Happy Fourth Week of January

The twenty-third of January was New Year’s Day in the lunar calendar – known to most people in the West as Chinese New Year. Well: Chinese, Korean – same thing, right? In Korea the holiday is called Seollal and consists of the day itself, the day before and the day after. While Christmas and solar New Year’s (aka Real New Year’s) are also public holidays in Korea, they’re not really special events. Seollal and the late summer harvest festival of Chuseok are the times when Koreans return to their families for food, ancestor worship, games and gifts.

This year’s Seollal fell on a Monday, which resulted in a four-day weekend (no worker-friendly days off in lieu in Korea). The day before – Sunday (in case you don’t know the order of days in a week) Habiba and I met our friend Graeme and his friend Dylan. We went to a tourist information centre near City Hall where we played some of the traditional games that always crop up at the two big holidays.

One of these was yutnori, a game that involves throwing up four stick that are flat on one side and rounded on the other; depending on the number of flat sides up (or down, depending on your point of view) you can move one of two counters around a board a certain number of spaces; if you land on the opposing team’s counter you can send it back to the start. Habiba and Graeme won.

We threw arrow-like sticks into urns and Korean hacksack was also there. Then we dressed up in traditional dress – they just went over our normal clothes. The usual hanbok was available, but we boys all chose royal and noble costumes.

After that we walked past the entrance to the Gyeongbok Palace and walked around Bukchon, an area with lots of coffee shops and shops selling crafts, nicknacks and jewellery, as well as old-fashioned, single-storey Korean houses (hanok). We had coffee and played cards.

While walking around this area, we saw a cat lying on its side on someone’s doorstep. We realised that the cat was sick. It was breathing with difficulty, foaming at the mouth a bit and it periodically spasmed. It wasn’t blinking at all and obviously had no strength to get up. A couple of young Korean guys had also stopped and they got on the phone and got in touch with some sort of animal centre. One of them found a bit of newspaper and plastic sacking to cover the cat with to try to keep it warm. We waited there for maybe forty-five minutes in total.

We didn’t know what had happened to it. We speculated that maybe it had eaten some poison or that it had been hit by a car and was suffering from shock or even that it had rabies. Habiba was quite emotional and my voice caught when I talked about some of my family’s cats that had been affected by poison. The van that took the cat away belonged to an organisation called Karma.

After that, we headed to Insadong, where the street of souvenir and craft shops is. It also has lots of restaurants and we met another couple of people, Jacky and Chris, for dinner. We shared two big pots of soup – heated at the table on portable burners – one of dalkdoritang or spicy chicken soup, another of beef, mushroom and Korean dumplings. And we got drunk on lots of bottles of makkeolli.

It wasn’t a late night, though, and we took the bus home. Habiba cried a bit again and wondered out loud why the innocent should suffer. I didn’t really say anything, as the honest answer to that is, basically, that shit happens. Nature is full of danger and disease and death, but we humans tend to forget this because of the comfortable world we’ve built for ourselves. I had appendicitis last year, a condition that, if I’d lived in an early time, probably would have killed me and that would have been perfectly in keeping with the natural order. In simple biological terms, humans become fertile in their early teens, so a lifespan of thirty-odd years gives people enough time to raise a couple of children (the lucky ones that survive) to maturity before dying – their evolutionary purpose fulfilled.

Still, it’s not pleasant to see a fellow mammal suffering (yes, mammal – remember that just a couple of weeks ago we were happy to hook fish out of a river and let them suffocate in the air). One of the things that distinguishes humans from other animals is not our empathy or compassion – it doesn’t seem too unreasonable to say that other animals possess these things – but the breadth of our empathy and compassion. Animals (cute, furry ones, at any rate) seem to occupy a place in our minds that is evolutionarily reserved for children.

But enough of such pretentious and, indeed, portentous rambling. Overall, this Lunar New Year’s Eve was pleasant – and if not pleasant, then at least it stimulated the emotions and the mind.

I thumb my nose at rules of thumb

This post contains images of a graphic nature.

About a month ago, I slammed my thumb in the heavy metal door to our apartment. I was closing the door with my right hand, pulling it towards me, and I didn’t realise that, as I was leaning with my left hand on the door post, that my thumb was in the way. It made a bit of a liquid crunch.

Very quickly, I got a big black bruise under my nail, filling about half of it. Obviously, the initial injury hurt like the proverbial motherfucker (assuming that ‘hurt like a motherfucker’ is a proverb). This faded away and I was left with a half black thumbnail that didn’t seem to be causing me any problems, so I left it.

