Human Acts: Han Kang receives the Nobel Prize in Literature

The media frenzy in the lead-up to the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature each year, with groundless speculation on likely winners accompanied by breathless reporting of bookies’ odds, unconsciously skewers the practices of the “literary elite”: a fictional apparatus that only serves the purposes of those who do not read or write.

The decision to award the 2024 prize to Korean novelist 한강 (Han Kang) demonstrates, for me at least, that the Committee values bravery and a commitment to ideals. Her work is extremely difficult to read: not in terms of its “readability”, but rather the devastating way in which she writes about what people are capable of doing to each other.

Han Kang is probably best known to English readers for 채식주의자 (The Vegetarian), a short but outlandish novel that mines the depths of human suffering. Beginning with a woman’s decision to stop eating meat, the narrative evolves, through changing perspectives, into a terrifying portrait of violence and trauma in Korean society.

As far as I’m concerned, however, her 2016 novel 소년이 온다 (Human Acts) illustrates just why Han Kang is so deserving of the Nobel Prize. A retelling of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising from the point of view of (sometimes murdered) civilians, the book is an astonishing document of political violence that is both shocking and utterly moving.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading and engaging with Korean literature for so long that the awarding of the prize to Han Kang means so much to me personally. In 2018 I travelled to the Göteborg Book Fair to hear her speak about the process of writing Human Acts. It got to the point, she said, where the book was writing her.

Last Thursday, succumbing to the hype, I posted my own breathless FB status update one second after the Nobel Committee made its announcement. A few minutes later, Kim Hyung-seok, who I first met in 2011 during a Cordite Poetry Review tour of Korea, commented on my post that Han Kang had been in attendance during one of our performances in Seoul, something I didn’t know at the time.

HAN KANG YES@!@@

My Facebook status update on Thursday 10 October 2024 LOL

We’d been in Seoul to meet with Korean poets and to launch Cordite’s 韓 – 濠 (Oz-Ko) issue, a bilingual selection of Australian and Korean works which (for me, personally) was the high point of my time as the journal’s editor. I have to admit, however, that I cringe a little at the idea of Han Kang watching me rant about my idea for an all-purpose PC방 or “Multibang”.

In the end, I missed a chance to get Han Kang’s autograph at the Göteborg Book Fair as she had left by the time I could purchase one of her books. In a similar vein, I can only hope that Han Kang had departed the Seoul Art Space in Yeonhui-dong by the time I “performed” that night. Is this selfish? Just another writer trying to make another writer’s success all about me?

Over the past few days, all of my social feeds have been flooded with AI-generated posts about Han Kang and her literary oeuvre. It’s a sign of the crisis of content we currently endure but also a reminder to speak, type, write, read and listen. It’s not about me, after all, but about all of us, all of the time. Read Han Kang. Read a book, any book. Write your own post.

Crossposted on Facebook.

Anthologised and reprised: “Jetlag World”

The last time a poem of mine appeared in a journal was back in 2013. But in the intervening years, the dim flame of my poetic muse has been sustained by the appearance of some of my published poems in a number of anthologies.

Suddenly, these old poems have a new agency. They just “hit differently” the second (or sometimes even third!) time around. Sure, there’s only five of them, but that’s, like, one every two years. And in the absence of any other kind of engagement with the publishing space, I’ll take those odds.

For this reason, I’m very grateful to the team at Vagabond Press (Sydney) for choosing to include my poem “Jetlag World” in its forthcoming Living Systems: Poetry from Asia Pacific anthology.

The front cover of Living Systems: Poetry from Asia Pacific (Vagabond Press, 2024).

“Jetlag World” first appeared in my chapbook Morgenland (2007), published as part of Vagabond’s Rare Objects series in a limited edition of 100 signed copies. The poems in Morgenland were written while undertaking an Asialink residency in Seoul, Republic of Korea, in 2005, with the support of Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council for the Arts).

During my residency, I worked as a visiting lecturer in the English Department at Sogang University, wrote “live” poems about imaginary cities in PC Bangs (PC방, Internet gaming cafes) and read a lot of Korean literature. I may also have imbibed modest quantities of soju and makkolli over the course of those four life-changing months.

I recall writing the poem, perhaps unsurprisingly, while suffering the effects of jet lag after arriving in (or maybe it was returning to) Seoul on a very crisp autumn morning. Reading the poem now, I am back there again, drinking a can of warm coffee in a convenience store and then heading straight to my campus office in Sinchon, as referred to in the poem’s last lines:

Catch the subway. The morning mist
Has not yet cleared. This day in the
Land of the morning calm is already
Several hours older. Sit in front of
The monitor. Work. Write this poem.

Taking a look back at the original draft of the poem, I’m now kind of glad I chopped out the two final lines:

Welcome to my brain. Every day is
Like a night in deepest jetlag world.

Hits different, don’t it?

Quite apart from the fact that the anthology provides me with the opportunity to take another trip down my own personal Amnesia Lane, I’m very much looking forward to reading the works of some 170 contributors from Australia, Japan, Korea, China, Viet Nam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Singapore, the United States, New Zealand, Mexico and elsewhere.

Cross-posted (and slightly edited) on LinkedIn.

When career and life collide: Cycling safety in Fryslân

After two years in Paris working for the International Transport Forum at the OECD, my family and I recently moved to a small village in the province of Fryslân in the Netherlands.

The contrast between one of the world’s biggest urban agglomerations and our tiny village of 200 is obvious.

