Everything.

We’ll just say that the bus driver didn’t break my foot, that the name of the building I live in is finally going to be changed — finally, after I asked twice, so that ordering groceries online won’t involve a dozen phone calls explaining that, yes, some morons decided to give no formal Korean name to the new building and it ended up being the same as another already-existent building, and that the delivery guy is in the wrong building and the fact that my careful note explaining this was simply left off my package (probably a website error or something, but goddamn it!), and though I had to watch the office people laugh gleefully when they heard that if it wasn’t fixed, food and package deliveries would go to the wrong place consistently, as they have been for months on end since I last pointed out the problem –  and at least I got a seat on the subway, so I was only crammed into a crowd so tightly I couldn’t breathe for a minute or two today.

Wow. It really was akin to a whole amusement park ride of the the things here that specifically drive me batty.

There were a few annoyances I couldn’t avert, but that’s life anywhere, and it doesn’t erase the annoyances themselves. It’s nice that the building’s name is being changed, it’s nice that my foot didn’t happen to be broken, and it’s nice that I managed to get a seat. That doesn’t erase the problem that it took six months to get a ame-changed started, that my foot could easily have been broken, and that other people had to stand in such a cramped space for an hour tonight. Just because things came out well doesn’t mean there wasn’t a problem, though that’s the most common institutional interpretation I encounter here.

Which reminds me of what Miss Jiwaku said to me on the phone when I vented about this: “Yeah, it reminds me of how Koreans abroad seem to replicate Korean society in microcosm… except, more extremely, more oppressively.” Makes one wonder why they would do that, but from what I saw in Indonesia, it does seem like a fair description of the state of affairs there. What baffles me is why, free of all the burdens, anyone would do that.

Perhaps, though, I’m fooling myself. People still use monarchic language when they refer to their religions after all, calling their gods things like “Lord” or”King” or “Prince”… having broken free of that bondage of monarchic rule, you’d think people would repudiate it. Yet not only in fantasy tales, but even in religion (insofar as the two can be separated) this is the kind of language that dominates.

Which makes me wonder what the religion (and “religious language”) look like within a group of people who had actually internalized freedom of thought, freedom of action, democratic power, and social and sexual equality. One wonders if it would be recognizably (to us) religious at all… or if religion would exist in such a society.

Ooops, tangent. But I feel better now.

For example, the other day I was taking a bus home, and noticed that all the women getting off the bus were immediately running off into the dark. I am not exaggerating. Four women got off the bus, each at a different stop. Each one ran away from the bus, presumably toward home. They ran in sneakers and in high heels alike; they ran not only when the bus stop was poorly-lit, but also when it was very well-lit.

I momentarily wondered whether it was a sort of paranoia — after all, my neighborhood is a rough one, with some nasty punks around, and some rather freakish people living there. Women I know have reported being taunted sexually by male passersby, having been fondled by middle-aged men on the escalator at the subway, and other such horrors. The women I’ve talked to about living here have agreed that our neighborhood is one with a strangely high number of jerks and weirdoes.

But certainly not all women were fleeing such dangers, real or imagined: after all, lots of women defiantly walk around the neighborhood. I couldn’t help, though, being amused by the behaviour. The first thing that crossed my mind was that some kind of very mild, rare zombie plague had struck my neighborhood. Not bad enough for people to stay home and board up the doors, just bad enough for people to run like hell whenever they were out in the open. But in the end, the behaviour was explicably by wholly mundane means.

Yes, it was only on a moment’s reflection that I figured what the real reason — the same one because of which plenty of Korean women spend much of the winter walking around saying, “아, 추워…” They were underdressed, in skirts and tiny shoes and thin coats (when they were wearing something that could actually be called a coat at all) and it was pretty chilly and windy outside. Simple, right? They were running because they were cold. Explicable! Yay!

Sycophants, though, I just don’t get it about them. I feel how most people feel when faced with an unabashed, unashamed, unrestrained cheering section for a moron: I feel derision, bewilderment, annoyance, but… well, especially bewilderment.

I’m not talking about politics, at least not in the sense we usually mean when we talk of politics — though there is a certain kind of sad sack moron who rises to the sycophantic occasion in any human organization, since every human organization involves politics; I’m not talking about artists or intellectuals, at least not except in the loosest sense.

I’m talking about the kind of people who ring themselves around the most relentlessly mediocre, viciously self-aggrandizing doofuses and chant, fists raised in the air, as if this guy (it’s usually a guy, isn’t it?) was nature’s (or heaven’s) greatest gift to humanity, someone who would lead their  organization to some mythic, unimaginable victory… even when it’s some run of the mill organization, a factory or an office, or a university faculty, or a church, or a freaking school chess club. Cheer, cheer, shout and stamp their feet, making sound and fury…

…signifying nothing. They don’t seem to grasp that, even when it’s witheringly obvious, and that baffles me. This kind of behaviour has always baffled me.

It’s not hard to understand the behaviour of the doofus they’re cheering for, mind you. Doofuses are often attracted to “power” — even if it’s contingent on their giving up on a normal life, for example turning their backs forever on coitus and on the fundamental familial bonds proceeding from it, which are so necessary to experience if one wishes to understand from the inside the state of most of humanity. Doofuses see nothing with self-aggrandizing behaviours: after all, as Peter Watts pointed out in his discussion of the phenomenon of Sarah Palin, doofuses tend overwhlemingly to overestimate both their own competence and to underestimate the competence of people who are less of a doofus than they are. No, really, there’s a study from Cornell and everything.

The behaviour that baffles me, and which Watts is trying to explain, isn’t why a doofus would choose brazenly (and rather unabashedly) to pursue power, but rather why people would rally around that doofus, cheering and chanting the name of their chosen doofus, propelling the doofus to the top of their organization… or, and this is even more embarrassing, if they’re in an organization where who occupies the top is, well, dictated from the top, what propels people to gather in delusionary crowds and do the same thing.

Of course, organizations where it happens that way are power-scarce: that means that those within the system may perceive the act of rallying around whichever doofus attains the top position as a way of gaining some “in” for themselves, some small nugget of power which may be dispensed for good service.

But the question arises whether they can see what others see — that they’re ridiculous sycophants — and suppress it from their conscious minds, or whether they just simply do not see what ridiculous doofuses they themselves are being.

Maybe that’s it: maybe it’s just that doofuses are so numerous that they can attain critical mass. But for the particular organization I’m thinking of, it seems that those who dislike the dooofus, or revile him, are far more numerous than those who support and cheer and idolize him. So… the real question is, how is it that doofuses attain critical mass, when people who are less of a bunch of doofuses don’t?

The reason seems to me that the non-doofuses tend to want to keep their heads down. Evolution has trained them well, perhaps: stand up to the doofuses and they witch-hunt you. Criticize the doofus poobah and you end up exiled from the camp, in dangerous territory. Maybe human history has worked constantly under this dynamic: a period of doofus-rule supported by sycophants, followed by a period of repair headed up by those who were clever enough to shut their mouths and wait for the idiots to destroy themselves? I’m not sure, but it really doesn’t bode well for us as a species.

Lest it seem an idle question, consider that the same dynamics underlie a lot of political behaviour, wars, and genocides. Oh, and also the hobbling of national education systems. (It’s not just Korea that’s got a mess on its hands educationally.) Hell, look at the institutional response to climate change, and you wonder if the smart people shutting up and letting the doofuses run the show will work this time… or whether the mess will simply be too bad to repair.

It struck me that the Korean internet (a subject about which I recently posted) is a wonderful demonstration of both sides of this notion: the benefit of a late start, and the handicaps that a head start can introduce into a system.

The link above details several of the handicaps: the dependency on Windows, ActiveX, and even Internet Explorer 6.0, as well as the general institutional resistance to retooling Korean net commerce and web design to modern, global standards, multi-platform functionality, and so on. All of this results from the early adoption of a locally-developed system for security that the Korean government developed, dependent on ActiveX controls, so that ecommerce could begin earlier, instead of waiting for American encryption technology to be exported. That is to say, Korea innovated its own software, got into the game early, and for that initiative — and, one must add, the resistance ever since to adopting the later-agreed-upon global standard for the task — it is now paying a technological price.