I read later that you should get the blood drained by a doctor if the bruise covers more than a quarter of the nail. The technique is to bore a small hole in the surface of the nail – a heated paper clip is apparently a good tool for this.

But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I waited to see if it would grow out.

Well, it did, to a certain extent, but the problem I discovered on Wednesday was that the nail wasn’t being replaced with new nail – a gap was growing at the base of my nail between it and the skin. The nail itself was bulging a little from the blood underneath.

On Wednesday, then, I started picking at some flakes of what might have been skin in that gap and dislodged a few granules of dried blood. I resolved to try to scrape out what I could, so, armed with a pair of scissor that I gave a good clean and in the privacy of one of a bathroom on one of the upper floors at work, I started digging out the dried blood. One thing led to another and I ended up peeling away the thumbnail from the bottom, revealing a dense scab underneath.

I took away an oval of nail extending about halfway up the thumbnail. In addition to the compacted scab there was a fair amount of old liquid blood, which I squeezed out and washed away, which was followed by some fresh stuff. Under the scab there was a flat white surface, which I initially interpreted as nail that had grown under the scab, but which I’m now sure is bone. Apparently, the trauma to my thumb had killed the flesh underneath.

Now that I’ve cleaned all the blood away, there is a pulpy bit of flesh poking out from under half of the remaining nail; next to it is a flat pink bit of flesh. There are a couple of pockets leading away to the sides under the skin and under the nail. Most of the remaining nail is attached to the meat underneath, but the flat bit of flesh I mentioned has a shallow space over it, from where I’ve squeezed out a bit of pus – although that seems to have cleared up in the past twenty-four hours. And there’s the bone – which isn’t as hard as you might think and gives a dull, unpleasant feeling when you touch it that is just short of being pain.

I’m keeping the whole area as clean as I can, washing it regularly, avoiding using the thumb, putting antiseptic cream, a fresh plaster and some protective tape on it two or three times a day. Since I removed the nail and scab on Wednesday, some skin has already started growing over the bone from the left hand side. And, surprisingly, the whole thing hasn’t caused me any pain; it’s sensitive, running hot water over it isn’t nice, but cleaning it and poking at the dried blood hasn’t hurt at all.

Because of all this, I’m not planning on seeing a doctor about it in the immediate future. If it gets more infected or painful then that might change, but I think I’m doing as much as can be reasonably done. Also, I don’t have insurance, so it’d be expensive and the doctor would probably want an X-ray.

I don’t regret removing the nail, either, as I’m sure all that scab was preventing the skin healing and the nail regrowing. We’ll see how it develops over the next few weeks.

And now, some pictures.

Review of God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Talk about preaching to the converted. I didn’t read Christopher Hitchens’s polemic for any challenge to the way I think about religion, but rather to see what arguments against belief he might cite that I wasn’t aware of. I suppose I also bought the book because the writer had been in the news recently, having revealed that he had cancer. Then he died, and I decided to read the book.

Over its fifteen or twenty chapters, the book argues mordantly and resolutely that belief in god (and Hitchens consistently gives the word a lower case initial) is a force for evil in the world, a non-sensical idea invented by primitive peoples of the Middle East millennia ago, in the name of which atrocities have been and continue to be committed.

Each chapter is an essay arguing this point in a specific area. Subjects include the monstrousness of the Bible (a quotation show the biblical Moses ordering the slaughter of the wives and sons of defeated soldiers and taking the daughters for slaves); the fear and hatred of religion for sex and the condoning of the genital mutilation of babies; the insipid fear of modern western religions of condemning Islamic totalitarian fiats against free speech in non-Muslim countries (Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses is a friend of Hitchens’s); the speciousness of the argument that some of the worst atrocities of history have been committed in secular regimes (Hitchens argues that the fascists of Europe and Stalin’s Russia were not so much non-religious as quasi-religious; their deifications of their leaders, their extermination of all dissenting views, their use of regime-aggrandising propaganda and imagery were all features adapted from religion); and the human heroism and inspiration of Martin Luther King Jr, a preacher fighting against the biblically ordained separation of the races and supported by many communists and rationalists.

As a read, it’s pretty entertaining. Hitchens’s erudition is impressive and there are various anecdotes from his life as a reporter that show that he is widely travelled and has conversed with people of many faiths and backgrounds. He has a sense of humour that often takes the form of presenting some damning information then saying, ‘I’ll leave the reader to decide for himself …’, which is a tiny bit grating. The chapters are short enough to be read in a single sitting, but long enough to explore the issue in some depth and provide some interesting facts.

