I am very sorry for the cancellation.  I know that I sent an e-mail to
either you or [Name Redacted] notifying of same with an explanation.  The
in-stock note was from Amazon because they assume, with reason, that,
if the book is listed, it’s there.  I most definitely have NOT sold
the book but I cannot locate it.  I looked for days and then went back
and did it again.  I store the books in boxes with letter labels.  I
have a distinct memory of having the book in my hand and opening up
box E.  I also have it on my own inventory as Box E.  I have a goodly
number of Korean translations and I have to keep special track of them
as the names can be tricky, sometimes it’s transliterated as Yi and
other times as Li, Jong can be Ch’eon

I then went through a number of boxes in which I had put some of the
more recent Korean titles thinking that inadvertently I put it in one
of them. But nothing.  And then I went back again figuring that
sometimes once you’ve done it your mind will not let you see the books
with fresh eyes.  (I still have the order form with the [Name Redacted] address in
[City Redacted] and I was going to drop a line once I came across it).

I am a book collector myself and know the disappointment of not
getting a book.  (Worse still if it’s stolen.  I had and extremely
rare book on the Celts from 1705 stolen from my hallway at Christmas.
It happens every year but the police and postal inspectors have no
interest whatsoever in stopping this seasonal behavior.  The book
would have been thrown away and be lost to posterity.)

FROM HERE ON IS AN EDIT OF MY FIRST POST..

……EDIT … here is a technical problem between Amazon and some of its dealers…

On January 11th I ordered “Early Spring, Mid-Summer and Other Korean Short Stories (Modern Korean Short Stories)” from focloir through Amazon. I was delighted to find it in stock and  listed at only $22.50, because it is a rare book.  The next day, I received the Amazon confirmation of my order which tells me that all my books will be shipped.

Today, I go to see where my orders are (I had ordered quite a few books) and this order is mysteriously nowhere to be found. Fortunately, I save these kind of emails, so I go back to that email and find my order number

I click on the order number and… nothing….  it goes nowhere. There is no record on Amazon that this transaction has ever existed.

So, I get on the handy Amazon chat and deal with a nice chap who tells me that the order was cancelled (apparently without ever contacting me) because the book was “not in stock.”

Whut?  I go back to look carefully at the confirmation, and I note that even the day after the order, the book is still clearly in stock.

The nice chap on Amazon then says I should file a complaint. “OK,” sez I, “It’s a way to get some justice out of this focloir-up.” Which I do, and I feel slightly better for about 45 seconds until I receive this risible response from Amazon:

Thank you for submitting your report. All reports are reviewed by our investigations team. For privacy reasons, the results of our investigations cannot be disclosed, but please know that we will take any appropriate disciplinary actions.

In other words – Ptooie to you and your stupid complaint, we don’t care to be transparent. Oh, and you won’t get any satisfaction from us, either.

2nd time I’ve missed out on this book, too.

We were chuffed to hear that our brilliant poetry was being considered by the Best Poems Encyclopedia for publication along with the works of such great poets as Pablo Neruda, Robert Frost and Maya Angelou, even though Frost is the only poet on that list we really care for.

Here is the email:

Hello from the editors of Best Poems Encyclopedia,

I see that you’re a poet and a writer, and I would love to connect
with you, so I can invite you to submit your texts for 2011 Best Poems
Awards and featured poets section. This month poets are Kelle Groom
and Martina Newberry for contemporary poets and Pablo Neruda, Robert
Frost and Maya Angelou for all time famous poets.

LOL.. I’m not sure what they are after, but I’m reasonably sure it isn’t me.^^

Chuseok's Bounty!

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHUSEOK

‘Twas the night before 추석, when all through the 집

Not a sound could be heard, not a cicida’s cheep;

The spam boxes were stacked in the cupboard with care,

In hopes that the relatives soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,

While visions of Songpyeon danced in their heads;

While mom in her perm, and I in armsleeves,

Had started to nap neath the old hanok eaves,

When out on the street there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The streetlight reflection from  smoggy night sky

Gave the lustre of noon to my gazing eye,

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,

But an adjeoshi carrying soju and beer!

A little old man, so lively and quick,

At scarfing down ramyeon to avoid being sick.

He spoke not a word, but went straight at his work,

Drinking and eating and then with a jerk,

He turned down the hill and gave a light whistle,

Dancing into the night like the down of a thistle.

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,

“Happy 추석 to all, and to all a good-night.”

UPDATED on Chuseok, along lines suggested by the Gypsy Scholar..

