The Selfish Gene

For one year, two years, three years, I’ve been convinced that I need to read more nonfiction, and so a day or two ago I downloaded a very decent torrent from ISO called “25 Greatest Science Books Of All Time”—featuring authors who are all dead or, in the case of Richard Dawkins, rich, famous, and in no need of the few cents they would make if I were to waste my hard-earned cash on a price-fixed amazon ebook. This is certainly theft, but only actual theft if I steal from someone who is poor or unknown.

That’s how I justify myself, anyway.

I’m not sure when I first heard of The Selfish Gene, but ever since I came across its alluring, enigmatic title I’ve been drawn toward it, thinking for months or even years, like, goddamn, I’ve got to read The Selfish Gene, because I love science and I’m desperate to possess a greater understanding of the world around me. I’m actually embarrassed that I can’t quite explain how life came to be, how computers and programs function, how an internal combustion engine works, or even how electricity is generated and stored in a battery—all of these things fascinate me to no end, and it’s embarrassing that after 24 years of age I still haven’t gotten around to answering my questions, because for the most part people have already figured a lot of these things out, and rather than going through the laborious process of figuring them out for myself, understanding these processes is as simple as taking the time to read about them. I need to be armed in case I encounter a Creationist; I need to be able to answer the questions my son is going to ask me; and it’s just good to know, because for almost the entirety of history humans have been unable to answer these questions realistically or scientifically. People living now are privileged with an incredible wealth of knowledge, and we really should take advantage of it.

I’m only twenty or thirty pages into the most excellent Selfish Gene, but I was intrigued from the first by the opening lines—

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’

When people talk about aliens, I find they project themselves, because aliens are a perfect mystery—their very existence is a completely open question—and a perfect mystery often acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting whatever is most important or most obvious to whoever looks into it. The same goes for the origin of life, or even of the universe—mysteries that are not quite perfect but still difficult, since there are no videotapes leftover from the beginning. Most, but not all, believers in Creationism aren’t really interested in the complexities of empirical thinking, and try to make the evidence fit their ideas; while scientists who have dedicated their lives to answering these questions possess almost obsessively doubting, questioning natures, and work as hard as they can to get their ideas to fit the evidence.

The same is true of aliens. Simplistic Hollywood-ers and writers have, for almost a century, assumed that aliens would immediately seek the destruction or enslavement of the entire human race, and this approach has proven to be an extremely profitable one, generating millions of dollars in reliable blockbuster revenues every summer for decades. Such violence appeals to the lowest, basest, and perhaps even the most natural instincts inside of us—fears and loves of artificial violence which most people seem to possess.

Likewise, Lovecraft, a guy who was definitely into old antiquated stuff, believed that aliens (if you can call ‘The Old Ones’ aliens) were impossibly ancient and malevolent. Arthur C. Clarke—and, so it seems, Ridley Scott—pass the buck on the question of the origin of life (or the origin of intelligence-based sentience), and assume that aliens were behind it. Carl Sagan, someone who seems like a pretty nice guy, assumed that aliens would be equally benevolent, while Stephen Hawking has recently warned that we should stop sending signals out into space because any encounter with a superior civilization would annihilate our own, regardless of how benevolent they may be, much in the same way primitive societies have been annihilated, over the centuries, by encountering unstoppably powerful European cultures. Others have speculated that the surest sign of other intelligences in the universe is the fact that they haven’t contacted us.

Dawkins tells us they’ll ask about evolution. A cheesemaker says they want to know where the best cheese is.

I don’t want to project my self onto the mystery of aliens, because my self is unreliable and subjective, and so the best I can do is assume that whatever they are, their forms and abilities go completely beyond whatever I can imagine. It’s possible that if they have survived the current dangerous stage of existence in which we find ourselves, when at the push of a button (by a president or premier who strongly believes in the coming of the apocalypse) the entire planet could be destroyed, their natures have evolved or transformed to the point where they are both invisible and incomprehensible to us—so bewilderingly complex and godlike that although they might be lurking right under our noses, we cannot see them because we cannot conceive of them without first becoming like them on our own.

Korean Food And Culinary History

This guy has apparently been declared a cultural treasure of Japan, and my mother in law needs to be declared a cultural treasure of Korea, on par with the greatest golden idols, the tallest pagodas, and the most ancient palaces, in the country. This meal she whipped up for us an hour or two ago was among the most incredible dining experiences of my life. It doesn’t look like much in the picture I snapped on my phone, in between gobbling everything down as fast as I could—she was taking care of our kid and waiting very patiently for one of us to finish and switch off—but I’ll still try to describe it:

The noodles, called “gooksoo” rather un-euphoniously, were mixed in with bits of spicy octopus from the pot toward the top of the picture. On the right you can kind of see spicy potatoes mixed in with spicy egglpant, while in the middle there are spicy kimchi cucumbers…and toward the top, just behind the pot, some kimchi that’s had its chili pepper sauce washed off (although there’s a ton of residual flavor still soaked into the cabbage flesh!).

But these weak words, this cold philosophy, is nothing to the raw power of that incredible food.

