A while ago I said I might start blogging regularly again if I found a reason to. Blogging without a purpose is a genuine waste of time if I ever saw one (one of many signs that one should stop blogging), and that was exactly what I was doing about a year ago, and exactly why I, for the most part, stopped. For anyone who has bothered to drop by, it should be clear from the dearth of posts around here that a reason and purpose have yet to be found. Granted, I’m finding more online fulfillment at flickr, but flickr isn’t really blogging (or even photoblogging for that matter). Instead, something I have neglected for years has regained my attention and focus, and explains my absence from the cacophony of the blogosphere.
One morning last month, I woke early, finished a book I’d been reading, and shut down my blog. …somewhere between the bedsheets and 6 a.m., I realized something: Blogging wasn’t helping me write; it was keeping me from it.
[...] Blogging had been the ideal run-up to a novel, but it had also become a major distraction. I would sit down to start on my novel only to come up with five different blog entries. I thought of them as a little something-something to whet the palate—because it was easier, more immediately satisfying, because I could write it, and post it, and people would say nice things about it, and I could go to bed feeling satisfied. But then I would wake feeling less than accomplished because a blog wasn’t a whole story told from beginning to end. I had shelves lined with other people’s prose while my best efforts were buried on a Web site somewhere, underneath a lot of blah-blah about American Idol and my kitty cat.
[O]nce a writer has entered that realm, there is no turning back. T’is true, so sadly true. Soon when your precious hour of free time arrives and you sit down to write, you will think to yourself, ‘oh, but I must do my blog first.’ And you will go there, and dutifully blog.
[...] the clock will suddenly say midnight. And you will look at your manuscript in consternation. How can it be that there are no new pages, not even a paragraph? Where has the time vanished? Why are your hands so weary?
Too weary to type so much as a sentence of your book.
Tomorrow, you will say to yourself. Tomorrow I will start afresh, and I will type all day to make up for the pages I have not written today. With the best of intentions, you will go to sleep.
But on the morrow, when you wake and rise, you will not write. You will blog.
So it will go. Slowly. Inevitably.
[...] Blogging is not writing. It masquerades as such, t’is true. You sit at the desk, your fingers dance their blind and clever dance across the keyboard, words appear upon the screen, and oh, it feels like writing, like the easiest sort of writing, the writing that needs not to be justified on the morrow. It is the writing that makes the idle stupidity of the day something of worth, for has it not been written down, have not readers shared it and responded to it? Have you not been recognized, flattered and preened for today’s bon mot? Is not that what the writer lives for?
Remember that you are a storyteller … This is not a feat that is accomplished thoughtlessly.
From “Endblog” William Gibson’s final post on his blog:
Time for me to get back to my day job, which means that it’s time for me to stop blogging.
I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel… I’ve always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off.
The bits and pieces that Joseph Cornell assembled in his shadow-boxes wouldn’t have seemed nearly as interesting if he’d simply left them arrayed on the bench of some picnic-table –- and they certainly wouldn’t still be there.
The counter-argument – which I can agree with to some extent – is that blogging is no more detrimental than knitting or cooking or video games or any other hobby or procrastinatory activity a writer can undertake. What the writer (professional or not) has to decide is whether the activity is more hobby or more procrastination, and finally, whether there is purpose and value involved, be it hobby or procrastination. I’ve already decided about all that.
That is not to say I won’t still fire off a random thought or two on here. But you’ll pardon me if the elapsed time gap between any such posts get wider and wider, and my apologies for not keeping up with some of my online friends out there and their blogs or journals. For my Muse has (finally) returned, and she can be a harsh mistress
February 25, 2008 - PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) - The New York Philharmonic performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” and North Korea’s anthem for Pyongyang’s communist elite Tuesday — a historic feat of musical diplomacy aimed at improving ties with the isolated nuclear power that considers the U.S. its mortal enemy.
The Philharmonic is the first major American cultural group to perform in the country and the largest delegation from the United States to visit its longtime foe.
[Works] included Dvorak’s “New World Symphony,” written while the Czech composer lived in the United States and inspired by native American themes; Wagner’s Prelude to Act 3 of “Lohengrin”; and Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.”
“Someday a composer may write a work entitled ‘Americans in Pyongyang,’” Maazel said in introducing the Gershwin, drawing warm applause.
When the concert ended with a final encore of the traditional Korean folk song “Arirang” — beloved in both the North and South — the orchestra received a five-minute standing ovation, with many audience members cheering, whistling and waving to the beaming musicians.
“There may be a mission accomplished here. We may have been instrumental in opening a little door,” Maazel said after the concert.
February 27, 2008 - PYONGYANG (Reuters) - The unprecedented concert of the New York Philharmonic made the world’s front pages on Wednesday, but in North Korea merited only brief mention in the main communist daily.
