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tarigwaemirBlair Hall Apts., on the Feast of St. John
I missed my chance to wish you all a merry Christmas, but happy holidays to everyone nonetheless! Progress on paper: minimal. Progress on gift fics: negligible. It's so easy to lull yourself into a false sense of security at home and feel relaxed even when you shouldn't be. On the other hand, I have managed to catch up on the friends list and inboxes. Here are some various entries I've been meaning to post since Christmas, cut for your convenience.
1. Gift list: As mentioned before, volumes 6-10 of Ravages of Time, translated into Korean. But my parents felt that was too meager a present, so my mother took me to Barnes and Noble and let me pick out three books. I looked for the titles suggested on that book gift meme a while back, but the only one I could readily find was Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma. (Also, my mother refused to get me anything SF/F, which ruled out half the options.) I also picked out Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. I've been meaning to read Calvino ever since someone on the friends list mentioned him on their list of top five books. The Coop displays If on a winter's night a traveler on its table of recommended fiction, and it caught my attention from the first line, but I've never gotten around to looking for it at the library. (Widener organizes its literature shelves by the author's country of origin, and the British fiction is on the first floor of the stacks--you happen on it almost immediately from where you enter--while American fiction is on the second floor, right above. It takes more walking to get to continental Europe though.) But I ended up getting Invisible Cities instead because the blurb on the back conjured up an image too irresistible to ignore: Kublai Khan and Marco Polo against the golden backdrop of the Huang. I'm about a third of the way through, and it's gorgeous, dreamy writing. At times I'm reminded of Borges; at others, Gibran; but mostly it just makes me want to write.
I'm a little more than halfway through Foucault's Pendulum, and enjoying every single second of it. What a fun book! I attempted reading The Name of the Rose once in senior year but what with schoolwork and the dense text, I didn't make it past the first chapter. Maybe I should attempt it again. Foucault's Pendulum is also dense, but also entertaining--well, maybe that's because I'm still in the section where Project Hermes has just started and none of the characters have started to take things entirely seriously yet--and just so enjoyable to read. It's worth noting that most of the occult/religious/mythological references that I recognized were first encountered in fanfiction: just goes to show how reading one's friends list can be educational. ^_^ By the way, I know next to nothing about the Kabalah/cabala/Qabbalah (how are you supposed to spell it?), and I bet I'm missing half the context as a result. -_- Well, at least I knew what gematriya was, thanks to that Chaim Potok phase in high school.
As for Ravages of Time, I finished volume 6 and in the process have considerably expanded my vocabulary. Now I shall be able to converse archaically in Korean about war and strategy and seizing power and changing the world to my heart's content! I had no idea Guan Yu was so poetic by the way, and wow, Lu Bu somehow manages to be two steps ahead of everyone else. I need to reread some of the earlier volumes now.
2. Another drama marathon: Watching SBS historical drama 서동요 (Seodong's Song), which is set during the Three Kingdoms period (Korean, not Chinese). You can clearly see them trying to copy off the 대장금 (Daejanggeum) model, down to the very soundtrack of all things. -_- The problem is that they fail to successfully imitate Daejanggeum's strengths: well-written dialogue, talented actors, gorgeous sets. The script is terrible; the characters keep saying lines twice, a habit that becomes awfully irritating by the fifth episode. If it was restricted to one or two characters and to occasions of emphatic emotion, I wouldn't mind, but it's every single character in the cast in nearly every single scene, and it drives me insane. Also, the sets and the armies are so laughably small that in the first scene, when the Baekje king gets captured by Silla soldiers and ends up beheaded (a real historical event), I commented to my parents, "Well, no wonder he got killed so easily if he was traveling with so few retainers." And why on earth do the Baekje and Silla palaces have the exact same architecture as the buildings shown in dramas set during the Yi Joseon dynasty? I mean, they wore different clothes and had a different state religion and lived, oh, I don't know, a thousand years before, and yet the buildings looked exactly the same? -_- By the way, the Hwarang have the most ridiculous looking hat/helmet ever, with these two long feathers that stick out like antennae. I hope that's not actually based on any historical evidence...