It was all amazing, but it was the potatoes that actually did it for me. I had been hanging around with my parents-in-law and my baby son for the last three hours and I was feeling so exhausted that I actually collapsed into a nap, for a bit, before dinner was finally ready to go—and when I dug into this stuff, and sank my jaws into the potatoes, I felt all of my fatigue just melt away. The world was peaceful, wonderful, and amazing again.

I must have sucked most of this stuff down in a matter of minutes, all over the protests of my tongue, where millions of tastebuds were perishing in the apocalyptic flames set by this woman’s love of spice—but, no matter, I pressed on, and felt myself in heaven, and knew myself to be experiencing the equivalent of an emperor’s banquet. Waves of flavor washed over me, mixed in with tongues of lashing flame. The textures were all different, all complimentary, but mostly smooth and rubbery, like the octopus, the fermented cabbage, the eggplant, the noodles cascading down my throat, combined with the cake-like starch of the potatoes.

Korean cuisine can be described, very basically, as boiled meat and vegetables mixed with rice and hot sauce. Sometimes the vegetables are fermented, as in the case of kimchi and the primary ingredient of denjang stew, which happens to be fermented soybean paste. It’s impossible not to notice the liberal use of chili peppers and jalapeños (both simply called go-choo, “pepper”, in Korean) in this species of cooking, and, in fact, I might go so far as to say that the fermentation and the heat are what really make the food unique.

Koreans appear to believe, almost universally, that their food is the hottest on the planet, but that’s because most of them have never tasted anything resembling Mexican food, and I’ve often thought that a fusion restaurant combining the two cuisines would have people spontaneously writhing on the floor in paroxysms of agonized joy.

A long time ago it came as a surprise to me when I learned that potatoes did not, in fact, come from Ireland. My mom is Irish, and obsessed with all things Irish, except for the two best Irish things—James Joyce and William Butler Yeats—and I had spent much of my life listening to her complain to my dad about the lack of potatoes in their lives, as she had apparently spent her childhood devouring a great deal of them. I was also vaguely aware that there had been some kind of potato famine or potato blight in Ireland in the distant past, and that this may have driven my ancestors to emigrate to America.

Then one day I learned that potatoes came from the New World, and my mind was blown. Food I had taken for granted as being singularly and permanently Western, from the days of the Homer on down, became historified: in the not-so distant past, my ancestors walked about with no knowledge of the tuberous delights my mother has spent so much of her own life complaining about. Tomatoes, and chocolate, and coffee, and god knows what else I had taken for granted as being indelibly my own, turned out to have come from somewhere else. There was nothing monolithic about it. All of its ingredients had been mixed in, over the course of two dozen centuries, from every region of the world, to suit our civilization’s archetypal palate.

My wife’s reaction was similar, when I revealed to her that there were no jalapeños or chili peppers in Korea five centuries ago, and that there was indeed a time when Korean food was not spicy. I’ve had some difficulty uncovering more than a few sentences on the internet on this subject, although I strongly suspect that there is plenty of information available in the Korean language, but it seems that these spices were first introduced to Korea during the Japanese invasions of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, which began in 1592, and completely destroyed the entire country. In those days Japan was using western harquebuses and crucifying its own native-born Christians, and it seems as though some of them got their hands on Mexican peppers.

Hasekura Tsunenaga, who was not the first Japanese ambassador to Europe, left on his voyage of discovery in 1613, and traveled there through Mexico, only two decades after the wars with Korea.

And so while the invasions resulted in the deaths of countless people, the destruction of numerous temples and palaces and other cultural artifacts, the abduction of artisans, and the reduction of arable land, there was one positive effect: Korean food, as we know it today, was born.

This revelation reminded me of the ship in One Hundred Years of Solitude:

When they woke up, with the sun already high in the sky, they were speechless with fascination. Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers.

Although it’s been translated into English, this has got to be one of the greatest passages ever written by anyone, period. This galleon, a symbol of Spanish oppression, tyranny, mercantilism, slavery, greed, war, disease, and profit, has been lost in the forests of Latin America for centuries, and is emerging now as something new: a fantastic artifact, completely divorced from its original purpose (lodged in a forest, distant from the ocean), covered in flowers, beautiful. An object of horror has been converted by time into something beautiful. One of my professors believed that the ship symbolized the birth of modern Latin American literature.

The peppers leftover from the first failed Japanese conquest of Korea bear some relation to this notion. I only wonder why they caught on in this country while they seem to have barely made a splash in Japan.

North Korea Agrees To Stop Being North Korea

There was something very telling left out of this tentative agreement between North Korea and the United States. Although the last hope for peace, justice, and goodness on Earth insisted that the distribution of food be rigorously monitored “to ensure that the aid goes to the neediest”, there was no mention of the North’s internal propaganda apparatus, or whatever you want to call it.

The question is not will the North stop making nuclear weapons, or will the North stop diverting all of its food aid to the rich and the military, but will the North stop depicting the United States as the Great Satan, South Korea as a terrified capitalist puppet, and its own government as the only hope for the salvation of the Korean people?

Will the North stop being itself?

