Summer — time to fire up the grill, slather on the sunscreen, and allow the trials of the rest of the year to fade into memory. The Printculture gang will be taking a vacation over the next month or so, giving us time to move house, recharge, and discuss directions that Printculture may take over the next year. Check back in for intermittent posts, and don't forget the sunscreen!

We’re deep into the process of buying our first home, an endeavor complicated by the fact that we’re doing the transactions from out of state. We had given ourselves five days to look at properties and make a decision—foolhardy, perhaps, but we reasoned that we’d have to find a place to live anyway, so why not get a pre-approval and go take a look at what’s available. But this post isn’t about the incredibly stressful process of buying the most expensive thing in our entire lives (well, yes it is), but (also) about all the new lingo we had to pick up along the way.

Let me tell you all the story of a man named Fred:
He lived in Paris, Tennessee, but dreamt of France instead.
He was rooting through the landfill seeking parts for his Corvair
And stumbled on a book of poems by Baudelaire.
Charles, that is. Decadence, metaphors.

After recently hearing the German word “das Baby” I began thinking about a cultural studies book I don’t want to write and probably wouldn’t even want to read (sounds like a printuculture post): The History of “Baby” or, to give it a more contemporary ring: Baby: A Natural History. How Baby Got Brought Up?

The story would begin with Baby’s slow, near-fatal suffocation of its older and larger sibling Babe. The OED’s oldest examples of “baby” go back to the end of the fourteenth century, but it seems to have taken a while for it to have given Babe a good enough scare that it was afraid to leave the realms of literature and movies about pigs.

Ten days ago I saw the worst academic talk I've seen in a very long time. It is the nature of academic talks that the bad talk you're listening to right now is by its very presentness likely to seem like the worst one that you've ever heard, but still, I insist: the talk I saw ten days ago was really very bad. (I should say that I judge academic talks on a formula that involves multiplying the quality of the talk by the fame quotient of the speaker, and that this latter may or may not include my awareness of how much money the person is being paid for the talk.)

Ah, the bi-weekly hunt for a blog topic. Yesterday I was inspired to write “Printculture: The Korean Drama,” but casting was a problem. Would I cast by age? By status? By personality? All problematic since I only know the rest of the gang virtually. Who would commit suicide at the end? It was a house of cards.

When I was in third grade, I did a report on the Chinese New Year, which I was excited to discover is celebrated by giving out red envelopes full of cash. Twenty years later I would marry a Chinese girl and collect dozens of such envelopes at our wedding.

To follow the recent reflections on printculture writing by E Hayot and S L Kim, one of the things that’s struck me often is the frequency with which I encounter old versions of myself – either in that I discover a “new” idea is actually one I’ve already written (and promptly forgotten) about or as today where I feel a kinship with myself from a year ago, writing then about the work of end-of-the-semester grading. It is that time of year again (or was, I guess until yesterday when I got grades submitted), and as a result, what I have to offer today is something of a fairly spontaneous sort.

As I struggle with end-of-the-semester burnout, wanting to take a nap but instead having to grade essays and continue with administrative work, I thought I'd offer some of my scattered thoughts in response to E Hayot's post from last week, specifically on moving and on the work of printculture, not in that order.

I could never be a linguist. I loved the one true linguistics course I took and did very well in it, but it also quelled any doubts I might have had that I wanted a full plate of that every semester for five or six years, to be followed by a dissertation and, if I became one of the lucky few, a lifetime of teaching it. I love hearing the results of other people’s research, but I don’t love it enough to want to do the legwork myself. Hence I took great pleasure in Tim Sultan’s “It’s Not the Sights, It’s the Sounds” when it appeared in The New York Times last year.

My father-in-law moves quickly, with the posture and sense of command of an aristocrat and the body of an old solider. He sits down with precision, taking inventory of the food on the table. His old clothes are fraying at the edges; he will wear the same pair of old socks until my embarrassed mother-in-law surreptitiously discards them. My father-in-law's grandfather was a wealthy landowner who served in the court of the last king, but my father-in-law's life of privilege shattered at the age of 18 when the Korean War began.

The Office, NBC’s single-camera comedy, is a meditation on boredom. Derived from a British miniseries, a mockumentary set inside a paper company, the sitcom transplants the concept and major characters from the original, but adds a number of fleshed-out officemates and warehouse workers. Manager Michael Scott, the attention-seeking buffoon, and Dwight, his authoritarian lackey, get the most screen time, but their antics are in many ways incidental to the show, which derives much of its humor from the appalled or amused reactions of its straight men.

A few small things today, just some ideas I've come across or thought this week, but none of them quite large enough to become its own entry.

1. “A Chinese judge charged with corruption died in his cell from ”adult sudden death syndrome“, Xinhua news agency said today.” This is the first line in a real story in a real newspaper. Apparently “ASDS” has been known to strike a variety of prisoners held in Chinese custody. American officials expressed “concern” that ASDS might be spreading to American detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It's like the bird flu,” said one source. “First China, and then the rest of the world!”

My oldest child W began elementary school in March (the school year begins in March in Korea). For months before this moms with older children had been telling me (with a maniacal gleam of the eye), “Oh you’re going to be really BUSY from now on.” As anyone even tangentially integrated into the Ajuma* network of Seoul knows, education is a big deal and a huge source of pressure here. We had always planned to send our kids to local school; we wanted them to have a strong base of Korean and be a part of the social and cultural networks here, not to live in a bubble.

Years ago I heard a talk on the history of film criticism that made some version of the following claim: key elements of feminist film criticism had faded from prominence not because subsequent arguments had improved upon or undone them, but rather because people had gotten bored of seeing and making the same arguments. It wasn’t quite that simple – but the clarity of that general proposition, the recession of intellectual ideas by virtue of boredom, stuck with me.