relevant topics.
My favourite example of this phenomenon is the meta-column. This actually makes me think back to my University days, and the idea of primary and secondary texts.
Here's how the ladder goes:
Top: Primary texts, like "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare.
Secondary texts, like "A Structural Analysis of the Dialogues Between Hamlet and Ophelia" by Dr. Hoight D. Toity
Tertiary texts, like "A Critique of Dr. H.D. Toity's Structural Analysis of the Dialogues Between Hamlet and Ophelia" by Dr. Ivy ReTower
and possibly, if the controversy gets heated enough:
a Quaternary text, like "The Flawed Reasoning in Drs. H.D. Toity and Ivy ReTower's Analyses of Dialogues Between Hamlet and Ophelia: A New Perspective" by Dr. P. Arasite. (aka: I couldn't think of an original article, but I need to publish to stay on the tenure track)
And so it goes. I don't know if you ever reach bottom in this kind of self-reflexive cannibalism.
The crazy thing is, these days, the same self-reflexive feeding is happening in the news. I like to call this meta-news. Meta-news is news that comments on news -- rather than discussing world events, you discuss news coverage of world events, the method, emphasis, responsibility, integrity of such.
Think about it:
Primary news: "Paris Hilton (or Michael Jackson, or Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, Tom Cruise, Mike Tyson, or whoever the latest pop-culture whipping person is) Does Something Disgusting but Not Altogether Surprising." by Associated Tabloid Press.
In a move that disappointed thousands of loyal fans, _______ committed a shocking act of ________ in a ___________ last night, in an incident that lasted __________ until ________ showed up and calmed everything down.
(Sometimes the real headline here is "Hey Everybody! Look Over Here And Get Distracted From The Mess We've Made In The Middle-East By Wasting Your Attention on Useless Crap!" by the G.W. Bush Administration and Fox News.
Hey Everybody! Look over here! She has blonde hair! Blonde hair! You like blonde hair! Your sons and cousins are dying in a needless war, and we're only just beginning -- the Iran scheme is already in the preparation stage -- but THIS GIRL IS FAMOUS, and she has a little dog with pink ears and Blonde Hair! She was in a sex video once and she has blonde hair! Look at her! She's rich and reckless with blonde hair! Grab your ankles while we stomp on your freedoms because she has BLONDE HAIR!!!!!)
The next wave:
Meta-news as analysis: "A Publicist Discusses the Implications of This Latest Non-Scandal" by Headlin G. Rabber.
It seems nobody is advising her on managing her image. She's obviously addicted to flashing cameras. If I were her publicist I'd say she. . . but doesn't her blonde hair look great!
Meta-news as commentary: "Why Are We Paying So Much Attention to Such A Waste of Copy?" by M. Oral Soapboxer
This isn't news! I can't BELIEVE so many people are reporting on this! What a society of clowns and hypocrites we are when we think THIS is important! Pay no attention to the irony in the fact I am adding to the coverage on her, by criticising it.
Look at this. Ahh, grandstanding. The sweet sweet smell of righteous outrage on national television!
Next: Meta-meta news: "Columnists Grabbing For Column Space by Claiming To Be Above It All are Phoneys!"
Don't even click on the link everybody. Don't even read the article. Let MY article be the last one you read on the topic. The only way we can make her go away is to ignore her. And read my article. And send it to your friends. Just click on the e-mail to your friends button, and the press agency sends me a thousandth of a penny. They add up. Really.
and finally, Meta-meta-meta news: Old Roboseyo
What a farce this is. I can't believe I clicked on the link, too. I can't believe I'm putting it on my blog. Yes, even adbusters etc. is part of the cycle when they criticise it.
What's to be done? Our lives are filling up with useless information. How do we get back to caring about what's important, and getting others to care, too? Seriously, all it takes for us to stop thinking about Blackwater, Guantanamo, Pakistan and Myanmar, is for Paris Hilton to climb out of a car without wearing panties. . . AGAIN? THIS, and we settle back into our duoback chairs and forget about writing letters, attending protests, and storming the lawns of our leaders to get things sorted out?
I don't even know what to say, except that when I think about it too much, I think that if there's real estate for sale on Mars, I'd think about going.
the Korean saying for being too stuck in your own perspective, your own point of view, your own comfort zone, so that you can't think outside the box, and can't think accurately anymore, is "A Frog in a Well"
So how do we get out, and get angry, and actually do something?
Here's another example, one that cuts both ways, from where I see it.
(Leading in:) After World War II, the US came clean on the Japanese internment camps they'd run, made reparations, made a public, official apology, and so made it possible to start healing. Germany did the same in Europe regarding the holocaust, making it possible to normalize relations between them and the other countries of the EU.
