Dan Disney
A Series of Fives: Notes from Seoul
11 June 2012This is a country of ghosts and robots. A country of seven thousand living poets – none of them talking to one another. The once-hermit kingdom, where all but gentry were garbed in white, now spills the neon of frantic consumerism. Seoul is a city-state; big government doing big deals in big smiles (when they’re not throwing punches or teargas canisters across parliament). At its centre, Korea is fractured – shaded by the shadowy near-history of military regimes morphed into what now passes for democracy. Beyond the DMZ and the world’s strangest brother / neighbour, the DPKR, is a dim but palpable, threatening absence.
Underpassing in Korea
Is it unfriendly to claim Seoul is a city dislocated from itself? Unlike Warsaw’s old town, meticulously rebuilt after WW2 – brick by original brick – Seoul of the 1950s was terra-formed with the pragmatic architectures of a starving, cold people: concrete smeared over the razed post war landscape. A generation of socialist-minded poets traipsed across the border and disappeared. The civilian war dead numbered in millions.
Now business howls in the aeries here. The ambience is eerie; luxury everywhere while ghosts mill underground in metro stations. The shaman have vanished, and Buddhist temples un-favoured by Korean hipsters who flock instead to cathedrals to sing hymns. In this post-textual place, where internet is a sixth sense, it seems that all the songs sung belong to someone else.
Each ‘robot’ has a smart phone; pushing ghosts out of the way to clamber aboard the early morning commute. Do these multi-taskers ever really leave work?
Lobe 1
Lobe 2
Big busy-ness = an inter-generational enchantment. This is what makes skyscrapers grow at velocity and industries into empires. This obsession is what makes these emergent humans, so profoundly linked and connected, paradoxically atomized.
The young poets I know are non-participants, outsider offspring of two competing schools: the Ch’amyŏ’p’a Group, who critiqued Korea’s socio-political unevenness, and the Sunsup’a Group, who maintained a purely literary focus. The poets I talk to are writing about body modification, schizophrenia, collective exhaustion, and a patriarchy gone wild.
Seoul is a mono-cultural megalopolis where at any moment you’ll find five preferred haircuts / five fabricated pop tunes on high rotation / five fashion statements to choose from. In this rule-bound plutocracy, a poem (as always, and with thanks to Badiou) is a lawless proposition and necessary transgression.
Gridlocked = the state of traffic and mind; any voice that challenges these systems speaks independently and courageously. What is less heartening is that none of my students of English Literature reads contemporary Korean poetry. Their focus is elsewhere.
They want someone else’s avant-garde. The English canon = enhanced language skills = (potentially) escape to (a perceived) utopia (eg, elsewhere or upward).
The Korean education system is as mythological as the rate of youth suicide; those who do not simply cope (itself a feat) but thrive, arrive at university pre-programmed with three or four languages, maybe a blackbelt or municipal chess championship trophy, and the heaviness of an aggressively high pressure future upon them. Can they do English language poetry? With gusto. Tell them to think for themselves and these second-language users cannot stop: whether I throw Bernstein or Bök at them, they get it … perhaps because they’re from a place where ‘language control = thought control = reality control’.
What they want is critically literate English, in all its otherness and nuance. What they want it for is altogether another matter.
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11 Responses to A Series of Fives: Notes from Seoul
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Alluring essay, Dan, on an apparently unsettling, voracious, pregnant yet empty place. Of course, there’s always more to anywhere, and you obviously know this. That’s why I would love to read more…
“They want someone else’s avant-garde”. Cool blogpost, Dan.
Interesting insights, Dan. I look forward to reading more.
Great post – it does capture that exciting, yet dislocating energy that Seoul in particular can give one. There’s just one aspect I thought about when you wrote on how it was disheartening that Korean students of English Literature tell their teacher that they don’t read contemporary Korean poetry. I don’t find it that surprising that such people in such a content would be more interested in someone else’s avant-garde. The way I read what follows in the post seems to hint that perhaps contemporary Korean poetry isn’t doing too well in Korea itself, which I would disagree with. In any of the big bookshops in Korea, there is yet another series of five – the top five selling books of poetry are displayed in pride of place right next to the top five novels, and top five non-fiction books – something I imagine wouldn’t be found in too many bookshops in western countries. Somebody’s reading it! Other than that, I love this piece.
Nice post, Dan … I totally get the way in which Seoul can overwhelm with its mono-cultural-ness (gawd, is that even a word?). Although deep within that, as I know you know, there lurks a fascinating, out-of-control spirit …
I think Paul has a point too but I also wonder what those top five books of poetry in Kyobo are actually like – and whether anyone really reads them …
More, more!!