We have to look at the North’s other recent actions to determine if anything else dovetails with this recent announcement. Just yesterday they were threatening, like clockwork, to kill everybody; and for the last week there has been a modest protest movement in the South to prevent the repatriation (and certain death) of several North Korean refugees who were captured in China. This all sounds very much like the North Korea we have all come to know and love over the past six or seven decades of its glorious existence.

Now if North Korea had ignored the joint US-ROK military drills, and if the North had simply let those refugees go—as I don’t think the Chinese really want to give them up to the North’s concentration camps—then I think we would have something to talk about. But since they behaved as they usually do in these situations, it’s safe to assume that they’ll behave as they usually do in the case of food and nuclear weapons: they’ll take as much of the aid as they can, they’ll find a way to funnel it to the military and to the elite, and then as soon as they think they have enough they’ll expel the weapons inspectors and resume the development of their nuclear program.

So don’t hold your breath. It would be suicidal for the elite in North Korea to give up on their raison d’être—naturally! obviously!—which is that they are the true leaders of the Korean people, and that one day they will control the entire peninsula. To officially accept food aid in exchange for abandoning their nuclear weapons, and to announce these changes in a truthful fashion to the proletariat of the North, would be the equivalent of saying something to the effect of, that’s it, the jig is up, the game is over, we’re tired of this shit, let’s just surrender to the South and get it over with. It ain’t gonna happen. You’d have better luck getting Rick Santorum to admit that god is a superstition.

I just told my Korean wife about this. “North Korea said they’re going to stop making nuclear weapons. America is going to give them food.” “Huh,” she exclaimed, “Liars. Fucking liars.”

Jeremy Lin

A few days ago the internet was chattering with the most remarkable news: a stereotype was misbehaving! An Asian was cleaning up on multiple basketball courts, surrounded on all sides and at all times by gigantic, powerful black people—their muscles like pistons, their hearts threatening to burst, as they thundered back and forth along the court, as though each was John Henry reborn! What the hell was going on here? Had the gods of the races lost their minds? Would a man in a mustache and a sombrero put down his acoustic guitar, step away from his mariachi band, and form a Silicon Valley startup? Would a woman in a black beekeeper’s burka go on national television and ask how short skirts and bare cleavage equal female liberation, exactly? Would The Autobiography of Malcolm X slip out of Donald Trump’s business suit by accident? Would a man with dreadlocks finally formulate a proper theory of quantum gravity?

I have a confession to make. I try to care about sports. It is the artist’s duty to find the beauty in everything (even the nape of Rick Santorum’s succulent neck), regardless of how Sun Tzu (or apparently Frederick the Great) says that when you defend everything you defend nothing. But seriously. Even when everyone here was going apeshit over the world cup with Japan—if you sat by a quiet window on one of those summer nights, you could hear the entire city of Busan screaming from every building, every bar and restaurant, in unison, like a chanting choir in a church made of skyscrapers and high-rises—I would try to join in the festivities, and I would look at the giant green screen before me fraught with dashing soccer players, and I would just zone out. I couldn’t help it. Everyone else was jumping and shouting, but I was turning over something I’d read that day despite myself. I cannot escape who I am. I like playing, even though I suck, but watching bores me to tears.

I didn’t know too many Asians before I came to Korea, and though I counted (and continue to count) a half-Indian and an Iranian as my closest friends—each of us has a different heritage but we are all full-blooded Americans; we don’t really notice that we belong to different tribes, it doesn’t matter—I had never gotten too close to anyone whose ancestors were from China, Korea, or Japan. There was Wataru and someone else who was named something like Yoomoo in kindergarten, and Xi from high school, and a friend of a girl I was after in college, and a few people in the background, but nobody really too close. No one close enough to destroy the stereotype of the zealously hardworking Asian, the perfectly robotic, uncreative, uncharismatic, hopelessly single straight-A student who will never be in charge of anyone…

…no one, that is, except for my friend Jacqueline, who is Asian, though I honestly never noticed, anymore than 99% of my friends and acquaintances noticed that my father comes from a family of secular Jews…

But anyway, then I came to Korea, to Busan, and one day I found myself walking around in the subway station under the Sports Complex, one of several stadiums in the city where Asians of all stripes regularly play baseball and basketball before legions of adoring fans. On the walls in the station there were life-size pictures of many of the players. I’m not going to lie here, but when I saw those pictures, and when I saw those guys playing on TV, I disdained them, not necessarily because they were Asian, but because I thought (possibly correctly) that the best players would have left for America at the first opportunity. There were some black players mixed in among them, and you can bet that (as with nearly everyone who comes to Korea), this country was not their first choice.

I’m a snob. I disdain. I also disdained and continue to disdain the pop bands, the singers, most of the actors and filmmakers, all of the comedians (how many foreigners have even cracked so much as a smile when watching a Korean comedy show?), the politicians (each rotten and corrupt to the core), even the writers (like Kim Jong Il-loving Gong Ji Young) and poets, regardless of the fact that my wife just told someone on the phone that my level of Korean is somewhere between beginner and intermediate.

