I am happy to say that I've got A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall pretty down pat. I just played it again after a few days not and made it all the way through without reading or stopping, which started one of the more satisfying rounds of music I've had in a while. Sometimes you get in a mood that you just don't want to change, but all things have a right ending. I played a few songs in between - an old original that has never been better, free falling (for old times sake, one of the first songs I learned on guitar freshman year - I remember being corrected on the strumming of part of it but just not getting it at the time), Josh Ritter's Potter's Wheel (another hard one to remember, though not quite as bad as Dylan's), and finally, just playing around with the sounds of the guitar and coming up with something right and letting it naturally end. I remember once seeing a spiritual show - I was recruited to help out ushering through someone I met at work - in a giant church in west downtown-ish Portland, by that long park with the statue fountains. There was chanting in sanskrit and spiritual sing alongs to lines like 'there is so much magnificence...near the ocean...near the ocean...' and I think my favorite part was when the husband (of the husband and wife duo) started playing a Beatles song and the wife wasn't too happy about it. (They also had an amazing young Indian-flute player.) But they were big on letting their songs fade out into complete silence; there was no clapping to cover that moment. They went so far as to say that that was the point, or the best part, which they probably meant (it was something to do with the spiritual part, I suppose). All this to say it is nice to play music alone and almost unheard so you can sustain the mood even after.
I wanted to follow up the last post about the Hard Rain with a quote from Nietzsche about prophetic men. Why? A lot of what I like about that song is its almost biblical feeling of prophecy - the young man comes home with mysterious insights which are portents to him of a certain kind of future. There's something powerful in prophecy, or at least in the ability to appear prophetic, which makes it something desirable - like, ooh, I would like to be like that. I'd like to write that kind of song, I'd like to make that kind of work of art (예술품), I'd like to be that kind of person. Enter Nietzsche with a response to this kind of feeling that arises in the admiring spectator. The passage is from the Gay Science (316):
Prophetic men.--You have no feeling for the fact that prophetic men are men who suffer a great deal: you merely suppose that they have been granted a beautiful "gift," and you would even like to have it yourself. But I shall express myself in a parable. How much may animals suffer from the electricity of the air and clouds! We see how some species have a prophetic faculty regarding the weather; monkeys, for example (as may be observed even in Europe, and not only in zoos--namely, on Gibraltar). But we do not heed that it is their pains that make them prophets. When a strong positive electrical charge, under the influence of an approaching cloud that is as yet far from visible, suddenly changes into negative electricity, these animals behave as if an enemy were drawing near and prepare for defense or escape; most often they try to hide: they do not understand bad weather as a kind of weather but as an enemy whose hand they already feel.
I like this passage - it's a good reprimand, and it is somehow comforting to think that prophetic men had to suffer for their 'gift' and didn't just get a handout in it - it makes the world seem both more expansive (there are whole feelings we don't know) and more just (if they had to suffer, they earned it). I also like the parable he uses to illustrate it just in itself - the idea that animals can predict the weather because they feel the pain from it, they feel it as an enemy - a good imaginative leap on N's part (more feelings we have no idea of), and dramatically-written. I'm curious about the pseudo-scientific reasoning he gives for it - a cloud's strong positive electrical charge suddenly changing to electricity to cause animal pain? Is that explanation really dated or naive or does something along those lines happen? (I clearly know no science.) And finally, I like that there actually are monkeys in Gibraltar, in England, and that Nietzsche took the trouble to point out that he knew this. I wonder, did he actually go there to look at the monkeys? Imagine that scene, complete with the spectacles and mustache. Or, as is more likely (and less funny), did he just hear an account of the monkey-viewing from an acquaintance or friend? Finally, telling us at the beginning of the passage that we "have no feeling for that fact that" prophetic men suffer humanizes them and is a call for us to feel compassion for them rather than applaud them as a phenomenon. I remember somewhere else in Nietzsche's corpus (I'm not going to bother finding out where) he characterizes the artist or poet more generally as one who suffers and tries to communicate his pain, only to be met by cheers and enthusiasm for it. It's an idea I've come across before - take one of Dylan's later great albums, Blood On the Tracks - he names it that for a reason. Those are some of the most pain-filled songs I know. "You're a Big Girl Now" "If You See Her Say Hello" and "Buckets of Rain," for instance. And a more living case - I once worked at a show for a singer-songwriter named Ellis, who was one of the most engaging performers in that between songs, she talked a lot and laughed like a dork in a way that made people happy and really like her. Her audience loved her, anyway. During the show, after a round of making everybody laugh, she said that she was so surprised at a show earlier that week when an audience member approached her and asked her how she could be so happy all the time. She didn't know she appeared that way, and told that girl something like, "Happy? Are you kidding? I was crying my eyes out an hour ago!" And everybody, her included, laughed about that one too.
Anyway, it's all well and good to wish to be prophetic, wish to be an artist, wish to be profound, what have you. But it's also good to recognize that in order to avoid being fake or superficial about it, to avoid pursuing an image of it (imagining yourself from an audience's point of view), going with this wish is also being okay with being unhappy for a lot of it. Maybe one does not want to suffer that much for it, maybe one is not strong enough to do so, and there's something to be said for that, too.
But the best part was about the monkeys on Gibraltar. It cracks me up that Nietzsche made a point of that. Apparently they're called Barbary Macaques, they don't have tails, and it is theoretically punishable by law to feed them.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Monday, December 15, 2008
Hard Rain
I want to memorize the lyrics to A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall so I can play the song without looking them up on the computer. It's such a fun song to play, I promise. I just came across a cover of it by Jason Mraz (track 10 here), and though he plays well overall I don't like it. He does things like throw in "you bet it's a hard rain" or "I met a man who was wounded in love 'til I met another man who was wounded in hatred", showing that he doesn't have the proper respect for the lyrics - he just adds in words as filler that either add nothing to the meaning or changes it in a dumb way (what does it mean to meet someone until you meet someone else?). He also changes the guitar and makes slight changes in vocal rhythm, and the guitar is nice and more pretty-sounding, but one of my favorite things about playing the song is the relentless 3/4 rhythm of it - the strumming goes 1 2 3&1 2 3&1 2 3&1 2 3& (you get the idea) and that rhythmic effect is one of the two main aspects of the song that gives it its hypnotic effect. The other is the held-back quality of the lyrics - there seems to be a lot behind each line but we're not given enough to easily figure out what they mean. A series of cryptic, non-rhyming lines is usually a recipe for bad lyrics, but this song is saved by two things - its form, which gives it some degree of structure and coherence, and the lines themselves, which are both poetic and all fit together in a certain mood if nothing else.
I recently read an essay by Phillip Pullman, the author of the Golden Compass, about the writing of Richard Dawkins, in which he observes that a crucial feature of good writing is to maintain a sense of the bigger picture in the readers. Part of the reason Lord of the Rings is so successful, according to Pullman, is that we know that everything that happens works towards a bigger, simple goal - Frodo has the drop the Ring of Power into Mount Doom and destroy it. Pullman thinks Dawkins is good at providing a big picture view like this in his scientific writing. (It's also a big part of Nietzsche's appeal - his claim to thoughts that 'span millenia' and make you feel as if you understand the basic direction of the Western tradition since the Ancient Greeks.) I think the Dylan song here is held together by a bigger picture as well, though it's kind of hard to articulate. We're listening to a dialogue and can sense the situation - a young traveler has just returned and is being asked about his journey by someone older who seems to know, love and understand him: calling the traveler "my darling young one" repeatedly and asking a follow up question after each answer, in increasing urgency - oh, where have you been? what did you see? what did you hear? who did you meet? And the son answers each time in such a way that his listener understands him but we only get a sense of what the listener is hearing. The son predicts some momentous happening beyond our comprehension, some disaster, some hard time, which leads the listener to ask the hardest question of all - what'll you do now, with your knowledge? And without a glitch in the rhythm, this elicits the final verse, which is pretty much heroic. And it's the last line before the refrain that gets me as I'm trying to play it, knowing that I don't know the lyrics or understand them but I'm warbling it anyway - "and I'll know my song well before I start singing." That's why I'd like to memorize the song, repeat it, and take the time to try to understand it, all just so I can really play it. That's also why I don't like it when someone musically talented like Jason Mraz plays it and is just singing words and making everything sound soft and emotional and pretty. He gets this last line slightly wrong and then repeats it (for emphasis of its significance, which he doesn't understand), saying "I'll know my songs well before I start singing," as if Dylan is just talking about making sure he's rehearsed his set list enough.
I guess the important thing that holds together the son's report on his journeys is that it seems like he was changed by everything he saw. A lot of it is charged with disillusionment and compassion, noticing the injustices, the outcasts, the unfairness of life among ignorance of it - obviously with "I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'; I heard the song of a poet who died in a gutter; I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley". But it seems like an honest and not all that happy look at life in its human complexities, one that necessitates the conclusion that we're up to a hard time and a challenge, which is what makes the last verse as inspiring as it is: he'll go straight to the heart of it, the worst of it, in order to reflect it to all of us and bring it out, and I think that's what he means by the song he has to know well, which why I think it misunderstands him to carelessly pluralize it.
Let us know if you have any thoughts on the song, the lyrics, the cover, any specific literary references you think he may be making, the state of the world, or whatever. I guess it's just worth mentioning at the end here though that the question and answer format of the song is based on an old ballad called Lord Randall, published by Francis James Child, and in that song the son character is telling his mother about being poisoned.
UPDATE: video clips from Christmas Day (they're cut off pretty suddenly).
I recently read an essay by Phillip Pullman, the author of the Golden Compass, about the writing of Richard Dawkins, in which he observes that a crucial feature of good writing is to maintain a sense of the bigger picture in the readers. Part of the reason Lord of the Rings is so successful, according to Pullman, is that we know that everything that happens works towards a bigger, simple goal - Frodo has the drop the Ring of Power into Mount Doom and destroy it. Pullman thinks Dawkins is good at providing a big picture view like this in his scientific writing. (It's also a big part of Nietzsche's appeal - his claim to thoughts that 'span millenia' and make you feel as if you understand the basic direction of the Western tradition since the Ancient Greeks.) I think the Dylan song here is held together by a bigger picture as well, though it's kind of hard to articulate. We're listening to a dialogue and can sense the situation - a young traveler has just returned and is being asked about his journey by someone older who seems to know, love and understand him: calling the traveler "my darling young one" repeatedly and asking a follow up question after each answer, in increasing urgency - oh, where have you been? what did you see? what did you hear? who did you meet? And the son answers each time in such a way that his listener understands him but we only get a sense of what the listener is hearing. The son predicts some momentous happening beyond our comprehension, some disaster, some hard time, which leads the listener to ask the hardest question of all - what'll you do now, with your knowledge? And without a glitch in the rhythm, this elicits the final verse, which is pretty much heroic. And it's the last line before the refrain that gets me as I'm trying to play it, knowing that I don't know the lyrics or understand them but I'm warbling it anyway - "and I'll know my song well before I start singing." That's why I'd like to memorize the song, repeat it, and take the time to try to understand it, all just so I can really play it. That's also why I don't like it when someone musically talented like Jason Mraz plays it and is just singing words and making everything sound soft and emotional and pretty. He gets this last line slightly wrong and then repeats it (for emphasis of its significance, which he doesn't understand), saying "I'll know my songs well before I start singing," as if Dylan is just talking about making sure he's rehearsed his set list enough.
I guess the important thing that holds together the son's report on his journeys is that it seems like he was changed by everything he saw. A lot of it is charged with disillusionment and compassion, noticing the injustices, the outcasts, the unfairness of life among ignorance of it - obviously with "I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'; I heard the song of a poet who died in a gutter; I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley". But it seems like an honest and not all that happy look at life in its human complexities, one that necessitates the conclusion that we're up to a hard time and a challenge, which is what makes the last verse as inspiring as it is: he'll go straight to the heart of it, the worst of it, in order to reflect it to all of us and bring it out, and I think that's what he means by the song he has to know well, which why I think it misunderstands him to carelessly pluralize it.
Let us know if you have any thoughts on the song, the lyrics, the cover, any specific literary references you think he may be making, the state of the world, or whatever. I guess it's just worth mentioning at the end here though that the question and answer format of the song is based on an old ballad called Lord Randall, published by Francis James Child, and in that song the son character is telling his mother about being poisoned.
UPDATE: video clips from Christmas Day (they're cut off pretty suddenly).
Monday, December 8, 2008
Coming Home
Hello everybody! I admit I've been lax on the blog posts lately, but many things have been happening. Since my last post, I've flown from Korea via Bay Area back to Portland Oregon, and from there down to my country home in Roseburg to recover from jet lag.
There is a part of me that would like to be multilingual and international - this part wants me to go back to Korea for a long time and really get a grip of the language; it also makes me want to spend at least a year in Germany in order to rescue the language skills I learned in college. How great it'd be to move between those three languages - English, German, and Korean - I'd feel quite cool. But another part of me recognizes that that sounds like too much effort. It's a big relief being back in my home state where I understand the culture and the store signs, street signs, newspapers, and magazines are all in my native language. There's a strain to being a foreigner, and sometimes it doesn't seem like a bad idea to save your travel money and stay home.
Oregon is beautiful, too. As obvious as this may seem, it's striking, especially from the air as the plane starts coming down, that there are a lot of trees. Also, the hills are beautiful this time of year with all the soft grays of the oaks. Oregon may not have dazzling fall colors, but the subtlety of the colors in winter are awesome. Though I don't have any winter photos of Oregon right now (my camera having been on my Korean phone), here a few late summer pictures of my state from before I left.
