Just finished Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward, which shows us two interpretations of the near future - one, only ten years in the future, that is, 2009; the other in 2030. One of the fun things about the book was his conservative guesses as to what future-tech might look like. No cybernetics or energy-based sex here.

In 2009:

• Someone is using “Windows 2009″. There is indeed a new Windows coming out in 2009, but it’ll be called Windows 7. Close enough.
• Genetically engineered grapes that stay fresh without refrigeration. I don’t believe we have these, or any such fruits or vegetables. France has long ago produced milk that stays fresh without refrigeration. Too bad it tastes like assssss.
• Most interesting: in a major bookstore, only a few of the titles are actually printed books, and these are by guaranteed bestsellers (King, Grisham, etc.). The rest are just placeholder cards with a description of the book; you order the book, and it’s printed and bound on the spot, in about fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, enjoy Starbucks coffee! Of course, in 1999, when the book came out, the coffee/book synthesis was while underway, but print-on-demand was just getting started and still very tied to the vanity press. I remember reading a few years ago about machines like this - they’ve been invented, but yet to be placed in stores. The repercussions in the publishing industry would be - enormous.
  The article I read envisioned these machines being placed in coffee shops. There’s a touchscreen on top. You order a book, pay for it with your card, and while it prints, order your coffee. The article described them as slightly larger than a Xerox machine. You could have a million books available in a coffee shop - in a mall kiosk - in a tattoo hut - a Smoothie King.
  Imagine how this would shake the book industry. Bookstores would function as described in Flashforward, or not at all. Publishers would actually make money. The current model ceased to be profitable when Americans decided that TV was more important, and stopped picking up books just for something to do. Now, publishers have a print run of a few thousand. If they don’t sell, they have to buy them back from the stores, or remainder them at a Pyrrhic loss. The bookstores take almost no risk, only the possibility of lost sales due to shelf space that could’ve been taken up by something that would sell better, like Shopaholic Hangs Herself in a Closet or Shopaholic Goes to the Eight Circle of Hell.
  Shelf space is in itself a precious commodity. It’s a form of advertising as well as the actual physical place where the stores keep books. How often do you go to B&N for a specific book and have to order it? With these printing machines, publishers would be able to cut out the overhead of initial print runs, which would let them take chances on new authors - a new unknown author’s book would be just as much “in stock” as a Harry Potter. Plus, without the albatross of initial print runs and having to sell all the stock, publishers would be more profitable, and might be able to pay their authors more than the miserly, miserable 10% that is standard.
  Nothing would ever go out of print. You could buy every single book ever published (and electronically typeset). No more driving all over north Texas looking for a copy of Melmoth the Wander or Liber Juratus.
  I hope we get such a system - it’s the convenience and availability of ebooks, but with the tangible quality of real books (which I love so much).

In 2030:

• AIDS and diabetes are cured. Cancer is not.
• India establishes a base on the moon. No one has gone any further.
• No aliens.
• Cars don’t fly, but hover about two metres off the ground (by the way, the US has finally gone metric). This is actually fairly reasonable. In theory, it takes no more energy to lift a car two metres than twenty; however, safety is usually the first concern when discussing the development of flying cars. Witness the bloodbath that is any given highway. Imagine that in three dimensions, along with the impossibility of rolling to a stop after a collision - you’d plummet to the ground in a fireball. Well, if you have a hovercar, you presumably have some sort of repulsing force that lifts the car from the ground. This could be projected from the sides as well to create a sort of “soft” force field that would gently deflect other vehicles.
  The other advantage of hovercars is that the condition of roads wouldn’t matter. I read that the US can’t maintain its highways as is - factor in peak oil (highway repairs use a lot of oil - asphalt, you know) and the economic crisis, and in ten years I think we’ll see a lot of overpasses closing down for safety reasons. With hovercars, the roads can go to hell. You could even rip them up and plant grass, which they do in the book.

Posted in Reading | 3 Comments »

… is live at ZTGamedomain. The review is more fun to read than the game was to play. The review is probably more fun to print out, roll up into a narrow tube, and cram into your eyeballs than the game was to play.

Posted in Games | No Comments »

(If Mr. Sawyer happens to stumble across my humble little blog, and be outraged by what he reads here, and be thus tempted to flick out a tentacle of his mighty empire and crush me, which he could do, easily, I ask: please don’t. I’m not worth the trouble.)

I first heard of Robert Sawyer when reading a Writers of the Future anthology a few years ago - he had an article in it, giving advice to aspiring writers. One of the tips was to stay current in your genre - don’t say that your favorite writers are Asimov and Tolkien. You need to be up to date. Paraphrasing from memory: “Then I ask if they’ve read any Robert Sawyer. If not, I just walk away.” Something like that. It did not give me a favorable impression of Mr. Sawyer. If I were in that position, I would see an opportunity to make this stranger into a fan of my work, and tell him all about my books.

Not wanting to draw his scorn, if I ever met him, I picked up a copy of Flashforward, a random selection. But I didn’t read it for a while. I read another article by Sawyer on getting an agent. “Please don’t email me and ask if you can have my agent. I had to have a Hugo Award before he would take me. He’s one of the best goddamn agents in the whole goddamn world. [That is, too good for you.]” Again, paraphrased from memory. Again, it didn’t give me a favorable impression of him.

But talent can be separated from personality - I love Harlan Ellison’s works, but don’t know if I ever want to meet him. He’d probably make fun of me. And, some people are so separated from us in space and time that their character is irrelevant. Shakespeare. Tennyson. Et cetera.

(Sometimes, though, personality can suffuse talent, and you think, “This writer is wise, and it shows in his work. He understands and respects people.” Maugham, Pasternak, Gaiman, Haldeman. Conversely: “this guy is bitter and alienated, and it shows.” Latter-day Sinclair Lewis and Heinlein. They did not seem savory people. Their work suffered for it.)

