Serendipity DooDah!

Just dorking around on the intarwebs trying to find contact info on my beloved Kim Yong-ik and, lo and behold, the Korea Journal has placed their archives on the web and there are 6 "new" pieces. Three are some kind of retread, so it may be that Kim was starting to coast in his late life. In any case, I'm excited to find them and the pieces are:

"Andy Crown" - Published in Nov. 1987: This is a pretty bad retelling of the "They Won't Crack It Open" story with the US lead cast as a Black Man. Nicely, this re-writing supports my contention that Kim is most effective when least overtly political.

"The Gold Watch" - Published in March 1989: This one is new to me and I will have to read it before comment.

"The School Bell" - April 1990: This is a chapter from "The Happy Days" (1960) published as a short story.

"The Smuggler's Boat" - March 1965: This is new to me, even though it is by far the oldest of the stories found here.

"Village Moon" - December 1983: This is a part (although a quick reading seems to catch some substantial differences) of the play "The Moon Thieves" which was written prior to 1982.

"Village Wine" - December 1983: A new one; a play featuring a US soldier in a Korean style house.

Paper accepted at "ENGLISH and ASIA: First International Conference on Language and Linguistics 2008"

In world-record time the folks at this conference got back to me and accepted my proposal for a presentation on Kim Yong-ik. This is in Malaysia around the time of my birthday and the only possible snag is if BPU will let me get away for it.

Well, I'll quit if they don't, really. This is a paper about a Korean author by the employee of a Korean University. I'm part of the wave, baby! ;-)

And it is pretty inexpensive to get there. The conference is 200,000 won and if I were (unlikely) able to get the whole week off the whole thing (flight and hotel inclusive) would be about 1.3 million won.

Not bad for a vacation and work trip.

ah... the rather poor (I have to start writing these things sooner than the day of the deadline) abstract is here:

Kim Yong Ik: Unimagining “Asian American” Through English

Kim Yong-Ik, a Korean by birth and English writer by trade attempted to avoid questions of empire, orientalization, language and literary theory by declaring autonomy from them. Kim was avowedly anti-political, extra-theoretical, and purposefully resistant to ethnic, political or theoretical placement. Kim publicly argued that his work was not concerned with contested terrains, and purposefully wrote in a dispassionate and narratively simple and concrete style. His writings, antithetically to his confessed approach, obsessively concerned themselves with issues attendant to cultural clash: oppression, the state of the outsider to the state, disconnection, diaspora, and the dream of coming to a “home” that was not contested; a home of ancestral imperials and not imperialists. This tension between language use and content essentially mirrored the tensions that Kim was describing between the United States and Korea.

Focusing on “They Won’t Crack it Open,” (The sole remaining work of Kim’s in print) this paper will discuss the arc of Kim’s individual works, literary oeuvre, career, and life and to what extent his approach gave him the freedom to write, to what extent it clashed with his written work and, finally, to what extent he found himself Occidentalized by his self-aware extra-theoretical approach.

Collecting Bones, Korea and Korean Literature. Being Part One.

First, I have to admit that this computer teases me. Old number 10 at the PC Bang always starts up trying to load its "Hamachi adapter."

But it always fails and the sushi is never mine!

O cruel fate...

Anyway.. here's the beginning of a 1 to 5 part thing on borders, korea and its literature. 1 is if I get bored. or distracted..

Hey, is that Rain?

OH...
-----------------------------------

Dokdo
(From Korea.net)

Somewhere in “Snow Crash” Neal Stephenson notes that, “interesting things happen along borders – transitions – not in the middle where everything is the same.”

Which is, of course, why I am in Korea.

Many years ago I collected skulls.

This began when my mother and sister moved far up into some ridiculous mountains for which they should have been issued lisps, stalks to chew on and banjos to play whilst contemplating the sodomization of lost flatlanders. I would visit, and on one visit – lo and behold – I found the skull of something.

As a suburban lad I was shocked and secretly pleased. I grabbed a stick and used it to carry the skull, which was not entirely cleaned by nature, back to my mother’s house.

People shrugged.

Sheep skull.

Sheep were herded in the meadow I had travelled. At the spot where, beginning to walk up the surrounding slopes, I had found the skull, ecologies collided. Wolves skulked in the trees and any sheep unlucky enough to wander out of the meadow risked a brief and lethal interaction.

Food chain.

Still, I was obscurely proud of having found the skull and began collecting animal bones.

I have also always been a fan of trains. I’ve ridden them, legally and illegally, for years and as an inveterate walker have worked out that they work as something like trails. In even the most rural or urban environments you might expect to find some train tracks to walk on. And so I do. I would find the most interesting things there. The tracks in Soda Springs often contained, between them, the creosote-covered bodies of dead frogs. I never quite figured this one out. I guessed the frogs got between the tracks (there were safe watery havens on each side of the raised tracks) and then, in the mid-day heat, could not quite navigate their ways back out. How they got creosoted is still a mystery to me. It had to have something to do with the trains that passed above their corpses, but I could never tease out the exact thing. Possibly, they were quite aware of the tracks they had to hop and were optimistic about how the whole thing would turn out. Right up til that unfortunate moment the… (“whatever”)…. creosoted them.

I wish I could get some kind of grant to explore this phenomenon.

It occurred to me that the railroad tracks were a condensed microcosm of the meadow and the hills and that what I was seeing was the interactions of the borderlands. On the train-tracks, ecosystems collided on a razor-thin border. Train tracks being one ecology, the three yards on either side of them being the next ecology, and then the “normal” world beyond.
In the big city, where I primarily lived, dogs and cats would die, or be disposed of, on the tracks. Occasionally a school child or drunk would be harvested by trains, but I was never allowed to get close enough to this event to win a skull.

Still, I thought “border” and, less charitably, “food chain.”

When I lived in Newark California I frequently found dead chickens on the tracks. This was a different kind of border. These chickens were losers (Other than the “SuperChicken” animated comic of my youth, I am at a loss to point to many times chickens have been winners). Hispanics in the neighborhood had cock-fights and knew they couldn’t toss chickens out in their garbage or they’d be turned in. So they looked for the next ecosystem and tossed their loser chickens there. Once I found some fish that had been tossed out and had resolved to nothing but their cartilagineous and bony cores. I still have on of those fish on a kind of art-thing that I put on the mantle of any home I inhabit. I think everyone should have a little “Yorick” thing in their homes. Just a reminder.

Then I moved to Korea and found the mother of all borders. A land that had no land – it was all borders.
(continued Monday)