Follow the River North

Well, here I’ve dropped the ball again. Life has kind of taken me by storm the last couple of months, and blogging definitely isn’t the only ball I’ve dropped. I’m still struggling with my sleep schedule in the face of so many late nights at the office, which give me insomnia and lead to me being varying degrees of lethargic, ranging on up to just plain sick, in the little pockets of rest in between.

I’m trying to make the best of it and have started formulating a new version of an old, incomplete project. I’m thinking and reading and writing a lot about the city, moving through the city, who has the right to move through the city, which leads to who has the right to see or the obligation to be seen, which leads to issues of subjectivity and objectification. Issues of industrialization and capitalism. And most of all, the way that women first came out into the city streets, under what conditions, why and to what response.

It’s complicated and I’m not sure what it will end up landing, but maps have been a concentration point of mine for several years now. I just couldn’t get a concrete grip on what they mean or how to interpret them.

At the moment, I’m reading Factory Girls Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrializing Korea, by Ruth Barraclough, mostly over my lunch breaks. It’s interesting in a lot of different ways, but one of the side issues that the book deals with is how Korea’s particular brand of industrialization and capitalism came about, which has kind of demystified a lot of things about the work culture here for me.

Key phrases I keep coming back to are “working girl” and “street walker”, phrases that encapsulate the conflicted relationships between women entering the labor market, women gaining (the potential for some degree of) financial agency and what this signified about independence, how this ties into the right to wander the streets of the city, as well as the threat of sexual “corruption” and/or liberation.  Essentially, women enter the city streets not as the flaneur (men) did, to see and to watch, but to be the target of watchful eyes — to be seen. The price for agency of movement was both physical safety, social protection and reputation (similar costs applied to entering the workforce).

It’s a lot. I’m excited.

On the less boring side of things (maybe?), I found a place where I can get my grubby little paws on dry-aged steaks for Christmas. New Year’s Eve is already being encroached upon by deadline, and I’m nervous for Christmas, too, so all plans have been scrapped in favor of a low-key and simple dinner at home that could just as well happen on Saturday as Thursday or Friday. But that doesn’t mean I can’t pull off something a bit fancy. (We already got into the Ballantine’s Christmas Reserve a bit early — it’s been a stressful month.)

There’s a lot going on that I just don’t have the time to get into, and a lot that I can’t quite get into yet. I feel like vague-blogging has been my MO for a couple of years now, which is annoying, but I promise it will come to an end soon. For now, I’m just trying to focus on getting the most I can out of the holidays, however restricted they may be.