What annoys me most is that the story has such potential to make a really good drama series, and some of the plot twists are genuinely interesting if implausible. The premise comes from Samguk Yusa: a beggar boy named Seodong (means boy who sells potatoes) spreads a rumor that 선화공주 (Princess Seonhwa), a Silla princess, sleeps with him every night. Due to the scandal, the king kicks the princess out of the palace to go live with the beggar boy, who proves to be the illegitimate son of the Baekje king. He eventually rises to the Baekje throne and rules wisely, etc. The drama adds a further twist in that Seodong actually belongs to a group of Baekje exiles who left their country due to factional squabbling between the king's nephew and the crown prince. They are skilled artisans, whose knowledge of various crafts makes them a prize for any country, which is why they must hide their identity in order to remain loyal to Baekje and keep various techniques and technologies secret. An element to politics that's seldom explored, you know. And of course, because no drama is complete without a love triangle, there's a Hwarang who goes undercover with the Baekje artisans so he can steal their technology and bring it to Silla. (As a reward for the completion of his mission, he would be awarded the hand of Princess Seonhwa, who in the meanwhile is in love with our hero, of course.) The story drags a lot at the beginning, when they take several episodes to explain how our hero came to be born and how he escapes with the artisans to Silla and how he meets the princess as a boy and falls in love with her. It's particularly annoying because Seodong as a child is petulant, sullen, lazy, and generally good-for-nothing. It gets more interesting ten years later when he meets the princess again and finds motivation to become a admirable/worthy person. They do stretch plausibility a lot by crediting Seodong with the invention of the Japanese sword (of all things) and ondol (a floor heating system) but nonetheless, the story becomes interesting and would be quite good if only the script were not so terrible. The romantic interludes are awkward; the drama does better when it's in its more shounen moments what with Seodong trying to prove himself and uncover his true identity or when it's focusing on the political maneuverings within and between Baekje and Silla.
A part of that may be due to the genre confusion going on here. What most people consider to be Korean dramas is actually a subset, romantic melodramas or comedies. (A part of this misconception is due to the fact that it's the romances, that is the ones most analogous to soap operas, that get exported most successfully.) Historical dramas actually tend to be mostly about war and politics with little actual romance (not surprising considering most marriages were arranged), but what with unconventional versions like 다모 and 대장금 achieving such popularity, there's been a tendency to try new variations on the old model. So you get things like 서동요 whose premise follows a classic romance and whose execution swerves back and forth between the strict historical drama conventions and the new ones set by recent hits like 대장금. It's like the collision of three genres, and strangely enough, the drama is at its best when it sticks to the old conventions. I say "strangely" because I personally had gotten rather sick of the long 100+ episode retellings of various epochs in Korean history. -_- The wigs are awful, and the martial arts is laughable. (Have you seen a bunch of middle-aged actors try to make swordfighting look cool? It's really sad.) Nonetheless, all is forgivable with a good script. I remember watching one on KBS way back in ninth or tenth grade based on King Taejong's life (I forget the title, something like tears of the dragon, maybe...or was that the one that came afterwards?), which was full of Machiavellian politics. I was moved though by the character of Taejong, who was not a good man and a rather ruthless and ambitious king, who was determined above else to establish a strong united dynasty and maintain stability in the kingdom. In a sense, more honest and true to history than all the royals spouting mechanically about their noblesse oblige to help the people. >_>
Anyway, I don't think we'll bother finishing 서동요 (it's still showing in Korea actually) once we go through all the tapes we rented...unless episode 26 ends on some major cliffhanger. ^_^
3. Family origins: While eating udon after Midnight Mass, one of my parents' friends informed me that my father's family traces its lineage back to a general from 후삼국 시대 (Later Three Kingdoms era, the period of chaos after United Silla fell and before the Koryo dynasty was established), who won some pivotal battle on the Later Koguryo-Later Baekje border and helped Wang Geon establish the Koryo dynasty. For his victory he gained the family name Yi (romanized as "Lee" or "Li" or "Rhee"), hence founding our clan's line. Isn't that neat? My father tells me that the story is apocryphal and that it was mentioned in the Taejo Wang Geon drama, but I hadn't known that before.
