"Until tomorrow, I'll just keep movin' on": More stamina fun!

At last! No, I'm not rejoicing a blog posting - insubstantial as this is - after much neglect these past few days but happy, at long last, to say that I tried dog soup!

Pictures and a longer story will follow in the next day or so but suffice it to say that the taste, the smell, the curious environment, the mental image of my sister's dog Howie and the girlfriend next to me making obscene "Woof! Woof!" sounds conspired to make it an unforgettable experience.

We'll see just how much I remember tomorrow.

The Grain Elevator Paradox

Don't know what you got till it's gone
Don't know what it is I did so wrong
Now I know what I got, it's just this song
And it ain't easy to get back, takes so long
- Cinderella

In the shade of every moment I bled
Such a sorrow was to be expected
I let a good thing go
- Gemma Hayes

Some things crossing my mind of late, other than the fast-approaching 33 1/3 deadline (but not to worry, I'm nearly done my bold and impossible to ignore pitch): getting ready to leave Korea, the Korean (read: human) desire to neglect nature and heritage in the face of progress, occasional thoughts about death, Clive James' recent panning of Borges' character, how much I hate taking the last bite of a great meal and why Mike Vernon wasn't so bad afterall. No, not much of note kicking around inside the onion these days.

But these thoughts - even the 33 1/3 pitch - are linked by longing for something gone that wasn't particularly revered at the time. This is what I just started calling the Grain Elevator Paradox: only in the face of extinction do we realise just how much something means to us (I like to think this applies to the Borges essay in that only in his final days did he begin to accept democracy and the will of the people - it took his decline for his perception of the real world to be redeemed).

I used to mock grain elevators and now wish for the days when I still could. Passing by a tiny hamlet like Turin, Alberta, I could joke that it had more grain elevators than people; nowadays there are more obese mayors in your average small town (ie one) than there are monuments to Alberta Wheat Pool glory. Ironically, it takes mass destruction for people to finally appreciate what they otherwise didn't care about.

And the same thing seems to be happening here in Korea but you wonder if it's all too late. As I mentioned last time, the economy is starving and it's gotta be fed: too bad it has to be on anything old and traditional (couldn't they tear down, say, a few of Korea's hideous churches?). Strange such a proud people won't do anything.

Back to the 33 1/3 pitch...do you think people will buy a book all about a Cinderella album?

Wither the Korean Economy?

Ever since I arrived here in Korea my students have been telling me about how terrible the Korean economy is. Leaving aside my lefty tendencies that consider all economies to be terrible (any system that relies upon people buying more and more things they mostly don't need can't be anything but), this claim to economic mediocrity begs the obvious question: what makes it so terrible?

There are a few stock answers they give: the IMF, the FTA, the declining and aging population, the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945 but these are offered up as reasons for everything. For sure, the root of all this country's problems lies somehow, in some way with these sources. But based on some anecdotal evidence at my disposal, there's nothing indicating a looming Korean depression. Consider:

- the Korea Times recently reported an economic projection that reckons Korea will be the world's second richest country within thirty to forty years. Granted, this assumes that the nation with the second highest number of people earning $200,000 a year is in actuality the second richest. And odd way to judge wealth to be sure but an impressive fact nonetheless.

- construction of office towers and high rise apartment buildings does not appear to be slowing down. A case could be made that the Korean government is working on a principle of modern day Keynesian economics (ie lavish spending during tough times in order to get the economic ball rolling, if my memories of Social 30 serve me well) but somehow I doubt it. The high powered chaebol's wouldn't be involved in something just to get the engine going.

- the influx of us in no way ubiquitous English teachers continues unabated and doesn't seem to be letting up. Half of Nova Scotia alone seems to teach ESL in Korea.

- the government hopes that every Korean household will have a robot within the next ten years or so (you'd think they were bankrolling these tech companies...oh wait, they are!). They might not be C-3P0 or even Johnny 5 but having a robot vacuum your floor is still pretty cool.

All of this makes me wonder how on Earth the Korean economy could be wallowing in the depths that it supposedly is. Obviously it has nothing to do with the chaebols and government conspiring to make everyone believe that because it isn't growing at the same rate as before then - ipso facto - there's a recession transpiring. No, of course that theory is ludicrous. But what do I know?

Find a city, find myself a city to live in

With one of my former adopted homes currently in a state that makes it even more unliveable than normal, another still under the jackboot of martial law and Basildon being, well, Basildon, you'd think I'd feel a little more well disposed towards both my hometown and Bucheon, my city of residence over the last eleven months. But I have my reasons for not being all that crazy about either of them.

