weekends

In school, on Saturday.

Houses in South Korea look like houses elsewhere in the world. Surprise, it's concrete.

The War Memorial at Chuncheon, one of the first and most heavily bombed places in the DPRK's assault back in 1950.

Daejon from Bomunsan.

cottage, dacha, villa

It was a hot day so I decided to take the bus out of the city. The countryside was hot, too, and it made me think of Chekov's story in which a man comes into town for the day only to hurry out again to his dacha his arms full of useless things, birdcages, presents, and special foods for his wife, things she couldn't get in the countryside. The story felt hot. The apartment in the city, where the man complained to his friend, was stifling and you felt that the heat never left him, even when he was in the country. He spent sleepless nights on his bed with mosquitoes buzzing around his head and the heat dwindling to a light cool in the early morning. Then before he knew it morning approached and he was leaving, again, for the city.

I had none of his sense of urgency in collecting things I would not use or need. I was simply going out of town but it was hot. Here the countryside suffers under the heat. The rivers run shallow and brown blue over hot white stones sticking out like broken bones, a cemetery aflood. The mountains drink in the heat. Leaves shimmer green from the light. The earth, scorched from the heat, has its revenge in August, giving back everything, burning children's soles, preparing for the cool which will lash the forests beginning with September evenings.

I sweltered on the way to the island, roasted on the lakeside walkway and baked in the shade of the Ethiopia Cafe. The sad blue plastic chairs, feeble in the shade of the cafe, bleached white by the sun and wear, surrounded little white tables from which I had the view across the parking lot, which was really no more than a few meters across, of the memorial to fallen Ethiopian soldiers of the Korean War. It sits there, a foreign tri-domed building, round and smooth. Its ribs are dark brown. They glisten in the sun. Haze rises off the ground like water and the building appears in front of you, out of the heat, like a vision.

Chuncheon was one of the first places the North Korean army attacked. It's the perfect town to shell. The town lies on a flat expanse around two lakes, dotted with pretty islands, and surrounded by hills, high and close. The North Koreans must have bombed this place to hell.

The town itself isn't attractive.

When the Americans recovered most of the peninsula Syngham Rhee went about building his villa on the east side of the peninsula. His life and reign is glorified in pictures and I blanched at the lack of information on this one and same autocrat who ruthlessly cracked down on opposition and riots. Princeton trained - oh yes - with a head for economics and tough love. How else would they have pulled out of a post war slump? Certainly, he was their man. His villa is simple. I went early one morning when no one was there. I looked into his office, his phone where he probably barked commands, the one room where he might have made love to his wife. Are autocrats able to make love?

The wind blows gentle there, the same way it does at my window, rustling the willows like feathers and the pines like clouds.

His villa sits on a rise above a lagoon and overlooks a spreading lawn with several trellises. He certainly had a splendid view. I took shade under the trellis and watched the water ripple. I traced the edge of the lagoon and followed a rocky headland up until my eyes met the sun.

He had his villa built here, within shooting distance of Kim Il-Sung's old villa. The latter's is now nothing at the top of that rocky headland across the lagoon. The only thing that remains are some steps up the hill. The view from the top is impressive and I imagined Kim Il-Sung climbing up the stairs to his retreat when this part of the country was still North Korea, before the 38th parallel moved for the last time. How he must have writhed at knowing that Syngham Rhee built his own personal retreat not far away! Perhaps the pain of knowing your enemy was in your land was a bit like feeling your wife a mistress, and her knowing that you knew she was unfaithful. Maybe that was the cause of the growth on his neck which became so obscene in his later years that bodyguards were positioned strategically around him so that even those who came close saw no more than what might have been a glimpse at something that may have been malignant growth, on the back of his neck.

The land here is magical.

The road runs straight, through Hwajinpo and north to Daejin. It is lined with tank traps and after passing the military checkpoint, razor wire. The Unification Highway appears from the woods, itself secure behind a double fence, barbed wire and invisibly placed dynamite in case of an invasion. It is thick, grey and beautiful. Its light posts feature small metal engravings of the full Korean peninsula, reunited as one country. Hope contained. The forest falls away quickly and the hills look as if they are covered in grass. They are not. The land is methodically razed kilometers before the observation post, which is still a kilometer and a half from the border.

