Another timely delivery from Seoul's WhatTheBook? We've got three authors I've never read before: Han Kang, Kim Stanley Robinson, and two by Matt Ruff.
Lovecraft Country has a very cool, pulp-themed cover in hardback.
Friday, July 22, 2016
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
True Fact
I approve of everything in this piece as to how "You Can Say It: Summer Is Garbage." Here's a bit on sleeping:
Oh Daegu summer, I do not like you one bit.
"Either you are cooking slowly in a bain marie of your own sweat or you are woken at 3 AM by some inexplicable sunrise or else every single animal in the world has decided to go loudly insane in the heat and as such are growling and chirping outside your bedroom where you, sticky with your own grotesque perspiration, toss and turn on top of a comforter and underneath a sheet because down means up and up means down here in summer, the worst season of the year by far."Leave my bedroom AC on when I got to sleep and risk waking up with pneumonia? Pretty bad, but the only alternative to waking up in a pool of my own dank sweat.
Oh Daegu summer, I do not like you one bit.
Uncharted Territory
I'm willing to bet the strangest part of the multi-month dumpster fire that has been Trump won't be the ongoing convention which has, indeed, been something to marvel at for all the wrong reasons. No, I'm guessing the real Twilight Zone moments will come in about October, with Hillary owning a healthy 8-10 point national lead in polling, and a deep blue Electoral College outlook.
Because that's when Donald Trump, a man who could never possibly allow himself to be beaten by a mere woman, announces that he has received credible threats of a HRC / CIA / Obama assassination plot against himself and his family, and he'll be throwing the nomination back to the Republican Party at a point when it's far too late for them to launch any credible resistance against eight more years of Democratic White House, and probably Senate, and maybe House rule.
I don't normally offer financial advice but it you think popcorn futures were going up last week, just wait until this fall.
Because that's when Donald Trump, a man who could never possibly allow himself to be beaten by a mere woman, announces that he has received credible threats of a HRC / CIA / Obama assassination plot against himself and his family, and he'll be throwing the nomination back to the Republican Party at a point when it's far too late for them to launch any credible resistance against eight more years of Democratic White House, and probably Senate, and maybe House rule.
I don't normally offer financial advice but it you think popcorn futures were going up last week, just wait until this fall.
Monday, July 18, 2016
From Foreign To Common
To say the least, America has a complex relationship with foreign food:
"When immigrant food is brought into the American fold, another big question, aside from whether it will be thought of as high- or low-end, is how long it will be considered exotic; food can be a useful entry point to thinking about how immigrant cultures are absorbed into the American mainstream, and what 'mainstream' might look like in just a few decades. Only 80 or so years ago, The New York Times published an article that, to make a point about how radically Americans’ eating habits were changing, imagined a 'hodge-podge' of “strange dishes” that a family at the time could plausibly plop on the dinner table next to each other, no matter how objectionable such a spread may have seemed. Those strange dishes? Spaghetti, meatballs, corn on the cob, sauerkraut, fruit salad, and apple pie. Yesterday’s strange hodgepodge is today’s boring dinner.
It's an interesting article, but it seems like a lot of foodie trends these days are towards "authentic" (scare quotes!) street food rather than towards the upper end of the dining scale.
"When immigrant food is brought into the American fold, another big question, aside from whether it will be thought of as high- or low-end, is how long it will be considered exotic; food can be a useful entry point to thinking about how immigrant cultures are absorbed into the American mainstream, and what 'mainstream' might look like in just a few decades. Only 80 or so years ago, The New York Times published an article that, to make a point about how radically Americans’ eating habits were changing, imagined a 'hodge-podge' of “strange dishes” that a family at the time could plausibly plop on the dinner table next to each other, no matter how objectionable such a spread may have seemed. Those strange dishes? Spaghetti, meatballs, corn on the cob, sauerkraut, fruit salad, and apple pie. Yesterday’s strange hodgepodge is today’s boring dinner.
For quite a while, in fact, 'foreign' food was simply shorthand for German food. That’s what writers in the Times meant virtually anytime they referred to foreign food between the 1850s, when the paper was founded, and around the 1920s. In the mid- to late 1800s, when relatively poor German immigrants were first arriving in the U.S. en masse, their sauerkraut and sausages were denied incorporation into the American culinary canon. Decades later, only after generations of Germans built wealth and social capital, the hot dog’s American-ness does not require elaboration."
It's an interesting article, but it seems like a lot of foodie trends these days are towards "authentic" (scare quotes!) street food rather than towards the upper end of the dining scale.
Friday, July 15, 2016
Thursday, July 14, 2016
What About The Voice of Geddy Lee?
True Fact: My band in high school covered this song. It almost got one of us laid once.
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Rise Above
Had a very long and, to everyone's surprise, very productive meeting with my co-workers on the research paper. Our methodology is starting to take shape as part of a two-part study (student projects and a select set of one-on-one interviews).
Let's celebrate with some Scottish synthpop, shall we?
New Adventures in WTF, Korea?
I don't think anybody looks forward to a job interview, but in South Korea people, especially women, really don't appreciate them for obvious reasons:
"Among those who said they had unpleasant experiences, 26 percent of them said they felt so because the interviewers ask them questions that are private and totally irrelevant to the job.