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There is a part of me that would like to be multilingual and international - this part wants me to go back to Korea for a long time and really get a grip of the language; it also makes me want to spend at least a year in Germany in order to rescue the language skills I learned in college. How great it'd be to move between those three languages - English, German, and Korean - I'd feel quite cool. But another part of me recognizes that that sounds like too much effort. It's a big relief being back in my home state where I understand the culture and the store signs, street signs, newspapers, and magazines are all in my native language. There's a strain to being a foreigner, and sometimes it doesn't seem like a bad idea to save your travel money and stay home.
Oregon is beautiful, too. As obvious as this may seem, it's striking, especially from the air as the plane starts coming down, that there are a lot of trees. Also, the hills are beautiful this time of year with all the soft grays of the oaks. Oregon may not have dazzling fall colors, but the subtlety of the colors in winter are awesome. Though I don't have any winter photos of Oregon right now (my camera having been on my Korean phone), here a few late summer pictures of my state from before I left.
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Saturday, November 29, 2008
English in Korean
Here's a list of Korean words that have been adopted from English. It may be good practice with alphabet to sound them out and then try to guess what they mean. The answers are below.
1. 마트
2. 센터
3. 테레비존
4. 하우스
5. 피아노
6. 바나나
7. 컴퓨터
8. 소파
9. 기타
10.버스
11.스피커
12.마이크
13.라디오
14.커피
15.포크
16.컵
17.브라드 피트
18.쿠션
19.드럼
20.카페트
21.테이블
22.아파트
23.에어컨
24.스파게티
25.스테이크
26.샐러드
27.토마토
1. Mart (a lot of small convenience stores have names that end in this)
2. Center
3. Television
4. House
5. Piano
6. Banana
7. Computer
8. Sofa
9. Guitar
10.Bus
11.Speaker
12.Mike
13.Radio
14.Coffee
15.Fork
16.Cup
17.Brad Pitt
18.Cushion
19.Drum
20.Carpet
21.Table
22.Apart (short for apartment)
23.Air Con (short for air conditioner)
24.Spaghetti
25.Steak
26.Salad
27.Tomato
Koreans call these kind of words 외래어, which means words from foreign countries. There are a ton of these in Korean, and not only adopted from English. For example, 아바이트 is adapted from the German Arbeit, which means work, and in Korean it refers to the kind of work you'd do as a part-time job, like working in a cafe. And of course there are a huge number of words in Korean that are derived from Chinese, including the number system used to count days and currency, that have become a major part of the language. These are called 'sino-Korean' words. This means that knowing Chinese would be really helpful in understanding Korean, kind of like Latin would be useful in learning English, but it seems more directly.
Anyway, this list should give you a chance to practice sounding out han-gul letters as well as a sense of what sounds are lacking in Korean and how other western words and names are likely to be adapted into Korean. I can continue to add to the list as time goes on.
1. 마트
2. 센터
3. 테레비존
4. 하우스
5. 피아노
6. 바나나
7. 컴퓨터
8. 소파
9. 기타
10.버스
11.스피커
12.마이크
13.라디오
14.커피
15.포크
16.컵
17.브라드 피트
18.쿠션
19.드럼
20.카페트
21.테이블
22.아파트
23.에어컨
24.스파게티
25.스테이크
26.샐러드
27.토마토
1. Mart (a lot of small convenience stores have names that end in this)
2. Center
3. Television
4. House
5. Piano
6. Banana
7. Computer
8. Sofa
9. Guitar
10.Bus
11.Speaker
12.Mike
13.Radio
14.Coffee
15.Fork
16.Cup
17.Brad Pitt
18.Cushion
19.Drum
20.Carpet
21.Table
22.Apart (short for apartment)
23.Air Con (short for air conditioner)
24.Spaghetti
25.Steak
26.Salad
27.Tomato
Koreans call these kind of words 외래어, which means words from foreign countries. There are a ton of these in Korean, and not only adopted from English. For example, 아바이트 is adapted from the German Arbeit, which means work, and in Korean it refers to the kind of work you'd do as a part-time job, like working in a cafe. And of course there are a huge number of words in Korean that are derived from Chinese, including the number system used to count days and currency, that have become a major part of the language. These are called 'sino-Korean' words. This means that knowing Chinese would be really helpful in understanding Korean, kind of like Latin would be useful in learning English, but it seems more directly.
Anyway, this list should give you a chance to practice sounding out han-gul letters as well as a sense of what sounds are lacking in Korean and how other western words and names are likely to be adapted into Korean. I can continue to add to the list as time goes on.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Names of Korean Letters
In my last post about Korean, I introduced the Korean consonants. Now it seems like a good idea to have a quick post about what those are called so we can talk about them. Most of them are pretty regular so it's easiest to just list them and you can very easily see the pattern. The form of my presentation will be consonant: consonant's name.
ㄴ: 니은 nee-eun
ㄹ: 리을 ree-eul
ㅁ: 미음 mee-eum
ㅂ: 비읍 bee-eup
ㅇ: 이응 ee-eung
ㅈ: 지읒 jee-eut
ㅊ: 치읓 chee-eut
ㅋ: 키읔 khee-euk
ㅌ: 티읕 tee-eut
ㅍ: 피읖 pee-eup
ㅎ: 히읗 hee-eut
That's right, the basic form of the name of a consonant is two syllables: that consonant plus ㅣ and then that consonant ending 으. [I've romanized ㅡ as "eu" for lack of a better way, and that's how they do it on the subway system for stops like 대흥 (Dae-Heung)].
There are a few irregular verb names:
ㄱ: 기역 gee-yuk
ㄷ: 디귿 dee-geut (diggit)
ㅅ: 시옷 shee-oat
The English glosses are more accurate if you say them quickly rather than drawing out each syllable.
Finally, there are the double consonants, and for these, you just add the word 쌍 (meaning 'double') in front of their single counterparts.
ㄲ: 쌍기역 ssang gee-yuk
ㄸ: 쌍디귿 ssang dee-geut
ㅃ: 쌍비읍 ssang bee-eup
ㅆ: 쌍시옷 ssang shee-oat
ㅉ: 쌍지읒 ssang jee-eut
That takes care of the consonants. Be sure to look at the last post on consonants to make sure you're pronouncing them correctly.
The names of the vowels are much easier than the consonants. To name a vowel, you just make its sound, so the name of ㅏ is just "ah", the name of ㅜ is "ooh", and so on.
Now that you know the names of the letters, you can verbally communicate how a word is spelled in Korean. So 강 (river) is spelled "gee-uk, ah, ee-eung". This should be moderately useful if you're learning new Korean words verbally and want to know how they're spelled to help you remember.
This post was so easy that I wrote it while drunk. :)
ㄴ: 니은 nee-eun
ㄹ: 리을 ree-eul
ㅁ: 미음 mee-eum
ㅂ: 비읍 bee-eup
ㅇ: 이응 ee-eung
ㅈ: 지읒 jee-eut
ㅊ: 치읓 chee-eut
ㅋ: 키읔 khee-euk
ㅌ: 티읕 tee-eut
ㅍ: 피읖 pee-eup
ㅎ: 히읗 hee-eut
That's right, the basic form of the name of a consonant is two syllables: that consonant plus ㅣ and then that consonant ending 으. [I've romanized ㅡ as "eu" for lack of a better way, and that's how they do it on the subway system for stops like 대흥 (Dae-Heung)].
There are a few irregular verb names:
ㄱ: 기역 gee-yuk
ㄷ: 디귿 dee-geut (diggit)
ㅅ: 시옷 shee-oat
The English glosses are more accurate if you say them quickly rather than drawing out each syllable.
Finally, there are the double consonants, and for these, you just add the word 쌍 (meaning 'double') in front of their single counterparts.
ㄲ: 쌍기역 ssang gee-yuk
ㄸ: 쌍디귿 ssang dee-geut
ㅃ: 쌍비읍 ssang bee-eup
ㅆ: 쌍시옷 ssang shee-oat
ㅉ: 쌍지읒 ssang jee-eut
That takes care of the consonants. Be sure to look at the last post on consonants to make sure you're pronouncing them correctly.
The names of the vowels are much easier than the consonants. To name a vowel, you just make its sound, so the name of ㅏ is just "ah", the name of ㅜ is "ooh", and so on.
Now that you know the names of the letters, you can verbally communicate how a word is spelled in Korean. So 강 (river) is spelled "gee-uk, ah, ee-eung". This should be moderately useful if you're learning new Korean words verbally and want to know how they're spelled to help you remember.
This post was so easy that I wrote it while drunk. :)
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Some Recent Photographs
It's been a while since my last post (I think perhaps the longest stretch since this blog's inception) so I want a quick post to catch up. Of course, I have quite a few ideas in the works but not the time to do them, and I may let them die for fresher thoughts.
Here are a few mood pictures from my journey home today from work. The first is near Sinchon station in Seoul; the others are closer to where I live.
Somehow on the bus ride home I was fascinated both by light and by lines. It is ridiculous how many surfaces reflect the many lights of a moving city and the interior of a full bus at night, and how much that light can shift and change with such detail. In this picture I like the dominance of the lines over the distant crowd of small people, the unidentifiable white splot (new word, somewhere between spot and splotch) on the first stripe, and the perspective provided by the lines.
I also thought of something I was told once, that psychologists have shown that lines do not exist out there in the world but are made by our brains. The person who told me this was incredulous about it; I'm still not sure precisely what it means. (What would it mean for lines to be "out there" in the world?) But we certainly make plentiful use of guiding lines in cities. Sometime during the ride, however, it started raining softly and stopped again, so that when I disembarked everything had more of a haze to it. The streets were also shining.
There is a book by a Proust scholar and philosopher called the Art of Travel in which he explains the appeal of lonely night-time scenes of transitional places like roads, train-cars, and hotels using the art of the Edward Hopper, whose paintings invite you to wonder about the solitary figures they depict. Most of his paintings are in transitional travel places that many would see as mundane; for instance, a gas station, an automat, and a hotel room. The man in the first picture passed me walking up the hill in this late night rainy scenery with a business suit and briefcase. It was probably the last leg of his day's journey from his apartment to work and back again, a period of involuntary introspection and quiet when there is nothing to do but put one foot patiently in from of the other to bring himself home. Who knows what is going through his mind - something in Korean, most likely. ;)
Photography is one of the most introspective mediums, but I don't pretend to be an artist in it. The pictures as shown here are as high quality as they're going to get; they were taken on a whim with my cell phone. I also noticed that the pictures don't end up framed as they look on the phone's screen when I try to take the picture, so when I get a picture I like it is usually pure luck. This last one is most like that; I just stuck the phone out of the window of a moving car this weekend during my trip to the southern coast of Korea. I was really lucky to get some of the Korean letters painted on the other lane, which is one of my favorite parts of the picture. I believe those are rice fields and a small bridge in the background.
And we'll end with some pictures near the ocean; I will soon be crossing that beast again at 30000 feet, though to the east, not in this direction, which is south. Those are islands that you see in the distance in the first one. There are quite a few of them in that direction, and many are developed just as the mainland.
Goodnight.
Here are a few mood pictures from my journey home today from work. The first is near Sinchon station in Seoul; the others are closer to where I live.
Somehow on the bus ride home I was fascinated both by light and by lines. It is ridiculous how many surfaces reflect the many lights of a moving city and the interior of a full bus at night, and how much that light can shift and change with such detail. In this picture I like the dominance of the lines over the distant crowd of small people, the unidentifiable white splot (new word, somewhere between spot and splotch) on the first stripe, and the perspective provided by the lines.
I also thought of something I was told once, that psychologists have shown that lines do not exist out there in the world but are made by our brains. The person who told me this was incredulous about it; I'm still not sure precisely what it means. (What would it mean for lines to be "out there" in the world?) But we certainly make plentiful use of guiding lines in cities. Sometime during the ride, however, it started raining softly and stopped again, so that when I disembarked everything had more of a haze to it. The streets were also shining.
There is a book by a Proust scholar and philosopher called the Art of Travel in which he explains the appeal of lonely night-time scenes of transitional places like roads, train-cars, and hotels using the art of the Edward Hopper, whose paintings invite you to wonder about the solitary figures they depict. Most of his paintings are in transitional travel places that many would see as mundane; for instance, a gas station, an automat, and a hotel room. The man in the first picture passed me walking up the hill in this late night rainy scenery with a business suit and briefcase. It was probably the last leg of his day's journey from his apartment to work and back again, a period of involuntary introspection and quiet when there is nothing to do but put one foot patiently in from of the other to bring himself home. Who knows what is going through his mind - something in Korean, most likely. ;)
Photography is one of the most introspective mediums, but I don't pretend to be an artist in it. The pictures as shown here are as high quality as they're going to get; they were taken on a whim with my cell phone. I also noticed that the pictures don't end up framed as they look on the phone's screen when I try to take the picture, so when I get a picture I like it is usually pure luck. This last one is most like that; I just stuck the phone out of the window of a moving car this weekend during my trip to the southern coast of Korea. I was really lucky to get some of the Korean letters painted on the other lane, which is one of my favorite parts of the picture. I believe those are rice fields and a small bridge in the background.
And we'll end with some pictures near the ocean; I will soon be crossing that beast again at 30000 feet, though to the east, not in this direction, which is south. Those are islands that you see in the distance in the first one. There are quite a few of them in that direction, and many are developed just as the mainland.
Goodnight.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Stay Home
I want to share a poem by Wendell Berry. It is the first one of his collection called "A Part", published in 1980. I have a copy of it that was given to my dad from his professor as a wedding present. The poem is called "Stay Home".
Stay Home
I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man's life
I am at home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.
I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.
