Research Paper: A World History of Communication, 1490-1800
A history term paper I wrote for Mr.Ganse’s world history class.
This paper is quite bulky, so instead of posting the whole paper in this blog, I will post the table of contents with each item hyperlinked, so that if you click the chapter title you can read that part of my paper posted on Mr.Ganse’s website.
Or, you can read the entire paper in: http://www.zum.de/whkmla/sp/1112/nemesis/hyun3.html
Kate Nash – Birds
One song I love with all my heart.
Am I not tired of love songs? – Not really. When they can be this good.
I think Kate Nash is genius. She writes songs with excellent dictions. She uses very simple chords to create wonderful melodies that fit perfectly with the amazing dictions.
I love this song of her’s especially. I love the way she describes the warm love of ordinary people and how people feel when they love someone. I love the way she makes me imagine how I would feel when I look up at the beautiful sky and see a bird flying there.
This is one of very few songs that I can sing along, playing my guitar, without any mistakes.
My short story – “November 4th”
The first short story of mine that I ever finished! I wrote it for Mr.Menard’s writing assignment, so the motivation was not fully original, but I enjoyed writing it anyway. Since it is a short story, it is something to be read, and if it is, it should not stay stuck in my laptop’s hard driver. It is not good enough for publishing, either, so I’m posting it on my blog instead!
It starts with a quote, btw. That is not what I wrote – I simply quoted it from a beautiful fashion model who died young of AIDS.
The song lyrics I quoted in the novel also are not my creations.
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“Life and death,
energy and peace.
If I stop today it was still worth it. Even the terrible mistakes that I made and would have unmade if I could. The pains that have burned and scarred my soul, it was worth it, for having been allowed to walk where I’ve walked, which was to hell on earth, heaven on earth, back again, into, under, far in between, through it, in it, and above.”
- Gia Marie Carangi (Jan. 1960 – Nov. 1986)
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<November 4th>
The hotel was fairly nice.
My friends must have spent a good deal of money. I could see the black sky and the scattered glows of streetlamps through the overly transparent window. Everything was fine – except that I never wanted any of this. I thought about breaking out, again, but then I remembered too well exactly how they immediately threw me back inside the room when I last attempted ten minutes ago. Those god damn bastards really were determined to get rid of the humiliating virginity of mine for good.
I sprang up from the bed and started pacing about the room. My footsteps didn’t hide the sound of clock ticking. I picked up the Rimbaud from the bed and put it down again – and turned on the radio. Soft music from the ‘80s flowed out. I marched to the window, opened it, felt the cold air hit my face,—
The doorbell rang. My heart fell.
I chose to clench my teeth tight and open the door rather than checking through the peephole first. A tall woman with dark waved hair and deep dark eyes – a Latin beauty – an Italian, maybe.
She immediately raised her eyebrows.
“Oh?”
“Uh… Hi. Come in.”
She frowned, looking as if she was half confused and half amused. I blushed.
“You sure I found the right room?”
“Er… I guess you did.”
The woman simply shrugged and came in ahead of me briskly, looking around with curiosity.
“Hmm… so a type six it is…” she murmured.
“A type six?”
With a faint crook on her lips, she turned her face towards me.
“A virgin.”
“Wha—?”
Damn. “How did you—?”
The crook on the lips became more evident. I blushed.
“I do this as my job, kid.”
She kept on looking around playfully until her eyes stopped at the Rimbaud thrown on the bed.
“Ah – so you’re the lovable type. A cute poet, huh?”
I stood awkwardly not knowing what to do as the woman sat down on the bed with her legs crossed, staring at me with that magically crooked smile.
“So what can I do for you, Mister?”
“I, well – uh… that is – actually I didn’t call – well my friends –”
“Ooooh – Friends!” A clap. “Of course! Those bulky boys playing FBIs out the door?”
I nodded helplessly. She seemed highly amused.
“So what’s the occasion now? Birthday?”
“Er… yes.”
“Well, Happy birthday! The day you joined the human race!”
“Thanks.” I mumbled as I scratched my head. It was getting harder to stand straight.
“Aw, come on! You’re just gonna stand there like that? I do know that you’re one of those guys who’d never do it for the first time with someone paid. I know that much. But you should at least let me grab a beer or somethin’! We must kill some time here to entertain your fellows anyway. Come! Sit!”
She went to the fridge with her playful walk, humming and swinging her hips. I sat on half of my bottom. The cheerful voice of a DJ distantly broke out from the radio as a quiet song ended.
“Today, as we celebrate the birthday of Will Rogers, who would have been 125 if he lived, let us listen to a wonderful song from ‘The Will Rogers Follies’, the musical on his life.
