'American Woman': Days of the Cobra

It remains one of the mysteries -- how certain things just chance to be ''in the air'' at a given time. Right now, for instance, for no reason I can discern, we are awash in accounts of American radicals in the high season of the counterculture. From media reports on the release from prison of Kathy Boudin, to the publication this month of Susan Braudy's ''Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left,'' to Sam Green and Bill Siegel's recent documentary, ''The Weather Underground,'' we are reminded at every turn of what that latter group once called the ''days of rage.''
Read it @ NYT October 5, 2003

When a Receding Tide Leaves Lives Behind: Susan Choi

In her lustrous novel "The Foreign Student," Susan Choi wrote of the birth pains of a Korean student attempting a life in a Southern college town.

Ms. Choi, a Korean-American, did something larger and more original than ingeniously devise a foreigner experiencing America. She devised America through the experience of the foreigner ?an America seemingly strange, largely because our own eyes hadn't known where to look. It was revelation under black light; not replacing daylight's vision but extending it to show crags we took for hills and torrents we knew as streams.
Reviewed September 12, 2003 @ NYT

Stray Questions for: Susan Choi - Paper Cuts Blog - NYTimes.com

Susan’s Choi’s most recent novel is “American Woman.” Her new novel, “A Person of Interest,” will be published in January.
September 28, 2007 @ NYTimes.com

A Person of Interest - Susan Choi - Book Review - New York Times

Reading “A Person of Interest,” it occurred to me that if we’re lucky, Susan Choi’s new book may turn out to be a prototypical 21st-century novel, combining the unhurried pleasures of certain classics with the jittery tensions of more recent fiction.

February 17, 2008 @ New York Times

Roger Angell Writes a New "Greetings, Friends!" Poem for The New Yorker

Longtime readers of The New Yorker will not, of course, need to be reminded who Mr. Angell is — an eminent baseball writer, an editor at the magazine since 1956 and the stepson of E. B. White. But they may wonder where “Greetings, Friends!,” an annual poem that was a New Yorker institution for nearly eight decades, has been. It was written by Frank Sullivan from 1932 until 1974, and by Mr. Angell starting in 1976. But “Greetings, Friends!” vanished after its 1998 iteration and has not been seen again until now.

Mr. Angell, for example, once won a palindrome competition with the writer Alastair Reid, Mr. Gill wrote, by composing the following epic, the speaker of which is an insane war veteran in a government hospital: “Marge, let dam dogs in. Am on satire: Vow I am Cain. Am on spot, am a Jap sniper. Red, raw murder on G.I.! Ignore drum. (Warder repins pajama tops.) No maniac, Ma! Iwo veritas: no man is God. — Mad Telegram.” Mr. Gill wrote that the palindrome was, at the time, “perhaps the world's longest.”

Get the full story @ NYTimes.com

Greetings, Friends!

Fair readers, hail! Now here’s a teaser:
Who’s this pale, familiar geezer
Appearing through the mists of time
Atop a tow’r of creaky rhyme?
Why, yes, it’s us—we’re back, hooray,
To hug you each this holiday
And post sweet thoughts of you from here
To neighbors round the blogosphere.
Here's the ditty at length @ The New Yorker

Cures for the Inevitable

Hangovers hurt. You may not remember the night before, but you never forget the morning after. But can they be avoided or cured?

The transition from prince to frog brought on by one too many was first scrutinized in ancient Greece, as indeed were remedies for the condition. The usual cure — I advise hungover readers to skip the next line — was boiled cabbage, whose pungent aroma, and powerful flavor were believed to restore the senses of the most ardent Epicurean. The poet Amphis reckoned the medicine to be worse than the ailment, and suggested that it relied on its emetic qualities for its effect.

Cures for the Inevitable - Proof Blog - NYTimes.com

정권교체해서 좋은 이유 하나

2008년 12월 10일 경향신문 이대근 칼럼
이러자고 정권교체한 것은 아닌데…. 이런 불만도 있겠고, 정권교체해서 좋아진 것 하나 없다는 비관도 있을 수 있다. 구관이 명관이라고 노무현이 더 나은 것 아니냐는 발상도 있을 수 있다. 그러나 노무현이 밉다고 이명박을 사랑할 수 없는 것과 마찬가지로, 이명박이 밉다고 노무현을 사랑할 수는 없다. 그들간의 차이를 따지려면 따질 수 있겠지만, 가난한 자에게는 어느쪽이든 마찬가지일 뿐이다. 그런데 이런 이야기는 너무 많이 하지 않는 편이 좋다. 화병만 돋울 수 있다. 그래서인데, 가끔이라도 긍정적 사고를 할 필요가 있다. 한번 이렇게 생각해 보자. 만약 정권이 교체되지 않았다면? 그랬다면, 노건평이 동생 노무현의 돈 많은 친구들과 어울려 농협을 먹이로 마음껏 비리, 부패행위를 해도 아무도 몰랐을 것이다. 정권교체하지 않았다면, 농협 말고 다른 거래에도 끼어들어 수십억원이 아니라, 수백억원을 해먹었을지 모른다. “아무것도 모르는 시골 노인”이라는 거짓말에 모두 속아 넘어 갔을지 모른다. 정권교체하지 않았다면, 노무현이 2005년 2월 “적어도 돈으로 하는 부정부패는 제 임기동안 확실히 해소해 나가도록 하겠다”고 다짐할 바로 그 때 노건평이 증권사를 농협에 팔아서 한 몫 잡으려는 사람을 소개받고 착수금 1억원 받은 이야기가 흘러나오지 않았을 것이다. 국정 지지율이 추락해 정권이 무너지는 소리가 들린다고 했을 때인 2005년 6월 노건평이 농협회장을 호텔에서 만나 청탁한 줄 아무도 몰랐을 것이다.
정권교체하지 않았다면
다 읽으려면 여기

In Defense of Teasing - NYTimes.com

Very often, though, we do not want our words to be taken too literally. When we speak in ways that risk offense, for example when we criticize a friend, we may add intentional vagueness or unnecessary circumlocutions. Say a friend proves to be too confrontational at a dinner party. To encourage greater civility, we might resort to indirect hints (“Say, did you read the latest by the Dalai Lama?”) or metaphor (“I guess sometimes you just need to blow off some steam”). These linguistic acts establish a new channel of communication — off-record communication — signaling that what is being said has an alternate meaning.

Read the article @ NYTimes.com

US: The Big Three's real union problem - Los Angeles Times

If the UAW really is to blame at all, then, it is because of the union's utter failure to unionize any of the transplants. What has the UAW been doing all these years? Isn't it the responsibility of any good union to protect union employers from competitive labor disadvantages by organizing wall to wall, throughout the industry? How could it have left these transplants unorganized? It is not too late to save the Big Three. But the solution is not to tear down the historic and heroic gains won by prior generations of UAW workers. If there is hope long term -- for the unionized Big Three companies and for the UAW -- it rests in dealing with the unfinished business of the 1980s: unionizing the unorganized transplants.
Read the article @ Los Angeles Times

가야금 Stairway to Heaven

가야금 [여울]이
Led Zepplin의
Stairway to heaven을 연주하연
공연 실황


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