Progress Report 9.1
Amyongh hasseyo, mo'fos.
How you doing? Good stuff. Me? Pfft. Not too bad, I suppose, but I've got an issue to deal with before we get down to business this week.
After last week, I received an email from one Nicholas 'I live in Henley' Clark, that slammed Progress Report 8.1 as, *ahem*, 'lacklustre'. Yes, lacklustre. As in 'lacking brilliance'. In fairness, I'm happy to concede that last week's dispatch was not one of my greatest efforts, but I really don't think it deserved such a gloves-off critical mauling. It's led to much introspection on my part as I've analyzed the content, timbre and rhythm of the report, sifting for a lack of lustre on each criterion; holding each word up to the light and checking every morpheme with a jeweller's loupe. My findings concluded that if there was a problem with Progress Report 8.1, it is that I've now reached the point in my Korean project where I'm failing to distinguish the irreducible difference of life on this curious peninsular. The peculiar has become normalized.
It is with this in mind that I've dragged myself through the past week with a particularly keen eye, looking for the details that eight weeks ago would have had me stopping and staring and clenching my fists. For instance, I don't even flinch now when I enter a restaurant and I'm expected to take my shoes off and sit on the floor. When I encountered this for the first time, I was outrage incarnate. 'Get up off the damn floor, you animals!' I demanded, as I dragged dumbfounded diners to their feet by the back of their shirt-collars. However, one quick lesson in Korean customs and a severe beating from the waitress later, I began to understand. This is the traditional way to eat in Korea, apparently. It's especially good in winter, when you can be closer to the underfloor heating. I might not like it (I have the suppleness of a poppadom so find sitting cross-legged a bind), but I've got used to it. Obviously, there's no sense or logic to it - it wouldn't be Korean if there were - but I've granted it the honour of my acceptance.
Also now languishing in the stately pleasure-dome of my assent is the norae-bang, or karaoke room. Endemic wherever bars gather and soju flows, these establishments offer groups of drunken revellers the opportunity to shout into a microphone along to awful electronic re-renderings of their favourite pop tunes in the comfort of a private room and the accompaniment of random images from someone's holiday videos on the big screen. In Korea, karaoke isn't just for ageing slappers who dream of wowing Simon Cowell with their take on 'I Will Survive' as he fortuitously passes through the lounge of the Dog & Hammer - no, it's a big part of a night out for everyone. I've been to a norae-bang at least five times that I can remember in the past two months, compared to the three vaguely-toe curling attempts at karaoke I'd chalked up in the twenty-nine years prior.
When rupturing my norae-bang hymen, I was all apprehension, but as soon as I realised that you're not expected or even meant to sing with any degree of ability, they couldn't get the microphone out of my hand. Musical illiteracy is no obstacle to your enjoyment of the norae-bang - I've heard Korean girls cover three octaves in the space of one syllable - but the lack of choice of Western choons is a bit of a bummer. The song directory is as thick as a phone book, but only six pages are devoted to songs in English. How these titles are chosen is a mystery that science could never unravel. No credence is given to the popularity or previous commercial success of the artists, hence Nazareth, Stryper and Skid Row all find themselves inexplicably well-represented, but in amongst the shite there's a few nuggets of pop sweetcorn - 'Sloop John B', 'The Boxer', and even 'Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You' by Led Zep, which I performed on Saturday night in full wailing, soaring Robert Plant mode. Needless to say that my audience were left crotch-sodden.
The other five hundred or so pages of the norae-bang directory are occupied by K-Pop classics. K-Pop? Korean pop. Unless you've been here and sought it out, you will be completely and blessedly unfamiliar with even the most chart-busting of K-Pop anthems. This is a shame, as I find myself constantly surprised by the harmonic sophistication, rhythmic inventiveness and the dynamic instrumentation that keeps Korean pop as an artform forever reinventing itself and surprising the listener in ways they couldn't have imagined... Only joking, of course - Korean pop is retarded, asinine swill, just as pop music should be. But there's something charmingly naive and uncynical about it that leaves you unable to dismiss it completely, especially when a good-looking Korean girl is caterwauling along to it at the norae-bang and your vision's been softened by soju.
Speaking of reduced optical accuity, I recently learnt that no-one in Korea suffers from the blight and heartache of long-sightedness. Amazing, isn't it? However, don't unfurl the bunting just yet, as the downside to this medical miracle means that your lacklustre adventurer has been left high-and-dry without contact lenses for the past two weeks. After a fruitless day trawling the streets of a rainy Seoul, being directed hither and thither by well-meaning opticians like a younger JR Hartley, I was forced to the conclusion that if I wanted +2.25 lenses with a base curve of 9 and a diameter of 14, I wasn't going to get them from a Korean. It's okay though -you needn't to sprint to Vision Express - I've got a three month supply winging their way to me as we speak. But who'd have guessed that I'd have come up against a closed door for such a simple requirement? Not me. But now you know...
