nnozomi

Posting mostly language stuff because I’m kind of halfway between busy and at loose ends (I owe some comments here and there…soon…) and need a distraction.

I went back over the books I want to translate and sorted out a stack approximately forty volumes high, so I did the logical thing (?) and put them in order by page number so I could start with the shortest one and work onward. The shortest one turns out to involve four different languages in addition to Japanese, and it's tying me in knots. I have been playing around with fonts to see if I can make that work, but I’m beginning to think there is no solution but to imitate the Japanese and use ruby text (superscript text on top of a given word so that you can express two things simultaneously, I don’t think DW can do it, named after the font size), otherwise you inevitably lose something or else the reading experience becomes very ponderous. That said, it’s very very fun to work on. I’ll write more about it as I get further into it.

Once in a while Wikipedia comes up with something that just makes you wonder (in a good way), and this is one of them. If you like spicy Chinese food, would you like to try some Bubula ex aqua bullita? How about Pullina paedagogi principum, or the classic Caseus soiae ani maculatae? I don’t know who translated several articles on Sichuan food into Latin (or more to the point, WHY they did so), but I love that they exist. (I came across these looking up the first one, 水煮牛肉, which I had misheard as 税局牛肉 and wondered what tax-office beef could be. There are weirder food names!)

Silly Chinese of the day: I was almost equally surprised to find a) that Chinese has the word 搅屎, literally and figuratively a shit-stirrer, and b) that it’s apparently acceptable to say on camera. I thought it must be a calque from English, but apparently (if Baidu is to be trusted) it’s a case of convergent evolution. Of all things. (I think I always expect 屎 to be considered a worse cuss word than it is because it’s pronounced shǐ, which just wants a t on the end to match the meaning.)

Jiang Dunhao song of the day, just because it’s making me happy: 我脑海里的泡沫展厅, the latest from his slowly appearing new album. He has a very good lyricist on hand and the song itself, written to suit his own voice, lives up to the words.

grumble: I want fic for The People at No. 1 Siwei St. for Yuletide! Except the English translation isn’t out yet as far as I can tell (it looks like Lin King, who translated Taiwan Travelogue, is doing this one too?) and the chances of receiving fic from someone who’s read it in Japanese or Chinese are very small. Will I have to wait for next year or the year after?

In addition to other ongoing projects I also feel like writing fic, but it’s not Yuletide yet and I don’t know what to write (I do want to do something little for the Guardian wishlist if I can, but not yet). Suggest me something you’d like to read? You can find fandoms I’ve written before here and here, along with books etc. I’ve mentioned on DW. I don’t promise anything will actually get written, but it can’t hurt to try.

Photos: Trip over to Akashi and, very briefly, to Tokushima. Three views of the Inland Sea, one featuring the big Akashi bridge at night. Crepe myrtle, unripe persimmons, and the meal I gave myself a break from dieting for: visible dishes include miso soup with lots of seaweed, tuna sashimi, taimeshi…um…rice with sea bream, and in the background tempura, more sashimi, and soup with ise-ebi, um, sort of lobster? in it. DELICIOUS.

Be safe and well.

Back from my mom’s city! Phew. There are many good things there, but nothing like being HOME.

This summer I was able to go back to the adult ESOL classes where I volunteered last year; same teacher, and a few of the same students were still there too, two or three older Chinese women who greeted me with big hugs and fed me zongzi. Most of the other students were Spanish-speaking, apart from one Russian woman (a doctor in her thirties, always exquisitely made-up, who mentioned in passing having escaped from Russia and gone through four countries before coming to the US); some with graduate degrees in their own countries, some who hadn’t finished high school and wanted more English in order to talk to their grandchildren, an eloquent Venezuelan yoga instructor with two-colored eyes, a gay Peruvian beautician with ultra-fancy fingernails, a Cantonese-speaking church secretary with a new granddaughter, two forty-ish women nicknamed “the hermanas” because they looked so alike, my stubborn jiejie from last year who makes you coax her into getting the work done and loves it—you name it, all devoted to the class. I miss them already.
Relatedly, I made a surprising discovery. When my mom was in college, in the early 1960s, her grandfather wrote her a series of autobiographical letters which she typed up and kept and showed me this summer; the one about coming to America—in 1895, when he was ten years old—says in part “I was not ready for the public schools since I could not speak a word of English. I was sent to a school called the [redacted1] School, located on [street]. It was called the [redacted2], I think it still exists as a settlement house.” It indeed still existed in 1961 and it still exists under the same name on the same street now: it’s the place that hosts the ESOL classes where I go to volunteer.

Some apartment buildings in my mom’s city have their tenants’ names outside in a list by the door, which I always enjoy reading because I have a thing about names and also it’s demographically interesting. I ran across one with some striking surnames. Andy Super may possibly be Andy the superintendent rather than Mr. Super, but C. Suds, V. Corpus and B. Gotcher among them—though individually normal—en masse sound like the cast of a murder mystery.
I also passed a church with a sign outside it reading “POST NO BILLS, Penal Law No. 555,” with the handwritten addition “Including Martin Luther.”

I think, although God knows it’s still not what it should be, my Chinese listening has actually improved. Source for this: the farmboys’ show features various languages, including Uyghur, at least two dialects of Tibetan, a little Kazakh, and of course Cantonese as well as assorted regional dialects of Mandarin (and that’s not counting their unique dialect of English). Everything is subtitled in Mandarin (including the English…), and I’ve been noticing that obviously when someone is speaking Tibetan or Cantonese I have to be glued to the subtitles, but when the spoken language is standard Mandarin (and not highly technical or heavily accented), I can kind of just glance at the subtitles and pick the rest up by ear.

A couple of neat Chinese words. 列文虎克, lièwénhǔkè, is the transliteration for Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the microscope (I have more trouble spelling the Dutch than the pinyin), and has apparently come to mean, by association, “sharp-eyed, quick to pick up on things” in slang as well. Also something from my Chinese teacher, 既来之则安之, which literally means something like “since I’m here I’ll be calm about it,” kind of a positive version of “it is what it is.”
For work I ran across the unfamiliar word 総花的 (Japanese, not Chinese) and had to look it up; turns out it means basically “comprehensive, all-around,” but the computer tried to translate it according to the actual characters and produced “totally flowery,” which is adorable.

I wrote a fic for the opera Turandot a while back, and recently someone was inspired by it to draw a beautiful f/f comic, to be found here (linked with permission). Apart from the gorgeous art, I’m delighted by the mixture of Italian lyrics and manga sound-effects in the background…
And in musical experiences beginning with Turan-, I was reminded how much I enjoy Messiaen’s Turangalila-symphony. Some of it is better suited to background music, but the last movement in particular is a goddamn delight.

New (to me) book notes, part 3.

Recommended by somebody:
H.G. Parry, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door: Lancashire farmer’s daughter goes to elite magical university to find a cure for her brother, who has a magical wound he got in WWI. She and her friends make some inevitable bad decisions, have a dramatic split, and are reunited several years later by the ultimate results of their bad decisions; bittersweet ending. I enjoyed this well enough, but I did not respect it a whole lot. The plotline in general felt cookie-cutterish, ticking off boxes one by one, and while the writing is competent it never really clicked for me. The characters all felt…constructed to serve the plot rather than because they _had_ to be who they were. I thought it would have been more fun with rotating POVs, giving us a chance to see what Alden and Hero and Eddie looked like inside their own heads, maybe even Matthew too, but with only Clover’s voice the others never really came to life, and neither did the settings. Also, while I can’t think of much offhand that seemed obviously anachronistic, it never really felt in-period to me either. The author cites Vera Brittain in her acknowledgments, but given the context I should have felt transported into the latter part of Testament of Youth, and I did not. (Now I wish someone would actually write Vera and Winifred et al. but with fantasy; that I’d read with enthusiasm.) That said, I may well go back to reread it and maybe I’ll think more of it a second time?