And, of course, criticism demands that we consider works on their own merit. But I cracked open Flashforward and noted that there are two “About the Author” pages. Some of the information overlaps, so it must have been a printing slip-up. But still. Then I noted that Sawyer’s webpage is “sfwriter.com”, as if he is the only science-fiction writer, or perhaps the only worth caring about. The picture on the inside back cover shows him holding his chin with thumb and forefinger, as if his titanic thoughts are too heavy for him to support his head.

But how was the book?
Very good, it turns out. I’ll read more of his stuff.
And the picture on his website is much cheerier and less pretentious.

I see that Flashforward has been picked up for an ABC series, to follow “Lost”, to be written by David Goyer (wow!). Goyer wrote, of course, the - monumental - Batman Begins, though his post-Batman output (”Threshold” and some forgettable January-release horror film) hasn’t been so great. Still, it’s the direct continuation of scifi’s unimpeachable rampage through primetime television, ongoing since “Lost”. Here we have a direct adaptation of a science-fiction book, unapologetically scifi.
Bravo, Robert Sawyer! Bravo, Canada!

Posted in Reading | No Comments »

Just finished Playback yesterday. Chandler’s final, and weakest, novel. But even at his weakest, he’s better than anyone else working in crime fiction.

I came across an interesting article by George Pelecanos (he wrote for “The Wire”!), written on the event of Chandler’s works being published by the Library of America. It contained this Chandler quote in defense of genre literature, a quote that can only be described as crackerjack:

“Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds… all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary Of The Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.”

Amen.

I’m consistently surprised when I recall that Chandler didn’t write his first novel until his mid-forties. Before that, he worked in the oil business. What did he do with that sort of talent? How could he go through life with this incredible gift hidden in his head? What outlet did it take? He must have been a sexual maniac (though biographies show otherwise) or, I don’t know, a champion whittler. That sort of talent, undiscovered, lurking in his brain, is like Cthulhu sleeping under Lake Arlington - it’s surprising no one discovered it, and it didn’t go on a killing rampage across space and time.

Posted in Reading | No Comments »

I’ve updated the publication list, there on the right, and added a contact page. Now you know my secrets.

Posted in Webpage | No Comments »

My first ever game review is online at PC Game Trek. Check it out!

Posted in Games | No Comments »

(I know he’s been waiting on pins and needles to hear that.)
I first discovered the Discworld series in 2004, when I read The Colour of Magic, which I liked - so I read another one - and another - and another - until I had read nineteen of the books over the course of a summer. Then I read Feet of Clay at my cousin’s wedding in Michigan, and The Last Hero on the long drive home, and thought, “I guess I’m done with this.” The jokes got old. The characters seemed thin. I could no longer tell one book from the other. I was sick of the Discworld, and it would be three years before I read another. (Jingo. It didn’t move me.)

Then I read Good Omens, and it was wonderful. The wit snapped in a way that it hasn’t since the earliest Discworld books, and the plot was gripping and fun. It’s hard to spot Neil Gaiman’s voice in this. In fact, you can describe the book with this theorem:

Terry Pratchett + Neil Gaiman = Douglas Adams

With the addition of Gaiman, there’s an urgency to the story-telling that Pratchett sometimes lacks. There’s also a better sense of timing to the jokes. The jokes are funnier. It has heft and depth. It’s a good book, in a way that the Discworld books rarely are.
But none of these qualities are trademarks of Gaiman’s style. His strengths are his imagination, his appreciation for and command of humanity’s cultural history, and his understanding of the construction of a narrative (which makes American Gods all the more of an odd misfire). It’s not that these changes add to the quality, they simply send it in a different direction - the direction of Douglas Adams.

In the back of the book are a few interesting features - a Q&A describing the genesis of the book, an essay by Pratchett about Gaiman, and an essay by Gaiman about Pratchett. In the Q&A, they mention an instance where Gaiman asked Pratchett about a line Pratchett knew he hadn’t written, but neither had Gaiman written it - that was when they knew the manuscript had taken on a life of its own. My theory - Douglas Adams was sending out powerful psychic beams, partly due to repressed energy from all the books he wasn’t writing at that time. These beams rattled around in the co-authors’ heads and came out in a distinctly Adamsian twist.

(Not to belittle their accomplishment. Certainly much of the book was written when they weren’t directly under Adams’s psychic command. And some parts of it are distinctly theirs - the sentimentality of the ending is pure Pratchett, and the final paragraph wouldn’t have been written by anyone but Gaiman.)

I’ve got Going Postal and Thud! on my shelf, and summer vacation is in a few weeks. Those are well suited to a beach. I’m happy to have Pratchett back in my life. The memories are strong. You know how humans have powerful connections between scents and memories? I.e., a certain perfume can make you weak-kneed with recollections of a lover, etc. Well, for me, it’s reading. Where I finished books. I finished Crime and Punishment and The Lurker in the Dark at the north Arlington Nizza Pizza. Hyperion in the Denpasar airport. War and Peace in a deeply cushioned chair in the TCC (southeast) library, with fierce summer sunlight blasting in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. But I have finished so many Pratchett novels in so many places: the Cooper Street Atlanta Bread Company, with a wad of muffin stuck on a fork in one hand, a cup of vanilla nut coffee going lukewarm before me; on the stationary bike at Vitamin, the gym I used to go to here in Mokpo; the aforementioned Ann Arbor hotel room; the deserted cafeteria at TCC (South), eating biscuits and gravy with all but one light off. By candlelight in the upstairs room when those summer thunderstorms of 2004 knocked out electricity for days. In the bathroom at the Lake Arlington public library, when I was supposed to be working. In the stacks at the same library, when I was supposed to be working. (I got fired for some reason.) On the nasty threadbare couch of the break room at the UTA writing lab. Driving across Indiana. It was a good long summer.