A note of context: well, obviously not all Koreans with the same last name are related to each other, but there are still ways to distinguish which ones you are related to. E.g. there are different clans all with the last name of Kim, but they distinguish themselves from each other by the hometown of their founding ancestor. This family information is all in official records, and it used to be that it was illegal to marry someone from the same clan, which was a bit ridiculous because by this point everyone has intermarried enough so that being from the same clan doesn't mean that you're necessarily any more related than two people with different last names altogether. Anyway, the clan that you belong to determines your generational name, although many people have abandoned the traditional naming conventions. You are also supposed to know which branch of the clan you belong to, i.e. from which major ancestor you trace your direct descent, but I don't remember that part at all.
I was looking up references on PubMed and came across several papers in Chinese. They had a translated version of the abstract but no link to the full text (not that I'd be able to read it even if they did have a link), and it reminded me of that part in Flowers for Algernon, where Charlie cites a paper published by an Indian scientist, and the doctors laugh it off because it's not in English. They tell him that not everyone has his facility with languages, which misses the point entirely...of course, in the end, it turns out that the paper was right, and the treatment they used on him to increase his intelligence was doomed to fail. I wonder, how much great science is being overlooked because it's not in English? I mean, it's near impossible to keep up with all the publications that are pouring out in English as it is. Not that the Chinese papers I was looking at were particularly groundbreaking, but still, it makes you wonder. It's also a fact that papers aren't just judged on their scientific merit alone; the quality of writing also affects how your research is received by your peers and funded by organizations. Even if English can act as the scientific lingua franca of today, one wonders if Anglophones will have a slight advantage simply by being more comfortable with the language. On the other hand, just because you grow up speaking a language doesn't mean you'll write well in it, as millions of teenagers on fanfiction.net prove every minute. It's odd how much English is emphasized as an essential component to a scientific education (well, to any education, but especially in a scientific one) overseas but how little American institutions focus on teaching good science writing. (Oh sure, expository writing is a required course in many colleges, but a literature essay is worlds apart from a scientific paper. And the lab reports we write for actual science courses aren't exactly enough preparation. I hear you do get some training in graduate school though.)
Yours &c.
I missed my chance to wish you all a merry Christmas, but happy holidays to everyone nonetheless! Progress on paper: minimal. Progress on gift fics: negligible. It's so easy to lull yourself into a false sense of security at home and feel relaxed even when you shouldn't be. On the other hand, I have managed to catch up on the friends list and inboxes. Here are some various entries I've been meaning to post since Christmas, cut for your convenience.
1. Gift list: As mentioned before, volumes 6-10 of Ravages of Time, translated into Korean. But my parents felt that was too meager a present, so my mother took me to Barnes and Noble and let me pick out three books. I looked for the titles suggested on that book gift meme a while back, but the only one I could readily find was Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma. (Also, my mother refused to get me anything SF/F, which ruled out half the options.) I also picked out Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. I've been meaning to read Calvino ever since someone on the friends list mentioned him on their list of top five books. The Coop displays If on a winter's night a traveler on its table of recommended fiction, and it caught my attention from the first line, but I've never gotten around to looking for it at the library. (Widener organizes its literature shelves by the author's country of origin, and the British fiction is on the first floor of the stacks--you happen on it almost immediately from where you enter--while American fiction is on the second floor, right above. It takes more walking to get to continental Europe though.) But I ended up getting Invisible Cities instead because the blurb on the back conjured up an image too irresistible to ignore: Kublai Khan and Marco Polo against the golden backdrop of the Huang. I'm about a third of the way through, and it's gorgeous, dreamy writing. At times I'm reminded of Borges; at others, Gibran; but mostly it just makes me want to write.
