Gary Schwartz in Korea

After our return from the ancient kingdom , we attended a pair of music and ballet performances in Seoul through the university. The first was the annual concert of the Sungshin Philharmonic Orchestra in late October: Reinicke: Flute Concerto in D Major; Mendelssohn: Piano Concerto No. 1; and Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique.  They performed in the […]

On the first Sunday in October, Barbara and I visited the National Museum of Korea, and spent a beautiful afternoon indoors as it poured outside. The edifice, and there is no other apt word for it in English, so I fall back on my formally native tongue to delineate it, is simply monumental, an emphatic […]

Shopping and Studenting in Seoul                                                                                                                   October 15, 2010 This week (09/29/10)  Korean for Foreign Faculty began with three students:  a biologist from Bangladesh, a biochemist from Kiev, Ukraine, and myself. One of us stutters at times, one of us has English diction difficulties, one of us needs a life jacket in a sea of sound. […]

Two Mondays ago, foreign faculty members were required to attend an event on sexual harrassment, and I realize I had not mentioned it, but it was very congenial and informative. The Director of Counseling Services, Dr. Paul Chae, a most amiable and warm older man who studied for quite a while in the US, somewhere […]

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 […]

Wednesday September 8 Kubrick Class #2 I showed “Fear and Desire” which was on what Elusive DVD called a “B-“ quality print, the best they could develop from the ancient and decaying copy they finally got their hands on.  Students loved that description; I guess that they liked the idea of something inanimate earning a […]

Seoul After One Week First Class, September 1, 2010 In May 1983, Barbara and I hiked 9 miles down the Sanmaria gorge in Crete. This descent began in midmorning, and around 6pm we passed through the sideropylos or “iron gate” at the nether end of the gorge which terminated a few hundred meters from the […]