God Is Not Great concludes with a rallying call for a new Enlightenment based on science, reason and humanism. This chapter was necessary, but feels like an afterthought, as Hitchens doesn’t spend much time describing how this might be brought about – but that would be another book.

The tone struck throughout the volume under discussion is combative and it focuses on extremes of religiosity – primitive superstitions, Islamic terrorism, exploitation of the gullible, textual uncertainty (the seventy-two virgins promised in the Koran to martyrs may, apparently, really be sweet white raisins), barbarous abuses (like African bishops who tell their flocks that condoms cause AIDS) – that most intelligent, moderate believers in whatever religion would agree with Hitchens on. It doesn’t really address the simple faith in faith that many seem to possess. Thus, God Is Not Great may only serve to sway the opinions of those who are already non-religious.

Trapped under ice

Yesterday, Habiba and I went to an ice fishing festival at a place called Hwacheon, a couple of hours drive from Seoul. The journey and tickets were organised by Seoul Hiking Group, and, along with about forty other people, mainly foreigners, we were accompanied by Habiba’s friends Aiden, Tae-gyu and Hayley.

Habiba had been to a similar event last year and had reported that it had been extremely cold, so I dressed accordingly, with two pairs of my thickest socks, a loose pair of Habiba’s leggings under my cargo trousers and six layers on my top: vest, two long-sleeved T-shirts, a hoodie, my olive jacket and my waterproof jacket. Also, I had my scarf and my two pairs of gloves (the inner pair being a disposable set that I’d got from the Jeju biking trip – another Seoul Hiking Group event).

It may have been a little too much. The weather, while cold, was sunny and calm not unpleasant.

We were given a fishing line and hook on the bus. The fishing line consisted of a short pole with a kind of twisted ladder at one end, around which was wrapped the line. The hook was a three-fold hook with a fish-shaped weight.

Once at the festival, we walked across the frozen river between two enclosures and up to the special, foreigner-only ice fishing area. In here, the five of us each claimed one of the many holes drilled at regular intervals in the ice – which was maybe a foot thick. The foreigners enclosure was maybe the size of a five-a-side football court and held a few dozen people. The regular ice fishing zones were about the same size, but were packed with a few hundred Koreans.

Basic technique consisted of lowering your hook into a hole and hoping. There was no bait. You were supposed to jerk your pole up a yard or so every few seconds. Nothing much happened in the first area we tried. When we moved a few feet away to a new area, we had much more success. Habiba was one of the first of us to catch something – a fish (trout, I believe – or sancheoneo, in Korean, which would literally mean mountain (san) stream (cheon) trout (eo), I think) about eight inches long.

I spent some time squatting over the hole watching the water below. Visibility was very good (barring ice that collected regularly on the surface) and I could see down the six or seven feet to the brown, rocky bottom. I jiggled my line and every now and then I saw a fish swim past and attempted to hook it. This didn’t work very well. The fish weren’t particularly interested in the hook and sinker.

I took to using the official technique and not long afterwards felt a tugging on my line. I pulled it up and pulled out my own fish. It was hooked through the scales on its flank. I tried grabbing it by the tail, but it flopped out of my grasp. I held it by the head and body instead and tried to unhook it from the barb. This didn’t work so I had to rip it off. Then I posed for a photo and put the fish in plastic bag, along with the others our group had caught.

The five of us caught eight fish – me, one; Habiba, two; Aiden, two; and Hayley, three. At the entrance to the ice fishing area was a place where caught fish could be barbecued for a thousand won each (about 55p). The staff cleaned the fish and wrapped them in foil, then they were put on grills over burning charcoal blocks. Then we ate them. I have no idea which one was mine, but, it has to be said that in this day and age, catching, cooking and eating your own food is a pretty rare event. The others exclaimed about how delicious the fish were; I thought they were fine, although some bits were very bitter.

After that, we looked into doing some of the various activities on offer. There were inner tube races down a slope, tiny sleds that you were either pulled along on or propelled with a pair of sticks, ice soccer (which involved kicking a puck, rather than a ball), quad bike, go-cart and skidoo races, a zip-line and being spun about in an all-terrain vehicle. We did none of them – they were too expensive or the lines were too long.

We tried ice skating, though – something I’ve never done. The boots were, apparently, less than helpful in that they didn’t go over the ankle and therefore didn’t provide any support. I staggered around half of the course with my ankles bending this way and that as my legs went in and out. It was pretty tiring and frustrating – it seemed ridiculously difficult. I stripped off my two jackets for a second attempt – which went a little more smoothly. Everyone else had had enough by that point.