Over in East Asia, though, relationships between Japan, China and Korea are strained these days because Japanese history books and politicians are smoothing over, or flatly denying a pair of disgusting blots on Japan's wartime history. There was a huge civilian massacre in Nanking during the war, the seriousness, and the very veracity of which Japan has disputed, and Japanese soldiers also kidnapped hundreds or maybe thousands of young women out of their villages in the territories they occupied during the war (Korea, China, Indonesia, etc.), housed them outside the soldiers' camps, and basically forced them to be sex slaves for the duration of the war. They were euphemistically called "comfort women" because that sounds better than "sex slaves" or "rape-bunnies". Japan's politicians have been saying that these women went voluntarily, or that they were amply compensated. Nationalist Japanese politicians are grumbling "I'm about fed up with being asked to apologize" when nobody's ever owned up to it specifically, and Japanese history textbooks have been de-emphasizing or trivializing such events. The Japanese emperor made a number of blanket apologies and such after the war, but Japan has refused to make the kinds of reparations and official statements necessary to allow China and Korea to move on . . . and when they HAVE made apologies, they've often been loaded with vague words, and evasive qualifiers, not ratified by any official bodies, or (former Prime Minister Koizumi caught a lot of flack for this) immediately after apologizing, the apologizers went and paid respects at a war memorial that honoured, among the others, dead war criminals.
At the same time as it refuses to come clean on its own war atrocities, Japan is campaigning to become a permanent member of the U.N. security council. Is there something wrong with this picture? Could anyone seriously trust Japan in concerns of world stability when it won't even play straight with its own history?
Michael Honda is the American politician who led a resolution through congress formally urging Japan to come clean, and he says, among other things (read the article) that "If you want to be a global leader, you have to first gain the trust and confidence of your neighbors."
Here are some pictures of former comfort womenI saw in a display outside Seoul's City Hall about the comfort women. Many of them were ostracized as "damaged goods" when they came back to Korea, and never married.
This next one especially breaks my heart because her face reminds me of my mom. It could have been anyone's mother -- that's the shocking thing about it.
Here's a painting that expresses the terror and degradation pretty clearly.
On the other hand, Korea has its own problems with moral authority: Koreans cry for an apology and compensation to the surviving comfort women (and their numbers are dwindling as many pass on from old age). It's a shame that Korea waited so long to begin campaigning for their vindication (the comfort women issue was hidden like a shameful secret until the 1990s), but the Korean agitation for an apology is toothless, in my opinion.
You see, the Korean government's refusal to enforce their own laws against prostitution cut Korea's protests to Japan off at the knees. How can Korea claim any moral authority, how can their criticism that Japanese soldeirs violated these young women's basic human dignity hold any water, when it's still common for Korean businessmen to visit "business clubs" and "massage parlours" and "barber shops" where the services for sale degrade the women forced to work there? Sure, there isn't a gun to these women's heads, but it doesn't wash for Korea to demand recompense for women who were degraded in the past, when Korea today STILL degrades their own women through the sex industry, and even the government turns a blind eye to it (after passing some token laws to divert international criticism).
Some links about prostitution in Korea from a site that translates articles in Korean newspapers.
It's common here for Russian or Indonesian or Philippino women to come to Korea to work in the lucrative sex trade: travelling to Korea and selling herself for a year will bring a woman enough profit to support her family back home for two more years! The "entertainment" districts are well known in Seoul (Mia, Chongnyangni, Yongsan, there was one in Bangi-dong where I lived before; there are many more), and range from places where you can pay for a woman to simply entertain you (a little like a geisha in Japan - she'll sing and converse and pour your drinks), to (in and) outright brothels. Though it's getting better in recent years, it's common enough that a few years ago, there was actually a campaign where an organization was handing out free movie tickets as an alternative to bosses taking their employees to "business clubs" for their Christmas bonuses. It's never spoken in polite company, but a student told me (and the male student who'd completed his military service turned red, but didn't deny) that when a Korean man is about to begin his military service, a common initiation custom is for his friends, or his senior soldiers, to take him to a brothel, if he's still a virgin, and make sure he loses his cherry before he goes out defending his country! Korea's stand on comfort women doesn't wash to me, because their own record for defending the human dignity of women over in Chongnyangni is pretty poor, while Japan's petition to become a permanent member of the security council rings hollow, too, because of their denial of the past.
All this is not to say that the speaker's character is the ONLY concern in discourse -- the fact Nietsche died in an asylum doesn't mean his ideas aren't worth serious consideration, and the fact some particular writer/poet/politician/artist was gay/a pedophile/rude/a plagiarist doesn't mean we can ignore their ideas completely (the ad hominem attack is an ancient, and petty trick). Shakespeare's sexual orientation has no effect on his genius, and more than a big nose would have!
