10 Reasons Why I haven't Posted Recently

Reasons 1 through 7 (really ruining my life): Tower Defense Games.  If you are at all susceptible to video game addictions, especially when games involve collecting points of some kind to unlock skills which will make it easier to collect more points to unlock still more skills (ad inifinitum) stay away from these kinds of games.  On the other hand, those towers ain't gonna defend themselves (unless you power them up appropriately).  Having exhausted Plants Versus Zombies, currently my drug of choice is Cursed Treasure (screen shot on the right).

Reason 8: American Horror Story.  If you like horror or alternatively want to see some television that plays with familiar plots and types but simultaneously stretches and lampoons the boundaries of commercial narrative (a la Twin Peaks), you must watch this show.  Also if you like Dylan McDermot's butt--and if you don't, you probably will after a few episodes.

Reason 9: Homeland.  Claire Daines triumphant return to television.  What if Cloe from 24 got her own show in which swearing and nudity were totally allowed (which, like urinating or eating food, is off limits in the land of 24)?  Also what if Cloe were a much more complex character whose trials and tribulations mattered a lot, lot more?  That's just to get started with what makes this spy drama cool (if only for those who shouted at the tvs in the 90s that they would treat Angela Chase soooooooo much better than Jordan Catalano ever would).  I would perhaps write more at the conclusion of the season; the show promises to be a good critical discussion piece.

Reason 10: Math.  Yes, I'm still studying math, because apparently for the man to let me in to his PhD programs in literature, he must be satisifed that I know a million and one uses for the pythagorean theorem.

The semester is ending soon, so hopefully that will translate in to more time for sitting still, being quiet, and telling the world and the web all about it.

Metric "Help I'm Alive" (Finally something besides the written word!)

I don't know whether it is the onset of chronic unhipness that seems to share a chromosome with the gene responsible for graying hair or if, perhaps, I was never hip in the first place--the two may not be mutually exclusive in any case--but the older I get, the more I can fell the power of pop music, regardless of its cheesy, commercial, cliche, or blah blah blah qualities.

This song would be an example, as would be a few others from my recent listening experiences that just a few years ago I would have dismissed as what I sometimes label "government music" (The Dead Kennedys 0:42) or plastic music. 

And now that I've invoked this change in my listening habits, I'm not sure what to say about it.

[Awkward pause in blog entry]

In honest, I think the change is due to my time my exposure to Korean pop music.  Much K-pop is intentionally derivative and a key reason (is there ever any other?) is economic: to appeal outside of South Korea, the music has to be familiar to other audiences.   Anyway, I've spent time from this angle considering the old debate that I used to have with an unabashedly hipster friend back at Syracuse University: must music be obscure and or original to be authentic?

And a more pressing question is: at what level does the originality, authenticity, cynicism, or whatever commercial ethos affecting an artists material affect the pleasurability of the sound?  Or must one rather decide that they don't like something and ask their interlocutors to kindly ignore their tapping foot?

Of course Theodor Adorno has devoted much more brainpower to this question than I (or anyone else) ever could.  

 

So I will not pretend to write anything so dialectically aware.  I would simply like to offer the above song (the video isn't the point, though its got a few interesting qualities) as something that I heard for the first time today and really really liked.  It is another testament to the pleasurable repeatability of musical patterns, for better or for worse.

Subtlety: the Pro Side?

I just watched a golfing video to make sure I know what I'm talking about.

Here's the deal:

In golf, when you putt, it is possible for the ball to break (roll) left or right, depending on the slope of the current hole.  If your put goes in--awesome.  But if it doesn't, it can either be on the pro side or the amateur side.  On the pro side the ball breaks toward the hole, on the amateur side, away from the hole.  So missing on the pro side is better; your ball still has a chance to go in. (Imagine what happens if the guy pictured here misses his shot.)

And so with life, too.  I suppose.

This is a not so subtle approach to my topic: subtlety.  And this is the not-at-all subtle segue.

Last weekend, I had a short story workshopped at a regular meeting of the Seoul Writer's Workshop.  The story is a short short that examines a doctor's self-absorbed attempt at last-minute parenting on the day he gets incontestable evidence that his wife is dying.  Their son comes to ask his father a question, and instead of answering, the father launches is in to some high-minded parable about his own childhood.

The subtle bit was this: I wanted it to be implied, and implied only, that it is the wife who is dying.  To emphasize the doctor's self-absorption, I wanted the fact to be ambiguous.  Not so much that you could miss it--in fact, I though I gave more than enough hints--but ambiguous enough that you would have to ask yourself: "Wait, who was dying?"