Getting to the ice rink – which wasn’t a rink, but part of the frozen river – involved walking across the ice. It crackled and creaked alarmingly as we stepped foot on it. The ice was pretty clear in many places apart from trapped bubbles and white fractures running through it.

The general weather conditions seemed far from cold enough to generate the amount of ice in the place. When I asked at the information centre, it appeared that there were no special chemicals or refrigeration techniques used. The river was blocked by a number of dams – I don’t know whether these were permanent – and the lack of flow allowed the water to freeze. There were a number of snow sculptures on one bank and these were clearly made of artificially produced snow. Walking along the river, we saw a fish lorry – a smallish lorry in which you could see, through windows on the sides, hundreds of farmed fish. These were being pumped into the river through a big, orange hose.

After ice skating, we got food and then it was coming up to five o’clock and time to head home. So that’s what we did. The trip had cost us ₩41,000, plus a bit extra for skating and food. We arrived back in Seoul fairly early and Habiba and I even had time to go shopping and finish watching 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Year-ending

New Year’s Eve saw Habiba and me meet some friends at British-style pub in Itaewon for dinner – most of us had fish and chips (I also had one beer). We then repaired to a cocktail bar for a couple of quite tasty drinks – a Green Fantasy and a Chocolate Martini, for me. And finally, we headed to a party at someone’s home nearby. Whilst there I had one shot of something fruity, two or three cups of wine and a few of beer.

My roleplaying buddy Matthew joined us towards midnight – and he discovered an area of of common interest with the host Moira – international peace and development. I chatted to a trio of Canadian guys – one who could pass for Korean, but is actually Vietnamese and Chinese (but Canadian) and his white visiting friends.

At midnight, we counted down and were happy.

On the way home I started feeling what I like to think of as ‘nauseous’ – although some authorities state that the correct adjective is ‘nauseated’. When we got out of the taxi, I was sick into a drain. I slept well enough, but in the morning I felt wretched. During the course of the day, I vomited maybe another seven times – usually with nothing coming up other than a bit of thick, orangey stomach juice. Habiba and I just watched TV all day; eventually, I started to feel better and managed to eat a good meal for dinner (one of Habiba’s soups).

The previous day, before meeting for dinner, I’d gone to Itaewon early and spent a bit of money at What the Book. I bought – finally – the tenth and last book in Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen, The Crippled God. I’m a bit wary of reading it, as the series has declined since the early books – or at least, my interest in it has declined. I also got an issue each of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Realms of Fantasy. I did some writing, too.

If I have a New Year’s Resolution, it’s to concentrate on creative writing again. It’s a project that I’ve neglected over the past year in favour of working on my roleplaying game and running a campaign. The RPG has been a challenging project, and one that I feel I’ve struggled to do justice to – although it’s also been lots of fun. It’s with a certain amount of relief that I’ve decided – once the current scene and its aftermath have been played through – to stop running the game. I’m going to suggest a weekly gaming night of Scrabble, Munchkin and whatever other things people want to play – maybe even a different RPG. I’ll only be able to participate in this for a few weeks until Habiba and I leave the country at the end of February.

The time that I’ll save not working on the game will be ploughed into working on stories. The last time I was writing, I was working on a piece about hunting fairy-like creatures. I will return to that, but right now I’m working on a new one. And when I say ‘right now’, I mean it almost literally: I paused work on it here at the local Starbucks because I was feeling tired and I thought writing this blog post would wake me up. The coffee has probably helped, too.

Presenting presents

I finished work for the year on Friday.

Kindergarten finished with a ‘Christmas party’, which consisted of the teachers putting on a fairly cack-handed puppet show, having the children watch these ‘Elf Yourself’ videos in which dancers’ faces are replaced with photos you provide. The kids thought it was hilarious. Then each class was taken upstairs separately to get present from a Korean guy – maybe one of the ministers at the church – dressed as Santa Claus. He read each child a message in broken English. One of my kids, Diane, slipped on some foamy fake snow that was on the floor and fell. She didn’t hurt herself, but she cried and wasn’t in a good mood for the remainder of the gift-giving. I gave each of my students a gift of some stationery – a pencil, a pencil sharpener, an eraser and a ruler – and some sweets. Then the kids went home.