At this point, you might be suspecting that I'm becoming complicit in the various crimes against taste and common sense commited in Korea on a daily basis, and to a certain extent you'd be right. I'm only moderately ashamed to admit that I own a Burberry umbrella (it's okay - I didn't buy it. I found it in a taxi. It was under the driver's seat, as it goes...), but even this guilty sin can be left by the wayside now as the rainy season draws to a close and the umbrella can be left broken in the gutter where it belongs. There are certain wrong-doings, however that I shan't have on my conscience. Chief among these is accepting as reasonable the beliefs of Christians. It's not like it is back home, where Christians know their place. Here, being Christian is not seem as a mark of shame but almost something to be proud of. Just the other day, I saw an old woman pass unharrassed through a subway carriage as she swore a firey death-in-eternity for all non-believers there present. If she'd tried such a trick on the tube, she'd have been meeting Jesus a lot sooner than she might have previously countenanced.
It's this attitude of tolerance that also grants my students the courage to express moronic biblical opinions in my conversation classes. No longer do I persecute them for their blind and cowardly beliefs though, as I've found a much more satisfying way of dealing with them - a little game I call 'rhetorical chess'.
The premise is simple. Your opponent cites a Christian view that is virulently offensive to those possessing critical faculty. You give yourself a limited number of moves to put them in checkmate; that is to silence them, or, in the parlance of my schooldays, to 'clamp' them. Let's look at an example. Stupid, pointy-faced Christian has played a weak offence on the subject of credit and debt, and despite some perfunctory bloodletting in the middle ranks, no real attempt has been made on the king. The conversation moves onto bankruptcy. 'Bankruptcy is a judgement against those who lead an extravagant lifestyle,' states Christian. Teacher to play; checkmate in three moves.
Can you see where to go next? Visualize the board. Look at his position. Got it yet?
Let me give you the solution. Teacher counters with: "Is your lifestyle extravagant, Kwang?"
It's an aggressive move which Christian is forced to defend against. 'No,' he predictably responds, leaving himself hopelessly vulnerable.
Teacher goes in for a surgical kill: "Would a North Korean think that your lifestyle was extravagant?"
There it is. Mate. Checkmate. The game is poetic in its beauty, isn't it? I sat back rightly proud of that gambit as Christian made a face like a goldfish that had leapt out if its tank, but I did resist the urge to stick my finger in his face and tell him: 'Aaah! CLAMPED!'
He hasn't been back to class since, which is a magnificent bonus, but there are tougher opponents to challenge. One of them is a principal at a local high school, and we had a fascinating exchange of pieces on the subject of gay marriage and adoption, but I refrained from taking his king as he had a look about him that suggested that he might reach across the board and break my nose. Sometimes I'm willing to be tolerant of others' beliefs...
Right, I've got a bumper round of thanks to distribute this week as the postman brought me a hefty parcel of books that I assume had been hiding out at the post office for some time. He tried to explain something about the package in Korean and I had to shoo him away. First on the thanks-list is one Xanthe 'Please-Don't-Mention-My-Surname' Butterwedge (not her real name), who blessed me with the following: The Last King of Scotland, by Giles Foden; Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh; Death and the Penguin, by Andrey Kurkov; Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami and The Tiger in the Smoke, by Margery Allingham. Xanthe receives gratitude so thick and creamy that you could stand a teaspoon up in it.
Xanthe has effectively wrecked the grading curve of future gratitude with such a magnaminous donation to my appeal, and I've no doubt that Mark 'Cruelshoes' Surname-Unknown will be absolutely furious at her when I offer him inevitably more watery gratitude for his nonethless magnificent contribution of 'A Journey Through America With The Rolling Stones', by Robert Greenfield and 'Cover-Up of Convenience' by John Ashton and Ian Ferguson. And more furious will Chris 'Ginger, Out and Proud' Laity be when he finds that his gratitude is thinner still, despite the fact he sent me 'Beckett', by A Alvarez; 'Man and Superman', by George Bernard Shaw; 'The Alchemist' by Ben Jonson and a collection of plays by Pinter, Willis Hall and NF Simpson.
Alas, Sam 'Smut-Peddlar' Pinney will find my gratitude spent, and despite his best efforts to perk it up by sending me a copy of his she-scud periodical Scarlet, I'm afraid he'll have to wait til next week for his thanks.
I'm still only too happy to accept further donations to my appeal if you haven't already pledged. Whatever you want to send I shall be delighted to receive. Honestly, anything.
That just about does her for now. I should have some photos for you midweek, so if you've nothing else to live for, please stave off your suicidal urges until then.
