Crenshaw's Books & Decks

Korea. The impossible Country is a passionate comprehensive introduction to Korea, its culture and its people. The book is easy to read, engaging, very informative, and a great introduction to the country, especially if you intend visiting. Tudor's depth of knowledge is admirable and impressive and although his expertise  is economics and business,  the book has a soul. What is more, Tudor is able to dig into the Korean soul and present it to you in its many faces. You will dive through Korea's collective psyche and understand why Koreans behave and do things in a certain way.

This could have been a Wikipedia sort of book or a travel guide sort of book, does none of that, but succeeds at being informative and a good companion for travelling. The book touches on the eternal and the mundane in five fascinating sections:

1- Foundations: We are presented with a brief analysis of the most influential religions in Korea (Buddhism, Christianity and Confucianism) and the specific ways that Capitalism and Democracy show in that country. 
2- Cultural Codes: We immerse ourselves into those beliefs, ways of being and attitudes that make Koreans who they are and are: Jeong, Chemyon, Han, Heung, competition, family and neophilia.
3- Cold Reality, focuses on those aspects of life that make the functioning of society possible but aren't as thrilling as others: politics, business, work,  marriage, studying and being fluent in English.
4- In the hours not spent working: Eating, drinking, music, cinema, and the living space are the subject of this part.
5- More of Us and Less of them analyses Korean attitudes towards foreigners, gays, women, and the many faces of Korean nationalism.
 

The book is preceded by a short historical introduction.Generally speaking, I dread those, especially when they come from non historians, but I have to confess that the introduction is short and sweet, very informative. and a good first approach to the History of Korea. Plenty of historical details are also found in each chapter when a historical background is needed.The epilogue is, in a good part, a brief summary of what Tudor discusses throughout the book, that is, what makes Koreans a remarkable nation and the challenges that Korea has and needs to face in the changing world we live in.

Tudor is basically an economist, and there are plenty of statistics and business and economical references in this book. However, they add to the overall believability of the book.

I love that one can read the chapters individually if one wants, as they are complete in themselves, so this makes the book very versatile and practical. 

I didn't find any typo in the book, something really cool.

THE ABSENTEES
>>> Two of the main absentees in the book are Korea's working classes and rural dwellers, who are barely mentioned in this work. Korea is a  very urban country, I get that, but I would have liked having a bit of more background on rural Korea and its culture and see how it differs from urban Korea, or not. On the other hand, the working class is barely mentioned, and I would have liked to know more about them as well. Are their interests, struggles and obsessions similar to those of the people who send their kids to an American University and have plastic surgery to look better in their resumé?

>>> There is a total absence of Korean literature,  theatre, painting, sculpture,  and visual arts, except for movies, in section 4, they are basically ignored. Korea has a vibrant literary scene, a scene where women are dominating the field, and are well-respected. I love Korean films, but what about visual arts like painting, sculpture, experimental artists, any around in Korea?

>>> One of the chapters I was looking forward to reading was that on Korean food.  One can find a list of typical Korean dishes anywhere, so I expected this chapter to go beyond that and offer some depth about Korean culinary culture. But there is little depth, and other things are taken for granted, as the author supposes that we already know many things about it. Some of the questions I wanted to know about and aren't mentioned in the book:  Which hours do they eat in the day? Is their main meal in the morning, midday or evening? Is there a foodie culture in Korea as we have it in Western countries?  Is eating out expensive? Does everybody cook at home these days or is still a women's task? Do Koreans have a strong street food culture? Which differences do you see in food eating according to social classes in Korea? Is there a "vernacular" tea culture in Korea? Do they love TV programs like MasterChef? Which foreign food/s do they love the most? Tudor knows all of this and much more and I would love have loved that sort of information commented on, even if lightly. Perhaps in the new edition of the book?

