Manny's Unconquerable Mind?

Manny Pacquiao and Freddie Roach

(Image from New York Times)

The sports writer Greg Bishop has some surprising facts to share about Philippine boxer Manny Pacquiao in an article for the New York Times, "Out of Chance Meeting, a Formidable Pairing," which is something of a human interest story about the fighter and his American trainer, Freddie Roach.

I don't keep up with professional sports despite having played basketball and baseball as a kid, and later a year of judo and a semester of badminton at university. My older brother can recall specific details of athletes' achievements that he saw on television or read about, but he's got brains to spare for that sort of thing. I save my brain space for history and literature because I don't have as much volume, apparently.

But that's what interested me in the article by Bishop, who makes Manny sound like a wunderkind:

The boxer has taken months off, recording music and running for political office, and he returned to each camp stronger, as if the training never stopped . . . . [He] possesses an innate ability to block out the world, to box for millions of people but not feel their collective weight. Inside the Thai restaurant [near Roach's gym], with fans pressed against the glass outside, Pacquiao strummed his guitar, surrounded by his entourage yet very much alone. This complex world suits a complex man. Pacquiao dabbles in darts, basketball and billiards. He has a photographic memory, learned to play the piano in one week and, when he is not training, often sleeps only three to four hours a day.

My first question: Is this hype? Or does Pacquiao truly have a 'photographic' memory? Did he really learn to play the piano in one week?

My second question (actually, my fourth): How is the name "Pacquiao" pronounced? Apparently, "pa'kjaw." (But how is that pronounced?)

And about his ability to go without training and return stronger, I also wonder (hence his wunderkind status). Is he some sort of superman? A Nietzschean Uebermensch?

I recall from the early 1980s reading a newspaper article -- I think that the paper was the San Francisco Chronicle -- about a scientist working in his Bay Area laboratory who would take two weeks off every summer to climb Mt. Everest. The peculiar point was that he never trained for the climb. He would simply fly to Nepal, join his climbing team, and ascend to the highest point on earth as if out for a mere stroll. Fellow scientists who studied such things told him that what he was doing was impossible. But he did it anyway.

I've forgotten the man's name. Wish I had Manny's unconquerable mind so I could recall.

Samuel Helfont: More on the Sunni Divide

(Image from Princeton University)

Some readers will recall a blog entry of nearly one month ago posted on Samuel Helfont's article for the Foreign Policy Research Institute's E-Notes, "Politics, Terrorism, and the Sunni Divide." If the article interested you, then a longer version in monograph at 74 pages will likely interest you even more:

The Sunni Divide: Understanding Politics and Terrorism in the Arab Middle East

Mr. Helfont is a doctoral student in Princeton University's Near Eastern Studies Department -- hence the logo above even though the monograph comes by way of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), where he is an Adjunct Scholar.

I have not yet had time to read Helfont's monograph, for he -- having noticed my blog post on his FPRI article -- sent me the link only yesterday, but it looks interesting and informative.

Helfont's counterintuitive argument is that the Shia-Sunni divide is not the truly significant one. Rather, a divide internal to the Sunnis is far more significant, the divide between Wahabism and the Muslim Brotherhood.

I'm particularly interested in reading the monograph because I need something explained to me, as noted in my previous post on Helfont:

One problem with Helfont's analysis, however, is that it does not very well account for the rise of Al Qaeda, which combines aspects of both types of Islamism -- as Helfont notes -- for given the stark distinction drawn between the two, one wouldn't expect to find such a combination.

Perhaps I'll find the explanation when I get into the monograph, and if so, I'll report back, but meanwhile, readers can see for themselves what Mr. Helfont has to say.

