On the subject of Korea

Ad Mundo Exteriore,

Oh, LiveJournal, what a pernicious creature thou art! Instead of dutifully searching for books on molecular orbitals, I find myself coming here to catch up on blog-reading and write a rant on North Korea, since I've just read four weeks of the New York Times' International articles.

There's this vague intimation of "how ungrateful they are!" when the journalists speak of newly President-elect Roh, whose main campaign platform was continuing open relations with North Korea, promising negotiations over war and somehow reducing or perhaps even eliminating American troops in the country. The furor over the death of two Korean girls due to the negligence of an American sergeant (I think it was a sergeant) has raised anti-American sentiment to an all-time high. The journalists mention, in an oh-so-blasé tone, that there are over 37,000 troops stationed in Korea and that South Korea owes its freedom to America. Which may be true, but they don't seem to realize the history of resentment towards American troops in the Asian region. It's not just South Korea--remember the Okinawa demonstrations from a few years back? American troops may claim to be protecting South Koreans from a DPRK invasion, but this isn't the first time that they've ran over civilians. (Not to mention the rapes and sexual harassment.) And the U.S. in its typically arrogant manner often makes a big fuss over giving the accused over to the Korean (or Japanese, in the case of Okinawa) courts, saying that their military judges have ruled the suspects innocent. It's quite rude behavior towards a host, no matter how weaker, and I wonder whether the reason why my non-Asian friends are much less conscious of guest etiquette is the same cause for this kind of attitude...but that's an irrelevant tangent.

The U.S. also silently backed military regimes in South Korea, so there's a lot of mixed feelings towards the protector ally, no mattter how helpful it may have been. Also the sense that if the West hadn't come and imposed its Cold War struggle on Korea then the country wouldn't have been split into two. Roosevelt, towards the end of World War II, when faced with the problem of the Korean peninsula, drew a line at the 38th parallel and said, "Give the Soviets the north and we'll take the south." (Okay, a paraphrase, but that was the gist of it.) It's true that the Korean War was very much a war between Koreans, but it was also very much a war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and you can't get rid of the "big bully" image just by saying, "Oh, now we'll protect you from your insane cousins up there."

And that's another thing: the North Koreans are Koreans. Many people have families up there. The ROK anthem even mentions a mountain that's technically the property of North Korea. So it's difficult as a South Korean to hate the North Koreans the way that, say, Israelis hate the Palestinians. There are of course regional resentments that go back to the Three Kingdoms period--hey, even modern politics is affected by whether the politicians and their constituents come from what used to be Paekche or Silla--but still...they're Koreans too. Combine this with a new generation with no memory of the Korean War, and it's only natural that the population would support a candidate who hopes more for reunification than for war.

Besides, if the North Koreans develop nuclear weapons, we'll be more vulnerable than the U.S., who at least has some means of defense or deterrence. (And honestly, Japan might have some reasons for being scared, but I think Seoul is more likely to get bombed than Tokyo. North Korea's first goal is not to conquer Japan but to reunify Korea.) Naturally, South Korea wants to have a chance at negotiations instead of Bush's policy of silence. Seriously, I think the critics are right--the president doesn't really have a Korea policy because he's been thinking so hard about Iraq. The U.S. has to take the initiative here, because South Korea, with all its goodwill, has very little to bargain with. If Bush had been less antagonistic and offensive to begin with, North Korea might not have pulled out all the stops like they did now. Sure, it's annoying to know that this tiny little country with an insane dictator is trying to bluff and threaten you, but that old adage about keeping enemies close is what applies here.

Nevertheless, there is room for hope, because the new chairman of the Foreign Relations committee in the Senate seems to be a reasonable person, even if he is a Republican. And most of the people in power, aside from the heart of the Bush administration itself, seem to encourage more rapprochement on the Korea issue.

Okay, got to go now, because I'm being chased off.

