Thanks to Mike for pointing to Douglas Ord’s work. Light shattering as it shines through a window, but somehow undamaged by the passage. The Korea Postscript (far down the index page) in particular says Important Things, I think, in a way that opens a door for me. Highly recommended, but you may need some patience if you are not sucking down the bits with a wide pipe.
Mike Golby shares his innermost. Harrowing to read, and hopefully cathartic for him to write. I am constantly amazed and humbled by pellucid writing like this all around me, by these sudden radiant windows into the lives and minds of other people, multitudes of them…we are truly blessed to have these voices helping us stay the course in our own lives.
I hope you’ll join me in wishing Mike and his family well, and I hope Mike will understand if I continue to celebrate the bottle in my own life, while he continues his struggles against the evils it can bring, and has brought to his family.
Comments? comments.
BurningBird, Mike Sanders, Steve Himmer, Elaine, AKMA, Mike Golby and others have been spinning up a conversation about belief, something about which I’ve spent a lot of time thinking over the years. It’s a fascinating, enlightening rolling colloquy that continues to renew my enthusiasm for this blogspace we’re exploring (to explore strange new blogs, to seek out new ideas and new css designs, to boldly go…well, you get it). That said, I’m not sure if I’m going to take part in the conversation this time. I will, however, point you to my favourite contribution so far (which perhaps in part explains why I don’t care to participate at the moment) this play from the Accordion Guy :
Jonathon and Burningbird and the usual suspects are talking about something that has been heavy on my mind in recent times, but I’m feeling too whimsical today to do more than note the conversation, and point you their way. Me, I have to think about it some more. Later.
*dances off into the middle distance, scattering flower petals, whimsically.*
Quick note : Frykitty is spreading the inline tag concept from it’s mysterious beginnings ~deep in the Alabama woods, where a group of secretive hill people, long isolated from society, have been developing strange and otherworldly shortcuts in their communication.~ The efficiency of their verbal and written interactions render their speech almost incomprehensible to us outsiders, but perhaps, adopting some of their more clever innovations, we can help the textual world become a more intelligible place.
This, I pray. Or I would, %if I were the prayin’ type%.
Seriously, I’d love to see these reach critical mass. Very useful, and a hell of a lot more nuanced than emoticons.
Comments? comments.
If you have broadband, and Realplayer, and an hour to spare, watch this speech delivered by Dean Kamen, of Segway and iBot fame. It’ll inspire you. It did me.
(A quick note about my lack of Korea-centric updates of late : I’m back to work next week, back into the fray, after a couple of months of gazing inward. Getting out into the thick of things again will certainly spark some new Hanguk-y observations and rants. And once the new domain is set up (soon, soon) and I transfer over, it’ll be a whole new WonderChicken. I’ll rock yer socks off. Or die trying. This I swear.)
Never fear, the WonderChicken’s here. comments.
I think I might like Rolf Potts, if we met. ‘Vagabonding’ is something I’ve done my entire adult life. It is actually possible that we could have met, as I lived in Pusan at the same time as he apparently did, a few years ago. His face looks oddly familiar. Unfortunately, my near-perpetual state of blissful inebriation at the time renders the recollections a mite blurry. Anyway – go read his stuff, about Korea and elsewhere. Some nice writing there, and some of the best I’ve seen about modern Korea.
He says in an interview “this would have been impossible without the Internet,” which is interesting. It sounds as if he began his wanderings about 10 years after I did, and as such, was able to get his best, freshest travel writing out to the world via this miraculous inTaRweb, while mine lies mouldering in the bottom of a box somewhere in Canada, as far as I know.
I’m not bitter. Honest. If I’d actually wanted to say anything to anyone other than my friends (sporadically) and my future self (onanistically) over the past 15 years, I would have done it. Submitted, published, lived outside the moment in order to write about it. I suppose I’m finally getting started at that now. I just wish my powers of recall were a little…sharper.
Feelin’ a bit old, this evening.
AllLookSame – An interesting effort to explode some preconceptions about similarities and differences in appearance between Koreans, Japanese and Chinese. I like to think that I’m fairly ept at being able to tell the ethnicity of a random North Asian person by looking at them, but I only scored 11/18 on the AllLookSame test. A good tool to make you think a bit about unconscious stereotyping.