Does this poem have any resonance with you? Berry is really a poet of the country, a farmer-poet who loves the land. Right now I am also reading a book by him called Andy Catlett: Early Travels, in which a grandfatherly voice narrates a trip he took as a nine year old boy to visit his grandparents in the fictional town of Port William. It is all about the old ways retreating under the advance of modernity, and Berry seems to me an intelligent advocate of simple conservatism - preserving a known good and settled way of life - without any of the intolerant social views associated with that term.
I remember being really impressed with an article of his that appeared in Harper's earlier in the year. It was called "Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits", a cry for us to realize and live within our limits, for example in natural resources like oil. He wants us to realize that limits are not confinements but allow for fullness of feeling, elegance, and that within the limits of, say, a small farm or a short poem, there can be inexhaustible lessons. He wants us to recognize that we live within certain self-imposed limits in society and in personal relationships - in love, in family for instance - and that our happiness and freedom lie more in this voluntary self-restraint than in the absence of any obligations or barriers to our desires.
I like this poem partly because the agrarian message does resonate a little with me. That lifestyle sometimes seems more simple, more fulfilling, more physical, more real. But I mainly like it for the sentiment of its refrain: "Don't come with me. You stay home too." While it pulls you in to his love of the country, it also pushes you away and tells you or reminds you the importance of staying with what you love.
It's interesting in this context to see how farming is treated by Thoreau. I don't know if there can be a bigger contrast. He seems to think the farmers he sees are stuck with it to their great misfortune, and it's only ignorance that keeps them toiling away:
I think both Thoreau and Berry value nature in some sense, but it is very different between the two of them. Berry wants to participate in the land responsibly, to work in it and feel it. While Thoreau wants more to be able to wander through it freely, observe it, and let it inspire him and be a mirror for his exploration of himself. His is a more leisurely appreciation.
In the future I hope to have a post on the contrasting ideas of freedom in Berry and Thoreau - for Berry, living within the limits of place, relationships, and society and indeed seeing them as voluntary self-restraints, and then finding the inexhaustible meaning within those; for Thoreau, getting away from all relationships and obligations and experiencing true leisure and self-exploration. I'll maybe approach it through sociology and bring Nietzsche in for commentary. But right now Berry's attitude seems more mature to me, whereas Thoreau's is more extreme, Romantic, self-absorbed, and childish. It reminds me a little of how he is quoted in Into the Wild. Because of this current leaning, I'll let Mr. Berry of Kentucky have the last word, though it's not one that has to do with this particular topic. This poem is from later in that same collection, and it is called "Woods".
Woods
I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.
I like that poem, too. I'd be interested in any comments about these poems, whether you like them or don't get anything from them, as well as anything about the limits/restraints/freedom issues that I mentioned that might be relevant to a future post.
Stay Home
I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man's life
I am at home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.
I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.
Does this poem have any resonance with you? Berry is really a poet of the country, a farmer-poet who loves the land. Right now I am also reading a book by him called Andy Catlett: Early Travels, in which a grandfatherly voice narrates a trip he took as a nine year old boy to visit his grandparents in the fictional town of Port William. It is all about the old ways retreating under the advance of modernity, and Berry seems to me an intelligent advocate of simple conservatism - preserving a known good and settled way of life - without any of the intolerant social views associated with that term.
I remember being really impressed with an article of his that appeared in Harper's earlier in the year. It was called "Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits", a cry for us to realize and live within our limits, for example in natural resources like oil. He wants us to realize that limits are not confinements but allow for fullness of feeling, elegance, and that within the limits of, say, a small farm or a short poem, there can be inexhaustible lessons. He wants us to recognize that we live within certain self-imposed limits in society and in personal relationships - in love, in family for instance - and that our happiness and freedom lie more in this voluntary self-restraint than in the absence of any obligations or barriers to our desires.
I like this poem partly because the agrarian message does resonate a little with me. That lifestyle sometimes seems more simple, more fulfilling, more physical, more real. But I mainly like it for the sentiment of its refrain: "Don't come with me. You stay home too." While it pulls you in to his love of the country, it also pushes you away and tells you or reminds you the importance of staying with what you love.
It's interesting in this context to see how farming is treated by Thoreau. I don't know if there can be a bigger contrast. He seems to think the farmers he sees are stuck with it to their great misfortune, and it's only ignorance that keeps them toiling away:
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot!...But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and theives break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.
I think both Thoreau and Berry value nature in some sense, but it is very different between the two of them. Berry wants to participate in the land responsibly, to work in it and feel it. While Thoreau wants more to be able to wander through it freely, observe it, and let it inspire him and be a mirror for his exploration of himself. His is a more leisurely appreciation.
In the future I hope to have a post on the contrasting ideas of freedom in Berry and Thoreau - for Berry, living within the limits of place, relationships, and society and indeed seeing them as voluntary self-restraints, and then finding the inexhaustible meaning within those; for Thoreau, getting away from all relationships and obligations and experiencing true leisure and self-exploration. I'll maybe approach it through sociology and bring Nietzsche in for commentary. But right now Berry's attitude seems more mature to me, whereas Thoreau's is more extreme, Romantic, self-absorbed, and childish. It reminds me a little of how he is quoted in Into the Wild. Because of this current leaning, I'll let Mr. Berry of Kentucky have the last word, though it's not one that has to do with this particular topic. This poem is from later in that same collection, and it is called "Woods".
Woods
I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.
I like that poem, too. I'd be interested in any comments about these poems, whether you like them or don't get anything from them, as well as anything about the limits/restraints/freedom issues that I mentioned that might be relevant to a future post.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Korean Consonants
In my first post about Korean I introduced four consonants: ㄱ, ㅇ, ㄴ, and ㅈ. I explained the first two in some length already; the last two are just [n] and [j] sounds, respectively. This post I want to introduce some more consonants and talk about consonant symmetry. Korean consonants are related in such a way that make them easy to remember.
The Korean alphabet was invented by King Sejong the Great, the fourth king of Korea's Joseon Dynasty as a way of transcribing the common speech of the people. At the time, the class of literate elite used Chinese characters. The project was completed in December of 1443 or January of 1444 and published with an explanatory manual in 1446, five years before Christopher Columbus was born, around the time harpsichords were being invented in Europe. Sejong organized the consonants by place of articulation and manner of articulation and tried to model the characters on how the lips, mouth, or tongue looked in making that sound. The manners of articulation included plain, aspirated, and tense, and these are what we'll look at in this post.
Plain consonants:
ㄱ [g], ㄷ [d], ㅂ [b], ㅈ [j], & ㅅ [s].
The first four of these have corresponding aspirated versions: consonants that are articulated in the same place but are said with a puff of air.
Aspirated consonants:
ㅋ [k], ㅌ [t], ㅍ [p], ㅊ [ch]
The English letters in brackets are not exact, just approximates to give you an idea. Sometimes ㄷ is romanized as a [t] rather than a [d] and the ㅂ as a [p] instead of a [b], but this way of romanizing makes the aspiration part more clear. Just remember that the aspirated versions are said with an added puff of air.
Finally, there are 'tense' or double consonants, which are like the plain ones but are said with more muscle tension:
ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅉ ㅆ.
So for our symmetric consonants, we have:
ㄱ ㄷ ㅂ ㅈ ㅅ (plain)
ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅊ -- (aspirated)
ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅉ ㅆ (tense)
The consonants in each column all of the same place of articulation and are based on the same basic character, which is meant to reflect that place of articulation.
ㄱ, ㅋ, & ㄲ are velar, and ㄱ is meant to show the back of the tongue touching the soft palate of a left-facing speaker.
ㄷ, ㅌ, & ㄸ are alveolar, and they are actually based off of the nasal consonant with this place of articulation, ㄴ, which shows the tip of the tongue at the ridge behind teeth of a left-facing speaker. (Both of these examples were in my first Korean post).
ㅂ, ㅍ, & ㅃ are labial, and they are based off of the nasal labial [m] sound, ㅁ, which is an abstract representation of the lips or the outline of the mouth.
The remaining five are all dental, and are based off of the character ㅅ, which is an abstract representation of a tooth.
I've already introduced ㅇ, and since there are only two more consonants after that I might as well finish it out. As a reminder, ㅇ has no value and is kind of a place holder when it appears as an initial consonant. As a bottom, syllable final consonant (or pach'im, as they call it), it has a [ng] sound as in sing. ㅎ is an [h] sound, and I suppose it can be thought of as the aspirated version of the place-holder ㅇ, though that's just out of my own head. Then there is ㄹ, and I'm quite honestly not sure how it fits into this. I'd have to do some research on it. It is written as if it is a combination of ㄱ on top and ㄷ on the bottom, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with its sounds. Like ㅇ, its sound changes depending on whether it appears as an initial consonant or as a pach'im. As an initial consonant, the sound is somewhere between [l] and [r], most similar to the flapped r of Spanish. I think it's actually misleading to gloss this as an r sound because the tongue actually makes contact with the ridge behind the teeth, so especially when it comes between syllables it sounds to me more like a "d". So for example, in Korean, head is 머리, which sounds more like "muh-dee" to me than "muh-ree". When ㄹ appears as a pach'im, as in 물 (water), it sounds like [ll] as in full. So 물 is pronounced "mool". My only guess as to the relation of how it written and how it sounds is that (ignoring the ㄱ on top), it seems to be based off the ㄴ character, like ㄷ, and it seems to have that same alveolar place of pronunciation. To get the more authentic answer, I suppose you'd do best to research what King Sejong actually said about the character in his explanatory manual well over 500 years ago. Hopefully there's a translation, because I imagine it would have had to have been written using Chinese characters. Incidentally, how about a picture of me with a statue of King Sejong? eh? eh?
Some final notes. You already know how ㅇ and ㄹ sound as pach'im. ㅁ and ㄴ sound exactly the same whether initial or pach'im. As a rule for the rest of the consonants, you don't release the sound when they appear as pach'im. To get what I mean, say "Bob", then say it again but this time keep your lips together at the end. That's how it should sound in Korean. This means that ㅂ & ㅍ sound exactly the same when they come at the end of a syllable, as do ㄱ, ㅋ, & ㄲ (for some reason, the only tense consonants that appear as pach'im seem to be ㄲ and ㅆ; I never see ㅃ, ㅉ, or ㄸ used as pach'im). Finally, ㄷ, ㅌ, ㅅ, ㅆ, ㅈ, ㅊ, and ㅎ all sound the same as pach'im: the sound is stopped but not released at the ridge behind the teeth (it can still make a difference which letter is used, but I'll save that for another post). And lastly: there's no separate character for [sh] in Korean, but sometimes ㅅ sounds like [sh] rather than just [s]. Basically, whenever it is followed by an ㅣ vowel, it takes on some of the palatization of the "ee" sound and sounds more like [sh].
With that, I'll leave you with the list of Korean consonants, along with their English approximates, in their alphabetical order. The tense double consonants don't appear here because they begin few enough words that those words are just added to the end of the section of the plain letters. For instance, you can find ㄲ words at the end of the ㄱ section.
So here you are. The Korean consonants:
ㄱ - "g"/"k"
ㄴ - "n"
ㄷ - "d"/"t"
ㄹ - initial: a flapped "r", pach'im: "ll"
ㅁ - "m"
ㅂ - "b"/"p"
ㅅ - "s"/"sh"
ㅇ - initial: no value, pach'im: "ng"
ㅈ - "j"
ㅊ - "ch"
ㅋ - "k"
ㅌ - "t"
ㅎ - "h"
(You can see all 3 posts about Korean so far by clicking the 'Korean' tag below.)
The Korean alphabet was invented by King Sejong the Great, the fourth king of Korea's Joseon Dynasty as a way of transcribing the common speech of the people. At the time, the class of literate elite used Chinese characters. The project was completed in December of 1443 or January of 1444 and published with an explanatory manual in 1446, five years before Christopher Columbus was born, around the time harpsichords were being invented in Europe. Sejong organized the consonants by place of articulation and manner of articulation and tried to model the characters on how the lips, mouth, or tongue looked in making that sound. The manners of articulation included plain, aspirated, and tense, and these are what we'll look at in this post.
Plain consonants:
ㄱ [g], ㄷ [d], ㅂ [b], ㅈ [j], & ㅅ [s].
The first four of these have corresponding aspirated versions: consonants that are articulated in the same place but are said with a puff of air.
Aspirated consonants:
ㅋ [k], ㅌ [t], ㅍ [p], ㅊ [ch]
The English letters in brackets are not exact, just approximates to give you an idea. Sometimes ㄷ is romanized as a [t] rather than a [d] and the ㅂ as a [p] instead of a [b], but this way of romanizing makes the aspiration part more clear. Just remember that the aspirated versions are said with an added puff of air.
Finally, there are 'tense' or double consonants, which are like the plain ones but are said with more muscle tension:
ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅉ ㅆ.
So for our symmetric consonants, we have:
ㄱ ㄷ ㅂ ㅈ ㅅ (plain)
ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅊ -- (aspirated)
ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅉ ㅆ (tense)
The consonants in each column all of the same place of articulation and are based on the same basic character, which is meant to reflect that place of articulation.
ㄱ, ㅋ, & ㄲ are velar, and ㄱ is meant to show the back of the tongue touching the soft palate of a left-facing speaker.
ㄷ, ㅌ, & ㄸ are alveolar, and they are actually based off of the nasal consonant with this place of articulation, ㄴ, which shows the tip of the tongue at the ridge behind teeth of a left-facing speaker. (Both of these examples were in my first Korean post).
ㅂ, ㅍ, & ㅃ are labial, and they are based off of the nasal labial [m] sound, ㅁ, which is an abstract representation of the lips or the outline of the mouth.
The remaining five are all dental, and are based off of the character ㅅ, which is an abstract representation of a tooth.