This land, the contested land, I see as if through gossamer.

The road stretches towards the border. The rail line curves towards the checkpoint. Into the distance they both go, towards the mutual place where they disappear. Look into that distance beyond the border where the hills are exposed rock behind a veil of cloud.

fighting

I usually go down to Seohyeon subway station simply to get away from life here, on the mountain.

For the past two Fridays I've watched people pay to fight a boxer. Last week the boxer noticed me and asked me whether I wanted to fight. I declined. Last night the boxer asked me whether I wanted to fight and I declined, again. He insisted, dropping the price from 10 000\ to 3 000\. I tried to walk away but he simply stood there and the crowd was getting antsy at watching this foreigner try to back out of the deal. I turned around and put on the gloves.

Here goes nothing.

October

I was working in a small town on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, which twinkles so enchantingly in the summer, a line of silver dividing the country in two.

The Etchemin melds into the St. Lawrence just across from Ste. Foy, after the pounding Chaudiere Falls. Drive along the Etchemin valley and you'd reach a little town, one of the first Irish settlements in this part of the country. The old road heads up the hill and into the town but now the highway cuts around it in a curve, along the river valley. There is a small cluster of houses at the top of the hill. The church spire touches the sky and the library, named after Jack Kerouac, is eternally closed.

I was there in the fall. The trees were bare and the sky, grey as ever, threatened snow. I had signed up as a respite care worker in a town that claimed seven hundred.

The Irish named the town after the prophet Malachi as the Scots did Frampton and the English, Scott. It was a thoroughly English county which was named Dorchester until just recently, and the names, St. Odile de Cranbourne and Ste. Rose de Watford bear witness to the swell of anglophones who called both the Etchemin and Chaudiere river valleys home.

I first saw this little town in the depth of winter. It was a winter from Roch Carrier's book _The Hockey Sweater_, and the road, a thin ribbon, that snaked towards the little lake in the middle the woods at St. Lazare, afterwards ran frighteningly striaight towards his borderland hometown. Nothing stood above the snow. It lay deep, undulating, frozen. A hill appeared, thick with trees and the old road cutting straight through the woods. Houses lined up, small, cozy, hidden except for the thin pipes jutting into the air, smoke rising straight into the sky.

The town was now about to make its turn into winter. The autumn rains hadn't completely passed. Hallowe'en was dark, wet, and the rain felt like murder. I lived in an old white house that was once a schoolhouse I feared was inhabited by the ghosts of schoolchildren - I imagined they would be the worst - or telegraph operators, since afterwards it served as the communication centre for this small town. I worked in the red woodshed across the river. Work was good, though you couldn't hear the neighbours' horses galloping across the fields, whinnying with pure joy at being in the cold, over the scream of air vents and chisel scrapes.

The sun set as I returned from the woodshed, dropping until one day I walked out into the dark. Life was true, though I began to find it tiring.

I asked Marie where she went for vacation. Marie who was so carefree yet direct. She took her week long break not in the Gaspe or in Montreal but on the Etchemin in her one room cottage. Sometimes the river would rise and give her a scare but otherwise she loved the change right there. I couldn't imagine wanting to vacation so close to work, or even making work there a vacation, which is what Roland did, coming down from Quebec City every Thursday to have dinner with the family in /Les Hirondelles/ and then spending time working in the woodshed on the other side of the river.

I never did ask Marie to use her cottage.

I walked out to the bleachers behind the church one night and after looking at the purple blue Laurentides across the river I lay down. The sky turned black, clear, twinkling and I left St. Malachie for outer space.

reading

It was my second year in university. I sat next to an auburn beauty in Can Lit class. I mean, she sat next to me. I was minding my own business, staring out the window at the changing maple leaves in the courtyard when she interrupted my view. The month was September and I was about to be browbeaten by the professor, unable to either define or differentiate between irony and sarcasm. He licked his lips at my plight while I struggled, discerned, then backpedalled in an effort to save myself in front of the whole class. He smirked and then the class released a sigh. He would give us the definition, but first, break.

I don't remember much about the class itself other than the work was dry and boring to read. I enjoyed _Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town_ in retrospect and _The Mountain and The Valley_ not at all. I assume my seat partner felt the same coming less to class, spending more time in the library where we would run into each other after class, she at her carel and I at mine. She read the classics, Ovid, Virgil, while I flipped through the student weeklies, atlases, and perhaps the occassional required reading.

