All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
So Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has admitted to “thousands” of “tactical errors” in Iraq. Big fucking deal.
On the face of it, this looks like the opposite of Dubya’s famous inability, during the 2004 presidential debates, to think of a single mistake he’d made. But really it’s the same thing. Until someone at the top of the Bush administration admits to an actual, specific mistake for which he or she takes direct responsibility, it’s just spin.
It’s time once again for the International Asian Art Fair at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue at 67th Street.
I visited this fair for the first time last year, and I was overwhelmed by the quality and diversity of the works on hand, often quite different from the collections of Asian art in most museums I’ve visited.
There were unusual Korean screen paintings and even a Korean celadon sculpture, which is quite rare, as well as excellent material of all kinds from across Asia. The highlight of the show for me was an extensive collection of exquisite Graeco-Bactrian Gandhāran Buddhist sculptures that straddle the line between East and West, clearly demonstrating the Greek origins of the most common Buddhist iconography.
Almost as interesting as the art itself was experiencing the art in its context as merchandise and investment. In museums, the cost and commerce is almost always obscured. Plaques give historical data and perhaps mention the owner or donor, but they don’t go into the provinence or mention that the market for Tang-dynasty sculpture is heating up. To get a sense of how art moves around the world, you can do worse than spend an afternoon eavesdropping among the masterworks at the Asian Art Fair.
The Fair runs from Friday March 31 through Wednesday April 5, and it’s open daily from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is $18 and well worth it.
Topic: Korea
우리 어머니하고 아버지는 켈리포니아에서 사신다. 우리 집은 마린구 샌라파엘시 루카스밸리동에 있다. 루카스밸리동은 샌프란시스코에서 20마일쯤 북쪽에 있다. 우리 집은 크고 넓다.
남동생 1명하고 여동생 1명이 있다. 형하고 누나는 없다. 남동생은 우리 집에 살고 있다. 하지만 지금은 잠시 이스라엘에 있다. 신학생이다. 탈무드를 공부하고 있다. 여동생도 학생이다. 애리조나 대학에서 미술사를 공부하고 있다.
Translation:
[My Family]
My mother and father live in California. Their house is in the Lucas Valley section of San Rafael, in Marin County. Lucas Valley is roughly 20 miles north of San Francisco. The house is big and spacious.
I have one younger brother, one younger sister, and no older siblings. My brother lives in my parents’ house, but currently he’s in Israel. He’s a seminary student, studying Talmud. My sister is also a student, studying art history at the University of Arizona.
Language is a window into culture. Learn a bit of a language, and you start to see peculiarities in the way thoughts are structured — differences from how we speak and think in English. In Spanish, for example, the subjunctive mood takes on a weight and importance far beyond its English equivalent. Is it any surprise, then, that Spain gave us literature’s greatest dreamer, Don Quixote, or that its signal dramatic work is called La vida es sueño (Life’s a Dream)?
For a native speaker of English, Korean is a whole lot more alien than Spanish, and the conceptual differences arrive early. For example, I was startled to discover that there is no word for you in Korean. It simply doesn’t exist. To refer to someone standing in front of you, you have to call him or her by name or title: not “Who are you?” but “Who is sir?” For perfect strangers, you can always fall back on the ungendered seonsaengnim (선생님), which literally means teacher, but means roughly sir or ma’am. More commonly, though, you’ll use a family kinship term: grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle. In Korea, everyone is kin.
This concept goes even further when it comes to the first person. Instead of my house or my mother, it’s common to say our house, our mother. This is even true of husbands and wives: not my wife, but our wife. This is neither a royal we nor an invitation to swing. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement of the collective nature of social organization. In a traditional family, the wife is indeed “our wife”: she plays the role of wife not just her husband, but for her children, her in-laws, etc. The house is “our house,” and so on. Today, that structure is less common than it used to be, leading to some quirky tendencies. Single people living alone in studio apartments will still refer to their dwellings as “our house.”
Anyone who has spent any time among Northeast Asians knows that this instinct to collectivism is more than a mere linguistic quirk. The construction of the entire community as kin, the linguistic standardization of common ownership, the linguistic impossibility of finding oneself face to face with an anonymous other are all reflections of deeply rooted cultural tendencies.
The way we speak is the way we think, and the way we think is who we are.
