This is very cool. I love typewriters. If I had a fixed abode (as opposed to a storage unit and moving once or twice a year for the last decade), I would collect them, I think. And I like to think about “alternative” methods of painting and doing art, too. This is definitely a conceptual piece but it has a strange practicality. A chromatic typewriter by Tyree Callahan.
As an update to my previous post, I followed up with a co-worker regarding my confusion as to how "If there are a lot of boatmen, the boat goes up the mountain," can mean the same thing as "too many cooks spoil the broth."
I had been visualizing a group of men working together to get a boat up a mountain, which would, naturally, be a difficult thing, and therefore a positive accomplishment, unlike spoiling broth. Hence my confusion. But, in fact, it turns out taking a boat up a mountain isn't perceived as useful.
I'm going to offer a slightly altered translation that, I think, makes this more negative connotation more clear in English: "If there are a lot of boatmen, the boat ends up far from water."
This removes the seemingly positive implicatures of getting the boat "up" a mountain, which apparently aren't present in the Korean – that's because the "going up" thing is inherently viewed as positive in English, but there's no "upness" involved in the Korean – it's that "lative" case ending I was preoccupied with, in fact: it means "into the mountain" meaning nothing more than "inland" (since all of the "inland" in Korea is mountain, this makes sense.
OK. So that explains it.
