Saturday, December 30, 2023

Climbing Hyoungjae Bong part one


Clip from Climbing Hyoungjae Bong/ 형재봉 등산 이야기 #mountainhiking #지리산 #등산 #hikinginkorea 


Full video via YouTube link: https://youtube.com/shorts/J01imHKLFw4?si=Repo9jWKUnARzx1Y

Friday, December 29, 2023

형재봉/ Hyoungjae Bong

 


형재봉높에서

At the peak of Hyoungjae Bong.

Full video at YouTube: Hiking the Jirisan Mountains./ 형재봉 그름다리의 풍경 #hikinginkorea #mountainhiking
https://youtube.com/shorts/8NIbygid5AU?feature=share

Winter in South Korea is Changing

 


Thursday, December 28, 2023

Climate Change 2


 This is noticeable in South Korea where last summer’s crops were negatively impacted by heat. 


Now we’re in the middle of a weird winter that’s sometimes very mild and sometimes bitterly cold. 


More at YouTube: https://youtube.com/shorts/Bv19U8MaIYY?si=-t8-9Fjg23IbTsTL



Climate Change 1


 

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Jaywalking in Seoul


https://youtube.com/shorts/U2XyGKyFekI?si=GisO58t56NFnyGp6


Jaywalking in Seoul: Why Not Often Seen? #pedestriansafety https://youtube.com/shorts/U2XyGKyFekI?si=GisO58t56NFnyGp6 via @YouTube


Visitors to Seoul sometimes comment on how law abiding the pedestrians are. There are structural reasons for that.

Monday, December 25, 2023

Living overseas away from hospitalized parents

 


What it’s like to be away from parents when living in another country.

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Borges contra the contemporary lit biz

  Borges once remarked that normal people want to be praised for what they’ve accomplished; writers want to be praised for what they will accomplish. Touché. 

And yet … what is deemed « accomplished » in 21st literary production tends to measured by skewed metrics. I have several mss I keep dutifully shopping ard; gatekeeping has bec dysfunctional — the influential agents and acq editors know it, and obv writers do too.

Gatekeeping — what I term Selector Class Systems (and extend to prestigious MFA programs, prize jury selection, etc) — needs public critique. Yet this rarely happens; it’s a career risk after all. In the meantime, speaking personally, the work I do have out there (including an online chapbook of poems/authorial moviepoems (something that hasn’t been done before: formerpeople.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/baram-… ) and a historical novel abt an attempted fascist coup in the US: eclectica.org/v23n2/harvor.h…— receive no critical attention. The excuse given is they lack an ISBN.

The presupposition is that online work is somehow less worthy; somehow akin to self published work. But both these works are curated, and what’s especially galling is work that IS self published but can camouflage itself as not receives reviews and shortlisting for prizes. The issue here isn’t one of the occasionally delusional self regard of writers or the rocky process of contemporary canon formation. Instead, it’s an issue of fundamental fairness. If work is out there, shouldn’t it be judged by objective standards?

동지/ Winter solstice


 

Friday, December 08, 2023

Alibag Film Festival

Happy that/ heureux que a few more pieces selected by the Alibag IFF. The first, an experimental documentary, the second a smartphone doc (I posted about the latter a couple of days ago at a different festival). Both of these about the region where Suki grew up.

If curious:

Your World: https://youtu.be/kaI1ZtdRVPA?si=l0AJvzDrwTK3MmFN

Speaking with Mountains: https://youtu.be/vYrauBynRVc?si=03VMu3ndFQMOtod8






 

Thursday, December 07, 2023

PicGall 20


Clip from PicGall 20


Full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/20mxqKN_j7Y?si=1HJPF9ozYVKcNqDq 


#streetphotography #zve10 #photography #photooftheday #seoul #urbanliving


From a series of minute-galleries of recent photos taken in Seoul and Yongin, Kyonggi do. 

Wednesday, December 06, 2023

On Literature and Cinema


ON CINEMA AND LITERATURE 


Cinema and literature are art forms that are proudly distinct from each other, yet — at least from point of view of moviemaking — inextricably linked; movies, after all, need scripts.


But on an important level, literature needs cinema as well. For ‪one thing, literary writing is becoming simpler; “script-like”. For another, arguably, the sensibility of writers is becoming more and more focused on scene creation … on depicting setpiece situations in which we observe the surface of characters’ actions, this accompanied (sometimes) by the monologue of one character’s interior monologue.


It’s a perfectly fine narrative strategy. But it raises a question: why not acknowledge the obvious? Why not make literary works into “movies”? 


Ex 1: https://youtu.be/GV2sxT5t8yg?si=CKmHhWAoEFA_-TbV


2: https://youtu.be/MPivPuRAyYA?si=7zOeCIzu-4P661T1


/end

Monday, December 04, 2023

Why?


 Clip from Why Are Some People So Nice?


Full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/1-5L60wK5zc?si=GO5Ns7vQzgAIdROh


#poetry