Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Korean books

"They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six.  So far without success.  Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head"--Brave New World

Sunday my Classic Book Club discussed Uncle Tom's Cabin.  I finished the Viking book and started Brave New World for the group's next event.

Saturday afternoon at the Crowdreads Meetup I read aloud the first few pages of Brave New World. (I wish I could have read a foreword Huxley wrote that concluded "You pays your money and you takes your chances," but this edition didn't have it.)

I filled up the notebook in which I've been writing memoir pieces for the Monday afternoon group.  A few days ago I went to Indigo Books and bought a new green notebook with a tree etched on the front!

Saturday I picked up several Korean folkore picture books at the Palmerston library. (They have quite a few Korean books there since it's just east of Koreatown.) I've started reading a story about a child who appeared in a magic place or somewhere and didn't have any family or anything...

I also got a children's biography of a famous Korean technological genius called Jang Yongshil.  He lived about 600 years ago and had a hard time getting ahead because he wasn't born into a scholar-elite family.  But he ended up designing precision astronomical instruments and automatic rain gauges and such.  Translating it into English is slow work, even with the considerable help of Google Translate, but I think I'm learning more. (There are a couple of details I've had to ask Hongmin about.)

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Chocolate time

On Tuesday I bought a lot of post-Easter chocolate.  One item was a big chocolate egg that contained a miniature Stanley Cup with a Chicago Black Hawks banner (some assembly required).  Another egg contained a mini-yoyo and jigsaw puzzle of the kiddie show Paw Patrol, except that the jigsaw puzzle pieces were so thin they wouldn't stay together!

I'm in the last part of the Viking book.  But I haven't even started Hillbilly Elegy!  I guess I'll have to return it and try it another time.

I've finished doing the first round of all the Korean quizzes on Duolingo! (The last two were about last year's Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and K-pop music.) Now I'm going to Palmerston library to borrow some Korean children's books...

Comics Kingdom, the website where I read King Features comic strips, has gone through a big redesign, which has been a bit of a headache.  While the day's new strips have traditionally come at midnight, I sometimes have to wait till the morning to read the latest classic strips.

Quora has some odd questions.  Someone asked, "How should I explain to someone that they can't lie to me?" and someone else asked, "What don't most liberals realize?" And under language, people want to know the reason for irregularities like the British ending words with -our and the Americans ending them with -or.  Honestly, I have no idea!

Hongmin says that my first Korean letter had just a few "tiny-winy" mistakes!  She was late getting back to me because she had a big exam and ended up sleeping all day afterward. (She got a high grade.)

Sunday, April 21, 2019

JUAREZ

"Virtue is a formidable weapon in the hands of an enemy"--Juarez

Wednesday night I saw William Dieterle's Juarez, for the second time, with the History Meetup.  It was one of three prestigious Warner Brothers biopics where Dieterle directed Paul Muni, the others being The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Life of Emile Zola. (I first saw it back in the '80s on the CBC late show that broadcast a lot of old Warner Brothers movies, hosted by Ben Gordon.)

The movie got better as it got along, but Muni's hagiographic Juarez wasn't so interesting; it was really about Brian Ahearne as the misguided, doomed Emperor Maximilian. (Of course there's a subtext about resisting the Nazis...)

A couple of people from my Crowdreads Meetup turned up at the screening, which was nice.  This afternoon I went to their group, and we were still talking about the movie.  I was also talking about the Viking history I'm reading.  Someone else had some quotes from Einstein. (I like his quote, "Don't feel bad if you have problems with mathematics.  Mine are bigger.")

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

An elegy for THE NATION

Katrina Van den Heuvel recently commemorated the 25th anniversary of becoming editor of the leftist magazine The Nation.  I'm sorry to say that she's ruined it. (At least she took longer than Tina Brown, who reduced The New Yorker to trendy, weaselly mediocrity well before the end of her six-year tenure.)