That is, if you consider being stuck with only one OS/software combo, and being stuck with dated standards a bad thing. But not keeping your software up-to-date, and having an unnaturally homogenous digital ecosystem, are both likely to leave the country vulnerable. You’d think that was learned on January 25th, 2003, but I suppose not. Though the prediction is that that Koreans will have insanely fast broadband (1Gbps) by 2012, one cannot help but wonder whether they’ll still be using Internet Explorer 6.0 as their main window onto the world… as well as how exportable those “new companies” will be, given their necessary focus on obsolete software and platforms.

(And though this may sound absurd, one finds it slightly more difficult to imagine that Korean IT community will suddenly wake up and recognize the problem: Internet Explorer 6.0 — a browser first released in 2001, close to a decade ago — actually got more users last month, bringing the total very close to 50% of Korean internet users. Apparently they used to blame Microsoft for the problems in ActiveX, going so far as to talk about suing the company in 2003 — even though Microsoft had indeed issued a patch for the vulnerability: one wonders who would get blamed if something like the Slammer virus hit Korea today. Maybe they’d do as the cops did in 2003, and blame China? Sorry, guys, but the Chinese didn’t force Korean ISPs not to patch their systems.)

But the ironic thing is, Korea was probably propelled into this situation by the advantage of a late start. It was easier for Korea to set up a wired broadband Internet infrastructure not just because of South Korea is small and densely-packed with people; there are a whole host of reasons, from the conscious promotion of the internet to housewives, the explosion of PC-Bangs (a “gateway drug” to the experience of using the Net, making it more desirable to do so at home), deregulation allowing competition to emerge, a nationwide impetus to change things up after the 1997 economic crisis, and even the desire to keep up with the Joneses. (More details on these and more causes are available in this report.)

Another reason, certainly, is that Korea didn’t have to go through the massive experimental period when everyone was faffing around, trying to figure out what was the best way to provide or receive internet service. There was competition, but the job of building a high-speed internet infrastructure on any real scale came years after the dust settled on the messy question of which types of hardware and wiring would work best (at least, for now… new cabling always becomes necessary eventually, but laying cable early on means replacing it if you make a wrong choice — which is easier since early choices are also more often relatively uninformed choices — always the curse of early adopters). By then, it was easy enough to choose a basic infrastructure model as the standard, and to even award construction companies for building structures (homes and offices alike) specifically to fit with the national standards for internet connectivity.

All this raises a couple of interesting questions, very pertinent to the next work of long fiction I plan to write:

• To the degree that a late start can provide an advantage in a given “complex technology,” (a technology with multiple tiers, where one tier can be cutting-edge while another is outdated) it can also create disadvantages further on down the line which proceed as a result of the late-start advantage. How is this applicable to technologies other than the Internet?
• Is it possible organizations — say, governments — to artificially retard the adoption of a technology or the development of an infrastructure until they can benefit from a late-start advantage? In “complex technologies” is it possible (or desirable) for a society to strategically retard elements of its development — certain tiers of a technology — to maximize late-starter advantages? (For example, had Korea waited the few months necessary to get 128-bit SSL encryption, would Korea’s internet be in less of an anachronistic bubble vis a vis the global internet?)
• How far does a lag need to go — or how long can it be ignored — before it is widely recognized that retooling is necessary? For example, Korean internet users are (a) primarily using Korean services and sites online, and (b) not particularly interested in the rest of the global internet. I can think of two scenarios which would prompt demands of a massive retooling: either peripheral services become impossible to  access (say, a game that is released for a newer version of Windows only, and not for XP), or a catastrophic event (like a repeat of the 2003 Slammer virus incident) based on a vulnerability that strikes Korea especially hard (or, if we wait long enough, Korea alone, perhaps purposefully so) because of the country’s dependence on an obsolete OS. Which, of course, raises another question:
• Are there hidden benefits in using an obsolete technology similar to those of using an unpopular technology? (For example, the number of computer viruses for Mac, Linux, and other OSes are a miniscule joke compared to the viruses tailored for Windows systems. Will virus writers move with the world, working on new code to infest newer Windows OSes? Will any new viruses be coded for the obsolete OS?)

Interesting questions to play with. Feel free to comment, or not. I’m already thinking a lot of this through in terms of the novel I’m writing with the working titlle A Killing in Burma.

The stars to which I refer are, of course, bright and shiny ideas about this future we’re tumbling toward, and not the authors, of which I am one.

Just got my contributors’ copies of Shine, the new anthology of optimistic SF edited by Jetse de Vries that Amazon says is coming out on March 30th. I’ve only read a little of it, but it looks like a hell of a ride!

If you want on, you can preorder it at a bunch of places: Jetse has links for all of ‘em in the 3rd column on the Shine weblog.

The subject of writing a culture as an outsider has been discussed a lot, and I’ll turn to it below, but for the moment, I want to look at something rarely discussion, and which may explain why SF from certain cultural mileux seems not to work so very well in English translation. I think Aliette’s quite right about the insider view having drawbacks that make it just as hard when writing for an outsider audience — the bakery example is a good example. But if we go a step further this specifically problematizes certain genres, like, say, SF.

A note: as much as I’mn touted as some kind of “expert” on Korean SF, I’m not. I have watched almost every Korean SF movie made, but the literature is locked behind a language barrier, one I have not yet climbed sufficiently enough to see over. I’m going by hearsay, and I’m sure I’m getting things wrong here. I welcome any corrections.

But some of my observations are based on things I’ve been told by Koreans. A great example a Korean translator/author acquaintance Jeong So-yeong mentioned to me while I was interviewing her for this article, is how in Korean society folks confronted with a problem are more inclined to reconcile themselves to living with the problem until it somehow works itself out than to seek for the underlying reason and prescribe solutions for it — the detailed, analytical assessment of the system responsible, and an according change in operations so natural to Westerners confronted with something that is (when they care to notice or recognize it) unfair or wrong. (Other reactions I’d add including kludging together a short-term workaround instead of fixing the broken system, or, when all else fails, to appeal (or protest) to someone in power to please fix it.)

It’s not that we in the West don’t do these things too, of course: the difference is which tendency dominates in which society. In Korea, something I’ve witnessed time and time again in Korean organizations — from social groups to workplaces and businesses — is that the systematic assessment and adjustment is the last thing to come, usually long after it would in a functional Western organization. It just  becomes a fact of life when you live here. If the outcome is okay, then for most Koreans the system just isn’t broken enough to need fixing… even when getting the good outcome took hours of unnecessary worry or work, even when it’s mostly just luck that things didn’t come out badly. As one friend and longtime expat in Korea wrote to me once (in confidence, so I won’t link his blog here), “I think every institution here is two steps away from collapse, and no one worries because they’re not one step away.” Actually, I’m not sure whether the need to fix a system kicks in at one step away, or after a case of dramatic, public collapse has begun, though the latter seems likelier in a lot of cases (such as in various scandals involving cops doing nothing to protect sexually-assaulted women and children or to catch their assailants, or the handling of the 1997 economic crisis here, or, for a small and recent example in ym own life, the complexity of red tape faced by a student re-enrolling early after taking a full year off school). One could think of it as, “If it ain’t broke enough to kill us all, don’t fix it,” but of course, one becomes less snide about it after reflecting that South Koreans and their ancestors lived under one or another form of authoritarian rule (domestic monarchy, Japanese colonial rule, and finally domestic dictatorship) until just a few decades ago.

This is definitely cultural, though whether it’s especially Korean, or was also a feature of other societies at some earlier stage of cultural modernization, I don’t know. I’m not saying it’s absolutely Korean, and in fact I bet we could find the same sort of attitude in English or American culture if we wound the clock back enough. (Probably to the Victorian and Edwardian eras in England, for example.) But this does inform Korean SF, in ways that make it different from Western SF, but also in ways that could make it aesthetically difficult for Westerners to digest; especially, it seems, when the solutions for problems come from far outside the characters actions and decisions themselves, and are likely to feel, to a Westerner, like some kind of weird deus ex machina.

(The examples So-yeon gave were of stories where school kids escaped from the hell of Korean high school into space, somehow though I don’t believe it was quite clear how they got there; and of an astronomer who had had a car accident after years of study and astronaut training, and thereafter suffered on Earth as she watched others go into space until one day her turn came with a government initiative to put more crippled people into space. The latter story was her own, and I have to admit it sounds, well, sort of baffling as SF stories go. Why not just use a Waldo? Why not have her find her own clever solution?)