Always, I thought, if these people were really remarkable, they would be famous in America. Even the warriors and kings from the country’s history seemed mediocre to me. The guy who invented the Korean alphabet, Korea’s favorite king, a one Mister Sejong, achieved this feat roughly five centuries after two Byzantine scholars named Cyril and Methodius gave what we now know as Cyrillic to the Bulgarians. Yi Sun Shin’s naval achievements are definitely astounding, but how do they compare with Alexander or Hannibal or Napoleon?

Although the media here would have the locals believe that people like Kim Yeona, Rain, and the members of The Wondergirls are world-famous, and that every American child adores Pororo, and that every American mother is using a podaegi, the only Korean who has ever gained household prominence outside of this peninsula is named Kim Jong Il.

It seemed to me that the Koreans who adored these Korean celebrities would not really give a damn if they themselves were not Korean. The Korean Wave has made some of them famous throughout Asia, but answer me this: if Asians were regularly starring in TV shows and movies in America, if Asians were not being victimized by their stereotype, if they were playing basketball and baseball and singing and dancing and marching and signing bills into law just as much as whites or blacks or anyone else, do you really think the Korean Wave would stand a chance inside or outside this peninsula? I’m not saying that Rain can’t dance, but if the man had a twin brother in America, and if that twin managed to ascend to the very top of the American pecking order against the likes of the successors of Michael Jackson, who would be more famous? Rain would be in a silver suit and a pink tie, selling cell phones out on the sidewalk, no question about it. The Korean Wave exists because Asians do not have an attractive place in American popular culture. These “World Stars” are definitely talented, but, like me, not that talented.

There’s a lot of protectionism going on in this country. The currency is kept artificially low. Foreign cars and electronics have almost no hope of competing against Korean ones inside Korea. The same supposedly goes for celebrities. But Jeremy Lin may just be the first nail in the coffin of the Korean Wave—he represents Asians all over America, he is playing against the very best in the world, and as a result of what are apparently remarkable achievements, he is proving to even the most skeptical racists that Asians are individuals, like anyone else, and that it’s high time America stopped worrying about the Yellow Peril, and learned to embrace it.

The first Asian-American president is not so far away as everyone believes. In fact, he turned eight months old just over a week ago.

Movies

I feel as if I have just absorbed a great work of art. A. and I went to see There Will Be Blood at a nearby DVD Bang, a seedy but effective place (which one could say of the entirety of this country) where you pay about six or seven dollars per person to sit in your own dark little room, on a reasonably comfortable bed with plastic covers and plastic pillows and a thin zebra blanket, with a gigantic high definition television and some very decent speakers not four feet away from your outstretched legs.

The experience is better than most movie theaters, since you don’t have to deal with people on their cellphones, the blue-white glow of text messages, the ceaseless babbling of idiots; you can also spontaneously have sex or masturbate, if the inspiration strikes, as there is a convenient plastic sphere of toilet paper sitting behind you on the bedstead.

The selection at this place is barbarous, truly barbarous, but there are a few good films nestled in amongst the mountains of catalogued garbage and sublime Japanese pornography, and we managed to find a few.

As for the movie, the music is one of the most striking things about it—the synthesized humming ringing in the first shot says that this is something alien we are looking at here, something unnatural and cruel that does not belong to the world. But I think the film falters in its use of one of Brahms’ most famous songs, which it samples almost like a rap star, cutting here and there, fast-forwarding to the parts the movie needs—this song jerked me out of the movie both times I heard it; the first time it sounded like a last-minute addition, and at the very end the irony was so overwhelming a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses almost sprouted from my nose—the second time we hear the song it seems as if the director wants to let us know that yes, actually, he had been intending to use that little jig all along.

There Will Be Blood makes use of a song called “Fratres for Piano and Cello” by a wholly unknown (to me) Estonian composer named Arvo Part, who seems to have lifted every last note straight out of one of Bach’s greatest achievements; the violin music that was originally composed by Jonny Greenwood (from Radiohead) is better.

A. and I have found a way to ride out the rest of the winter. If we could afford to go every day, we would.

Yesterday we saw a Korean film called Dogani, or The Crucible, in English, a fairly bleak, black-and-white picture about child molestation in a school for deaf orphans—is it possible to get any bleaker? howabout robots raping blind-and-deaf puppies inside Auschwitz during The Holocaust?—but it’s based on true events, though I doubt the good guys in the real world were so perfectly good as they were in this film, and I doubt the bad guys were so horribly evil and soulless. The film is based on a novel written by one of Kim Jong Il’s long-distance admirers, whom I wrote about earlier, a woman who will never be famous in the outside world for anything other than her quirks, even if she claims that she will attain immortality when the government crucifies her; still, it was entertaining, and it jerked plenty of tears from the both of us, and its indictment of Korean society is far harsher than anything you’ll find coming out of the mouths of the disenchanted foreigners living here. To me it seemed as though a classroom full of deaf kids was probably the only such place in Korea where the teacher could hear himself think.

One of the more ridiculous things you see in this film is a $50,000 bribe delivered to the school principal from a teacher who wants to work there—it’s one of those commonplace Korean customs (according to A.) that makes absolutely no sense to me, since it seems to mean that there is no reason to get the job to begin with. I’ll pay you $50,000 now so you can pay me $20,000 a year while I work for you. Disgruntled foreigners occasionally refer to something called KLogic—this is KLogic.

