Monolith

I took an icicle from the eaves and put it in the snowbank, then photographed the results - enjoy.

Our Twisted Hero: A review

The World Wide Web, vast as it is, does not provide a lot of information (in English anyway) about Yi Munyol. One understands quickly from various sources that his father defected to North Korea during the civil war, leaving his family behind. This seminal event is held up as a principal reason Yi became a novelist with a political bent. And Our Twisted Hero, which was the first of his books to be translated into English, is an insightful allegory into autocratic rule, and the complicity of the individual.

Our Twisted Hero is set in a Korean elementary school, which will no doubt bring up comparisons to Lord of the Flies, in that the boys of the class are under minimal parental supervision (In Our Twisted Hero's case, a poor teacher), and so are free create their own moral universe. Han Pyong'tae has just transferred in to a rural school from Seoul, where he was one of the most gifted students. He finds, however, that this new rural school has a different order than in Seoul. Here, the class is run by the monitor, Om Sokdae, a boy a few years older than the rest of the class.

Om Sokdae rules the class with a system of tacit menace, and forces the other students to pay tribute to him under the threat of physical beatings and social ostracism. Han tries to disrupt the social order, but is driven to exile; eventually, like the hero of Koestler's Darkness at Noon, or Winston Smith of Orwell's 1984, he is broken, and accepts his new place in the totalitarian order he finds himself. Although, unlike those novels, the story does not end there. Sokdae is eventually loses power over the classroom, though the effects of his rule haunt Han for many years and imbue him with a dark cynicism as South Korea grows into an industrial, western-style economy where people like Om Sokdae are able to flourish.

The parallels to Korean politics and social order are insightful and frightening. South Korea, I have since learned, was led by a series of strongman presidents from the end of the civil war (1950) until as recently as 1987, the year this book was published. So the student's complicity in Om Sokdae's rule are parallel not only to the North's brutality, but to the system many contemporary South Koreans grew up under. In fact, Yi's insights on authority, self-determination, and the vigilance necessary to sustain a free society - and its implications on the role of violence in maintaining order - are relevant everywhere.

Feb 12: Saturday Night: Self-portrait with Dog

Man's best friend my butt. He didn't buy a single round!

The Tao of Koi

We went out to the Como Zoo conservatory last weekend, and I took these pictures of light playing across the rippling water, and the koi fish feeding at the surface. It was very peaceful, and put me in an Far Eastern state of mind, so I pulled a relevant quote from the 8th chapter of the Tao Te Ching and laid it on top. (I hope it's the eighth chapter - I don't speak a word of Chinese.) The rough translation of the pertinent verse is:

The highest goodness resembles water.
Water greatly benefits myriad things without conflict, and
It stays in places that people dislike.
Therefore, it's way is similar to the Tao

Make on, people! 

-- Mike

http://www.grebmar.net

Playing with Words...

Here's a throw-together - I was hoping at first to get the paper box strong enough to hold actual strings, but let's get real - office paper isn't used to make guitars for a reason. So it's a sculpture, and a temporary one at that. Enjoy.

-- Mike

Kapitan Ri: a review

A review of the a short story Kapitan Ri, by Chon Kwangyong (1962)

As anyone who studies Korean history for the shortest amount of time finds out, the division of Korea is but one tragedy in a line of unbroken hardships dating to the end of the 19th century, when a declining kingdom was forced into a pseudo-vassalage with the Chinese empire. In 1910, Korea was annexed by Japan; in WWII occupied by the Russians, and afterwards fell to civil war and American influence, and the division that now stands to this day.

Thus, for fifty years or more Koreans lived with little sense of national sovereignty. Children were raised to speak Japanese, and professionals gave preference to Japanese officials who controlled their life. How did they live and survive? It's a complicated answer. Now, I'm not an expert by any means of Korean literature (or history). But there is probably no short story which dramatizes the first fifty years of the 20th century Korean condition better than Kapitan Ri, by Chon Kwangyong.

The title character is Yi Inguk, M.D., a surgeon who has made a comfortable living working in the Japanese clinics. He gives preference to people who can pay, which means throwing out dissidents and poor who resist Japanese rule. On admission, 'His examination of a new patient began with an inquiry over his ability to pay...' followed by questions about the disease.

In these early pages, Yi Inguk is an unsympathetic, even satirical character, a privileged doctor driven by money and not ashamed of his conciliation, a profiteer of the Japanese occupation. Later, he angers Korean dissidents when he turns one of their leaders from his clinic, and it is not until the end of the second world war, with his being held prisoner by Russians, that we gain a measure of sympathy for Yi Inguk.

But Yi Inguk is a doctor, and when this comes to the attention of his Russian captors his skills are suddenly useful to the new regime yet again. He is pulled from prison and put to use in the clinic, and eventually allowed to resume his privileged life. He even regains his most important possession, a pocketwatch given to him by the Japanese as a sign of their appreciation.

It is hard not to be sympathetic to Yi Inguk. He is not a political creature, but one who merely wants to survive (and thrive). Perhaps he is a product of the forces which shaped modern Korea, and of a culture which still respects authority and a firmly defined social order. After World War II, when Yi Inguk finds himself with an opportunity to leave the country for America, he is not hesitant to use his conciliatory skills to ingratiate himself with the new authority. As he'd learned Japanese, and then Russian, he learns to speak English. He thinks to himself, "Revolutions my come and the nation change hands, but the way out has never been blocked for Yi Inguk."

Like all great stories, there is an inherent ambiguity to the situation: Is Yi Inguk to be admired for his survival skills, or condemned for betraying the notion of Korean sovereignty? Is he a stand-in for the national character of Korea, or a straw-man for a class of citizens not to be found any more? Further reading is necessary.

