I am attempting to add living color to my dispatches with a group of photographs covering some of our wanderings over the past three weeks. The photographs are Barbara Siegel’s. I anticipate gaining some great level of finesse in captioning, describing, and titling, but for now here’s some of what we got, so this is what you get. About the food market, there are many many of them, and what they signal is that above and beyond Marilyn Monroe’s famous film, “Some Like It Hot,” everybody here likes it really hot.

If seeing is not believing, then institutionalizing is, and this is made emphatically clear by The Kimchi Field Museum, which we visited incidentally on a spending spree at The Coex Mall, Seoul’s largest (indoor and underground) shopping mall. The supposed reason for the excursion (no mistakes on the metro – first time – merit badge applied for!) was to pick up a book on Japan because tomorrow morning we fly to Osaka and train to Kyoto for four days since the bulk of this week is Chuseok,  the Korean Thanksgiving holiday, a harvest festival. Kimchi is incomparably more serious a cultural icon than apple pie, and even Mom, is in the States.  To borrow three little words from Saddam Hussein’s immortal phrase about the First Gulf War, Kimchi is the “mother of all” health and wellbeing here, as well as an inseparable companion if not top sergeant of every meal. It’s as important as work, and it takes a great deal of careful preparation which the exhibits in the Kimchi Field Museum teach their visitors.

There may be varieties of kimchi not represented at the museum, pegged to their provincial provenance, but I would doubt it. The museum is so comprehensive that it’s almost Germanic in detail. Every variation of the genre is physically represented in the characteristic Asian synthetic model food mode most of us are by now familiar with from some Japanese restaurant window displays in NYC.  If you want to become a kimchi maker, you leave the building with definite knowledge, you know how to play the game, at least the fundamentals, something one cannot say after leaving the Mets behind in City Field (failed cultural icon). There is a research room for kimchi scholarship, and a kimchi kitchen where fresh samples are available on a self-service basis.  There are dozens of ceramic and wooden kimchi pots as well as mortars and pestles for the grinders and pounders
among the artifact ogling  (definitely us) patrons.

Do I believe in health food? There was an extended presentation on boards (just as at a student scholarship — excuse me – research conference) about the virtues of kimchi as an indispensible aid to every aspect of good health for both female and male (this is also the land of balance between what is male and what is female; just buy yourself a Korean flag online and contemplate the red and the blue forms in the center). Therefore, I now believe, at least, in Kimchi as the key to the rest of my life. Radishes (daikons) cabbage, nappa, garlic, bean-sprouts, scallions (green onions), and the entire vegetable world beyond V-8 juice can be kimchied and get this: for you pulpo fans in the Bronx, yeah octopodi as we call it in Greek, I saw a number of varieties with octopus in them.  I can see the future of kimchi-octopus gelato in the hip and groovy downtown restaurants for the young chic and rich thrillseekers at Otto’s on 8th street and “wherever particular people congregate.”

My quest for good video equipment turned out successfully, but the room they finally found me has poor sound quality.  This week presented some challenges in the classroom. I am still daunted by my paralytic tongue pronouncing the students names. I signed up and paid good money for a basic Korean language course “How To Sound Like a Six-year-old After Eight Weeks” which begins on the 29th and terminates on December 3.  That may help.

I am trying to bust my way through the Odyssey in both classes, and it’s certainly taxing my ability to condense and determine what is expendable and what is crucial in navigating through this book which is about as close to me as any work of literature, besides Ulysses and The English Patient, has been, so it’s hard to not want to talk about every other word in the text.  My students are used to the straight and direct method of absorption through memorization and then throwing it back on paper for tests. That is not my style. In Memory, Longing, and Reunion I assigned Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory online, then we discuss the painting and what (duh) it has to do with time inconographically, simply to get them on to the idea of the shape of memory. I assigned an essay on the day’s film, Bad Day At Black Rock, a stunning 1954 John Sturges film[dramatic date 1945], with Spencer Tracy, Lee Marvin, and a septet of evil doers, and asked the students to write on the persistence of memory in the film. They immediately literally connected the painting to the film and were stymied about how the painting and the film were linked, which was not my intention at all; I just wanted to lay the painting’s title on the essay so that memory, which is massive in Bad Day, and the way it persists and how it does this, could be thought and written about. The problem is…they’re sharper than I am but were thinking in a very linear way, by training, and thoroughly understandable.

Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss was many times more impressive than when I last used it in 2008, just because I was working through the Kubrick corpus with my seminar students then for the first time. This time the structure of the film begged to be embraced and commented on, beginning with the shots in Pennsylvania Station framing the film, then with mise en scene-ing some of the same props in both main characters’ apartments, particularly a Woolworth’s captain’s wheel wall lamp, great and subtle in a film where neither character has a clue about where her or his life is going, and vocational match of the characters’ trades, Davey, a boxer, and Gloria, a dollar-a dance hall girl, both physical contact sports which knock them out before they come to their senses and fall in love, or they knock each other out.  Then there is the medieval weaponry and the battle of the manikins in a prehistoric loft in a struggle to gain possession of a real woman.  The manikins are recapitulated in the maligned Eyes Wide Shut, his career-crowning masterpiece about marriage and its odyssean parallels. And, as you well may ask: Who cares? After class, several students stayed to talk very seriously with me about whether Stanley was a sexist and about how to deal with the gods in the Odyssey. We are glad to have the week off.

Gary