A story on the concert was on page four of the communist party newspaper Rodong Sinmun with a picture of the event. The front page was reserved for news that leader Kim Jong-il had sent congratulatory flowers to the new president of Cuba.
The newspaper report on the concert was heavy on who among the North’s elite attended and called the concert “very sophisticated and sensitive.”
Some orchestra members met North Korean musicians while others headed to the Mangyondae School Childrens Palace to see a performance that included young girls in white shirts and red scarves singing: “Generalissimo Kim Il-sung danced with us.”
Philharmonic members were flanked in the audience by school children who were not allowed to talk to any foreigners.
The finale was a song and dance number called “We are Faithful Only to General Kim Jong-il”
February 8, 2008 - NEW YORK (NY Sun) – On the eve of the New York Philharmonic’s departure on an Asian tour that will include a visit to Pyongyang, its music director, Lorin Maazel, suggested that Americans are not in a position to criticize the North Korean regime, because America’s own record on human rights is flawed.
“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw bricks, should they?” Mr. Maazel told the Associated Press. “Is our standing as a country — the United States — is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others.”
Experts on North Korea responded to Mr. Maazel’s comment with shock and dismay.
A senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics and the author of “Korea after Kim Jong-il,” Marcus Noland, called Mr. Maazel’s statement “outrageous.”
“North Korea maintains a gulag that has an estimated 200,000 prisoners in it, which includes multigenerational families who are imprisoned because of the offense of one family member,” Mr. Noland said. Death rates in the camps are high, he said, and there has been testimony of medical experimentation on prisoners in the camps.
“The North Korean government engages in forced abortion and infanticide for women who are repatriated from China when pregnant and are thought to be carrying binational children,” Mr. Noland continued.
“This is about as close to a Nazi regime in terms of its internal practices as exists in the world today,” he said. “It’s outrageous that the director of the New York Philharmonic would [make such a statement] before this trip. I think you have to at least admit that there are troubling aspects to this regime and [consider] how your activity fits into these. To just dismiss it is outrageous.”
The Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, Sophie Richardson, also expressed astonishment at Mr. Maazel’s comment.
“Yes, it’s absolutely true that the U.S. commits human rights abuses both here and abroad, and Human Rights Watch is quite critical of those practices,” she said. “At the same time, perhaps he’s unaware that the North Korean government still publicly executes people. We continue to characterize it as one of the worst abusers of the full spectrum of rights anywhere in the world.”
“I don’t think the answer to America’s commission of human rights abuses is to ignore even worse ones,” she said.
February 20, 2008 - YANJI, CHINA (DailyNK) – An accident at a mine near Jeongeu-ri in Hoiryeong, North Hamkyung Province left 22 people dead and more than 20 critically injured. Among the injured is the mine supervisor. The mine where the incident occurred is part of the “No. 12 Reeducation Camp.”
According to a North Korean source, a mineshaft caved in after a blasting operation, crushing all those inside. Signs of danger were evident once the explosives were detonated as fissures appeared in the rock foundation. Despite this, prisoners were sent back into the mine. Fifty prisoners were helplessly buried under a mound of rocks and dirt as a result of this negligence.
February 18, 2008 - (The Korea Times) – North Korea executed the director of one of its state-run companies last year for having made phone calls abroad without permission, according to an international association of journalists.
“North Korea is the world’s most isolated country and the security forces are responsible for keeping it that way at all costs,” Reporters Without Borders based in Paris said last week in its annual report covering 98 countries.
It shows a marked increase in executions for the offense of communicating with people outside the country, the reported added.
The group said the North has intensified its oppression of the press, particularly foreign press which target North Koreans as an audience.
Several foreign-based radio stations have increased their airtime while newspapers available online, in particular the Daily NK, have stepped up their coverage.
But Pyongyang responded to the challenges by resuming jamming independent and dissident radios from broadcasting to its people. They are Free North Korea Radio, Voice of America, Open Radio for North Korea, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Chosun.
February 17, 2008 -(Yonhap News) – A group of 22 North Koreans who had been returned home after their boats drifted into South Korean waters were all immediately executed by North Korean authorities, a source here said Sunday.
Two fishing boats carrying the North Koreans — 14 women and eight men including three teenagers — drifted into the western waters off South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island on Feb. 8 and were sent back home after South Korean interrogators found they had no intention of defecting, the National Intelligence Service said in a press release on Saturday.
October 30, 2007 SEOUL, South Korea (ABC News) – The first two days of torture started with threatening questions about his family’s conspiracy. Shin Dong-Hyuk had no answers because at age 14, he was required to live in the dormitory with other teenagers in North Korea’s notorious political prison camp No.14, north of Pyongyang. He had not seen his parents and brother for weeks.