Kapitan Ri can be found in the collection Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction.

Skylab Sketch

I was in the library today, researching Skylab for a story I may or may not write. I got to sketching, partly because I'd forgotten my camera (and library card), and partly because I'm easily distracted. Here are the results. 

Skylab, as you may or may not know, was America's first attempt at an orbiting space station designed for extended human habitation. It was launched in May of 1973, and over the next ten months held three crews of astronauts who lived in the station for up to 84 days, conducting experiments and taking pictures. After they left Skylab for the last time, its orbit steadily deteriorated until in July of 1979, it re-entered the atmosphere, burning up and scattering itself over the Indian Ocean and parts of Australia. The resulting media circus was one of the seminal events of many a childhood, mine included. 

Keep up the good work, everyone, and we'll see you tomorrow!

-- Mike

Dino Attack!

We went out to the Snow Sculptures at the St. Paul Winter Carnival, where I snapped this photo of a dinosaur. All it needed was the proper sound effect and, viola, instant terror.

Have a nice night.

-- Mike

Moby-Dick, or the Whale

Download now or watch on posterous

Moby-Dick.m4v (9271 KB)

I recorded this in Caribou, on my Mac's built-in iSight, with stir-sticks and some notebook paper.

Thank you Caribou coffee, for letting me abuse my stir-stick privileges and your bandwidth.

-- Mike

Lord of the Rings from Mordor's point of view?

In 1999, Someone in Russia re-wrote Lord of the Rings from Mordor's point of view: http://bit.ly/eZM3na - the English translation is due any day now. They seem to be serious about Mordor being a victim whose story was re-written by the victorious western alliance. I remember in 2002, McSweeney's did the same thing as satire, which I thought was far more worth reading: http://bit.ly/e3WhIg

Review: The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman

When you find out Tom Rachman's novel The Imperfectionists is set mostly in Rome, you may think to yourself: Ah, Rome! The fountains! The statues! The history and adventure of a foreign country! The intrigue of living and working there, amongst the purebred romantics!

Then you start reading, and you find out: you're stuck with Americans. American Journalists, at that. Bitter, past-their-prime Americans entrenched in their own self-absorbed bitterness, toiling at a newspaper in its final death-throes. Americans who retain their American-ness so tightly that when they leave the building they say “I'm going to Italy for a minute. Need anything?” You might want to despair, but hold on: This book is pretty darn good. Heck, I almost never enjoy books as much as I enjoyed this one.

Perhaps it's because Americanism, it turns out, is a state of mind, unbounded by our continental shelves. The Americans who populate this collection of intertwinded stories are churlish, childish, short-sighted, bitter, often alchoholic, and fallible in uniquely American ways. Many are so wrapped up in their work and failures they fail to notice: They're living in Rome!

Or Paris, as is Lloyd Burko, longtime French correspondent of the unnamed paper. His is the first story of the collection, and a good introduction to Rachman's ideas and obsessions. He's seventy, with a much younger (fourth) wife, and he's on the downslope of a long, infamous life of unchecked impulses. He's lost his sex drive, but his wife hasn't; she spends most nights with the guy across the hall. His newspaper is out of money, and he's out of contacts, so he taps his son to feed him some dish on the goings on at the local embassy. Trouble is...

Well, things are often not as they appear in Rachman's world. Perceptions dash up against reality in surprising ways over and over again. (For journalists, these people are pretty dense.) But that's fair enough: the paper itself has no real reason for existence except the inscrutable whim of its millionaire American founder. (The story of the newspaper is told in brief italicized passages between the stories, the saga of the Ott family as it passes the newpaper down from generation to generation.) Uncertainty is the sand these people's lives are built on.

The characters are the reason to race through this book, and each chapter delivers a fresh voice, often of people so flawed that in the hands of a lesser writer the book would sink into despair. In a great feat of interior monologe, Rachman tells the story of Ruby Zaga, a bitter, middle-aged alchoholic who hates everyone and everything, as she holes up in a hotel room on new year's eve, pretending to be an American Tourist. She expects to be fired (for good reason) come Monday, and her interior voice is a constant stream of put-downs and insults, punctuated with her own muttered comments in quotes: "She locks her drawer and rakes a shivering hand through her hair, as if to dislodge spiders. 'Such pricks.' It'll feel good when she fucking quits. 'Cannot wait.'" But of course, she doesn't want to quit; the paper is all she has.

The tension between desire and reality is strong throughout all these stories. Winston Cheung, for instance, is a hapless kid who thinks he wants to be a foreign correspondent. He heads out to Cairo, where he stands around waiting for news to happen: “Every day in Cairo, news events take place. But where? At what time?” Then, a seasoned reporter comes to town and sweeps Winston up in a hilarious storm of self-absorption and danger, and Winston has to rethink his goals.

Or consider obituary writer Arthur Gopal, son of legendary writer R.P. Gopal, whose ambition ran out years ago and doesn't care about much any more. His greatest career goal is a job that “pays him to make Nutella sandwiches and cheat at Monopoly with [his daughter] Pickle.” Unfortunately, fate has another future in store for Mr. Gopal. Or Hardy Benjamin, business reporter, lonely and losing hope, who begins af affair with a shiftless Irishman who she meets when both their apartments are burglarized in the same 24 hours. Or the reader who insists on reading every word of every issue, even if it means falling behind, so that the news she is actually reading is years behind the events taking place just outside her door...

Suffice it to say that this book is filled with people in over their heads, and rogue losers on the outskirts of the romantic Europe you're used to reading about. There are affairs, or course, and bad judgement, death, unrequited love and tragedy. But there's such an effusive good-naturedness, and a sure, steady hand to guide you, you'll just be happy you've read this book.