The interesting thing being that Western SF in translation is popular among SF fans here, and doesn’t seem to pose them the same kinds of digestive problems. I guess cultural hegemony of a kind, and huge American media penetration, will do that for you.

The other thing is that the longer I’m in Korea, the more I discover that for this culture, at least, the more people claim that X or Y value is universal, that nobody would transgress taboo Z, there is someone — or many someones — who does nothing but repudiate value X or Y, and someone (or many such someones) shamelessly transgressing taboo Z on a regular basis. The trick is remembering that the character is being “different” and knows it too. This isn’t license to just build a completely foreign character and inject him or her into local skin, of course. One needs to understand a society’s self-contradictions and fantasies about itself, and this is a tricky proposition as an outsider, even when living somewhere for a long time.

(For example, I would have a very hard time writing a story about a truly intelligent Korean who somehow believes the Koreans-are-one-blood propaganda. There are highly educated people who believe it, but I haven’t met any very intelligent people who didn’t at least feel doubts about it. Yet I’m sure they exist, since smart people have always existed who, for whatever reason, believed patently ludicrous propositions on one subject but not on others. Just as there are some Canadians who are both very intelligent, and possessed of a kind of nationalistic chauvanism, a sense that Canada is somehow “special,” there must be intelligent Koreans who believe not just that Korea is unusually homogenous (also problematic, but at least debatable) but also believe the one-blood myth is literally true. I’m not sure I could write such a character believably for either a Korean or non-Korean audience, though now of course I am beginning to think it a hell of a challenge for myself.)

One finds sometimes transracial characters are used to explore this kind of unclear space between cultures well — the title character in Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, the protagonist in Bruce Sterling’s “Green Days in Brunei,” and probably dozens more that aren’t coming to my mind. That’s a dangerous gambit, of course: if one is less careful than the esteemed authors above, one will find the transracial (or otherwise supposedly transcultural) character is really just one or another culture poured into a racially ambiguous skin. And of course, one must watch out for the temptation to exoticize the halfie… or hapa, or whatever else such a character might be termed. I wish I could remember the term Nalo Hopkinson used back at Clarion West when she described mystical, oh-so-exotic transracial characters as one of the newer remixes of the Magical Negro trope.

But even here, of course, experience tells me there’s a degree of freedom available with which to play: in my experience, overseas Koreans and Koreans of mixed-ancestry (or those of mixed ancestry including Korean, but living abroad) have a far different experience of Korea and Koreanness than, say, white guys like myself, or Afro-Canadian women, or Nepali factory workers, or Filipina mail-order brides. (Though, then again, I think class and education and workplace and personal idiosyncracy all play into it: one South Indian PhD I know and occasionally have a beer with seems to be having an experience of Korea radically more similar to mine than many white male expats I meet here.) But I also find that it’s not hard to figure out why so many overseas Korean have such a difficult time adjusting here, especially when one observes their interactions with locals a bit.

The text mentioned in a comment appended to the post, <i>Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile</em> looks like a wonderful book, even if it is far too expensive for me to get a copy. I’d love to read it and see how much applied to myself, as an expatriate writer. Though it seems a particularly funny thing that so many non-Western (or non-Anglo, maybe?) writers today end up writing (in English) about their “homelands” after emigrating, while so many Westerners I know who end up abroad write less about the familiar “homeland” than about the place they’ve ended up, or some analogue. Actually, even the expats who “go home” seem to do this more often than not, in my experience.

(Though, thinking in broader terms, meaning beyond just the people I’ve known and beyond SF, I guess maybe there’s an even split of Anglophone authors who write about home, and those who write about the foreign, “exotic” place where they live or lived.)

Looking at my own writing, I recently realized that often when I write a story about a Korean, I impose a rather Western aesthetic onto his or her situation. In Korean narratives, just as in real life here, coming together and joining the group is so often crucial — the key to things moving forward, whether it’s promotion, having a social life, solving some problem, or whatever. (Which is why having a meal together is such a common, recurrent symbol in films here; it really does signify communion to Koreans.) Yet in my stories, I constantly challenge characters with a situation I often see in reality here: that is, that joining the group brings one to an impasse, and one can only move forward by breaking away from the group and going it alone, or drawing lines within the group and splitting it up.

But going it alone — in almost all the Korean fiction I’ve read in English translation, anyway, and the vast majority of the films I’ve seen — seems to be a traumatic experience (or the echo of, or response to, trauma), and seems to lead to some kind of sad ending, to a bad ending, to erasure or disappearance of a character, while joining groups, forming cohesion, working together seems from my limited experience to be, almost by default, a positive thing. (Which is why a film like Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is such a devious film, with the parents of murdered children and the woman wrongfully imprisoned for the murders team up and, well, torture the real murderer to death.)

(By the way, I welcome correction by someone who knows more about Korean Lit than me. Are there significant numbers of examples of a character breaking away or going it alone, which don’t end in tragedy or where going it alone is depicted as a good, necessary thing, as opposed to, say, a temporary strategy, like in The Host? Has, for example, the Korean version of cop drama been deeply affected by the Hollywood trope of the cop who defies his supervisor, loses his badge and gun, and goes out on his own to solve the crime?)

My paricular inversion of this apparent pattern isn’t simply rooted in ignorance, of course. Though I didn’t realize I was explicitly inverting it in my fiction, I have known of this cultural difference for a long time. There are two things going on here: one, there are Koreans who go it alone, and Korean naratives that focus on that. One is the film Cheong Yeon (Blue Swallow), which I adored but which flopped in Korea, I think, mainly for reasons of historiographically unpalatable realism. (I discussed that film here, and while my view has changed a little — especially with regard to the perplexing popularity of the success of the competitor film, The King and the Clown, it’s close enough for the moment.) The other thing, I think, is a combination of my own predilection for characters and narratives like this — folks who have no choice but to go it alone at times to do what needs to get done — and my own reaction to what is, for me, a kind of over-valuing (and sometimes fantastical romanticization) of the group over the individual in Korea, not just in stories but in real life as well.

(Which is not to say that it’s just a clash of North American individualism versus Korean communality. It’s just to observe that communal solutions don’t — and can’t — work for all problems, just as individualists cannot always go it alone to achieve what needs getting done. It’s just interesting that my emphasis in the stories I’ve set in Korea have the same focus as Korean stories on the unfairness of society, but (perhaps) rather individualistic, independent responses on the part of characters.)

As my stories are beginning to get translated into Korean, I cannot help but feel curious at what the reaction will be: amusement, puzzlement, or careful annotation of what I got “wrong” — as well as how much of a grain of salt I’ll need to take all that with. (If a small selection of honest and trustworthy Korean beta-readers don’t see a problem with a character speaking or thinking a certain way, or choosing one or another response to a problem, how seriously can or should one take public criticisms?) The great experiment would be to write such a story, publish it in Korean under a Korean penname, and see how it was received, because, as so often is the case, who is writing seems to play as much of a role in the reception of a work as what is contained therein.

Hmm. Which reminds me, I need to proofread my long-deferred (for a month!) review of Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days, which also deals with some of these issues, specifically related to the realm of SF… especially as to the question of why I think Western authors ought to be trying to write creditable SF set in places we usually don’t see it set in, concerning characters of backgrounds we rarely see in SF.

This year is the last year of guaranteed funding, so it could well be your last chance. (Hopefully not: a new funding application is pending, but you never know.) The guest lecturer this year is Kevin Grazier, and of course the inimitable Mike Brotherton is leading the proceedings.

(And by the way, it’s held in Laramie, Wyoming, home to amazing numbers of wonderful microbreweries. Even the beer out there, though you won’t drink much unless you’re already used to the altitude, is wonderful and mind-blowing all at once.)

Apply! Apply! You know you want to!

This isn’t quite midway for average male life expectancy in the developed world, but on the other hand, for the men in my family, this might well be the average of halfway, or even farther along.

So I guess I should be reflecting on where I’ve been, and where I want to go. Except, well, I did that a lot last year, and I feel like I’m on track, and I have a meeting tonight, with good beer in the plans, and good food, and not much commuting. Sounds like a plan.

