Sappho. Translated by Mary Barnard, Foreword by Dudley Fitts. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1956 (renewed 1986). (link) Let me begin with a quotation, and it shall be nearly all I need to say: You may forget but Let me tell youthis: someone insome future timewill think of us If you like powerful, simple verse, this book of translations is for you. Mary Barnard’s Sappho has a voice that rings across 2600 years with the crisp and particular clarity of poems by a woman friend one has left behind in one’s home country while traveling, who sends letters with poems …
Month: November 2004
The Pedagogically Challenged Cabbie
Tonight, my cab driver who took me to the girls’ school where I work twice a week was an interesting fellow. When he picked me up, unlike a lot of guys he knew exactly where I wanted to go, and started talking with me right away. When he asked where I was from and I replied I was from Canada, he observed what a lot of cab drivers observe when they ask me that question: that in Jeonju, a lot of hakwon teachers come from Canada. I asked him how many of them speak Korean with him, and he said …
Just a Thought…
Isn’t it one of the silliest ideas in the world, that old motto that tells us that “there are two sides to every story”? Most stories have many, many sides and to think that two sides will cover it is just too simplistic. There are not just two sides to any story; there are a whole range of possible viewpoints and understandings of different situations. Most situations are more complex than that, most situations and more challenging than that to resolve. When you recognize this, then nothing is more frustrating than hearing someone say, “Well, you know, every side has …
A Mountain
Lime and I went to a mountain Saturday morning, with tea and fruit in our bags. I also packed a nice woollen blanket for us, and we ended up climbing most of a rather big mountain, as well as crossing the scariest bridge I’ve seen so far in Korea. I also packed my leather jacket in case it got cold, which it didn’t; I regretted bringing the jacket, as it made my bag very heavy and I didn’t use it once! Oh, how it hurt my poor aching back! I have pictures, but they’ll have to wait. Tonight we saw …
Spam Out Of Hand
Aside from the fact that my MT-Blacklist spamblocker is broken, someow prevent rebuilds to the page when it as turned on, I am finding that there are ridiculous amounts of spam now being posted to my page. (It was 600 posts in the two says I was away from the site.) The solution, I fear, is to install a human checker—you know, one of those things that displays an image and requests the user enter the word in the image, which is too distorted for a spambot to read properly. Expect something like that to appear on the page sometime …