Kang, a 26-year-old female job seeker, was recently asked questions like “What kind of man do you like?” She said she is afraid of taking interviews now.
Another female job seeker surnamed Kim said she had a similar experience.
She answered the type of man she prefers and the male interviewer winked at her and said, “then you would want to date someone like me.”
"Among those who said they had unpleasant experiences, 26 percent of them said they felt so because the interviewers ask them questions that are private and totally irrelevant to the job.
Kang, a 26-year-old female job seeker, was recently asked questions like “What kind of man do you like?” She said she is afraid of taking interviews now.
Another female job seeker surnamed Kim said she had a similar experience.
She answered the type of man she prefers and the male interviewer winked at her and said, “then you would want to date someone like me.”
Ugh.
Ripsnorter
I'm about 50 pages from finishing Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. The third book is, frustratingly, the most exciting and the most long-winded. It focuses on the British takeover of Hong Kong from China during the Opium Wars (using mostly Indian troops) and that stuff is great. But he also throws out at least four difference romantic sub-plots that are all pretty similar and not nearly as funny as he seems to think they are.
Also, five pages of a long joke about masturbation is great. 50 pages, not so much.
Still, he’s a master of evocation. You really feel as if you’re there, watching the British annihilate Chinese forces in order to force China to take in opium grown in India. (The gleeful British traders coined the phrase "free trade" to celebrate their triumph.)
It just feels like the final installment was a bit of a chore at 600 pages, whereas I flew through the first two.
Monday, July 11, 2016
I Ain't Afraid of No Reboot
I don't care about the original Ghostbusters or the re-make.
Where's my gold star, internet?
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Work
I'm in my office on a Sunday (!) working on the paper. One of my foreign co-workers / office-mates is also here (!!). Anyhow, tomorrow we're meeting with foreign co-worker no. 3 to start talking methodology for our research paper on using effective questions to build confidence in beginner level English students. Incredibly sexy, no?
So for the past two weeks we've been working on our literature review, and I was given the task of going over 1) foreign language anxiety ("F.L.A.") and 2) differences between Western and Asian teaching styles.
F.L.A. is a surprisingly contentious issue, academically speaking. It's a concept that began in the 1980's but during the 90's people criticized it for focusing solely on the classroom environment and being far too teacher-oriented. F.L.A. definitely exists, but defining it merely as a classroom phenomenon ignores the larger context of people using foreign languages in social and work situations as well. (Technically speaking, the E.S.L. context, where students are living in countries where the "target language" is already being spoken.)
Even more interesting is the literature on Western and Asian (if you prefer, Confucian) teaching and learning styles. There are lots of papers and even some books out there on this issue (believe me!) and, unsurprisingly, lots of debate. The general sense is that while stereotypes about "passive," "submissive" Asian students and "active," "student oriented" Western teachers remain quite strong to this day, lots of good research has shown that this divide tends to be overblown. There may be strong cultural divisions in the classroom, but effective teachers can break these down by empowering their students to participate and learn actively, and by modeling the behavior of how to engage with a teacher as an equal. In the worst case scenario, an English teacher might excuse her own deficiencies with the cultural stereotype that her Korean students are just too damn passive to learn anything.
I could go on. I won't. As far as academic writing goes this is all pretty niche stuff, so it's nice to be turning to the more practical side of things. (Most of our data will come from taped interviews with selected students starting in September.) But this whole project has kind of tickled a part of my brain that I haven't really stretched since graduate school. Changes of pace are usually a good thing.
So for the past two weeks we've been working on our literature review, and I was given the task of going over 1) foreign language anxiety ("F.L.A.") and 2) differences between Western and Asian teaching styles.
F.L.A. is a surprisingly contentious issue, academically speaking. It's a concept that began in the 1980's but during the 90's people criticized it for focusing solely on the classroom environment and being far too teacher-oriented. F.L.A. definitely exists, but defining it merely as a classroom phenomenon ignores the larger context of people using foreign languages in social and work situations as well. (Technically speaking, the E.S.L. context, where students are living in countries where the "target language" is already being spoken.)
Even more interesting is the literature on Western and Asian (if you prefer, Confucian) teaching and learning styles. There are lots of papers and even some books out there on this issue (believe me!) and, unsurprisingly, lots of debate. The general sense is that while stereotypes about "passive," "submissive" Asian students and "active," "student oriented" Western teachers remain quite strong to this day, lots of good research has shown that this divide tends to be overblown. There may be strong cultural divisions in the classroom, but effective teachers can break these down by empowering their students to participate and learn actively, and by modeling the behavior of how to engage with a teacher as an equal. In the worst case scenario, an English teacher might excuse her own deficiencies with the cultural stereotype that her Korean students are just too damn passive to learn anything.
I could go on. I won't. As far as academic writing goes this is all pretty niche stuff, so it's nice to be turning to the more practical side of things. (Most of our data will come from taped interviews with selected students starting in September.) But this whole project has kind of tickled a part of my brain that I haven't really stretched since graduate school. Changes of pace are usually a good thing.
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