Mnemosyne

When adding Chinese vocabulary to my Mnemosyne cards, I use definitions from an online dictionary. Many Chinese characters have multiple meanings and so, while I often learn only one particular meaning from my book, I find other meanings in the dictionary. An interesting one I recently ran across is 疼, which is pronounced téng. We learned it, in the chapter of our book on going to the doctor, as "hurt" or "pain". For example, 头疼, pronounced tóu téng, means "headache" (头 means "head"). My dictionary listed some other synonyms (ache, sore) but also gave the meaning "love fondly".

Another interesting feature of Chinese words is the tendency to double up characters that have the same or similar meanings. I imagine this happened partially for emphasis or expressiveness, but also to distinguish a particular meaning of a character (recall that an individual character can often have more than one meaning). For example, take the word 休息, pronounced xiū xi and meaning "to rest". The first character, 休, also means "to rest", but the second character, 息, has several different interpretations: "news; interest; breath; rest".

The character 休 is also cool because it's one of the pictograph characters. The left side is the radical for man, while the right side is the character 木 (pronounced mù) which means "tree". So the character 休, meaning "to rest", is a person leaning against a tree.

I recently joined the Charing Cross library, which is the one closest to Chinatown and which has a large supply of Chinese books. I take out kids' books and try to read what I can. I ran into an interesting character in one of them, which is 佛, pronounced fó and meaning Buddha or Buddhism. I found this character interesting because it's the first sound I've run across that doesn't have any other characters associated to it, not even with other tones. Now, that might be due to limitations in my dictionaries, which are probably not the most extensive Chinese dictionaries in existence, but every other sound I've looked up has had some other characters, and some sounds have tons of characters. For example, look up "yan" with the "Pinyin" option in the online dictionary. Not all sounds have that many entries (try "xiong"). But then try "fo".

Basic Corner Shapes

I really like this one too.

Fest!

Marty and I are on the same Heathrow -> JFK flight!

Ooooh... pretty....

King Lear at the Globe

France. Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor,
Most choice forsaken, and most lov’d despis’d!
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon,
Be it lawful I take up what’s cast away.
Gods, gods! ’tis strange that from their cold’st neglect
My love should kindle to inflam’d respect.
Thy dowerless daughter, king, thrown to my chance,
Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France.
Not all the dukes of waterish Burgundy
Can buy this unpriz’d precious maid of me.
Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind;
Thou losest here, a better where to find.

Edm. This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeits of our own behaviour,—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail; and my nativity was under Ursa Major; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar—

Enter EDGAR

and pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villanous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam —O, these eclipses do portend these divisions! fa, sol, la, mi.

The ending was so powerful. The play, of course, ends in carnage and despair. Then the music started, melancholy at first, and the minor characters returned to the stage, touching the corpses on stage to revive them. They in turn would awake the others. Goneril and Regan woke Cordelia who in turn finally woke Lear. Even as they rose, they were all still overflowing with sorrow. But then the music started to pick up and they moved into a dance, stomping their feet in time to the music, with a crescendo into a jig, allowing, at long last, the release of the sorrow and the much needed outbreak of smiles and laughter. What a beautiful way to end the play.

Afterwards, we stayed at the bar there for a pint. Everyone else left and the place was pretty much deserted until a few minutes later when the entire cast came out and sat next to us for their post show drinks. So we got to bask in the glory of their performance a little while longer.

Psycho Buildings

My second trip to the Hayward Gallery confirmed my delight with it from the first. My favourite pieces in this exhibit were "Show Room" by Los Carpinteros and "Place" by Rachel Whiteread. The two pieces were in adjacent rooms.

We saw "Show Room" first. It consisted of a life size living room, bedroom and bathroom. Some force had blasted a hole through the cinder block "external" wall of the living room and the scene was frozen mid-destruction, Matrix style. To create such a scene, pieces of wall and furniture and debris were suspended from the ceiling with fishing line, bathing the whole scene in a beautiful almost glittering light, except "glittering" is the wrong word since it suggests some movement and the scene was breathtakingly still. The furniture was all plain and bare and mostly white (the rugs and bedspread were red). There was nothing in the rooms except the furniture: no knickknacks, appliances, toiletries, etc., the lack of which contributed to the stillness contrasting the chaos.

