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Clever Turtles
"Science is interesting; if you don't
agree, you can fuck off."
agree, you can fuck off."
Strange Korean word I found in my dictionary while looking something else up.
서리: stealing (melons, chickens, var. farm products) for fun, mischevious raid (on another's farm products), etc.
Now if only I could find a cultural note explaining the context . . .
EDIT: On a related note . . .
I ran across This article from the Marmot's Hole. And since I have nothing to do with myself (except earn my degree, which means actually do homework tonight) I tried to translate it. Pretty loose, but I think I worked out any major errors.
"I like Korea, so. . ." Elite Foreigner Naturalization
Seo Taiji Symphony, a show from Korea's only real rock star (to date).
In Korean class we've been watching "좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈" (released in America as "The Good, the Bad, and the Weird"). It's supposed to be a pastiche of the 60's Korean Manchurian Westerns that were, in turn, pastiches of the Sergio Leone, Eastwood Westerns. I just got around to watching the old Eastwood movies a couple of months ago, so they're pretty fresh in my mind. I have to say, this new movie has nothing in common with but costumes.
Growing up in the Netherlands as a Chinese I cannot remember a moment in which I felt I was treated differently because of my ethnicity. There have been curious questions and misunderstandings, especially in the early days when Asia was not regarded yet as an upcoming economical force but as just some mysterious incomprehensible piece of land in the East.
Lately I've been reading THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, which won a Pulitzer despite being the geekiest novel I've read since Bruce Bethke's HEADCRASH. Seriously. It references the mid-80's RPG GAMMA WORLD.
Given the content and extremely referential hipster style, I wondered if it was translated into Korean, so I did a Google search and pretty soon ran across this review. Having nothing better to do (aside from, you know, earning my graduate degree) I sat down and translated it. It goes as follows,
The Korean Army Thought Police strike again!
I'm actually pretty surprised that this stuff comes up. From my Korean friends who grew up in the 1980's, I've heard stories of rigid anti-Communism, and I know a lot of books were supressed during the Park regime. But that's just, so . . . Cold War, you know?
It's funny that they singled out Chomsky (I'm guessing not his linguistics texts). As for BAD SAMARITAN, I've seen it in the bookstores but I didn't know it was written by a Korean ("go diaspora!").
I just noticed an interesting feature on Korean Youtube. When I did a search for '줄타기' (jultagi), after the first set of results it suggested the translation 'tightrope'.
See? Pretty neat.
By the way, whaaaaat?
I was flipping through some scanlated Korean manhwa recently (really, really bad manhwa) and I came across a "Westerner" character, an over-sexed blonde American woman drawn more from pornographic films than any sort of psychological sketch. (This could be said for pretty much all of the characters. It was pretty bad.) Of course, we are constantly reminded of her Western-ness by salting her dialog with the few English phrases that any Korean would recognize, and any American would recognize as written by a non-English-speaking Korean.
Returning to that famous photo from the Liberian civil war in 2001.
I remember seeing it on the front page of the Seattle Times.