Amyonghi kasseyo for now,
S
How you doing? Good stuff. Me? Pfft. Not too bad, I suppose, but I've got an issue to deal with before we get down to business this week.
After last week, I received an email from one Nicholas 'I live in Henley' Clark, that slammed Progress Report 8.1 as, *ahem*, 'lacklustre'. Yes, lacklustre. As in 'lacking brilliance'. In fairness, I'm happy to concede that last week's dispatch was not one of my greatest efforts, but I really don't think it deserved such a gloves-off critical mauling. It's led to much introspection on my part as I've analyzed the content, timbre and rhythm of the report, sifting for a lack of lustre on each criterion; holding each word up to the light and checking every morpheme with a jeweller's loupe. My findings concluded that if there was a problem with Progress Report 8.1, it is that I've now reached the point in my Korean project where I'm failing to distinguish the irreducible difference of life on this curious peninsular. The peculiar has become normalized.
It is with this in mind that I've dragged myself through the past week with a particularly keen eye, looking for the details that eight weeks ago would have had me stopping and staring and clenching my fists. For instance, I don't even flinch now when I enter a restaurant and I'm expected to take my shoes off and sit on the floor. When I encountered this for the first time, I was outrage incarnate. 'Get up off the damn floor, you animals!' I demanded, as I dragged dumbfounded diners to their feet by the back of their shirt-collars. However, one quick lesson in Korean customs and a severe beating from the waitress later, I began to understand. This is the traditional way to eat in Korea, apparently. It's especially good in winter, when you can be closer to the underfloor heating. I might not like it (I have the suppleness of a poppadom so find sitting cross-legged a bind), but I've got used to it. Obviously, there's no sense or logic to it - it wouldn't be Korean if there were - but I've granted it the honour of my acceptance.
Also now languishing in the stately pleasure-dome of my assent is the norae-bang, or karaoke room. Endemic wherever bars gather and soju flows, these establishments offer groups of drunken revellers the opportunity to shout into a microphone along to awful electronic re-renderings of their favourite pop tunes in the comfort of a private room and the accompaniment of random images from someone's holiday videos on the big screen. In Korea, karaoke isn't just for ageing slappers who dream of wowing Simon Cowell with their take on 'I Will Survive' as he fortuitously passes through the lounge of the Dog & Hammer - no, it's a big part of a night out for everyone. I've been to a norae-bang at least five times that I can remember in the past two months, compared to the three vaguely-toe curling attempts at karaoke I'd chalked up in the twenty-nine years prior.
When rupturing my norae-bang hymen, I was all apprehension, but as soon as I realised that you're not expected or even meant to sing with any degree of ability, they couldn't get the microphone out of my hand. Musical illiteracy is no obstacle to your enjoyment of the norae-bang - I've heard Korean girls cover three octaves in the space of one syllable - but the lack of choice of Western choons is a bit of a bummer. The song directory is as thick as a phone book, but only six pages are devoted to songs in English. How these titles are chosen is a mystery that science could never unravel. No credence is given to the popularity or previous commercial success of the artists, hence Nazareth, Stryper and Skid Row all find themselves inexplicably well-represented, but in amongst the shite there's a few nuggets of pop sweetcorn - 'Sloop John B', 'The Boxer', and even 'Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You' by Led Zep, which I performed on Saturday night in full wailing, soaring Robert Plant mode. Needless to say that my audience were left crotch-sodden.
The other five hundred or so pages of the norae-bang directory are occupied by K-Pop classics. K-Pop? Korean pop. Unless you've been here and sought it out, you will be completely and blessedly unfamiliar with even the most chart-busting of K-Pop anthems. This is a shame, as I find myself constantly surprised by the harmonic sophistication, rhythmic inventiveness and the dynamic instrumentation that keeps Korean pop as an artform forever reinventing itself and surprising the listener in ways they couldn't have imagined... Only joking, of course - Korean pop is retarded, asinine swill, just as pop music should be. But there's something charmingly naive and uncynical about it that leaves you unable to dismiss it completely, especially when a good-looking Korean girl is caterwauling along to it at the norae-bang and your vision's been softened by soju.
Speaking of reduced optical accuity, I recently learnt that no-one in Korea suffers from the blight and heartache of long-sightedness. Amazing, isn't it? However, don't unfurl the bunting just yet, as the downside to this medical miracle means that your lacklustre adventurer has been left high-and-dry without contact lenses for the past two weeks. After a fruitless day trawling the streets of a rainy Seoul, being directed hither and thither by well-meaning opticians like a younger JR Hartley, I was forced to the conclusion that if I wanted +2.25 lenses with a base curve of 9 and a diameter of 14, I wasn't going to get them from a Korean. It's okay though -you needn't to sprint to Vision Express - I've got a three month supply winging their way to me as we speak. But who'd have guessed that I'd have come up against a closed door for such a simple requirement? Not me. But now you know...