Posted in Reading | 3 Comments »

The Marmot’s Hole has a reposting of a statistical comparison of NK and SK’s relative military strengths. Short answer: SK could probably handle them on their own, but the damage could be bad if they don’t respond to NK aggression quickly and competently. Even still, any conflict would be over in a matter of days. Most of SK’s ships, tanks, and planes, are capable of destroying their NK counterparts before NK even knows they’re there.

And the NY Times has a piece on why China remains North Korea’s ally, even through all its embarrassments and immaturities; basically, China has a difficult decision of whether it wants a nuclear NK or a collapsing NK, and “nuclear” works out better for China. Too bad for anti-proliferation! It was a nice idea.

Posted in Korea | No Comments »

Photographer Kyle Cassidy photographed (as is the wont of such creatures) a whole gaggle of fantasy and science fiction writers in their various creative spaces. They run the gamut of “functional” to “dignified”.
(I’m also unsurprised to see that many of them are old men with beards.) Joe Haldeman, for some reason, writes in full-on neo-Goth mode, with candles and - is that an oil lamp? All he needs now is a guttering tallow candle melting atop a human skull. It’s strangely unfitting for a writer of hard military scifi, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Samuel R. Delany looks like some sort of chronomancer in an exploded fish-bowl universe, creating not only fiction but new realities.

I’d like to get a picture of myself in my own writing space, but that means I’d have to put on pants, and then the creativity stops.

Posted in Writing | 2 Comments »

The Dodos are a good band, with good music.

Norfolk & Western, which to me will always be the band that poached the Decemberists’ drummer, have a good sound. Their actual songs aren’t always memorable, but the textures, the tones they go for are unique. I like bands named after railroads.

Good Omens, the Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman collaborative novel, is quite fun. A lot of good jokes, and some interesting things to say about humans. It’s sometimes a bit too cute for its own good. And so far it seems overwhelmingly Pratchetty rather than Gaimany. The plot is a bit more gripping than usual for Pratchett, but plotting isn’t exactly Gaiman’s strong suit either, is it?

Collaborative novels are a weird beast. I wonder if I’ll ever write one, and with whom I would write one. It could be fun - it could lead to great things, like this novel or the Illuminatus! trilogy, where Shea and Wilson kept trying to one-up each other. At worst, the writers’ unique voices could be lost; a lot of the Larry Niven books I’ve read are collaborations, and they may as well have been written by just one person. The Trillium series (Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Julian May gave each author a character to play with, which seems a sensible way of handling things. Personally, I wouldn’t like relying on someone else to get their work done. However, I know that when two like-minded people get talking, ideas spark in ways they don’t when working alone.

Further thoughts:

The Satanic Verses is quite the book. There are books that I finish, thinking, “I could write something that good, some day.” And there are books that totally astonish me with their fire and brilliance and make me painfully aware of the… (shall we say) modesty of my talent. These books are the totems of culture, the books that are remembered for transcending competence and entering the realm of the inspired.

Etrian Odyssey II is just like the first, but better.

Painkiller is a fun game. It is only fun, and nothing more. How did I miss this one first time around?

Posted in Games, Music, Reading | No Comments »

Ask a Korean, a blog that you should be reading if you live in this crazy country, answers the question of whether or not SK is a safe place to be, what with the North rattling sabres all the dang time. Short answer: yes. A lot of his reasoning concurs with my post from a few weeks ago - they don’t have the resources for an invasion, there’s no way they could beat SK (especially when combined with the US); they basically couldn’t do anything except get off a brief, damaging bombardment before SK and US guns flattened them. But he brings up very interesting point - North Korea couldn’t handle the South even if they willingly bowed down before the august reign of Kim Jong Il. Unfortunately, the article cited is entirely in Korean, so I’m going to have to guess.

I remember reading that many South Koreans (especially younger ones) no longer want reunification. (Actually saying so is politically not very acceptable, like saying that marijuana should be legalized in America, even if a majority thinks so.) The reason: economic devastation. The South has pulled itself up by its bootstraps to get where it is today, and I believe they are aware of the fragility of their wealth. A country with almost no resources and very little arable land has little on which to fall should there be a global decrease in demand for cars, flat screen TVs, and supertankers. The financial crises of 1998 and 2002 show how responsive the economy is to the lightest blows; one blow it could not absorb would be an influx of ten million relatively unskilled laborers. How could they feed these people? House them? Find employment for generations of people essentially ruined by Kim Jong Il’s regime, left unfit for any sort of employment in a robust capitalist environment? Never mind the psychological trauma; the economic trauma of absorbing all these refugees would be unsustainable to the Korean economy.
Then there would be the process of disarmament, which would take years. The North has over a million soldiers who would need new jobs.
Imagine the land rush. Land in South Korea is extremely expensive. It’s one of the most overcrowded countries in the world. The North, in comparison, is undeveloped, a wilderness. Developers rushing to snatch up the resources and farmland would be chaotic beyond imagining, opening up opportunities for corruption and abuse that would make Roh’s alleged bribes look like peanuts in comparison.

Now, put the military knee-high boot on the other foot, and imagine the North, which has a fifth of the South’s population and a tenth of its technical sophistication, trying to rule fifty million North Koreans. Keep in mind, too, that South Koreans can barely rule South Korea. (I won’t try to count the riots, protests, and fistfights at the National Assembly that have happened in my two and a half years here.) It would be the kind of fiasco that we might find laughable, if sixty million lives weren’t caught in it. The conquered people would have to educate their conquerors on how to use, say, the Internet, or modern global banking, or how to make supertankers and fly F-15s. Then, too, they would have 650,000 South Korean troops to decommission, along with SK battleships and tanks far beyond their comprehension. An example only slightly exaggerated might be Mongol warriors trying to run New York City.