Saturday saw the first of a couple of parties at the weekend. Habiba prepared some mashed potato – sadly ruined by the addition of horseradish – and some eggnog. We each brought a gift for the secret Santa; I bought Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, Habiba wrapped some old, unused toiletries. The party was OK – lots of food, conversation, games of mini-pool. The presents we ended up with were a candle (Habiba) and some bathroom stuff (me). We ended up leaving them behind.

On coming home that night, we gave each other our seasonal gifts. From me to her: a pair of earrings, some chocolates, a bag of Starbucks extra bold coffee beans, a copy of A Game of Thrones and an envelope of coupons entitling the holder to such things as a massage, free drink, bathroom cleaning etc. From her to me: a pair of underpants, a cap and a light, long-sleeved T-shirt, and no coupons – even though it was Habiba’s idea.

The following day we attended a similar party, except without the gifts and a lot closer to home – with Habiba’s colleagues, those of them who stayed in the country and weren’t Korean. Also a nice enough party. Both days I ended up getting extremely tired and not at all drunk – which latter is strange given the amount of alcohol on offer.

The tiredness is partly due to having a cold; partly also, I suspect, to a kind of jetlag – or joblag, if you like: I’m pretty used to going to bed and getting up early.

On Monday, we packed boxes to send home. I also packed my gifts for my family, which, by the time they arrive, will be more like Easter presents. I sent off a largish box of books, clothes and other random stuff; Habiba sent three. We spent much of the day going through our stuff (I even threw out all the receipts I’d carefully kept from the past three years). We packed all the things we’d picked out into a suitcase and backpack, took them to the post office and packed our boxes there.

On Tuesday, we went to Yongsan, the electronics district, and Habiba bought herself a mini notebook – which weighs a little more than a kilogram – for ₩330,000 (about £185). Unfortunately, when we got home, it appeared that it didn’t have a built-in microphone; as Skyping is one of the main purposes Habiba wants to put it to, that’s a pain in the arse. We also put in her headphones for repair at the Sony service centre, and bought a two-to-one headphone jack adapter so we can each use our own headphones on the same computer while on our travels.

Those travels will be commencing in two months.

Review of A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr

If you know nothing about this book – and I didn’t know much about it before reading it, other than the fact that it was famous – here’s the gist: published in 1960, A Canticle for Leibowitz won the Hugo award for best novel in 1961. It’s a novel, but one made out of three short stories, each one set at different points in the future and each concerning the monks of a monastery in the desert of what is now the southern USA.

The first part, ‘Fiat Homo’, is set 600 years after a nuclear apocalypse has all but obliterated modern civilisation. What’s left resembles the Dark Ages of Europe, with only fragmentary knowledge remaining of the earlier time. The monastery is one founded by Beatus Leibowitz, a priest who, it turns out, was a Jewish scientist and who converted to Christianity in order to avoid the Simplification – the surge of destruction and murder of learning and the learned that followed the nuclear war. His monastery is a secret repository of knowledge. Helped by a mysterious pilgrim, the main character, a novice called Francis, discovers a fallout shelter (he believes that ‘Fallout’ was some kind of demon) containing holy relics – some notes and blueprints of once belonging to Leibowitz.

The second part, ‘Fiat Lux’, is set 600 years after that and sees the world having progressed somewhat, but not that much – the equivalent era of past history might be the Renaissance. Leibowitz has been made a saint and his fortified monastery (made from the ruins of the pre-Flame Deluge era) has become known as a repository of knowledge, attracting the attention of scholars and rulers.

The third part, ‘Fiat Voluntas Tua’, is set a further 600 years after that and sees mankind having developed nuclear weapons and space-faring technology. With the prospect of a new all-out nuclear war looming, the monks of the monastery send a mission to one of Earth’s colonies in other solar systems in order to preserve the Apostolic succession should the Church be destroyed on Earth.

Each of these three parts started life as a short story, each published separately in magazines. Miller then rewrote them and glued them together to form this novel. This format works with mixed results. On the plus side, it gives you an idea of the grand procession of history and its depressingly cyclical nature. Each is linked not only by location, but by more subtle elements: each part of the book ends with violence, the magnitude of which escalates dramatically: the main character is murdered at the end of the first part, war sweeps across North America at the end of the second part and nuclear holocaust returns at the end of the final part; the abbot in the first part is called Arkos, while the abbot in the last part is called Zerchi, reminiscent of the Christian symbol of the Alpha and Omega and suggesting that the whole story represents everything important in human history.

