One or two of us will be meeting up in a Korean restaurant somewhere in Soho on 15 August. If any reader wants to join us, please get in touch using the contact form. [Read More]
Year: 2007 (page 11)
Sorok Island joined to the mainland
Yi Chong-jun’s (이청준) novel on the subject is called Your Paradise. Looking at the beach above you see maybe one reason. But Sorok Island (소록도) is Korea’s best known leper colony. As Brother Anthony explains, in Yi’s book, the subject is the relation between the individual and the collective. The setting is the remote leper … [Read More]
Book review: J Scott Burgeson — Korea Bug
J Scott Burgeson: Korea Bug Eunhaeng Namu, Seoul, 2005 A recent article in the JoongAng daily about a foreigner in Seoul who hasn’t made himself popular with hypersensitive and volatile Korean netizens introduced me to a gem. Burgeson, a foreigner who has been in Seoul since 1996 is one of the more unusual expats out … [Read More]
The fate of North Korean returnees
“The only way I’m going back to Korea is in a coffin” said a North Korean woman now living in China. Her story, recently told in the Daily Telegraph, is typical of the experience of a certain category of North Koreans in China. What that category is called depends on your orientation — economic migrants, … [Read More]
July statistics and site updates
Traffic Not much changes month on month now. Whatever set of statistics you look at, my growth period seems to have come to an end. Just as well given the problem reported last month regarding my using too much CPU. The site isn’t taken offline quite so frequently any more, but maybe that’s just because … [Read More]
The beauty of particular body parts 2
Thanks to Mrs Daeguowl for the nomination of Gong Yu (공유) for the competition of most sculpted six-pack. Here’s a sample: And something I forgot to include in yesterday’s post. With a big hat tip to Scott Burgeson (1), here’s an itemisation of how the body parts for Miss Korea should stack up, taken from … [Read More]
The beauty of particular body parts
Browsing through the celebrity rags the other day I came across a report of a survey which struck me as rather distasteful: the actress with the most beautiful chest. I’m not sure why it struck me as distasteful, seeing as in the UK we have a light-hearted annual survey as to which female celebrity has … [Read More]
Growing interest in DPRK art show
The North Korean art exhibition in Pall Mall is gathering momentum. A small-scale re-hang has seen more propaganda posters in the window facing the Institute of Directors (above), which encourages passing traffic. The jewel painting is now hung so that pedestrians in the Royal Opera Arcade get greeted by it. The big painting of the … [Read More]
Crossing the Line screening, with Q&A
One of these last-minute things I’m afraid. I just checked my least-used email account to find information about a screening of Crossing the Line at the Frontline Club (near Paddington Station) tomorrow, Sunday. There was to have been a Q&A hosted by director Dan Gordon, but he’s had to pull out due to ill health, … [Read More]
The Korean peasants’ revolt
Anyone who has read Yi Mun-yol’s popular book The Poet may be interested in a new book which sets out the historical background. In Yi’s fictional biography, the poet Kim Sakkat is ostracised from society, condemned to life as a vagabond, because of his grandfather’s actions during the peasants’ revolt in Northest Korea in 1812. … [Read More]
Britain, Korea linked in airline “price fixing”
Both BA and KAL get multi-million fines, while equally guilty sneaks Virgin and Lufthansa escape punishment. Whatever, I’ll still fly Virgin in preference to BA whenever I can. Links: British Airways and Korean Air Lines fined by regulators for price-fixing, International Herald Tribune, 1 August 2007. Also covered by Reuters. [Read More]
Happy End (해피엔드, 1999) review: explicit and unmissable cautionary tale
An explicit marital drama about infidelity, obsession and quiet desperation. As a neglected husband uncovers his wife’s affair, Happy End is an uncompromising look at the human heart and how its desires, if unchecked, can rule the head with cataclysmic results. A cautionary tale which is both explicit and unmissable. [Read More]
ISKS conference agenda announced
Here’s the provisional agenda. Apologies if I’ve misinterpreted a somewhat confusing Word document. Many parallel streams, I think. Thursday 16 August 8월 16일 (목) 09:00-09:30 개 회 식 10:00-12:00 분과회A 언어1 국어 불규칙동사의 기저형 재고 (김진우 – Univ.of Illinois) 최근 조선언어학계가 관심하고있는 연구방향과 성과 (문영호 – 사회과학원) 고구려어 연구 시론 -고구려어 문법 형태의 재구를 시도하며 … [Read More]
August Events 2007
This month the focus is emphatically on Edinburgh. The events taking place as part of the Festival Fringe and the Film Festival are too numerous to type out again, given that I’ve listed them out in posts over the past couple of days. They are all in the events calendar, but please check with the … [Read More]
Korean Film at Edinburgh Int’l Film Fest 2007
The Edinburgh Film Festival will be showing four Korean films this year. The choice of three of the four comes as no surprise. No western film festival with Korean content is complete without a recent Kim Ki-duk film, and this time round it’s Breath (숨). Everyone wants to know how Park Chan-wook can follow his … [Read More]
Independent Korean performances at Edinburgh Fringe
My recent post on Korean events at the Edinburgh Fringe seriously undersold the Korean involvement there. I was simply reproducing the publicity of one particular organisation – Korea@fringe. But that organisation is only responsible for the six acts I mentioned in my previous post. Thanks to Colin Bartlett for pointing this out. So here is, … [Read More]