Birthday greetings, admonishments, advice, or whatever are welcome. The comments section is there for a reason, folks…

This metaphor came to mind today as I logged onto my Gmail account on one of the computers at my department office. At the top of the screen was a note informing anyone using the PC that Google was discontinuing support for the browser I was using — which, like on a vast number of computers in Korea, is Internet Explorer 6.0.

Yes, 6.0. The browser that came out in 2001. The browser that most of the Korean internet requires you to use if you want to do banking, buy something, or view most of their websites. The browser that most of my readers outside Korea probably haven’t had any reason to use since, well… a long time ago.

In a very recent article in the Korea Times, the problem was outlined as follows (ironically — but unsurprisingly — on a page not easily viewable in Firefox on Linux, as per the graphic below):

Korea Times Unviewable Page

Click on the image to see a larger version of the screenshot, and the ironically unviewable content.

Cutting the cord to IE6 isn’t expected to cause too much noise in most countries when it is clearly on its way out, accounting for less than 15 percent of the world’s browser market as of January, according to market researcher, StatCounter.

However, there could be disruption in Korea, where about half of the country’s computer users still insist that IE6 should be their gateway to the Internet.

In what would be seen as incredible elsewhere, IE6 seems to have actually gained ground here in the past few months ― the browser’s share dipped below 40 percent for the first time last September, but has now recovered to a healthy 49 percent.

Make that unhealthy. That is. if being less able to access more of the web, and being less accessible to more of the world, is what is in Korea’s best interests. But since we’re talking about South Korea, I don’t think even the government can cogently argue that, at least not when it comes to web services! (Though sometimes, looking at the established government’s sense of how free information should be, I wonder sometimes.)

There’s a wonderful article out called “The Costs of Monoculture” describing the situation circa 2007 which you should check out. It’s depressing that I still can highly recommend reading it today, but, unfortunately, despite what are undoubtedly a few new changes and developments, it’s mostly still pretty reflective of the situation here as I understand it. And the picture is one of a lack of freedom and choice emerging from an early, all-out commitment to protocols that were once shiny and new, but now are basically extinct everywhere else on planet Earth. This is why the quote above is misleading: it’s not that “half of the country’s computer users still insist that IE6 should be their gateway to the Internet” but that half of the country’s computer users insist that they should be able to access financial, banking, and consumer systems while using their home computers. It’s the country’s administrative bodies, and IT community, in their resistance to catching up to global standards, who insist that those end-users rely solely on Internet Explorer 6.0 if they want to do banking or web shopping.

ActiveX — used only in Windows, really — is still king here, which is why most Koreans are stuck using older Microsoft browsing software. As one of the assistants-to-the-assistants put it to me one day, “Mac computers are SO hard to use in Korea.” And Linux? Well… all I can say is that a dual boot setup with Windows on your spare partition isn’t enough: you need to dual boot with a Korean-language version of Windows, because all kinds of data that comes up in commercial transactions will appear as little blank boxes in a dialog box on your screen if you’re using a standard English installation of Windows. (I don’t know if adding more Korean fonts fixes the problem, but normal English-languages Windows installations always, in my experience, seem to get foiled sooner or later!)

The weird thing reading this old article is that, having come back from Indonesia, I am a bit shocked — not that I had forgotten this situation, but because the contrast is so stark. Sure, connectivity was always a problem there. It was relatively hard to find wifi zones, especially free ones, and when I did find them, connectivity was still often so slow that basic websites took a while to load, or refused to function. But the Indonesian websites I visited, on the other hand, worked fine in Firefox. Not a problem in any of the sites I visited. It looked basically like the modern internet, compliant with global standards and all that. Then I came back to Korea and suddenly half the local Web began to like crap in Firefox again. It’s… well, shocking. What’s most shocking is how deeply accustomed to this utter dysfunction one can finally become.

Anyway, that post linked above is really interesting, more so because of a comment (also from 2007) signed by “zzang”, who claimed to work for the Ministry of Information and Communication. I’ll quote (and respond to) that comment and conclude in the extended section of this post, as I’m likely to get a bit sarcastic.

The situation doesn’t seem to be changing significantly, at least from where I stand. Korea, instead, has got a bunch of proprietary systems and outmoded architecture and I don’t know if the IT community here is just daunted by the change that’s increasingly necessary, or underqualified to make that change happen, or just collectively too lazy to actually do the work involved. I can say that IT professionals I’ve met — such as those running the campus network where I am working — are, despite being relatively nice guys, completely in the dark when it comes to anything beyond the Windows OS and Windows servers. It’s like a huge enigma to them, to the point where one of them exasperatedly said to me, “Why don’t you just use Windows?” when the campus network started refusing me a connection. (Which, by the way, it does periodically, usually about once a year, when the (really, really ostensible) “security software” has been upgraded.)

In any case, the cracks are starting to show, but as far as I can tell, it’s only in the spots where Korean internet users are using their current software setup to extensively access websites abroad. When Koreans do internet banking with banks outside Korea, when they buy things online at foreign websites, the reaction is so often the same: wow. That was easy. Wait, why is it so much easier than Korean websites? But the number of people doing that remains, I suspect, too small for any real pressure for a change to build up for now.

When it does come, though, there’s going to be a lot of catching-up to do.

Interested in my thoughts on that comment by “zzang”? Right, then:

As someone working in a public agency under the Ministry of Information and Communication in Korea, I found your article fascinating, albeit a little one-sided.

As pointed out by many other posters, monoculture is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially to a nation that needed to play catch-up in the IT industry. A single OS and standard coupled with rapid broadband adoption allowed the Korean Market to expand at an incredible rate, and in the end outpaced most of the world.

Remember, “zzang” wrote this in 2007. What he’s mistaken about was that “the end” had already arrived in 2007. The end hasn’t even yet arrived in 2010. The end is a long way off, and I guarantee it will come long after Korean IT professionals have to spend time totally rebuilding their local software environment. Hopefully, next time around they’ll integrate some kind of object lesson from the current situation into their understanding and approach when The Great Rebuilding becomes unavoidably necessary.

“zzang” goes on:

While it may be debatable whether this is entirely because of our monoculture, there is no denying the outcomes.

Laughable, in part, because of the logic. “X may not really entirely be a result of Y [or at all], but Y is striking and good, so I will continue to lionize X, despite all the problems associated with it.”

And besides, there are, of course, really a number of reasons why broadband internet became so widespread. On a practical level, wiring up Korea was much easier than wiring up Canada. For one thing, Koreans are generally tolerant of a shit-ton of visible wiring defacing their neighborhoods…

This is far from an uncommon sight in urban Korea. I only ever notice it myself when returning here from places where wiring is primarily in the ground. These are mostly power lines, note. I'm including the picture more for the point of the toleration of aboveground wiring in general here.

… and for another, Korea’s small. Wiring a small country is much easier than wiring a big, expansive one. It just simply is.

As for other reasons the Net exploded in Korea: I’ve got an absolutely hilarious story on the subject I got from a very intelligent young professional I met last November, who made a pretty interesting argument that the explosion of the Korean Internet provider market had much more to do with prurient interest in some sex tape scandal that exploded in the media around the time when service was finally available. (He argued that family patriarchs, who were making the decision to get home service, had been hearing about this “sex tape” that was “on the internet” and decided they wanted a look for themselves.

Which is, of course, exactly the kind of thing you hear foreigners snidely say, but this was a Korean guy, one who was well-informed in general and even named the woman in the scandal. (I can’t remember who she was, though: I’d never heard of her.) I’m not sure I quite believe it, but sex does seem like the likeliest motivator for a bunch of middle-aged men to start buying home computers and getting internet service.

Even if this is not true, the explosion of online shopping in Korea is not simply explicable as a result of the positive effects of computer monoculture: in fact, it’s as much the result of the negative effects of offline monoculture. Unless you’re a middle-aged Korean woman who lives in a house where nothing ever breaks down, and who only ever cooks Korean food, then shopping offline will invariably require you to either (a) travel to some distant place where all of the shops of some type are located. (ie. Furniture street; hardware shop street; the kitchen supplies market; an actual selection of live herbs, and so on.)

This is all well and good for middle-aged Korean women who only cook Korean food, etc, but it’s not so great for most young people, or people who’ve gone abroad, or whatever. I’ve met young Koreans who, time and time again, bemoan how difficult it is to get this or that foreign foodstuff or curio, and I always tell them they can probably find it online. Thai rice? It’s available on Gmarket. Indonesian nasi goreng spice mixes? Gmarket. Beer making supplies? Well, not Gmarket, mostly, but online.