But in certain arenas, especially those on a national and international scale, where practical action is required, and where a lot of people are affected by movers' and shakers' opinions and decisions, and especially in cases where the people effected by those decisions have little or no power, or voice, or wealth, I think one DOES need to look at the entirety of a group's choices and decisions, sniffing around for ulterior motives, in order to lend them credence. If Nike is planting trees to make up its carbon debt, that's good, but they're STILL running sweat shops in Cambodia. Megaphones and mufflers! I wrote in one of my notebooks in highschool (I'm not sure if I stole this from somewhere or not, but. . . ) "Our words show what we want to be; our actions show what we are."
So I've been thinking lately about different kinds of power and influence.
There's a theory of diplomacy that says there are three ways to influence people: hard power, financial power, and soft power. We might also call them sticks, carrots and models. Here's how it works.
If I want you to do something, here are my possible methods:
The Hard Power Way: I threaten to hit you with a stick. Obey me, or you will SUFFER! Internationally, this means military power.
The Financial Power Way: I offer you a carrot -- think of a donkey pulling a cart in order to reach the carrot dangled in front of its nose. If you do what I ask, I'll make it worth your while! Internationally, think of aid, lifting sanctions, lower trade tariffs, free trade agreements, opening doors for investment. This is certainly a more positive kind of power than hard power.
The Soft Power Way: I model the behaviour I'd like to see you try, and hopefully my way helps ME so much that you try it too, in hopes that it'll help YOU, too. Think of how many more people a cheerful, kind, peaceful monk will attract to his religion than a prosletyzer with a big sign saying "No Jesus: Hell!" (to say nothing of a suicide bomber). I want to get my marriage advice from an insanely happily married counsellor, not from one going through her third divorce.
This kind of soft power has no relationship to my ability to punish or reward you -- the richest countries are not necessarily the ones with the most soft power (other than in their economic infrastructure).
Countries like Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Canada regularly top worldwide lists of the top places to live, because of education, health care, social support and diplomacy, so when Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper criticizes China's human rights track record, people listen a lot more carefully than if, say, your friendly South American despot does. Maybe the best measure of a country's soft power is simply this: how would it go if you backpacked around the world with their flag on your t-shirt, and what kind of conversations would it bring about?
The strongest kind of soft power, I think (is strong soft power a contradiction in terms?) is moral authority -- I've been thinking a lot about moral authority. Fact is, in the arena of moral choices and exercising of power (particularly where one's power effects the basically powerless), your actions act as a megaphone or a muffler for your words. Being a leader and/or taking a stand puts one under a microscope, and it ought to, I think. So, when Mrs. Bush phones world leaders about the urgent human rights situation in Burma, all it does to me is highlight the fact her husband has no leg to stand on when it comes to a question of human rights violations, and if he took a posture against the Burmese junta, he'd be laughed right off his high horse (Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, etc.)
I had some interesting conversations in my classes about the American multinational companies that run sweatshops in China and South Asia -- I asked the question, "Does a company have a responsibility toward the community where it operates?" and if the company, with lots of money and power, doesn't protect and help its employees living on barely-sustenance wages, who will?
I talked about the hypocrisy of Nike projecting an image of empowerment when their shoes are manufactured in sweat-shops where women (along with men) work in ugly, ugly conditions these links are outdated, and I can't tell whether it's because Nike has made positive progress to improving conditions, or because their lobbyists are doing a better job of burying such stories before they get to the papers. Anybody have anything more current than these articles?
Think about how much credibility the Catholic Church lost in America when the pedophilia/cover-up scandal broke, or Senator Larry Craig flushing his reputation in a men's room. On the other hand, when Bill Gates created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he set an example for the rich and powerful that really shames guys like the CEO of Samsung (Korea's largest conglomerate) who's catching heat now in a bribery scandal/coverup. Al Gore should have gotten rid of his private jet before he made "An Inconvenient Truth" -- sure, he was buying carbon credits, sponsoring woodlands in India or wherever, but why not protect the rain-forest AND get rid of your private jet, if you're throwing down in the environmental arena, anyway?
Meanwhile, nobody buys it anymore when G.W. Bush talks about bringing freedom INTO Iraq, because his interests reveal that he cares more about getting oil OUT of Iraq -- if it were actually about freedom, he would have gone after Robert Mugabe, too; if it were actually about WMDs, he would have dislodged Kim Jong-Il in North Korea before he aimed his big guns at Sadaam.
Names like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ghandi STILL carry influence, far out of proportion with the ACTUAL power they had, because they spoke moral truth to power.
Stay tuned for Moral Authority and Soft Power, part two: indeterminate bat-time, same bat-channel!
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)
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 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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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:
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?
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. . . )
Here's a close-up of one of the iron spikes. It's on the bottom corner of the giant rock above, and this rock is right next to one of the most important mountainside temples in Seoul -- where the king used to come for spiritual counsel.
