Some Recent Photographs

It's been a while since my last post (I think perhaps the longest stretch since this blog's inception) so I want a quick post to catch up. Of course, I have quite a few ideas in the works but not the time to do them, and I may let them die for fresher thoughts.
Here are a few mood pictures from my journey home today from work. The first is near Sinchon station in Seoul; the others are closer to where I live.

Somehow on the bus ride home I was fascinated both by light and by lines. It is ridiculous how many surfaces reflect the many lights of a moving city and the interior of a full bus at night, and how much that light can shift and change with such detail. In this picture I like the dominance of the lines over the distant crowd of small people, the unidentifiable white splot (new word, somewhere between spot and splotch) on the first stripe, and the perspective provided by the lines.
I also thought of something I was told once, that psychologists have shown that lines do not exist out there in the world but are made by our brains. The person who told me this was incredulous about it; I'm still not sure precisely what it means. (What would it mean for lines to be "out there" in the world?) But we certainly make plentiful use of guiding lines in cities. Sometime during the ride, however, it started raining softly and stopped again, so that when I disembarked everything had more of a haze to it. The streets were also shining.


There is a book by a Proust scholar and philosopher called the Art of Travel in which he explains the appeal of lonely night-time scenes of transitional places like roads, train-cars, and hotels using the art of the Edward Hopper, whose paintings invite you to wonder about the solitary figures they depict. Most of his paintings are in transitional travel places that many would see as mundane; for instance, a gas station, an automat, and a hotel room. The man in the first picture passed me walking up the hill in this late night rainy scenery with a business suit and briefcase. It was probably the last leg of his day's journey from his apartment to work and back again, a period of involuntary introspection and quiet when there is nothing to do but put one foot patiently in from of the other to bring himself home. Who knows what is going through his mind - something in Korean, most likely. ;)
Photography is one of the most introspective mediums, but I don't pretend to be an artist in it. The pictures as shown here are as high quality as they're going to get; they were taken on a whim with my cell phone. I also noticed that the pictures don't end up framed as they look on the phone's screen when I try to take the picture, so when I get a picture I like it is usually pure luck. This last one is most like that; I just stuck the phone out of the window of a moving car this weekend during my trip to the southern coast of Korea. I was really lucky to get some of the Korean letters painted on the other lane, which is one of my favorite parts of the picture. I believe those are rice fields and a small bridge in the background.

And we'll end with some pictures near the ocean; I will soon be crossing that beast again at 30000 feet, though to the east, not in this direction, which is south. Those are islands that you see in the distance in the first one. There are quite a few of them in that direction, and many are developed just as the mainland.


Goodnight.

Harvesting Persimmons

A typical Korean countryside autumn scene is that of bright orange persimmons (감) hanging alone from the branches of a persimmon tree (감나무), the leaves of which have already fallen. Fall is also the time to pick the persimmons and eat them, leave them to ripen, or string them together vertically and leave them hanging to dry. Unlike with an apple tree, however, it's not a good idea to climb a 감나무 to try to pick the persimmons - its branches are too brittle. In fact, an old Korean saying or joke upon seeing a child who has broken his arm is to ask if he was climbing a persimmon tree. So how do you get to the persimmons that are so way up high?

I suppose you could just move around a very tall ladder and pick them by hand. But because the branches are so brittle, you can extend your reach and break a branch off for yourself with a simple tool like this:

To break the branch, you just catch it in the nook and twist.
Now, recently my mom came to visit from Oregon and took me to her friends' country home, which is where I took these pictures. One of the first things I did when I got there was to learn how to pick persimmons from their tree since they had so many to harvest. But rather than climbing a ladder with a sack and using the branch-breaking stick, I learned to use a much niftier device that works on the same principle. It looks like this:

So you can see that this is a stick with a sling-shot shape that has a very ratty looking bag hanging from it. This stick is tied to a very long piece of bamboo, which has the advantage of being relatively light and very sturdy. To use this - and this is the fun part - you lift up the stick and enclose a persimmon in the bag from the bottom. Then you push the stick forward and up until the twig that is holding the persimmon is right in the nook of the V shape, the persimmon right under it. There has to be tension between the bamboo stick and the tree for this to work. When you twist the bamboo (and sometimes you have to twist a couple times), the twig breaks and the persimmon plops right into the bag. Like so:

This may seem like a strange post, but for some reason, this was one of my most satisfying and even relaxing experiences in Korea. It's very simple and easy, but it takes some degree of attention and a little skill to guide the stick up past the lower branches and to get it situated right in relation to the persimmons you're trying to get in order for the twisting to work. I liked the simple ingenuity of the tool - which is just a branch, a piece of bamboo, and some cloth and string - and the actual sensed experience of picking fruit this way: the snap of the twig and the increase of weight in your hands as the persimmon(s) fall into the bag fifteen feet up in the air from you, the balancing act of lowering it to the ground while moving your hands under each other to bring the other end of the stick closer so you don't have to walk as far to pick the fruit out of the damp bag, the sounds of the branches and persimmons that sometimes fall unintentionally, the holding of each success in your hand, watching the pile of fruit grow. It could make for another good persimmon-related poem for someone more poetically ambitious than I. It also probably helped my experience that I wasn't really obligated to do any of this work, only as much as I wanted, and that on the day I did most of the picking (unlike when I took these photos, the next day) the weather was great and the persimmons were brighter against the backdrop of a clear blue sky.