David, I haven’t been in Korea for a few years, so I don’t know if the situation’s changed, but when i last checked out one of those top fives, there was a mix of pulpy, “inspirational” anthologies, a “best of” title like the ones we get in oz or the states, but also a couple of more interesting and experimental titles – number 4 was a book by Kim Hyesoon, a fantastic volume (http://www.ypbooks.co.kr/book.yp?bookcd=1206902252&gubun=null). I’d also hazard a guess that, good capitalists as South Koreans can be, I wouldn’t imagine a big bookshop over there would sacrifice valuable shelf space to books that wouldn’t sell. As far as I can see, straight-up poetry plays a greater role in Korean society than in Australian – most Koreans, I think, would be able to recite a poem by Kim Sowol or Ch’eon Sangbyeong; and most subway stations have at least a couple of poems up on their walls, if that’s any relevant measure at all >_<
Oh yeah, KIm Hyesoon is great! I wasn’t really trying to cast nasturtiums on the reading habits of Koreans, or anyone else for that matter – but I guess I was also trying to make a point about books and reading, in that people don’t necessarily buy books in order to read them … and I think this applies especially to poetry books, as a mark of ‘proper’ culture. But maybe I’ve been reading to much Bourdieu ++
i don’t think it’s possible to read too much bourdieu, or to even just buy too many of his books…
“…writing about body modification, schizophrenia, collective exhaustion, and a patriarchy gone wild.”
Thanks Dan, lively essay, and I hope we get more of your insights. How does a patriarchy go wild? Please explain!
Dear all … forgive my tardiness and thanks in abundance for your comments.
Paul, I think your point is valid … yes Koreans seem to read both their contemporary and canonical poets (though how many latenite conversations have I had with pokerfaced youngish professors of Korean Lit who assure me there’s been nothing worthwhile added to Korean letters since the war) (ahem, etc). I haven’t checked the bestsellers list at Kyobo and the rest, but do have poet friends who have sold thousands of copies of first books (in one instance, 20000 copies no less [Kim Kyungju]). I am not sure what it is in the native material that resonates to the Korean groundnote (I can’t read the language) but certainly, yes, Korean poetry gets read by readers at large. This is all by way of agreeing with you: of course English Literature students are interested in (mostly) the New American Poetry and after, and in this I confess to worrying sometimes that I may be agent of that monoculturality (good call, Davey) that is the nightmare … not so much a case of groupthink as groupspeak … ? The students in front of me are some of the best and brightest in Korea, and their yearning for English language/ American culture is a force to behold. English Literature departments have been a growth industry here for a number of years (that’s why folk like me get jobs in Seoul), and where it all ends up is anyone’s guess.
In terms of where Korea is at the moment (apart from winning a sackful of gold in London … talk about punching above one’s weight), and framed at best from an outsider’s necessarily simplistic perspective (dead on, Andy), I’ll venture this binary: there are those who are in a position to consume, conspicuously and voraciously, and then there’s everyone else playing a game of catch-up. This points me somewhat toward your question Adam, which I’ll focus on … apart from these facts — women earning drastically less than male counterparts/ colleagues, a near-absence of women in higher management or upper level govt + teritiary education sectors — it appears from where I am (J Building Room 803, usually) that body modification and commodification in Seoul cuts across socio-economic groups. The way women choose to look (Eurasian eyes with a fold in the lid; angular chins; larger breasts) is dictated by a rampant cosmetic surgery industry (currently making inroads into China), and lots of young women receive these modifications as a gift from parents before going to university. Young men don’t get their eyes (etc) altered, that I’m aware. There is also a sex industry here which beggars belief … VIP rooms, ‘karaoke bars’, massage places, brothels, blahx3 … it seems that in this strangely stratified society, consumption extends to women’s bodies. This was some of what I meant when I mentioned a ‘patriarchy gone wild’.
I’ll be back in front of a regular internet connection at the end of August, and will look forward to continuing the conversation
Ciao, all.
Look, the way I see it, I think that most societies are relying too heavily on existential philosophy of “waiting for godot”. Their instincts on fulfilling time through less meaningful reciprications has become inevitable. All I can say is, focus on the clarity of life (the true inner being and existence) and forget the ‘gutteral’ approach to interpretation of experiential life moments. I ask you, what makes your experiences of life and heart lessons feel fulfilled? Is it a dull personal intellectual vommit shown only through a dull narrative, or is it a masked ambition through a blind poem make you feel fulfilled?