Old friends of the family (not literally):
Penelope Fitzgerald, Letters: Not a real overview of Fitzgerald’s life, which is not the fault of the editor (her son-in-law) since so many of her letters were lost along the way. Very entertaining tour of her voice in (mostly) later life, often funny and relatable. From letters to various publishers, etc.: “I’m sorry I said quadratic instead of simultaneous equations when trying to explain the routine work on Enigma—I don’t wonder that as a mathematician you shrink away in disgust—my only excuse is that I’d been trying most of the day to explain the difference between irony and satire to my VI form—” “The trouble is that it’s rather difficult to shake the people off when the book is written, and to return to yourself. They’re not to be gotten rid of so easily.” “…on the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.” She also remarks “I’ll never forget first reading Where the Wild Things Are,” not a combination of authors I would have expected, but entertaining. The only problem is that the letters are organized by correspondent instead of chronologically overall, which makes it very difficult to keep track of what was going on in her life at any given moment. The editor’s intent was most likely to give a sense of her relationships with each person, which might have been harder to grasp if the letters were scattered, but it didn’t work for me. Still, that’s what we have the Hermione Lee biography for.
William Helmreich, The Bronx Nobody Knows: I forget if I’ve written about this guy before; he made it his business to walk every street in New York City, and wrote a series of quasi-guidebooks about what he found there, one for each borough. There’s a little section for each neighborhood and they’re both interesting—delving into the history and sociology of the people who have lived there—and very soothing. He does have an elderly-white-guy perspective, but also knows that not everyone shares it and does his best. This time I picked up the one for the Bronx, enjoying a few asides: “By the entrance [to a little park], there’s a sign with the usual admonishments to the public—no littering, no drinking, no loud noise, no cooking, and no monopolizing. What does this last prohibition mean, I wonder. No monopolizing of space? Of conversations? No financial monopolies? No Monopoly games? Who knows?”

Bookstore shelf at random:
Portia Elan, Homebound: I’m actually surprised I haven’t seen people talking about this one anywhere on DW. Hard to describe: a thread that starts with a 1980s college student coming to terms with her uncle’s death by finishing the computer game he started, and runs by means of the game itself through to a little group of lonely twenty-fifth century voyagers, including an AI with a long memory, sad and hopeful. Coming to terms with loss, and with being queer, are themes all the way through, and almost everyone is Jewish.
Jane Pek, The Verifiers and The Rivals: These are so good. Murder mysteries which, although set in more-or-less modern-day New York, have a hint of a science-fiction feel. The protagonist, Claudia Lin (a wonderful first-person voice, up there with Peter Grant, with whom she would probably hit it off), is herself a murder-mystery nut, a Taiwanese-American lesbian ex-English major who has found her perfect job at a tiny company which investigates matches on dating sites. Each book has its own mystery to solve, but there's an overarching plot which is not even slightly finished, please keep working on book three and beyond, Jane Pek!). The detective-story meta is funny (I kind of want somebody to write fic about the nonexistent “Inspector Yuan” mystery series Claudia loves), and the (as yet unresolved) slow burn with one of Claudia’s colleagues is very good, along with her complicated relationships with her family, especially her driven but troubled older brother (what can I say, I’m soft for anyone who gets called da-ge).
Angela Mi Young Hur, The Loom Tree: This is the other “girl from ordinary background goes to magical college and encounters dramatic events with a bittersweet ending” novel, and I will say it’s in no danger of being formulaic; it’s wild and lavish and more than a little incoherent, but satisfying just for that. The framing story starts when Korean-American high schooler V- discovers her single mother Sharon’s magical journal from college days. Most of the novel is Sharon’s perspective on her one eventful term being magic, learning about and becoming various fairy tales and origin stories, and meeting a wild array of characters from within the stories (a terrible description, but I don’t think I’ve retained the niceties of the plot well enough to describe them clearly). The one character who is not an archetype but an ordinary mundane college student is also the most vivid, and made the book for me, tiny kind motormouth ruthless Ruth Huang-with-a-u.
Dorothy Roberts, The Mixed Marriage Project: Half memoir of Roberts’ Chicago childhood with a Black mother and white father, half an account of her father’s endlessly unfinished sociological/oral history research on Black/white couples. Beautifully, engagingly and occasionally brutally written, bringing everyone she writes about to life and adding perspective and analysis to her father’s interviews without ever falling into dry academicism, while giving me a lot to think about.

Photos, just a few: something blue, some elegant stripy eggplants, some fire escapes.

Be safe and well.

Went to see the American Ballet Theatre do Onegin. I just barely missed seeing Takumi Miyake as Lensky, which I really regret, but on the other hand I got to see Calvin Royal* in the role, a floating, gorgeous dancer I’ve seen before who has a consistently adorable stage presence (making Lensky’s fate that much sadder; Onegin, how can you do that to such a sweetheart. During the intermission, I heard a group of college kids or similar in the row ahead of me energetically debating what makes Onegin the biggest asshole, quote unquote.) I’ve never heard of the choreographer, John Cranko—the production was made in 1965—and I don’t know how it stacks up against Balanchine, Ashton, etc. for people in the know, but I thought it was very good theater, and the dancers did the acting well. My favorite part of the actual dancing was the Act I dream pas-de-deux, because of all the astonishing lifts, in which the Onegin (Aran Bell) did a good job of making the Tatiana (Devon Teuscher) into the star of the show, letting her fly. Slow lifts (and whatever it’s called when the man sets the woman down again) can be even more exciting than fast ones.
(Dance performances always make me remember Toni Bentley’s rendition of what the corps dancers say to each other when they come off stage—“Shit, I made so many mistakes. Was [the ballet mistress] watching?” “I’ve never never danced so badly, I’m in shock!” but also, occasionally, “Wow, that was fun!”)
My own fault for not doing my homework, but I’d been super looking forward to hearing the Onegin opera music with the ballet—the real draw, if anything—and was much disappointed to find that the music is a string of kleinmeister-level Tchaikovsky pastiche (I mean, real Tchaikovsky, but not his best work; the only one I actually recognized was what I always think of as the theme from The Rebel lol). Why would you DO that when you could have such a good thing going, I don’t understand the way ballet people think about music. That said, the orchestra was good.
I didn’t like the costumes for the last scene, Tatiana and Onegin; he’s still in black and she’s wearing a kind of charcoal-gray dress, meaning that without opera glasses it was hard to distinguish their two separate bodies from high up during their pas de deux. I can see dramatically where the costume comes from, but at least they could have put her in dark green or something? Still, it’s an amazing scene, up there with the ending of Jenufa in terms of the moral victory over a weak man of a woman who stays true to herself. (With apologies to the Russian speakers, I kept wanting to call Tatiana’s rather sweet husband Prince Gremlin, which of course is not his name.)
*Some article about Calvin Royal also quotes him saying very sweetly of his partner, the pianist Jacek Mysinski, that he can feel his presence when Mysinski is playing for a ballet performance: “It’s almost like having him at my side, almost like a partner” aw.