Ask a Korean

Sorry for the lack of posts lately; my mom is visiting me now in Korea (all the way from Oregon!) so I've spent less time reading and writing posts and more time traveling and meeting her friends. There is a post in the works as a follow up to my introduction to the Korean language that will attempt to explain all Korean vowels in one fell swoop. In the meantime I want to refer you to a blog that I'm following that is pretty good. It is called "Ask a Korean" and is usually interesting and intelligent, and there's the running joke of the main blogger's speaking in the third person as "the Korean." There's a good discussion of Korean culture, candid and actually intelligent answers to questions involving stereotypes/races, and occasional links to random other things the blogger finds interesting. Mainly he responds to reader questions that are e-mailed him. The most recent post, for example, was about the status and perception of homosexuality in Korea, which is something I'd been wondering about since arriving in Korea but hadn't asked anyone about. So! Without further ado: http://askakorean.blogspot.com/
More idiot posts coming soon...

a poem

Yesterday my uncle and I went to the house of a friend of his that I've seen a few times and really like. His name is Mr. Pak, but we usually refer to him as the Tin Man because of the role he played in a performance they and two pastors put together as part of a yearly community gathering (guess who played Dorothy?). Although he lives near the third biggest metropolis on the globe, he managed to find a neighborhood that feels like the country. He lives there with his wife and son in a traditional style Korean house. They have a small garden around the edges of the house and a small persimmon tree near the gate. He likes to drink country rice-wine and can play the traditional Korean bamboo flute, which along with the following earned him the additional pseudonym "dionysus plays the flute" on my uncle's phone: he has read a lot of and is grateful to Nietzsche. His specialty, however, is James Joyce, on whom he wrote a dissertation (in English!) even longer (and probably better written) than my thesis. He and my uncle like to get together to hike or, more often, to play guitar and sing. Yesterday he kindly translated a verse of a song he had just sung into English so I could get a sense of how beautiful and poetic he felt it to be, and he asked me if I had written any poems. As we were leaving the two of us waited by the persimmon tree for my uncle to come back out and I told him that persimmons reminded me of a poem of that title I once read for a class. He said he would like to read it, so I looked it up at home and figured I might as well share it as an easy post. Before we left, though, he reached into the tree and broke off a bit of branch for me to take home. It has two persimmons on it. I'd never held a persimmon before that save for one other time, the summer after I took that poetry class, when someone sent me one in the mail.

The poet is Li-Young Lee. Enjoy.

My only reservation about persimmons, though, is that they can look suspiciously similar to tomatoes...
(painting by Elizabeth Brandon)

Curses!

I have a valid excuse for the complete lack of posts lately: about a week ago, I got an e-mail notifying me that this blog had been identified as a potential spam blog. As a result, it was "locked" so that I couldn't make or edit posts and had to request someone to review the blog to "unlock" it. The good news, though, is that the blog is now again up and running, and, since it had to be reviewed by a staff member of blogger.com, I now know that at least one person has actually looked at it. :)

I suppose the spam filter arrested the blog because of the questionable use of profanity in its title. So I'll explain. The basic idea is that I have intellectually stagnated since college and this gives me a way to digest those and new thoughts into semi-interesting shit. I titled it the way I did so I didn't feel like each post had to be perfect or super-insightful, in which case I might never post anything. I also didn't want it to have a pretentious tone, which was something to consider since I wanted to write about Nietzsche. Those of you who know me, though, hopefully got that the title is mainly a joke on my name. Personally, it also reminds me of being in Korea, since, because of certain linguistics features of Korean, someone who pronounces my name with a thick Korean accent would get something vaguely towards that direction (though nobody here has actually pronounced that poorly so far). And because of how poorly I speak the language, I am kind of an idiot here, unable to understand the majority of conversation and needing help for a lot of basic tasks like figuring out how to get to an upper floor of a building or knowing which bus I should take.

Incidentally, I was shocked to discover that the most popular family name in Korea, which we all know as Lee, is not actually pronounced with the L in front. In fact, the "ㄹ" sound never begins a word in Korean except in adaptations of English words like "radio". The popular name Lee is actually "이" in Korean, which has no initial consonant sound; it's just "Ee". But I guess that just looks so weird in English letters that they decided to add an L. Likewise, names with the no-initial-consonant "Oo" sound (우) tend to have a W added to them when written in English. Since they are both weak consonants, the pronunciation doesn't change all that much when Western speakers mispronounce them as Lee and Woo, but it's still pretty strange.

At any rate, I've figured out how to type Korean characters using my laptop, so a possible post explaining Han-gul, the Korean alphabet, may be coming up for those who are curious.