Ever wonder what neighborhood you’re in? Ever wonder whether there really is such a thing as Turtle Bay or Blissville, or where the heck Clinton Hill might be?
Well, now you can find out, thanks to the New York City Department of City Planning “City of Neighborhoods” map.
The Department of City Planning offers a wealth of other information in its Reference section, as well as info on zoning changes, proposed projects and many other developments that affect our lives here in NYC. Definitely worth exploring when you’re feeling a wave of NYC geekery. (Via Curbed.)
Choi Eun-jin: Arirang
Choi Yong-pil: Kangwon-do Arirang
“Arirang“(아리랑) is Korea’s most famous folk song, and possibly its most famous work of art, period. It has been sung throughout the Korean Peninsula for centuries in numerous local variants. Today I’ve got a variety of versions for you, courtesy of the astonishing Music from Korea website, which I have only just begun to explore.
We begin our Arirangery with Kim Geum-suk’s gorgeous traditional performance of the most well known variant of the song. From there, we move on to Choi Eun-jin’s pop version, which sounds like it was recorded in the 1950s, if not earlier. A group of American musicians going under the name Heart of Coree turn “Arirang” into a lovely jazz ballad, while Yoon Band gives it a heavy metal treatment.
Finally, we’ve got a couple of regional variants. Once again, Kim Geum-suk gives a powerfully emotional traditional performance, this time of “Jongson Arirang,” accompanied by the piri. And we close with Choi Yong-pil’s rendition of “Kangwon-do Arirang” in the Teurotu, or trot, style, a fiercely unfashionable form of low-culture pop music known for racy lyrics, bouncy beats and electronic overkill and often heard emanating from street stalls.
For a song so ubiquitous, it’s a bit surprising that no one knows its origins or even what it’s really about. Last Thursday, I attended a lecture at the Korea Society by Heinz Insu Fenkl, a creative writing professor and folklorist at SUNY New Paltz, on Korean shamanism. As a sort of side note, he proposed his own hypothesis for how “Arirang” gained its place at the center of Korean culture. According to Fenkl, the song is related to the story of Princess Pari, the mythic spiritual founder of the mudang (Korean shaman, usually female) tradition.
Here is the story of Princess Pari, as told by Jie Won Im:
Princess Pari’s proper name is Parideggie; “Pari” being a verb root meaning “to discard, abandon” and “-deggie” a suffix similar to English “-ling,” specifying “one connected with or having the quality of.” The fact that she is a princess abandoned by her parents is one thing that does not change in the different versions of the Parideggie Muga, “Ballad of Parideggie.” The shamanistic tradition being orally handed down, slight alterations by region are inevitable, but the essence of the tale is as follows:
A fortune teller (probably a shaman) informs King Ogu that if he marries the lady Gildae, she will bear him an heir. In his impatience (he is only fourteen in one version), he marries her before the day deemed auspicious for marriage by the fortune teller. Bad luck follows, and the couple has six daughters in a row. Queen Gildae has a taemong, “birth dream,” that her next child will be an exiled angel from heaven, the daughter of the angel Seowangmo, possessor of the elixir of life. When Princess Pari comes along as the seventh, King Ogu is exasperated and in his anger he orders her to be expelled from the palace. The disowned princess is left to perish at some strange and exotic place which is, depending on the rendition learnt by the performing shaman, sometimes “the dragons’ fen,” sometimes an amaranth field, sometimes just some cave deep in the mountains. However she is rescued by a supernatural force (Dragon Queen, Buddha, etc.) or the servant of such supernatural forces, and grows up showing signs of excellence. One day her father and/or mother falls terminally and incurably sick (serves him right) as punishment for throwing Pari away, and Pari returns to the palace. She volunteers to take the long and dangerous journey through the netherworld to SeocheonSeoyukGuk, a westward heaven beyond India, to retrieve a cure for her dying parent(s). She braves many perils (such as washing black laundry white and white laundry black, or being tread upon by a monk, or more seriously tempting fiends) along the way (of course with a little help), and finally procures the potion in exchange of wedlock and a few sons to a celestial being. On the way back home, she prays for the wandering ghosts of those whose deaths were untimely and unfair, before returning to this world. She revives her father, and is forgiven by her parents for marrying without their consent. Finally she becomes a god that receives the Ogu (death rites) and also the fairy god mother of shamans.