But I wasn’t prepared for the difference in transport infrastructure, especially given that the Netherlands has put enormous efforts into making roads safer for cyclists, pedestrians and other vulnerable road users.

It seems that the distribution of this effort has been uneven. A case in point: the road running through the village where we live has become a local “rat run” (i.e. a short cut used by through traffic seeking the fastest route).

The speed limit on the road in the photo below is 80km/h: a speed that, on other roads, means that cyclists and pedestrians are prohibited. And yet here, drivers regularly exceed even this limit both on their approach to and departure from the village (where a 30 km/h speed limit is routinely ignored).

Despite longstanding plans by Gemeente Noardeast-Fryslân to build a bypass, the traffic situation in the village is dangerous for anyone not in a car, tractor, truck or light commercial vehicle. As the Gemeente admits on its own website: “The patience of the inhabitants … has been put to the test for too long.”

In this context, the driver education campaign featured in this photo is laughable at best — and, at worst, fatal. The text of the sign translates roughly as “School is about to begin again” and sits above an image of two school children hanging off a speedometer.

What is the actual message here? Slow down? If so, by how much? And why?

Yesterday, I rode our two sons home from school along this stretch of road. The older boy was on his own bike, the younger on the back of mine. Just before this sign, we were forced off the road by a driver who had swerved into our lane, accelerating out of the village.

I could see they had their head down, probably using a phone. Completely oblivious. Secure in their miniature safe world. Confident that they would never be held to account. Driving in the middle of the oncoming lane.

If we had been riding “Dutch” style (i.e. two abreast) my son and I would have been struck and killed. Only the fact that I had impressed on our older son the need for him to stick to the right saved him from a similar fate.

The lesson was clear: nobody will slow down for us, school vacation or not. The needs of some road users have been prioritised over others and this will continue, even if the bypass is built. It is safer to drive your children to school than to risk them being run over.

I spent two years at the ITF editing reports on road safety. I now have the uncomfortable feeling that reports, campaigns (and blog posts!) are largely useless. How can I protect my children from the kindermoordenaars who continue to move freely in this society?

Crossposted on LinkedIn.

Site/life update: New directions …

The older I get, the more sporadic these site updates become.

My single reader will be relieved to know that this time around I’m not announcing a brand new WordPress theme. Although I admit that I recently began looking at alternatives to WordPress, including GitHub, before concluding that such an exercise would constitute an even bigger time suck than WP is.

What I have done, however, is rejig the front page of this site to more closely resemble an author home page. The only problem being that the last time I actually did anything vaguely author-like was around 10 years ago now.

You’ll also see two new links in the top navigation: the first to a brand new [d/dn] wiki and the second to the new Davey Dreamnation Substack.

So, you see, while I was not lying when I said I’ve added a new theme to this site, I’ve technically created two completely new sites instead.

I actually created the [d/dn] wiki back in 2019, after discovering a way to install wikis via CPanel. However, I had very little idea about how a wiki works and soon lost interest in the whole project (sound familiar?).

About two years later I realised that I’d left unchecked the option for users to create their own accounts, thus ending up with thousands of new users (who then gleefully deleted each others’ spam texts on the wiki main page). Rather than delete all the database rows, I nuked the entire wiki.

This time, I’ve made it impossible for new users to register themselves, and copied over the content from the old wiki, which is basically a new way of telling the Davey Dreamnation origin story.

The advantage of a wiki is that it allows me to quickly crosslink pages related to Davey and his pals, the various DNRC artists and their DNRC Records releases, and more overarching narrative pages. Like anything else I’ve ever done, however, it remains a work in progress but I’m hoping to chip away at it over the coming weeks and months.

As for the Substack site, I’ll have much more to say about that soon.

Until then, as Christy Burr would say, “gourd these moments well”.

Blocksy WordPress theme

Long-suffering reader(s) of this blog will need no reminder that [d/dn]’s been through more incarnations than the Wikipedia entry on Buddhism. But as my posts have become more sporadic in recent years, I’ve had fewer reasons to tinker with design and layout.

In fact, I last changed the theme for this site in February 2023: a mere nine months ago. I’d opted for yet another theme by Anders Norén, the beautiful and simple Koji WordPress theme, which at around five years of age is still less than a quarter as old as [d/dn].

This time, I’ve decided to buck my long-term Scandinavian trend and install the free version of a more commercial theme, Blocksy. While I have no intention of paying for the premium version, Blocksy comes with some pretty neat features I’m keen to try out.

A screenshot from [d/dn] on the date this post was published, showing the early stages of the new site design “build” using the Blocksy theme.

The most important of these, from my point of view, include: more flexible layouts for pages, projects (portfolios) and posts; multiple menus and sidebar options; and better integration of images (e.g. with automatic crediting of photographers in image captions).

I guess I’ve also realised that I’m looking to increase the number and range of posts I publish in the coming months and years, and to do that effectively I’m going to need to let go of my desire for complete control over site design (which is a massive time suck).

And without going too deeply into it, I’m very keen to reorient the focus of this site: away from the never-ending gift that is Davey Dreamnation and his cohort, and towards something a little more centred on travel and travelling.

A screenshot of the Blocksy travel starter site front page.

This is partly why the Blocksy theme (or to be more specific its Travel starter site) caught my eye. As you can hopefully see in the featured image for this post, it offers a more immersive experience, making better use of images and space.

I’m a long way from achieving anything like the look and feel of that starter site but let’s just say I have plans. Anyway, more on those once I post this entry and get through the backlog of other half-finished posts from the past few years.