Sunday, September 22, 2013

βιος post #1190 / An Inadvertent Series of Lessons




Today's lessons include How to type in Greek on a computer:

We just never know where internet searches may lead us.  Early this morning when I checked my email, I saw this subject line:  Check out Journal of Surrealism and the Americas.  Although I was about to delete it, wondering why I was receiving this particular unsolicited email, something prompted me to open it.  We all know how this goes. Within seconds I realized that I had read something from the JSA before and must have given them my email address, and I was engaged with reading 'My World is Surreal,' or 'The Northwest Coast' is Surreal, by Charlotte Townsend-Gault (educated in England, taught in Scotland, Nova Scotia, and currently teaching in British Columbia) and was soon compelled to find out about Giorgio Agamben.  Part way down the Wiki page on Agamben, I came across this:

"bare life" — zoe (Gk. ζωή), as opposed to bios (Gk. βίος): qualified life

βίος looks like  Blog, doesn't it?

When I tried to copy and save "βίος" in a Word document, it copied as:  ____

Of course I couldn't let that stop me, and in the process I learned how to type in Greek letters on a computer and discovered that the Greek letter sigma's capitalized form is Σ and that it has two lower case forms -- σ and ς. The former is used within a word, and the latter is used at the end of word.  Ιt took me a little longer to figure out that in order to type the final Σ, I would have to use the  "w" key.

In the midst of these rich lessons, my attention was drawn outside to where I listened to the wind beginning to thrash the cattails before the drenching rain began.

And now another lesson in listening :



I had to play this a second time before I began to hear the high notes of "Amazing Grace" woven into the droning.

If you'd like to know more about Koomei, click here.

That's all for today.  Thanks for stopping by.


1 comment:

The Solitary Walker said...

Love all the connections here, and the Greek lesson. I wish I knew some Greek. I learnt Latin at school — for which I've always been grateful — but not Greek, although the Latin teacher was equally a Greek scholar.