Where I've Been

This weekend I gave a speech on human rights at the UN.

Really!

But first, a stop at the Republic of Korea's permanent mission, with a lobby installation by one of my favorite video artists:



Then off to the UN, for real.

See?

The seminar was about Gwangju Diary and the Gwangju Uprising. (The Uprising is an official UNESCO Memory of the World.) We got in a lot of Korean news media, including one report which caught me on my phone.

I was told, moments before my talk, not to say the "M-word" (Marxism) or the "s-word" (socialism), so had to quickly rewrite my talk about human existence divorced from both state and market, which luckily happened to dovetail with the novel of Gwangju I'd just read, Human Acts by Han Kang. (So my phone came in handy.)

And I got to wear a simultaneous interpretation earcup!

Unfortunately, no matter how many times I pressed "NO" the UN remained a tool of Western imperialist interests.

The upside to all this is that Gwangju Diary's new publisher in perpetuity, the 5.18 Memorial Foundation, will soon make the book freely available to interested parties.