According to the Herald article the Underground Foreign Bookshop has been in business for nearly 30 years, 7 years with the current owner, Lee Ho-ryong. When KTLIT went there yesterday we discovered that Mr. Lee is extremely friendly, speaks great English, and has his cramped store stuffed to the seams with English language books. In addition, he has more books in storage, so if you have a type of book you like, you can talk to him about pulling them into the store. This place is definitely worth looking into and is open from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Monday to Friday.
Phone: (02) 776-7940
Cell: (011) 294-1944
email: hrlee57@naver.com

Now, here’s how you get there. From City Hall Plaza or the City Hall Subway Station (Euljiro 1-ga is also possible) you go to the City Hall Plaza underground market. Here is a snapshot of a map:

The bookstore is very near a large CD/DVD store and the nearest entrance, which is across from the City Hall Plaza (NOT on the Deoksogung side), looks like this:

And to give you an even better idea, here is a broader picture:

The other store is the Beautiful Store Bookshop, which has a relatively small (several hundred, tops) section of books in English (as you enter the store there is a nook with a table, then the second nook on the right contains the English books) in a surprisingly spacious area . This bookstore is a bit more difficult to find. Go the the Hyewha Subway Station and leave by exit 2. Then, after only a few steps, turn left through the Marionnier Park, past the cool sculpture:

Continue straight for two blocks after the park until  the street stops at the Beer Castle:

Turn right here, walk about 500 meters, and then on your right you will see the Beautiful Bookstore. It is down some stairs, and the storefront looks like this (you go in that scary looking door, and down the stairs):

(NOTE: This is the first bit of my effort to recreate the narrative of how I got interested in Korean literature, what it’s meant to me, and a little bit about the literature itself. These essays, if that is the word, will be collected under the “Finding Hong Gildong” menu at the upper right. This may not be interesting to most readers. ^^)

As the plane descended from a clear sky, through angry clouds and down to a surrealistically white Incheon airport, dusted in snow, I was not thinking of Yun Danyeong’s Between Heaven and Hell, a novella which features indistinct whiteness as a main symbol. In fact, I hadn’t heard of that book or seen it, much less read it.

I was thinking of a Calvin and Hobbes comic. After eight years in a job I loathed I had quit. I had proposed to my girlfriend of 14 years. And I had taken a job at a University in Daejon, Korea, leaving both my job and my now fiancée behind.

I had a blog, and before I left the United States I had considered what to post when I landed. The snow clarified it for me.

On December 31^st, 1995, Bill Watterston retired his brilliant comic strip Calvin and Hobbes with a beautiful Sunday panel in which Calvin, a young boy, and Hobbes, his stuffed tiger and friend go out to play in freshly fallen snow. Hobbes says, “Everything familiar has disappeared.” This was more or less how I felt. Calvin responds twice, “It’s a magical world, Hobbes ol’ buddy. …. Let’s go exploring.”

The Final Strip

This seemed to fit how I felt about everything, and it was duly posted to my personal blog. I posted that on February 25^th, 2008 from a hotel near Incheon airport, where I was staying the night, as it was too late to catch anything down to Daejeon. I went out exploring my neighborhood and found a GS25 where I purchased two beers and something that, to appropriated a clever bit of writing from Douglass Adams was “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a sandwich.” I also purchased a Korean newspaper (in English, obviously) and returned to my room to read it, occasionally staring out the window into the blur of snow that continued to fall.

I had only the slightest inkling of where my exploration would take me.

The inkling I did have was that I would explore literature. My Master’s Degree had been in literature. My best friend in the United States was a Korean expatriate who had taken a Comparative Literature degree at the University of California at Berkeley, then gone on to get a Master’s Degree in Translation from the Monterey Institute. I loved to read, as did my fiancée, although I would characterize the kinds of things we read quite differently. In a polite word I would call my reading a bit more literary. She might disagree.^^

In any case, at the time of my landing, I had already established a blog aside from my personal one. The non-personal blog (KTLIT, which you are reading now) was focused on Korean Literature, though I had done very little writing about it. This was largely due to ignorance.

When I first arrived in Korea, I had read one short story (They Won’t Crack it Open by Kim Yong-ik) and one novel (Our Twisted Hero by Yi Mun-yol). I was interested in Korean culture, my best friend was Korean, but it was relatively alien to me despite the fact I had visited twice already. I wanted to dive right in, but I was limited by my poor Korean, lack of reading, and ignorance of the culture.

Still, one of the places were my search for Hong Gildong can be documented to have started, if anything can be said to have ‘started’ anywhere, is on blog, “Morning Calm, Night Terrors,” which was the original name of KTLIT when it was published on blogger. It focused on Korean Modern Literature with a little bit of writing about culture and marketing. On January 6^th, 2006, calling myself “Mr. Crackerman,” I posted:

Mr. Crackerman sez…

Well, here we have the start of some….. thing……

I have plenty to say now, no doubt, but will certainly run out of steam. And Mr. Ox is as phlegmatic and retiring (though equally as broad-shouldered and swivel-hipped) as his namesake. So who know what comes from that quarter?