I've already introduced ㅇ, and since there are only two more consonants after that I might as well finish it out. As a reminder, ㅇ has no value and is kind of a place holder when it appears as an initial consonant. As a bottom, syllable final consonant (or pach'im, as they call it), it has a [ng] sound as in sing. ㅎ is an [h] sound, and I suppose it can be thought of as the aspirated version of the place-holder ㅇ, though that's just out of my own head. Then there is ㄹ, and I'm quite honestly not sure how it fits into this. I'd have to do some research on it. It is written as if it is a combination of ㄱ on top and ㄷ on the bottom, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with its sounds. Like ㅇ, its sound changes depending on whether it appears as an initial consonant or as a pach'im. As an initial consonant, the sound is somewhere between [l] and [r], most similar to the flapped r of Spanish. I think it's actually misleading to gloss this as an r sound because the tongue actually makes contact with the ridge behind the teeth, so especially when it comes between syllables it sounds to me more like a "d". So for example, in Korean, head is 머리, which sounds more like "muh-dee" to me than "muh-ree". When ㄹ appears as a pach'im, as in 물 (water), it sounds like [ll] as in full. So 물 is pronounced "mool". My only guess as to the relation of how it written and how it sounds is that (ignoring the ㄱ on top), it seems to be based off the ㄴ character, like ㄷ, and it seems to have that same alveolar place of pronunciation. To get the more authentic answer, I suppose you'd do best to research what King Sejong actually said about the character in his explanatory manual well over 500 years ago. Hopefully there's a translation, because I imagine it would have had to have been written using Chinese characters. Incidentally, how about a picture of me with a statue of King Sejong? eh? eh?
Some final notes. You already know how ㅇ and ㄹ sound as pach'im. ㅁ and ㄴ sound exactly the same whether initial or pach'im. As a rule for the rest of the consonants, you don't release the sound when they appear as pach'im. To get what I mean, say "Bob", then say it again but this time keep your lips together at the end. That's how it should sound in Korean. This means that ㅂ & ㅍ sound exactly the same when they come at the end of a syllable, as do ㄱ, ㅋ, & ㄲ (for some reason, the only tense consonants that appear as pach'im seem to be ㄲ and ㅆ; I never see ㅃ, ㅉ, or ㄸ used as pach'im). Finally, ㄷ, ㅌ, ㅅ, ㅆ, ㅈ, ㅊ, and ㅎ all sound the same as pach'im: the sound is stopped but not released at the ridge behind the teeth (it can still make a difference which letter is used, but I'll save that for another post). And lastly: there's no separate character for [sh] in Korean, but sometimes ㅅ sounds like [sh] rather than just [s]. Basically, whenever it is followed by an ㅣ vowel, it takes on some of the palatization of the "ee" sound and sounds more like [sh].
With that, I'll leave you with the list of Korean consonants, along with their English approximates, in their alphabetical order. The tense double consonants don't appear here because they begin few enough words that those words are just added to the end of the section of the plain letters. For instance, you can find ㄲ words at the end of the ㄱ section.
So here you are. The Korean consonants:
ㄱ - "g"/"k"
ㄴ - "n"
ㄷ - "d"/"t"
ㄹ - initial: a flapped "r", pach'im: "ll"
ㅁ - "m"
ㅂ - "b"/"p"
ㅅ - "s"/"sh"
ㅇ - initial: no value, pach'im: "ng"
ㅈ - "j"
ㅊ - "ch"
ㅋ - "k"
ㅌ - "t"
ㅎ - "h"
(You can see all 3 posts about Korean so far by clicking the 'Korean' tag below.)
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Harvesting Persimmons
A typical Korean countryside autumn scene is that of bright orange persimmons (감) hanging alone from the branches of a persimmon tree (감나무), the leaves of which have already fallen. Fall is also the time to pick the persimmons and eat them, leave them to ripen, or string them together vertically and leave them hanging to dry. Unlike with an apple tree, however, it's not a good idea to climb a 감나무 to try to pick the persimmons - its branches are too brittle. In fact, an old Korean saying or joke upon seeing a child who has broken his arm is to ask if he was climbing a persimmon tree. So how do you get to the persimmons that are so way up high?
I suppose you could just move around a very tall ladder and pick them by hand. But because the branches are so brittle, you can extend your reach and break a branch off for yourself with a simple tool like this:
To break the branch, you just catch it in the nook and twist.
Now, recently my mom came to visit from Oregon and took me to her friends' country home, which is where I took these pictures. One of the first things I did when I got there was to learn how to pick persimmons from their tree since they had so many to harvest. But rather than climbing a ladder with a sack and using the branch-breaking stick, I learned to use a much niftier device that works on the same principle. It looks like this:
So you can see that this is a stick with a sling-shot shape that has a very ratty looking bag hanging from it. This stick is tied to a very long piece of bamboo, which has the advantage of being relatively light and very sturdy. To use this - and this is the fun part - you lift up the stick and enclose a persimmon in the bag from the bottom. Then you push the stick forward and up until the twig that is holding the persimmon is right in the nook of the V shape, the persimmon right under it. There has to be tension between the bamboo stick and the tree for this to work. When you twist the bamboo (and sometimes you have to twist a couple times), the twig breaks and the persimmon plops right into the bag. Like so:
This may seem like a strange post, but for some reason, this was one of my most satisfying and even relaxing experiences in Korea. It's very simple and easy, but it takes some degree of attention and a little skill to guide the stick up past the lower branches and to get it situated right in relation to the persimmons you're trying to get in order for the twisting to work. I liked the simple ingenuity of the tool - which is just a branch, a piece of bamboo, and some cloth and string - and the actual sensed experience of picking fruit this way: the snap of the twig and the increase of weight in your hands as the persimmon(s) fall into the bag fifteen feet up in the air from you, the balancing act of lowering it to the ground while moving your hands under each other to bring the other end of the stick closer so you don't have to walk as far to pick the fruit out of the damp bag, the sounds of the branches and persimmons that sometimes fall unintentionally, the holding of each success in your hand, watching the pile of fruit grow. It could make for another good persimmon-related poem for someone more poetically ambitious than I. It also probably helped my experience that I wasn't really obligated to do any of this work, only as much as I wanted, and that on the day I did most of the picking (unlike when I took these photos, the next day) the weather was great and the persimmons were brighter against the backdrop of a clear blue sky.
I suppose you could just move around a very tall ladder and pick them by hand. But because the branches are so brittle, you can extend your reach and break a branch off for yourself with a simple tool like this:
To break the branch, you just catch it in the nook and twist.
Now, recently my mom came to visit from Oregon and took me to her friends' country home, which is where I took these pictures. One of the first things I did when I got there was to learn how to pick persimmons from their tree since they had so many to harvest. But rather than climbing a ladder with a sack and using the branch-breaking stick, I learned to use a much niftier device that works on the same principle. It looks like this:
So you can see that this is a stick with a sling-shot shape that has a very ratty looking bag hanging from it. This stick is tied to a very long piece of bamboo, which has the advantage of being relatively light and very sturdy. To use this - and this is the fun part - you lift up the stick and enclose a persimmon in the bag from the bottom. Then you push the stick forward and up until the twig that is holding the persimmon is right in the nook of the V shape, the persimmon right under it. There has to be tension between the bamboo stick and the tree for this to work. When you twist the bamboo (and sometimes you have to twist a couple times), the twig breaks and the persimmon plops right into the bag. Like so:
This may seem like a strange post, but for some reason, this was one of my most satisfying and even relaxing experiences in Korea. It's very simple and easy, but it takes some degree of attention and a little skill to guide the stick up past the lower branches and to get it situated right in relation to the persimmons you're trying to get in order for the twisting to work. I liked the simple ingenuity of the tool - which is just a branch, a piece of bamboo, and some cloth and string - and the actual sensed experience of picking fruit this way: the snap of the twig and the increase of weight in your hands as the persimmon(s) fall into the bag fifteen feet up in the air from you, the balancing act of lowering it to the ground while moving your hands under each other to bring the other end of the stick closer so you don't have to walk as far to pick the fruit out of the damp bag, the sounds of the branches and persimmons that sometimes fall unintentionally, the holding of each success in your hand, watching the pile of fruit grow. It could make for another good persimmon-related poem for someone more poetically ambitious than I. It also probably helped my experience that I wasn't really obligated to do any of this work, only as much as I wanted, and that on the day I did most of the picking (unlike when I took these photos, the next day) the weather was great and the persimmons were brighter against the backdrop of a clear blue sky.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
David Karsten Daniels
"Jesus and the Devil"
This guy did a residency series at Mississippi Studios. Though I didn't buy his CD at the time some of the songs stuck with me and he's worth checking out on the net. I'll see him again if I get the chance and probably buy some of his stuff.
This guy did a residency series at Mississippi Studios. Though I didn't buy his CD at the time some of the songs stuck with me and he's worth checking out on the net. I'll see him again if I get the chance and probably buy some of his stuff.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Korean Vowels
There are 21 Korean vowels, but they can be seen as combinations of only 6. Those 6 can be broken down to two dimensions: strong/weak/neutral and horizontal/vertical. All the strokes are straight and are either long or short.
Let's start with neutral horizontal: ㅡ
If you have an expressionless face, open your mouth a little and make a sound, it's basically this. You can think of it as an "oo" sound without rounding the lips, or you can think of it as an "mmm" sound or hum with the lips slightly apart.
Neutral vertical: ㅣ
This is an "ee" sound.
For the strong vowels, add a short stroke out and up:
ㅗ ("oh")
ㅏ ("ah")
(I introduced these vowels last time.)
For the weak vowels, down and in.
ㅜ ("ooh")
ㅓ ("uh")
That's it for the basics as I see them. See if you can remember their sounds:
ㅡ ㅣ neutral
ㅗ ㅏ strong
ㅜ ㅓ weak
Now consider just the verticals and we'll add two more: ㅐ and ㅔ. Visually, you can think of them as ㅏ + ㅣ and ㅓ + ㅣ. So they are strong and weak, respectively. ㅐ is pronounced "ay" as in hay and ㅔ is pronounced "eh" as in bed. ㅐ is more open than ㅔ; if you make the sounds for "ㅣ, ㅔ, ㅐ, ㅏ" in that order you'll know what I mean. Try it.
Now consider the strong and weak vowels:
ㅗ ㅏ ㅐ (strong)
ㅜ ㅓ ㅔ (weak)
Each of these are simple sounds, monothongs, which means that the mouth shape doesn't change while saying them. But they each have a corresponding diphthong that begins with the vertical neutral sound ("ee"). The resulting symbols just add another short stroke.
ㅣ + ㅏ = ㅑ
ㅣ + ㅐ = ㅒ
ㅣ + ㅓ = ㅕ
ㅣ + ㅔ = ㅖ
ㅣ + ㅗ = ㅛ
ㅣ + ㅜ = ㅠ
What do these symbols sound like? Let's take ㅑ. You start with ㅣ ("ee") and end with ㅏ ("ah"). Say it more and more quickly and you get what sounds like "yah". Same goes for the others; the vowels with two short strokes sound like the corresponding one-short-stroke vowels with a "y" added before it. But keep in mind that Koreans don't think of "yah" as a consonant sound plus a vowel sound (y + ah) but as a single vowel sound ㅑ. In the same way, we think of the English sound "I" as a single vowel sound even though it is a diphthong made of ㅏ and ㅣ, "ah-ee" said really quickly (this is more obvious to formal singers who have to hold out syllables more often).
On to combined vowels. The strong horizontal vowel (ㅗ) can be combined with the strong vertical vowels (ㅏ & ㅐ); likewise for the weak horizontal vowel (ㅜ) with the weak vertical vowels (ㅓ & ㅔ). These make diphthongs similar to the ones just above but with a 'w' sound rather than a 'y' sound.
ㅗ + ㅏ = ㅘ
ㅗ + ㅐ = ㅙ
ㅜ + ㅓ = ㅝ
ㅜ + ㅔ = ㅞ
Again, we'll take the one based on ㅏ as our example. To pronounce ㅘ, you start with "oh" and end with "ah". Say it quickly and you get something like "wah." Likewise with ㅙ: you start with "oh" and end with "ay" so you get "way." The next two are similar but because you start with "ooh" rather than "oh" the sound quality of the "w" sound is slightly different. It isn't very crucial to be able to distinguish these two to comprehend Korean speech. As one of my books puts it, the only difference between them is the "degree of clearness of the sound": clear ㅗ vs. dark ㅜ. I don't know how helpful that is, but you if you're determined to pronounce them exactly right, just make sure to make yourself think of each of these sounds not as a "w" plus a vowel sound but as a diphthong made from a particular pair of vowels. So for ㅝ, you start with "ooh" and end with "uh," getting "wuh"; and for ㅞ, start with "ooh" and end with "eh" to get a "weh" sound, but you think of this more in terms of a semi-vowel "ooh" than of a consonant sound "w".
All three of the horizontal vowels can combine with the neutral vertical vowel ㅣ, so there are three more combined vowels:
ㅜ + ㅣ = ㅟ
ㅗ + ㅣ = ㅚ
ㅡ + ㅣ = ㅢ
The first one here, ㅟ, is the most intuitive. You start with "ooh" and end with "ee", getting "wee". It seems like the next one, ㅚ, should sound extremely similar to this but in actual speech instead of ending with an "ee" sound, for some reason it actually sounds basically the same as ㅙ. As for the last vowel, ㅢ is just a combination of the sounds ㅡ and ㅣ. This has no equivalent in English but if you just say the two sounds together quickly, just like in the other diphthongs, you'll get the sound right.
