This week, I sat down to learn how to make two of my grandmother’s recipes; something I wish I’d had the time and inclination to have been doing all along. Seasoned more in proportion with each other in a web of relationships than any standardized measure, and woefully precise in freeflow adjustments. It really is “the spoon we have in the cupboard” as the standard to which it all comes together. I learned how to make two things: Makgeoli and Kimchi. These are relatively simple recipes, mostly consisting of gathering ingredients together, mixing them together, and waiting for the fermentation to do the rest of the work.

And it made me think about fermented foods as a bridge between the past, the present, and the future.

Continue reading “Now, Then, and To Be” →

Hey folks! Before we get into the actual post, I wanted to explain what this series is. I wrote a bunch of essays for my undergrad program and I’d rather put them up than forget about them. They’re a little rough around the edges from my current perspective, and they have a lot of literary jargon (since you need to put that in to not fail your classes). Plus I wrote most of them in one straight shot hours before the due date. I’ve done a little light editing to make sure the spelling, grammar, and general flow make sense, as well as changed anything that has become factually incorrect in light of new information. But for the most part, what you see is what I was two or three years ago as a student. I’ll provide a list of materials that you can read or reference, or just have on hand, to know where I was coming from/where the basis of the knowledge I was drawing from when I can.

This first essay is from a class about the writer Franz Kafka and both his body of works and his influence. It is primarily about the forms of violence depicted in The Vegetarian by Han Kang.

Continue reading “The Complex Violence of Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian”” →