Thinking about what makes the difference between characters who feel real and those who don’t (flat/one-dimensional/etc.). I’m sure that whole books have been written about this, I have nothing new and original to say here, but it’s on my mind, due to both reading and writing lately. To me the characters I write feel real, but I expect most writers feel that way, and God knows it doesn’t necessarily mean they come off that way to others. Is there an objective distinction to be made, and if so what is it? (other than the classic definition of pornography, “I know it when I see it…”).
Maybe if: the writer believes in the characters as people who are living, changing, developing, interacting, experiencing throughout the book/story, and whose behavior is in keeping therewith, rather than static archetypes or plot devices? Characters who are more than just their utility to the book, and are designed to be people who live in that world rather than to match given types or to provoke specific feelings in the reader (that sense of YOU SHOULD LIKE/DISLIKE THIS PERSON that sometimes arises, the writer’s hand visible in the background).
Examples, on either side? (The obvious dichotomy that came to mind for me was that Antonia Forest never wrote a flat character in her life: even apart from her main and major side characters, we get people like Elaine Rees, the rather vapid classmate who gets her own moment of inspiration onstage, or Val Longstreet, the tiresome prefect who flinches in spite of herself when facing a fast bowler. Meanwhile, genuinely real-feeling characters are far to seek in most of Elinor Brent-Dyer, but now and then they momentarily emerge, in spite of their author’s best efforts: cf Grizel, Miss Slater, Tom.)

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 我爱你推广大使, which is about as much joy as anyone can fit into three minutes and forty-one seconds.

A translator’s joke passed on to me from A-Pei, who was checking a JA-ZHTW text. Japanese transliterates rather than translating the English technical terms “sink” and “source”; either a person or a machine, it could be either one, had looked at ソース and produced 酱汁 as the Taiwanese version. Please do not apply sauce to your electronic equipment!

Reading “The Rape of Lucrece” with yaaurens and company, finding a handful of phrases I want to hang on to for later: “Nor read the subtle-shining secrecies/Writ in the glassy margents of such books” / “For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy?” / “Mar not the thing that cannot be amended” / “This helpless smoke of words.”

You know what, I realized I never posted about finishing the second season of Under the Skin.

spoilers within

On the whole I was pleased with it; it was a much happier ending than I’d actually expected (the little teaser at the end I don’t take too seriously). It almost felt unearned to me—Shen Yi’s increasing fall into, I don’t know what to call it, traumatic stress disorder of some kind along with whatever it’s called when you feel like you’re the only one who can save the world? seemed more believable than the rooftop conversation where we learn that he’s effectively undercover and it’s (mostly) a front, and I wouldn’t have found it odd if we ended the season with Shen Yi genuinely deeply troubled and more on Fang Kaiyi’s side than Du Cheng’s; in a way it would have been more interesting to see how he might then climb out of there in a prospective third season. Oh well, that’s what fic is for, I guess. While I thought Fang Kaiyi’s actor did a good job of making him compelling, I (shallowly) didn’t find him especially attractive (another role that Liu Chang would have done good work in…). (On the other hand, the actress playing Tang Keying was gorgeous, not least because they let her be on the curvy side.

Photos: Just a couple. Cherries, ajisai, a very large-scale prayer.

Be safe and well.

Too much boring work to do (better than no work at all, but still), so of course I am escaping reality and posting here instead. (Also owe some comments on other people's posts! Soon, I hope!)

I went to the thrice-yearly used book fair* in Kyoto, which is always fun and frustrating in equal measure; it’s the usual used bookstore problem writ large, i.e. I know there is something I want there, but there are so many books arranged in such random order, there’s no real way to come across it other than dumb luck. Still, I found one book for me (oral history in Japanese) and one for my mom (Hamerton’s Paris, architectural essays published in 1892, in amazingly good condition and not at all expensive), as well as some cute postcards from past book fair posters, see below. In the past I’ve also come across things like a set of Chujo Yuriko’s complete works at about 2 dollars a volume (there are a lot of volumes, but still), some art I still have up on my wall, at least one of the books I use as a source for senzenwomen, and my favorite piece of ephemera ever, have I mentioned it here before? a school directory for a Kyoto public junior high school from 1955, containing not just students’ names and addresses but also parents’ names, ages, and occupations, like a sociological map of the neighborhood at the time.
*(Of the three yearly used book fairs, the May one is the only one held inside; I usually skip the August one, because even in the shady precincts of the Shimogamo Shrine, Kyoto in August is too damn hot and humid to wander around outside for any length of time, and one doesn’t want to sweat on the books. October at Chionji (or is it Chion-in, I always forget) is much nicer.)

I’ve been watching a bunch of people doing reaction videos to songs/concerts on Bilibili, and found myself thinking, I could do this! Not showing my face, God forbid, just my voice and my terrible Chinese. I have things I want to say! It would be such good speaking practice! (she said innocently). Probably nobody would watch them, but so what? Except, I couldn’t do it, because I don’t have the relevant software/hardware and have never made a video in my life. Is that something you can just, like, download and learn? (Also I’d have to actually sign up to B站, but presumably that can be done…)

Considering some of the more varied uses of the character 美 in Chinese. 美甲, painted/polished/manicured nails; 美瞳, cosmetic contacts; 美声, bel canto (used, I think, as a metonym (?) for Western-opera singing in general, to distinguish it from Chinese opera). Also the phonetic ones: 美乃滋, Taiwan-Chinese for mayonnaise (the mainland uses 蛋黄酱, egg yolk sauce); 美式 is American-style and a 冰美式 is an iced Americano.
Other random Chinese stuff: 大肠发卷, a really delightful word which is literally “large intestine hairband,” ie a scrunchie; and the frequent online use of the English “ing”to mean, appropriately, “currently doing ~~” (I’ve seen “排练ing” and “考虑ing” among others).

Jiang Dunhao song of the post, 好的晚安, because the 转音 (melisma? do you call it melisma in a pop song?) get to me; also a bonus Zhou Shen version of the same song, up an octave of course (or rather JDH is taking it down an octave, Zhou Shen covered it first).

For the last orchestra concert, we had a different tuba player (the one before was a slight, fresh-faced young man who looked as if he might get sucked into his own tuba, a la Alice in Orchestralia); this one was a tall thin guy about thirty, with glasses and a short ponytail (still unusual in mainstream Japan). He looks like someone, I kept thinking, but I couldn’t pin it down until I saw him in his concert suit: Liu Sang!

Rereading the diaries of Nella Last, a mid-20th-c. housewife from Northern England, vibrant as always.