I learned at the workshop that I was too subtle.  Everyone in attendance that it was the father who was dying, due to which they forgave the character some of his self-absorption.  Is that the pro or the amateur side?  After the work shop, I'm not sure and I've been thinking about subtlety since.

According to most histories of the short story, including the excellent Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English, the 'shortness' of the short story was made fully conscious and intentional in the form by the beginning of the 20th century.  The long and short of it (ha!) is this: the best short story writers make negative space, the unspoken, the missing parts positive, palpable, knowable elements of the story.  Hence the related (but not exactly the same) dictum: show don't tell.  Because you can't tell your reader, "Notice that I'm not discussing the mother's health in this story."

A close friend, with whom I workshopped stories every week for almost two years, used to tell me, "Trust your reader." And I've been thinking how subtlety, especially when extreme, can actually be a kind of distrust, a litmus test, a shibboleth.  A way to chase of a lumpen-readership, if you will.  And my reading list being what it's been recently (I read Girl With the Dragon Tattoo right after reading Henry James's Washington Square) I'm actually not sure how I feel about that.

But I do know that the story needs just a bit more work.  That will mean another hour or so of sitting still and being quiet.

PS: Putting labels on this post is causing an error with blogger, so I will have to add them later.

The Elementary Particles

The Elementary Particles 
(Les Particules élémentaires)
Michel Houellebecq

(click here for author website--in French)
Vintage International, 2001

First things first: if you are the type of person who believes that 'spoilers' are a thing, then save this review for after you've read this challenging novel.  For the record, I think anything that can truly be spoiled by a spoiler is not very valuable in the first place.

Now, with that piece of housekeeping out of the way, let's take a quick look at one of the most ambitious novels I've read in some time.  As will be seen with a quick look just about anywhere on the web, Houellebecq and his writing are also frequent subjects of controversy.  I am not well aware of contemporary trends or standards in French literature.  But I can easily compare him to some American authors to clarify the intensity or vulgarity (whichever you prefer) of his style, or at least the style in this book.  
The book deals in explicit sexual intercourse.  When coming from the narrator, the language used is detached and clinical if at the same time shockingly thorough.  The language of sex and sexuality, from the mouths of characters, follows the tendencies of those characters--crude, bashful, joyous, depressive, and so on.  In no way, however, does the book employ the kind of shock tactics often used by writers like Chuck Palahniuk and Brett Easton Ellis.  Nor is the explicit language in service of any sort of decadent tendency.


In fact, those that would think so have clearly and simply failed to read (or understand) the framing elements of the novel--the 'Prologue and 'Epilogue.' These crucial parts of the novel reveal the story to as primarily a history and biography of the era just before the (fictional) obviation of sexual reproduction and the scientific visionary most responsible for said obviation.  This would be Michel Djerzinski, one of the novel's step-brother duo, both of whom live lives of amorous awkwardness and confusion, and have been scared by the 'free love' pretensions of their parents' generation.  

The narrator  begins the story explaining the rareness of 'metaphysical mutations'--think something like Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm shift, but with even more intensive and extensive effect.  It is Djerzinski who would be responsible for the final metaphysical mutations that would end millenia of human suffering through a combination of philosophical pleadings and scientific breakthroughs.


This is why I say the language cannot be considered shocking in any way.  Or, to put it another way, it is only as shocking as what it describes: a human race in a time and place of total desperation, an obsessive devotion to what the narrator terms 'the cult of the body beautiful' and the sexual gratification of this body.  It is Djerzinski who fights to end the cycle of decay and desperation by conclusively replacing it with reliable means of asexual reproduction.  The vulgarity of the characters is the vulgarity of their times; the vulgarity of the narrator is that of the scientist.


Hence why I was so impressed with the novel.  I experienced in it nothing less than a revival of the naturalist project--of both the American and the French variety.  A biting, sardonic reminder to all humanists of the seething, humming biological base on which the superstructures of their cultures and nobilities and progresses are constructed.


I strongly and seriously recommend anyone who wants to think freshly and honestly about  our contemporary period to sit still, be quiet, and have a good scuffle with this book.

Miracle Mile

Miracle Mile (1988)

Director: Steve De Jarnatt

A few months back there was a CFP (Call For Papers, for all you non-academics) for research on apocalyptically themed cultural production.  I intended to write something, but got to wrapped up in all the movies.  A proposal for a conference paper on a related topic came out of it instead.