Park Wan-suh: A Writer's Vocation

Park Wan-suh

(Image from Amazon.com)

As some readers have probably noticed, I've been working to finish a short review of Park Wan-suh's autobiographical 'novel' Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, and I've now completed a rough draft, from which I provide the following material that makes up part of my introduction:

The author herself appeared somewhat late on the Korean literary scene with her first novel, Namok (The Naked Tree), published in 1970, when she was nearly forty, and though one might imagine that she had also come late to recognize her vocation as a writer, Shinga tells otherwise. In the penultimate paragraph of the final chapter, significantly titled "Epiphany," the bewildered and frightened Park finds herself and her family trapped during the Korean War in an utterly abandoned Seoul confronted with the threat of its imminent reoccupation by Communist forces, apparently a cul de sac:

But an abrupt change in perspective hit me. I felt as though I'd been chased into a dead end but then suddenly turned around. Surely there was meaning in my being the sole witness to it all. How many bizarre events had conspired to make us the only ones left behind? If I were the sole witness, I had responsibility to record it. (248)

In the passage that follows, which is the final paragraph of the book, Park adds, "From all this came a vision that I would write someday, and this premonition dispelled my fear" (248). The abruptness of her epiphany might suggest that Park's development as a writer stemmed from that moment as its initiatory point, but the author herself shows us that the process was already long in motion.

The remainder of my short review looks briefly at this process, but I'll report on that after the review is published . . . if it gets published.

One never knows . . .

Fort Hood Shootings: Motivated by Islamism?

Bernard V. Benjamin II (Left)

and

Duane Reasoner Jr. (Right)

Commenting

on

Major Nidal Malik Hasan

(Image from New York Times)

Michael Moss, writing for the New York Times in "Muslims at Fort Voice Outrage and Ask Questions" (November 6, 2009), notes the shocked outrage felt by many of the local Muslims near Fort Hood, where the recent mass shooting by Major Nidal Malik Hasan occurred . . . but also the questions asked by some. Or the questionable remarks:

"When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal," said Victor Benjamin II, 30, a former member of the Army. "But when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad. Ultimately it was Brother Nidal's doing, but the command should be held accountable," Mr. Benjamin said. "G.I.'s are like any equipment in the Army. When it breaks, those who were in charge of keeping it fit should be held responsible for it."

Mr. Benjamin has expressed himself oddly in assigning responsibility. I wouldn't refer to people as "like any equipment" that "breaks," but I would agree that the army seems to have ignored clear evidence that Hasan was a profoundly disturbed man. Unlike Mr. Benjamin, however, I doubt that Hasan's actions can be so easily distinguished from "jihad" since the words he is reported as crying out at the beginning of his rampage suggest religious motives on his part: "Allahu Akhbar!"

We will have to wait for the full report to determine what motivated Hasan, and since he's still alive, we may learn a great deal indeed. The early evidence, though, does point to religion as a significant factor, as we learn from Duane Reasoner Jr.:

It was Major Hasan, though, who increasingly felt let down by the military, and deeply conflicted by his religion, said those who knew him through the mosque. Duane Reasoner Jr., an 18-year-old substitute teacher whose parents worked at Fort Hood, said Major Hassan was told he would be sent to Afghanistan on Nov. 28, and he did not like it.

"He said he should quit the Army," Mr. Reasoner said. "In the Koran, you're not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christian or others, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell."

The explanation given by Mr. Reasoner, that Muslims are not supposed to have alliances with non-Muslims, seems to be attributed to Hasan, but I suspect that Mr. Reasoner himself believes this as well, given his manner of citing the Qur'an on this point. I also suspect that this Duane Reasoner would be the same "young Muslim" named "Duane" interviewed by the BBC's Gavin Lee at the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen the day after the killings at Fort Hood, available in video on You Tube:

Duane: I'm not going to condemn him for what he did. I don't know why he did it. I will not, absolutely not, condemn him for what he had done though. If he had done it for selfish reasons I still will not condemn him. He's my brother in the end. I will never condemn him.

Gavin Lee: There might be a lot of people shocked to hear you say that.

Duane: Well, that's the way it is. I don't speak for the community here but me personally I will not condemn him.

Gavin Lee: What are your thoughts towards those that were victims in this?