I'm a little more than halfway through Foucault's Pendulum, and enjoying every single second of it. What a fun book! I attempted reading The Name of the Rose once in senior year but what with schoolwork and the dense text, I didn't make it past the first chapter. Maybe I should attempt it again. Foucault's Pendulum is also dense, but also entertaining--well, maybe that's because I'm still in the section where Project Hermes has just started and none of the characters have started to take things entirely seriously yet--and just so enjoyable to read. It's worth noting that most of the occult/religious/mythological references that I recognized were first encountered in fanfiction: just goes to show how reading one's friends list can be educational. ^_^ By the way, I know next to nothing about the Kabalah/cabala/Qabbalah (how are you supposed to spell it?), and I bet I'm missing half the context as a result. -_- Well, at least I knew what gematriya was, thanks to that Chaim Potok phase in high school.
As for Ravages of Time, I finished volume 6 and in the process have considerably expanded my vocabulary. Now I shall be able to converse archaically in Korean about war and strategy and seizing power and changing the world to my heart's content! I had no idea Guan Yu was so poetic by the way, and wow, Lu Bu somehow manages to be two steps ahead of everyone else. I need to reread some of the earlier volumes now.
2. Another drama marathon: Watching SBS historical drama 서동요 (Seodong's Song), which is set during the Three Kingdoms period (Korean, not Chinese). You can clearly see them trying to copy off the 대장금 (Daejanggeum) model, down to the very soundtrack of all things. -_- The problem is that they fail to successfully imitate Daejanggeum's strengths: well-written dialogue, talented actors, gorgeous sets. The script is terrible; the characters keep saying lines twice, a habit that becomes awfully irritating by the fifth episode. If it was restricted to one or two characters and to occasions of emphatic emotion, I wouldn't mind, but it's every single character in the cast in nearly every single scene, and it drives me insane. Also, the sets and the armies are so laughably small that in the first scene, when the Baekje king gets captured by Silla soldiers and ends up beheaded (a real historical event), I commented to my parents, "Well, no wonder he got killed so easily if he was traveling with so few retainers." And why on earth do the Baekje and Silla palaces have the exact same architecture as the buildings shown in dramas set during the Yi Joseon dynasty? I mean, they wore different clothes and had a different state religion and lived, oh, I don't know, a thousand years before, and yet the buildings looked exactly the same? -_- By the way, the Hwarang have the most ridiculous looking hat/helmet ever, with these two long feathers that stick out like antennae. I hope that's not actually based on any historical evidence...
What annoys me most is that the story has such potential to make a really good drama series, and some of the plot twists are genuinely interesting if implausible. The premise comes from Samguk Yusa: a beggar boy named Seodong (means boy who sells potatoes) spreads a rumor that 선화공주 (Princess Seonhwa), a Silla princess, sleeps with him every night. Due to the scandal, the king kicks the princess out of the palace to go live with the beggar boy, who proves to be the illegitimate son of the Baekje king. He eventually rises to the Baekje throne and rules wisely, etc. The drama adds a further twist in that Seodong actually belongs to a group of Baekje exiles who left their country due to factional squabbling between the king's nephew and the crown prince. They are skilled artisans, whose knowledge of various crafts makes them a prize for any country, which is why they must hide their identity in order to remain loyal to Baekje and keep various techniques and technologies secret. An element to politics that's seldom explored, you know. And of course, because no drama is complete without a love triangle, there's a Hwarang who goes undercover with the Baekje artisans so he can steal their technology and bring it to Silla. (As a reward for the completion of his mission, he would be awarded the hand of Princess Seonhwa, who in the meanwhile is in love with our hero, of course.) The story drags a lot at the beginning, when they take several episodes to explain how our hero came to be born and how he escapes with the artisans to Silla and how he meets the princess as a boy and falls in love with her. It's particularly annoying because Seodong as a child is petulant, sullen, lazy, and generally good-for-nothing. It gets more interesting ten years later when he meets the princess again and finds motivation to become a admirable/worthy person. They do stretch plausibility a lot by crediting Seodong with the invention of the Japanese sword (of all things) and ondol (a floor heating system) but nonetheless, the story becomes interesting and would be quite good if only the script were not so terrible. The romantic interludes are awkward; the drama does better when it's in its more shounen moments what with Seodong trying to prove himself and uncover his true identity or when it's focusing on the political maneuverings within and between Baekje and Silla.
