Me, Prince of Darkness

From rdi

My vampire name

The Great Archives determine you to have gone by the identity:
Claudius Vigée-Lebrun
Known in some parts of the world as:
Father of The Cursed
The Great Archives Record:
The cursed and the curser - bringing downfall and ill favour to kings and peasants alike!

Fun! fun! fun!

Last night we all went to Tara's house in Argyle Shore for a farewell dinner in Christine's honour. It was quite fun. Tara introduced us to a do-it-yourself Provençal salad:

• You take a lettuce leaf and tear it up.


• You take a garlic clove and mash it with your fork.


• You mix the lettuce and garlic shreds together.


• You pour olive oil over it all.


• You eat the result.

It was quite tasty, in fact, probably because of its simplicity. Olive oil is good; much better than the actual olive. Of course, since I'm of phlegmatic northwestern European background raised in a non-warm temperate area of North America without any significant immigration from olive-producing countries, I've never had it before. My cholesterol should be better, or something.

Afterwards, more fun. Playing crokinole, which is good; playing Outburst, which was fun if occasionally frustratingly obscure; drinking Tara's parent's excellent wines; signing Christine's yearbook with our names and addresses for future contact; talking in French to Jen and occasionally other people; learning about Allan's desire to set up a French-language coffee house on Tuesday night; saying goodbye to Christine. It was a great evening, I believe.

Today's gone well, too. I had an 8 o'clock meeting with Dr. MacLaine on my Honours, and things are going well on that front--I've got revised rough drafts to give to him Monday. We also talked about grad school. Dr. MacLaine suggested that I should be willing to consider some western Canadian universities--the University of Alberta at Edmonton was mentioned for its excellent student stipends, but also the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia--but I want to stay relatively close to home, no matter how much distance is collapsed. Too, he warned me that I might get bogged down in abstract theory courses with little connection to literature, particularly at Queens'--he mentioned two students who'd had a hard time there with theory. My problem with theory, though, probably won't be that I'll find it too difficult, but that I'll find it too seductive; my literary studies to date have been dominated by that. Fortunately I think I'm too ironic to be fully taken in, so I'll be able to maintain that distance.

(I also have to do more work on finding addresses and marks for the people writing my letters of reference, which I can easily do tonight. Ah, the benefits of obsessive archiving!

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Korea's Future and Anti-Americanism

I went over to Dragan Antulov's blog at a time when I should have been working, but then, Dragan's someone I've known for a long time from the USENET newsgroup soc.history.what-if.

Recently, he made an interesting observation about anti-Americanism, that the "rising anti-Americanism in the world [...] manifests even in the country that owes its very existence to U.S. military might."

But then, South Koreans are probably right to fear that some people in the Bush Administration would be quite happy to wage a Second Korean War down to the last Korean, and the vulnerability of Seoul--surely the single largest metropolis in the developed world most vulnerable to deadly military assault since the end of the Cold War--to North Korean artillery is in itself an excellent reason not to be particulary hawkish. Never mind the fact that north and south, despite Korea's rather divided, fragmented, and tragic 20th century, do see themselves as part of a single nation and aren't particularly interested in fratiride.

(Note--I said "not particularly." I don't think that Kim Il Sung is a particularly pleasant fellow; quite the contrary, in fact.)

North Korea, when it comes down off of its juche high, is going to be massively dependent upon South Korea come reunification, so much so that reunified Korea could be aptly termed a greater South Korea--East Germany was assimilated wholesale into West Germany come reunification, and despite its massive flaws it was a fairly well-industrialized country that was the high-technology centre of the Soviet bloc. North Korea, well--as Jonathan Edelstein and I agreed on soc.history.what-if when the topic of an alternate-historical reunification in the 1990's came up, North Korea could easily be depopulated as shantytowns of North Korean immigrants form outside of Seoul and Pusan and the other nuclei of the South Korean economic miracle. Ah well, at least land prices in the north will be cheap. (Me, I'm curious as to what reunified Korea will do with North Korea nuclear weapons.)

South Korea owes the fact of its survival and its economic prosperity to the United States. If not for the US-led UN military intervention in the Korean War, then we could well have ended up with a unified Korea under the dynastic rule of the Kims that probably wouldn't have enjoyed an economic boom like South Korea or even mainland China; Korea could well have been North Korea writ large, and we'd all have been the poorer for that.

It seems, though, from reading the American press, that not a few Americans think that South Koreans should be indefinitely grateful for American aid earlier in the century and that they should suspend their critical judgement and their concerns for their homeland. Yet how can there be an alliance that isn't based on mutual respect for the limits of the other partner?

As South Korea goes, perhaps (hopefully not) the world. Ah, for a multilateralism with teeth.

Influential Books

This afternoon, I'd the first class from the seminar on the interactions between literature and society (and on future career goals for English majors) co-taught by Drs. Murray and Magrath.

The class' final exercise (after the Meyers-Briggs personality test) was to create a list of the books that influenced us as children. For the life of me, I couldn't think of any, apart from C.S. Lewis' Narnia series, the books of Québécoise children's science-fiction writer Suzanne Martel, and Madeleine L'Engle's A Whisper in Time. I said that they were important to me--I'd read them all in Grade 6--because they showed how an ordinary world could become fractured, could undergo a radical transformation to become something entirely unexpected.