I'm set to return to Calgary within the next four or five months and, beyond the excitement of seeing my niece in person for the first time and spending plenty of quality time with both my family and friends, the pervading feeling is one of dread (not an all-encompassing feeling, mind you, more the kind that knaws on you at the back of your mind). The two previous times I came back home from Asia I found myself lost, not short on things I wanted to do, just at a complete loss on how to do them. It's made me resentful of Calgary and all its money and the feeling that I was being shut out. Only recently did I begin to think that maybe I wasn't entirely blameless for my problems.

As much as I want to redeem myself for my mistakes, I can't seem to get past the fact that I'm from a scary place. Paul Heaton was probably singing about London in his song "Bow Down" but I only hear Calgary in it:

Mother, Father, I think that I would rather,
Stay at home with you for another year,
That building's so tall and it makes me feel so small,
That I might get lost and simply disappear.

As for Bucheon, the overall feeling is one of ennui. Kristina often remarks on how much she'll miss it here but I can't ever imagine missing a city. I'll miss certain things about it, particularly the people, but it's just a city. Maybe this is the Buddhist (or the Jedi) in me but I no longer feel attached to one place. That what all this travel does. And that's definitely what living in Basildon does.

So, then, where do I go next?

That creep sure can roll, man (or Ode to Ion Replenishment)

I first tried Pocari Sweat back in Indonesia and immediately regretted doing so. Tasting vaguely like a flat Fresca mixed with salty water, I had it pegged as one of those Asian curiosities - like their penchant for red bean pastries and men dressed in pink.

But I've begun to warm up to it as late. I started up this blog a couple months ago intending to provide weekly updates of my bowling scores. Thinking this would spur me on to my goal of rolling a 200 game, it instead led me into a bleak phase where I was struggling through several 80 point "efforts" (which, suffice it to say, was why the bowling updates were quickly and unceremoniously abandoned). But I'm slowly regaining my form and I've got Asia's favourite Ion supply drink to thank for it.

(For a nation so proud of its ability to thrive on a permanent drunken stupor, Korea's bowling allies are strangely booze-free environments. There's nary an Oat Soda or Caucasian to be found at the Bucheon Bowling Club; we have to make do with cans of Pocari Sweat and Pine Juice. Don't they know that bowling and beer go together like red bean paste and rice cakes?)

And the added ions appear to be paying off. I won't claim that I'm becoming consistent because I was consistent before and that was consistently poor. Now I've developed into the wonderfully erratic player I've always wanted to be. Last Friday's solid 135 was followed by a piss-poor 71 (and it's a wonder I even did that well considering the 19 I scored on the final frame) but I wouldn't want it any other way. I played again this afternoon with Jason and managed a 176 so expect an 83 or so next time round; bowling sober does this to a guy.

Yoda and the Slacker Generation

Back in the summer of 1998, I saw the film The Last Days of Disco. Clever and just sentimental enough to be palpable, it starred Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny and the always underrated Chris Eigeman. Looking back on it now, it seems to have been part of a curious pre-millenial sub-genre of movies set in the late seventies and early eighties (200 Cigarettes also comes to mind but I'm sure there were others as well) that seemed to communicate that these previously derided decades may not have been so bad after all. The nineties' dogged pursuit of substance was noble enough but the corollary of it was a colossal bore of a decade. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama proposed the End of History; ten years later, we witnessed the End of Entertainment.

One of the film's characters - played by either Mackenzie Astin or Robert Sean Leonard - worked for some kind of environmental agency and one night told the group at the disco about the birth of the green movement. It seems that many Baby Boomers were scarred by the scene in Bambi where his mother is shot and this led to a generation of adults with a deep concern for the environment and animal rights. A nice theory.

Almost immediately this scene preyed on my mind and I began to search for some sort of Generation X equivalent. While plenty of people will make a case for E.T. being our generation's Bambi - and they're probably correct - its ability to leave an impression on our young minds was negligible compared to that of Star Wars. And who from that monumental trilogy was better at imparting some wisdom on us than Yoda? Take that Han Solo!

Do or do not, there is no try

(This line seems particularly strange now given how the whole story played out with the prequels. The portrayal of Yoda as arrogant and out of touch - and, pointedly, the fact that he didn't even kill anyone of importance - in Episodes I, II and III shows how the originals were almost as much about his redemption as it was Anakin Skywalker's. It's as if the line were a throwback to an earlier time that hadn't yet taken place. A redeemed Yoda, if anything, should have been encouraging diligence in his charges to avoid them becoming the lazy - and evil - bastards that Anakin became.)

It's since been my theory that my generation has rode with these words, even if it has done so subconsciously. Yoda's scolding of Luke Skywalker may well have been an attempt to motivate his young padawan but to me it was an invitation to slack, to not bother doing anything that ever proved difficult or challenging. Stick with what you're good at don't bother with anything else. Luke's subsequent failure to use the force to lift his ship out of the swamp only gave credence to his master's words: the whiny Jedi shouldn't have bothered trying.