On the other hand, these separate parts are separate narratives, meaning each one has to establish a new set of characters and a new plot, so the novel feels fractured and incomplete. They also diminish in quality: ‘Fiat Homo’, was the best – perhaps because it was so novel, but also because of its hapless hero; ‘Fiat Lux’ was also good and had an interesting interplay between the abbot and the scholar; ‘Fiat Voluntas Tua’ was OK; the return of high technology meant it didn’t have the same appeal as the earlier parts and it had some less interesting discussions – of the rights and wrongs of euthanasia, for instance.

The book contained a number of mysterious elements that were never explained. The prime example being a Jewish hermit who apparently turns up in all three parts and who may be the Wandering Jew or may be Leibowitz himself. A poet with a glass eye, which he takes out and sets on an upturned cup to watch over a meal after he leaves, may have been more than just an eccentric character. And the mutant extra head of a simple tomato-selling woman coming alive when the bombs go off was apparently a miracle, although a very bizarre one.

The writing was pretty good throughout. The novel opens with Francis spotting a wiggling dot in the distance – which turns out to be the mysterious Jew. This was great image, but really one of the few instances of especial poetry. There’s a lot of subtle humour in the book (for instance, Francis makes an illuminated copy of one of Leibowitz’s blueprints; everyone is amazed at the beauty of his work, so he’s sent to New Rome with both as a gift for the Pope; unfortunately he’s ambushed by a bandit who takes the copy believing it to be the original, while the ratty old blueprint is assumed to be Francis’s cack-handed copy), and it moves along at a fair pace – although a lot of what happens is conversation (for instance, while war engulfs the land or the world, the reader never sees it directly, but only through the speech and thoughts of the characters in the monastery).

A Canticle for Leibowitz appears to be a novel with a message – that message being the importance of religion as a preserver of knowledge, culture, tradition and morality. That’s not a message that appeals to me, but the book is undeniably evocative of the monastery as a lonely island of civilisation in a sea of barbarism (as I say, the final segment of the book lacks this feeling). Many of the obvious science fictional elements feel pretty dated – Abbot Zerchi has a translating machine that fills a cabinet, and he tries to fix it by fiddling with its wiring – another reason why the last part is the lesser of this particular trinity. The novel is also full of Latin – which gives it a unique feel of authenticity, but is not so easy to understand.

On the whole, though, definitely an interesting, entertaining and worthwhile read.

Review of A Dance with Dragons by George R R Martin

This is, of course, the long-awaited fifth book in the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire and it takes up the story of perhaps the three best characters: Jon Snow (not the newscaster), Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen. These characters were conspicuous in their absence from the equally long-awaited fourth volume, A Feast for Crows; much of Dance is therefore contemporary with its predecessor; towards the end, however, the timelines of the two books merge and other characters, such as Jaime and Cersei Lannister and Arya Stark, make appearances.

It’s a long book – this is epic fantasy, after all – at a little under a thousand pages. You’d think that, after five years of writing it and such a bloated page count, a lot would happen in this fifth of a promised seven books. Stuff does happen of course, but nothing hugely momentous, really. Jon manages men on the Wall; Daenerys does much the same in Meereen; Tyrion has the most interesting narrative, but he doesn’t have much control over it, being passed from pillar to post. Theon Greyjoy also has a fairly prominent role, but he gets faded to the back of the mix as the book progresses; ditto Bran Stark.

Minor characters also crop up along with the aforementioned major players who rejoin the narrative near the end. Each has minor character that gets a viewpoint character necessitates several pages of exposition detailing their backstory; such infodump is, I find, acceptable at the start of a book, but, at the end, it just bogs things down and dilutes the sense of a rising climax. I wonder how necessary they are, as well, being fairly small links in an already mighty chain.

An important new character emerges in this book – another Targaryen, and yet another claimant to the Iron Throne of Westeros. Unlike Daenerys, he actually leads an initially successful invasion of the western continent, leading me to think he’s fulfilling Daenerys’s narrative purpose since the Mother of Dragons lost her way occupying the slave city of Meereen.

Most frustratingly of all, pretty much all of the plotlines end in cliffhangers that probably won’t be resolved for another five years.

Also most frustratingly – if you’ll grant me the contradiction – are some frequent problematic lexical choices. Firstly, Martin often uses the word ‘oft’; a word that is described in dictionaries as being ‘poetical’ or ‘literary’ – which basically means ‘pretentious’; it’s oft-used here, and grates consistently. Worse than this are two equally over-used words that are actually incorrect. ‘Wroth’ is an adjective that means ‘angry’ or ‘wrathful’; however, Martin uses it repeatedly to mean ‘wrath’, which is a noun. Presumably, he’s confused by the British pronunciation of ‘wrath’, which is ‘roth’ or ‘rawth’. He also uses the word ‘mayhaps’, the etymology of which Wiktionary defines as ‘A misconstruction of mayhap after maybe and perhaps.’ This particular lexeme isn’t even listed on Dictionary.com.