Next door, we stepped into a dark cold night in a crowded hillside town of dollhouses. The houses were all empty, but warm and inviting light spilled from the windows. For me, Whiteread's "Place" evoked the same sensation as driving alone along a dark road in western NY, occasionally passing a house, strung with Christmas lights, off on a hill, at once making you feel more alone, since the warmth and life there is one to which you are not invited, and less, for the evidence of fellow humanity at all.



We also got to wallow in boats on a lovely rooftop pool. I say wallow instead of "row" or "paddle" since maneuvering of these unseaworthy tubs proved beyond our ability in the few minutes we were given. I think it would have been better not to try, and instead to just enjoy floating over London.

On another of the gallery's terraces was a theatre, the interior of which was beautiful. The canvas walls allowed a lovely light to filter in. The curved walls were lined with delicate slats, reminding me of the gills of the underside of a mushroom. They were showing several films on a loop. I usually find art films difficult to appreciate, and this one particularly so. Being sick, I was already woozy and dizzy and then this film was from the viewpoint of some guy exploring the crawl spaces between the walls and rooms of a house. Over and under and squeezing through, peering around, up and down, with the light from the partly cloudy day outside and the shifting spotlights on the walls inside all contriving to make me quite nauseous.



The big sphere outside was pleasant from the bottom, but we didn't get to go into the top part. Entrance was on a "lucky dip" system, and we never even figured out how to qualify for it.

Busy week

Sat:
     Preview of Wall-E
     Psycho Buildings at the Hayward Gallery
Mon-Wed:
     Tim's in town!
Tues:
     King Lear at the Globe
Thurs:
     dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip at Astoria 2



Sat:
     Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at the Royal Opera House
Sun:
     Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Concert at the Royal Opera House

With incredibly bad timing, it seems I've just gotten sick.

成语

Today Guo Juan had a question and answer session for her Audio Lessons. (It seems I am the only one who asks questions, which is great for me. Maybe eventually more people will find out about it and it will no longer be free personal lessons for me.) After answering my questions in the session, she ended up taking suggestions for new lectures and reading off her already long to do lecture list.

We were chatting afterwards and I mentioned that she has so much on her to do list. "We're already on the tiger," she replied. Oooh... it must be a 成语 (chéng yǔ). I asked her if it was, and got this:

骑虎难下 (qí hǔ nán xià)

Breakdown:
骑     qí        to ride (an animal or bike); to sit astride
虎     hǔ       tiger
难     nán     difficult (to...); problem; difficulty; difficult; not good
下     xià      under; second (of two parts); next (week, etc.); lower; below; underneath; down(wards); to decline; to go down; latter

What a great expression, eh? I like it even more than I otherwise would because I already knew all of the words. (Although I must admit that I would not have recognized the characters 虎 and 难.) Also, I realized that I now actually know (from other contexts) both of the characters 成 and 语, so now that makes sense.

成     chéng   finish; complete; accomplish; become; turn into; win; succeed; one tenth
语     yǔ        dialect; language; speech

False Positive

I woke this morning to a chat from Aftab, wondering whether I had yet seen this. A brief racing of the heart: Could it be? After all this time? After attending so many talks that started with "We tried to prove such and such" and ended with "We found that it's equivalent to the Riemann Hypothesis"? But I know where to check, so the excitement was short lived.

Meanwhile, on my way in to the office today, I recognized for the first time a tattooed Chinese (or Japanese) character. Now that I'm learning Chinese, I always look to see if I know the characters people have tattooed on themselves, but until now I hadn't seen any that I actually know. This isn't so surprising, as the Chinese we learn tends to be practical, and people are unlikely to tattoo "fried rice" or "taxicab" on themselves.

The tattoo in question was on a girl's arm and the character was 生. I'm told that in Japanese this has 8 billion pronunciations and meanings. In Chinese, I know it as "shēng", meaning "to be born; to give birth; life; to grow". It's possible that it was preceded by another character or other characters, covered by her sleeve, giving a more particular meaning (possibly something one is more likely to tattoo upon oneself). The only thing I could think of offhand was 出生，"chū shēng", "to be born", but that seems unlikely. Searching by pinyin, my dictionary also just turned up 畜生, "chù sheng", "domestic animal", which seems even less likely. We learn 生 early on, as part of 生日, "shēng rì", which means "birthday" (日 is "day" or "sun").