Keith Carrandine sings – ‘I—”
“So you wonderin’ about the meaning of life and stuff? Every night before bed, eh?”
She pointed at the Rimbaud with a hand holding a beer, plumping down on the bed.
“Tell you what, boy. You know, life – don’t take that thing too heavy. Life’s a bunch of fun. Really, it’s a hell lot of fun – even when it sucks the most.”
As she pronounced the word “hell”, she stretched the L sound, like the French people do, making it sound like “hell-uh”. She opened the can. I suddenly noticed that she was wearing nothing but black.
“Um… Do you like wearing black?”
She looked down at herself at my abrupt question. “Oh, this. Well, my friend died a couple of days ago – my colleague. So I decided to wear black for the next three months instead of mourning her for a day. She liked black, you see.”
Now her smile was gone. I blushed.
“Darn. I never meant to – I’m really sorry for you.”
“Nah, you don’t have to.” She waved her hand like it was nothing. “I always knew that she’d die soon – although I’m still kinda sorry that she killed herself. You know, folks somehow expect people like us to kill ourselves. They want to see us dead, do some tut-tut’s, and say ‘I bet that poor girl didn’t plan to become a whore’, or even say ‘that dirty slut deserved it’, or somethin’ like that, just like they did to Jolie – that’s my dead friend, by the way.”
Her eyes pierced into mine.
“But I’d never make it that way. I’d never kill myself. I’ll live.”
None of us spoke for a moment. Only the corny musical number from the radio continued.
“…Fancy cinema stars, fake evangelist,
politicians, morticians.
And I have reached the conclusion
while hiking the pike. Though I try and I try—”
“How long have you been, umm—”
I strived to find the right word.
“A hooker?” She took a gulp of beer. I dared not nod. “Seven years.”
“Wow. Then you must have…”
“Met a lot of people, yeah. My client list’s a god damn Bible.” She rolled her eyes.
I took all the care possible in choosing each word to come next.
“Doesn’t it sometimes get – um – tiring?”
“Nasty. I’d say nasty. Some folks can get real nasty. Usually men. Few women.”
“Women? You serve women?”
I imagined someone beating me up for asking a stupid question. She almost rolled her eyes again.
“Honey, I’ve got my dad, my younger sister and myself to feed. And besides, women are much easier. Those nasty rich men – they often give me bad dreams. I’d better hate them. God – I really must.”
“Don’t you hate them?”
She took another gulp of beer. Her deeply carved eyes slightly narrowed.
“Nah –, nah I don’t.” She gently shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Why? Because they pay you?”
And there it was – as if all my earlier questions weren’t stupid enough. Damn.
“Ha ha ha ha. Well that could be a reason!”
She suddenly seemed to have recovered the original energy of amusement. I blushed.
I felt like I ran out of appropriate words and took a glimpse. The woman seemed to be sunk in some pleasant memory. The lyrics from the radio resumed to make sense in my head for a moment.
“…Try the shoes on that are his
Feel what makes him what he is
What it’s like inside his skin
Living in the skin he’s in—”
“I think you deserve something better. Someone beautiful like you.”
It seemed like the words just escaped from me all of a sudden. I tried all my best to make the word ‘beautiful’ sound casual.
“Ah – Now that’s nice! Thank you!”
“Well… it’s just that – you’re too nice to suffer from nasty men.”
“Oh, how swee-t.” Her eyes looked at me in the way my mother looked at me when I picked her some daisies for her birthday 13 years ago. “Now I really want to tell you that you’re not like any other men. That you’re the nice one — that you’re special,—”
Her hand stroked my cheek, with all the affection in the world.
“—so I’m really sorry that I can’t.”
The hand fell.
“I know too well that I am as evil as they are, and they are as lonely as you are…”
She smiled, without any crook this time.
“The truth is, kid, – the whole seven years, I never met one I didn’t like. Never – even the most horrible ones.”
Suddenly she got up.
“So I gotta live. And you too, boy. You gotta live.”
She patted on my shoulder once and walked smoothly towards the door, as the DJ’s lively voice filled the room once again.
“We just listened to “Never Met a Man I Didn’t Like”, sung first by Keith Carrandine in 1991. Although this musical’s not on stage anymore, it was quite an item in early ‘90s,—”
“Wait – Tell me your name—” I sprang up. “or number, or—”
She turned around—
“It’s Will Rogers. Miss William Rogers.”
And she was gone.
“Faith and Confidence”, William C. Beall, 1958
An image that I like. (I don’t have “favorite”s about no matter what, so don’t think this is it.)