There you go! All 21 vowels derived from the basic six. Here they are in their dictionary order:
ㅏ ㅐ ㅑ ㅒ (strong vertical)
ㅓ ㅔ ㅕ ㅖ (weak vertical)
ㅗ ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅛ (strong horizontal/combined)
ㅜ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ ㅠ (weak horizontal/combined)
ㅡ ㅣ ㅢ (neutral)
I'll end with a reminder that even though I presented the vowels by themselves in this post, they always appear with an initial consonant (and sometimes an ending consonant on the bottom as well) and never alone. Even when there is no consonant sound, they appear with a placeholder consonant, ㅇ. With the vertical vowels, the initial consonant goes to the left of the vowel; with the horizontal ones, the initial consonant goes above the vowel; with the combined vowels it goes above the horizontal part and to the left of the vertical part. So here are some examples using the familiar consonants ㄱ and ㅇ.
개 (dog)
여기 (here)
우유 (milk)
과거 (the past, days gone by)
귀 (ear)
Now you only need to learn the consonants to have a pretty solid base in written and phonetic Korean.
Let's start with neutral horizontal: ㅡ
If you have an expressionless face, open your mouth a little and make a sound, it's basically this. You can think of it as an "oo" sound without rounding the lips, or you can think of it as an "mmm" sound or hum with the lips slightly apart.
Neutral vertical: ㅣ
This is an "ee" sound.
For the strong vowels, add a short stroke out and up:
ㅗ ("oh")
ㅏ ("ah")
(I introduced these vowels last time.)
For the weak vowels, down and in.
ㅜ ("ooh")
ㅓ ("uh")
That's it for the basics as I see them. See if you can remember their sounds:
ㅡ ㅣ neutral
ㅗ ㅏ strong
ㅜ ㅓ weak
Now consider just the verticals and we'll add two more: ㅐ and ㅔ. Visually, you can think of them as ㅏ + ㅣ and ㅓ + ㅣ. So they are strong and weak, respectively. ㅐ is pronounced "ay" as in hay and ㅔ is pronounced "eh" as in bed. ㅐ is more open than ㅔ; if you make the sounds for "ㅣ, ㅔ, ㅐ, ㅏ" in that order you'll know what I mean. Try it.
Now consider the strong and weak vowels:
ㅗ ㅏ ㅐ (strong)
ㅜ ㅓ ㅔ (weak)
Each of these are simple sounds, monothongs, which means that the mouth shape doesn't change while saying them. But they each have a corresponding diphthong that begins with the vertical neutral sound ("ee"). The resulting symbols just add another short stroke.
ㅣ + ㅏ = ㅑ
ㅣ + ㅐ = ㅒ
ㅣ + ㅓ = ㅕ
ㅣ + ㅔ = ㅖ
ㅣ + ㅗ = ㅛ
ㅣ + ㅜ = ㅠ
What do these symbols sound like? Let's take ㅑ. You start with ㅣ ("ee") and end with ㅏ ("ah"). Say it more and more quickly and you get what sounds like "yah". Same goes for the others; the vowels with two short strokes sound like the corresponding one-short-stroke vowels with a "y" added before it. But keep in mind that Koreans don't think of "yah" as a consonant sound plus a vowel sound (y + ah) but as a single vowel sound ㅑ. In the same way, we think of the English sound "I" as a single vowel sound even though it is a diphthong made of ㅏ and ㅣ, "ah-ee" said really quickly (this is more obvious to formal singers who have to hold out syllables more often).
On to combined vowels. The strong horizontal vowel (ㅗ) can be combined with the strong vertical vowels (ㅏ & ㅐ); likewise for the weak horizontal vowel (ㅜ) with the weak vertical vowels (ㅓ & ㅔ). These make diphthongs similar to the ones just above but with a 'w' sound rather than a 'y' sound.
ㅗ + ㅏ = ㅘ
ㅗ + ㅐ = ㅙ
ㅜ + ㅓ = ㅝ
ㅜ + ㅔ = ㅞ
Again, we'll take the one based on ㅏ as our example. To pronounce ㅘ, you start with "oh" and end with "ah". Say it quickly and you get something like "wah." Likewise with ㅙ: you start with "oh" and end with "ay" so you get "way." The next two are similar but because you start with "ooh" rather than "oh" the sound quality of the "w" sound is slightly different. It isn't very crucial to be able to distinguish these two to comprehend Korean speech. As one of my books puts it, the only difference between them is the "degree of clearness of the sound": clear ㅗ vs. dark ㅜ. I don't know how helpful that is, but you if you're determined to pronounce them exactly right, just make sure to make yourself think of each of these sounds not as a "w" plus a vowel sound but as a diphthong made from a particular pair of vowels. So for ㅝ, you start with "ooh" and end with "uh," getting "wuh"; and for ㅞ, start with "ooh" and end with "eh" to get a "weh" sound, but you think of this more in terms of a semi-vowel "ooh" than of a consonant sound "w".
All three of the horizontal vowels can combine with the neutral vertical vowel ㅣ, so there are three more combined vowels:
ㅜ + ㅣ = ㅟ
ㅗ + ㅣ = ㅚ
ㅡ + ㅣ = ㅢ
The first one here, ㅟ, is the most intuitive. You start with "ooh" and end with "ee", getting "wee". It seems like the next one, ㅚ, should sound extremely similar to this but in actual speech instead of ending with an "ee" sound, for some reason it actually sounds basically the same as ㅙ. As for the last vowel, ㅢ is just a combination of the sounds ㅡ and ㅣ. This has no equivalent in English but if you just say the two sounds together quickly, just like in the other diphthongs, you'll get the sound right.
There you go! All 21 vowels derived from the basic six. Here they are in their dictionary order:
ㅏ ㅐ ㅑ ㅒ (strong vertical)
ㅓ ㅔ ㅕ ㅖ (weak vertical)
ㅗ ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅛ (strong horizontal/combined)
ㅜ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ ㅠ (weak horizontal/combined)
ㅡ ㅣ ㅢ (neutral)
I'll end with a reminder that even though I presented the vowels by themselves in this post, they always appear with an initial consonant (and sometimes an ending consonant on the bottom as well) and never alone. Even when there is no consonant sound, they appear with a placeholder consonant, ㅇ. With the vertical vowels, the initial consonant goes to the left of the vowel; with the horizontal ones, the initial consonant goes above the vowel; with the combined vowels it goes above the horizontal part and to the left of the vertical part. So here are some examples using the familiar consonants ㄱ and ㅇ.
개 (dog)
여기 (here)
우유 (milk)
과거 (the past, days gone by)
귀 (ear)
Now you only need to learn the consonants to have a pretty solid base in written and phonetic Korean.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Another Recommendation - Paleo
Paleo is the stage name of a songwriter that I first saw at the Funky Church in Portland opening for Portland's Loch Lomond. Later he played at the venue I worked at and forgot his band t-shirt, which (after a few weeks) I decided to take home. It's now one of my favorite shirts, but I hesitate to say I'm glad that he forgot it because he had his luggage lost or stolen that day so he probably could have used the extra shirt. At least I bought his music! And though I like him mainly for his songwriting and singing style, he's also an inspiration for aspiring artists because one day he decided to try to write and record a song a day for a full year and actually pulled it off, 365 days in a row, while traveling and playing around America. He sells a DVD of mp3 files that includes all of those songs. Here's a random article I found about him that links to mp3 files and lyrics so you can check out a few of his songs. More songs are on his website, and he also has a myspace. Paleo can sometimes sound goat-like, but he's great if you like singers with distinct voices and good lyrics. For a sample, here's a video of a song called "Of Athens" that I remember liking when I heard him in person.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Ask a Korean
Sorry for the lack of posts lately; my mom is visiting me now in Korea (all the way from Oregon!) so I've spent less time reading and writing posts and more time traveling and meeting her friends. There is a post in the works as a follow up to my introduction to the Korean language that will attempt to explain all Korean vowels in one fell swoop. In the meantime I want to refer you to a blog that I'm following that is pretty good. It is called "Ask a Korean" and is usually interesting and intelligent, and there's the running joke of the main blogger's speaking in the third person as "the Korean." There's a good discussion of Korean culture, candid and actually intelligent answers to questions involving stereotypes/races, and occasional links to random other things the blogger finds interesting. Mainly he responds to reader questions that are e-mailed him. The most recent post, for example, was about the status and perception of homosexuality in Korea, which is something I'd been wondering about since arriving in Korea but hadn't asked anyone about. So! Without further ado: http://askakorean.blogspot.com/
More idiot posts coming soon...
More idiot posts coming soon...
Monday, October 20, 2008
The Antichrist
I recently finished reading the Antichrist, one of Nietzsche’s last books. Oftentimes Nietzsche asks to be read slowly and carefully, but this particular book seemed to have a torrential pace and I had to read it really quickly, like each section pushed me onto the next section and it was hard to stop. Turns out he also wrote it really fast: it was “the work of so few days that I hesitate to mention how many,” (Ecce Homo). By the end I feel like it got less controlled, more repetitive and not as exciting. But on my first sitting I was basically riveted and he puts his ideas very clearly and forcefully.
I can't summarize the whole thing, but it's mainly a invective of Christianity as an insidious subterranean conspiracy born of weakness and envy and revenge against everything that is healthy, powerful, and privileged. It's kind of ridiculous at times and also can sound anti-semitic because of his insistence that Christianity is the culmination of Jewishness, but it's good to remember here that he was writing in an environment full of fanatic Christian anti-Semites (like his sister) and this was a knife-twisting irony at their expense. Along the way he talks about all sort of things, including pity, Kant, the French Revolution, Buddhism, Jesus, the Gospels, the fall of the Roman Empire, the law of Manu, the Renaissance and Luther. As he's denouncing, at least/especially in the beginning, you get a sense of the type and way of thought way outside of Christianity from which he is speaking and this positive element sustains the reading more than anything for me.
The part about Buddhism was fascinating to me because he usually doesn't talk about it explicitly but mentions it really cryptically in passing so it's hard to tell what he thinks about it. Here he actually spends a few passages on it, and it compares so favorably to Christianity that it almost reads as an endorsement. He says Buddhism fulfills where Christianity only promises, Buddhism is a hundred times more truthful by talking in plain terms of suffering rather than sin, he expresses admiration for its lack of prayer, asceticism, and compulsion, he likes its practical focus on the individual (how can I stop suffering?), and even says "Buddhism is not a religion in which one merely aspires to perfection: perfection is the normal case." He is still not a Buddhist because he believes it is also nihilistic, meant to help those who suffer from life, but it's interesting to see how much he admires it. His interpretation of Jesus was really interesting too (he definitely does not equate Jesus' teachings with what ended up being Christianity) but I don't want to get into it now. My summaries are bound to be pretty superficial and slightly misleading anyhow.
Anyway, I don't think the Antichrist is Nietzsche's best book but I'm glad I read it. I don't remember whether or not I read it for my Nietzsche class long ago; if I did I forgot it all. But he leaves no room for doubt about his position on Christianity; he ends by calling it "the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough" and even "the one immortal blemish of mankind." And then, because he's ridiculous, after lamenting that we reckon time from the beginning of this 'calamity', the first day of Christianity, he says, "why not rather after its last day? After today? Revaluation of all values!" and that's how he ends the book: why not mark this moment the beginning of time because I say so? Of course, he didn't go around erasing calendars after that and it probably occurred to him in the heat of the moment, but it gives you an idea of how seriously he took the importance of his thought.
Unfortunately he never quite finished. The Antichrist was to be the first of four books that together would make up the grand work called The Revaluation of All Values. As it was, he had a mental breakdown and went permanently insane upon seeing a driver beating a horse in Turin a little more than three months later. That didn't stop him from writing two more books (an autobiography and an edited compilation) in between.
Incidentally, for those of you who were not previously aware, we are now on the 21st day of the 120th year on the Immoralist's Calendar. I guess it'd still be a Monday.
I can't summarize the whole thing, but it's mainly a invective of Christianity as an insidious subterranean conspiracy born of weakness and envy and revenge against everything that is healthy, powerful, and privileged. It's kind of ridiculous at times and also can sound anti-semitic because of his insistence that Christianity is the culmination of Jewishness, but it's good to remember here that he was writing in an environment full of fanatic Christian anti-Semites (like his sister) and this was a knife-twisting irony at their expense. Along the way he talks about all sort of things, including pity, Kant, the French Revolution, Buddhism, Jesus, the Gospels, the fall of the Roman Empire, the law of Manu, the Renaissance and Luther. As he's denouncing, at least/especially in the beginning, you get a sense of the type and way of thought way outside of Christianity from which he is speaking and this positive element sustains the reading more than anything for me.
The part about Buddhism was fascinating to me because he usually doesn't talk about it explicitly but mentions it really cryptically in passing so it's hard to tell what he thinks about it. Here he actually spends a few passages on it, and it compares so favorably to Christianity that it almost reads as an endorsement. He says Buddhism fulfills where Christianity only promises, Buddhism is a hundred times more truthful by talking in plain terms of suffering rather than sin, he expresses admiration for its lack of prayer, asceticism, and compulsion, he likes its practical focus on the individual (how can I stop suffering?), and even says "Buddhism is not a religion in which one merely aspires to perfection: perfection is the normal case." He is still not a Buddhist because he believes it is also nihilistic, meant to help those who suffer from life, but it's interesting to see how much he admires it. His interpretation of Jesus was really interesting too (he definitely does not equate Jesus' teachings with what ended up being Christianity) but I don't want to get into it now. My summaries are bound to be pretty superficial and slightly misleading anyhow.
Anyway, I don't think the Antichrist is Nietzsche's best book but I'm glad I read it. I don't remember whether or not I read it for my Nietzsche class long ago; if I did I forgot it all. But he leaves no room for doubt about his position on Christianity; he ends by calling it "the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough" and even "the one immortal blemish of mankind." And then, because he's ridiculous, after lamenting that we reckon time from the beginning of this 'calamity', the first day of Christianity, he says, "why not rather after its last day? After today? Revaluation of all values!" and that's how he ends the book: why not mark this moment the beginning of time because I say so? Of course, he didn't go around erasing calendars after that and it probably occurred to him in the heat of the moment, but it gives you an idea of how seriously he took the importance of his thought.