Then there was something I watched on my own, called The Interrupters—I’m watching movies all the time now because I haven’t been able to watch movies for eight months (the boy slept from 9 to 7:30 without waking last night, hallelujah)—a movie great and remarkable for many reasons, one of the most notable being that it is full of black people, although unlike (ahem) most movies that are full of black people, it was clearly made for everyone to see. There’s nothing else I think I can say about it, or anything else, that hasn’t been said a million times before.

I Only Watch Good Movies

Kingdom of Heaven—Visually a perfect piece of cinema, its impossible hero, played by Mr. Mediocrity Orlando Bloom, wounds the film very deeply, and acts like an extra who accidentally wandered into the movie’s exquisite costumes and sets, all while there are several other actors (Jeremy Irons, Ghassan Massoud, Edward Norton) who are crying out to be the center of what could have been a masterpiece. Also, pretending that violence is bad when you yourself are making an incredibly violent movie is stupid. But I love it anyway.

My Neighbor Totoro—Flawless magic. The best part is when Totoro notices the sound of raindrops striking his umbrella, and then jumps up and down to get more of them to fall from a nearby tree. The attention to detail in the film, such as the way an old oven door slumps on its hinges after it is closed, is remarkable, and the fact that this is a good story without conflict or bad guys or anything in the way of cliches makes the film even more remarkable.

Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates)—Speaking of cliches, a movie that seeks to invent a new cinematic language, eschewing the camera’s movement, and even the third dimension, might have created a whole new set of cliches as well, if anyone had ever tried to make movies like Sergei Parajanov. The story is based on the life of a medieval Armenian poet, and draws its inspiration from medieval sculptures and illuminations, in addition to the metaphors from his poetry. The insane length of each shot, some of them continuing without interruption for several minutes, is almost too much to bear, since most of us have been raised on quick movements, quick cuts, and shots that never last more than three seconds at a time—but this great length is a gift, because it demands the viewer’s attention, forces him or her to examine everything in depth, while the onscreen metaphors likewise require viewers to examine them and wonder, at length, what the hell is going on. The film is challenging and very uncomfortable, but each shot is mesmerizing, beautiful, bizarre, and unlike anything you’ve seen before. If you have the time and the patience, you won’t regret watching it.

Slumdog Millionaire—Not as good on the second viewing, it left me feeling drained, and I was really disappointed by how the female lead is little better than a princess locked in a castle, waiting for her rescue by prince charming. She is not really a character so much as a pretty caricature, as is everyone else in this movie—we see lots of nice postcard shots, but nothing of the interior lives of the people wandering through them.

Going Bonkers

Ilya Repin's depiction of Gogol burning the manuscript to the sequel of Dead Souls, which was, apparently, not very good.

Every couple of weeks I find myself reading a book or a website which convinces me that everything I do is completely stupid and pointless. The last such treasure I stumbled across was Stuff White People Like, in which I learned that I was a hipster—don’t waste your breath trying to convince me otherwise—focusing on the little things I did and thought which made me completely superior to all other forms of animate and inanimate matter. I burned through that sucker in a couple of hours, thirsting for page after page of revelation, staring into the author’s somewhat-less-than-stunning-and-ultimately-predictable prose as though into a mirror. Portlandia, my current favorite show, is a warmer and more amusing take on the same rough question—why is it necessary for me to distinguish myself from the rest of humanity?

I just decided to discard this entire post, and then tried to edit my book, and concluded that the first sentence I looked at was worthless, though I could not say why, and then I resurrected these words from the trash, wrote this paragraph, and concluded once again that I should just give up, because there is absolutely no point: what am I supposed to do when an intelligent person reads this and concludes that I am an idiot, and says so?

It might be nice if I could run through a gauntlet of such people: two rows of everyone whom we all consider to be brilliant, every last godlike artist, scientist, and philosopher, castigating us for our inadequacies. Maybe then I wouldn’t be so afraid of critiques; I’d be able to get things done without allowing these petty moods to get the best of me.

But it’s been some time since someone has come out and said that I’m a moron. The last was a ridiculous, rambling attack on a job ad I posted a few months ago on koreabridge, which I didn’t really care about because, after all, I don’t take teaching nearly as seriously as writing. Nonetheless, even the potential for an attack on my literary abilities frightens me into the defensive posture of already agreeing that I suck, long before anyone else has said so.

As I write these words I should stress that I’m not looking for any affirmation from my readers so much as a simple exploration of the bizarre thoughts running through my head at this very moment.