5/13/41: Men are so odd. I often feel I give up trying to understand them at all. Perhaps they feel like that about us!!
6/8/41: Today at Morecambe Bay two carfuls of happy people sat within earshot and I caught scraps of conversation…the rest of the talk seemed to be of ‘whether our Margaret should stand so much of Bill’s nonsense—girls were daft nowadays to bother about things like that.’ I was so curious about Margaret’s particular daftness!
4/23/42: Mrs Waite started off about ‘crawling snakes’ and ‘tricks her mother would have done’ and suddenly I got angry and said ‘If I wanted to leave I’d leave. Nothing would stop me. But if you want to make me grow tired of Hospital Supply, you will start bickering and nagging. What I do when I’m not at Hospital Supply is my own concern and to talk of “liking to be where men are” in that nasty insinuating way you did when I said I would rather work in the men’s Canteen than change over was quite uncalled for. I do like men best—I’m more used to them and anyway I’ve never heard a man say as many stupid childish things to another man as you did to Molly Diss. You are a very peevish cantankerous old thing and I will not be spoken to like that.’ There was dead silence and then Mrs. Waite said mildly ‘I cannot see us doing without a bit of fire for a week or two’ and Mrs. Higham got up and went out. Later she said ‘I went off to have a mild attack of hysterics…’
12/18/45: And there’s a thing people tend to forget. One of the strongest cornerstones in American society as a whole is bitter resentment, either to their own country or another, which compelled them to seek a fuller life overseas.
3/7/47: Shan We [Siamese cat] seemed to lose his head—he took a header [from the window] into the deep snow and disappeared, except for the tip of his brown tail. I leaned forward and heaved and we both fell backward into the hall, bringing a pile of snow. The cross-eyed look of reproach he gave me and the anxious look he gave his tail, as if surprised to find it still on, nearly sent me into hysterics of laughter—helped by the same ‘Why should this happen to me?’ look on my husband’s face as he shovelled snow.
2/3/50: Then the elephant keeper ‘had a go’ [on the eponymous radio program] and in a perfectly serious voice, answering Wilfred’s ‘Why do elephants marching along a street hold on to each other’s tails?’ said ‘It keeps them decent’! not pausing to realise he meant decent in the Northern Irish idiom meaning ‘tidy.’ … I was in the lounge and my eyes fell on a little carved coconut wood elephant. I felt chuckles begin in my throat and a vision of five or six elephants swinging down the Strand, with their ponderous yet ‘mincing’ tread, so smug and confident in their ‘decent’ appearance as trunks gripped tails! My husband put his head round the door and said ‘What are you laughing about?’ and I said ‘Decent elephants’ and he laughed too.
2/27/50: Luckily I didn’t mention going to Ireland, for my husband said quickly ‘Ah, Nell can have a good rest [while he would be away]. I’ll soon be back and she will have to write lots of letters to me…’. I sniffed as I said to Mrs Howson ‘So, if you see a cheap line in chastity girdles, let me know.’ He wondered why we both set off laughing. He said ‘You’ve just got new corsets. What do you want another girdle for?’
6/26/52: I’d have awarded top place for oddity, though, to a gentle old world type of man who could have been a country parson or doctor. In Lyons he had a glass of lemonade with ice cream dropped in, and a double portion of ice cream, with four wafers, and by his look enjoyed his odd lunch.

Photos: Miké-chan in the park; two from the regional jazz festival over Golden Week, one mostly sky and one a performance in a shrine (look close to see the sax and trumpet); iris, maple, and strawberries, the latter from my veranda; two from a recent Gaudí exhibition, because I can’t resist dragons, or mosaic (especially as a tiny model); and four postcards of past used-book-fair posters. Maybe the Heian lady is that girl whose name I can never remember who was so thrilled when her aunt gave her the latest chapters of the Tale of Genji?

Be safe and well.

Reading a few people on my f-list who always have interesting things to say about writing, I was moved to reread Dorothy Bryant’s Writing a Novel (I always want to call her Dorothy Allison, who is another person altogether). Not all of it works for me, but I find it interesting and sometimes motivating. For today “Remember that detailed planning is of great value, but only if you understand that it does not work. By that I mean you cannot expect your careful planning to solve in advance many of the problems you will run into while writing, nor help you avoid making changes you must make. It is through the writing itself that you learn what you are trying to write. You write some of it, and it’s not quite right, but the process of writing sets deep forces in motion. (That’s why if you miss a day you feel as if getting started again is like moving mountains.) These deep forces shift you to a new place, slightly closer to what you can write. Day by day, as you write, everything keeps shifting and changing under your hands. The plan helps in this process, but only if you are ready to deviate from it as you begin to see your direction more clearly.”

From my favorite singer, not a song this time but a game livestream (from last summer sometime). Unlike Liu Chang, Jiang Dunhao does not do livestreams on the regular (“I never know what to say”), so this is a bit of an exception. He’s playing a game called inZoi? which seems to be a kind of slice-of-life? in a city where they speak an annoyingly random language? and makes himself an avatar wearing one of his own typical striped shirts (with a lot of cute little “Nope!”s in English when he doesn’t like the options presented). It’s not all that exciting to watch, but like Liu Chang’s game livestreams, excellent for listening practice, since his narration reflects what’s happening on screen, plus the style of the game means there are a lot of everyday words coming up. (The first thing he does is go to the karaoke box on the game map, where he is somewhat appalled to find that his avatar sings really badly.)
(okay, I lied, here’s a song too, even though I think I’ve already posted this one: 掉了, just because it blows my mind every time.)

For work reasons, I came across this list of large cardinal properties (I don’t even know what cardinals are, other than cardinal-versus-ordinal, not counting the religious ones and the red birds) and found it extremely delightful. I know for math people, including those on my f-list, it must make actual sense, but I just like the existence of worldly cardinals, weakly and strongly inaccessible cardinals (need to apply this categorization to the local authorities, utilities companies, etc.), unfoldable cardinals, shrewd cardinals, almost and totally ineffable cardinals, ethereal cardinals, subtle cardinals, remarkable cardinals, almost high jump cardinals, super almost huge cardinals, and so on.

Antonia Forest fans may be amused to note that there’s a kid called Juki at the Saturday juku; also another boy called Mokuren, a very pretty name which means “magnolia” (I haven’t seen the characters but presumably it’s 木蓮, although these days you never know). Some of the modern kira-kira names I find too much, as in the previous post, but at least it’s more interesting than everyone being named Hiroshi or Daisuke or Keiko or Miyuki (depending on the generation).

Still working my way through the Chinese edition of The People at No. 1 Siwei Street; the dialogue is very cute in Chinese. Seriously confusing myself because there’s a character who is mostly just called the landlady, 房东, but because I know there’s a landlady character, I keep looking at 大家 and wanting to read it that way (“landlord/-lady” in Japanese, “everyone” in Chinese). Also I can’t believe I now know how to say both “pillowfriend” and “fuckbuddy” in Chinese (床伴 and 炮友, if anyone cares); clearly I have made some fundamental mistake somewhere in my self-guided Chinese education.
More silly Chinese: People online using on-the-spot loan words written in hanzi, like 哦莫 (Korean “omo,” kind of “oy vey”) or 摩西摩西 (Japanese “moshi-moshi,” telephone hello doubling as “hey you, wake up there”).
When I need spare names for original Chinese characters (I mean, people, not letters) I have a secret weapon: searching for chorus or orchestra rosters in Chinese. The former usually separates members by voice part and the latter often comes with photos, making it easy both ways to check name gender, and there are lots and lots of names to mix-and-match first and last. Also interested that Western orchestra instruments seem to have multiple translations: for the contrabass I’ve mostly seen 低音提琴, low violin, but also 倍大提琴 which is literally “double bass” (or “double cello,” anyway). Also the 法国号, French horn, which also goes by 圆号, round horn; the cor anglais seems to be literally the 英国管 as well. The harp is 竖琴, vertical-stringed-instrument (琴 is the word for “zither” but can refer to anything with strings, the violin family as above is various 提琴s and even rock guitarists and bass players will refer casually to their axes as 琴 as well). Timpani are 定音鼓, fixed-tone drums.

Visit to Arima, a hot spring spa with centuries of history as a tourist destination (possibly millennia; the original hot spring visitors were gods, if you follow the local legend). Lots of cherry blossoms, because it’s in the mountains and they bloom later; steep hills everywhere (my knees are not in good shape right now and the hills were a challenge; does anybody have any good exercise ideas that are easy on the knees?); the “Jealousy Spring” said to puff out steam whenever a beautiful woman walks by; a local train using rolling stock from sixty years ago; soda-water senbei, which you’re supposed to eat within five seconds (literally) after they come off the griddle, because the first bite is chewy and after that they get crisp (they taste like old-fashioned fortune cookies); and of course the hot springs, notable for their copper-colored water, like bathing in a mud puddle but actually very clean and soothing (see here, not where we stayed but the photos are nice). (No wonder I’ve read at least one murder mystery in which the Arima waters are used to conceal an exsanguinated victim.)