Unfortunately he never quite finished. The Antichrist was to be the first of four books that together would make up the grand work called The Revaluation of All Values. As it was, he had a mental breakdown and went permanently insane upon seeing a driver beating a horse in Turin a little more than three months later. That didn't stop him from writing two more books (an autobiography and an edited compilation) in between.
Incidentally, for those of you who were not previously aware, we are now on the 21st day of the 120th year on the Immoralist's Calendar. I guess it'd still be a Monday.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
video
Music Video shot by the Penny Jam with my friend Derrek Wayne. I met him when he came to a show at the music venue I worked at right at the beginning of summer. He is a fellow former phil major, trained in barbershop quartet style vocals, a proponent of bike-riding and fun to play frisbee with. The video also includes Ben on belled soprano saxophone. It was shot on July 6th and afterwards we stopped at the Horse Brass Pub with the Penny Jam people, rode to drop off my drums at the Broadway Cinema where we'd open for the Independent Film Festival there the next day, then made it back to SE for a barbecue. The drums are my backpack set; I was pretty pleased with myself for being able to fit them all into a backpack guitar case and carry it around by bike.
Derrek Wayne at The Immortal Piano Company from The Penny Jam on Vimeo.
Pictures
The location, the Immortal Piano Company, was really cool. The lady who works there is really eccentric and awesome and taught us a little about the incredibly precise craft of piano repairing that she practices. That pedal piano at the beginning is set up to play all of the music from the Wizard of Oz.
Now that I've figured out how to post videos, anything could happen...
Derrek Wayne at The Immortal Piano Company from The Penny Jam on Vimeo.
Pictures
The location, the Immortal Piano Company, was really cool. The lady who works there is really eccentric and awesome and taught us a little about the incredibly precise craft of piano repairing that she practices. That pedal piano at the beginning is set up to play all of the music from the Wizard of Oz.
Now that I've figured out how to post videos, anything could happen...
Friday, October 17, 2008
Very Simple Korean
A Korean consonant: ㄱ
A Korean vowel: ㅏ
A Korean word: 가
Simple enough? The consonant comes in front of the vowel, so far just like English.
An English consonant: G
An English vowel: o
An English word: Go
가 is the verb stem of the Korean verb that means to go. It can be used alone to mean "Go away." You now know enough Korean to watch this video.
These two examples, "가" & "Go", are both one-syllable words that begin with a consonant and end with a vowel. Now let's add a syllable-final consonant. In English, we just tack it on the end:
Consonant: G
Vowel: o
Consonant: d
Word: God
In Korean, that consonant instead goes beneath, as follows:
Consonant: ㄱ
Vowel: ㅏ
Consonant: ㅇ
Word: 강
The advantage of this is that written Korean is visually split up into syllables: each syllable takes the space of one square. So 가 and 강 are each one syllable and 강남대학교 is five syllables. This is nice because words look their length. (Unlike in English, in which "era" is longer than "droughts".)
On to pronunciation.ㄱ is somewhere between a G and a K, and "ㅏ" is an "ah" sound, so "가" is pronounced like "kah" or "gah". The word 강, which means river, is pronounced gahng. The nice thing is that, unlike in English with Go and God, the the vowel sound doesn't change when we add the syllable final "ng" (ㅇ) sound. As far as I know this is always the case in Korean so it is usually very straightforward to pronounce.
To get nitpicky, though: The place of articulation of ㄱ is actually farther back in the mouth than either G or K (at least how I say them), at the root of the tongue. The character ㄱ is actually designed as a visual representation of this. If you imagine a left-facing speaker, it shows the back of the tongue pulled up to touch the rear part of the roof of the mouth. (Likewise, the character for an [n] sound, ㄴ, shows the tip of the tongue behind the teeth.)
A note about the round character, ㅇ. When it comes at the bottom of a syllable, like in 강, it is pronounced like ng, but when it comes in the initial position it's just a place holder with no sound value. This is because letters can't stand alone in Korean the way they can in English (in the particle "a" or the pronoun "I"). So "ㅇ" takes the initial consonant position in syllables that begin with a vowel sound. For example, while 나 is pronounced "nah", 아 is simply "ah."
I'll teach you two more easy vowel sounds while I'm at it:ㅣand ㅗ. The first is just a vertical line and is pronounced "ee" as in see. The second is pronounced "oh" as in go. Notice that the long stroke of the second vowel is horizontal rather than vertical. With this kind of vowel, the initial consonant goes above it rather than to its left. So you should be able to figure out the following sounds:
1.아이
2.오
3.온기
4.가강
5.공
6.아니오
1. ah-ee (child)
2. oh (five)
3. ohn-gee (warmth)
4. gah-gahng (riverside)
5. gohng (ball)
6. ah-nee-oh (no)
At least some of Korean should be less mysterious to you now. Even though I've only taught you three consonants (ㄱ,ㅇ,ㄴ) and three vowels (ㅏ,ㅣ,ㅗ) you get the basic idea of how it's laid out. Now for the last word:
가자!
This is pronounced Kah-Jah. It is based off of the verb stem 가, includes the consonant ㅈ, and it means "Let's go."
A Korean vowel: ㅏ
A Korean word: 가
Simple enough? The consonant comes in front of the vowel, so far just like English.
An English consonant: G
An English vowel: o
An English word: Go
가 is the verb stem of the Korean verb that means to go. It can be used alone to mean "Go away." You now know enough Korean to watch this video.
These two examples, "가" & "Go", are both one-syllable words that begin with a consonant and end with a vowel. Now let's add a syllable-final consonant. In English, we just tack it on the end:
Consonant: G
Vowel: o
Consonant: d
Word: God
In Korean, that consonant instead goes beneath, as follows:
Consonant: ㄱ
Vowel: ㅏ
Consonant: ㅇ
Word: 강
The advantage of this is that written Korean is visually split up into syllables: each syllable takes the space of one square. So 가 and 강 are each one syllable and 강남대학교 is five syllables. This is nice because words look their length. (Unlike in English, in which "era" is longer than "droughts".)
On to pronunciation.ㄱ is somewhere between a G and a K, and "ㅏ" is an "ah" sound, so "가" is pronounced like "kah" or "gah". The word 강, which means river, is pronounced gahng. The nice thing is that, unlike in English with Go and God, the the vowel sound doesn't change when we add the syllable final "ng" (ㅇ) sound. As far as I know this is always the case in Korean so it is usually very straightforward to pronounce.
To get nitpicky, though: The place of articulation of ㄱ is actually farther back in the mouth than either G or K (at least how I say them), at the root of the tongue. The character ㄱ is actually designed as a visual representation of this. If you imagine a left-facing speaker, it shows the back of the tongue pulled up to touch the rear part of the roof of the mouth. (Likewise, the character for an [n] sound, ㄴ, shows the tip of the tongue behind the teeth.)
A note about the round character, ㅇ. When it comes at the bottom of a syllable, like in 강, it is pronounced like ng, but when it comes in the initial position it's just a place holder with no sound value. This is because letters can't stand alone in Korean the way they can in English (in the particle "a" or the pronoun "I"). So "ㅇ" takes the initial consonant position in syllables that begin with a vowel sound. For example, while 나 is pronounced "nah", 아 is simply "ah."
I'll teach you two more easy vowel sounds while I'm at it:ㅣand ㅗ. The first is just a vertical line and is pronounced "ee" as in see. The second is pronounced "oh" as in go. Notice that the long stroke of the second vowel is horizontal rather than vertical. With this kind of vowel, the initial consonant goes above it rather than to its left. So you should be able to figure out the following sounds:
1.아이
2.오
3.온기
4.가강
5.공
6.아니오
1. ah-ee (child)
2. oh (five)
3. ohn-gee (warmth)
4. gah-gahng (riverside)
5. gohng (ball)
6. ah-nee-oh (no)
At least some of Korean should be less mysterious to you now. Even though I've only taught you three consonants (ㄱ,ㅇ,ㄴ) and three vowels (ㅏ,ㅣ,ㅗ) you get the basic idea of how it's laid out. Now for the last word:
가자!
This is pronounced Kah-Jah. It is based off of the verb stem 가, includes the consonant ㅈ, and it means "Let's go."
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Falsification
And now, the blog turns again to that guy with the mustache, Nietzsche. He has resigned from the professorship he'd held for a decade at Basel and has been living off of the pension writing books for a couple of years. He is about thirty seven years old and he is writing what he will later call his most personal work of philosophy, almost like a journal, called the Gay Science - cheerful, even silly at times, highly naturalistic, and right on the edge "of something incomparable" (according to Nietzsche later). It is made up of four major sections called "books," and the fourth book ends with the beginning of his favorite work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he writes with such inspiration that he feels that Zarathustra "overtook" him. It is his first attempt at expressing his whole philosophy. The first two parts of Zarathustra were written the following winter and the summer, the third part the following year, and the fourth part (privately published and distributed to only seven friends) the year after. His next book is Beyond Good & Evil, his attempt to say "the same things as my Zarathustra, but differently...very differently", around the same time beginning to look back over, republish, and write new prefaces for his early books. This is the period on which I wrote my undergraduate thesis. He writes yet another book, Genealogy of Morals, as a clarification of Beyond Good & Evil, republishes with a new preface his third book, the Dawn, and finally, gets back to his fourth, the Gay Science, with which I started this post. This is when he publishes a second edition, not just with a new preface, but with an added fifth book, which instead of being like a journal has been popular among philosophers because its more argumentative and traditionally philosophic subject matter. The whole Gay Science hangs together, of course, but you can see what distance there is between the publishing of the first four books of it and its fifth! Three of his most famous works and a self-re-evaluation of all the books before it! Three huge attempts to communicate a philosophic world view that he hadn't had before! Zarathustra, Beyond Good & Evil, new prefaces to his previous works, and the Genealogy of Morals all lie in between the first four books and the fifth book of the Gay Science.
There's a point to all this, I swear. Skip ahead just over a century to a Nietzsche scholar named Maudemarie Clark, currently a professor at Colgate University. She was and still is regarded as one of Nietzsche's top scholars because of her highly acclaimed 1990 book, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, which was reportedly so good that it "continues to serve as the gold standard for studies of its kind." In this book, she argues that a huge strain of Nietzsche's thought - his apparent radical anti-realism and skepticism about logic, math, science and even everyday objects - can all be explained away as part of a "falsification thesis" that Nietzsche develops early in his career and later gives up. Whew! This means we can bring him into the fold a bit...though he did debunk the ridiculous notion of an otherworldly, metaphysical truth, he still believes in the more modest, everyday notion of limited, empirical truth that we all rely on. The only problem with this: the crux of her argument, the entire PROOF or TEXTUAL BASIS of her argument, relied on the mistake of thinking that the fifth book of the Gay Science, from which her main example of this early "falsification thesis" came from, was written and published BEFORE his main works in which he reached his mature philosophical thought (and to say it again, although the first four sections of the Gay Science came earlier, the fifth was undeniably written AFTER Zarathustra, Beyond Good & Evil, and the Genealogy of Morals - his "mature" thought). In fact, the very passage that Clark cites as her main evidence, as THE passage in which Nietzsche realizes that he must give the falsification thesis up, is in Beyond Good & Evil, written and published before her main example of the "early" and problematic "falsification thesis" of the 5th book of the Gay Science.
Can you imagine how incredulous I felt when I discovered this as a fresh-faced young undergraduate? That one of the top Nietzsche scholars in existence, in one of the most influential books on Nietzsche in recent times, in an extremely influential interpretation, argued that a "later" passage showed that he gave up the views of an "earlier" passage up...and got the order switched up? That the passage that she needed to come after actually and undeniably, as a matter of historical fact, came before?
And I lied when I said that this was the only problem...there were plenty others, including the fact (pointed out in an article by Prof. Nadeem Hussain, now at Stanford) that the supposedly early "falsification" claims seem to appear elsewhere in the same book, Beyond Good & Evil, in which he supposedly gives it up. Had she just not read the book? Did she just pick this one passage out of context and put it into her argument of what Nietzsche should have said were he smart, or, in Clark's terms, of reading Nietzsche "charitably"? Keep in mind, this is a scholar who ranks as co-translator on an edition of the Genealogy of Morals!!! Shouldn't she know the text? And her response to Hussain, in which she explained away two of the many instances of the falsification claims in that book (saying the others can be 'similarly' explained away by careful interpretation), also seemed to me to be full of bad interpretation, ignorant of context. I disagreed with her interpretation of the crucial passage itself, the one in which he supposedly gives up the falsification thesis. In fact, I thought she was wrong on basically every point and brought forth many arguments and close readings to show it.
I think it's pretty well established that going to a good school and doing well has the danger of giving yourself too much credit. On the basis of this single scholarly interpretation of Nietzsche and fueled by my moral indignation to the wrong it did Nietzsche, I more or less decided that the secondary literature was not worth much reading, and that I would just go back to Nietzsche's text itself and do it right, do it better. Looking back, my actions said, "you so-called scholars are not paying enough attention to what he's writing! You're not getting everything he's saying! Look at me, I'm going to pay so much attention to him that I'm going to spend all year interpreting only these first four passages, two of which you so badly bungled up, of Beyond Good & Evil." It didn't help that my thesis adviser happened to have barely read any Nietzsche, and not since his undergraduate days, so I was always a position of intellectual authority over my professor, who basically helped me by telling me where to clarify and asking questions.