Duane: They were, in the end, they were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims. I honestly have no pity for them. It's just like the majority of the people that will hear this, after five or six minutes they'll be shocked, after that they'll forget about them and go on their day. (Transcript from You Tube)

According to a report in the Stars and Stripes by Leo Shane III, "Fort Hood deals with aftermath of shooting as details of accused gunman emerge" (November 7, 2009), Duane Reasoner Jr. is "a recent Muslim convert who had been having dinner regularly with Hasan" because "Hasan had taken 18-year-old Reasoner under his wing, mentoring him in his new faith," so I think that we're hearing from the same guy in the BBC interview.

At any rate, the "Duane" in the BBC interview sounds to me to be a radical Islamist who would approve of the killing of any soldier headed for Iraq or Afghanistan, and if he was being mentored in his "new faith" by Hasan, then I infer that we can attribute the same Islamist views to Hasan.

And given that the Stars and Stripes article notes that Hasan gave a lecture "U.S. war in Iraq: A war against Islam," the inference is strengthened -- and will be strengthened even more if Hasan really did compare "Muslim suicide bombers to U.S. soldiers who've thrown themselves onto grenades to save their fellow soldiers," as he's alleged to have done on a website last May.

But let's see wait and see where the evidence leads . . .

Joshua Stanton: Red-Baiter?

Professor Elaine Kim

UC Berkeley

(Image from East Bay Express)

Robert Koehler of the The Marmot's Hole has posted a short blog entry siding with Joshua Stanton of One Free Korea against Christine Ahn, who accuses Stanton of 'red-baiting' her in having called her a "North Korean apologist" several years ago.

The accusation comes in an article favorable to Ahn published in the East Bay Express, one of the papers that I used to read for free back in my Berkeley days and now discover that I can read for free online . . . not that I'm much inclined to.

And just to ensure that you get both sides of this story, you can read Joshua's so-called 'red-baiting' of Ahn from several years ago as well as his recent response.

The East Bay Express article isn't just about Ahn, but also about several left-leaning activists pushing for peace and negotiations with North Korea, including Professor Elaine Kim, coordinator of UC Berkeley's Asian American Studies Department, who tells us:

Many Americans also may be unaware that North Korea's economy was doing quite well during the 1960s and 1970s, even surpassing that of its southern neighbor. But a reduction in trade with the Soviet Union, and the impact of the American embargo and sanctions, helped freeze North Korea's development. "The reason they don't have energy for all their infrastructure is . . . the US and its allies who embargo them don't allow them to trade with anybody the US trades with," said Kim. As a result, for example, there are streetlights, but no electricity in them. Many North Koreans are extremely slight and seemingly malnourished. "This is a crime," she noted. "Talk about human rights -- this is a crime against humanity that was allowed to happen. And they're trying to say that it's because Kim Jong Il is a dictator and wants to keep everybody enthralled, that's why it's like that?" she asked, incredulously. "Hello! Let's have some reality here."

Professor Kim may be well-intentioned, and I'm no expert on North Korea, but even I can see manifest flaws in her argument just from my having kept up with the news in the daily papers for the past 30 years. The North's economy in the 60s and 70s was being subsidized by the Soviet Union, so it looked as though it were "doing quite well" when it in fact was decaying like all communist economies modeled on the Soviet one. Moreover, it was already clearly declining in the 80s despite continued Soviet subsidies. Finally, when the Soviet subsidies stopped after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, the North Korean economy didn't just 'freeze' in its development, it immediately went into a very steep decline and effectively collapsed despite the North Korean state's coercive power for mobilizing the workforce. This collapse is not because "the US and its allies . . . don't allow . . . [the North] to trade with anybody the US trades with," a statement that is obviously incorrect, for North Korea has extensive trade with China, one of America's biggest trading partners. As for the lack of electricity to the North's city streetlights, a bit more of it might be available for city lighting if the electrical grid weren't constructed primarily to serve the ruling elite, whose mansions receive much of the available power. And as for malnourishment, this is due to North Korea's state-run agricultural sector, a Soviet-model system that just doesn't work and that has fundamentally collapsed. The North could feed itself if it allowed a free market in agriculture, but the ruling elite isn't willing to relinquish any control for fear of losing complete control. And yes, it is "because Kim Jong Il is a dictator and wants to keep everybody enthralled." Let's do "have some reality here."