Photos: Way too many cherry blossoms, mostly from Arima; I still maintain that they’re not my favorite flowers, but they sure are photogenic. Two cats: Koron-chan with an elegant little halo, and an offended stray at a safe distance. Some maples: the red leaves are not actually painted on the wall, they just look like it. Message on a mailbox that cracked me up. A bounty of kumquats going to waste because they’re growing on the train side of the railway fence, meaning nobody can pick them (I suppose the railway company could, but logistically it wouldn’t be easy). An alleyway in Arima and a temple entrance which looks like it’s off in the mountains somewhere but is actually right in the middle of my large city.

Be safe and well.

I lost most of this week to an atmospheric-pressure headache, the usual “not bad enough to put off things I have to do (like meet deadlines) but bad enough that I can’t enjoy doing things I want to do,” ugh. Still, if it’s the worst health problem I have in middle age I should be relieved, knock wood. (I went to the doctor for an MRI a few years back and they said “oh, your brain is fine, your neck is just fucked up, sorry about that.”) Catching up now, and grateful for everyday things.

Instead of a Jiang Dunhao song this time around, here’s one by one of his brothers: Li Hao’s I should be with you is absolutely haunting for me, in all senses, the chorus just gets me where I live. Also, listen to this song without checking the singer names and tell me whether you think you’re hearing two women, two men, a man and a woman, or what?

Still reading The People at No. 1 Siwei St.; there are definitely lesbians, along with non-Taipei regionalisms (the characters come from Taichung and Tainan and Chiayi and Taitung) and delicious-sounding food and a grad student who writes BL novels in her spare time, and it’s a lot of fun. Maybe I will just go ahead and translate it (from the Japanese version, until I can get my hands on the original) for my own amusement? It’s a quick read, except for figuring out all the Taiwanese food names.

Elen and I have been watching season 2 of Under the Skin--about halfway through, or maybe two thirds?—and it’s very enjoyable, although maybe that’s not the word I want; it’s quite brutal, a chronicle of all the ways society finds to victimize women (and sometimes other vulnerable people, but especially women). But not completely bleak, at least not so far (we’ve counted at least two stealth-lesbian couples up to this point, both with tentatively happy endings, the scene with the wedding cake was one of the best things I’ve watched in ages). It is often stunning to look at, not that I know anything about cinematography whatsoever, and thoroughly, thoughtfully characterized down to (or especially) the one-off roles, a gold-mine of gifted middle-aged character actors of both sexes. I like Shen Yi and Du Cheng, but am not as gripped by them as I was in s1; Shen Yi as the all-knowing psychologist doesn’t really work for me, and the rest of the time he needs the services of one himself, the man has no common sense/self-preservation to the point where it’s just frustrating. (Having also encountered Shen Wei and Wu Xie along the line, I would now really like to watch a drama where the main character does have common sense and acts accordingly, i.e. throwing yourself into stupid danger is not required to move along the plot! Any recs?) My favorite regular characters remain Zhang-ju (competent older woman in a position of authority who has retained her sense of humor and looks very good in a uniform—and now we know her first name!) and Jiang Feng (straightforward loyal floppy-eared puppy). Also I was delighted that Lu Haizhou, my very favorite character from s1, showed up again briefly in s2 and was still very very Lu Haizhou—fair, stern, unemotional, and not unwilling to make enemies in the course of his duty, but also prepared to flirt outrageously with more than one of his male colleagues likewise. (Somebody please give Zhang Tao bigger roles? He still reminds me of a younger Wang Yang, and should be able to follow in his footsteps.)

Reading A Winter’s Tale with yaaurens and company; among other roles I was assigned the unspectacular-sounding Second Gentleman, who has this wonderful line: “Nothing but bonfires: the oracle is fulfilled; the king's daughter is found: such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it.”

In cooking news, I recently invented a new and sinful form of TKG. Tamago kake gohan is a Japanese diner standard of raw egg served over hot rice with soy sauce; unfortunately I won’t eat raw eggs (they’re safe to eat here, I just can’t stand the texture), so instead I started by chopping up some garlic and sautéing it in sesame oil until browned and sweet. Then I broke a couple of eggs into the saucepan and let the egg whites fold in the garlic, until the eggs were sunny-side-up with hard whites, soft yolks, and very crispy, garlic-studded bottoms and edges. Eaten over rice with a dash of soy sauce, delicious.

Sometimes I wonder why Brahms’ contemporaries/fellow composers didn’t just go “okay, forget it, I’m going off to sell insurance or run a sheep farm” or something. Listen to the quintet here, my God, it’s doing so much. (Okay, among Brahms’ contemporaries was Wagner, who wouldn’t have run out of musical confidence if God Himself came down and said “Richard, you’re not getting it,” but still.)

Photos: Lots of plum blossoms, some citrus, and some winter daphne (I have to look up the English name every time), which is boring to look at but has a lovely fragrance you’ll just have to imagine.

Be safe and well.

It’s been shared in many places on my f-list but here again: https://www.standwithminnesota.com/ . 心疼.

Reading Cymbeline with yaaurens and company, mostly striking for the “Fear no more the heat of the sun” song—which works backward in me, calling up the books I’ve read where it’s quoted, including the chilling and well-judged use in Pamela Dean’s The Dubious Hills, and Nicola Marlow singing it and making first her mother and then herself cry with its associations of Jon and Jael.

A couple of Chinese jokes with A-Pei: she’s an expert baker who recently ventured into brownies and then into blondies, which we decided should be called 小金发 in Chinese. Also, an exchange about work thus. Me: I had to translate something about the Abominable Snowman for a psychological test of some kind, can you believe it? What is that, 雪男? A-Pei: lol, that sounds like the husband of 雪女, you know that Japanese goddess Yuki-onna? We’d say 雪怪 for the yeti. Me: somehow I don’t think Yuki-onna has plans to marry a yeti…

I learned from grayswandir that 搞掂 in Cantonese is what you say when you finish a job or a task, and was delighted to discover that the similarly used Mandarin term 搞定, which I already knew, is actually a borrowing from this Cantonese word!

Argument against machine translation #179544: Pink plastic tray with a Kitty-chan theme, which lists as its first raw ingredient 人民解放军, the People’s Liberation Army. Your country needs YOU to be transmuted into Kitty-chan!? I thought, and then figured it out… plastic --> pla --> PLA…

New musical discovery: Piano Sonata #1 by the extremely hyphenated Sophie-Carmen [Fridman-Kochevskaya] Eckhardt-Gramatté , which starts out a la maniere de Bach and very quickly gets much weirder and more Romantic, a lot of fun.

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 你要的爱, a duet with Li Hao ideal for the combination of their voices.

Once in a way I like to act like the good Japanese housewife I’m really not, and one way is to make buri daikon in the winter—yellowtail and daikon radish stewed with the classic Japanese holy trinity, or rather 3+1, of soy sauce, cooking sake, mirin, and sugar, plus ginger on top. It’s very simple and usually turns out pretty well (see photo below); Y eats most of it, because I’m cursed to like the taste and texture of fish but hate anything that might have tiny bones in it.

Last week I had two in-person events of a purely social nature in three days, which never happens. One was a girls’ night out of sorts, women from the company I used to work at (and still freelance for), some former close colleagues, including Misa who was the most patient boss I could have asked for and Yu-jie who helps me practice Chinese, as well as others I used to know and some I’d never met, about two dozen of us, mostly middle-aged, eating cheap Chinese food and drinking according to capacity and chattering. Someone got me a glass of coffee liqueur with milk which was delicious and evil and I got much tipsier than I usually do. Yu-jie and another Chinese woman, Cho-san (Zhao or Zhang but I don’t know which) and I sat around talking in two languages; Cho-san and I delighted each other because she’d heard of my farmboys and I had heard of her own recent obsession, that hockey gay romance show. (“I know I wouldn’t really meet them if I went to Canada, but I still want to go!” “I feel just the same way about going to China!”). Rina-san, the organizer, played around with the group photo we took to results as shown below (I don’t usually post my own face online but this time I feel I can get away with it, especially since the app didn’t know what to do with me and made me look East Asian like everyone else there).