A part of that may be due to the genre confusion going on here. What most people consider to be Korean dramas is actually a subset, romantic melodramas or comedies. (A part of this misconception is due to the fact that it's the romances, that is the ones most analogous to soap operas, that get exported most successfully.) Historical dramas actually tend to be mostly about war and politics with little actual romance (not surprising considering most marriages were arranged), but what with unconventional versions like 다모 and 대장금 achieving such popularity, there's been a tendency to try new variations on the old model. So you get things like 서동요 whose premise follows a classic romance and whose execution swerves back and forth between the strict historical drama conventions and the new ones set by recent hits like 대장금. It's like the collision of three genres, and strangely enough, the drama is at its best when it sticks to the old conventions. I say "strangely" because I personally had gotten rather sick of the long 100+ episode retellings of various epochs in Korean history. -_- The wigs are awful, and the martial arts is laughable. (Have you seen a bunch of middle-aged actors try to make swordfighting look cool? It's really sad.) Nonetheless, all is forgivable with a good script. I remember watching one on KBS way back in ninth or tenth grade based on King Taejong's life (I forget the title, something like tears of the dragon, maybe...or was that the one that came afterwards?), which was full of Machiavellian politics. I was moved though by the character of Taejong, who was not a good man and a rather ruthless and ambitious king, who was determined above else to establish a strong united dynasty and maintain stability in the kingdom. In a sense, more honest and true to history than all the royals spouting mechanically about their noblesse oblige to help the people. >_>
Anyway, I don't think we'll bother finishing 서동요 (it's still showing in Korea actually) once we go through all the tapes we rented...unless episode 26 ends on some major cliffhanger. ^_^
3. Family origins: While eating udon after Midnight Mass, one of my parents' friends informed me that my father's family traces its lineage back to a general from 후삼국 시대 (Later Three Kingdoms era, the period of chaos after United Silla fell and before the Koryo dynasty was established), who won some pivotal battle on the Later Koguryo-Later Baekje border and helped Wang Geon establish the Koryo dynasty. For his victory he gained the family name Yi (romanized as "Lee" or "Li" or "Rhee"), hence founding our clan's line. Isn't that neat? My father tells me that the story is apocryphal and that it was mentioned in the Taejo Wang Geon drama, but I hadn't known that before.
A note of context: well, obviously not all Koreans with the same last name are related to each other, but there are still ways to distinguish which ones you are related to. E.g. there are different clans all with the last name of Kim, but they distinguish themselves from each other by the hometown of their founding ancestor. This family information is all in official records, and it used to be that it was illegal to marry someone from the same clan, which was a bit ridiculous because by this point everyone has intermarried enough so that being from the same clan doesn't mean that you're necessarily any more related than two people with different last names altogether. Anyway, the clan that you belong to determines your generational name, although many people have abandoned the traditional naming conventions. You are also supposed to know which branch of the clan you belong to, i.e. from which major ancestor you trace your direct descent, but I don't remember that part at all.
I was looking up references on PubMed and came across several papers in Chinese. They had a translated version of the abstract but no link to the full text (not that I'd be able to read it even if they did have a link), and it reminded me of that part in Flowers for Algernon, where Charlie cites a paper published by an Indian scientist, and the doctors laugh it off because it's not in English. They tell him that not everyone has his facility with languages, which misses the point entirely...of course, in the end, it turns out that the paper was right, and the treatment they used on him to increase his intelligence was doomed to fail. I wonder, how much great science is being overlooked because it's not in English? I mean, it's near impossible to keep up with all the publications that are pouring out in English as it is. Not that the Chinese papers I was looking at were particularly groundbreaking, but still, it makes you wonder. It's also a fact that papers aren't just judged on their scientific merit alone; the quality of writing also affects how your research is received by your peers and funded by organizations. Even if English can act as the scientific lingua franca of today, one wonders if Anglophones will have a slight advantage simply by being more comfortable with the language. On the other hand, just because you grow up speaking a language doesn't mean you'll write well in it, as millions of teenagers on fanfiction.net prove every minute. It's odd how much English is emphasized as an essential component to a scientific education (well, to any education, but especially in a scientific one) overseas but how little American institutions focus on teaching good science writing. (Oh sure, expository writing is a required course in many colleges, but a literature essay is worlds apart from a scientific paper. And the lab reports we write for actual science courses aren't exactly enough preparation. I hear you do get some training in graduate school though.)