Joshua Stanton may be brusque in his statements about North Korea, but he offers an honest reality check.

Feisty Feist

Leslie Feist

(Image from last.fm)

Employment in Ewha's EPO has its perks . . . such as leisurely working the English Lounge, a required two hours of tutoring that includes elongated stretches of time with little to do other than listen to the music playing in English for all the lounge to hear.

One voice struck my fancy, so I asked who the femme fatale might be and was told . . . "Feist."

"Feist?" I echoed, puzzled. "As in 'feisty'?"

"No," the lounge assistant replied, "Just 'Feist'."

But not just "Feist." Rather, "Leslie Feist" . . . as the two of us discovered.

"Where's Feist from?" I wondered.

The assistant Googled . . . waited . . . "Canada," she finally informed me.

I'd only heard the voice and never seen the lady perform, so I was curious. As you see from the image above, she's stunning. But can she perform?

Yes. She. Can.

Here she is in video dancing in mesmerizing manner to "One Evening."

And also moving herself around in "1234" . . . though the video's quality is lacking. But great fun, especially the Sesame Street version.

Or if you're feeling down but not out and want some 80s-style California pop blues, check out the retro "Inside and Out."

But if you're feeling snazzy, here's a number jazzy, "When I Was A Young Girl," performed live in Paris.

Or the oddly named "Mushaboom"?

I reckon I'm just in a feisty mood, and if you are, too, You Tube has more, even one of her screwing up "One Evening" in live concert, but doing so with charm.

Park Wan-suh: More Ambivalence?

Also More Shinga . . .

(Image from Amazon.com)

In a post about one month ago, I remarked upon re-reading Park Wan-suh's novel about "Shinga" that "I've become alert to small differences of the sort that signal a writer's ambivalence." In the two passages below, Park looks back over her six years of walking alone along a path across Mount Inwang to reach her elementary school within Seoul's walls, and I find a slight difference between the two. The first passage begins positively and alludes approvingly to the entertaining stories that Park had learned from her mother, but concludes on a somewhat negative note:

For six years, I had to pass over a hill to attend school, something that was quite rare in Seoul, but I never felt scared or bored. On the few occasions when someone accompanied me, I found having to make conversation a burden. It was actually more comfortable and liberating to walk alone. The stories triggered my young and hyperactive imagination, and I took pleasure in those moments of solitude. In retrospect, though, it strikes me that the way I developed emotionally was not normal. (Park Wan-suh, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? page 95)

That negative conclusion imparts to this first passage some ambivalence of its own, and that will constitute a difference from the second passages, which comes forty pages later, where Park writes similarly, but maintains a positive tone throughout, with even a positive-sounding remark in her concluding sentence:

I no longer had to skirt Mount Inwang once I began middle school; now I could take the streetcar. Initially I'd felt no affection for Seoul's bare hills, but I'd taken that mountain path regularly for six years, and I began to miss the cherry blossoms of April, the acacias of May, and the snowy landscape of winter. It dawned on me that I'd enjoyed a rare privilege for a Seoul child. Walking to school alone for six long years had a significant effect on my character. For one thing, I learned to entertain myself. Even now I prefer to go about by myself unless I'm with those so close to me that I don't have to be conscious of their presence. (Park Wan-suh, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? page 135)

The more positive concluding remark leaves the passage largely without ambivalence, making it to differ from the first passage and thereby revealing the ambivalence in her feelings, i.e., does she feel that her emotional development from walking alone was not normal because it made her into a solitary person, or does she feel that the significant effect of walking alone was positive because it made her into a solitary person?

Perhaps she considers the process abnormal but the result beneficial, for she seems to have entertained herself without interruption for the long walk by repeating the many exciting stories that her mother had so dramatically recited to her. That experience must have helped shape her as a writer, though she doesn't explicitly say so.