At the same time as I conclude, once and for all, that it would have been better if I had never existed at all, I am seeking my rehabilitation, similar in its ultimate pointlessness to the one that Gogol desired for Chichikov, who was supposed to become something resembling A Good Person in the uninteresting sequel to Dead Souls. For all its faults I started reading Bertrand Russell’s A History Of Western Philosophy for the thirtieth time (skipping ahead to Thales, whose conclusion that everything is water (called a scientific hypothesis by Russell, who reminds us that most things are made of hydrogen) is oddly reminiscent of an enigmatic line in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, in which a dying relative’s last words are, you guessed it, “Aha, I see now, everything is water”, or something to that effect (at times these hidden connections (evidence for the muse, that every book has really just been written by one person, or dictated to us by psychic aliens) are all I’ve got going for me)) so as to convince myself that some things actually are good, that everything I do is not stupid, and that I should stop wasting my time debating whether I am up to the task of adding words to the universe and just shut up and do it.

But I cannot watch a stupid video, even a hilariously stupid video, without concluding that I am likewise stupid—and not even hilariously so.

This all comes back to the question of individuality. I am worthless. I am worthwhile. What is this I, really?—right now one of my friends is sticking out her tongue, rolling her eyes back, and pumping her fist as if to mimic the act of masturbation—but I is, first and foremost, the letter I use to start off most of my self-centered sentences. Two nights ago I went to my second Jaesa, or Korean Ancestor Worship Ceremony, translated far more coolly by google to “Sacrifice”, where we honored the memory of my wife’s grandmother, who was apparently a pleasant human being born into an age in which no one ever smiled while being photographed.

This got me thinking about atavism, a word I had been searching for in the back of my mind for a few days—that very old question of how much of who we are is really due to our ancestry? What agency do human beings really possess? Are we all really just genes? Yes! Absolutely! The answer is yes!

People say my son is handsome, and conclude that this can only be a result of the sexual union between myself and my wife, but really he is indebted to our parents for his handsomeness, and to their ancestors, and to all of the good genes that won out over the bad ones, thus eventually producing an aesthetically-pleasing human being.

I had nothing to do with his beauty, because I am just a single step in human evolution, and the idea that I could have had anything to do with how well our son turned out is merely a reflection of the illusion of personality and individuality, which I believe now to be an evolutionary safeguard against suicide. Human beings are smart enough to understand that the universe is meaningless, that there is no reason existence is better than nonexistence—and without this belief in the importance of the self, and its preservation, I think most of us wouldn’t bother with the struggle to be, because the eternal sleep of nonbeing is far easier.

So, truistically, obviously, in a manner befitting wide-eyed hippies and yogis both, I can declare here and now that it doesn’t matter whether you think I’m an idiot, because you don’t exist, and I don’t exist, either. The key to triumph is solipsism.

If I could realize this on a deeper level, and not just an intellectual one, I might be able to stop blogging and get to work—I have just under two hours before I have to go pick up my son from daycare.

From Comics To Chinese To Ancient Egyptian To Korea And Back Again

I once saw Art Spiegeleman, the author of Maus and Raw and other comics, deliver a lecture in which he argued two important points: that we should call them comics rather than graphic novels, because the latter term is just pandering to snobs who are never going to pick up a comic book anyway, and that comic books are not only art, but the argument that comic books are art is redundant and unnecessary. Roger Ebert might disagree, and Vladimir Nabokov would say that artists are lost the moment they begin to wonder what art actually is, or should be. In Nikolai Gogol he writes that “A writer is lost when he grows interested in such questions as ‘what is art?’ and ‘what is an artist’s duty?’”, even though he obviously thought about this question all the time.

What are the oldest comics in the world? The first Superman or Batman comics? Ridiculous Victorian political cartoons? None of these, Spiegeleman said—we find comics (defined as pictures together with words, telling a story) in medieval stained glass windows and also in ancient Egypt, where the boundary between letters (phonemes, symbols representing sounds) and images (pictoral representations of real things or abstract concepts) is blurred to the point where the hieroglyphic for the famous Horus eye can mean both an eye as well as the sound I. This writing system is no longer in regular use, although the letters I’m using to express my thoughts can be traced all the way back to Ancient Egypt—but in China and the Sinosphere there is a system that is still around and still regularly used by millions of people.

Called Hanzi by the Chinese, and written Chinese by us, the system is phonemic and pictoral at the same time, just like Ancient Egyptian, and as in Europe there is an old tradition of pairing detailed images with words—known to us, today, as comics. Although my knowledge on the subject is purely amateur, it seems rare to stumble upon any kind of traditional Chinese painting that does not possess some kind of writing, stamp, or signature, in contrast to classical Western paintings, which seem to be much more focused on the image rather than the writing which accompanies it. More often than not, Chinese paintings are covered with writing, in places which Westerners would probably consider fairly intrusive.

But Koreans take the idea of the word as art to greater extremes. Scholars here relied on Chinese characters exclusively for millennia, and only switched over to the homegrown Korean alphabet after the Colonial Japanese—seeking to distance Korea from China—forced them to. As a result written Chinese became fairly rare, even if something like seventy percent of Korean (and perhaps far more) is just mispronounced Chinese, but it also took on something of a cultish aspect; it became an object of worship, a marker of intellectual achievement, as well as a work of art.

Few temples or traditional structures in Korea go without a very necessary adornment of Chinese characters, many of which are so bizarre that almost no one can read them; newspapers and books still use Hanzi, or Hanja in Korean, to help readers distinguish between complex academic words, when mere context is not enough; it is a mark of an intellectual to read and write Hanja, even if Hanja is commonplace just next door in China as Hanzi or in Japan as Kanji; and most importantly, Hanja itself became art.