Isn’t that boy just adorable? The way that officer stooped? And the way that man behind is smiling at the boy?
The striking cotrast between the rediculously well-arranged line of an upright crowd and the innocent bend in the little boy’s posture… and so on. When I went to an exhibition of the photographs that won Pulitzer prize, most of the images there squeezed, shaked, and stabbed my heart, indeed. But this one – this one simply fascinated me. I stood in front of this picture forever. For those pictures that awoke me, what I cherish is the learnings I got from them, but for this one, I simply want to keep this image forever. Every single time I look at it, I can’t help smiling.
I got the postcard of this one after the exhibition.
Umm…yeah, simply “Hyun”. Nothing more.
Hi blog. This is a late introduction of myself - what a shame that my first posting was an argumentative essay on Korean education system. Yuck.
Anyways. It’d take me hours to introduce myself in this itsy bitsy blog, so I’ll just introduce my “name”.
My name is “Hyun” – an unusual name in two aspects because 1. it’s one-syllabled, and 2. it’s usually a boy’s name. I like the uniqueness of my name, but it took me quite a long time to actually be able to say that I like anything about my name. Obviously, I hated it for the two reasons I explained beforehand: 1. people always waited for the second syllable to come out when I told them my name, and 2. I was mistaken as a boy for a hundred time or so. On top of that, I absolutely detested the pronunciation of my name. “Hyun” is okay, but since most of Korean names are two-syllabled and it’s kinda akward to call a one-syllabled name, a lot of people call me by my full name – “Park Hyun”. Not only does it sound unfriendly, but also the sound is very strong and coarse, so that I feel like being hated a lot of times.
I succeeded in finding some advantages of my name, though:
1. It’s unique
2. It’s conspicuous (I mean, literally. I can find my name from any written or printed list in less than 3 seconds)
3. It has a terrific meaning
Since my previous remarks serve perfectly well to explain #1 and #2, only #3 is left to be explained. As most of Korean names, my name is also a Korean-pronunciated version of a chinese character, and it means “wise”. Some might say it’s a god damn cliché, but I doubt if wisdom can ever be one. “Wise” might look like just an old trite word, but any good a human does falls into the category of “wise”. Becoming a wise person is sort of like my ultimate goal of life, so I’m quite satisfied with this feeling that my name is predicting my wise future. And one good thing about having a one-syllabled name: it can deeply focus on one single meaning.
I have an English name, too. I usually go by “Alice” among English-speakers(although not in KMLA). When I was little, somebody gave me the name “Ann”, but I hated it because of its striking resemblance to the word “ant”. So I was named again as “Elison”, and I again hated it because I thought it sounded boyish (maybe because of the “son” part) – and I decided to name myself “Alice”. (I was really into the animated version of Alice in Wonderland at that time.)
This is basically what I have to say about my name! (or names)
See ya, blog.
How do we evaluate a country’s quality of education? Unfortunately, it is rather hard to esbatlish clear, objective standards. The evaluation has to be done by applying some kind of standardized test. Unfortunately again, Korean education system, more test-oriented than that of any other country, desplays genius ability when it comes to producing good test results, no matter what kind of test, therefore blinding people on the reality of the system that does not show in test results. It is something to be called “a wild apricot with deceptive good looks” in Korean proverb.
The first major problem of Korean educadtion system is the hopeless narrowness of the scope of learning. Korean education hinders students from being diverse by forcefully stressing certain subjects to almost all students. When students get their report cards, there eyes first search for the scores of what are called “the major subjects”, mainly Korean, English and math. No matter what interest or what talent they have, they should put highest effort in those few subjects. Ironically, few of them actually get the chance to utilize what they have studied for those subjects, later in their life and career.
Even though a large part of what Korean students learn at school lacks true meaning, they netheless have to strive to get good test results. For the sake of good scores, and good ranks, morality is often disregarded. Young children go to extracurricular institutions to learn math and English, instead of learning how to behave as an individual and as a member of society. Academic achievements are often considered as the highest virtue. We can often hear people saying “he might not be a good boy, but still, he is smart. He is the first in his class,” as if intelligence can compensate one’s moral defects. To be considered as a smart person, many Korean students still their friend’s notebooks during exams. From young age, Korean students learn to cherish academics more than anything in their life.
Any type of education can teach us something. Even the experience of harsh competition and difficult exams can benefit the students in some ways. Still, there are essential truths of our life that should not be neglected or considered secondary. No matter how great test results Korean education system produces, as long as those important learnings are neglected, the system cannot be laudable.