And the political reeducation would be a farce for the ages. Communism has only gained power when acting against an entrenched, corrupt regime (usually monarchal, though in NK’s case, occupational). There has never been a case of people throwing off capitalism to embrace Communism; SK is nothing if not the triumph of capitalism. It would be a hard sell to get these people to trade their state-of-the-art handphones for Dear Leader pins. The NK forces would be confronted with the undeniable victory of the free market, the skyscrapers, the incredible wealth available to every SK citizen (even the poorest is wealthy compared to a Nork), and discontent would give way to the collapse of Communism. Perversely, NK can only keep its soldiers Communist as long as it keeps them in the country. Give them a glimpse of PC bangs and Hite beer and choco pies, and capitalism will bloom. That’s how we beat the Soviets! Their steel-clad ideology was powerless against the temptation of McDonald’s.
Kim Jong Il understands this; he’s not entirely insane yet; that’s why we’re safe, for now.

Posted in Korea | 1 Comment »

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be doing a little writing for Gamespite, a site I’ve been reading for so long that I remember when it was called “Toastyfrog”. I’ve always enjoyed the site, and I’m glad to be able to contribute to it.
My assignment is a “Greatest Games of All Time” write-up of Diablo II and Alpha Centauri. Diablo II I concede, but Alpha Centauri is a strange inclusion - certainly future Civilization titles have surpassed it. In replaying it to prepare for the piece, I found myself wondering what people saw in that title that they didn’t in Civ III or IV. Answer: nerve stapling.
Diablo II holds up very well, though.

Posted in Games, Nonfiction | 1 Comment »

Hell, yes, I want to eat deer antler!

Posted in Korea | No Comments »

If you’re coming to this site for the first time, I direct you to this, the most useful entry you could hope to find here, or, indeed, anywhere.

Posted in Webpage | No Comments »

(I just typed some random words for the title of this entry, but now that I think about it, that could be a pretty awesome short story.)

Some of my talented friends are currently undergoing the Story Every Day contest, where they write a … story every day … for fifteen days. Their daring is to be congratulated, and their efforts encouraged. Bravo!

I would like to add that listening to Gogol Bordello makes me feel more alive. I recommend them.

I told my grandfather that my next novel would be set in Texas, and could he please, for my birthday, send me a few books that he considers representative of Texas authors? But no more Larry McMurtry, I’m up to my neck in him. A few weeks later, I got a hefty box of mostly J. Frank Dobie hardbacks that I know cost him a fortune to ship. More than I expected, and surely they will be helpful! Thanks, Papa. Now I have to write a good novel.

I’ll begin that one in September. We’ll be back from vacation August 20th, and for a week Randi will work while I stay home and read books and books and books. A few days or a week of prewriting, and then it’s off again. Makes me think I should hurry up on Khatima revisions. This next novel will be about the disintegration of small-town America due to Cthulhoid monsters beaming dreams of terror and madness from their underground lairs, and the relocation of business and industry to the cities.

Read Carson McCuller’s Reflections in a Golden Eye last weekend. Like all of her stuff, it was polished, beautiful, horrible, wrenching, and a delight to read. What a writer! What a life. She attempted suicide, wrote a masterpiece, and suffered from multiple strokes - before the age of thirty. After The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, her output dwindled to a trickle for her remaining twenty-seven years - three short novels, a novella of surpassing excellence (”The Ballad of the Sad Cafe”) and a handful of short stories. But short and difficult though her life might have been, it was validated by the creation of Lonely Hunter, a work of such brilliance and sensitivity that it changed me at an age when I thought books no longer had that power. And she was twenty-three when she wrote it! Twenty-three!

Then I began Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. I knew the book was important, intelligent, excoriating, etc., but I never suspected that it be so dang entertaining. It’s a thick stew - a bouillabaisse, if you will -  of - of - many things. I’m not sure how to describe it. Rushdie wants to talk about the foundation of Islam, and problems with the textuality of the Koran, as well as modern India, and problems with faith and identity, but he also wants to talk about men magically transforming into satyrs. And here’s where I like to bite my thumb at Modern Literature (note the capitals): magic realism is the victory of genre fiction, you elitist jerks. This genre inhabited by prize-baiters like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges (whom I adore/venerate), Jose Saramago, Isabel Allende (a lot of Latins on this list, but that’s a subject for another post), Umberto Eco (for whom I have the utmost respect) - this genre which is the biggest thing in academia for a long time - and why? because it’s not boring and staid and done to death - this genre is the triump of fantasy fiction.

But it’s not fantasy, say the academics, their pince-nezes bouncing furiously on their reddening noses, it’s a metaphor.
Yes, of course. And what else would it be? What the hell is the point of any fantastic element in fantasy? It’s a metaphor. Hey, for that matter, what is the point of any character or object in any mainstream book? Metaphors. Symbols. That is how we tell stories. Do not malign a book because it includes rocket ships or monsters; they’re symbols. If you do so, then you disavow the power and utility of symbols, and thereby invalidate most of western literature. You morons. So I love magical realism. It’s fantasy, snuck onto the “general fiction” shelves and winning Nobel prizes. It’s one more barrier between scifi/fantasy and the mainstream struck down. Another barrier goes when Neil Gaiman wins the Newberry, when a Lord of the Rings movie grosses a million billion dollars. Genre fiction hasn’t been the exclusive province of nerds for a long time, and it’s time people recognized that.
I guess what I’m saying is I want people to study Gene Wolfe in college.

Posted in Anomalous, My Talented Friends, Reading | 1 Comment »

A Muslim cleric who denounced suicide attacks was killed in… … … … wait for it… … a suicide attack!

