Complaints Department
There’s nowhere to get breakfast in Pohang on the weekends. It’s crazy. Say you’re up at 8AM and decide to walk along the beach, if you’re lucky maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a coffee shop open. Even the toast places don’t open until 10:30AM. And. They. Make. TOAST!?! Doesn’t anyone in this town want to drink coffee outside of their house early on a Saturday morning?
It’s become so bad I’m starting to daydream about opening up a restaurant that would just serve two eggs, toast, and hash browns. We’d be open from 6AM to noon and that’s it. Nothing but breakfast.
I also regularly daydream about learning how to play Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” on the ukelele, so yeah, pipe-dreams both of them.
4 Books and a Stuffed Gorilla
1. The Greek Myths Vol. 1 by Robert Graves
From a scholarship standpoint I hear this is a bit ofan unsightly conglomeration of fornicating individuals notable for its awkwardness (a clusterfuck), but damn this book has life in it. Graves is shoe-horning all the myths into his grand unified theory of mythology as laid out in The White Goddess, but he believes it and allows the mythology to inform his own work, so in a way they are accurate in the sense of mythology being a living thing that people can still embrace as meaningful in their lives, and not something dead and confined to the dust. Great stuff in here.
2. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
A bit of a masterpiece for its style and oblique plotting alone, even if its characters and situations often irritated me. In a way it reminded me of Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust. Similar jazz-age setting and critique ending in chaos, though Waugh is a more adept stylist using vignettes of varying “thickness” to develop his story. The reader at the end is left feeling the emotions Waugh’s characters are incapable of.
3. The Edogawa Rampo Reader by Edogawa Rampo
A decent collection though not as good as Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. The highlight story was “The Air Raid Shelter” about a pyromaniac during the firebombing of Tokyo. It delivered the oddly captivating creepy. But the essays at the back are great.
4. Girl in Landscape by Jonathan Lethem
Aesthetic YA science fiction, is that a thing? If so that’s what this is. If not, well, that’s what it is still. It’s set in the future on another planet, but that’s more window dressing on the narrative than a thing you get details about, and science fiction in the way JG Ballard is science fiction. Teenager Pella Marsh and her family leave a dystopian future Brooklyn for a frontier life on the Planet of Archbuilders. John Ford’s The Searchers ensues except mashed somewhat with the spirit of Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time Slip.
These Days
Jin and I got smartphones. There’s the first picture.
Look! It’s Pohang!
This is the end point of the harbor where it becomes a stagnant canal. If you walk straight across the water (what? You can’t?) you’ll pass the fishing fleet on your left, and the ship repair dry docks on your right, then you’ll come upon a few scrap heaps, and the ferry boat landing before passing the lighthouse and going out into the Sea of Japan East Sea.
Lovely, no? The plan’s to extend this canal down to the river. So they’re bulldozing the entire neighborhood behind me, which coincidentally is where I teach.
Speaking of teaching, the semester starts again tomorrow. This year I’ll be teaching 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades. It should be… interesting. Of course, I’m not teaching any of the students I taught last year, which, you know, would have made sense. But because of the internal rift between the English teachers at my school I get to start with all new students. Don’t ask. Or do, but don’t suspect an answer other than a shrug and a “I don’t make the schedule.” I don’t quite get it myself. Basically the two English teachers at my school don’t get along, and it’s tiresome.
Still, new students, and they want be all jaded like my 6th graders were. No more listening to poorly executed swears like “Pak you! Shut up your mouse!”
Shut up your mouse. Adorable.
Help Me, Ken Watanabe. You’re My Only Hope.
I still get stressed out whenever I have to get my haircut.
Last year I made the mistake of going to one of my student’s mom’s place to get my haircut. This was a bad idea. The woman’s “face” ended up being on the line, so basically she cut two hairs, fled across the room, made me some coffee, and then ushered me out. After that I stuck with the woman who kept the place beside the headstone seller. She was not related to any of my students and didn’t have to worry about what might happen if *gasp* the English teacher got a bad haircut.
The guy I go to now looks a bit like Rick Hunter from Robotech except with glasses.
I start panicking when he hands me the “Style Book”. The book’s full of handsome guys like this:
Hmmm. Maybe next time I'll ask for the Tony Leung.
And, when I need a haircut, I sort of look like this:
But I’ve figured out a method now. So when Rick hand’s me the book I pretty much flip through it and find the picture of Ken Watanabe. This is my go-to haircut at the moment. It’s not bad and as it grows out it becomes like two other decent haircuts.
Though I’m still lazy as shit about getting my haircut regularly and spend far longer looking like Robert Donner than any guy really should.
Quotidian Pohang – Three Day Weekend Edition
Stuff done this weekend:
Ate noodles and hotteok, not together but on the same day. While eating noodles the restaurant owner gave me some tips on how to hold my chopsticks. Hotteok remains delicious if not nutritious.
Printed out Clusterfuck, the Novel (it’ll either be called The Crooked Ones or Castle Junction depending on which pile of story-corpses wins the fistfight). This necessitated purchasing a printer and three printer cartridges to print the whole thing.
A new coffee shop opened up near us. It’s next to one of the faux-French bakeries. Drank lots of coffee. Also lots of green tea. Jin and I had a conversation about the difference between “being lucky” and “being fortunate”. We decided it came down to degrees of randomness and one’s response to that randomness, with “being lucky” being more random than “being fortunate”.
Would you agree or disagree?
Back to work tomorrow…
Quotidian Pohang
The momentary thrill of drinking can end your happiness forever.
Banga Waeyo!
I started taking a Korean class at one of the colleges here. Most of my fellow students are exchange students from across Europe and Asia. (It’s fun being in a class where the Austrian guy makes an “oh la la” joke about the French guy.) Another student is the wife of one of the school’s visiting professors, and the rest of us (three including myself) are Public School English teachers.
Let me first say I am lousy at languages. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me, you’d have noticed I can barely speak English with ease and it’s my native language. I’ve screwed the pooch in every language class I’ve ever taken.
But I’m making the effort here, because I consider myself better organized than at those times. I know what’s in store and I have a grasp of what I need to do. It doesn’t mean I do it. I don’t study everyday like I should, but it’s better than never, which is an improvement. I’m also living in the culture and living with a native speaker so I’m learning in a different environment (not to mention it’s the only class I’m taking).
One positive side effect is it’s making me approach my own teaching differently. I can see the why behind some of my students’ mistakes and possible ways to explain tricky pieces of grammar to them by relating it to something in Korean. So overall it’s a net plus, even if my brain feels a bit more fried than usual.
Another side effect is I keep trying to form a narrative out of all these examples and illustrations in the book. The main character is a vapid umbrellaless American named Andy who travels across Korea asking women questions with all the blond-haired charm of a rather boisterous but earnest puppy.
Banga waeyo, Andy-si!
Quotidian Pohang
Blue skies from school’s back window.
Yesterweird 