The lyrics to “Arirang” are “I am crossing over Arirang Pass. / The man/woman who abandoned me [here] / Will not walk even ten li before his/her feet hurt.” According to Fenkl, this could be a reference to the story of Pari’s abandonment. Why else would a song about abandonment and foot pain become the national song of Korea? As linguistic evidence, he pointed out the closeness of “Ari” (아리) and “Pari” (바리). The root “Ar” (알), meanwhile, means “to know” as well as “to suffer disease,” while “Par” (발), the first syllable of “Pari,” means “foot,” and the similar “peori” (버리) is the root of the verb “to punish.”
Whether this is all just pie in the sky is hard to know, but whatever the origins, “Arirang” seems to be embedded as deeply in Korean culture as the shamanism it may or may not be about.
To some of you, the title of this entry undoubtedly looks like an unfortunate string of garbage characters. If you’ve got the right language settings, though, you should see Korean script — which, for many of you, will hardly be better than a bunch of question marks, diamonds and slashes. And for those of you who can read Korean, it will quickly become obvious that I can say very little in your language.
Nevertheless, I intend to start a regular series of Korean blog entries, as part of my effort to learn and use the Korean language — and, in particular, to type in Korean, which is a bit complicated.
As I advance through Pimsleur Korean (I’m on lesson 11 of 36) and the KLEAR Integrated Korean program (I’m on lesson 2 of Beginner 1), hopefully I’ll be able to compose more complex ideas.
I recognize that for most of you who read this blog, these Korean entries will be incomprehensible. That’s fine. Just scroll past them. They’re an exercise, a personal challenge, a self-indulgence — but then, so’s Palaverist in the first place, so what the heck. And now … 한국어!
안영하세요. 제 이름이 조수아입니다. 한국어를 공부 열시미 해요. 핌스러하고 KLEAR Integrated Korean은 공부 해요.
There. It ain’t much, but it’s a start.
Is America building a global empire? The answer to this question is by no means clear, but it seems obvious at this point that even if we are not building an empire, the American government is engaging in imperialistic activities the world over: stationing troops, keeping (or trying to keep) local and regional peace and stability, providing support and protection for American companies that extract resources and labor.
The most obvious question raised by all this is whether we should be doing it at all, and to what purposes. This is a legitimate and important question. But let’s set it aside for the moment and simply assume as a given that the United States will be militarily, diplomatically and economically engaged in many parts of the globe for the foreseeable future. Comparing ourselves to past empires, how are we doing?
In an article in The New York Review of Books entitled The Mirage of Empire, John Gray notes that “American bases span the globe, often serving goals similar in kind to those pursued by European colonial powers, but the US is nowhere engaged in colonial rule of the sort that Britain and other European powers established throughout much of the world.”
European imperialists made a long-term commitment to the territories they annexed. They spent large parts of their lives immersed in the cultures of the countries they had colonized, learning the languages and often forging enduring alliances with local rulers. As well as subjugating and exploiting their colonies they also ruled and lived in them. European imperialism involved many atrocities — in German Southwest Africa and the Belgian Congo large numbers died in conditions not far removed from slavery, and it was the British who began the use of air power against civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq in the Twenties, for example. Moreover, the views formed by European colonial elites of the countries they occupied were colored by a mix of racial prejudice and Orientalist myths. Nevertheless, the close familiarity of some of these colonial rulers with the languages, histories, and ruling classes of the colonies made possible a degree of political control over them that went far beyond anything that could be achieved by military force alone.
This point has been made before, but I think it’s an important point that we haven’t yet absorbed. For better or worse, the United States is engaged in transformative efforts from Latin America to Afghanistan and Iraq. More and more, we are turning to our military as the primary tool in these endeavors. (The military is also replacing FEMA domestically, but that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.) Yet our military and State Department are still structured around short-term tours of duty and temporary engagements that make it impossible for any individual to develop a lasting relationship with and understanding of a particular region in all its complexities.
In this regard, the image of America as the world’s policeman is instructive. Our ideal police officer is the beat cop who knows his precinct through and through — its shopkeepers, its wiseguys, its hubs of gossip. He can tell the difference between troubled teenage vandals who need to be let off with a stern warning and dangerous criminals who need to be collared on whatever technicalities he can find. His enforcement of the law is informed by a deep intuitive understanding of the social dynamics of his community.
