[KS] spies and thrillers

[Afostercarter at aol.com]

Dear Frank, and all,

Your big frown of disapproval is unmistakable.
But your precise reasons for this are less obvious.
Might you kindly elaborate? 

A. As I read it, you could be saying any (or several) 
of the following:

Accusations that North Korea engages in espionage,
terrorist bombings, and other bad things, are:

1. False; or exaggerated; or no longer true.
2. So well known as to be not worth discussing.
3. Impolite or impolitic to highlight, even if true;
because this may perpetuate hostile attitudes and
so prevent the Koreas from making peace.
4. Bad pedagogy, for a teacher. (But why, exactly?
What, instead, would you regard as "good questions"?)
5. Somehow morally bad to repeatedly dwell upon,
(the curious porn analogy).
6. Stereotyped; intellectually stale, unchallenging.
7. Made by people whose company one does not
want to keep (eg Bush, neocons, ROK cold-warriors)


B. On shelf shopping, Bo Diddley's wise words spring to mind.
You really can't judge a book by looking at the cover.

1. We live under capitalism. Books are commodities. Cover and
title in particular are designed to grab you; to win readers.
Like newspaper headlines, these are often not of the author's choosing.
Thus I don't think Gavan Mccormack chose to call his excellent book
Target North Korea. Blame the publishers for this.

2. Ergo, title and cover may be misleading as to both the nature,
scope and quality of what lies within. You're surely not seriously 
suggesting that it suffices to read with "one eye closed", "from a 
secure distance" - and dismiss a whole literature a priori, unread?

3. As one of the few in the North Korea field who has not written
a book recently, I must spring to the defence of my colleagues.
All hail Kim Jong-il's nuclear defiance! - which has created a
market for at least two or three dozen new books on the DPRK
in English in the past three years, which might otherwise have had
difficulty finding a publisher and readers.

Frank's dismissiveness of these riches is unfair, and unwarranted.
Regardless of title, almost all these books are useful. Some, like
Bradley Martin's, are exceptionally good. I can think of only one
really bad one, which (sadly) is Jasper Becker's Rogue Regime.

4. If Frank objects to terms like "fatherly leader", surely he should
address his complaint to Pyongyang. Brad and others are only using
and reporting the DPRK's own official discourse and terminology.
If this sound ludicrous to our ears, whose fault or problem is that?

best wishes
Aidan

AIDAN FOSTER-CARTER
Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology & Modern Korea, Leeds University 

Home address: 17 Birklands Road, Shipley, West Yorkshire, BD18 3BY, UK 
tel: +44(0)  1274  588586         (alt) +44(0) 1264 737634          mobile:  
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Email: afostercarter at aol.com     (alt) afostercarter at yahoo.com      website: 
www.aidanfc.net
[Please use @aol; but if any problems, please try @yahoo too - and let me 
know, so I can chide AOL]

____________

In a message dated 24/03/2006 06:10:47 GMT Standard Time, frank at koreaweb.ws 
writes:


> Subj:Re: [KS] spies and thrillers 
> Date:24/03/2006 06:10:47 GMT Standard Time
> From:frank at koreaweb.ws
> Reply-to:Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
> To:Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
> Sent from the Internet 
> 
> 
> 
> Fatherly leaders and good articles about carnages -- hmmmm...
> With all due respect, are you planning to teach a Korean film class 
> like a history class with documentary visual material, including 
> North Korea related spy movies from the South? I would find this a 
> problematic approach that likely leads to the usual answers that 
> anyone here is able to anticipate and that might hinder students to 
> develop good questions; and I even find your request to the list 
> confusing. We all know the situation as regards to such kind of 
> information and what is involved politically. The reply you got was 
> to be anticipated.
> 
> --QUOTE--
> >"Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader" by
> >Bradley K. Martin is a recent book that often offers
> >quite deep examination of this subject (...)."
> ---------
> 
> On TV, I remember, an interviewee was asked about watching porn 
> strips. His short and cute reply: "Well, you've seen one, you've seen 
> them all -- why bother?" Recently doing some window (shelve) shopping 
> in bookstores that very sentence came to mind when gazing at the 
> KOREA section, from a secure distance, one eye closed. Why are there 
> 20 books on North Korea all with the same stale and totally unsexy 
> joke as title? Are these all funded by the same known source, edited 
> by the same editor, published by the same .... or is there only one 
> reader?
> 
> Frank
> 
> -- 
> --------------------------------------
> Frank Hoffmann
> http://koreaweb.ws
> 

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