Back in the 1990s The Nation was required reading for people like me, in contrast to the wonkish Beltway neoliberalism of The New Republic, which Martin Peretz ruined in his own time.  For me, that magazine's defining moment came in 1986 when they came out in favor of Congress funding Reagan's contra campaign against Nicaragua--for them, anticommunism ultimately trumped their much-vaunted disapproval of terrorism!

But I digress, of course.  Back in the '90s The Nation had two great columnists in Christopher Hitchens (before he became the Pentagon's useful idiot after 9/11--sigh) and Alexander Cockburn.  And Katha Pollitt was also very readable, at least in her early years.  True, there were bores like Jonathan Schell, Daniel Singer and William S. Greider, but better too wide a range of views than too narrow. (I'm looking at you, The Daily Beast!)

What happened next?  Around 2001, The Nation came to represent the "play it safe" left. It goes back to the 2000 election, when Ralph Nader became the scapegoat for Bill Clinton and Al Gore's ineptness, with The Nation's press columnist Eric Alterman leading the charge. 

And I definitely do consider Nader a scapegoat:  Gore might well have lost without Nader on the ballot, and he might well have succeeded with him.  As far as I'm concerned, the real story about the 2000 election is that the left overwhelmingly stayed loyal to the Democrats, even in non-swing states where their support clearly wasn't needed, and realized the worst of both worlds.  If they weren't quite as unanimous as the Democratic Party needed them to be, the latter have themselves to blame.  Wishing, "If only we'd been a bit more unanimous!" is very, very lame.  And more importantly, such scapegoating has made it easier for the Democrats to continue to make the same mistakes and fail again and again.

But The Nation was now in the "play it safe" business.  In 2004 they published an article by an African-American minister appealing to Nader not to run again, urging him to "take back the party" instead. (The power of wishful thinking...) Then the editors  themselves called on Nader not to run again.  But Nader did run again, voters on the left voted Democrat again, and George W. Bush succeeded again.

Pragmatism is a slippery slope.  Consider the 2016 election.  Right after the final California primary (the one where they didn't dare run an exit poll), there was a report in The Nation insisting that the primary hadn't been "rigged" against Bernie Sanders.  And in October they ran a whole slew of articles clearly intended to get out the vote for Hillary.  I actually felt sorry for them!

And now the Clintonites are blaming Sanders for their heroine's embarrassing failure. "If only Bernie hadn't said so many Mean Things about Hillary, everyone would have been happy with her!" (A truly "pragmatic" view would suggest that a candidate who couldn't quite survive being the subject of Mean Things in the primary was a poor choice for the nomination.) The "pragmatists" have gone from scapegoating to killing the messenger.

Which brings us to the 2020 campaign.  Alterman recently wrote an article in The Nation insisting that Sanders represented "too big a risk" for the party! (If Alterman were any more unreadable, he'd be illegible.) Back in 2016, some Democrats convinced themselves that Hillary was a "safer" choice than Bernie, and I suppose they'll back affectionate Joe Biden now...

There's a new leftist magazine with the title Jacobin, which represents what The Nation used to be before drinking the prudence koolaid. They recently published an amusing putdown of Alterman's article by Luke Savage, and a Liza Featherstone article putting down Pete Buttigieg.  And now the latest issue of The Nation has an article disapproving of the "takedown" tone in both articles.  Progressives mustn't say Mean Things, you see.

This article, by one Jeffrey Isaacs, has the ineffable title "For Agonistic Respect on the Left." (I had to look up "agonistic," of course.) Isaacs' admirers call him "thoughtful," but I'd have to say that Savage and Featherstone have more thoughtfulness in their little fingers than in all of Isaacs' semi-educated head!  It ends with the line, "And too much is at stake to risk failure." So don't you dare attack the Democratic Party strategy that's largely produced one defeat after another for the last generation or two...

Here we see The Nation adhering to the "play it safe" mentality that blames the 2016 loss on leftists who didn't know their place saying Mean Things.  And they have some nerve putting down Jacobin for exhibiting the qualities that used to distinguish their own magazine.  The Nation has crossed the line from tragedy into farce.