America’s policing efforts to date seem more like the macho thrustings of hyperarmed SWAT teams bent on demonstrating their own awesomeness. I’ve lived in some crime-riddled spots, and I was always happy when the cops moved in to take some control, but I think I would’ve liked it less if they’d gone in Fallujah-style, rescuing my neighborhood by evacuating and levelling it.
To do better than that will require the long-term commitment of resources, including human resources. A first step might be restructuring the State Department into regional sections so that diplomats can serve repeatedly in a particular region, developing the local knowledge, connections and language skills that we so badly need and lack. At the start of their careers, Foreign Service officers could either select a region of specialization, just as they currently select a particular career “cone,” or area of professional specialization (the cones are Management, Consular, Public Diplomacy, Political and Economic), or else let the State Department assign them to regions based on need. Just as the current system makes it harder to join up in the more coveted cones because competition is stiffer, recruitment could be weighted to favor those who choose the least popular regions.
The State Department could obviously retain the flexibility to move officers with particular skills as necessary to locations outside their regions of specialization, and changing geopolitical dynamics would at times require that staff be moved from one region to another. Nevertheless, the Department should make every effort to keep officers focused on a given region for the bulk of their 20-year careers.
There are risks involved in this regional approach. A traditional reason for keeping Foreign Service officers on short postings is to prevent them from developing attachments to particular countries and regimes, leading to biased thinking and even corruption. This is a legitimate concern, but I believe the importance of gaining deeper regional understanding outweighs these risks. Nevertheless, the State Department would have to watch for signs of officers who have “gone native” or become unduly cozy with regional power elites. One way to prevent such developments is simply to ensure that regions are reasonably large and diverse. It is one thing to spend two decades becoming an old India hand, and quite another to hop from one South Asian capital to another over the course of twenty years.
Another risk of dividing the State Department into regional sections is that the department would lose coherence, fragmenting into disconnected fiefdoms. To prevent such fragmentation and ensure that best practices and valuable experience are distributed throughout the Department, officers should be rotated to posts outside of their regions of specialization once every third or fourth foreign posting. This would also help prevent burnout, especially for those officers who have chosen the most difficult regions.
Similar changes will also be needed elsewhere in government, particularly within the intelligence community and the military. The current situation, in which local knowledge is gleaned from translators, immigrants and politically motivated expatriates, is untenable. There is much to malign in 19th-century European imperialism, not least its racism and its contempt for the local populations over which it often rode roughshod. This should not blind us to those elements of the old colonial system that were effective and not wholly reprehensible. If America is going to continue to assert its will in the world — and I have no doubt that it is — we would do well to learn from the more effective habits of the older empires, even as we try to avoid their moral pitfalls. Certainly a bit more knowledge of the locals would be a worthy replacement for chaos punctuated by air assaults, which is what we have now. If people are losing lives to American arms, it would be good for us to have a clearer understanding of who they are and why we’re shooting at them.
Yesterday I told you that P.A.R.O.D.Y. had made the Independent. Well, today I went over to the UN newsstand and bought me a copy, and I was thrilled to discover that the reference and quote come toward the end of a lush two-page spread dominated by a large photo of Robert Smith, with insets of Siouxsie Sioux, Marylin Manson, Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy. So my faux Christianist ranting is in good company. Plus, I’m just happy at any public mention of my writing — especially if it happens to begin with the word “Mancunians.”
Topic: Culture
Merriam-Webster Online has announced its Words of the Year 2005, based on user lookups. And the winner is …
Integrity. Of all things. I suppose there’s been a lot of questioning of people’s integrity in the last year, so it makes a certain amount of sense. The rest of the top-ten list has more of a du jour feel about it:
2. refugee
3. contempt
4. filibuster
5. insipid
6. tsunami
7. pandemic
8. conclave
9. levee
10. inept
You can peg 2 and 9 and probably 10 to Hurricane Katrina. Number 3 is on the list because of Judith Miller’s long summer in the clink for contempt of court, waiting for the aspens to turn. Four obviously has to do with the whole Supreme Court nomination pre-battle, 6 is self-explanatory, and 7 is the product of our ongoing low-grade panic over avian influenza. Insipid, like integrity, is a bit of a mystery to me. Any ideas?