So, if you've been basking a little too much in your own sloth, don't fret; that's the way we're supposed to be. It's not quite as noble as a dead doe inspiring environmentalism is it? But don't blame us: we're the lost generation.

We were never being Borges

The autumn of 2005 was the height of my Geoff Dyer period. During that time I didn't just read his books, I read everything I could get my hands on: archived New Statesman reviews from 1987 at the U of C library, articles dug from the deepest corners of cyberspace and introductions to F. Scott Fitzgerald novels I had no interest in reading (that is to say all of them). Once these areas had been exhausted, I began to explore his literary heroes (as well as his favourite music, which probably explains why I've become such a jazz fiend, though I'm having trouble tracking down The Necks) and this began with Dyer's mentor, the great John Berger.

Strange how whenever I'm thinking aloud about getting into someone new - literary or musical - that everyone has this idea of just where I should "start". Curious, too, that these places to start are never all that interesting. Still, I guess it's a crime against suspense if I were to have discovered beautiful works like and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, Photocopies or Here is Where We Meet before the comparatively dull Ways of Seeing.

In his intro to Berger's Selected Essays, Dyer name drops a few exotic literary exports, the kind (aside from, presumably, Berger himself) that England no longer seems to be able to produce: Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Milan Kundera, W.G. Sebald. Those four names were where I needed to go. And since being in Korea I've read at least one book by each member of this distinguished quartet.

But the results have been somewhat mixed. I'm planning a seperate blog entry on finding Kundera baffling and decidedly unmoving experienceso I won't get into that here, nor will I praise Sebald's damn-near miraculous prose. What I want to write about is the real Borges and the fake Borges that my mind created.

I didn't know what to make of Borges at first and I'm not sure that was entirely because I chose to start reading it on my unspeakably boring Korean Airlines flight (nor do I want to blame Borges for aiding in the trip's dullness factor). The book reviews of fake books and metaphysical elucidations felt like the kind of thing I could only admire but never enjoy. Then I read "Funes, His Memory" and "The Book of Sand" and I was hooked. I like to think of his work at alchemical: his imagination didn't clash with his detailed, erudite mind, it complemented it. They always say of the original that if they didn't exist, you'd have to invent them; if Borges had never existed, no one would've ever thought to.

The Borges fixation persisted to the extent that even when I was reading someone else I was still trying to read him. And this was especially the case when I finally got down to reading Calvino. Sure, Invisible Cities is great, a major work though, I believed at the time, spoken by a less than major voice. I found him gimmicky and, in the case of If on a winter's night a traveller, far too clever for his own good. My praise was even somewhat backhanded: is it really a complement to anyone other than Borges if their imagination is described as Borgesian? In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) loving one of his books, I felt that I couldn't take him seriously, that he was little more than a sideshow for the mighty Sebald or Borges.

But yesterday I picked up a used copy of The Baron in the Trees and, just four chapters in, I know my Calvino period is set to commence. I wonder if he too recognized his lack of a voice and dealt with it by communicating his vast ideas through the voices of others. Borges could be writing from the perspective of an Argentine gaucho, a Nazi war criminal facing execution or a Scandinavian philosopher but he is still Borges and only Borges. Calvino seems to toy with voices, giving each of his works a distinct quality that never could be blended in with another - the bit in If on a winter's night where he speaks for the reader not believing this to be one of his books would seem to apply to all of them (and, as such, to none of them).

Previously, Calvino suffered for not being Borges; now he benefits for being Calvino, whoever or whatever he or that may be. Let's start the insanity.

The Small McMercies

Ever since I was four and informed everyone who would listen that I wanted to work at McDonald's when I grew up (which, despite the paper hats my sister and I were rewarded with, was probably tempting fate given the kinds of jobs I've had) I've had a pretty stormy relationship with the chain.

The gradual phasing out of the Shamrock Shake was deplorable enough, as was deep-sixing the yummiest burger they ever came up with, the McDLT. Then they redecorated the cool old school McDonald's on 4th Street (the same place, incidentally, where I expressed my interest in employment; given what their employees look like, I suppose that was a couple years too young) and closed the one at Stadium Shopping Centre which had pictures of the Calgary Stampeders on the walls and lowered seating in the middle of the restaurant. And there was all that corporate greed/legal action/health warning stuff, which was pretty unpleasant. Subsequently, my habit for disgusting, fatty foods was being satiated by Wendy's and Harvey's and, more recently, by my beloved Tubby Dog.

But now, McDonald's here in Korea has moved one step towards redemption by introducing Egg McMuffins! It's difficult to say just how this will fly with a people who routinely eat kimchi, seaweed soup and rice for breakfast but I think it's safe to say the entire English teaching community is basking in this development. Already I've been to my local Macca's (as the Aussies call it) at Bucheon Station three times during my brief 8:20 to 9:00 break to pick up McMuffins for Dave, Jason and me. And my ponch continues to expand.

Now about those Shamrock Shakes...