"Hurrah for Thompson!"

I finished The Brothers Karamazov last night, which is a book I highly recommend if you have a month or two to devote to reading it...no, seriously, it was really really good. In parts.

I remember as I was flying over to Korea we passed over the eastern-most stretch of Russia and I thought it was really cool to finally be in the country, even if I was at 30,000 feet or whatever. I've always been fascinated by the place, and I think when my year in Korea is up if I still want to do the wandering-teacher thing I might try to find work in Moscow or Petersburg. At this point I definitely want to use some of my savings at the end of the year to ride westward on the Trans-Siberian from Vladivostok to Moscow. And the literature has always appealed to me. Fathers & Sons is one of my favorite novels.

I can't really say the same for TBK...parts of it were enthralling...Father's Zossima's stories, especially about the encounter with the murderer, Ivan's story about Jesus returning and encountering a clergyman who denies his message, and his conversations/hallucinations with the devil. But those were small sections that were in some ways short stories within the novel, and I don't know if the exoskeleton of the narrative itself was as interesting. The climax was fun, and I wasn't really sure until the end whether Dmitri would be found guilty or innocent...but it was sort of ruined by Smerdyakov (sp?)'s confession.

And I'm not really down with all the explicit philosophical discussion. It's interesting for a bit, but I just kept thinking about that part in the Woody Allen movie Love & Death where he and Diane Keaton are having a normal conversation and then awkwardly segue into topics like phenomenology and whatnot. Not my cup of tea.

Life here marches on. Another session ended recently and report cards were due, again, but I flew through them pretty quickly and didn't sweat the small stuff. My job is becoming less and less interesting/challenging and more and more dull. This Sunday I have a meeting with a book club I've joined and I'm looking forward to that. I'm about halfway through the book we're reading for this session and it's interesting.

Ah, we went on a field trip a coupla days ago, to the 'Incheon Zoo.' The kids and I were exposed to, get this: four disinterested ducks (two of them seemed to have some sort of cancerous growth on their necks), a couple of sleepy dogs (no kidding: dogs), a pair of hungry ostriches and their turkey companion, three or four languid and sickly sheep, a bevy of exotic squirrels, about 10 million comparably aged groups of noisy schoolchildren, and the coup de grace: a cageful of irascible monkeys.

The highlight of the trip for me was when Joanne, my Korean coteacher, approached the monkeys' cage and tried to get their attention by making a face at them. One monkey, who'd probably been getting this kind of treatment all day for many days past, had had enough. He steps back a few paces from the edge of the cage and then charges at Joanne full speed. He crashed into the bars, of course, and probably fucked up his face pretty bad, but he scared the shit out of Joanne and she screamed and nearly fell down as she ran away. It was hi-lar-i-ous. She has a blog with some photos from the trip, if you want to check them out - click me!

What else...I'm thinking about joining a gym. We'll see where that goes. I'm eating like shit again, and smoking to boot...but the packs are so fucking cheap here, how can I not? 2500 won, about US $2.50...at the most. That's for the high end shit, Marlboros and whatnot. It's still pretty cold, and it's almost May, though the flowers haven't noticed and are starting to bloom. Walking around my neighborhood isn't quite as gloomy as it used to be, b/c of it. There hasn't really been any yellow dust for a while, which is nice. I guess that's it. out.