Nowadays if I read some of the secondary literature on Nietzsche from the realm of academic philosophy, the effect is basically humbling. Like, why the hell didn't I read this when I was writing my thesis? For example, John Richardson's extremely well-written introduction the the Oxford Readings in Philosophy Volume easily dealt with some of the things I couldn't figure out how to get across that well in my thesis, especially about how to deal with the apparent antimony between Nietzsche's thought and scholarly/academic philosophy.
It still is a mystery to me, though, whether or not anyone has bothered to point out Clark's chronological mistake in Nietzsche On Truth & Philosophy. Paul Katsafanas (who recently finished his Harvard dissertation on Nietzsche's applications to constitutivism about practical reason in the philosophy of action and mind) deftly sidesteps the issue using a footnote in his "Consciousness and Conceptualization", even though he there provides a better explanation of Nietzsche's 'falsification' claims. Leiter is sympathetic to Clark's basic interpretation but shifts the chronology a bit in his summary of it, and Richardson does something similar in the article I mentioned. None of them gets into the specifics. Richardson also notes that Clark revises the chronology a bit in a later article which I admittedly haven't read, but her response to Hussain postdates that article, and in that response (which is co-authored by David Dudrick) she sticks to saying that Beyond Good & Evil 15 provides evidence that he gives the falsification thesis up. Even more baffling to me was that in that later article (2004) she recognizes in a footnote at the back of the article that the fifth book of the Gay Science postdates Beyond Good & Evil but makes no mention of the fact that this undermines her main evidence for the crux of her interpretation, that Nietzsche gives the falsification thesis up.
At any rate, I'm left wondering whether it is academic politics or politeness that prevented this error from being an academic embarrassment for Clark, or if it has been pointed out somewhere I'm not aware of, or if maybe just nobody really cares. Maybe scholars see it as a technicality, a detail, and still like having her view out there as a possibility in the landscape of possible interpretations of Nietzsche on truth. I guess given how nebulous a lot of philosophy seems to be, with no clear yes or no answers on a lot of things, it would be refreshing for an interpretation to just be refuted and killed. Especially if you're a strange little man who feels like this is important to more than academic Nietzsche specialists in their towers, that Nietzsche has something actually important to say about truth.
There's a point to all this, I swear. Skip ahead just over a century to a Nietzsche scholar named Maudemarie Clark, currently a professor at Colgate University. She was and still is regarded as one of Nietzsche's top scholars because of her highly acclaimed 1990 book, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, which was reportedly so good that it "continues to serve as the gold standard for studies of its kind." In this book, she argues that a huge strain of Nietzsche's thought - his apparent radical anti-realism and skepticism about logic, math, science and even everyday objects - can all be explained away as part of a "falsification thesis" that Nietzsche develops early in his career and later gives up. Whew! This means we can bring him into the fold a bit...though he did debunk the ridiculous notion of an otherworldly, metaphysical truth, he still believes in the more modest, everyday notion of limited, empirical truth that we all rely on. The only problem with this: the crux of her argument, the entire PROOF or TEXTUAL BASIS of her argument, relied on the mistake of thinking that the fifth book of the Gay Science, from which her main example of this early "falsification thesis" came from, was written and published BEFORE his main works in which he reached his mature philosophical thought (and to say it again, although the first four sections of the Gay Science came earlier, the fifth was undeniably written AFTER Zarathustra, Beyond Good & Evil, and the Genealogy of Morals - his "mature" thought). In fact, the very passage that Clark cites as her main evidence, as THE passage in which Nietzsche realizes that he must give the falsification thesis up, is in Beyond Good & Evil, written and published before her main example of the "early" and problematic "falsification thesis" of the 5th book of the Gay Science.
Can you imagine how incredulous I felt when I discovered this as a fresh-faced young undergraduate? That one of the top Nietzsche scholars in existence, in one of the most influential books on Nietzsche in recent times, in an extremely influential interpretation, argued that a "later" passage showed that he gave up the views of an "earlier" passage up...and got the order switched up? That the passage that she needed to come after actually and undeniably, as a matter of historical fact, came before?
And I lied when I said that this was the only problem...there were plenty others, including the fact (pointed out in an article by Prof. Nadeem Hussain, now at Stanford) that the supposedly early "falsification" claims seem to appear elsewhere in the same book, Beyond Good & Evil, in which he supposedly gives it up. Had she just not read the book? Did she just pick this one passage out of context and put it into her argument of what Nietzsche should have said were he smart, or, in Clark's terms, of reading Nietzsche "charitably"? Keep in mind, this is a scholar who ranks as co-translator on an edition of the Genealogy of Morals!!! Shouldn't she know the text? And her response to Hussain, in which she explained away two of the many instances of the falsification claims in that book (saying the others can be 'similarly' explained away by careful interpretation), also seemed to me to be full of bad interpretation, ignorant of context. I disagreed with her interpretation of the crucial passage itself, the one in which he supposedly gives up the falsification thesis. In fact, I thought she was wrong on basically every point and brought forth many arguments and close readings to show it.
I think it's pretty well established that going to a good school and doing well has the danger of giving yourself too much credit. On the basis of this single scholarly interpretation of Nietzsche and fueled by my moral indignation to the wrong it did Nietzsche, I more or less decided that the secondary literature was not worth much reading, and that I would just go back to Nietzsche's text itself and do it right, do it better. Looking back, my actions said, "you so-called scholars are not paying enough attention to what he's writing! You're not getting everything he's saying! Look at me, I'm going to pay so much attention to him that I'm going to spend all year interpreting only these first four passages, two of which you so badly bungled up, of Beyond Good & Evil." It didn't help that my thesis adviser happened to have barely read any Nietzsche, and not since his undergraduate days, so I was always a position of intellectual authority over my professor, who basically helped me by telling me where to clarify and asking questions.
Nowadays if I read some of the secondary literature on Nietzsche from the realm of academic philosophy, the effect is basically humbling. Like, why the hell didn't I read this when I was writing my thesis? For example, John Richardson's extremely well-written introduction the the Oxford Readings in Philosophy Volume easily dealt with some of the things I couldn't figure out how to get across that well in my thesis, especially about how to deal with the apparent antimony between Nietzsche's thought and scholarly/academic philosophy.
It still is a mystery to me, though, whether or not anyone has bothered to point out Clark's chronological mistake in Nietzsche On Truth & Philosophy. Paul Katsafanas (who recently finished his Harvard dissertation on Nietzsche's applications to constitutivism about practical reason in the philosophy of action and mind) deftly sidesteps the issue using a footnote in his "Consciousness and Conceptualization", even though he there provides a better explanation of Nietzsche's 'falsification' claims. Leiter is sympathetic to Clark's basic interpretation but shifts the chronology a bit in his summary of it, and Richardson does something similar in the article I mentioned. None of them gets into the specifics. Richardson also notes that Clark revises the chronology a bit in a later article which I admittedly haven't read, but her response to Hussain postdates that article, and in that response (which is co-authored by David Dudrick) she sticks to saying that Beyond Good & Evil 15 provides evidence that he gives the falsification thesis up. Even more baffling to me was that in that later article (2004) she recognizes in a footnote at the back of the article that the fifth book of the Gay Science postdates Beyond Good & Evil but makes no mention of the fact that this undermines her main evidence for the crux of her interpretation, that Nietzsche gives the falsification thesis up.
At any rate, I'm left wondering whether it is academic politics or politeness that prevented this error from being an academic embarrassment for Clark, or if it has been pointed out somewhere I'm not aware of, or if maybe just nobody really cares. Maybe scholars see it as a technicality, a detail, and still like having her view out there as a possibility in the landscape of possible interpretations of Nietzsche on truth. I guess given how nebulous a lot of philosophy seems to be, with no clear yes or no answers on a lot of things, it would be refreshing for an interpretation to just be refuted and killed. Especially if you're a strange little man who feels like this is important to more than academic Nietzsche specialists in their towers, that Nietzsche has something actually important to say about truth.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
a poem
Yesterday my uncle and I went to the house of a friend of his that I've seen a few times and really like. His name is Mr. Pak, but we usually refer to him as the Tin Man because of the role he played in a performance they and two pastors put together as part of a yearly community gathering (guess who played Dorothy?). Although he lives near the third biggest metropolis on the globe, he managed to find a neighborhood that feels like the country. He lives there with his wife and son in a traditional style Korean house. They have a small garden around the edges of the house and a small persimmon tree near the gate. He likes to drink country rice-wine and can play the traditional Korean bamboo flute, which along with the following earned him the additional pseudonym "dionysus plays the flute" on my uncle's phone: he has read a lot of and is grateful to Nietzsche. His specialty, however, is James Joyce, on whom he wrote a dissertation (in English!) even longer (and probably better written) than my thesis. He and my uncle like to get together to hike or, more often, to play guitar and sing. Yesterday he kindly translated a verse of a song he had just sung into English so I could get a sense of how beautiful and poetic he felt it to be, and he asked me if I had written any poems. As we were leaving the two of us waited by the persimmon tree for my uncle to come back out and I told him that persimmons reminded me of a poem of that title I once read for a class. He said he would like to read it, so I looked it up at home and figured I might as well share it as an easy post. Before we left, though, he reached into the tree and broke off a bit of branch for me to take home. It has two persimmons on it. I'd never held a persimmon before that save for one other time, the summer after I took that poetry class, when someone sent me one in the mail.
The poet is Li-Young Lee. Enjoy.
My only reservation about persimmons, though, is that they can look suspiciously similar to tomatoes...
(painting by Elizabeth Brandon)
The poet is Li-Young Lee. Enjoy.
My only reservation about persimmons, though, is that they can look suspiciously similar to tomatoes...
(painting by Elizabeth Brandon)
Friday, October 10, 2008
Curses!
I have a valid excuse for the complete lack of posts lately: about a week ago, I got an e-mail notifying me that this blog had been identified as a potential spam blog. As a result, it was "locked" so that I couldn't make or edit posts and had to request someone to review the blog to "unlock" it. The good news, though, is that the blog is now again up and running, and, since it had to be reviewed by a staff member of blogger.com, I now know that at least one person has actually looked at it. :)
I suppose the spam filter arrested the blog because of the questionable use of profanity in its title. So I'll explain. The basic idea is that I have intellectually stagnated since college and this gives me a way to digest those and new thoughts into semi-interesting shit. I titled it the way I did so I didn't feel like each post had to be perfect or super-insightful, in which case I might never post anything. I also didn't want it to have a pretentious tone, which was something to consider since I wanted to write about Nietzsche. Those of you who know me, though, hopefully got that the title is mainly a joke on my name. Personally, it also reminds me of being in Korea, since, because of certain linguistics features of Korean, someone who pronounces my name with a thick Korean accent would get something vaguely towards that direction (though nobody here has actually pronounced that poorly so far). And because of how poorly I speak the language, I am kind of an idiot here, unable to understand the majority of conversation and needing help for a lot of basic tasks like figuring out how to get to an upper floor of a building or knowing which bus I should take.
Incidentally, I was shocked to discover that the most popular family name in Korea, which we all know as Lee, is not actually pronounced with the L in front. In fact, the "ㄹ" sound never begins a word in Korean except in adaptations of English words like "radio". The popular name Lee is actually "이" in Korean, which has no initial consonant sound; it's just "Ee". But I guess that just looks so weird in English letters that they decided to add an L. Likewise, names with the no-initial-consonant "Oo" sound (우) tend to have a W added to them when written in English. Since they are both weak consonants, the pronunciation doesn't change all that much when Western speakers mispronounce them as Lee and Woo, but it's still pretty strange.
At any rate, I've figured out how to type Korean characters using my laptop, so a possible post explaining Han-gul, the Korean alphabet, may be coming up for those who are curious.
I suppose the spam filter arrested the blog because of the questionable use of profanity in its title. So I'll explain. The basic idea is that I have intellectually stagnated since college and this gives me a way to digest those and new thoughts into semi-interesting shit. I titled it the way I did so I didn't feel like each post had to be perfect or super-insightful, in which case I might never post anything. I also didn't want it to have a pretentious tone, which was something to consider since I wanted to write about Nietzsche. Those of you who know me, though, hopefully got that the title is mainly a joke on my name. Personally, it also reminds me of being in Korea, since, because of certain linguistics features of Korean, someone who pronounces my name with a thick Korean accent would get something vaguely towards that direction (though nobody here has actually pronounced that poorly so far). And because of how poorly I speak the language, I am kind of an idiot here, unable to understand the majority of conversation and needing help for a lot of basic tasks like figuring out how to get to an upper floor of a building or knowing which bus I should take.
Incidentally, I was shocked to discover that the most popular family name in Korea, which we all know as Lee, is not actually pronounced with the L in front. In fact, the "ㄹ" sound never begins a word in Korean except in adaptations of English words like "radio". The popular name Lee is actually "이" in Korean, which has no initial consonant sound; it's just "Ee". But I guess that just looks so weird in English letters that they decided to add an L. Likewise, names with the no-initial-consonant "Oo" sound (우) tend to have a W added to them when written in English. Since they are both weak consonants, the pronunciation doesn't change all that much when Western speakers mispronounce them as Lee and Woo, but it's still pretty strange.
At any rate, I've figured out how to type Korean characters using my laptop, so a possible post explaining Han-gul, the Korean alphabet, may be coming up for those who are curious.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Introduction
Hello! And welcome to this blog. I will think of it as the refuse of my mind, the stuff that I want to say to get rid of but don't have a good reason to say in everyday conversation. Most of it will be intellectual mumbo-jumbo left over from college, where the main thing I tried to digest in the last year and a half was the philosophy of Nietzsche. What goes in, must come out, I suppose. It may also be a place where I can throw up ideas that I haven't worked out yet, or other unintelligent rants. It may also include some reflections on Korea, where I recently moved, or it may just serve as an escape from it. If I ever figure out how to get the ability to type korean characters on my keyboard, perhaps there will be a bit about the Korean language, too, which I am teaching myself sporadically. Comments are always welcome. Thanks.