The next morning, Shin was hung upside down with his ankles cuffed, all day long. He wondered why his mother and brother tried to escape, if what the authorities claimed was true. Surely, they should have known that anything short of being out of place in this camp is punished by death.
On the fourth day Shin was dragged into cell No.7, the secret underground torture chamber. Completely stripped, legs cuffed, hands tied with rope, his legs and hands were hung from the ceiling. The torturers lit up a charcoal fire under his back. He struggled. But they pierced a steel hook near Shin’s groin to keep him from writhing. Amid the sounds and smells of flesh burning, Shin then blacked out.
Eleven years after that day, Shin Dong-Hyuk is now standing high in Seoul, South Korea, signing autographs in his recently published book “Escape to the Outside World,” which is about his life in the North Korean prison camp. He’s spreading the word about the brutal North Korean regime and making plans for a new life of freedom.
[...] In 2005, Shin successfully escaped the prison camp where he was born, raised and repeatedly tortured. It took a month for him to sneak to the border where he bribed his way into China. After 17 months of seeking refuge, he was granted defector status by the South Korean government last year.
Shin’s parents were granted marriage inside the camp for being model prisoners. They spent five days together as an award, and separated again in accordance with the prison rule. Shin has little memory of his father and brother because everyone above 12 years old was to live in separate dormitories of same age and sex. He lived with his mother until age 12, but he has no attached feelings.
“She never hugged me, never,” he recalled.
Shin’s schooling involved reading, writing and simple adding and subtracting. Children were beaten to death in front of others for stealing five grains of wheat out of hunger. Girls were raped and protesting mothers disappeared. He witnessed his own mother offering sex to guards. Teenagers were buried under cement while being forced to build power plants. Shin’s middle-finger knuckle was cut off as punishment for dropping a sewing machine. And he watched the public executions of his mother and brother after their failed escape.
July 17, 2007 - SEOUL (Radio Free Asia) – “There have been two or three reports of public executions of North Korean young people in major cities including Chungjin, as punishment for having illegally copied and distributed South Korean visual material,” said Kang Chul Hwan, vice-chairman of the Seoul-based Committee for the Democratization of North Korea.
“It is not an overstatement to say that the Kim Jong Il regime is waging war on the South Korean TV drama,” he said, adding that the North Korean authorities have intensified surveillance and searches to prevent South Korean videos from entering North Korea.
May 31, 2007 - SEOUL (International Herald Tribune) – In 1999, a group of seven North Koreans fleeing their country was intercepted in Russia. The Russian authorities, rejecting appeals from the United Nations and human rights groups, sent them to China. China returned them to North Korea.
In the ensuing uproar in South Korea over the government’s failure to rescue them, the foreign minister had to step down. And then, the seven were largely forgotten. Those who remember them may have recalled their frightened faces on Russian television, where they said they feared death if sent back to their Communist homeland.
Now, two of them have escaped again and arrived in South Korea, contradicting what the North Korean government told United Nations officials about the group’s fate - that most had been returned to their homes and jobs. One brought with him accounts of life and death at North Korea’s infamous prison camp No. 15, known to the outside world as Yodok.
“Until the last minute, until the Russians blindfolded us, loaded us into a truck and handed us over to the Chinese at a border bridge on Dec. 31, 1999, we believed the United Nations could save us,” said Kim Eun Chul, now 27, in an interview. “We were naive about real-world politics.”
At least five of the seven languished in Yodok, where inmates toiled 15 hours or more a day on rations meager even by the standards of the impoverished North for such deeds as criticizing the government or fleeing the country because of famine, Kim said.
The only woman among the seven - Pang Young Sil - “shriveled to the size of a dog” by the time she arrived in Yodok in July 2000 after months of torture by North Korea’s notorious National Security Agency and died two months later, Kim said. Another North Korean who was not among the seven but was incarcerated with the five at Yodok corroborated Kim’s account in a separate interview.
April 25, 2007 - (DailyNK) – The reality of Arirang is different however, according to vivid testimony of the parents whose children participate in the performance. Their children’s eyes are tense after robust mechanical drilling by their director.
The training period for the Arirang is over 6 months. Particularly delicate dancing or movement may require training for a year or more during which students give up studying and their private lives. The performances last from two to four months. As in the army, every participant belongs to a company, battalion and regiment and participates in regular meetings for evaluation and peer criticism.
They train in both dazzling sunshine and snowstorms. Thousands of preschoolers perform choreographed rope-jumping stunts, hand-standing, and hand-walking while singing, “The way for victory with the great general” in unison. They practice a single movement thousands of times.