KOREAN, REALLY?
Some of the things Tudor says about Korean can be seen also in Western Europe, USA and Australia, so I wonder in which ways they are specifically Korean. For example:
# Yummy mummies who don't work or have achieved nothing in life and use their children's achievements to push their own egos and, therefore, push their kids unnecessarily for their own sake are everywhere.
# The obsession with technology. Sure, Korean moves faster than any other country on neophilia. Yet, I found very similar attitudes and obsessions in countries like Australia, where teens can be seen with super-duper phones and their parents renew their handsets in less than two years. In many Western countries people camp outside Apple stores before the launch of a new product to be the first to get it.

# Gay actors who keep in the closet not to destroy their careers. Certainly, gay people have a brighter life in the Western World (Wester Europe especially) and no actor is going to be publicly shamed or condemned for being gay. In real life, though, there are youngsters who are bullied, abused, and marginalised because of their sexual orientation in different countries called civilised and very Western. The Australian ex-swimmer Ian Thorpe had depression, publicly denied being guy, wrote a biography in which he denied it again, and when he came out of the closet said that he had kept it secret out of fear because he didn't know if his country would accept him. Also in Australia, a pop singer Anthony Callea kept his gay self hidden for work career purposes, he said, as most of his fans were female teens. Of course, nobody is making life difficult for them, but Korea is not the only country in which the attitudes mentioned in the book are part of the daily life of gays. 

> The problem of the ageing population and low birth rates. I cannot but agree with what Tudor says, but this is not a typically Korean problem, as it affects most countries in Western Europe, Spain and Italy with one the lowest birth rates in the world and the population ageing at the speed of ageing :).

THE EDITING
I notice the editing when the editing is not good. When it is is, I don't notice anything. I focus on the writing, the message of the book or the story being told. This book could have been a better book if the editing had been better. An editor is not just a person who corrects typos and grammar in writing (which is excellent here by the way), an editor also focuses on content, how one says things and the way one says them, what is superfluous and what is not, which things have been repeated many times and which things should be mentioned and they haven't. Just a few examples:

> Tudor repeats himself quite often, things are said over and over again in different chapters, sometimes in the same chapter, and it is not always necessary. Just one example, the per capita earnings of  Koreans in the post-war era. 
>  At times the book reads like a blog, others like a newspaper article, and others like a proper book. That is, there is no coherence in the style. That is distracting to me and not good for any book.
> The "Special Feature: Interview with Choi Min-sik" feels like a cut-&-paste from a blog or article added here. I don't know if that is the case, but it reads as a pastiche even though I loved Oldboy. The question that matters here is, is this interview really relevant to know the film culture of Korea and necessary to be included in the book? The answer is no.
> The data that Tudor uses for some references to religious practices relates to the 1990s! Hello hello, 2016 calling. I wonder how accurate the statistics were in 2012, when the book was written, and today.

> The author mentions a few books and articles, but does not properly quote them. I understand that the book is for the general public, but including an endnote after an explicit reference would not disturb the general populace, it is a matter of courtesy to the author mentioned, it is the right thing to do when you are a professional writer as it backs up your reputation, and some readers could be interested in that book or article. Just an example:

" In a paper on the influence of chemyon on Korean consumer culture, Yoosun Hann of the University of Illinois wrote that it was important “not to stand out, but to fit in” (pp. 112-113)

RENDERING FOR KINDLE
~~ The comprehensive final index is not rendered for Kindle, therefore, not linked, therefore, useless for Kindle users. Moreover, the number of pages relates to the printed edition. Cheat!  Cheat! Cheat!
~~ If I get an e-book, I expect the book to have any website mentioned in the text out-linked.

A WISH
After reading the book I am sure he is an expert on Korea. Why not including a list of  must-read books and reputed sources on Korea?

IN SHORT
I cannot highlight enough how much I enjoyed this book and how much I recommend it to anybody interested in Korea.  However, the book is also lacking in finesse, and some themes that are also very Korean, aren't mentioned.