Oy vey, people. I never thought I would say it, but there’s a way suicide attacks can actually be embarassing as well as plain old deadly and horrible. This does not prove your point! It’s as if he said, “You guys need to stop being idiots,” and then you idiot him to death.

Posted in News | No Comments »

I’m not the sort of guy who likes to make broad generalizations about any culture without first saying how I don’t like to do it - so now that’s out of the way, here we go!
What’s up with Korean workmanship? It’s baffling. These people make very fine supertankers and mp3 players and economy cars, but in construction, quality is all over the place. Often one encounters maddening and bizarre cases where a minimum concession is made to necessity, and a maximum to laziness and getting the job done in as quick a way as possible, never mind how it looks (or functions).

In our first Korean apartment, back in Daegu, they installed the air conditioner exhaust hose, from which condensation drips, by breaking the window. They just smashed out a corner of the pane, snaked the hose through, and taped up the rest in a half-assed way. Mosquitoes leaked in through the gap, and cold air leaked out. In our last place, here in Mokpo, the bathtub was sealed improperly, and it leaked every time we showered. The balcony doors didn’t seal - no problem with the doors, though, it was the very foundation of the building that was crooked. At my insistence, the handyman drilled the sliding screen doors into place, blocking out mosquitoes, but preventing us from ever opening the screen. Our hot water heater constantly conked out; after many complaints, the maintenance guys finally condescended to come and give the filaments a good scraping with a pair of needlenose pliars, fixing the problem for at least a week and a half.

Now, certainly Korea has a valid excuse for this sort of thing. The aforementioned trauma of the 20th century aside, they’ve only been industrialized for fifty or sixty years, or about two generations. In 1950, most of them lived in shacks, huts, or wooden houses, where such, shall we say, temporary repairs might have been acceptable. But this “good enough” spirit just doesn’t cut it an age when everyone lives in fifteen-story apartment buildings.

When we moved into our current place, we noted some problems with our gas range and kitchen cabinets. The cabinet was too close to the range, so the side of it was blackened and peeling. It was also too close to the wall, so it pinched the hose for the gas range against the wall, holding the hose at such an angle that the hose sometimes dipped perilously close to the open flame. I believe life should be lived at the edge, and this existential hazard gave me a little thrill every time I fried eggs, but Randi is of a steadier temperament, and did not appreciate living under the looming spectre of devastating explosions. For some reason.

A few weeks of complaining got an apartment guy to come see it, who told us that he could do nothing with the hose, as it was the gas company’s business; a gas man came, and told us he could do nothing because of the cabinet blocking it; the cabinet belongs to the apartment. Today we had a visit from the people empowered to move the cabinet. It only needed to go a few inches away from the wall to allow access to the hose.

The ajumma (middle-aged woman who wears a visor) pondered the problem, in pondering pose, hands on hips. Then, when my back was turned, she grabbed a peanut butter-smeared knife from the sink and hacked away the glue holding the cabinet to the sill behind the range. I offered a saw so she might not ruin the kitchen knife, but she merrily declined. Then she had me empty the contents of the cabinet, covering the dining table and ruining that room of the house unusable for the nonce. The repairman arrived, power drill in hand, and the real work began.

At first, the ajumma walked around the house, looking for another suitable place to site the cabinet; I stopped her when she suggested we put it on the balcony, on the other end of the house, where my exercise bike is. (Where would the bike go? Behind the refrigerator?) I didn’t relish the idea of walking through the dining room and living room, and opening the patio doors (which stick) every time I want a spoonful of mustard (which is often). In the pantry, then, where the oven is, and put the oven in the bathroom. No, thank you. Please just move it a few inches out from the wall to unpinch the hose, and an inch or two to the left to remove it from the heat of the stove. Simple.

So they did! Problem solved. Thank you for your help.

And then they disassembled the cabinet, removing the two top cabinets from the bottom one, giving us two cabinets - one three feet tall, with no top surface, the contents exposed from above - and then another section about five feet tall that would go where the oven is. The oven would go on top of that one. And what about that expensive and totally functional oven shelf? Who cares? Why was this arrangement better than leaving the cabinet in one piece? They mused for a while, hands on hips, then realized that now we had access to the gas shut-off knob, which we didn’t before. Much better.

So much better.

When the repairman got out his tape measure to prepare a new top for the first cabinet section - after first seeing if our now-displaced wooden floor grate from the pantry would fit (it didn’t) - I knew I had to speak up. I explained in my pidgin Korean that we didn’t use the knob before and didn’t need it - what we did need was our cabinet in one piece. “Can you please reassemble it in this new location, a few inches from the old? That would solve every problem at once, easily.” “Oh, sure, we can do that. On Monday, at 6:00. See you then!”
“Wait! Why can’t you do it now?”
The ajumma had a good laugh, and I asked again. Finally, she gestured at the repairman, and said, in Korean, sotto voce, “He’s stupid!”
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. Of course. All becomes clear now.

And they left. Our cabinet is in two pieces, our oven is unusable, on top of the cabinet, and our foodstuffs are all over the kitchen. Until Monday. Then everything will be fixed.

