Part Two Review: The Geography of Thought

Part Two Review: The Geography of Thought

What's happening? Thursday morning I found out I was moving on Friday morning. Really couldn't believe it nobody told me when they knew on Monday! Anyway in the middle of marking and felt like what the hell is going on why now? Anyway the owner wanted to move back in (breaking the rental contract - pretty common here). So rushed with the housing coordinator to find an apartment which didn't take long. So moving and packing all Thursday night and then an express moving service crew arrived Friday morning at 7:00 and it was sleet and freezing rain out. But by nine o'clock they had me on my way to my new place just five minutes walk away.

The crew had a super fast delivery elevator ladder truck that runs the stuff up to the patio window like a rocket ship and I just sat and pointed where things should go. Was pretty wrecked on Friday falling asleep around noon and waking up at nine pm then going to back to bed around 11:00 pm and getting up Saturday around 7:00 am. It was a whirlwind. So I didn't put in any marking on Saturday and cancelled an evening out in Seoul with a friend recently returned from Australia. She is Korean but seemed pissed that I didn't have enough umph left to run down the two hours on bus and subway to go out for the evening anyway.

Sunday had a meeting at the Korea Herald building with the editor Matt Lamers from Canada and a collection of Korea's best foreign bloggers and writers (Zen Kimchi, Marmot, EFL Geek, Gypsy Scholar, wow they were all there). He invited me to contribute a column on Expat Finance after reading my blog. Anyway it is a thrill to be considered one of the best English writers in Korea and it will be good for my exposure level here anyway. The meeting was cool because with literate people, writers anyway, no topic seems too outlandish and intellectual curiousity seems pretty high at a table like that.

Yesterday I finished marking and dropped off some wine and green tea to my secretary and my boss who is polishing a paper for a conference in China on January 2nd. Got a call from an Australian lady I work with named Pauline and I invited her over to see the new place and go out for dinner. Was waiting for a gas range hose installation so that I can actually cook but nobody showed up when they told me. We went into Pocheon proper (we live ten minutes out) to a restaurant I found the first night I came here in 2006 - a beef ribs BBQ place and we had a little feast. The last time we went was my birthday and this time they put out extra whole raw oysters and marinaded green crabs. Luckily Pauline doesn't like spicy food so I had all those crab legs to my lonesome. I took the bones and gave them to neighbourhood dogs.

Pauline went to church this morning but I slept in and then for dinner I prepared an olive oil and red wine salad with smoked quail's eggs, nachos and herb cheese in the rice cooker (what haven't I cooked in there yet?), smoked Atlantic salmon with diced green onions, sliced calamata olives and garam masala on Carr's cracked pepper crackers, cold cajun fried chicken from GS Supermarket in Pocheon (purchased the night before) with various wines including Argentina Bodega Privada Cabernet Sauvignon, J.P.Chenet white medium sweet, Gran Reserva Torre Maria Vanecia Bodega Enguera 1999 (in the salad), a young white Spanish Valhondo, and last night with Spanish cured salami some Casillero del Diablo Cabernet from Concha Y Toro which the Koreans don't seem to like and for which I got 25% discounts at Samsung-TESCO Homeplus Supermarket.

Dinner was finished with green tea from Hadong a private stock reserved for Buddhist temples of which a small canister costs about seventy-five dollars and powdered oiled chesnut robed rice cakes which have become one of my favourite desserts.



This is all a nod to the Chinese philosophy of the world not having any logic whatsoever or empiricial nature having few comparative qualities as defined by the Greeks. Nisbett defines the differences between the two as a contrast in defining the nature of things. Greeks according to Nisbett took great pains to identify attributes and categorisations of abstract qualities, discrete objects having distinctive limits which together form construction of patterns and rules and accordances to those observable variables. Nisbett describes how Greek logic once born can be made fairly irrelevant through excessive contradictory logic at odds with being, changing, or otherwise flawed reasoning through slavery to either-or and linear logic as described by Robert Logan.



His description of Chinese logic starts with duality of change and the contradictions in affairs which can provide benefits and pitfalls in expression of fortune, life's lessons, and wisdom similar to the philosphy of the yin and yang of all things and events. Such theories on life's teaching have a basis in Confucian, Taoist and spirit in all its changeable essences. For there to be truth there is fallacy, for there to be good there is evil, for there to be fortune is to be misfortune. In its blending with Buddhism these thoughts on the nature of things tends towards the prospect of resonance or that everything is connected and that nothing especially logic is at all concrete. In such a world view the interconnections and influences between things are more important than their respective categories.

Thus there is no surprise that cultural studies plot American versus Korean culture very much as two halves of the same coin or two opposites in terms of yin and yang.
The basis of much of each cultural framework is the apogee of each highly contrasted philosophy.