The Vegetarian (채식주의자) is a Korean novel, and the winner of the 2016's Man Booker International Prize.

This is a tree-part novella, each narrated by a different character. The main character is Yeon-hye, a young married woman who suffers a mental crisis and becomes a vegan in a country and family where veganism is almost unknown and not well-seen. Her crisis will affect all members of her family in unexpected ways, opening a box of Pandora that will varnish with emotional turmoil everyone it touches. The other two major characters are her sister In-hye, and her brother-in-law (an unnamed artist and In-hye's husband.)

The three parts are:

Ω Ω Ω

The unbearable heaviness of being is an expression that comes to mind when I think of all the characters in this novel. The three main characters are masterfully composed, and we come to understand the three of them, to put ourselves in their shoes and see their view of the world and experience their inner pain. None of them oozes happiness.

I love the way the character of Yeong-hye is portrayed, like an ethereal ghost-like being even though there is little lightness about her. The depiction of her mental crisis and conversion to veganism is very real. I have come across many cases of real women in the 19th century, just to use an example, who developed food phobias and anorexia nervosa as a part of severe mental problems, some of them with deeply spiritual roots. There is something about the way you feed you body affects your soul, and vice versa, and this is masterly captured in the book.

I love the character of In-hye. I think she is a reflection of most of  us, we who endure life and don't live it to the fullest, we who mute our inner voice, we who please instead of enjoy, we who repress anger to show how civilise we are but really angrier than those who do the contrary. To me, the character of In-hye is the most insane of all even though she is sane in her mind.

It is very difficult, at least for me, to like the character of In-hye's artist husband as he appears as a selfish, self-centred, and self-absorbed prick. He, like Yeon-hue, wants to die, but in a different way. His art comes from his core, is created to feed his soul, and in this case to die, to be one with the Universe, with Nature, to become one with humans, animals and plants as he expressly says. It is not a surprise that the character mentions as a source of inspiration an untitled audiovisual work by the avant-garde Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, which I think is self-obliteration. 

Ω Ω Ω

There is a heavy presence of oneiric elements and moments in the novel that I find remarkable:

  ‘I had a dream … and that’s why I don’t eat meat.’ (Locations 1079-1080).

In-hye has also dreams, as does her son, and her husband. Dreams are mentioned throughout the book, even at the very end.

‘I have dreams too, you know. Dreams … and I could let myself dissolve into them, let them take me over … but surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we? Because … because then …(Kindle Locations 2174-2176). 

The oneiric element works perfectly in the novel because, dreams are the messengers of the psyche, they are the bed where the soul rests, the mirror of the true self, that part of the human being that is honest and says to you how you feel even when your conscious mind doesn't want to accept it. Dreams are also a space where reality and non-reality mix in organic but mysterious ways. The dream is the seed of our hidden truth, of our moments of elation, despair and anguish. The dream is always emotional. We see our characters' frigid emotionality in their awaken life, but very emotional in their oneiric life and very connected to their inner truth trough dreams. We see their dreams speaking their inner truth.

However, the dream is not only an literary element here. There is a strong dream culture in South Korea, still alive nowadays. Jeremy Seligson says in his entry on traditional Korean Dreams that:

"In traditional Korea, clairvoyant and precognitive dreams have played a vital role in the individual's and family's life at every level of society"

and also, and relevant for this novel, 

"Once an event is foreseen in a dream, the dreamer takes steps to prepare for its arrival" (see Deirdre Barrett, D. & McNamara, P.. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreams: The Evolution, Function, Nature, and Mysteries of Slumber. Greenwood, 2012, vol. 2, pps. 774-776.)

Ω Ω Ω

The book spans out for only 160 pages. The story and narrative are brilliant, the language I don't know. I always prefer that to three volumes of epic adventures full of fluff that are populating the charts of best-sellers around the English-speaking world.

