Pensee

I finally realized that I need to earnestly return to the study Korean at some point and encounter frustration while controlling, consolidating and slowly expanding the frontiers of mercurial Mandarin.  Like Schumann and Heinrich Heine who battled and grew and merged at the top from the same ironic/romantic taproot, Chinese and Korean can duel it out and clamber up simultaneously.  Perhaps it can be said that they are protean brothers who overstep, stab one another and grow rich on the mutual cultural blood that pools below. But like Richard Nixon said, I’m a bad butcher.  So then, devolve the slavemastering to a teacher, outsource the gruel-mongering to a pedagogue armed with a dull blade called “grammar” and then invite your own ribs to be slashed.

And then, splashed with alcohol, cleansed and stung, there is the matter of treating article writing more like a scientist, and less like a faux-humanist.  There is no need to roll out glorious syntax.  Just use periods and capitol letters. Convey the data.  After all, the content of the work is heavy enough, worthy, and amply ponderous on its own, stacked like cylinders; like munitions wheeled out to B-29s in Kyushu, or handed out blindly in velvet sacks from within the shadows of dead hulking stadiums.  Brutal, majestic handicap.  Of course simplicity and guile coexist.