It was the CFP, though, that had me collecting and watching all the films I could find on catastrophe and the end of the world.  I actually found a website that had an excellent database of such films.  If you are interested check out apocalyptic movies.com.

Anyway, I'm still working my way through all the interesting films I turned up.  The most interesting so far was this one, Miracle Mile.  It starts as a very typical 80s romantic comedy but takes a left turn and becomes a nuclear holocaust film.

And it is veeeeeeeeeeeery 80s.

By which I mean it is hard for me now to decode the movie.  It seems at times to be intentionally campy but also to be an entirely serious meditation on qualities of the 'human spirit' (lets not dispute this term just now) by examining what people do when they learn of their immanent doom.

Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards, better known as Dr. Greene on ER) oversleeps and misses his date with the girl of dreams.  When he arrives at their prearranged rendezvous, the diner where the girl works, he answers a payphone and learns of an impending nuclear strike on the US.  (It seems unlikely, but a soldier at a nuclear silo in Nebraska has dialed the wrong area code and thinks he is talking with his father.)

Washello proceeds to inform those in the diner of his information and once they believe him, the group scatters in various directions trying to round up loved ones and meet atop a skyscraper where a helicopter will supposedly be waiting to take them to safety.  Except for the cross-dresser--s/he stays put and finishes dinner.

To get his girl, Washello steals a car, holds up a gas station, fights with some cops, reunites the girl's estranged parents, and finds a helicopter pilot.

Out of breath?  That's what this movie feels like.  And at the same time it as a very empty movie--wide open spaces, not many extras until the last ten minutes of the film, and not many plot points to the story.  Lots of incidents, but not much plot at all.  The readily apparent lowness of the budget means spectacular shots of the end time were not possible which, again, serves to make the movie more interesting.

The film says to you, "Here's what the nuclear holocaust might look like if you are a trumpet player hanging out with some of the weirdest losers in LA."

I had no trouble at all sitting still and being quiet--except for a few "WTF?"s here and there.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson
(click here for author website)
Kindle Edition

I don't often read mainstream fiction.  The style of Larsson's doesn't exactly make me want to read more, but the scope and ambition of his plotting does.

I could speculate about how the novel (and others in the series--though I haven't read them) would likely be better had Larsson lived to oversee a greater editing process.  But who knows.

What I enjoyed most about this book is that it did not read like other mysteries I've read in which the atmosphere is a little too thick with suspicious things and the reader can too easily imagine the orchestral hits accompanying the shocking revelations.

The attempted mix of local color, and critical thoughts about economic and gender issues in Sweden makes for a believable and interesting world.  Unfortunately, the things that happen in this world are not as satisfying as the fabric itself.  Too often the protagonist, Blomqvist, has breakthroughs that come in the nick of time from his unconscious, i.e. the numerous times when he glances at a picture and knows--intuitively--that there's something wrong with it.

The character of Lisbeth Salander has major staying power for a long running franchise, but Sundquist has very little personality other than the suspiciously self-indulgent characterizations he receives from women, via the narrator, through indirect discourse.

For example, we hear often that he is kind and patient and disarming, but we rarely see it except for one instance (per girlfriend) of Blomqvist taking time out to make sure the ambivalent woman in question knows that friendship is really important to him.

In sum, I think Larsson is admirable for his desire to tell a story involving the rich and fraught social fabric of his time and place through the eyes of characters that (he hoped would) push the envelope.  Unfortunately, I think the legacy of the novel will be the same as most stories of its kind--focusing people on the entertainment value of the serious issues it pretends to tackle.

That and Hollywood, I assume, is going to make it into another good sex/bad sex crime thriller.

Writing, actually

It's National Novel Writing Month again, the time of year when I feel crappy about all the writing I haven't done in the preceding year and do penance by writing unreasonable amounts for a period of about 30 days.

NaNoWriMo also ends with my birthday, which is kind of cool.

I started late this year with my novel and so as of day 5/6 (international dateline issues, you know?) I have only about 2,000 words.  But I'm optimistic as those 2,000 only took about half an hour last night.  Meaning: I have a pretty good idea.  Here's the rough synopsis:

Why did Jeff disappear? And where did he go? By all indication he disappeared via airplane. The only problem is no one knows where he actually went. Jeff's supposedly best friend, Grant, tries to sort through his memories, his prejudices, and his worldviews to figure out exactly where his hauntingly similar best friend has disappeared to, and why.