There we sat back to back, she later admitting that she had a crush on Ovid. I wanted to be dead two thousand years, too.

I was frustrated at having thought I had chosen a major that didn't interest me, confused because I did not understand what I read and bewildered because I could not master it. I had only begun reading to understand the year previous and while I understood, in part, what I was supposed to accomplish I didn't know how to go about it. I began writing academic papers and found I was no good, failing miserably in writing English papers, answering multiple choice questions in science, writing short answers for classics, and memorizing French verbs like haïr which, incidentally, means to hate.

The year passed quickly, though by the end of it I still had not learned how to write clearly.

It would land me in trouble the following year where I successfully puzzled professors. They looked at me and assumed I could produce when I couldn't. I did not know how to write but that was because I still didn't know how to read.

I was caught up in symbol and image and history when in fact, the story, the bare enjoyment of what I loved was what these professors wanted to hear. I forgot how to enjoy the stories. I thought professors wanted serious thought, depth, dry wit. If I had known that these teachers had wanted the same passion and simplicity I brought to the Hardy Boys, later to the Hardy Boys Case File series, Encyclopedia Brown's neighbourhood mysteries, and Tintin, then it would have been easier to tell them what I felt.

I felt the stirrings of emotion in my transition from those books of my youth just before university. I read Ibsen, Pirandello, Neruda, Naipaul, O'Neill, and Kafka for the sake of the story. It was pure enjoyment. I ranted with Kafka, labelling the world insipid and cringed at Pirandello's stark landscapes. I was afraid of Naipaul's eccentric characters and moved by Neruda's short poems. I didn't know why. I only know I felt them deeply.

I was puzzled. Was this what these learned men and women wanted? Someone who still enjoyed literature? Surely they still enjoyed it didn't they? I did not know at the time that they could not enjoy the works the same way I could, a virgin to the texts. They enjoyed the works at a structural level and were longing for students who enjoyed it simply for the story but were able to identify structural changes in the work that reflected perhaps the author's intention and creatitvity.

My auburn beauty gave me Chekov's _Collected Stories_ for my birthday the following year before disappearing. I started in on the book. It was a delight to read and I began to understand through what she wrote, how to read. I began to enjoy reading once again.

"To my dear friend Matt,
I started reading these stories on the train. "A Boring Story" looks like the most interesting one, though I didn't finish it. I guess that's up to you. I hope you enjoy the book. All the best for a new year.
Happy Birthday. L."

a boring post

I've made it a habit to drop into a little restaurant on the second floor of one of the myriad of buildings near the subway station to dine on pork bone soup. On my third visit the cook put five large bones in the bowl, up from the normal three, two with hunks of soft pork barely clinging to the bone. Now, my visit on my visit to their empty restaurant - only empty because I go to eat there in the off hours - the cook sat watching karaoke being hosted in the most southerly province mainland in Korea while the waitress leaned on the cash counter at the front of the restaurant. On the television one of the performers knotted his hands behind his back and then brought his arms around his body in a complete circle. I never could watch people dislocate their joints so I laughed uncomfortably. The cook pointed at the tv and exclaimed. I don't know why but I looked back and caught the waitress with her arms behind her back, laughing.

I usually draw out my meal at their restaurant. There's nothing particularly special about the view and they've taped over the tv controls so that customers don't change their favourite channels that show soap operas. I've begun to follow one of the operas myself spending my time there figuring out what could have possibly happened to make the young woman turn neurotic. Was it the overbearing mother or her boss? Why does the father react so violently to the old neighbour who brings gifts for his children? The food is good and the silence aside from the tv is pleasant.

This time, however, as I was leaving the waitress asked me a question. Was I in Korea for money or to study? She smiled, Regardless, we're happy you come here. You have a good appetite. I looked at the cook. She nodded and started talking. All of a sudden I didn't know what they were saying. They went on and on about something I did, I think, and I tried to listen a bit more closely. Surely I'm not incompetent, I thought - and then it happened. I realized that I didn't speak Korean.

In The Mood For Love

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, 'I love you madly,' because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, 'As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.' At this point, avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said it what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. [. . .] [B]oth will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony. Both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.

Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable - Eco