The other event was lunch with my former student D; we stay loosely in touch and meet up every couple of years. As usual he did most of the talking, mostly about his work and what he hopes to do, a little about his marriage and the other kids he went to high school with and so on. It’s funny. The gap between teens and early thirties, as we were when I was teaching him high school English, is enormous; the gap between early thirties and late forties, where we are now, is a lot less momentous. We’re not the same generation, but we’ve both lived in other countries, worked various jobs, married, lost a parent, and so on, we can and do interact as fellow adults with shared experiences. At the same time, he…damn, there is no good way to say 甘える in English (or in Chinese as far as I know), he knows I’ll let him get away with things? because I was his teacher when we met, and I’ve known him since he was fifteen, more than half his life. So he can be self-centered with me in a way he might not with someone he’d met as an adult. I’m very fond of him.

Something reminded me of The Young Visiters for the first time in ages, and I looked it up on Gutenberg; didn’t reread all of it but found this delightful romantic passage from near the end. (I think I like “well some people do he added kindly” in particular, but it’s all great.)

Bernard at once hired a boat to row his beloved up the river. Ethel could not row but she much enjoyed seeing the tough sunburnt arms of Bernard tugging at the oars as she lay among the rich cushons of the dainty boat. She had a rarther lazy nature but Bernard did not know of this. However he soon got dog tired and sugested lunch by the mossy bank.
Oh yes said Ethel quickly opening the sparkling champaigne.
Dont spill any cried Bernard as he carved some chicken.
They eat and drank deeply of the charming viands ending up with merangs and choclates.
Let us now bask under the spreading trees said Bernard in a passiunate tone.
Oh yes lets said Ethel and she opened her dainty parasole and sank down upon the long green grass. She closed her eyes but she was far from asleep. Bernard sat beside her in profound silence gazing at her pink face and long wavy eye lashes. He puffed at his pipe for some moments while the larks gaily caroled in the blue sky. Then he edged a trifle closer to Ethels form.
Ethel he murmured in a trembly voice.
Oh what is it said Ethel hastily sitting up.
Words fail me ejaculated Bernard horsly my passion for you is intense he added fervently. It has grown day and night since I first beheld you.
Oh said Ethel in supprise I am not prepared for this and she lent back against the trunk of the tree.
Bernard placed one arm tightly round her. When will you marry me Ethel he uttered you must be my wife it has come to that I love you so intensly that if you say no I shall perforce dash my body to the brink of yon muddy river he panted wildly.
Oh dont do that implored Ethel breathing rarther hard.
Then say you love me he cried.
Oh Bernard she sighed fervently I certinly love you madly you are to me like a Heathen god she cried looking at his manly form and handsome flashing face I will indeed marry you.
How soon gasped Bernard gazing at her intensly.
As soon as possible said Ethel gently closing her eyes.
My Darling whispered Bernard and he seiezed her in his arms we will be marrid next week.
Oh Bernard muttered Ethel this is so sudden.
No no cried Bernard and taking the bull by both horns he kissed her violently on her dainty face. My bride to be he murmered several times.
Ethel trembled with joy as she heard the mistick words.
Oh Bernard she said little did I ever dream of such as this and she suddenly fainted into his out stretched arms.
Oh I say gasped Bernard and laying the dainty burden on the grass he dashed to the waters edge and got a cup full of the fragrant river to pour on his true loves pallid brow.
She soon came to and looked up with a sickly smile Take me back to the Gaierty hotel she whispered faintly.
With plesure my darling said Bernard I will just pack up our viands ere I unloose the boat.
Ethel felt better after a few drops of champagne and began to tidy her hair while Bernard packed the remains of the food. Then arm in arm they tottered to the boat.
I trust you have not got an illness my darling murmured Bernard as he helped her in.
Oh no I am very strong said Ethel I fainted from joy she added to explain matters.
Oh I see said Bernard handing her a cushon well some people do he added kindly and so saying they rowed down the dark stream now flowing silently beneath a golden moon.

Photos: Not a lot this time around, it’s been too cold out to photograph things. Miké-chan enjoying the sun, the front half of a gorgeous Siamese (?) cat which came and chattered at us and looked annoyed when we didn’t respond by feeding it (when humans talk to each other they get fed, don’t they?), the afore-mentioned buri daikon, a bridge and river view, my standard train-station view at sunset (I’m often in this place on the platform and I just like the natural composition it makes), and the promised view of the girls’ night out.

Be safe and well.

Mostly an ordinary post, I didn’t mean to make it the last one of the year. I am very grateful to all my DW friends for companionship and interaction over this year as well; wishing everyone good health and good fortune all the way around in 2026, with much love.

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 少女, a cover in Chinese of an OST song from a slice-of-life Korean drama called Reply 1988, new to me but apparently very good. The song itself is sweet and gentle and sits really nicely in his voice.

Tickled that there’s a Chinese song called 夏日漱石; it took me much longer than it should have to figure out that it’s not actually named after the venerated Japanese author (whose name is 夏目漱石; spot the difference). Cheeky!

Listening to the Dvorak 8th Symphony, an old favorite which I have played more than once and listened to a zillion times. This one conductor mentioned in passing once that the development of the fourth movement feels like a war, and ever since there has been a detailed story in my head for it (timestamps for this recording, which has a score). The movement begins at 26:14, with a trumpet fanfare hinting at martial events to come; at 26:40 is the pastoral cello melody, the innocent young shepherd from the village. Happy village life continues until 29:12, when you can hear the army on the march, and from there the war begins, with more and more violent clashes until the victorious brass sounds at 30:37. At 31:08 the original cello melody returns, but it’s more wistful now, looking back on what was before things changed, especially so from 32:30 and 33:39. At 33:58 there’s a kind of coming to terms with how things are now. In the coda at 34:30 the village is happy again, but it never feels quite genuine again, especially with the frenzied trombone slide in the last few bars reminding us of what the brass can mean. …I’m sure Dvorak had nothing of the sort in mind, I don’t know where any of this comes from, it just works that way in my head!

I have slightly fallen for this Japanese professor called Ito Tsukusu (or Tsukushi, except I think that was an error, or Jinn) whom I’ve never met and probably never will; he supervised the various elvish languages for the Japanese subtitles on all the Lord of the Rings movies, and studies philology and Norse sagas and other things Tolkien would have approved of, and talks (in this very long and fascinating National Geographic article, which I won’t link here because it’s in Japanese) about getting a C.S. Lewis-esque sense of “Northernness” from the Grieg Piano Concerto as a child, and reading the Anne of Green Gables series in the original English as a sixth-grader with limited English skills and being fascinated by the language as much as the story (quoting from Anne of Ingleside, “’Transubstantiationalist,’ said Jem proudly. ‘Walter found it in the dictionary last week...you know he likes great big full words, Susan...’”) and then becoming devoted to everything Tolkien-related (and spending a year in Iceland to learn Icelandic: “…when I came back to Japan I was speaking English with an Icelandic accent and Icelandic grammar”), and now researching how Norse myths show up in manga and anime, as well as the triangulations of Tolkien in WWI with Wagner’s Ring in Japan and…I’m tempted to write to him just because.

