Travel Impressions and Images

Crumbling Walls and Bare Naked Trees

When I began my blog in August 2010 at the outset of our year of travels, I hoped to learn from doing. I knew only that I did not want the blog to be a diary or a journal.  But beyond that limitation, I had no clear sense of what I would find myself doing.

The starting point for our trips, which I thought might be reflected in what I wrote, was to see and to listen; to understand without judging; and to record the places, the people, the events, and the culture as we encountered them. Or maybe I should say, as I understood them. I intended to experience without prejudice.

Built into our program was the possibility that we might settle, however temporary and however oblivious, into the cultures hosting us. But because we intended to be residents not tourists, I suppose you might say we began with prejudice:  that to be a resident would afford a better understanding, a clearer view of whatever the culture offered.

It was, I think now, a high ambition, full of hope and leavened with optimism. It required a kind of quiet patience, such as shown by the little dog who waits patiently on the doorstep of the vicarage at St. Augustine's Church. Or at least a willingness to adapt to whatever life requires, as, I suppose, is true of this vine we found at a Buddhist temple in Busan.

And after a post or two, someone suggested I add pictures, since people like pictures and without them the words have a tendency to pile up.  So I learned to include pictures. It took a while, despite the ease of the process, because even simple technologies do not seem at all obvious to my manually oriented mind.

I had been taking photographs already, first as a memory aid for the writing that would come later, and then once persuaded to use them, as a way to illustrate in my blog.  A picture may not be worth a thousand words exactly, but it is worth a handful of words at least if it can be managed properly.

Almost immediately I realized I did not want to use pictures simply to illustrate my narratives. I don't have a story to go with this very Korean stone wall, so un-British, so un-American, yet I find it fascinating. Clearly the photographs would never be just a memory spur or just a way to fill out my word pictures.  I somehow came to understand that photographs are a source of information, emotional as well as logical, in their own right. 

At some point, they simply became a way of seeing things.

All that to say, the photographs are their own reason for appearing in the blog.  It would be too disturbing, I suppose, to say that they are a window into my mind. They are, rather, partners with the writing in exploring the territory, whatever that is.

And sometimes, as with these pictures of Grace Oh's babies taken at a restaurant in Seoul last March, they tell their own stories.

New Year Book Review

 On Reading, Korea, and the Long View

 

End of the year commentators are in agreement apparently that 2011 was, well, bad news all around and we are well to be rid of it. Much of this badmouthing arises from national or global events about which there is little room to argue, although many people have felt personal unhappiness as well. Some would just like life to get better; others have gone to the trouble of making resolutions to correct their woes.

While there are areas of my life that might well benefit from improvement, I am not making resolutions myself.  And while 2011 had its share of catastrophes, I can't say that it was worse on average than many other years. By December most of us have grown tired of what we have and we'd like a fresh start. 

For me personally, however, 2011 was actually a wonderful year, the highlight of which was spending 19 weeks in Busan, Republic of Korea. 

2011 was also a bumper year for reading books --  for me, at least. I finished the year at 57, a total that may not be a personal record but is certainly in the top two or three totals for any year since I have been keeping track.

For nearly forty years, I have recorded the books I read.  I note down, usually, title, author, genre, and the month I finished.  For a while I did not include books that I finished for a second or third time; but now I do.A second reading is not necessarily a faster reading, and I am by nearly any measure a slow reader.  Not a promising characteristic in an English teacher.

It took me a few years to establish the habit -- the habit of recording what I read, that is -- and I have modified the particulars from time to time. I typed the titles on 4x6 cards for a few years, for example, which I then stapled into the notebook, a modification that clearly involved too many unnecessary steps.

There are some notable gaps in my record keeping as well, especially when I was getting started. The gaps pain me a bit now because I would love to know what books I actually read during my college years.  Or during high school, when presumably I actually did read a few books from cover to cover.

My first entry is dated December 1973, the year I finished my Masters Degree and also the year I began teaching -- which means I have no record of what I would like to think of as extensive reading for my Masters program, nor of what I read as I struggled to learn how to teach during that painful first year. Both of these "missing" lists of titles might provide insight given where my interests have taken me.

The fact that I finished 57 books in 2011, a tid-bit of personal trivia, is largely unremarkable. There are many faster and more prolific readers around. Furthermore, any literary detective worth her salt could easily point out that 9 of these books were poetry, which, as we all know, are usually thin volumes with considerable white space. Another half dozen are short fictions translated from Korean, no more than 100 pages or so.  Admittedly, 57 is a misleading number.  Still . . .

If the number is notable at all, it is notable for two reasons.  The first is practical:  I have no more room in the notebook that I have used since 1973 to keep my yearly lists. [A footnote here that may be of interest: the notebook itself was rescued from a friend who was discarding it as "smoke damaged" after a fire ruined it.  Apparently, a bag of garbage in his entryway smoldered for several hours and filled that end of his house with heavy black smoke.  The notebook still carries smoke marks on its cover.]

In a way, not surprisingly, my book count embraced and benefited from my months in Korea. In addition to the short fictions mentioned above, by such writers as Gong JiYoung, Kim Dong-Ni, Ch'ae Man-shik, and Hwang Soon-Won, and the poetry of Kim Chiha,So Chong Ju, and Ku Sang, I found myself drawn into the work of Korean-American writers in a way I had not anticipated. Reading Chang-rae Lee in Korea, for example, illuminated his characters in a way that simple reflection would not have afforded.

Most of the Asian poetry and some of the fiction was given to me by our good friend Lee Joo-yub, who understood that I needed a systematic grounding in a literature that I had been randomly picking at. So my reading, and my four month immersion in Korean life, and one of the people who made our time not only possible and profitable, but also enjoyable came together nicely to make 2011 a very good year, all in all. 

With the new year, I have closed the old notebook, so to speak, and begin a new one.  I made my first entry this morning, so I am off to a good start for 2012. I don't expect to read 57 books this year, nor do I expect to keep making entries into the new notebook for the next 39 years.  But I will give it a shot anyway.