Posted in Korea | 2 Comments »

My friend Kerry sent me an email that was so wonderfully acerbic that I decided I must share part of it with the world, particularly this passage, delightful in its apocalyptic imagery:

“People keep talking about how global warming will “destroy the world” and all I can think to myself is “maybe y’all should’ve been paying attention when you were warned 20 years ago, or 15 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 8 years ago, or 4 years ago… but fuck it, global warming won’t destroy the world.  At most, it’ll wipe out and reorganize large chunks of the food web, likely including human beings.  The Earth will be fuckin’ fine.  Until the magnetic core shuts down and the magnetic field dissipates and the Sun’s radiation strips the world of all life, or the Sun expands into a Red Giant and engulfs the planet, or a super-massive asteroid or comet makes direct contact and vaporizes the planet, the world will not be destroyed.  Humanity’s days sure seem numbered, and 2 million years is a paltry run in geologic time, but fuck it, we can still fit in another strong 30 fiscal years if we fuck up everything faster.  Then, we’ll all be dead, but when the alien archaeologists come to Earth they’ll see our NASDAQ numbers and our bank accounts and think ‘holy shit, these people had their shit in order!’ ”

Reminds me of a line from “Dollhouse”, talking about Earth Day - “The Earth gets one day! One day! In a few hundred years, when we’re all dead, the Earth will probably have a People Day, when she just laughs and shakes our bones.”

Posted in Anomalous | 1 Comment »

One Hundred Push-ups offers a plan that is guaranteed to get you, you skinny white nerd, to one hundred daily push-ups within six weeks. The plan involves a suspicious mix of discipline and hard work, so clearly it is fraudulent; nothing worth having cannot be had instantly, and with minimum effort. Nonetheless, I’m going to give it a go.

It is known that I was slim and muscular in my youth. I traveled from town to town, earning my bread by the sweat of my brow in carnival weight-lifting competitions. But the carnivals died off one by one, and unemployment led to the atrophy of my fine Olympian frame. And then: video games.

I challenge you to join me, dear reader. This program takes only thirty minutes of exercise per week. You don’t want to be humiliated when I rip my shirt off at the beach this summer and you have nothing to show for yourself.

Tomorrow I will do the push-up test that determines the course of my exercise for the next six weeks. Simply, I do as many correct push-ups as I can without resting. Note: correct. A bent knee or back, or failure to descend all the way invalidates a push-up. I place a coffee cup beneath my chest and make sure I touch it with each downward movement. This has the double advantage of collecting the sweat dripping from my body. Then I boil the sweat and make tea. Earl Grey, with milk and honey.

Posted in Anomalous | 2 Comments »

With the first copycat suicide after the late president’s, now seems as good a time as ever to discuss Korea’s suicide problem.
In case you’re too lazy to click that link, the facts are these: a 23 year-old college student hung herself, saying that she was following former President Roh’s example. Roh, of course, jumped off a cliff last week after a corruption probe dragged his name through the dirt, incarcerated his family members, and aggravated his already poor health. We’ll come back to that.

Korea’s suicide problem isn’t merely bad; it’s approaching chronic. Korea’s got the highest rate among the OECD, and the third highest in the developed world (sometimes Finland edges it down to the fourth, depending on the year), behind Russia and Japan. Suicide is the fourth-highest cause of death in this country. I have friends here who once found a dead body while hiking, and in the past month, at least two students in this province killed themselves over difficulties at school. Last year, after popular actress Choi Jin-Sil killed herself, a rash of celebrity suicides followed; five or six more killed themselves in the following month, one singer by burning himself in his car. This rippled throughout the country, too, and rates rose for the rest of the year; the hotline Lifeline Korea reported a much higher volume of calls.
Then, earlier this year, actress Jang Ja-yeon killed herself after suffering sexual abuse at the hands of her TV producers. She named names in her suicide note, and legal action followed.
And, finally, last week the former president killed himself.

What creates this culture where suicide is acceptable?
It is acceptable. There are online forums where people discuss how and why they want to commit suicide; 59% of Korean teens consider suicide, and 11% have attempted it. The government rewarded Roh’s suicide by calling off the investigation, giving their tacit approval to his death by showing that suicide does get your family or reputation out of trouble. Roh put his own stamp of approval on suicide as a problem-solver, as does every other star or politician who kills himself.

History!
Korea, you know, has a rigid Confucianist background. All society was ordered according to obligations to country and family. It’s much less rigid today, but still evident. At any sort of staff meeting, it’s always the women making coffee for the men; old men are routinely let off the hook for horrible crimes because of this deep-seated respect for elders. So it’s no surprise that matters of familial duty and honor trump personal well-being. It’s the same pressure that leads to Japan’s more popular tradition of seppuku; “You have disgraced your family! There is only one way to restore honor!”
But compounding this is the subtler notion of “kibun”, something like the Korean counterpart of self-esteem. It can also be translated as “face” - dignity and pride (but not vanity), both inward and outward. One must maintain one’s own kibun and avoid damaging that of others - the problem is that it is easy to damage others’ kibun. Interactions of which Westerners would think nothing can be damaging to a Korean’s kibun - things like small impolitenesses (not bowing properly or frequently enough, or to the wrong people), social snubs (”I don’t want to eat lunch with you, I just want to be alone for a little while”), or winning an argument. Blatant offenses are even more damaging. When kibun is damaged, it can take some time to regenerate. So when, say, Jang Ja-Yeon was forced to have sex with her bosses, she may not have been able to conceive that her kibun could recover from such a blow. When Roh was investigated, he lost face (almost completely). In America, we encourage a sense of self-worth derived from our own opinion of ourselves - “Who cares what someone else thinks about you?” In Confucianist Korea, that idea is much, much weaker. Choi Jin-sil killed herself after intense Internet hate sparked by her former lover’s suicide. I’m not saying that Koreans have a poor sense of self-esteem, only that they are more susceptible to letting their self-esteem be influenced by external rather than internal forces.
Furthermore, the Confucist ethic requires harmony in all things. Koreans don’t want to be different. They’re proud of their 99% ethnic Korean population; they drive white and black cars, with a very occasional red one. There are only a few brands of milk, juice, beer. They all drink soju, even though no one can actually like the stuff. They like to do things together. This sounds glib; what I mean, though, is that they respond easily to peer pressure. If someone else does something, it’s okay.