I was rereading some of the Chalet School books online, as one does, and ran across a character quoting from their idea of a quaint old book, called Barbara Bellamy, Schoolgirl; out of curiosity I looked it up and it exists and is certainly quaint. May Baldwin, the author, wrote many other things including A Schoolgirl of Moscow, which I found on openlibrary.org and adored. Published in 1911, it describes Nina Hamilton’s eventful few months living in Russia with her businessman father, her aunt Penelope, and her maid Anna. It only kind of has a plot, which is enough to make it clear that even in 1911 it was possible to see 1917 coming on the horizon; in between conspiracies (the conspirators are young and attractive if rather obsessive), there are bits reminiscent of those interwar children’s books where Jane and Jim tour somewhere in Europe with their erudite Uncle David and learn all about the relevant history and geography (I will say that the description of Russian Orthodox Easter is genuinely moving). I like it that Nina (who starts out speaking French with all her classmates because she doesn’t know Russian and they don’t know English) takes the language seriously and learns fast (…Nina protesting against an alphabet which contained thirty-six letters and three ways of writing them, and the ‘class-lady’ insisting that it was not so bad as a word spelt one way and pronounced in two different ways, acccording to meaning, such as ‘tear,’ or spelt different ways and pronounced the same, such as ‘way,’ ‘weigh,’ ‘wae.’ I’m not sure what “wae” is doing in there.) Anna is the comic relief but also has a lot of interesting points to make for herself (demanding to have her profession changed on her passport from “maid” to “gouvernante”), and Aunt Penelope is a triumph, a classic maiden aunt but also one with her own unique opinions and, when she decides to take action, remarkable boldness and originality. “I like a woman who is ready to die for her country!” announced Miss Hamilton.

Reading Pericles with yaaurens and company; typically I got distracted by a character who literally never appears on stage and is mentioned about twice, Philoten, the daughter of hapless Cleon and villainous Dionyza, who constitutes an excuse for her foster sister Marina to be murdered because she’s not as pretty or as good at anything as Marina is. Now I want to know what Philoten thought about the whole thing! I want an AU where she and Marina get wind of Dionyza’s plans and run away together like Celia and Rosalind!

I saw a signboard the other day offering “Gee Pie hot sandwiches” and only got it when I read the extra text saying “Taiwanese-style fried chicken!” Gee Pie i.e. 鸡排 i.e. jīpái, duh. A-Pei thought this was hilarious. I tested her on the classic Japanese “G-pan” and “Y-shatsu” and confused her completely: she came back with “G胖 [G-páng/G-fat]? Y虾子 [Y-xiāzi/Y-shrimp]???” G-pan are in fact jeans (ジーンズ・パンツ [jeans pants] to ジーパン jiipan to G-pan; Y-shatsu are men’s dress shirts, ワイトシャツ [white shirt] to ワイシャツ waishatsu to Y-shatsu (and you can have a Y-shirt in any color, the “white” is no longer a meaningful descriptor). A-Pei and I decided that G胖 are the jeans we buy when we need to go up a size!

Photos: Bionic cat (no, just me being a bad photographer), kumquats and…grapefruits? pomelos? in various stages of ripening, canal trees, and seasonal reds.

Be safe and well.

Good wishes and hugs as wanted to people on my f-list (and others too!) who are having a hard time right now; a lot of people seem to be sick and stressed, even aside from the usual global issues.

More adventures with Kuro-chan the cat, no photo this time: I went past the park gates one evening to find Kuro-chan curled up on the wall outside, so naturally I stopped to say hello. Me: aw, your fur is so cold, 小冷猫猫, let me pick you up-- Kuro-chan: [hiss, growl, snap] Me: okay okay, I get it! Kuro-chan: [looks around, stretches, jumps off the wall to suri-suri around my ankles] Mrrowr? Me: …okay, if you say so? Kuro-chan [contentedly settles into my arms to relax langorously throughout the very short trip across the street to their putative actual home, while being stroked and crooned at in whatever language came into my head]. Cats.

I was thinking about what my family always called “household words” meaning phrases either from books/movies/etc. or heard in real life which we started using on a regular basis. Five cents, please (courtesy of Lucy van Pelt the psychiatrist, also allowing me to link my favorite Peanuts strip of all time here); long time no interface, I have no idea where this one came from or if anyone else says it, but I use it with online friends often; that’s life on a crocodile isle (from T.S. Eliot, sometimes used in full with “You see this egg? You see this egg?” too, I say it to myself when frying eggs); Study now, dance later. Plato AD 61, a graffito my mom saw once, which we use as shorthand for “get down to it”; after the opera—my dad ran a semi-professional opera company in his spare time, and was always exceptionally busy with rehearsals in the last few weeks before a performance, so that any normal household duties would be postponed until “after the opera,” a time sooner but not much more definite than the twelfth of never. What do you guys have of this kind?

I posted my Yuletide fic, considerably later than I’d planned but well before the deadline; it could still use (and will hopefully get) a brisk edit, but I think it hangs together. Big relief! Knock wood I will manage to write a couple of short treats before the 25th, we’ll see.

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: a couple of new ones from a music program, 好盆与 and 小孩与我, not all that exciting musically but fun to watch and listen to, the former in particular has a couple of really lovely vocal moments.

It’s the season when vending machines in Japan offer hot drinks of all kinds; many varieties of coffee and tea, to begin with. I’m not much of a coffee drinker except when very sleep-deprived, so I favor 焙じ茶 or roasted green tea (I also like to make it from teabags at home and soak dried fruit in it as a late-night snack). Corn tea is also much rarer but delicious (I was wondering if cornsilk tea, known in both Korean and Japanese as “corn beard tea,” is correspondingly 玉米胡茬茶 in Chinese…). I love hot chocolate, but vending machine cocoa is usually repulsive, basically hot brown water full of sugar and chemicals. Other standards include corn soup (with corn kernels in), お汁粉 hot sweet red-bean porridge, and Hot Lemon (just what it sounds like, hot flat lemon soda with honey, stickily sweet but very satisfying on a cold day). The less standard offerings are getting weirder and weirder every year, this year I took some notes: miso soup with clams, yukkejang soup with rice, sundubu soup with tofu, extra-fancy corn soup scented with truffles (at an extra-fancy price), Starbucks caramel macchiatos, and “milkshakes,” which as far as I can tell are hot sweet slightly thickened milk with caramel?

The download problem never ends! cobalt.tools was so great and now it’s not; it doesn’t do YouTube any more, which is YouTube’s fault, of course (and I’m still not sure of a decent YouTube downloader, none of them seem actually safe?) and now cobalt.tools won’t recognize bilibili URLs any more either, although it says it should work. And you can’t ask for support help with error messages without signing up to a github account, and… (Yes, it’s a free service! I would be happy to pay them some money and get some support in the normal way!) oh dear.

Rereading Melissa Scott’s Dreaming Metal, the second volume of her Dreamships SF duology (the eponymous first volume is also very good). I really love these, they are far and away my favorites of anything Melissa Scott has written. They are about, among other things, AI but not in the way we think of AI right now (although the first volume bears a little more resemblance). The worldbuilding is wonderful—everything is in there, technology and language and clothes and entertainment and politics and ethnic groups and class issues and public transit and food and jobs and religion and family structures and God knows what else, but it’s not infodumpy, you just get to live in the world for three hundred pages or so and see it all there. Spoilery thoughts on the central conceit of the book: where it’s also amazing is the ideas about what kind of music an AI musician might want to make, how it would be derived and what it would sound like, and the way human musicians might react to it and work with it—in a way that’s both plausible and sounds like something exciting that I actually want to hear.

