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?

Grasping and veering: the moment

The moment

so here's the thing.

In the effort of giving one's all, of being actually In The Moment, appreciating The Here And Now, there are pitfalls.

I've recently had trouble with the old cliche that you ought to live each day as if it were your last, because that's a non-viable lifestyle. If I woke up this morning and Gabrielle the messenger angel visited me in the shower and told me that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I'd be dead by midnight that day, I'd make a certain set of choices:

What would you do?

I'd find a way to be with as many of the ones I love as possible; I'd eat the best food I knew; I'd write a letter or phone the people I could not have around me; if I were in Korea, I might try to cheat time by flying to Vancouver, crossing the international date line, and stealing an extra sixteen or seventeen hours. I'd do my damndest to die happy, whatever that means.

The thing is, I can't live each day as if it were my last. That's a pretty manic kind of day, jettisoning all responsibilities, etc.. I'd get fired after two days of living each day as if it were my last. You see the problem.

That silly old adage, I suppose, is actually intended to encourage people to live without fear, and maybe also, to live with an integrity such that, if one DID die suddenly, one could stand before God and say one has no regrets, if nothing else.

One part of that, I think, is living in the moment: being mindful of the world around, of the wonders visible all around creation, to be fully Present for the experience of being alive. That requires its own kind of courage -- to know, and then live according to, one's priorities, rather than other's perceptions, measurements, or expectations, is important to actually finding joy.

I think there are many ways we get trapped out of really Being Present, but recently I've been thinking about two in particular: veering and grasping.

I said to Girlfriendoseyo once, "There are some things that can't be fully experienced if you hesitate." This is especially true of relationships, I think. If my default approach is caution, if I'm hedging my bets before I know anything, I might shut myself off from something real, because I wanted to stay safe. My old roommate Anthony taught me the word velleity -- it means "the lowest level of motivation" -- that vague hankering one never gets around to acting upon. "I should work out more." "It was a long time ago, but I ought to apologize, really." Often the old objection, "sounds too much like work" prevents us from really investing and getting passionate about something. Sometimes, we're just afraid of what it might demand of us if we really pour ourselves into something.

A sports writer I like (Bill Simmons) discussed this in a column once as it applies to sports: some athletes DON'T prepare the best they can for their sport, so that they have an excuse ready if they fail -- if Quarterback A loses the big game, he thinks "I'll work out this off-season, instead of just drinking beer and driving my motorcycle" -- his excuse is ready-made because of his own lack of effort. He let himself down, but he can boast that "I could have won the game if I wanted". If Quarterback B loses the big game, he has nothing to fall back on -- "I trained and prepared, brought myself to the absolute peak of my ability physically and mentally. . . and I STILL failed." That's a much lonelier failure, because there's nowhere to hide. Some people do the same with relationships -- "I've been hurt before, so I'll hold back on this new one, so that I'm limiting how much she could hurt me, if it doesn't work out" -- but holding onto that old baggage might keep me from reaching the peak of the mountain! Maybe the loss hurts more if one's fully invested, but I'd much rather have a "gave it my best and it didn't work out" in my past than a "woulda coulda shoulda" -- I think the regret of woulda coulda shoulda's linger longer.

On the other hand, I realized another way people shut themselves out of truly experiencing a moment last Saturday: Girlfriendoseyo and I walked out to the middle of Mapo bridge on the Han River in Seoul, because over by 63 Building (the tallest building in Korea), there was a fireworks festival. I opened my eyes wide and watched, taking in as much as I could, from the delay between flash and boom, because of the distance, to the jostling of crowds, to the whistling of traffic conductors keeping people off the lanes still open to traffic. A large (huge) number of others, instead of watching the fireworks, held their cameras up in the air, pointed them at the fireworks, clicked, and checked in the display screen for what they had. Instead of enjoying the moment, they removed themselves a step from the actual experience, by filtering it through a camera. Taking a picture of something as ephemeral as fireworks strikes me as completely defeating the purpose of going to a fireworks show, unless you're a pyrotechnician yourself, collecting data on your rivals.