The notion here, I suppose, is to discuss Korea, Koreans, Korean-Americans and Americans through a primarily critical (in the literary, not attacking sense) lens. I would like this website to eventually grow to include complete forums and IMPORTANT DISCUSSION! .

But I have the megalomania that comes from being an Anglo in the land of Empire.

For the moment I leave it at that as I have just put all this …. “stuff”…. up and must send some info to Mr. Ox.

That post, full of silly bluster and uncertainty, suggests that this was far from the actual start while at the same time it wasn’t really much of a start. In fact the reference to “Mr. Ox” points to a much longer provenance – basically discussions of literature and Korea over soju and Sam-gyap-sal with my best friend.

It is interesting to read this, nearly 5 years later, and notice that I had named the blog for Korean literature, but was far too scared and ignorant to actually talk about Korean literature.

I didn’t begin writing again on KTLIT until after my first semester in Daejeon. Everything was exciting and new (Calvin was right!) and I had barely begun to read Korean literature. I was mainly writing on my personal blog, and about all kinds of things. But once I did, in January 2009, the blog came right along. This was for several reasons.

The first reason, I suppose, is I am flighty. In Geoff Dyer’s highly amusing book, Out of Sheer Rage, in which he recounts his own struggles writing about D.H. Lawrence, Dyer notes:

“There are people who like to complete all the reading, all the research, and then, when they have attained complete mastery of the material, then and only then do the sit down and write it up. Not me. Once I know enough about a subject to begin writing about it I lose interest in it immediately.” 105

And I am a bit like that, so something like the blog was necessary as a kind of ongoing notebook from which I could draw and redraw from as necessary to write papers, articles, etc., when the time came for that.

There was a bit of judgementalism involved as well. Dyer notes that D.H. Lawrence often could not resist beginning to write, to judge. On a trip to Florence, on the very first night, Lawrence’s traveling companions found him, “Fresh off the train, ‘tapping out an article on the state of Florence at that moment without knowing enough about it to make his views of real value.’” (114)

And of course this is a version of what I was doing with my blog – my complete lack of knowledge about Korean literature was far too small an obstacle to stop me. I was full of evaluations and judgments. This book was good. That book was bad. Pundhan Munhak was intolerable. Translation should only concentrate on making works easily digestible to Western readers. I was full of these kinds of absolute ideas. It was all very .. well … western. There was only one right way, my way, and the alternative was the highway.

One interesting side-effect of reading Korean history, literature, and philosophy, is that this kind of Manichean approach, which I certainly still indulge in, has somewhat fallen away. Some of my initial stances remain – I can’t, for instance, fathom why Hwang Sun-won’s Sonagi should be so popular in Korea, the subject of movies, musicals and relentless retranslation and republication. But others have changed. When I first read Buckwheat Season, I was appalled. On the blog I called it a shaggy dog tale without the dog and expressed complete bafflement as to why it was so popular with Koreans. Over time, and the result of more knowledge of Korea and more reading of its fiction, Buckwheat Season has come to make more sense to me.

Finally, I had been studying the blogs of Western expats in Korea long before I had landed. This was initially to try to develop some relationships ahead of my arrival. But it also became clear that a small but growing group of Koreans was watching these blogs, and that this might represent some kind of opportunity in the future. I had no idea what kind of opportunity that might have been, but it seemed like another good reason to work on the blog. Even with that, as mentioned above, the blog did not come into its current form until January 2009. I don’t recall making any kind of resolution for the New Year, but from that point on I, and KTLIT, was away.

It talks about the differences between Granta’s “rollout” of Indian translated literature and now Pakistani translated literature.  The article makes several points, but among the most important is the difference in the KIND of literature that Granta chose to present, and what that might mean for potential readers.

About the Indian lit roll-out it says:

The issue, which consisted largely of contributions from native Indians writing in English, was a testament both to the country’s extraordinary intellectual and artistic richness, and to one of the few legacies of British colonialism that could be unequivocally celebrated by readers in South Asia and the West: a common language.

Which, to my marketing brain, sounds sensible (though I’d like to be clear I’m not saying Korean literature should be written in English, rather that translations should be “a testament both to the country’s extraordinary intellectual and artistic richness.”  The NYT goes on to say:

In the ensuing years, the American appetite for Indian culture has only grown

I would call that a win and walk away. And again, I think the implications for Korean literature are clear: Get some good understandable fiction out there, and the general appetite for Korean fiction will grow.