Five and six year old children emulate military parade walking techniques that require exhausting straight leg kicks to a 60 cm height, toes straight, followed by a floor kick. A day’s training in this technique leaves the children weak and dizzy.
The Arirang is a modern slavery performance used to raise foreign currency and produce propaganda. Participation is mandatory and generally without reward, though in 2005, some participants received sewing machines as “gifts from the General.”
February 1, 2004 (The Guardian) – In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea’s largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held.
[...] Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC’s This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.
‘I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,’ he said. ‘The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.’
Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: ‘The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.’
He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. ‘At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.
‘It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.’
His testimony is backed up by Soon Ok-lee, who was imprisoned for seven years. ‘An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,’ she said. ‘One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.’
Defectors have smuggled out documents that appear to reveal how methodical the chemical experiments were. One stamped ‘top secret’ and ‘transfer letter’ is dated February 2002. The name of the victim was Lin Hun-hwa. He was 39. The text reads: ‘The above person is transferred from … camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons.’
Kim Sang-hun, a North Korean human rights worker, says the document is genuine. He said: ‘It carries a North Korean format, the quality of paper is North Korean and it has an official stamp of agencies involved with this human experimentation. A stamp they cannot deny. And it carries names of the victim and where and why and how these people were experimented [on].’
The number of prisoners held in the North Korean gulag is not known: one estimate is 200,000, held in 12 or more centres. Camp 22 is thought to hold 50,000.
Most are imprisoned because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime. Many are Christians, a religion believed by Kim Jong-il to be one of the greatest threats to his power. According to the dictator, not only is a suspected dissident arrested but also three generations of his family are imprisoned, to root out the bad blood and seed of dissent.
October 22, 2003 - (BBC) – The US-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (CHRNK) report, based on the testimony of dozens of escaped prisoners, is one of the fullest accounts to emerge so far. It paints a picture of detention centres and camps where torture, chronic malnutrition and forced labour are commonplace.
One woman told of being forced to assist injection-induced labours and then watching as a baby was suffocated with a wet towel in front of its mother.
Many former prisoners told of babies buried alive or left face down on the ground to die. They were told by guards this was to prevent the survival of half-Chinese babies.
[...] The CHRNK says testimony of a former prisoner of a North Korean gulag from 1967-74 is very similar to contemporary accounts, and indicates that the mistreatment of prisoners has not changed much in the last 30 years.
[...] Methods of torture reported across North Korea’s detention system include beating prisoners on their fingertips, the use of miniaturised prison cells, getting prisoners to repeatedly stand up and sit down and forcing them to kneel motionless for hours - a punishment described by one prisoner as more painful than beatings.
One former prisoner at a camp in North Hamgyong province said the highlights of his stay were walks outside, when prisoners could eat plants and grass.
The report’s contributors reported a constant lack of food and fights between prisoners over scraps of nourishment. No-one expected to survive long-term detention.
(Wednesday - Feb. 13) European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Hans Schlegel, STS-122 mission specialist, and NASA astronaut Rex Walheim (out of frame), mission specialist, work on the new Columbus laboratory as they participate in the mission’s second scheduled session of extravehicular activity (EVA) as construction and maintenance continue on the International Space Station.
For those who didn’t know: the U.S. Space Shuttle Atlantis is currently in orbit, docked to the ISS – carrying up and installing the new (European Space Agency’s) Columbus laboratory to the station (which you can see some of in the above photo). Three spacewalks were performed. Atlantis also transported ESA astronaut Leopold Eyharts to the station to take the place of Daniel Tani as Expedition 16 flight engineer. Tani is returning to Earth aboard the shuttle. Read loads more details at NASA’s site.
Atlantis and the STS-122 crew are scheduled to leave the space station on Monday, with undocking slated for 4:26 a.m. that day, and will land back here on Earth sometime Wednesday.
Taken in the backyard of my uncle & aunt’s place in Miami Shores, FL back in November. Most of the time, my friends and colleagues will express skepticism at my claim to be willing to move and live down there (for some reason I don’t strike them as Miami material I guess – though none of them have been there themselves, so what do they know?). But on nights like last night (8 degrees, 40mph winds making it feel like -10 and nearly blowing out the plastic insulation off the windows) they sure don’t ask why :p Ugh. And a snow-changing-to-sleet-changing-to-freezing-rain-and-ice storm is in the forecast for tomorrow night (it’s like the NYC metro area changed climates with Seattle for winters, I swear). Maybe if I stare at this picture long enough, I’ll trick my brain into feeling warm.
My roommate is cooking a giant slow-cooker full of four-bean chile. *breaths deeply* Ah Almost as good as the visual therapy above to chase away winter blues. Almost.
Almost as good as the visual therapy above to chase away winter blues. Almost.