Anything even remotely different, unusual, or non-monocultural requires online shopping in Korea. Arguably, the explosion of online shopping is really just a reaction to the offline consumer monoculture, though, it is worth noting, in Seoul at least this is somewhat better now than it was in the early days of the Korean internet.

As to the comments raised on the issue of government control over the industry, all I can say is that it was true in the old days, but not anymore. The MIC is finding it more and more difficult to impose control over the actions of major telecomm carriers. While the level of control is still significant when compared with Europe/N.America, the trend is definitely going towards relaxing of regulations.

Of course, if many people follow your blog posts about economics, you might get arrested and tried by the government. Oh, and by the way, you cannot buy a breast pump or comic book online at many cybermalls now without registering your national ID number.  (I know, I have friends who tried pretty hard to get that breast pump.)

Oh, and every comment you make online is now tracked in connection to your Real Name identity. (Because, after all, celebrity suicides need to be stopped. What’s that? The non-celebrity suicide epidemic in Korea? And what do you mean, the destruction of anonymity could be misused by authorities to suppress criticism? Oh, oh, no, don’t let facts and ethical considerations get in the way of lazy rationalization, now!)

In truth, as a Korean, I feel stifled by the lack of technological innovation and the generally poor Internet services that are offered whenever I go outside of my country on business trips.

Yes, those poor Canadians… how they can do secure online banking in any browser on any OS, with just a password and ID or account number. What? No special plastic card to tote around, so one can punch in code numbers for ten minutes before each transaction? What? No special certificates and ActiveX controls to download for access to every consumer website? No byzantine credit card password-and certificate-schemes? How do people maintain their false sense of security? That’s just so… un-innovative!

And yes, those poorly internet services. Like, oh, Gmail — those poor, put-upon American Gmail users who never have to go back and delete half their inbox because the disk quota was reached and their email has been bouncing for a week. I love Hanmail because little surprises like that not only does it keep me on my toes, it also filters out  anyone who doesn’t really want to contact me (like, badly enough to keep trying, or text-message me that my inbox is full). Or, another example, Google Docs, which by the way, like most of the backward, electronically undeveloped world doesn’t even read the national proprietary document format, HWP! I mean, open formats? Standard document types viewable worldwide? Where’s the fun in that?

Those poor Euopeans, with all their Linux this and Mac that. Freedom of choice? How pesky and undeveloped. Me, I prefer my decisions made for me!

The bottome [sic] line is, I feel very comfortable in my Windows XP, IE6 working environment. It’s familiar, and I can get all the services I need. The price for all this convenience is of course more tighter management of my computer(i.e. frequent virus, adware scans, computer upgrades, etc…) But the truth is I enjoy tweaking my computer and having to upgrade every once in a while to keep up with the bloated and demanding activeX controls and new services based on them.

Two words, one diagnosis: Stockholm Syndrome. The guy lists everything that makes Windows a pain in the ass — including things no Windows user outside Korea regularly deals with anymore — and then says he is comfortable. Like, the way a loveless marriage is comfortable because you have no real choice but to stick it through, at least till the kids are grown up?

Which begs the question, when will the kids grow up?

The rest of the lineup is well worth checking out, too: Jeremy L.C. Jones interviews Kij Johnson (about, among other things, her Nebula-nominated “Spar,” which appeared alongside my last story in Clarkesworld) and there’s a short piece on neuroscience and SF by Luc Reid. I especially want to direct your attention to Matthew Kressel’s “The History Within Us”: it’s a particularly striking, dark far-future story about, well, a nightmare from which we cannot wake — though maybe we can find a reason to live on within it. Kressel’s story reminds me how fun it can be to watch an author destroy all hope, just to see what your characters will do with the tattered remnants of what was once their lives. Like I said, well worth checking out…

Finally, I just wanted to say I think it’s cool how Georgi Markov’s cover art seems weirdly appropriate, in a sort of metaphorical way, to both Matthew’s and my own story. That’s just really cool.

By the way, if you enjoy my story, please feel free to stop by my Stories page to read a little more about its background, genesis, and so on.

I had the first class for three of my four courses today. I’m not sure if it’s just that one of the two office assistants (the less helpful  one, generally speaking) quit last week, but something has left our remaining office staff in a tailspin. I had syllabi for only one of my courses (the others were lost until after the second class had finished), and the attendance sheets are blank in the front, as I’ve never seen them before. (So you can only know what class it is by looking inside.)They’re only tentative attendance sheets, mind you, but it’s still weird.

I’m not slamming the Office Assistant who’s stayed on staff: she’s very clearly overloaded, but I’m just surprised: we haven’t had a semester start off this roughly in years, and it’s not like its beginning was an unexpected ocurrence. We knew school would start March 2nd, it always does, but it looked like most of the preparation that was usually done at the end of the week before was left until today this time around. Maybe it was to catch the late enrollments over the weekend in the attendance sheets? I dunno: I’m puzzled as to where the extra work that’s overloading our Office Assistant is coming from. But she’s definitely busting her butt now!

In any case, the new semester has, with no remorse or trepidation, begun. In all three classes, there were a mixture of familiar and new faces, and one class is particularly huge, which is nice. Several students commented about being disappointed that my Debate course was canceled, to which I could say little else beyond, “Why didn’t you enroll in it, then?” (It was canceled because of insufficient enrollment, but also so I could take over The Course That Dare Not Be Named in the place of a newly-hired prof in another department who backed out at the “last minute.”)

Tomorrow, my fourth course’s first class. That one’s Creative Writing. It’s in the afternoon, so I’m hoping I get some reading and writing done in the morning. I also have a book review to work on, several emails to send out, a class-related website to update, an outing to confirm: I’m meeting another Clarionite — though not a Westie, alas, and not from my year, though I hold neither data point against him — for dinner and beer on March 4th, which is my birthday.

Actually, if any other of you booksy, SF-loving readers here in Korea are not busy Thursday night, and wanna join, and help celebrate my 36-ness, and meet a newcomer who is also an up-and-coming speculative fiction writer, let me know.

(Or if you want to get together on the weekend. I have nothing booked, and a recent publication to celebrate — for more on that, see my next post!)

Wait, am I begging for company this weekend on my blog?

Nah, nah… I would never do that. I have no plans mainly because I’m just back in country, need to sort out my house, and am feeling just lazy enough not to arrange anything. But I wouldn’t be averse to one outing this weekend, if those friends of mine who happen to read this blog feel up for something. I’m just letting them know — in the laziest way possible — that this is the case.

No, really!

By the way, as the KCDC gotten more paranoid or something? I handed in my health questionnaire form, with check marks on diarrhea and vomiting among my experiences in the last ten days. The guy who was collecting the papers gave me a shocked, slightly horrified look — which suggests a lot of travelers must be lying on their forms, since traveler’s diarrhea is utterly common. I resisted the urge to say, “You asked, pal…” and clarified, “It’s just food poisoning,” but the guy looked at me in horror as he waved me through.

Which is enough to make me wonder whether the guy has ever traveled anywhere in Southeast Asia. I cannot imagine someone traveling there for two months without having gotten food poisoned at least once. Me, I was extremely careful and still got hit three times, each time quite seriously. I’m a bit sensitive, but, really, now.

Anyway, I wasn’t hauled aside for further testing or quarantine, so I guess I should consider myself lucky. I am expecting an odd little phone call in the next couple of days.

It is better to be safe than sorry, of course. I just don’t get how the guy was so utterly shocked by a couple of check-marks which, surely, if travelers were being honest, would probably be not uncommon, if not downright frequent. I can’t shake a sense that there was some ancient-Greek aesthetic at work in the back of his mind. (Illness = contagion = evil carried into Korea by some foreigner.)