Deeper into history!
It’s no secret that Korea had a twentieth century that experts might liberally describe as “fucked.” They suffered through forty years of the worst brutality inthe Japanese occupation, then a traumatic civil war, then forty years of military dictatorship marked by oppression, sometimes bloody, and a rocketship-ride to industrialization the whole time. Fifty years ago, this country was rice paddies and the occasional railroad. Now it is Seoul, with its 23 million people and fourteen subway lines, and state-of-the-art handphones, flatscreen TVs on every surface, and wealth never dreamt of. Giddy with this modern state, the country has never really worked through the severe trauma of the past century. One can see how this tumultuous past could be disaffecting.
And then there’s the pressure cooker of the Korean education system, which is a topic for another post. Suffice to say it is often literally murderous. Suicide rates peak around the time of high school exams. Exams here determine the course of one’s life; teenagers are not built to handle that kind of pressure. Reform is desperately needed on this front.

And, finally, there’s the poor treatment given to those with mental illnesses, including victims of depression and substance abuse. It’s still considered a subject of shame to suffer from depression here, and the number and training of psychiatrists is below standard for a nation with this human development index. Jang Ja-Yeon expressed frustration with her inadequate psychiatric care. Most don’t receive it. I know that at my school, and most schools, mentally handicapped children are mixed with the general population. There aren’t enough teachers to tend to them, and they don’t receive much additional training. This is indicative of Korea not coming to grasp with the problem of people with different mental abilities.

The Korean government could address the problem by … addressing the problem. They’ve been quiet about it, saying little to nothing to discourage people from killing themselves. This is a burgeoning problem, and it will worsen - the last PRESIDENT just killed himself, for crying out loud! The government needs to tackle this problem immediately; they need to set up hotlines; they need to encourage depressed people to seek counseling, and they need to improve the quality and availability of that counseling. (Unfortunately, the Lee Myung-Bak administration is not known for its compassion or civic sensitivity - they are the embodiment of what one candidate means when he calls another “out of touch”.) Most of all, they need to overhaul the ineffective and deleterious public education system, or they’ll be cutting teenagers down from trees and shower curtain rods for some time to come.

Posted in Korea | 2 Comments »

Over at Whatever, Mr. Scalzi refers to WWII as “America’s favorite war”. Yes, indeed.

The flood of WWII films, novels, and video games tells us as much. And why not? In that conflict, the bad guys were clearly bad - aggressive genocidal expansionists! - and the good guys clearly good. It’s basically the story of America saving the world from the forces of evil (with a little help from the Brits, Russians, and even the Canucks). Our wars since have been much messier. The Korean War (or police action) is still an open conflict, and the Vietnam War - well! You know. Not to speak of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, unwinnable morasses with unclear motivations, against dogged and vague foes. When we play Call of Duty, we remember a time when warfare was simple, legalized killing. Us versus them, with Western Civilization at stake. Simpler times.

WWII makes a good story. And all it took was sixty million dead!

(Don’t let that little sarcasm make you think I’m demeaning the enormity of the event. When I finished the last Call of Duty, planted the Soviet flag in the Reichstag, and the credits told me, “World War II claimed over sixty million human lives,” I got chills. I understand the obsession that made Jeff Mangum record “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” [an elegy to Anne Frank]. The war is an open wound in our history, and anyone with sufficient historical sensitivity - historical empathy - can be quickly whelmed by the magnitude of the thing. Well done, men and women of D-Day; we value your sacrifices, and hope like hell that such sacrifices are never needed again.)

Posted in History | 1 Comment »

I came across this transcript of ABC Radio host Mark Levin humiliating and insulting a caller. It’s almost cartoonish in its brutality. This is the way a very poorly written villain might behave if the writer said, “Screw believability, let’s make him as loathsome as possible!” Except it’s real, and the villain is a NY Times best-selling author.

Highlights, if you can’t be arsed with the link, include:

“WHY DO YOU HATE MY COUNTRY! WHY DO YOU HATE MY CONSTITUTION? WHY DO YOU HATE MY DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE?”
And:
“Well, I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the hell out of here.”

This is not only hateful and indecent, it is absurd. Absurd that the right can spew this kind of ichor and call it rhetoric; absurd that people listen to this foulness. The awful thing is that this meets with success. You know that while a percentage of the listeners were mortified at what they heard, the majority were probably pumping their fists in the air and thinking, “You tell that goddamn Commie pinko hippie bitch!”

A different viewpoint.
Well said, Mr. Levin. Every time you substitute shouting for discourse, vitriol for reasoning, you lose credibility, alienate voters, and drive your party further into irrelevance. Parties cease to exist. It happens. It is hilarious, though bemusing, that the Republicans can’t see that they’re on this path. Part of me shakes my head in horror at this behavior; the other part cackles with glee.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments »

Two American journalists are being held in North Korea, and will receive a sentence soon. I don’t have any illusions that they are receiving anything like a fair trial, and the North has made too big a deal out of this to let them go. They’ll likely destroy their lives by sending them to one of their horrific slave camps and claim a great victory against the imperialist US.

It’s a difficult situation, and the US government has remained silent. That’s understandable; the women did enter the country illegally (though they certainly weren’t “spying” or “conspiring to commit harmful acts”). Does that mean our government’s hands are tied? Apparently. The US has “expressed concern” and is working with Chinese officials to secure their release - but the journalists are still going to trial. It’s probable, too, that the US is more concerned with NK’s nuclear ambitions and warmongering, and feels demanding the journalists’ release would compromise those goals. The devil of it is that NK could send them to prison for the rest of their lives 100% “legally”.

Posted in Korea | No Comments »

I’ve gone through a few recently.