On the whole, then, it seems that I didn’t really enjoy this book. On the plus side, it’s quite readable. There are a couple of notable scenes where very striking events take place – particularly one involving Daenerys and a dragon – but they’re not really followed up in this volume. The titular dance with dragons is a ponderous affair, and the dragons themselves are sorely under-used – no doubt because of the quite logical problems one would have in dealing with a fire-breathing wild animal. This book is very much a chapter in the overall story. It’s not quite as pointless as Robert Jordan’s Crossroads of Twilight, but it does seem to highlight many similar issues that afflict writers, and, consequently, readers of epic fantasy – namely the risk of sinking in a morass of plotlines.

Review of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Although this book is set in seventeenth century France, it’s easy to forget that it’s actually Victorian literature (and is actually based on a real-life d’Artagnan). Dumas wrote it as a weekly serial for a newspaper; the translation in the edtion I read – Wordsworth Classics – also dated from the nineteenth century.

At first, I found reading The Three Musketeers quite heavy going for the most part. It starts with d’Artagnan travelling up from his home town to Paris where he plans to join the musketeers; he has a letter of introduction from his father to M de Treville, the musketeers’ chief. On the way, at a place called Meung, he picks a fight with a stranger for no particularly good reason; also for no particularly good reason, the stranger takes his letter of introduction once he’s laid d’Artagnan out cold. This theft, however, proves to be of no great consequence, as he manages to get in with Treville with no problem – although he doesn’t have the experience to join the musketeers just yet.

The description above is pretty representative of an annoying randomness and pointlessness to some of the plot points. It’s also full of very long conversations (although none compare to the scene where Linden Avery resurrects Thomas Covenant at the end of Fatal Revenant and the resulting discussion that takes up the first five chapters of the following book, Against All Things Ending). Characters discuss their histories, go into excessive detail and ejaculate interjections such as ‘Plague!’ and ‘God’s blood!’

The mysterious man whom d’Artagnan fought at Meung seems to have been intended as a mysterious bad guy, but he doesn’t really play much of a part – although he does crop up regularly and becomes something of an ally at the end. He takes second fiddle to Lady de Winter, also known as Milady, who, at towards the end of the book, becomes the central character for several chapters. This episode is not uninteresting, but could have been left out.

The introduction to the book describes how Dumas banged out each chapter at a fair lick in order to meet his weekly deadline, and it shows. The plot is meandering, it can be excessively verbose and the characterisation is uneven – the hotheaded d’Artagnan of the early chapters is quickly replaced with a wise and wily fighter. As a novel, it could have done with a lot of rewriting. There is no great poetry of language in the text – indeed, one chapter near the end even begins, ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ – but it’s very direct: everything is either conversation or action (mostly conversation, though).

There are some dubious morals on display. Seemingly, if any musketeer sees a man of the cardinal and takes offence, the man’s life is fair game in a duel. D’Artagnan himself all but kills a man he encounters in order to take his papers so he can sail to England. The love interest is a married woman; her husband is a coward who works for the cardinal, so she, too, is fair game.

However, it wasn’t terrible, by any means. Although I stopped reading it for a couple of months, when I finally returned to it, I enjoyed it much more. There is a fair amount of humour in it – most notably Athos’s manservant, Grimaud, who is forbidden to speak. The language – while undeniably ersatz, being written two centuries after its setting – has a certain authenticity to it. I even felt a pang of emotion when d’Artagnan mourned his love near the climax.

Overall, it was an OK read – not the most classic of classic literature. The Three Musketeers is actually the first in a trilogy, the third book of which is extremely long and often published in three parts, one of which is The Man in the Iron Mask. I may check out Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne at some point.

Weekendings

A couple of weekends ago, Habiba and I went on one of the Korea Foundation Volunteer Network’s ‘Culture Classes’. November’s event was making kimchi. Kimchi is fermented Chinese cabbage heavily seasoned with spices and red pepper and it’s supposed to take a long time to make – it’s left outside in pots for weeks.