• Nixon. Well, I haven’t finished it, yet, but I enjoyed what I saw. Anthony Hopkins, damn, that man can act.
• New York, I Love You. A fine omnibus of shorts, this was like a collection of flash fiction set in what seems like a realer New York than most depictions of the city.
• Haeundae. Well, actually, I guess this Korean movie was an SF film — no less than Japan sinks — based on the idea that something as bad as the tsunami that struck Southeast Asia could hit the East Coast of Korea at some point. (It seemed ripe for metaphorical analysis, really, given that that’s where invasions from Japan have come, but, well, the issue is almost completely avoided in the film, except that it’s a chunk of Tsushima Island that triggers the tsunami.) The science is mostly quite bad, and I found most of the characters (aside from the main, poor couple) quite unlikeable. Some of them — like the grandma, the rich local businessman, and the young man who ended up on the bridge — I actively disliked enough to look forward to seeing how the tsunami would kill ‘em.Having given this a pass, I only saw it for the sake of taking Miss jiwaku’s mom to a Korean film, since she hasn’t seen one on the big screen for quite some time.
• Tarzan Ke Kota: a bizarre Indonesian fantasy film featuring an Indonesian Tarzan and a cast of other oddball characters. We were tired when watching  it, and so gave up on it in the middle. Quality of the filming was about mid-80s Hollywood, but the film is fascinating as a bizarre document from another culture, as a comment on urban vs. rural life, and more. (A more realistic story might have involved an Indonesian Tarzan living in the wilds of Papua, but it would also have been much more politically offensive.)

As for the update: I’m still in Indonesia, still reading and not writing as much as I’d planned. Decided to cool it an try enjoy the rest of my stay instead of stressing out on the writing thing: I’m working on reviews and some short things. I’m going to post some book reviews, and schedule them to appear on the blog over the next few days. We’re hitting Bali soon, so I will not be online as much.

Still struggling to finish my review of Cyberabad Days.It’d have been done days ago if I had regular Net access, but, well… I don’t. And won’t, for a few more weeks. The research and thinking has done me some good, in the meantime, though.

When I originally wrote this, I had two weeks  left here in Indonesia — now I have eight days — and the current works-in-progress are a review of B.R. Myers’ The Cleanest Race and a short story weaving some of Indonesia’s Hindu past into its (distinctly Indonesian) Muslim present. Just fantasy, a bit of imagining. Shall have to find a couple of people willing to read such a thing to tell me how wrong I got it! I’m going to put the finishing touches on my review of Cyberabad Days and finally post it, in any case. Hopefully today!

The reason I bring this up is not because we watched several Russian films in that course, but because of the discussion of history and its depiction that ensued for the hour following my professor’s reading this article to us. Depiction is a slippery enough thing in fiction: in the writing of history, it is even more complex, challenging, and even dangerous.

The cover of the book shows that Rick Geary, too, is aware of this. Indeed, the images on the cover, taken from the first few pages of the book, show Trotsky as others saw him: as a sort of St. George slaying the top-hat-wearing “dragon of capitalist repression.” The following picture is of Trotsky as a kind of devil figure, horned and sitting upon a bone-pile, “the ruthless and Satanic purveyor of bloody rebellion, the cold, detached theorist gone mad with power.” Geary’s following lines are the telling ones: “In truth, he fitted neither of these images. He was a writer, a thinker, and a nation builder — albeit a reluctant one — with deep roots in his Russia’s agricultural heartland.” This, then, is the “real” Trotsky.

A slippery thing, the “real Trotsky”: Geary’s list of texts for “further reading” includes six authors, one of them Trotsky himself. Doubtless those authors are good authorities on Trotsky. Yet one cannot help but wonder how much the text of Geary’s book actually represents the “real Trotsky.” Now, I am not one of those sorts of people who are convinced that to talk of the “real Trotsky” or the “real Wyndham Lewis” or the “real Ezra Pound” or indeed the “real Gord Sellar” is to talk of airy nothingness. Some will insist there is no “reality” to any of those figures, except in context and in whatever roles they happen to be playing in a social sense. I think there is such a thing as real persons, and while authenticity is a complex issue, we I’ve found that the brightest people around me can, like me, immediately sense when someone is being inauthentic and, like me, they tend to react negatively to it.

When we are discussing historical figures, of course, the problem is a little more complex: Trotsky and most everyone he knew is now dead. Trotsky no longer exists, and we cannot compare depictions of him — depictions filtered through individuals’ perceptions, filtered through individuals’ politics, and filtered through individuals’ feelings about the world in general.

In the light of this, I much appreciated Geary’s unspoken attempt to remain neutral much of the time. When, for example, Tortsky’s wife was arrested and Trotsky fled to hide out in Finland for six months, only to return when the revolution of 1905 was in full swing, Geary makes no excuses, but also issues no condemnations. We are left wondering what his contemporaries, and indeed his wife, would have thought of this, but Geary leaves it for us to wonder. While the author does, of necessity, tell us the story somewhat from the point of view of Trotsky — comments like, “Trotsky later described this as…” or “Trotsky would later say that…” about crucial moments in his life — he also often uses quotations when he puts words into Trotsky’s mouth, and even cleverly uses his approach to depiction to avoid lending misleading inferences to the images he uses to tell Trotsky’s story. (See, for example, the image of Trotsky reunited with Natalia after her imprisonment, on page 33: their backs are turned to the reader, and instead of dialog simple facts are narrated about her release are narrated.)

Of course, a story cannot be told completely in this way, or in the space of a hundred pages, it will grow plain unreadable. There are villains in this tale: as anyone who knows anything of Trotsky’s life would imagine, Stalin is one of them, and some of the depictions of Stalin — like the one on page 84, with his back turned to the reader, but his face still visible, what looks like an evil smile hidden by his moustache and shoulder, as he looks back over his shoulder at Trotsky (and the reader) with a giant knife in his hand, a thumb caressing the blade. This is pure silent film villainy, and one can almost hear the piano music in the background when gazing upon this image. Far be it from me to object to the any such depiction of Stalin, of course: it is widely agreed that the man was a literal monster, in what he did to his nation. But it still pays to be aware of the techniques of depiction being used, the kinds of narrative they engender, and so on. Stalin was Trotsky’s rival. Stalin looking like a silent film villain, by the logic of silent films, implies that Trotsky is Stalin’s inverse, the hero of the tale. Well, and we are each the heroes and heroines of our own lives, but history is not a silent film. It is easily possible that Trotsky was less a hero, and less the inverse of Stalin, than the image suggests. (We cannot know what Trotsky might have done had he ended up in the position Stalin eventually took, can we?)

This is not to criticize Geary — I point out these issues not to discredit his book, but because it is of interest to see what a difficult task he faced in writing and drawing it: too much absolute neutrality, and the book would have been not only impossible to draw, but also quite unbearable to read. On the other hand, too little neutrality and the book would have become a useless hagiography. There are times when Geary seems to be quite impressed with Trotsky, and seems to want his readers to be as well — “In service to the revolution, his energy was limitless,” Geary writes on page 55, paraphrasing Trotsky’s own recollection of his “hidden reserve of nervous energy” that kept him going through the “whirl of mass meetings” (all page 55) — but then, he was impressed enough by Trotsky to take on a book-length project about the man’s life, and the hero of that book necessarily must be Trotsky himself. I think he does an admirable job of balancing the need to tell a story, and the task of depicting history fairly, in the end.

On a less analytical note, this book reminded me of the Value Tales books I read during my own childhood. Remember those? The illustrated kids’ books that told the story of one historical figure, usually accompanied by a cute animal or object sidekick? Harriet Tubman, Ben Franklin, Florence Nightingale… eachh character’s life was narrated, and then analyzed, the the character finally being held up as an exemplar of a specific value: courage, patience, dedication, sacrifice, imagination, and so on. It’s been so long I barely recall them, but I do wonder what I’d see if I set the same analytical eye on those books that I have on this one. I suspect the liberties taken were far broader, and that respect for the ambiguities and problems of these historical figures’ lives was much less than what we see in Geary’s book. In any case, Hill and Wang (the publisher of Geary’s Graphic Biography) seem to be taking on some of the characters that the Value Tales might not have handled so well, like Trotsky and Malcolm X. Maybe these are the Value Tales of the 21st century, and of teenagers and adults alike?

As for me, I think sometime I may check out the Malcolm X book. Maybe not soon… these little books are pricey, as enjoyable as they might be. But sometime.

From Roles of the Northern Goddess by Hida Ellis Davidson. London: Routledge, 1998.