Sunday, April 14, 2019

Writing in Korean

“'Take care,' he said, 'take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country.' Then seizing the shaving glass, he went on: 'And this is the wretched thing that has done the mischief. It is a foul bauble of man’s vanity. Away with it!' and opening the heavy window with one wrench of his terrible hand, he flung out the glass, which was shattered into a thousand pieces on the stones of the courtyard far below"--Dracula

I'm now going to a new reading group at St. Lawrence Market library.  We're reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, a chapter or two at a time.  We take turns reading it aloud. (The others like my Dracula voice.) It should take about five months to finish.

I've finished Uncle Tom's Cabin and started Neil Oliver's Vikings for the History Meetup. (It was published to accompany his BBC documentary series, which I think I saw some of when I was in London seven years ago.)

I also borrowed J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy from the library.  It's a memoir about growing up in the Appalachians and a discussion of the region's continuing problems.  Some people say it's unfair, but I want to decide for myself.

Today I wrote Hongmin an email in Korean!  Writing in a new language is a humbling experience--you may not feel sure you're doing it right, even when you are!  It was slow work, because I had to keep switching between English and Korean keyboard inputs. (English for looking up words, Korean for writing.) I've been correcting all her little mistakes in English--with her encouragement!--and now she'll be doing the same for me.

Tuesday, April 09, 2019

Will wonders never cease?

"From this time, an inviolable sphere of peace encompassed the lowly heart of the oppressed one--an ever-present Saviour hallowed it as a temple.  Past now the bleeding of earthly regrets; past its fluctuations of hope, and fear, and desire; the human will, bent, and bleeding, and struggling long, was now entirely merged in the Divine.  So short now seemed the remaining voyage of life--so near, so vivid, seemed eternal blessedness--that life's uttermost woes fell from him unharming"--Uncle Tom's Cabin

One comic strip I usually hate is The Family Circus, but the other day Jeffy Keane did an episode I actually liked! (Actually, there was one I liked from decades ago when one of the kids sees an obese guy and asks, "Is that man going to have a baby?")
These days we don't usually see this level of realism in any comic strip, let alone that one! (I especially like the boy imagining his girl in a nun's veil, with his dog commiserating as best he can.)

I've been learning some interesting Korean words on Duolingo.  Their word for a briefcase literally means "007 pack"! (I guess they've shown James Bond movies in Korea.) The other day I was learning words related to the human body, and their word for palm means "hand-floor"! (Sounds a bit like German words...) I've been putting colours in their own category in my word list, but when I learned the words for the senses I gave them their own category and added visual stuff like those colours.

At Sunday's singing group, we were doing "Love Potion Number Nine" and the round "Rose, rose, will I never see thee red?"

I've almost finished Uncle Tom's Cabin.  In the last part, with Simon Legree, it turns into a passion play.  (When Uncle Tom refused to murder Legree, I wanted to say, "Don't be a pussy!  It's Nat Turner time!")

The other night I had a nightmare where I was back in school, and I was way behind because I'd been absent quite a while, and I was afraid to go back because catching up would be such a huge task!

Friday, April 05, 2019

History Meetup

On his daughter's last days: "St. Clare found a strange calm coming over him.  It was not hope--that was impossible; it was not resignation; it was only a calm resting in the present, which seemed so beautiful that he wished to think of no future.  It was like that hush of spirit which we feel amid the bright, mild woods of autumn, when the bright hectic flush is on the trees, and the last lingering flowers by the brook; and we joy in it all the more, because we know that soon it will all pass away"--Uncle Tom's Cabin

Yesterday I had lunch with Pam at the Schnitzel Hub.

Last night I went to the History Meetup.  The subject was Mexico.

Something I ate at the Schnitzel Hub disagreed with me. (The goulash soup?) I got through the Meetup, but after I got home I was sick.  That's why I'm writing this post now instead of a day ago.

My Korean is progressing on Duolingo.  The other day I was learning colours in Korean!

I haven't been following this business of Trudeau Jr. vs. the First Nations woman he kicked out of the cabinet at all.  I guess I'm growing older.