Hi. This is Seoyeon Kim, a student in the Department of English Language & Culture at CUK.

I’m about to start a Book Club. My idea is that if we read and discuss books in English, it will help us  to improve our English — our reading comprehension and writing abilities, of course, but also our conversational and public speaking skills.

The idea is this: We will choose English books and then read them at home; then we will meet and discuss them together, one by one, regularly. It’s a great, fun way to keep challenging ourselves and developing our English during summer holidays!

If you have any questions or are interesting in joining us, then please contact me either by email or telephone:

email: llaimll@naver.com (You can copy the link and use in your webmail; or if you click the link and open in your email program, this will create an email with a message already written. You can add to it, or delete a part of it if you want.)
phone: 010 2880 0772

Here is the(partial) MP3 lecture #3 — “The Beats and the Hippies.” I could have talked about more, such as the role the Beats and Hippies played in the growth of the environmental movement, the Hippies and the Vietnam War protest movement (and the Woodstock Music Festival), and religious ideas explored by the Beats and their relationship to American religion. However, I wanted to stay focused on the connections between these movements, and their specifically youth-culture elements.

Here’s are some links to videos of Ginsberg reading his poems “America” and “Howl” (part 1 | part 2 | part 3), both of which are included in your readings pack.

In addition, feel free to check out Jack Kerouac reading from his novel On the Road, this conversation between Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs reading from Junkie, his novel about drug addicts in New York City.

I encourage you to read more on your own about the issues I didn’t touch upon. However, I will direct your attention to the following texts specifically, which will be of use for class discussion:

• When the Beats. Became Hippies, by Steve Silberman. (A review of a book by Debora Baker about the Beats and their travels in India, touching on the interest, among Beats, in non-Western religious traditions and culture.)
• An interesting article on German precursors to the American hippie movement (showing elements not directly related to the Beats).
• A more general primer on hippie culture, in the 60s and today, from the point of view of a sympathetic writer (who may or may not be a hippie).
• An interesting comment on the unrepeatability of the Beat Movement, with lots of great links to check out.

Optional Readings:

• There are some texts from the Beat movement available here.
• Here’s the University of Adelaide’s resource center on the Beats.

… and here is the great article on elevators. Short, wonderfully written, worth reading!

1. Choose an interesting, dramatic scene from a film, and write the dialog exactly as it appears in the film. (You can use subtitles, but remember, subtitles usually simplify the dialog, so you need to check it against the spoken dialog.) Then, decide which actions to add to the text surrounding the reported speech — the words inside the quotation marks. You cannot write all of the actions, facial expressions, and sounds, so choose the important ones that should got into the scene.
2. Take the dialog that you wrote for me earlier, and add actions, facial expressions, and attributions (he said, she shouted, they whispered) other supporting details to enrich the conversation.

If you have already done or started assignment #2, that’s fine, just finish it and hand it in, and you won’t need to do #1.But if you haven’t started either one, I prefer you do assignment #1. Remember, Youtube is a useful source and there are lots of short clips from films. You should choose a single scene, or part of a scene, for this exercise.ALSO: I forgot the other “assignment” I gave you last time — about flashbacks. That is, to look at a flashback in a short story or a book you liked, and try to explain how it works, what it is doing, and what it contributes to the story.  Since one student did it, I was reminded of that assignment. So don’t forget to do this one as well! That’s enough assignments for the semester!

I just realized that I forgot to share with you the link to the feedback form for the most recent panel discussion. Here it is.  That lecture on SF is coming sometime on Sunday!

Here’s more information (from about a year ago) on attempts to make ActiveX work in Google’s new(ish) browser, Chrome… specifically so Koreans can use it. There’s also information on a Professor named Kichang Kim who’s trying to force the Korean government to catch up with the standards and protocols of the rest of the planet’s internet. And here’s an entry about Korea’s continuing dependency on IE6, on a blog all about IT and the web in Korea — and its relationship with the rest of the internet.

On a  tangent, but it’s an interesting one, Brian Deutsch blogged here about what happened when the Korean government  created a website “for foreigners” but followed the very limited and behind-the-times web standards (IE6, Windows only, etc.) common to Korea. And here’s an interesting report about how the Internet developed in Korea in the first place!

I can’t recall what the other topic I promised to give you links about was, but I’ll offer this one to you: Manybooks.net is a website where, at the present moment, over 27,000 ebooks can be gotten for free — legally, because they have been released under a Creative Commons License, or are in the Public Domain.

By the way, Manybooks.net is far from the only site like this. Project Gutenbeg probably started the whole trend — digitizing books in the Public Domain — and now there are many similar sites offering eBooks in many formats for free.

For example, a book by another Gordon Sellar is available on Manybooks.net. It’s from the 1800s and, no, I don’t think he and I are related (though you never know).  In any case, the book is available in a wide variety of standardized formats — 20 of them, if you include a few specific version of PDF. This website gives these books away. If this is possible, I’m sure Korean eBook publishing needn’t require the development of a whole new eBook format. At most, it might take some modification of an existing format to display Korean text properly.

Manybooks and and other sources of free reading material are likely to be important to the development of the eBook hardware business, just as Napster and other file-sharing services that facilitated illegal MP3 downloading were important for the development of the MP3 player business.

So… perhaps what Koreans need to do to get an eBook business started is to start a few websites where free eBooks (in the public domain) are encoded and offered in standardized formats… and make those formats so popular that, finally, eBook hardware makers will have to simply include those formats among the ones readable by their hardware?

If they don’t, then alternative software will be developed and made cheaply or freely available in the iTunes App Store, allowing people to skip buying the Korean eBook reader hardware and opt for something a little more open-standards based.

In other words, by stalling, Korean book companies may well be damaging or even destroying their chances of developing a dedicated eBook hardware market… and even destroying the chances of a legal eBook trade in Korea for the foreseeable future!

See below for the revised course schedule, which I just posted earlier today! (Including the film we’ll be discussing in class on Tuesday!)