(from the Chapter titled “Mistress of the Household” (Pg 138-141):

Yet another important use of water by the women was for brewing ale, the usual drink for all ages at a time when water was often suspect. Its association with a goddess may be seen in ancient Egypt, where beer transformed the goddess Hathor from a wild lioness about to destroy humankind into a benevolent deity (Blecker 1973: 50). She is addressed in a hym as ‘Mistress of Both Lands, Mistress of Bread, who made beer with what her heart created and her hands prepared’, and described as ‘the Lady of Drunkenness, rich in feasts’ (W.J. Darby et. al 1977: 529). The effects of fermented cereals may have been discovered accidentally by women baking bread, and it was women who did the brewing in Ancient Egypt, as may be seen from tomb paintings. The Egyptian method was to work the malt into a dough to convert the starch into maltose, and the women are shown kneading, sieving, and brewing (W.J. Darby et. al 1977: 531). Although the rich drank wine, beer was the general drink in Egypt, and formed an essential part of offerings to the gods.

In medieval times in northern Europe, brewing was done mostly by women and, as with butter-making, often went wrong for no obvious reason. This was because the process depended on experience and judgment, with many different factors being involved. The grain most used was barley, which was stored for a time in the barn or oasthouse [sic?], then steeped in water and germinated until it began to sprout. It was dried in a current of warm air in the malting house, after which it would remain stable for some months. The malted corn was ground in early times by women using a quern and sieve, and in later medieval times by men when mills came into use. It was not necessary to gind it finely, but each grain needed to be cracked so that the husk could float free in liguid. Once ground it was put into water and heated in a mash tun, so that the soluble starch was converted by enzymes int the malt to fermentable sugars. This solution, known as the wort, was drawn off, and further sugar washed out to get a dilute wort, until only the husks were left, to be used as animal feeding stuff.

It was at about this point in the process that in England hops were added from about the fifteenth century onwards, giving the ale additional flavour and making it less perishable. Before this, mugwort or other herbs were used for flavoring, but the ale very soon turned sour. The wort was boiled for some time and cooled in large shallow trays of wood (causing a risk of infection) before being run into fermenting vessels where yeast was added. This was another hazardous part of the process as, while the temperature had to be kept low, excessive cold was injurious. Fermentation took several days, and went on after the beer was put into casks, sometimes with additional hopes or sugar added. Some gas might be let out when the beer was finally put in the cellar, but if too much escaped it would go flat.

There was clearly much room for error here, with no exact means of testing the temperature or the length of time needed at various stages, while much depended on the original state of the barley and the weather. An example of the risks involved is Margery Kempe’s account of her failure as a brewster in the fourteenth century, at a time when brewing was largely done by women outside the monasteries. she claimed that for three years she was the leading brewster in Lynne (King’s Lynn in Norfolk), but suddenly things went wrong:

For though she had ever such good servants, cunning in brewing, yet it would never succeed with them. For when the ale was as fair standing under barm as any might see, suddenly the barm would fsall down, so that all the ale was lost, one brewing after another. (Butler-Bowdon 1936:28)

A contrasting picture of successful brewing is that of St. Brigid, for this was one of the many bhousehold skills at which she excelled, even when supplies were scarce. One Easter she was left with only one measure of malt in a sieve, and two troughs to hold the liquid. She used the first for steeping the malt in water, and then brewed the ale in the second; when this was distributed around seventeen churches at Easter, there was plenty for all (Stokes 1890: 188-9).

It was customary for women to brew their own ale at home up to about the seventeenth century. However, this involved much labour, and before hopes were used beer was drinkable only for a few days, so that medieval women often preferred to buy from ale-wives and brewsters like Margery Kempe. Alternatively if they paid a ‘fine’ they could sell part of their own ale to their neighbours. There were official ale-tasters (mostly men) who judged the standard and price of the ale, and fixed the fine accordingly, and records of these payments have given information about the women (and occasionally men) who sold ale locally (J.M. Bennett 1986).

The brewing of ale depended on the use of both fire and water, and also on skill and luck; the association with a goddess as in Ancient Egypt might therefore be expected in the North. A detailed account of the brewing of ale for a wedding in section 20 of the Kalevala suggests the existence of an earlier myth concerning the origin of brewing. The mistress of Northland neeeded to brew a vast quantity of ale for her daughter’s wedding, but declared that she did not know how brewing originated in the beginning; such knowledge was evidently held necessary for success. Then we are told how ale was first brewed by ‘Osmo’s daughter’, ‘the beer smith, the brewer woman’, hinting at some possible mythological figure, though in Lönnrot’s arrangement the discovery is made by the dauughter of the house, who is to be the bride. Here we have a practical account of brewing after the wort has been produced together with some fantastic magical additions when the beer is fermented.

The girl first boiled up barley and hops, but did not know how to cause the mixture to ferment. She then created a squirrel from a splinter from the floor, by rubbing it between her palms and her thighs, and sent it off to fetch cones from the spruce and pine, but these had no effect. Then she created a gold-breasted pine martenin the same way from a wood shaving, and dispatched it to the den of the bear, to bring back froth from the animal’s jaws; but again, the liquid failed to ferment. Finally from a pea pod she created a bee, which brought back honey, and this time the ale fermented and rose to the top of the cask and over:

The young drink gre up
in the grooved cask of new wood,
inside the birch tub;
it foamed high as the handles,
roared up to the brims (Bosley 1989: XX, 384ff.)

When this occurred, the girl thought at first that she had ruined the drink, but the birds told her that all was going well, and so ‘the beer got its good name, its famous honour’.

The mistress of the Northland was then able to proceed with the brewing on an almost cosmic scale, using barley and hop catkins. She heated the mixture with hot stones and boiled it for months, so that the smoke from her fires could be seen for many miles; finally the ale was left to mature ‘lying underground / in a stone cellar / in an oaken barrel / behind a bung of copper’ (Bosley 1989: XX 503ff.) Then it was necessary to find a singer if the results were to be fully successful, and Väinämöinen chanted a blessing over the ale, since no one else had the necessary knowledge.

Here honey was added as the final ingredient, as this possesses fermenting qualities; it could be added to ale, wine, or fruit-juice to produce various types of mead, the intoxicating drink made with honey popular in many parts of the world (Simonsson 1956: 288). It is, however, apparently ale of beer (there seems no distinction at this stage between the two) which in the Viking Age was drunk at the annual religious feasts, and which was brewed by the women. A strange but vivid story in the late Hals saga ok Halfsrekka, one fo the Icelandic sagas full of legendary material, is of a competition between to queens in a kingdom in Norway as to which could brew the best ale for the feast, and on this their future depended. One of the, Alrek, appealed to Freyja to help her, suggesting a traditional link between brewing and the goddess, but Geirhild, her rival, put her trust in Odin, and turned to him. He dropped his spittle on the yeast, and the resulting brew was unsurpassed. As a reward for his help Geirhild had promised to give him what came between her and the cask; this proved to be her unborn child, the doomed King Vikar, who was forced to give up his life as a sacrifice to Odin when he grew to manhood.

Odin himself did no brewing, but the mead of inspiration, his gift to poets and orators, was continually associated with him in the myths and in early skaldic verse. Accoorsing to Snorri (Skáldskaparmál 57) this wonderful drink was brewed by the two races of gods, the AEsir and the Vanir, when the finally made peace together. All spat into the vat to cause it to ferment, just as Odin did in the tale of the rival queens. Spittle has the effect of hydrolysing the starch into fermentable sugar, and use had been made of this in various partys of the world (M. Barnard 1966: 12); it accounts for the attempt to use foam from the bear’s jaws in the Kalevala. The micture at first too the form of a giant named Kvasir, a word associated in several languages with alcoholic drink (J. de Vries 1957: II, 67). He was capable of answering all questions, but was killed by dwarves, who brewed mead from his blood. Possibly more than one myth has been used here, or perhaps Snorri was trying to account for the description of mead in early poems as ‘Kvasir’s blood’.

The mead of inspiration passed into the possession of a giant; one of the great achievements of Odin was to win it back fro the gods (Davidson 1993: 72). The importance of this episode, thought by some to represent an early myth of the Indo-European peoples, may have pushed into the background the original link between brewing and a goddess in the poems and tales of Scandinavia and Iceland. But the important part which brewing played in women’s lives for centuries, and the suggestion of powerful female figures associated with it, make it a relevant part of this study of the goddess as mistress of the household, the hearth and the spring.