Pretty crappy, right?  I'm not at the polishing stage yet, so this blurb is really just a snapshot so I can remember what I'm writing.  The working title is 'Mutatis Mutandis.'  The basic idea is to write about the post-millenial tension of the washed up suburbanite.

Like me...

...and this is my cue to talk about the other things I'm writing these days.  Let's list them in order of time spent.

1. This blog.  I won't get meta.  If you are reading this you know all about it.  So enjoy, instead this pic of my workspace at home.

2. Personal Statements.  The big secret is I'm getting ready to apply to PhD programs.  Five of them.  And naturally each department has its own formula for the application essay.  Sometimes they even ask for separate 'intellectual' and 'teaching' statements.

I have been spending four or five hours a week finding a sleek and sexy way of explaining that I want to read 19th century American literature and think about it and also think about French theory, but not in a bad way.  If you are unfamiliar with the terrain of the contemporary American English department, this is actually quite a trick, due mainly to the reigning school of that that has, among other tricks convinced itself and many others that it is NOT a school of thought.

COUGH, COUGH!--New Historicism--COUGH!

I will be devoting more time to this assignment in the next two weeks, as submission deadlines are fast approaching.

3. Short Stories.  Last weekend, a draft of a piece called "A Fun Birthday Thing" was workshopped by the fine people at the Seoul Writer's Workshop.  It was characterized as 'a sad, asymmetrical love story.  I'm gonna let it rest for awhile as I build up my portfolio of short stories.  Perhaps, sometime within the next year, I will attempt publication.  But I am wary and lazy--a bad combination.

I always want to do more writing.  For some reason, these days I'm really enjoying reading--like binge drinking levels of enjoyment.  So reading and writing are currently sitting across the table (in my brain) eying each other like a wife and a mistress who have just learned of their triangular entanglement.

The only solution is to spend plenty of time sitting still and being quiet.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
Ha-Joon Chang
(click here for author website)
Edition: Penguin, 2010 (and Kindle)

From the title, one can guess right away that this will be a polemic.  The most interesting, perhaps, is that the polemic is decidedly not anti-capitalist.  Professor Chang, in fact, is famous as a 'heterodox economist'--meaning many things but chief among them the fact that he still views himself as a 'capitalist.'

The book  is really, really well organized.  In addition to the conventional table of contents it has an alternative list of 'ways to read this book' which makes selection from the 23 chapters to focus a reading around a question or conviction.  For example:

"Way 1. If you are not even sure what capitalism is, read: 
Things 1, 2, 5, 8, 13, 16, 19, 20, and 22
Way 2.  If you think politics is a waste of time, read: Things 1, 5, 7, 12, 16, 18, 19, 21, and 23"

Six such alternatives are listed and the useful organizational tactics continue in the chapters ("things") themselves.

Each chapter begins with "What they tell you"--an introductory segment that explains the received wisdom about contemporary capitalism with clarity, precision, and honesty.  Immediately following this is "What they don't tell you," in other words, Chang's response contradicting the received wisdom.  Chang's claims are then substantiated with whirlwind tours of 19th century economic history, contemporary case studies (rendered rhetorical palatable for the general reader), and no-nonsense explanations of the logical composition and economic consequences (actual and potential) of each chapter's point/counterpoint conflict.

At bottom, Chang's book believes, and would have readers believe, in the perfectable nature of capitalism.  Those who know me well know that I am not necessarily in that camp.   But, I can go along with the rest of Chang's project: to recognize the call for open education of the history, theory, and practice of capitalist political economy.  Chang wants to confirm our suspicions about the superficial advantages of capitalism and expose some of the hidden (more often not-so-hidden) disadvantages of capitalism.  The goal, in the end, is moderate-progressive: once we understand the history and the basic concepts, we will be much more capable of weighing in on the 'right' side of contemporary economic policy debates which is, for Chang, a sort of post-national, regional, protectionism.

Surely, this is over-simplifying his views, but a clear theme of the book is the hastiness of contemporary ideas (and the policies that follow from them) about globalization, post-industrialism, technological revolutions, and international capital.  Chang would have us sit still and quietly consider that we all--laborers, capitalists, producers, and consumers alike--still live, act, and think in this or that locality and hence economies should be conceived, nurtured, and protected accordingly.

If you don't have time for the book right now, check out this video to get the essence of chapter 1, "There is no such thing as a free market."