Reading another book of essays by a Taiwan-born writer who lives in Japan and writes in Japanese; unlike Li Kotomi|李琴峰, who grew up in Taiwan, taught herself Japanese, and came to Japan as an adult, 温又柔 came to Japan with her parents at age three and has lived here ever since (she’s Wen Yourou in the Chinese reading and On Yuju in Japanese; her romanized name on the copyright page splits the difference and uses “Wen Yuju.” I’ll settle for the latter for convenience. She also comments on how much her real name sounds like a pen name). I’ve only read one of her novels, 祝宴, which is about a middle-aged Taiwanese businessman, resident in Japan for many years, and his family—he’s 外省人 and his wife is 本省人, their younger daughter is marrying a Japanese man and their older daughter has a girlfriend. Very little actually happens but it was affecting and hopeful without veering into melodrama or Japan Sentimental. I found a lot to resonate with in her essays (reminded also that for me, with no original connections to Japan or Taiwan or anywhere else in Asia at all, studying/writing in Japanese or Chinese can be a much less fraught matter for good or ill). Like me Wen Yuju was fascinated by Lee Yangji’s short story Yuhee—she’s the editor of a Lee Yangji collection, which she says drew her some criticism from Korean-Japanese readers who argued that a Taiwanese-Japanese woman shouldn’t be doing it, another complex issue.
In some ways she covers a lot of familiar ground—growing up as a first- or 1.5-generation immigrant, more comfortable with the new country’s language than her parents’, sometimes accepted and sometimes dealing with microaggressions and blank majority ignorance, struggling with identity and complicated relationships with her parents’ country and family, and so on. It occurs to me that though there are so many anglophone novels, both YA and adult, now that go into this—just from a quick look through my shelves right now, Elizabeth Acevedo, Bernadine Evaristo, Tanuja Desai Hidier, Jean Little, Melina Marchetta, Naomi Shihab Nye, Chaim Potok, Nina Mingya Powles, Isabel Quintero, Joyce Lee Wong, Lois Ann Yamanaka, and that’s just a tiny sample—and still so, so few in Japanese, so that Wen Yuju and just a few others are reinventing the wheel because they have to. It’s not like the “monoethnic Japan” myth was ever true, I wonder when this will change.

Photos: Seasonal leaves, flowers, and skies; Koron-chan, who doesn’t seem to feel the cold and maybe I wouldn’t either if I were that nicely rounded; a bakery with an interesting tagline; kumquat jam made by Y from the produce of his father’s kumquat bush, which was as delicious as it was beautiful, although the photo isn’t very good. I’ll take a better one next time.

Be safe and well.

I'm sorry I've been so lax about DW commenting lately; work and other things have been kind of crazy, as always at this end of the year. Why is it that the busier you are the busier you get, and vice versa?

I was looking for a Chinese idiom equivalent to “pie in the sky” and found 画饼充饥 (feeding hunger on a drawing of a cake) which is not quite the same but kind of related; I also found 天上掉馅饼, meat pies falling from the sky, which sounds related and actually means more like “serendipity” lol (in Japanese 棚から牡丹餅, botamochi cakes falling off the shelf, or tanabota for short. Do other languages have serendipity idioms which involve falling food items, I wonder?).

Jiang Dunhao song(s) of the post: 命名, one of his signature songs—I’m not actually wild about the chorus, too rock-vocal for me, but the verse and the last line raise the hairs on the back of my neck (in a good way). Warning for flashing lights! And for something completely different from the same singer, 又是艳阳天, an adorable duet with the Taiwanese singer Claire Kuo, over on the jazz end of pop. (*Because there are a lot of bilibili.com links here—if you’re not logged in it stops playback a minute in, but if you close the pop-up and hit play again the video goes on. I almost don’t notice at this point.)

Also Jiang Dunhao-related (I’m sorry, I’ve been this obsessed for a while now), I’ve been watching a program for young singers on which he is a mentor. I hate the competition part—why do people always do this with music—but I’ve found it very entertaining otherwise, the young singers are VERY fun. I’m pleased to notice that several of the twenty-odd women contestants are not just not c-ent standard skinny but well over on the plump side, including Niu Mengyao, who has a fantastic contralto, and the Chinese-Malaysian Vanessa Reynauld (莎莎 to her Chinese colleagues), who is all-round adorable with her slangy English-Chinese, as well as Zhang Jiayu with a pretty floaty soprano. Long Yuxun also has an amazing deep voice: a talented and sort of nerdily self-absorbed young man called Jing Shenghui fell in love with her voice at first hearing, grabbed her to form a group with (they all have to make groups of three or four people), and has basically been glued to her side ever since, while she treats him with a kind of amused, impatient fondness and everyone else ships them. (A lot of what makes this program interesting is seeing which singers end up working together. I was tickled, and confused as usual by censorship rules, that not only were two women telling each other “I’m in love with you and your voice!” but everyone else was commenting 嗑到了, I ship it.) Other interesting contestants include Yin Yuke, who seems to want to be the next Zhou Shen only much more deliberately androgynous, and the delightful twins Xie Yuxuan and Xie Yu’ang, who compete and perform as a single entity (I just realized that their names must come from the chengyu 气宇轩昂); then there’s Chen Yang, a rock singer listed as from the mainland on Baidu and from Taiwan on Wikipedia (I know which one I believe), who clearly has a strong personality to match her strong voice and, well, I don’t have the strongest gaydar but this lady’s style… (Some very short links: Niu Mengyao and Vanessa Reynauld, Zhang Jiayu and Yin Yuke, Long Yuxun and Jing Shenghui, Xie Yuxuan and Xie Yu’ang, Chen Yang)

Orchestra stuff. I survived the previous concert—there were some places where I wish I’d done better, but at least one prominent little twiddle which I got right for the very first time during the concert itself, giving me a Mizutani feeling a character from the baseball manga Ookiku Furikabutte who says to himself at one point during a game, wow, I’ve practiced this really hard and I can actually do it! wow!. The new program is movie music, mostly dead boring, but the Totoro suite is actually quite fun here and there (although I think I’ll be tired of it in six months). And I’ve always loved the Star Wars suite, it’s a symphony and a good one, with the accompanying images it calls up from the movies (although sadly it doesn’t contain the Mos Eisley cantina jazz piece). At our first rehearsal I was joined by a high school senior, son of one of the bass players, who was of course a much better player than me (Japanese high school bands are brutal), very solemn and big-eyed and polite; we’ll see if he stays around, knock wood.

Bits of assorted reading: Antony and Cleopatra with yaaurens and company, where I by no means did justice to Enobarbus but enjoyed him anyway (and decided to adopt Charmian’s “keep yourself within yourself” line when in danger of losing my temper). Some Margery Allingham mysteries, which are very weird; I did enjoy her sub-Wimsey detective’s interpretation of “seems like Sweet Fanny Adams to me” into “I am not very sanguine about this.”

With encouragement from everyone around here and qian in particular, I have been sending off the agent query letters for my original thing at the rate of one a day since around the beginning of the month; so far three polite rejections, not that I’m expecting anything else. Reminding myself that some of the best authors I know (personally and otherwise) are self-published. One good thing unrelated to results is that I was reminded of the one effective way I know to get an intimidating task done: break it down into the tiniest components possible and tell myself I’m just going to do one of them and I don’t have to worry about the rest yet. One little tiny subtask at a time is usually surprisingly manageable.

Composers riffing on B.A.C.H.: Bach himself (or maybe not, authorship is disputed, but it’s certainly good enough to be Bach), and Schumann. I love both of these pieces, so helpful of Herr Bach to have a name with half-tones in it.

Photos: Mostly from another historical-building tour with Y, at the Chourakukan in Kyoto, plus some autumn sweets and some nice skies.

Be safe and well.