They may as well have stayed home and watched them on TV, or downloaded clips of fireworks displays from the internet! Why go in person if you're not going to BE there? (Yes, that's Be with a capital B.) Some moments are like water -- they're meant to run through your fingers and be gone, and if you catch water in a bowl, it loses a lot of the beauty it had when it was in motion, jumping over rocks and scattering light in every direction.

Camera culture is strange to me -- cameras only catch one of the five senses, and give no sense of story, and to me, if it's not a story, it's not a memory. My best memories from Malaysia are tastes, running jokes, textures of food or sand, sounds and voices. Ditto for my trips to Japan. You can't take a picture of washing all that sand down the shower drain after spending a day at the beach; you could, but it wouldn't show that little bit of sand that ALWAYS goes in the wrong direction. Even the dancers I saw in Osaka, if I took a picture of them, would have lost the excitement and motion that imprinted them on my memory. Cameras can't catch any of that, so I always feel that pictures are terribly inadequate keepsakes of a place, unless they bring about the memory of a story.

The main thing is just this: a camera removes me from the Here And Now by one step -- I'm now seeing the world through a viewfinder instead of through my eyes -- and looking at the picture is poorer again than the viewfinder display. Even more, the taking of a picture is an attempt to make permanent moments that are often best appreciated for their very fleeting nature, and stepping back from those times of spontaneous fun often kills the spirit of fun anyway.

I feel like I cheat myself out of truly experiencing life if I hesitate and guard myself, and I also limit myself by trying to keep moments that are meant to pass by. (Veering away, or grasping too tight.) Some rare pictures catch something more than just the images -- an expression, a sense of love between two people, or a sense of fun, and some people are really good at catching that (I'm thinking of my brother-in-law's pictures from my father's wedding), but for me, I'd rather open my eyes as wide as possible, turn on my senses, and experience things, as fully as I can.

And later, I can write about it.

One nice thing about cameras, and their attempt to catch things (though it removes me a little from my Here And Now) is that, though it doesn't bring back the smells and sounds for me, it DOES allow me to share my life with people who couldn't be there with me.

(Irony alert)

Here are some pictures I took from a Eulalia festival in Seoul, in Sky Park near World Cup Stadium in Seoul, where I went with Girlfriendoseyo, complained about people who hide from reality behind cameras, and then took about a dozen pictures, hypocrite that I am.

But I did it for YOU, my wonderful readers. I hope you like them.


They look like wheat, but they're about six feet tall.



The reason there's a whole park full of them is because when the sun is low in the sky, they blaze with pure white, catching the sunlight like a spider-web.



In full blossom, from close up.

I have no idea of the purpose of these plants, but they're sure pretty.


In the low sun:


They looked much nicer in person (back to that old "why bother to capture it" thing)

The one drawback: you can never quite pretend you're in the countryside when there are so many people,

when there are mounted lights (for the open-air concert to start later, and to light up the plants in the evening)


And when speakers ALL through the park are playing the Korean pop-song equivalent to Roy Orbison.

I'm about halfway through this, but. . .

Holy cow you gotta read this book! I don't care what your upbringing or background is, everybody on the planet can learn from the Dalai Lama.


I finished it now . . .

his teaching is rooted in ancient traditions, yet profoundly practical, and immediately applicable to real life. Reading this guy was like having a light switched on -- he teaches such deep wisdom, so simply, in ways that translate directly into my own situations. He explains a twenty-five century old principle, and than shows me how I can apply it to the guy who drives through the crosswalk right in front of me. (And yes, I HAVE been using his techniques at crosswalks. . . and they've helped. He probably added a month to my life just like that, by nipping that tension in the bud.) Give this dude a try. Right now, he's on the shortlist with Rainer Maria Rilke, J.D. Salinger, and Jesus as the greatest teachers I've ever read.

Rare air up there!