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself 
(Korean: 나는 나를 파괴할 권리가 있다)
Young-ha Kim
(click here for author website)
Edition: Harvest Originals, 2007 (and Kindle)

Our unnamed narrator, begins by explaining his perverse aestheticization of suicide.  A chilling quote to represent his thought: "People who don't know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don't know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life" (6).  This is why he has devoted his professional life to creating beautiful suicides--finding, consoling, and finally organizing the suicides of his 'clients.'  The bulk of the novel is his elliptical and fragmented report about a group of people connected to one such client.  To demonstrate her centrality in the lives of her acquaintances, she has two names, Judith and Se-yeon and we see clearly how she energizes the lives of the narrator and two other men, named only 'C' and 'K.' 

I am now reading this book, over and over, as I've assigned it for my Reading and Discussion class at my university (I've paired it with Chang Ha-joon's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism--see the relevant post).  I originally read this book during the summer before I moved to Korea.  My impression at the time, as far as I remember, was shock.  I had already watched as many Korean films as I could get my hands on.  I had also worked through a major television drama, Tomato   (토마토).  The television show is from 1999, the novel from 1996.  Now I know all about South Korea's rich field of cultural production, but a few years ago, to a relatively inexperienced American, the contrast was amazing.  Watch this highlight video set to Tomato's theme song for a hint of what I mean



Let's define American pop culture with two examples: the Jonas Brothers and Marilyn Manson.  Or how about Friends and Kill Bill?  Confused and excited?  Well, that's the response I had when, in the same July, I watched this TV show and read this book.

As I'm reading it now, week by week, the book is taking on a new complexity as it teaches me exactly how much I have learned about Korea, about being a foreigner, and about the rise of what is called 'globalization' since moving to South Korea.

After the semester ends, I will sum up what I've tried to do with this book in my classes.  For now, I simply want to note that this is a deceptively simple book.  You can read it in a few hours, especially if you know nothing about Korea.  But, like any remarkable work of fiction, the more attention you invest in  I Have the Right, the more difficult it will become.

For now, my basic reading of the text is as follows.  I Have the Right is a kind of Nietzschean tone poem dropped by the author, like a bomb, on a South Korean scene (mid 90s, remember) just beginning to think about imagining to recover from (please note all the bet hedging!) several decades of dictatorship, beginning to publicly wonder about the doom of freedom, a la Sartre.  Whatever links one might draw between the dueling dictators of the North and South, the book would welcome.  One can't lose sight of the absented protagonist of the story, Judith/Se-yeon, an abused, disaffected sex-worker.  But for me the keyword is 'Nietzschean'--all the gloom, disaster, and pain pinpointed by the novel serve to point out the opportunity for empowerment any of us can grab when our starting point is the sudden realization:

OMG!  I have the right to destroy myself!

Truly, an adventure in sitting still and being quiet.

Introductions are in order

Hello Everyone and Anyone...hopefully not no one,

I've had it with losing the ideas and impressions I have of books! Good, bad, strange, or predictable, they deserve to be remembered. So do the books.

So what you've found here is my shiny new blog. Strangely I have much less difficulty remembering or conjuring anything related to movies and music. But, for the sake of the theme, if nothing else, I'm going to be cataloging, summarizing, and responding (all action verbs, I assure you--and where there's action, adventure isn't far away...oh god shoot me now...) to the various media that require my still and quiet-type efforts: books, writing projects, movies, television, and music. Comments, suggestions, recommendations (if they somehow differ from suggestions, especially) are all welcome; these are the synapses, ligaments, tendons, bones--whatever--of a healthy life of reading, writing, viewing and listening.

 Over the next weeks or so, I hope to be process a backlog going back a few months. The goal is mainly to avoid that sickly look that blogs are wont to have in their first weeks. If only I could start at the beginning...I wouldn't need the blog in the first place! I'll be starting with the books that I've assigned to my students and myself for academic purposes this fall semester of 2011.

Which reminds me--in case you wanted to ask--to say a word about myself:

I am a (newly) 30-something English teacher currently living in the Mohyeon area of Yongin City, 30-40 kilometers south of Seoul, South Korea. Though I currently teach English as a foreign language, I mainly teach classes from the standpoint of my education in the philosophy, literature, and cultural studies. My first wedding anniversary is quickly approaching and my wife and I are currently planning a move (back, in my case) to the USA. I will definitely say more about that in the coming months. So that's it. The first post on my new blog...yet another adventure in sitting still and being quiet! 

~Chuck

 (...I need theme music...this will do:)