It turns out that there is some benefit to working in an industry that is clearly contracting but has not yet died. It forces you to think. Which is anyway your job, if you’re a teacher. As Samuel Johnson said of the death penalty, it concentrates the mind. Granted, one is hardly thinking from a position of disinterest, any more than are the various gadget-mongers and module enthusiasts who constantly assert that they will, with a little more venture capital funding, finally overthrow your tyrannical grip on the process of “education” (which is to say, your tenuous grip on a day’s pay for a day’s work). But love is a form of knowledge, or so I think, and I love what I do. So before I am replaced by an automated grader, an “AI” tutor, and an underpaid, non-union “learning facilitator” who is making a third my salary to coach three times as many students through a college experience for which, somehow, Silicon Valley will figure out how to charge even more than we do, I want to try to get a grip on what that loved thing I do actually is. What is it worth? Who is it for? Why is it important to me that the academic study of literature and writing should survive?
I pace inside my Airbnb, running through a list of potential freelancers I can commission to write about what’s happening in Korea, but no one is available. I do not report on Korean politics, nor do I have enough language proficiency to interview people on the street. Also, I am completely blasted, though maybe not unusually so in Seoul on a weeknight. At dinner we were seated by a group of men with maybe a dozen empty liter bottles of beer on their table; we watched them wave down the proprietor for even more alcohol. “Wow,” I said, before going on to mix soju bombs for my companions. I sometimes describe Korea as the Ireland of East Asia; I’m not a huge drinker when I’m at home in the US, but the general ambience of Seoul shifts my habits.
As I chug hangover tea, I scroll through my phone, continuing to be baffled that no emergency alert has gone out. My cheeks are flushed and my head is buzzing, and I can’t tell how much of it is alcohol and how much of it is the pure surrealness of living under martial law. I text my brother and I text my cousin, asking if they’ve received an alert, asking them to ask their friends if they have. At 11:30PM I put on my coat and trundle off to the subway, a decision that is equal parts soju and commitment to the principles of journalism. I might as well be on the ground — even if I can’t make sense of what’s happening, the least I could do is witness it.
Cook has told a tale that delivers a measure of justice for some patients, while preserving the dreadful mystique spelled out on top of the “decorative rusty wrought iron fence” at the southeastern corner of First Avenue and 30th Street: B-E-L-L-E-V-U-E.