There are images powerfully lyric and visually artistic and cinematic in this book. One of my favourites is in the fist part, when Yeong-hye in the courtyard in the hospital with a bird in his hand.Almost like a modern painting. Or the image of In-hye reflected in the mirror with a bleeding eye, very surrealist. Others, on the contrary are very dramatic, shocking and horrific, like the dream with the dog. Those images will stay with you for a long time, tattooed onto your retina long after you finish the book.

Ω Ω Ω

The translation by Deborah Smith is good. Most of the book flows and that is the sort of experience we want as translators and readers to have when translating literary works.  However, as I reader, I thought that the first chapter needed of a better editing because, personally, I found it lacking in punctuation at times, some unnecessarily wording others, and the choice of some words over others a bit distracting, at least to me.

Ω Ω Ω

TWO  NOTES 
Ѫ The Vegetarian was originally published in 2007, compiling three novelettes previously published separately. However, the story, according to Hang herself, developed organically, but turned dark, from  a short story of hers "Fruits of my Woman" written in the year 2000:

The main characters are a man and woman, and one day when the man returns home from work, he sees that his wife has become a plant. So he moves her into a pot, waters her, and takes care of her. As the seasons change, the woman spits out her last hard seeds. As he takes the seeds out to the balcony, he wonders whether his wife will be able to bloom again in spring. Overall the story isn’t so dark, and is also magical, but after writing it, I wanted to write it again from a different perspective. So I thought for years about how to write it. From the very first page, The Vegetarian came out very dark and different. (in "Violence and Being Human: A Conversation with Han Kang" by Krys Lee (World Literature Today, January 2016).

 Ѫ The book was taken to the screen in 2009 under the direction of Woo-Seong Lim. The movie was also called The Vegetarian.

A TYPO
> I couldn’t get my head round it. (Locations 48-49).
> natural it was to not wear clothes. (Location 1220).

A WARNING
This word contains explicit violence, human and animal, and explicit sex scenes.
 
A QUERY
Why was the book called Vegetarian in English is the character becomes a vegan? Was the title in Korean the same? 

"Reading the Comments" is an exploration of online comments, of their nature, their authors, what is good, bad and funny about them. Reagle shows how comments inform (reviews), serve to improve your own works or projects (via feedback), can be manipulative and serve to alienate people (through abuse and hatred), and shape how we see the world and ourselves (via quantification and social comparison). Reagle uses a humongous amount of data, using the main platforms generating comments:Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, fiction writers communities, and personal blogs.

The book poses and answers intriguing questions with a more or less degree of success:
> Why do people like disclosing info about themselves in their comments?
> Is society more narcissist today as a result of the Internet?
> Is anonymity the mother of all problems in abusive comments?
> Is fakery the exception or the norm in review?
> Who is writing false reviews and why? And what is being done to counteract it?
> Who are those creating sock-puppet accounts?
> Why do review sites benefit from your comments?
> How do Facebook and Google+ use your profile and contact list every time you rate a product?
> What is the difference between a comment and a review?
> What is the key to providing a good feedback that is useful to the author without hurting their feelings?
> Is a bullied person bullying a person as bully as the bully?
> Can good communities, in self-defence, morph into what they try to avoid?
> Do the gazillion comments processed during the day affect our ability to concentrate and our well-being?
> Is the pervasive rating and ranking of people and services dehumanising?

The book is divided in seven chapters:
1/ Comment, offers a contextualisation of comment, of what makes people comment, interact or to look for another place.
2/  Informed, is an introduction to reviews, ratings, unboxing videos and other informative commentary on the web.
3/Manipulation, is about the use of fake reviews and online fakery in general.These manipulators are fakers (those who deceptively praise their own works or pillory others), makers (those who do that for a fee), and the takers (those who avail themselves of such services).
4/ Improvement, deals with feedback: peer feedback, feedback in formal writing communities, and feedback in communities where the line between feedback and collaboration blurs.
5/ Alienated, describes online trolls and haters, bully battles and  misogyny, and tries to frame this "culture" with what we know about the effects of anonymity, deindividuation and depersonalization.
6/ Shaped, poses the question of how this infinite stream of information, status updates, and photos affects self-esteem and wellbeing and our view of ourselves.
7/ Bemused, focuses on the puzzling aspect of commenting as comments can be slapdash, confusing, amusing, revealing, and weird.

