I started to learn Korean last night. It seems insanely simple. I went to the library and got The Korean Language, which is literally about the Korean language rather than teaching it. The book is a collection of eighteen essays which appeared in a scholarly (and no doubt smarmy) journal on Korean. The table of contents lists the authors, and it was mostly Koreans who wrote the essays, but every so often, sandwiched between Kyun Lee and Bok Hwa you get Theodore Albert Jameson III. The first essay discusses the history of the language, which doesn't go back very far because until about the fifteenth century, earlier dialects were written in Chinese characters whose voicings in Chinese resembled the intended Korean word. This essay also includes an explanation of the Korean letters (although not, as I would like, an explanation of how they came to be, merely of the sounds they represent). There are only about ten consonants, and the vowels are variations of each other, so I found that I was able to read "Ira Kaplan (guitar, vocals)" and "Georgia Hubley (drums, vocals)" within an hour. Oh, for the unaware, I bought a copy of the Deluxe Edition of Yo La Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, intended for sale in Korea, so the liner notes are in that langauge and the lyric sheets include facing page English and Korean. The album itself has no liner notes. These were written specifically for their Korean audience. So I must know what they say.

Oh, and track six of the first CD of Special Album by Baby V.O.X. (a Korean girl-electro-pop group I bought at the same time of Han's Band, now in John Darnielle's possession) is called "Ya Ya Ya." I think that's pretty awesome.

Anyway, last night, after learning this basic, basic Korean, I went outside to smoke and the prospect frightened me a bit. One of the fears in my acid flashbacks related to reading. Roman letters nauseated me. I can't explain why, and you're just going to have to take my word for this. Whenever I would read, my heart would start beating faster and faster, my eyes would widen; and just because of the letters. I was, however, learing kanji at the time, and these calmed me. That is a partial explanation of why Korean frightened me. Really, though, it is more related to another flashback fear, which is even more complicated. See, during the trip, I thought that everything there was to learn in the world was suddenly incredibly easy, as if during my actual life I was muddling through these concepts which seemed complicated and worthwhile but were just bullshit puzzles made to keep me busy and humiliate me. I'll write a book about this someday; I'm sure it would make stellar fiction. The main point for Korean is that it reminded me vaguely of that feeling that everything I hadn't learned, and had assumed was difficult, was actually incredibly simple with few variations and not requiring any thought to understand.

And so on. But the main point of this blog is that those liner notes are withing my grasp.