At this point, you might be suspecting that I'm becoming complicit in the various crimes against taste and common sense commited in Korea on a daily basis, and to a certain extent you'd be right. I'm only moderately ashamed to admit that I own a Burberry umbrella (it's okay - I didn't buy it. I found it in a taxi. It was under the driver's seat, as it goes...), but even this guilty sin can be left by the wayside now as the rainy season draws to a close and the umbrella can be left broken in the gutter where it belongs. There are certain wrong-doings, however that I shan't have on my conscience. Chief among these is accepting as reasonable the beliefs of Christians. It's not like it is back home, where Christians know their place. Here, being Christian is not seem as a mark of shame but almost something to be proud of. Just the other day, I saw an old woman pass unharrassed through a subway carriage as she swore a firey death-in-eternity for all non-believers there present. If she'd tried such a trick on the tube, she'd have been meeting Jesus a lot sooner than she might have previously countenanced.
It's this attitude of tolerance that also grants my students the courage to express moronic biblical opinions in my conversation classes. No longer do I persecute them for their blind and cowardly beliefs though, as I've found a much more satisfying way of dealing with them - a little game I call 'rhetorical chess'.
The premise is simple. Your opponent cites a Christian view that is virulently offensive to those possessing critical faculty. You give yourself a limited number of moves to put them in checkmate; that is to silence them, or, in the parlance of my schooldays, to 'clamp' them. Let's look at an example. Stupid, pointy-faced Christian has played a weak offence on the subject of credit and debt, and despite some perfunctory bloodletting in the middle ranks, no real attempt has been made on the king. The conversation moves onto bankruptcy. 'Bankruptcy is a judgement against those who lead an extravagant lifestyle,' states Christian. Teacher to play; checkmate in three moves.
Can you see where to go next? Visualize the board. Look at his position. Got it yet?
Let me give you the solution. Teacher counters with: "Is your lifestyle extravagant, Kwang?"
It's an aggressive move which Christian is forced to defend against. 'No,' he predictably responds, leaving himself hopelessly vulnerable.
Teacher goes in for a surgical kill: "Would a North Korean think that your lifestyle was extravagant?"
There it is. Mate. Checkmate. The game is poetic in its beauty, isn't it? I sat back rightly proud of that gambit as Christian made a face like a goldfish that had leapt out if its tank, but I did resist the urge to stick my finger in his face and tell him: 'Aaah! CLAMPED!'
He hasn't been back to class since, which is a magnificent bonus, but there are tougher opponents to challenge. One of them is a principal at a local high school, and we had a fascinating exchange of pieces on the subject of gay marriage and adoption, but I refrained from taking his king as he had a look about him that suggested that he might reach across the board and break my nose. Sometimes I'm willing to be tolerant of others' beliefs...
Right, I've got a bumper round of thanks to distribute this week as the postman brought me a hefty parcel of books that I assume had been hiding out at the post office for some time. He tried to explain something about the package in Korean and I had to shoo him away. First on the thanks-list is one Xanthe 'Please-Don't-Mention-My-Surname' Butterwedge (not her real name), who blessed me with the following: The Last King of Scotland, by Giles Foden; Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh; Death and the Penguin, by Andrey Kurkov; Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami and The Tiger in the Smoke, by Margery Allingham. Xanthe receives gratitude so thick and creamy that you could stand a teaspoon up in it.
Xanthe has effectively wrecked the grading curve of future gratitude with such a magnaminous donation to my appeal, and I've no doubt that Mark 'Cruelshoes' Surname-Unknown will be absolutely furious at her when I offer him inevitably more watery gratitude for his nonethless magnificent contribution of 'A Journey Through America With The Rolling Stones', by Robert Greenfield and 'Cover-Up of Convenience' by John Ashton and Ian Ferguson. And more furious will Chris 'Ginger, Out and Proud' Laity be when he finds that his gratitude is thinner still, despite the fact he sent me 'Beckett', by A Alvarez; 'Man and Superman', by George Bernard Shaw; 'The Alchemist' by Ben Jonson and a collection of plays by Pinter, Willis Hall and NF Simpson.
Alas, Sam 'Smut-Peddlar' Pinney will find my gratitude spent, and despite his best efforts to perk it up by sending me a copy of his she-scud periodical Scarlet, I'm afraid he'll have to wait til next week for his thanks.
I'm still only too happy to accept further donations to my appeal if you haven't already pledged. Whatever you want to send I shall be delighted to receive. Honestly, anything.
That just about does her for now. I should have some photos for you midweek, so if you've nothing else to live for, please stave off your suicidal urges until then.
Amyonghi kasseyo for now,
S
posted by Stephen Beckett at 7:24 PM
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