- idiot shit
- idiot shit
"Pure Perspectives" in Nietzsche's Perspectivism
In this entry I want to share a problem I have with Brian Leiter's reading of Nietzsche's perspectivism. The article of his I cite is almost 15 years old now so it might be a bit dated, but I just want to get it out there. It will start with a summary of some of the main points of the article before I get to the criticism, but I'll keep it short. This may be interesting to anyone who is frustrated with the intellectual laziness encouraged by the prevalence of the "there's no truth, it's all how you look at it" way of thinking. Or anyone who has heard a bunch of hype about Nietzsche's perspectivism and wants to find out more about what he actually wrote.
In “Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” Brian Leiter criticizes a reading of perspectivism that he believes “has attained the status of near-orthodoxy among commentators,” (334). He characterizes this "Received View" (RV) as follows:
(i) the world has no determinate nature or character;
(ii) our concepts and theories do not “describe” or “correspond” to this world because it has no determinate character;
(iii) our concepts and theories are “mere” interpretations or “mere” perspectives (reflecting our pragmatic needs, at least on some accounts);
(iv) no perspective can enjoy an epistemic privilege over any other, because there is no epistemically privileged mode of access to this characterless world.
Leiter sez: “the Received View cannot be sustained by a close reading of the central text in the work Nietzsche published in which he actually discusses perspectivism: section 12 of the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals,” (335). Before he starts this close reading, Leiter puts up two basic problems with the RV. First, a big part of Nietzsche's philosophy is arguing that other views are mistaken, like when he says something has no basis in experience or that religious and moral interpretations appeal to “imaginary causes." This clashes with his supposed avowal that no perspective can be any more true than any other. Second, in insisting that no perspective can give an account of the world as it ‘really is’, the RV reinstates the distinction between appearance and reality that Nietzsche famously rejects.
Now let's go to the "central text," GM III:12, which provides evidence against the RV. Leiter notes that instead of presenting truth as something impossible to attain, Nietzsche begins the passage “with an attack on any metaphysics that posits the truth as essentially unknowable, with Kant’s thing-in-itself as a paradigmatic case in point,” (343). And instead of giving up objectivity for relativism, Nietzsche presents a different understanding of objectivity. He writes that “objectivity” should be:
...understood not as “contemplation without interest” (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge.
Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”: these always demand that we should think of something that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?— (GM III:12)
The passage proposes an analogy between “knowing” and literal, visual seeing: as seeing is dependent on visual perspectives, so “knowing” is dependent on interests or affects. Leiter spells out the analogy as follows:
In the visual case:
Necessarily, we see an object from a particular perspective: for example, from a certain angle, from a certain distance, under certain conditions (perspectivism claim).
The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more angles we see the object from—the better our conception of what the object is actually like will be (plurality claim).
We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of vision (infinity claim).
There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our perspective on the object: for instance, we are too far away or the background conditions are poor (purity claim).
In the “knowing” case:
Necessarily, we know an object from a particular perspective: that is, from the standpoint of particular interests and needs (perspectivism claim).
The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more interests we employ in knowing the object—the better our conception of what the object is like will be (plurality claim).
We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of knowledge (there are an infinity of interpretive interests that could be brought to bear) (infinity claim).
There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our knowledge of the object: that is, certain interpretive interests and needs will distort the nature of objects (purity claim).
The problem I have with Leiter is with the epistemic purity claim, which Leiter admits is “the most contentious.” He writes, "If we are to have the epistemic purity claim then we must be able to make out something like the following thought: certain interpretive needs and interests distort the nature of objects. We require, then, some criterion for distinguishing nondistorting and distorting needs and interests," (346). What I don't get is how needs and interests could be nondistorting. As I understand it, needs and interests cause us to focus on certain aspects of an experience or situation at the cost of others and to automatically process everything in relation to a certain idea, framework, or agenda, so the perspectives they produce are necessarily partial and unfair. The idea of non-distorting interests is mysterious, and Leiter's speculation as to what the criterion to identify them could be does not clear things up (I'll return to this below).
Moreover, if some perspectives are distorting and others are not, it seems like old Friedrich should tell us to avoid the bad ones and collect the good ones. Indeed, this is how Leiter goes on to qualify the plurality claim: we “can always benefit from additional *nondistorting* perspectives," (Leiter 346). But he does no such thing; in GM III:12 the plurality claim is indiscriminate: “the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be.” Moreover, he makes it clear that one can learn from perspectives that one considers to be distorting and false. After all, immediately after beginning GM III:12 with “an attack on any metaphysics that posits truth as essentially unknowable,” using something he clearly disagrees with, Kant’s metaphysics, as an example, he writes that we should be grateful to this kind of metaphysical view for increasing our capacity for “objectivity” and thereby aiding us in our search for knowledge. This suggests that we can learn from all perspectives, not just some of them. There seems to be nothing in the passage to support the introduction of this fishy "pure perspectives" idea.
So what led Leiter to introduce it? The worry seems to have been that if all perspectives are misleading and distorting, that would leave no true or reliable perspectives from which we can learn. But I think N's point is precisely that such 'reliable sources' are empty fictions that have no role in a true search for knowledge; this is why he attacks such concepts as pure reasons, contemplation without interest, and knowledge in itself as absurd. I think he might add Leiter's pure perspective to the bunch, and that at any rate we can do without it.
I think we can read this passage as making a simple point: even if each point of view we take up is a partial, simplified, and distorted version of the truth, we can learn from each point of view if we understand *how* it is partial, simplified, and distorted. The more we recognize such interest-driven partiality in the beliefs and practices of ourselves and others, the better we understand those beliefs, the interests that shape them, the people who have them, and the world. Recognizing the partiality will drive us away from our comfortable beliefs to understand and learn from a variety of perspectives, which we can do despite the fact that none of them will give us a pure, nondistorted view into the true nature of the world. This does the opposite of encouraging laziness with beliefs because "it's all just perspective, anyway," by encouraging strenuous effort in understanding and criticizing many points of view, without retracting its attack on the old objectivity's claim to interest-free authority. Though this doesn't necessarily mean it is now understood better, I think that attack on metaphysical objectivity was radical at the time it was written but is seen as pretty commonplace today.
(As a footnote: I said I'd return to Leiter's criterion for telling distorting interests from non-distorting interests, so here we go. After observing that it must be those rare strong individuals who are capable of facing the terrible truth who have those nondistorting interests, he writes that "The mark or criterion of a nondistorting interest, for Nietzsche, is that it is adequate to the “terrible truth” about the world. But that “terrible truth” must be established on other grounds," (347). This would mean we can't know which interests are distorting and which aren't unless we know the truth already and can judge what we epistemically "see" from certain perspectives by comparing it to what we already know. So as you can see, this doesn't help explain how those strong interests could avoid shaping the world in a certain partial way.
Instead of explaining the strong's ability to know the truth by supposing that their strength is constituted by the passive possession of ‘strong, truth-adequate perspectives,’ I think it makes more sense to see their strength as an active ability “to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives in the service of knowledge.” On this reading, strong people can approach the truth not because of the particular interests or perspectives they happen to have, but because they are able move between and learn from a variety of perspectives.)
In “Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” Brian Leiter criticizes a reading of perspectivism that he believes “has attained the status of near-orthodoxy among commentators,” (334). He characterizes this "Received View" (RV) as follows:
(i) the world has no determinate nature or character;
(ii) our concepts and theories do not “describe” or “correspond” to this world because it has no determinate character;
(iii) our concepts and theories are “mere” interpretations or “mere” perspectives (reflecting our pragmatic needs, at least on some accounts);
(iv) no perspective can enjoy an epistemic privilege over any other, because there is no epistemically privileged mode of access to this characterless world.
Leiter sez: “the Received View cannot be sustained by a close reading of the central text in the work Nietzsche published in which he actually discusses perspectivism: section 12 of the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals,” (335). Before he starts this close reading, Leiter puts up two basic problems with the RV. First, a big part of Nietzsche's philosophy is arguing that other views are mistaken, like when he says something has no basis in experience or that religious and moral interpretations appeal to “imaginary causes." This clashes with his supposed avowal that no perspective can be any more true than any other. Second, in insisting that no perspective can give an account of the world as it ‘really is’, the RV reinstates the distinction between appearance and reality that Nietzsche famously rejects.
Now let's go to the "central text," GM III:12, which provides evidence against the RV. Leiter notes that instead of presenting truth as something impossible to attain, Nietzsche begins the passage “with an attack on any metaphysics that posits the truth as essentially unknowable, with Kant’s thing-in-itself as a paradigmatic case in point,” (343). And instead of giving up objectivity for relativism, Nietzsche presents a different understanding of objectivity. He writes that “objectivity” should be:
...understood not as “contemplation without interest” (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge.
Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”: these always demand that we should think of something that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?— (GM III:12)
The passage proposes an analogy between “knowing” and literal, visual seeing: as seeing is dependent on visual perspectives, so “knowing” is dependent on interests or affects. Leiter spells out the analogy as follows:
In the visual case:
Necessarily, we see an object from a particular perspective: for example, from a certain angle, from a certain distance, under certain conditions (perspectivism claim).
The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more angles we see the object from—the better our conception of what the object is actually like will be (plurality claim).
We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of vision (infinity claim).
There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our perspective on the object: for instance, we are too far away or the background conditions are poor (purity claim).
In the “knowing” case:
Necessarily, we know an object from a particular perspective: that is, from the standpoint of particular interests and needs (perspectivism claim).
The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more interests we employ in knowing the object—the better our conception of what the object is like will be (plurality claim).
We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of knowledge (there are an infinity of interpretive interests that could be brought to bear) (infinity claim).
There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our knowledge of the object: that is, certain interpretive interests and needs will distort the nature of objects (purity claim).
The problem I have with Leiter is with the epistemic purity claim, which Leiter admits is “the most contentious.” He writes, "If we are to have the epistemic purity claim then we must be able to make out something like the following thought: certain interpretive needs and interests distort the nature of objects. We require, then, some criterion for distinguishing nondistorting and distorting needs and interests," (346). What I don't get is how needs and interests could be nondistorting. As I understand it, needs and interests cause us to focus on certain aspects of an experience or situation at the cost of others and to automatically process everything in relation to a certain idea, framework, or agenda, so the perspectives they produce are necessarily partial and unfair. The idea of non-distorting interests is mysterious, and Leiter's speculation as to what the criterion to identify them could be does not clear things up (I'll return to this below).
Moreover, if some perspectives are distorting and others are not, it seems like old Friedrich should tell us to avoid the bad ones and collect the good ones. Indeed, this is how Leiter goes on to qualify the plurality claim: we “can always benefit from additional *nondistorting* perspectives," (Leiter 346). But he does no such thing; in GM III:12 the plurality claim is indiscriminate: “the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be.” Moreover, he makes it clear that one can learn from perspectives that one considers to be distorting and false. After all, immediately after beginning GM III:12 with “an attack on any metaphysics that posits truth as essentially unknowable,” using something he clearly disagrees with, Kant’s metaphysics, as an example, he writes that we should be grateful to this kind of metaphysical view for increasing our capacity for “objectivity” and thereby aiding us in our search for knowledge. This suggests that we can learn from all perspectives, not just some of them. There seems to be nothing in the passage to support the introduction of this fishy "pure perspectives" idea.
So what led Leiter to introduce it? The worry seems to have been that if all perspectives are misleading and distorting, that would leave no true or reliable perspectives from which we can learn. But I think N's point is precisely that such 'reliable sources' are empty fictions that have no role in a true search for knowledge; this is why he attacks such concepts as pure reasons, contemplation without interest, and knowledge in itself as absurd. I think he might add Leiter's pure perspective to the bunch, and that at any rate we can do without it.
I think we can read this passage as making a simple point: even if each point of view we take up is a partial, simplified, and distorted version of the truth, we can learn from each point of view if we understand *how* it is partial, simplified, and distorted. The more we recognize such interest-driven partiality in the beliefs and practices of ourselves and others, the better we understand those beliefs, the interests that shape them, the people who have them, and the world. Recognizing the partiality will drive us away from our comfortable beliefs to understand and learn from a variety of perspectives, which we can do despite the fact that none of them will give us a pure, nondistorted view into the true nature of the world. This does the opposite of encouraging laziness with beliefs because "it's all just perspective, anyway," by encouraging strenuous effort in understanding and criticizing many points of view, without retracting its attack on the old objectivity's claim to interest-free authority. Though this doesn't necessarily mean it is now understood better, I think that attack on metaphysical objectivity was radical at the time it was written but is seen as pretty commonplace today.
(As a footnote: I said I'd return to Leiter's criterion for telling distorting interests from non-distorting interests, so here we go. After observing that it must be those rare strong individuals who are capable of facing the terrible truth who have those nondistorting interests, he writes that "The mark or criterion of a nondistorting interest, for Nietzsche, is that it is adequate to the “terrible truth” about the world. But that “terrible truth” must be established on other grounds," (347). This would mean we can't know which interests are distorting and which aren't unless we know the truth already and can judge what we epistemically "see" from certain perspectives by comparing it to what we already know. So as you can see, this doesn't help explain how those strong interests could avoid shaping the world in a certain partial way.
Instead of explaining the strong's ability to know the truth by supposing that their strength is constituted by the passive possession of ‘strong, truth-adequate perspectives,’ I think it makes more sense to see their strength as an active ability “to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives in the service of knowledge.” On this reading, strong people can approach the truth not because of the particular interests or perspectives they happen to have, but because they are able move between and learn from a variety of perspectives.)
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