We can explain Engrish, Chinglish, Konglish—the way various Asian societies seem to adore the visual form rather than the actual meaning of written English, resulting in ridiculous gibberish printed on t-shirts and signs—by looking at the Sinosphere’s love of written Chinese. I can’t speak for China or Japan, but I know that when Koreans want to make any place look really fancy, they use Chinese to do it—often with obsolete words written in unreadable cursive. If we Westerners think covering something with incomprehensible English is ridiculous, we should recall that Chinese people think more or less the same thing when they come to Korea and find their everyday language transformed into a mystical fetish. In my old elementary school, in my in-laws’ home, Chinese is carefully painted on expensive paper, framed, and displayed as a mark of class, a status symbol.

I myself am guilty of this fetishizing tendency as well—written Chinese is obviously far more of an art than written English, and I like the form of a lot of the plainer characters (天, heaven; 水, water; 公, public; 文, culture; 心, mind;)—and I know that there are plenty of Westerners who have gone to tattoo artists so as to inform the Chinese-speaking world that they are child molesters. Chinese is cool. If you get a Chinese shirt or tattoo, you are cool, as well—my father once purchased a t-shirt at Narita glorifying fascist Japan because the shirt looked good and he didn’t know any better. Had he worn the shirt here in Korea, it would have been little different from displaying a Nazi swastika in America.

I haven’t read too many comic books, but I’ve enjoyed the ones I have read, and I wouldn’t exclude comics from the world of art because I believe to do so would be pedantic—no different from doing the same with video games, as Roger Ebert has. Still, there is a certain perception in the West that, for the most part, words and images should be separate. Only smart people read books that are just words, and look at paintings that are just paintings, and only stupid people mix the two together. But the fact of the matter is that a written word and a painted image are more or less the same representation, the same symbol, and if you go back far enough in time, or travel around the world, you find that the distinction between word and image is entirely arbitrary.

A Prominent South Korean Writer Expresses Her Sadness For The Death of Kim Jong Il

So Kim Jong Il was a weird guy—and how nice is it to refer to him in the past tense?—but hidden among his more famous quirks is the fact that there are prominent South Koreans who support him and have expressed genuine sadness at his death. One of them is a famous writer named Gong Ji Young, who in response to a photograph of South Korean protestors celebrating the death of the Heinously Dear Leader tweeted the following—”Shame on you!” (“정말 부끄럽구요 쫌!”). Various politicians aligned with the Democratic Party have also apparently expressed their condolences.

(news is over, opinion follows; the preceding paragraph would have been impossible to write without A.’s help)

Now I am a communist, partly because communism is cool again, but also partly because Christopher Hitchens called himself an especially conservative Trotskyist, a title I would like to adopt for myself even though most of my knowledge about Leon Trotsky comes from Animal Farm. Nevertheless, armed with an amateur’s knowledge of the issues I essentially hope that our capitalist economy will become more democratic, peacefully, over time. This opinion places me far to the left of most people. But in South Korea I am a conservative.

It is a hallowed South Korean tradition to despise whoever is in power, and as the current president, Lee Myung Bak, has been around for several years, you will be hard pressed to find a single person expressing support for his policies, which mostly benefit a small group of incredibly rich old Christian men. But people hate him for a lot of good reasons. The economy, his strongest asset, is doing okay but that’s really because everyone here is working like slaves (everyone, that is, except for me) and because the country appears to sell a lot more than it buys—particularly in the case of ships, cars, electronics, cellphones.

The man does not care about the environment, the underprivileged, or freedom of speech, sacrificing everything and everyone in the name of money, and he is also—as the North Koreans call him, and everyone else in this country—a puppet of the United States, having just signed what would seem to be a fairly unpopular Free Trade Agreement with America (which some Koreans believe to be more of a threat to their security than the North (Japan also is considered to be more dangerous)). For these reasons I should probably not support him. But I do.

For all his faults, the man doesn’t give anything to North Korea. Not a dime. Not a grain of rice. And because every dime and grain of rice would go toward maintaining the elite and the military in that country, I support the idea of starving it of resources and allowing it to collapse on its own, because the North Korean army is too powerful to be destroyed without killing huge numbers of innocent people, and the North Korean people themselves appear to be too weak or too unwilling to take down the regime on their own. This may seem callous, but I think the people who are starving to death in the North right now will continue starving regardless of whether or not anyone sends them aid. Some people might say that aid should be sent along with people to monitor its distribution, but in Asia that would mean losing face, because the poverty in North Korea would be exposed for all to see, and nothing could be more shameful, because horrible things are okay as long as nobody else knows about them. The Northrons (or Norks) will allow countless people to starve before allowing themselves to be humiliated like that.