 I found this statement one of the most interesting in the book:

All forms of writing that have gone before are present on the Web— and at a very large scale. These types of comment existed before the twenty-first century, but never were they available in such great numbers or were they as easily accessible as they are today.

I love the historical contextualisation of commenting, and to learn that many attitudes we find online nowadays were very much alive in the past, and that well-known writers, philosophers and artists of the past were involved in actions or activities that are today found online. I found really good the section on feedback and the section on trolls very exhaustively informative. When you provide with historical antecedents for online behaviour that are rooted in morphed off-line behaviour, we can have a mini-epiphany because then, some behaviour and attitudes are not only contextualised but can be tackled in different ways. Reagle's analysis on quantification or rating, which are more relevant by the day in our times. was also really good.

I agree with Reagle about the search for intimate serendipity being one of the reasons why some people aren't in big social sites or social networks in general, they join when they are small and quit then when they become too big, too popular or the first scum appears, or they don't allow comments on their personal sites. That is my case, and that is great putting a name to what I do.

I really loved some of the comic strips from The Geek & Poke, a German nerdy comic-strip, reproduced in the book, which are really relevant for some of the matters discussed in it. I especially feel connected to the the one below, but this is precisely one of the comments I get most often from people I don´t know or have interaction with me, and the other one, that "the free gift" (above) use preached by corporations, major social networks and dot com start-up companies and geeks.

Reagle clearly mentions at the beginning that the book isn't about the future of online sites or of commenting online. This being the case, one of the most interesting and controversial aspects of commenting is hurdled over, which is very disappointing to me. In that regard, the book scratches the top layers of the subject, leaving many of the issues associated to commenting just described. Which is not bad if you want a comprehensive analysis of the subject without digging down.

Although I enjoyed the book, Reading the Comments is a bit a sum-up of things and research found in other works, and Reagle  does not always expresses his opinion on important matters; for example, how would he tackle some of the problems he describes? However, he does give his honest opinion other times, as when he says that he doesn't think anonymity is the problem for the state of the online world. In fact, some of the most abusive people I've come across online had their real photo and name displayed. I always appreciate solutions, or at least proposals on how to change things online, especially when an expert is writing. Reagle is, after all, an academic, an expert on communication and on the Internet so I expected more prognosis, diagnosis or  even personal involvement.

The book reads well as a course for students, where his students would learn about things and the teacher wouldn't always need to express his views upfront unless questioned. That is OK for a course, I expected more on bleeding matters: like sexist misogynist comments, the level of verbal aggression thriving online, why does trolling occur beyond those groups who made an entertaining of doing so? In that regard I found Sarah Jeon's book necessary to read after this, because she digs on the subject and provides readers with personal answers and solutions on how to turn things around. Both books complement each other quite well.

The book is wonderfully edited. I didn't notice any typo, the reference system and endnoting are flawless, something that, as a reader, I always appreciate.There is always a lot of work to get to that point, and you cannot take it for granted. I think the first chapter should be called Introduction, because that is what it is, and where the author mentions what he is going to do and describes the subjects discussed in each chapter.

The rendering for Kindle is excellent except for the index at the back, which isn't linked for Kindle, therefore, worthless. I always feel cheated when this happens.

IN SHORT

The book reads really well, is engaging, entertaining and digs on many aspects of the web that aren't well known to people who don't live on or research the Internet. Three and half stars rounding to 4. That is why the five-star-rating system sucks...