...Tari

On the subject of various books

Ad Mundo Exteriore,

Earlier, I was secretly using the library computer for an hour longer than I was supposed to and got kicked off by the next person on line. Oops. ::innocent grin::

Anyway, I also wanted to mention that instead of watching The Way Home on Wednesday, my parents and I rented Yeopgi jeogin keunyeo and Miseulgwan yeop tongmulwon (yes, I really can't romanize, I think the official translations are: "My Yupgi Girl" and "The Zoo Next to the Art Gallery."). Both were actually quite funny and not sappy, though they do belong to the genre of--::dramatic pause::--the romantic comedy. ::gasp:: But they were well written and really amusing, and I actually followed the dialogue completely. Although I have a feeling that Tryo-chan might have missed the jokes in My Yupgi Girl when she saw it, because a lot of them require cultural context. Oh well. "Yupgi" by the way means "strange" or "bizarre" and is normally used in the context of "a most bizarre murder case," i.e. something along the lines of serial semi-cannibalistic dismemberment...O_O

I finished The Biographer's Tale, which was pretty strange, but I enjoyed it. I don't know why I enjoyed it, but I did. Not quite as much as Possession, which it paralleled in some ways, but it was an engrossing story, with flashes of humor and a slightly surrealistic tinge to it, i.e. occasionally events would slowly slip over the edge until you weren't quite sure whether you both as the reader and as the character weren't dreaming everything. So yes, liked it and would recommend it. (Not that recommending ever does anything...)

Started re-reading the LotR and realized how absolutely different the movies were from the books, though I still say that Peter Jackson couldn't possibly have done a better job than he did. There were some significant differences in mood and style, but let me just mention some of the trivial cases, like characters. Before the movie, when I read the book, I actually thought of Sam as rather young, almost like the gardener boy--older than Pippin, but still younger than Merry or Frodo. Correspondingly, I thought of him as dark-haired and sort of on the thin side--lithe, you know? Now, I have this odd shifting hybrid of Sean Astin as Sam and my former image. It's sort of settling down into former Sam with Sean Astin's voice, which works. I also realized that I never thought of Merry as a comic character. I mean, he's light-hearted and funny, but he has an air of authority (as future Master of Buckland, I presume) in the books that didn't really come out in the FotR movie, although it's starting to show in the TT. Oh, and Gandalf had been very different in my mind as well, though now I can't think of anyone except Ian McKellen's character as him.

Random note: I never pictured Frodo as old, just middle-aged, and I now have the justification for it! Hobbits come of age at thirty-three, which I presume is equivalent to the human age of eighteen. So the conversion factor from hobbit age to human age is 6/11. Frodo is about fifty (fifty-one, perhaps, like Bilbo in The Hobbit?) when he sets out on his quest. So by my conversion factor, he's about twenty-seven in human years. Of course, I never pictured him as pretty, youngest-of-them-all Elijah Wood either.

What else was I going to say? Oh yes. Welcome to lianara, who has now succumbed to the LJ fad as well! Mwahahaha!

...Tari

(no subject)

Ad Mundo Exteriore,

Okay. I've resigned myself to no FTP and went to Brinkster for reliable no-ads free hosting. It means poor bandwidth, but no one ever goes to the Society site anyway, so it doesn't matter. It also means uploading files five at a time, which is excruciatingly slow, but hey...better than nothing. There are clones of this site up at Topcities and Zero Catch, but hopefully that won't matter too much. So the new site is at: http://www31.brinkster.com/sotliterati/. Hard to remember, but probably not as difficult as http://www.geocities.com/sagaludi/SocietyoftheLiterati, in the end.

Why is Fanfiction.net down? I need to read the next installment of Bridlewood Manor!

Five minutes later: Thank goodness, the upload process is actually working at a pretty good pace. I've gotten the HTML files up, but the image files...well...let's see what happens. Brinkster is pretty sophisticated with its File Manager user interface (all sorts of cool scripts) but the problem is, it doesn't always work. Nevertheless, it's working now, so let us cross our fingers and hope. (Why am I talking in the royal plural? I have a thin, thin, almost negligible strain of royal blood in me, and it doesn't really count because the ancestor in question was married to the king and not directly of the royal line. Lyd-chan is probably more royal than me.)

As you can see, all this free hosting business is driving me insane. I am tempted, oh so tempted, to just move this site onto the Ender's Jeesh domain, but it'll be so weird to have the Society as a subdomain in an Ender's Game fan site.

...Tari

Post-script: The second version Society site is fully up but downloads at an abysmally slow rate. But hey, it's up and looks better than ever! And no ads! Plus, if you are a Society member, you can give me an LJ-esque icon to put on your very own profile page. Aren't I so nice?