A more liberal politician is probably going to be elected to the presidency at the end of next year as the result of the current backlash against President Lee, which means that the status quo will remain the same except for North Korea. The South will, quite promptly, resume sending everything short of nuclear weapons to the North in the name of solidarity with everyone’s racial brethren (seriously), and these actions will probably prolong the North’s eventual collapse by months, years, or even decades. America’s policymakers will probably support this move as well because people seem to think that the leaders of North Korea actually want to give up their weapons, their mansions, and their power, in exchange for nooses and cold prison cells. This would not be logical anywhere outside of North Korea; I don’t know why it is logical inside North Korea.

The Garbage In New York

To us, because we were traveling, even the trash was beautiful. It was early in the morning on the day we were to return to Korea, and under the orange streetlight outside the taxi window there was a Manhattan curb choked with garbage. It was an Aleph for me, representing everything and nothing, all cities and no cities and just the city of New York, and because I had missed this place (my birthplace!) so much that image took on the most profound significance, and I still remember it as though it is here, now, before my eyes, a year later—all while complaining about the garbage in Korea.

A. talked about this yesterday (after we read and discussed On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer together, in an attempt to undo the damage of her Korean education) and said that as a Korean it was like walking into a movie, to go to New York City and wander around for a couple of days. Sometimes the experience of travel is so intense you photograph everything you see with your eyes, and all the food you eat is exquisite, and you feel like you’re coming to life for the first time in ages.

To live in New York sounds extraordinary to me, but I’m sure it would become normal enough after a few months. Likewise I’m guessing other people think it must be so bizarre to live in Korea, but life here acquires the same grinding slog you would find almost anywhere else—although after two and a half years I still have not gotten used to being pointed or stared at by children and old people. Nonetheless, normalcy snatches the days away. Habits of living accelerate the passage of time; any escape from these patterns, a glance at a pile of leaves glowing in the sunshine, a bird diving into the river and rippling beneath the water, the mountains turning blue beneath a pink sunset, a boy in his white taekwondo suit leaping out of a beeping, roaring minivan—these breaks from the grind wake me up to the astounding perfection of the mind of god, and I start thinking like Liebniz, and not Voltaire. This really is the best of all possible worlds.

Should I stop there? No, now I must reduce things to the absurd.

Why was New York like a movie to A.? Obviously because she had seen the city starring in a lot of movies. To a lot of people here I think New York is America, and I’ve known a few Koreans to express surprise and bewilderment when I tell them that almost every inch of America is wide open country. On the other side of things, from my perspective, I think there is one prime image of Asia (or East Asia) in the American consciousness, or at least in my consciousness: Asians clogging up subways. Mobs of them in the hundreds and the thousands going up escalators, piling onto subways, pouring down hallways in floods…and to travel away from home and step inside that image of modern exoticism is not at all as pleasant as voyaging out to New York City from Korea. On Saturday I was in such a sour mood I actually shoved an ajumma against a stairway wall after she herself shoved me out of her way; I believe it was the first time in my life I have violently acted out against a perfect stranger, and some part of that violence definitely comes from my preconception of Asia: the subway is bad, and ugly, and must be gotten over with. It’s not just the objective shittiness of the subway itself, but the negative image I consumed before I came here already convinced me of the horror of the place. And as a boy I loved trains. My first job preference was to be a conductor.

These two tropes, of New York and the East Asian Subway, are played in different keys. Regardless of the actual beauty of New York—and there are plenty of people who can’t stand the place—Koreans are programmed to believe that it’s a great city, and most will tell you that they really want to go. The image of Asia is more negative, and fits in with one stereotype about Asians, that they are mindlessly hard workers, trudging in and out of existence with little more individuality than a hive of ants (and perhaps the only alternative to this dreariness is leaping over bamboo rooftops). But there is nothing objectively good or bad about the reality from which this image draws its strength, and if the subways were depicted in a more positive light—imagine some sort of ridiculous subway musical, a good comedy, a patriotic song imported from North Korea, what have you—I think it’s possible I might have been programmed or influenced into believing that it is actually a pleasant thing to take the train. I mean, the train gives you a few minutes to listen to music or read a book; I finished two books by Balzac, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, and To The Finland Station, reading them almost entirely on the subway, and it can be thrilling to listen to a good song while darting through the crowds. It sucks when people are yapping or shoving, but they’re not always doing that, so sometimes it’s really not that bad.

The clip I posted from Baraka is an exposure of background. There are a few ideas behind the film (most obviously that Western civilization is mindless and destructive), and one of them is a sort of switchup: take the background to all the news clips and movies and TV shows we’ve ever seen, and make it the foreground. Focus on the background instead, and bring the innocent bystanders out of the woodwork—the three schoolgirls at 3:29—and make them confront us, head on, staring at us like we stare at them, from behind the safety of the television screen, for an uncomfortably long period of time, a lengthy break to the rushing about we’ve been getting used to for the last few minutes. This is what I’m talking about. These are the ideas that have programmed me, brought out into the light. Cities likewise become absolutely horrifying here, with the huge endless buildings like living moai statues, rushing about, devouring the landscape, and all the traffic between them is reduced to a factory’s production line—the sound effects suggest a roaring incinerator. Everything is reversed. The subway becomes a work of art, something to focus on, and the city, the centerpiece, the star, of so many great films, is exposed as a concentration camp.