David J. Nemeth

~ I am a Lucky guy. How I got this way is no longer a mystery to me. Based on my personal experience I can highly advise this path to others in search of Luck: Strive to always be in the right place at the right time, facing the right direction, while doing the right thing -- and the Luck Wagon will come around. For example: Early January, 2013, was a time when the Luck Wagon swung by again to pick me up. On that memorable occasion Jeju World Wide Managing Editor Todd Thacker published an essay I wrote about my arriving by airplane to Cheju (nowadays Jeju) Island, as a Peace Corps Volunteer in February of 1973. Todd asked to see more short manuscripts from me mining the same nostalgic vein. His request and encouragement propelled me into a productive writing mood. Once I pried open that old crate of Peace Corps memories, so much direct and tangential material spewed forth there was no shutting the lid on it. For the entire year of 2013 I submitted an essay a week to total 52 essays. Around June or July of 2013 I began to imagine that my online weekly essays might eventually be revised into chapters for a book project. At the end of 2013 Todd committed to republishing the 2013 essays, again weekly, during 2014. He also kindly consolidated the 52 digital essay files as edited and published for JWW readers to one digital file, and sent that file to me. It is this file I have since massaged into a publishable book project and titled Jeju Island Rambling: Self-exile in Peace Corps, 1973-1974.

~ Luck begets Luck. It was certainly another Lucky Day for me back in 1971 when I decided to apply for the opportunity to become a United States Peace Corps Volunteer. This book describes some of the selective detail and outcome of that fortuitous decision. After reading my book you may agree that I am a Lucky guy.

~ My current researches continue to track from past to future along three broad avenues:

1) Cultural/ethnic geography, with emphases on those groups whose occupations and industries are perceived by outsiders as "shadow" (informal or underground) economies; for example, Gypsies (Romanies) and Travelers;

2) Asia, with emphases on South Korea and Jeju Island;

3) Philosophy and Methodology in Geography, which includes the history of geographic thought and current trends in the academic discipline.

Related to these general paths, I tend to promote the concepts of "enlightened underdevelopment" and "extreme [human] geography" in most of my published researches and in my classroom and online teaching. Many of the MA thesis projects I have supervised explored and elaborated these sorts of topics, concepts and issues. The titles some selected examples are:

"Between Nada and Nietzsche: Geographical Dimensions of Hemingway's 'Clean Well-Lighted Place';" "Geography: Undisciplined by Virtue of Her Relativism;" "My Search for William Bunge;" "Borderlands: A Poetic Hermeneutic on the Cultural Morphology of the Northern Irish Landscape;" "The Covered Staircases of Toledo;" "An Ethnography of the Egyptian Ghawazee;" "Irish Travelers Exposed: A Critique of the Toogood Case;" "Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills: The Architecture of Ideology in a Contested Space;" "Personal Reflections in Berlin's Built Environment: Ideology and Symbolism in the Government District;" "Relativism Within Geography;" "Rix's Bears;" "Secrets Beneath the Soil: A Mixed Methods Necrogeographic Investigation of Romany ("Gypsy") Memorial Sites;" "Tropical Africa and Generation Kalashnikov: the AK47's Role in Shaping an African Identity;" "Where the Sidewalk Ends (and Social Process Begins) : An Evaluation of New Urbanism and a Postmodern Proposal of Social Process Planning;" (and others).