So.. the Pakistani’s want in, because:

“I think everyone has been waiting for Pakistani literature to burst out,” Fatima Bhutto, another Granta contributor (and a niece and granddaughter of Pakistani prime ministers), told me recently. “It’s always been there, and yet it has been untapped.”

Which sounds very similar to the situation for Korean fiction at the moment, however…..

Then, the NYT discusses the roll-out for Pakistani lit, and guess what, they’ve gone for the equivalent of pundan munhak:

Granta’s Pakistan is a country of jihadists, anti-Americanism and increasingly misogynistic and brutal forms of Islam. Mohsin Hamid’s terse short story, for example, is a first-person tale of being beheaded; it ends with the narrator describing “the sound of my blood rushing out.”

The strong implication there being that this is not exactly what English readers are going to flock to. Isaac Chotiner, the author, attempts to leave us with the conclusion that, “oh, this is ok, I guess it could lead to more cultural understanding,” but that sentiment seems forced.

All of which I post, of course, because of the similarities one can find between the Granta Pakistani effort and the general Korean effort. Isn’t it time to choose some works to translate that might be…. “gasp!”…. enjoyable for readers?

If you want to make the next year a great one for the Wikipedia Project, you can find me this book in Korea, rather than my having to order it from Amazon and wait 3-6 (minimum) weeks for delivery.

Other than that?

Stay dry!

300 posts
Over 100 Twitter followers
A relatively pathetic 35 followers of the RSS feed
Nearly 450 comments, AND…..

(drumroll please!)

about 5,000 spam comments! (Thank you Askimet!)

A nice Installation/Interaction Piece

With a catalog featuring two new short stories by Kim Young-ha, it is clear that he was somehow in the minds of the organizers of Media City Seoul’s  “Trust” Exhibition.

I had a chance to talk with the organizers, and it turns out that  he was not only on their minds, but also an inspiration for the exhibition.  This makes a certain amount of sense, as the theme of “Trust” zig-zags through “Your Republic is Calling You.”

I interviewed the curator, a video I hope to have up tomorrow, and she was quite clear that Kim was on their minds.

The two new stories are Head (which is not dirty!), a story about trust and lack of trust that pulls it off in less than one page. The other story is Promise, which also, and in amusing detail, discusses trust in public and private.

You may have to visit the exhibition to read these (I’m going to ask if I can link them), as they may not be printed beyond the catalog. We shall see… In any case, the kickoff of the event is described below.

The opening event for Media City Seoul’s 6^th Biennial exhibition, this year called “Trust,” is at 5pm on Monday the 6^th at the Seoul Museum of Art.

I had a chance to visit the exhibit during its sneak-preview on Saturday, and it is an art exhibit worth seeing. Focusing on art in modern media – often video art, but also presentation, photo, and performance arts – the exhibition examines the duality of trust, particularly in a modern and increasingly technologized world.

The opening event will feature an exclusive music performance by Tarek Atoui (which promises to be dramatic and loud, if the rehearsals were any example) in front of the Seoul Museum of Art.

One of the truly exciting pieces at the exhibition is the Blast Theory’s audience-performance piece Ulrike and Eamon Compliant. The piece is a sound work that walks audience members through the direct surroundings of SeMA while giving directions and asking questions of the audience member. The piece has a great ending, and I urge anyone who attends to NOT be scared by the fact that they are being asked to participate.

The exhibition catalog is extensive, and contains two new short fictions by Kim Young-ha, which were commissioned for the event.

Browsers interested in following learning more about the exhibition can keep in touch online:
webpage: http://www.mediacityseoul.org
blog page: http://trustseoul.worpdress.com
twitter account: http://twitter.com/mediacityseoulE
flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mediacityseoul/sets/

Dates: Through November 17^th
Times: Tuesday – Sunday, 10.00 am – 9.00 pm, Weekends & Holidays, 10.00 am – 7.00 pm, closed on Mondays.
Location: Seoul Museum of Modern Art, Simpson Memorial Hall of EWHA Girls High School, Gyenghuigung Annex of SeMA, Seoul Museum of History (All in or around City Hall)
Admission: Adults W3,000, Students/Soldiers W2,000, Under 18/Senior FREE

I Defy You, Feminazis!

While poking around the intarwebs I come across a PDF version of From Wonso Pond. Which, of course, I can’t purchase because I live in the country in which From Wonso Pond was written and not Canada or the US.

Sure.. that makes sense? ^^

And as I read the page I further discover that I am not allowed to

1) Copy the PDF

2) Print the PDF, or

3) WTF!?!?!? I can’t read it aloud?

The “feminist press” at CUNY is totally out of their ‘mynds’!