However, I wanted to draw attention to the bid Starship Sofa is making for Best Fanzine nomination. This isn’t just a case of pimping — apparently a change in the wording of the rules for nominating Hugo candidates makes it possible for podcasts to be nominated (as discussed here) but not everyone realizes it’s possible, or that podcasts could be eligible for such prizes. And well they should be: podcasts are an important venue emerging on the SF/F fiction scene, and Starship Sofa is a regular kickass fanzine party, deserving of the recognition.

To hear more about why Starship Sofa ought to win (or at least be nominated for) a Hugo, check out this MP3, recorded by Matthew Sanborn Smith. I agree with him: the Sofa is like a big huge pirate ship that picks up willing joiners at every harbour — and having ridden it occasionally myself as a contributor, I have to say it’s a jolly good crew they have, who couldn’t wish for a finer captain. So… nominate The Sofa, folks. I will be…

The Guy Delisle of Burma Chronicles is a different man than the one with whom we wandered around Pyongyang: for one thing, he is married and spends at least some (if not all) of his time in Burma as a stay-at-home dad while his wife, Negene, works for MSF (Doctors Without Borders). Hardly surprising, given this, that his text should be episodic, a series of short episodes and vignettes with recurring themes, rather than the single unfolding narrative of life in a bizarre (and slightly horrifying) place that was Pyongyang: then again, in my (very limited) experience, infants seem to make everything become episodic for a while. This was, however, a disappointment for me, as I was hoping for a deeper critique of the situation in Burma, but it would be unfair to fault Delisle for having different goals for his text than those I hoped he had.

Likewise, his discussion of the Burmese government is quite limited. It is a comic, so I didn’t expect him to hold forth in any great detail, but the little he actually says about the subject is unusual given that the insane regime is one of the few things people in the West actually know (or think they know) about Burma. Delisle seems angry about the regime’s abuses, and he seems also to want sometimes to convey the anger of those around him… but it almost feels as if he’s pulling his punches here. Maybe he’s just more worried about repercussions in this case than he was in Pyongyang, and if that is the case, it is understandable: the stories of his exchanges with a hired servant, and with a group of cartoonists who took animation lessons from him, doubtless involve real people whom the government could track down if they wanted to badly enough.

Either way, I must confess: once the book got my attention, it was very difficult to put down. The most interesting parts were Delisle’s interactions with the local people, and with the expat crowd — ah, the familiar figures, and the very believable conversations — and the moments when he samples the local art, redrawing local cartoons in his own style. The least interesting parts, for my money, were the visual renderings of tourist trips with his wife. I think even these sections were necessary, in part to balance out the stay-at-home-dad-abroad material, but Delisle’s choice to render them as a series of smaller panels suggests he was aware of what I am about to say: in one way, they amount to slide shows of the couple’s trips, except a tiny cartoon slideshow is less interesting than a real photographic slideshow. However, I will also confess that I didn’t skip those sections. Though I wished Delilse had decided to go for the depiction of the trips in fewer images with much greater detail. But I am not a cartoonist, and it’s not up to me to tell him how to do his job.

It is up to me to tell you, however, what I think about how Delisle did his job, and I think Burma Chronicles is, while not for me as successful as Pyongyang, a very engaging morning’s read, and worth getting your hands on.

Yeah, it’s hard for me to say much without spoiling this, but then again, I don’t think there are many surprises in this book, and it’s been out for ages (since June 2007), so I’m going to just go ahead and talk about it.

Well: this is a horror comic that was published by Virgin Comics, one that, according to a tiny note on the cover, is “Suggested for Mature Readers.” The problem is, however, that mature readers are bound to find themselves asking some questions, such as… why is everyone in this Indian-themed book white? Alright, alright, the British officers were white originally too — the backstory is one of British colonial conquest and rapacious exploitation and murder. But, while I understand that reincarnation wouldn’t necessarily occur such that a person of one race would reincarnate in the same race again and again, I wondered why the 68 (all the examples we met, anyway) remained white, while the Snake Woman was also reincarnated as a white woman. Sure, there are minor characters who aren’t white: Jessica’s sex-kitten roommate Jin is Korean-American, and Raj (the man both Jin and Jessica are attracted to) is an Indian, or maybe Indo-American. I rather expected the 68 to be of more diverse ethnic makeup, but every other individual I recall seeing in the text (except for the Snake Woman in the childhood of her earliest incarnation) was Caucasian, for no reason I can imagine. This might have been addressed in later books in the series, but it baffled me.

Maybe I’m sensitive to the issue because of all the discussion of race and depiction in SF these days? Maybe being sensitive to the issue isn’t a bad thing, though.

The story was alright, with enough little surprises, twists and turns, and reversals to keep me entertained. The backstory, especially, and the characteristically different (and much more interesting) art used to weave that backstory into the main plot, were very well-handled. But all in all it really didn’t come together for me strongly enough to send me hunting for other books in the series. Were I an avid reader of graphic novels, I might feel otherwise, but this book didn’t really do that much for me.

Best of all, it looks like it’s out of print. While I would hardly be the fellow to publicly encourage copyright violation, one is inclined to feel a little less badly about it when the book is no longer available through channels where any money at all will reach the author, and when mere parts of it are being reproduced for educational purposes.

I do wish, however, that Klepper would make it available, for cheap, online, though: I’d be able to give a link here and very highly recommend it to all TEFL teachers in search of a public speaking textbook, as well as have my students purchase it online and print their own copies. As it is, you’re going to either have to take a look at it sometime when you visit my place — and no, this is not a standing invitation to all readers! — or else you’re going to have to take the risk of ordering it cheap at some used book website online.

(Well, because of circumstances I guess. The minimum enrollment for a course is 6 students, but once I was made to teach a class with 5, actually 4 in the end, because it was the night program and because there was no other course for me to take on. And, of course, some courses fill up in the first week of classes, but anyway… whatever, a canceled course, I don’t mind much.)

The thing is a new faculty memeber for the other department in the School of English backed out at the last minute, so there are some classes that are left in the lurch. I’ve been asked to take over one…

Business Across Cultures.

Seriously. Not joking. If you know me, you know how bad an idea this is.

An excerpt from my reponse to this suggestion:

Wow, the new Lit professor didn’t show up? That’s horrible.

I have absolutely no problem taking on a new day class, but…

Well, I have to say, I don’t know all that much about business stuff.

Well, wait, no, I actually do know some things about it, which is why I’m pretty harshly against mainstream business culture, I hate big companies with a passion that is hard to contain, and I… okay, I *revile* business culture. I hate it hate it hate it, and think it’s mostly a cancer afflicting humanity, which we would do well to burn off the planet like a wart or a tumor. Shakespeare said, “Kill all the lawyers,” but I think he should have said “businessmen.”

All of which is to say, I’m completely unqualified for that class. Actually I’m probably less qualified to teach *that* class than I am to teach a class on physics or bioethics or philosophy or art history, to be honest!

Having said this, I suppose I could put something together, but if there’s something more related to my areas of knowledge among the classes that this professoor abandoned, it would be better for the students. I worry that whatever I end up teaching in a Business course would be, well, a waste of time for the students.

Anyway… given the way things work with [The Other Department That Is Asking Me To Cover This Class], I doubt any of that, even the fact I’m unqualified, have no idea what to teach, and will probably waste students’ time, will make any difference. So, I’ll just shrug and say, “Whatever.”

Please do let me know if that schedule is final, as I’ll need to do some thinking about what the hell I’m going to do with this class!

Yes, yes, histrionic reaction, maybe. I don’t think all businesspeople should be killed. I don’t think I’d weep too hard, though, if a plague that selectively reduced the population of businesspeople-only struck.

All I really have to add is that I don’t think this kind of course really belongs in a School of English. This is what happens when education gets downgraded to Career Preparation: inherently academic departments get stuck offering supposedly “useful” courses (as if understanding a culture’s literary history, or media fluency, are not “useful”).

Ah well. I am pretty sure I have a copy of The Corporation somewhere. And Boiler Room. We could talk about how contracts work in the West, as compared to in Korea. Hmmm. I could have them interview business people on ethical issues.

But it is quite absurd. A course on war, I could do. A course on literary work from some random time period, sure. Business English?

Come to think of it, I think I know why the PhD in English Literature decided not to come and teach, being stuck with an out-of-left-field course like that. Wouldn’t take much of a better offer… say, being given a gig involving any course even remotely related to his or her field?