Day: June 24, 2011

Caveat: Summer, Damply

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

True summer in Korea means rain.  These broad fronts of humid, hot, overcast weather with lots of rain swarm up from the south and then just linger over the peninsula.  It's as if the tropics come to visit for a few months each year.  For someone who grew up on the Northern California coast, this is backwards in more than one way – rain is supposed to come from the northwest, and in winter, and be cold.  But rain is rain is rain.  I still like it.

Our current bout of it started two days ago.  Yesterday's and today's satellite pictures are almost identical.

[broken link! FIXME] Rain_html_9401893

[broken link! FIXME] Rain2_html_6c1a9f93

Caveat: 65) 모든 생명은 소통과 교감이 이루어진다는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다

Buddhism & Zen / The 108 / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that all life is achieved through communication and sympathy.”
This is #65 out of a series of [broken link! FIXME] 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).

…
63. [broken link! FIXME] 승가에 귀의하게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
        “I bow with a thankful heart and become converted to the [Buddha’s] Priesthood.”
64. [broken link! FIXME] 모든 생명은 하나로 연결되어있다는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that all life is connected as one.”
65. 모든 생명은 소통과 교감이 이루어진다는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.

I would read this sixty-fifth affirmation as:  “I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that all life is achieved through communication and sympathy.”
“Communication and sympathy” above is the subject of the verb achieve, while “all life” is a topic, and it’s hard to put that together with the lack of an object.  So I kind of messed around with the verb roles a little bit. 

Caveat: Alan Parsons Project – Eye in the Sky

Background Noise / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

What I'm listening to right now.

I remember buying this album on vinyl in 1982 when it was released, at a record store in Eureka during a weekend visiting my dad's house there.  It was not the first record I bought, but for some reason I remember the day I bought with weird clarity.  Why does music work that way, sometimes?

[broken link! FIXME] Eits_single If you want something profound about the symbolism of the song, I will leave you with this obscure philosophical reference:  it's about Orwell and the surveillance state (which I think was what inspired me to go ahead and buy the album despite the "soft rock" top-40 stigma surrounding it, which didn't necessarily impress me at age 17).  It seems weirdly prescient from where we sit now.  It makes me think of how Foucault deploys Bentham's panopticon concept as a metaphor.

The video, nevertheless, I concede is cheesy.  You have to concede that the concept of the music video was only a few years old at this point.

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