Colchis is famous for the Golden Fleece

Jason and Medea

Excerpts from a new international version


Cast
Chorus: various fifth and sixth grade Korean public school students whose vocab consists mostly of phrases from their textbooks.

Jason: A greek warrior, prince of Iolcus
Medea: Sorceress and princess of Colchis
Creon: King of Corinth


Part 1, Colchis:

Chorus:
Hello, how are you? I’m from Colchis.
Colchis is beautiful and special.
Colchis is famous for the Golden Fleece.

[Enter Medea]
This is Medea. She is very pretty.
She can do magic too.
But, she is very sad. Let’s listen!

Medea:
Oh, but that the world could know of my laments,
of the darkness in my soul. For it has
been said that tragedy should bite my heels
until time’s bitter end, that I should be
the ruin of great men through magicks and treason
most foul. But in truth I know not whether
my mind’s contents are fair or foul, for a life
of shelter tells me that should the test come,
I may not know it. Hark? What silver flash
upon the sea’s wine-stained horizon do I spy?

Chorus:
Look! It’s a boat! Such a big boat!
Who is it? Who is in the boat?
Medea does not know.
But, he is handsome.

ENTER Jason

Chorus:
That is Jason. He’s from Greece.
He’s very strong and kind. He wants to be King.
Let’s listen again!

Jason:
Long I have journeyed and hard, to this land
to seek and claim the fleece of gold foretold
as birthright destiny. But unseeming
of kindness is this land, and people here
shall surely prove awesome strange indeed.
But lo, what shape is that of woman shone
on distant parapet? Let us move close,
that providence may to me her hand reveal.

Chorus:
Medea likes Jason. She will help him.
She gives him many things.
She helps him get the golden fleece.

----

Let me know in the comments if you want the rest.

Book Trailer for The MZD

So, I was playing with iMovie the other day. iMovie is Apple's simple movie editor, designed for making souvenir reels of your vacation to wherever. But I was just messing around, stringing together a bunch of clips of things I've filmed in and around Mokpo, South Korea. (You should visit my other site, here, for more information on all that.)

Soon I saw that iMovie has a bunch of other cool features, like sound effects and suspenseful background sounds and such, so I put that on there, too, and then, holy cow, I had a spooky little book trailer. What to do with it?

Lucky for me, I also wrote a spooky book, just in time for Halloween.You may remember The MZD, a shortish novel about a zombie outbreak with supernatural origins. If not, well, here's a trailer that works as an introduction. Those of you who've read it, go take a look anyway. Here it is:

And now that I've got iMovie mastered, I think there are a few more book trailers coming, like for my book Jack's Boys. But that needs a post on its own.

The MZD: FAQ continued

Since last I posted, there have been several more questions for me to answer: Here they are.

Q: So, what's The MZD about?

A: Okay, it's about this: Legions of walking undead are roaming the streets of South Jeolla province. All westerners know things change fast in South Korea, but a contagion of murderous horror is a bit too much. Now they’re running for their lives, and looking for help anywhere they can get it. Can the US Army help? Does a rogue filmmaker hold the secret to stop the destruction? Read now to discover the secret horror of... The MZD.

Q: How long did it take you to write?
A: I started in October, during 'desk-warming' time at school. I banged out a page or two a day till I had a hundred pages, then stopped. Then a re-wrote the whole thing a couple times.

Q: Can I get a free copy?
A: Sure. If you promise to do a (hopefully positive) Goodreads or Amazon review, I can send you a copy in kindle, nook, ebook, or .pdf format. Just leave a comment with your email address and I'll get one out to you. *quantities limited.

Q: And, what does The MZD stand for?
A: Well, that's a good question. I knew when I started, but kinda forgot as I went on, and now I just think it's kind of cool. If you think you know, post it in the comments.

Get your copy on Amazon: 

Decision Tree: Korea

You may or may not know we're moving to Korea in a month. What that means is that everything I own now belongs to one of three categories: 1) Take to Korea 2) Put into Storage 3) Get rid of forever. How to decide, especially with the disposal part? I made a flowchart to help:

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.

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.