This kimchi-making experience was at a kimchi museum near Insadong. The kimchi we made involved pre-fermented cabbage – a quarter of a head each. Wearing long, plastic gloves, we smeared spicy red paste between the leaves, put the kimchi in a plastic bottle and that was it. We also fried up some ddeokbokki – a cheap street food snack of rubbery rice flour sticks (not a great description; not an especially great food, either).

After that we took to the streets in teams and headed to a market to hunt down various items – the most Korean thing in the market, the cheapest thing and so on. One of the things was a stall that sold 마약 김밥 – drug kimbap, so-called for its addictiveness; which turned out to be the blandest kimbap ever, with no filling other than rice. This was followed by a brief meal at a pajeon (savoury pancake) restaurant. The whole event was quite nice.

The following day, we, along with one of Habiba’s colleagues, went to see the Body Worlds exhibition at the Korean War Memorial (which is actually a museum). Body Worlds is a display of plastinated human bodies and body parts – which means that they are real human bodies – taken from donors – that are treated to remove all the fluids and to prevent them from decomposing. This process was invented by Gunther von Hagens and has become quite famous in the last decade or so – I saw the TV programme where he autopsied bodies when I was at university.

The exhibition was divided into areas relating to certain parts of the body or bodily processes. The first part was the pre-natal body. There were various plastinated embryos – starting at a tiny, few-week-old thing smaller than a grain of rice – and foetuses, including a couple of well developed babies with hydrocephalus and anencephaly (the latter having an ugly  little lump of a head with no brain).

Thereafter, there were plastinated lungs and hearts and venous networks, and, of course, full bodies – except not full because they had been stripped of their skin and often a lot of their muscles, too. There were also salami slices of bodies affected with various conditions illustrating how, for instance, tumours can fragment, enter the bloodstream and take root in other parts of the body; there was a cross section of a pelvic area showing a presumably fatal case of constipation.

The bodies were gruesomely fascinating, but hard to take as real – even though I knew that they were: the dryness of the cadavers made them seem, appropriately enough, I suppose, made of plastic. They were often posed in playful positions.  A male and female couple posed as Leo and Kate in Titanic; one man had been divided in two and his left and right halves were playing chess with each other; another couple were having sex – the woman had also been split in two lengthwise, so you could see the position of the man’s penis inside her.

It was an interesting show and I’d recommend it if you’re not squeamish.

The weekend after that I did some gift-shopping for my family; at some point I’ll wrap and post the presents, too. Last weekend, I went down to visit my friend Peter, who lives in Daegu, a city in the south-east of South Korea.

Because he lives down south, I haven’t seen as much of Peter as I’d have liked since he returned to Korea with his Korean wife and daughter (who has now multiplied to become two daughters (that may not have been the exact process)).

It was good to see him and to have a long conversation without the distractions of gaming or other people. We went up a tower in Daegu that is much like the N-Seoul Tower at Namsan; it gave a good view of the city and its lights. Daegu is much smaller than Seoul and seems much like any other provincial city in Korea. We had dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. There are many Vietnamese noodle soup places in Korea; this place was cheap and dingy by comparison, but it was staffed by real Vietnamese people. Later we played a Space Hulk card game called Death Angel - it was fun and neither too complex nor too simple; we ended up beating the game fairly handily.

The following day, Peter made us breakfast and later drove me to the bus terminal to catch the coach home. We made plans for him to come over to dinner in the new year – which I’m looking forward to.

Last night, I met Josh and Zach and Matthew and we all went to see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. We went to the newly re-opened CineCity cinema close to where Habiba and I live; the whole building is pretty fancy now and sports a Tous les Jours (a Korean chain of bakeries) that has a range of bread and other stuff that look very classy and tasty (whereas you usually find little more than some halfway decent baguettes).

We saw the film in the ‘Beats by Dr Dre’ auditorium; the USP of this screening room was that you listened to the sound on headphones. This was initially a little strange, but you get used to it. It creates a kind of sonic cocoon that isolates you from random extraneous noises. It also highlights some bits of dialogue that seem to have been overdubbed after the scene was shot.

The film itself was an enjoyable action blockbuster crammed with great sequences like Tom Cruise climbing up the outside of the Burj Khalifa and the climactic scene in an automated car park tower. Afterwards we got some tofu kimchi and makgeolli at a restaurant/bar place and talked until about 3 am or later.

As I write this, we have plans to meet Zach and Josh for dinner and watching 50/50.

Next weekend is some sort of religious holiday, so we’re going to a couple of pot luck dinner/secret Santa things. Then I have week’s holiday – Habiba’s starts in the middle of this week and goes on until the new year.