Last week was Readageddon, in which I placed second, reading Doctor Zhivago in four days. In some parts of the world, this is considered a sign of great virility. The book was good, too. There was a lot of dialogue, and a lot of discussion about what’s wrong with Communism, and why art and beauty are good things. Some passages were breathtakingly beautiful, and moved me deeply. The ending frustrated me. We have a character distinguished for his wisdom and common sense; at the end, he makes a self-defeating, dramatically logical but realistically boneheaded decision, dooming himself, his love, and his unborn child to lifetimes of misery. His motivations are unclear; it is not satisfying, and not a worthy end to an otherwise great, nay, titanic novel.
Next year’s Readageddon selection needs to be longer - four days is too short by far.

Then I read The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi, about whom I’ve written before. I’m pleased that Brigades continues the excellence of Old Man’s War - the economical narration, the wit, and the fascinating use of science - and adds tight plotting, which its predecessor lacked. I could never write books like Scalzi’s, but I have the greatest admiration for his work. I look forward to the next one.

Next was Philip Jose Farmer’s A Woman A Day. The cover depicts a handsome, muscular surgeon standing over an unconscious or dead woman on an operating table, a sheet draped over her obviously nude body. He holds a scalpel. Behind him is an array of more unconscious or dead women in some sort of holding pods along the wall. This has very little to do with the story. In fact, I really have no idea why they went with this art. I would guess that the publisher (Berkeley) had no idea how to sell this weird little story, and forced a title and cover art on it to make it seem more about sex and murder. (The original title was The Day of the Timestop, which makes a lot more sense in context of the book.) (Ah, I’m glad the 70s are over.)
The last Farmer novel I read, Night of Light, disappointed me. It didn’t capitalize on its premise, and Farmer has a bad habit of letting his storylines get tangled, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. In A Woman A Day, it worked for the better. There’s a lot going on in these 210 yellowed pages.
There’s a plague that kills three-fourths of the world’s population. There’s a future fascist alliance of Hawaiians and Icelanders that rules North America and Europe, opposed by the Israeli Republics and Bantuland. There are some experiments in telepathy and empathy (”psychosomatism”), caveman bloodsports, sex, murder, and, yes, dissection of a beautiful dead woman. Farmer gets off a few lightning bolts of profundity, particularly when discussing how fascist states can oppress their people by repressing them sexually; anything that hinders a human being’s development makes them easier to oppress, so the Hawaiian-Icelander government represses sexuality via the Sturch, a religion based on time travel. Our heroes, spies from a neighboring small country, fight this with the only possible tactic - sexing up everyone they can, sowing corruption and disillusionment within the ranks of the enemy. Good stuff.

Then I read a novella, “Shadow of the Vulture”, by Robert Howard. I’ve talked, at great length, about my love for his works. His language is sometimes overwrought to the point of silliness, but it functions like opera - emotions writ incredibly large, every gesture made with enough force to level mountains. “Shadow” is one of his historical tales in my collection The Lord of Samarkand, all of which are Christians vs. Muslims stories. The cover makes it seem like they’re about the Crusades, but they vary - the last one I read was about Timur the Lame, and this one was about the 1529 Turkish siege of Vienna - an event covered, coincidentally, in Tim Powers’s surprisingly awesome The Drawing of the Dark. Howard’s treatment has no magic or monsters, though, and sticks fairly closely to history, with the addition of two fictional characters - Gottfried, a stereotypical Howard superman, seven feet tall, thews of steel, etc. - and, more interestingly, Red Sonya, who later became Red Sonja, the “She-Devil with a Sword” of comic and movie demi-fame. Sonya was introduced in this story, but it was a later comic writer who put her in Conan’s world and gave her the classic chain mail bikini. In this story, she’s just an awesome chick, seven feet tall, thews of steel, etc. - basically like almost every other Howard superman, but with breasts. Which is totally awesome.
And, as in the best of Howard’s work, like “The Sowers of Thunder” and “Beyond the Black River”, the violence in this story is more than just an excuse to write sweepingly of blades crunching through chain mail, hewing limbs from torsos and all the other graphic, brutal, and beautiful epic poetry Howard usually gives us. He shows us the fields of dead beyond the immediate melee, and the toll taken on humanity when titans clash; he portrays the sixty thousand casualties of the siege as the monstrous fruit of Suleyman the Magnificent’s ego. It’s pretty weighty for twenty thousand words or so, but I’d expect nothing less from Howard. I can’t imagine how much Schwartzenegger’s Neanderthal performance as Conan put people off Howard’s works. That film, which was the public face of Howard’s greatest protagonist, gave his stories an undeserved reputation as brainless pulp; the truth is they are much more cerebral than one suspects. Howard has undiscovered depths.

Yesterday I began Frank Herbert’s The Godmakers. It’s not what I expected. I’ve always wanted to - nay, felt the obligation to - read this most literary of scifi authors, but I was loathe to pick up the baggage of the whole Dune series, so I figured this would be a convenient entry point. I don’t know what to make of it. The novel is four novellas cobbled together, so the plot feels episodic, the characters fairly thin. The core concept is interesting. After some cataclysmic pan-galactic war, the human worlds lose contact - now, the protagonist has the job of contacting these long lost worlds and determining whether they’re fit to rejoin galactic society. Interesting stuff. There’s some humor, as well, which I wasn’t expecting.

Excelsior!

Posted in Reading | No Comments »

In other world-shaking news, “Tears of Clobbersaurus” is live on Thousand Faces. It’s short! Read it and understand why modern art is a sham.

Because it has failed to depict dinosaurs often enough.

Posted in Stories | 1 Comment »

He’s conducting MORE missile tests from BOTH coasts soon.

And it looks like he’s named a successor. That’s something one does when one feels the icy hand of death on one’s neck, n’est-ce pas?

Posted in Korea | 1 Comment »