I suppose that I'll just have to leave my query unanswered since an interpretation on this level would require analysis of the two passages in the original Korean.

Artist of the Avaunt Guard?

En-Uk Sequoya Hwang

Performance Artist

Knight in Twining Armor Routine

Readers who recall my ten-year-old son's art works from early last spring will be pleased to learn that he is also into art theory and has recently written a manifesto for publication first of all here on Gypsy Scholar:

Art

Art is a great thing. You can make your life feel better. You will feel great. It is good to have art. It is a good thing there's art. Without art, life would be bad. You wouldn't feel so great. You wouldn't live well.

And as we can see from those aforementioned art works, yet even more from the image above, En-Uk is an artist who not only expresses his artistic vision in line, form, and color but who also lives out his aesthetic convictions well. Hence, let us join him as a ceremonial escort in his performative-art march of departure away from the mundane.

En-Uk Sequoya Hwang, "Artist of the Avaunt Guard" . . .

Korean Identity: Confucian 'Disharmony'?

Four Contemporary Korean Plays

Lee Yun-Taek

(Image from Amazon.com)

In my essay on Korean identity, which I've referred to numerous times recently and which I'm still fine-tuning, I delineate Confucianism's hierarchically arranged system of obligations for personal relationships and then make the following claim:

A society organized by these Confucian duties will . . . be strong in vertical obligations but weak in extended horizontal relations. Because strangers in such a society lack personal relationships, they will seek to ascertain their relative status for proper hierarchical interaction, and the at times attendant jostling for position can foster disharmonious relations.

In a play by Lee Yun-Taek, "O-Gu: A Ceremony of Death," which I was duty-bound to read for the Daesan Foundation last month, I came across the following dialogue of subtle jostling between "Seok-Chul," a male shaman performing the ceremony-of-death rites, and "Condoler 1," a relative of the dead person:

Seok-Chul: (Kneeling down and making a great bow to him.) I am a professional here to mourn as the chief mourner.

Condoler 1: (Instantly bowing, with a smile on his face.) I am the eldest grandson in the head-family of Lee at Yoeju and one of the relatives of the dead, (Handing Seok-Chul his name card.) . . . Here we go; I am a man of no special significance.

Seok-Chul: (Taking the name card and reading it.) General Director of the Union for Liberty, Jongno District Branch Office; Executive Committee Member and Director of Relationships in the Buddhist Order for the Defense of Korea, Jongno Branch . . . uh, I didn't recognize that you're a man of high position. (Lee Yun-Taek, "O-Gu: A Ceremony of Death," Four Contemporary Korean Plays, page 70)

The interaction probably speaks for itself, but the translators offer a footnote:

Koreans rely heavily on business cards in order to determine who a person is and, thus, determine how they should behave. Education and titles are especially important information on business cards. In this case, the organizations and offices held are fictitious, designed only to impress an unknowing recipient and amuse the audience. (page 88)

The "Buddhist Order for the Defense of Korea" is an especially amusing touch, I find. Humor aside, the interaction depicted by the playwright is recognizably Korean, namely, the jostling for positional status, initiated by Seok-Chul in his emphasis on his 'professional' standing as 'chief mourner' but trumped by the Condoler's standing as both a 'General Director' and an 'Executive Committee Member'. Seok-Chul humbles himself, but if he had been clever enough to recognize the Condoler's bluff and mount a challenge, some 'disharmonious relations' might have followed.

And the disharmony can at times become extreme, occasionally even breaking out into disagreement as vehement as the physically jostling fights observed from time to time in Korea's National Assembly.

Well, that's how they do it in Arkansas...

Everyone surely remembers the famous instructive series from Calvin and Hobbes where the omniscient father explains science and technology. My favorite is the one explaining how load limits on bridges are determined:


Of course, I already knew that this was the standard method because I grew up in Arkansas:


I believe that I see the need for a new sort of magazine aimed at the do-it-yourself market, something of a cross between Popular Mechanics and Better Homes and Gardens . . . plus maybe a bit of Field and Stream.