Yours &c.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-27 11:48 pm (UTC)I've never even heard of this 서동요 before, though I can't help but think it's cliché. I'd have to echo the martial arts and wig comment, too. Anyway, I enjoyed 대장금 as well. It was a wonderful story. <3
Happy holidays, Tari 언니, and I hope you're looking forward to fantastic new year. ^_^ *hugs*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 05:15 pm (UTC)Happy holidays to you too! I hope you have a great New Year's as well~!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 12:15 am (UTC)As for writing -- yeah, I agree. This is why I avoid Science papers and go for the Nature/Cell ones. But I know that grad schools often care what languages you can speak, and there are tons of overseas conferences, judging by my profs' absences, so ... there is hope yet?
Merry Christmas!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 05:18 pm (UTC)Are overseas conferences conducted in other languages though? I thought they were still mostly in English...but yes, I think science is certainly one of the most internationalized disciplines. ^_^
Thanks! Hope you had a merry Christmas too!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 12:38 am (UTC)Ravages of Time 6: Yeah, Lu Bu is so different from how he is in the novel. Hehehe, I'm sure that vols 9 and 10 will expand your vocab as well. (So much talking in those...)
2. Hmm, my parents might end up watching that at some point. (Hmm, three kingdoms period Korea, eh? Sounds pretty interesting. )
3. Whoa, so you are of noble descent?
Languages: hey, some day when they create the universal language translator... (if it is possible to make machine translation that good)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 05:37 pm (UTC)2. There have been quite a few dramas set during the Three Kingdoms period coming out lately. E.g. the KBS series 해신 (Sea God) was pretty popular a while back as well--that one's based on this historical figure (he's part merchant, part organized crime ring leader) who helps a Silla prince ascend to the throne. He gets dynastic ambitions however and insists that his daughter be married to the king's heir, which ultimately leads to his destruction. My pet theory for the new spate of Three Kingdoms-era dramas is that after having major historical dramas cover the exciting periods in Yi Joseon and Koryo dynasties, they're now forced to go all the way back to the Three Kingdoms era for new drama material. ^_^ Although I don't know if I'd necessarily recommend 서동요, since it really does have an unbearable script.
3. Yes, although I don't think it's exactly unusual...what with the chaos during the Japanese occupation, class distinctions broke down and grew largely meaningless. >_>;; Both my parents belong to yangban families by paternal descent, but I don't think either of my grandmothers belonged to the same class. I'll bet most people these days can trace back some relationship to the nobility of their respective country of origin.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 07:59 pm (UTC)3. Well... everyone wants to say that they're related to someone noble, as well. (Although, IIRC, I can't)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 08:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 09:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-29 07:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-29 07:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-30 04:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-02 06:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 12:53 am (UTC)Interesting books you're reading--it's really, really sad that I'm going for all the jokey books now, rather than any serious stuff... ah, well.
Yup, not being particularly science-literate, I depend on good science writing to give me information and interest me.
It's also a fact that papers aren't just judged on their scientific merit alone; the quality of writing also affects how your research is received by your peers and funded by organizations
Weeeelll. It's lucky you're not in humanities or social sciences then, because some segments of academia judge papers by how obscure or incomprehensible they are. ^^;
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 05:42 pm (UTC)Haha, that's very true. I think on the whole scientists don't consider themselves very verbal so they value clarity in writing. That being said, I've read way too many papers that are far too wordy and beg for a red pen. >_<
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 05:19 am (UTC)Ah, vacation, an excuse to gorge oneself <3 Whenever I see the Bon Appetit bakery in Flushing, I snicker.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-28 09:56 pm (UTC)