nnozomi

啊啊啊啊嗚呼嗚呼 aaaah! I think I posted a while back about wanting to make some little videos for B站 in which I could talk about my favorite C-pop songs; I’ve been doing my best, why is it SO HARD. All I want to do is play a video borrowed from YouTube (or B站, either one) and stop it here and there to talk about it, adding subtitles while I’m talking since my accent is so terrible, and it seems like I have to master five apps and sixteen techniques just to do that. I am stuck. Anybody have any help?

Reading osprey-archer’s post the other day about conlangs, I went to look some up to find out if there is a version of Esperanto which draws on languages outside Europe; I came up with Lingwa de Planeta, which is quite neat. I’m tempted to write something SF where it could be used (with due credit)… “Good morning” is “Hao sabah!” and it looks like the grammar also borrows from multiple languages: “fa-nocha” means “it’s becoming night,” “night is falling,” from Chinese 发, for instance, along with a lot of Russian, Hindi and Arabic roots and usages I’m not familiar with. (It seems to me to be one of those conlangs which has just the right amount of grammar, neither boringly simple nor fanatically complicated.)
(The Wikipedia list of conlangs is a lot of fun in general; I also noticed Unish, an earnest effort which is just awfully silly-looking, and Europanto, a deliberate comedy act from the first.)

Confusing Chinese of the day: 打嗝 can mean either “to burp” or “to hiccup,” there aren’t separate words, it’s all context. I know people have studied which languages have green/blue distinctions and which ones don’t, has anyone looked into the burp/hiccup distinction?

Watching my farmboys harvest their fields, I was extremely amused to see a familiar logo on their combine harvesters, that of a major Japanese manufacturer of agricultural machinery which I will not name, well known to me because I’ve done a ton of translation for them through my old company. They do good business in China and it’s no surprise to me that their harvesters were in use, just that the logos were visible! A Japanese company, shock horror! (Okay, covered with a token piece of duct tape, but still unmistakable.) So maybe my farmboys actually read an operation manual or in farmboy-English a “talk light book,” 说明书 translated into Chinese by my former company, who knows.

I finally bit the bullet and bought one and a half new bookcases, so now for the first time in ages all my books are in stacks on shelves instead of in stacks on the floor, which is very satisfying. Also the new bookcase is black and the top of it provides a nice place to display nice things, including a couple of photos, a pair of ceramic Shmoos, a little bronze-brown pottery vessel given to me a zillion years ago by a girl I had a crush on, a bunch of shells from Busan and bits of tiles from all over, a translucent stone that I use as a worry-stone sometimes, some o-mamori, my father’s old garnet(-like) tuxedo studs, and my mother-in-law’s engagement ring.

I feel like I need a change in listening to music lately; I tend to fall back on YouTube because I’m lazy, and its recommendations can be repetitive (largely divided between classical music and C-pop, because me). Plus my collection of CDs, though not small, is limited. Tell me what I should listen to in those two categories as well as jazz and Brazilian music, or give me something in a completely different genre and maybe I’ll like it?
For the moment, here’s some J-pop instead: just because I haven’t listened to them in a while, have my two favorite Mr.Children songs, 君が好き and エソラ. Sakurai-san doesn’t have anything like a beautiful singing voice, certainly not compared to the singers I’ve been listening to lately, but the way he puts over his lyrics makes me understand why so many MisChil fans have been devoted for literal decades.

I ran across (thanks as always, openlibrary) a long string of mysteries from the 1940s by Frances and Richard Lockridge, quirky and highly entertaining so far (apart from the period-typical racism, sigh). A little tempted to nominate them for Yuletide, mostly because the first one puts together the amateur detectives Mr. and Mrs. North with the police detective Weigand in a way that closely resembles my favorite OT3 dynamic of “established couple plus one.” This is among the sillier of the examples: “But [Mrs. North] had not had lunch, and would be delighted to eat it with [Lieutenant Weigand], although Mr. North might be along and join them. / ‘But he won’t mind,’ she said, leaving Weigand to wonder what Mr. North wouldn’t mind. / They were led to a table by a captain who beamed on Mrs. North, and assured her that another place could easily be set for Mr. North. Mrs. North had waffles and sausage and Weigand wondered about her digestion. He had broiled sea bass, and wondered a little about his. After a few minutes Mr. North did come, groaned openly over the choices of the other two, and ordered a green salad.”

I mentioned in a previous post that I’d been reading Dorothy Roberts’ The Mixed Marriage Project, which I recommend highly. My attention was drawn to one particular comment she makes: “It dawns on me that some of the people my father interviewed had married because of their partner’s color, not despite it. Some Black partners chose white spouses in the hope of lightening their children’s skin, even imagining they might one day pass as white. Some white partners, in turn, selected Black spouses with light skin, hoping their children would turn out lighter than their spouse. I’m appalled by their obsession with color, especially when it was driven by the desire to look whiter—to lighten Black people generation by generation. It is precisely this kind of thinking that has always made it hard for me to see anything positive in interracial intimacy. Why I’ve never been able to share my father’s optimism, much to his chagrin.”
I was reminded by this of something I read quite a few years back, a book by a Japanese grad student about her fieldwork—what’s it called, participant observer?—with a burakumin rights organization. The book was very interesting but bad scholarship, incomplete field notes published too soon with a general lack of analysis and investigation, notable in the excerpt I’m thinking of: at a community meeting, a non-burakumin attendee comments that “since there’s less prejudice now and burakumin can live among and marry non-burakumin, in a couple of generations the issue will have disappeared naturally,” and the grad student fumes “how dare he say that the problem would be solved by the buraku disappearing?!” “Disappearing” into the majority for burakumin in Japan is a more immediate issue than for Black people in the US or for other groups where there’s a distinct visual and/or linguistic and/or cultural divide, but the concept is similar, and the remaining question mark likewise. I don’t know where to go to read more about this, but it has my attention, especially given that if Y and I had had children it would have been an extremely personal issue. (Our “interracial intimacy” is very different on almost all fronts from that of Black/white marriages in the US, but even so.)

Photos: I haven’t taken many lately, I don’t know why. Sunset (my phone camera isn’t good enough to get the real colors); the two cats who live at the Tenri-kyo church one station over, one skittish, one shy but adventurous (zig-zagging closer to me and finally bonking its forehead against my hand, only to dash away as if startled); a sign at the tax office which struck me funny, being a painstakingly hand-calligraphed invitation to…file your taxes electronically.

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.

More reading (I have a library card now! And have also been buying more books than I should, it’s so nice to have multiple English-language bookstores to wallow in, and borrowing here and there from my mother as well). This got so long I’m going to devote this entry entirely to book chatter. In roughly increasing order of positivity:

Naomi Ishiguro, The Rainshadow Orphans

The Rainshadow Orphans is a gorgeously designed edition of a big fat fantasy novel and I’m sorry to say I was not impressed. It is about twice the length it needs to be, everything is written out painstakingly at the greatest length possible and with unnecessary repetition (although shelved as general fantasy, it reads like upper middle-grade); the characters are just not…I was talking about this before, but they don’t come to life in any way that’s interesting, they are just the same collections of traits carrying out the required plot movements, and not allowed to develop on their own. While it is neat to have an Asian-inspired setting and characters, there’s only one culturally Asian thing I can think of in the whole book that is actually load-bearing, ie the dragon pearls (Chinese myth). Everything else—food and drink, names*, clothing—is essentially a surface veneer of aesthetics: very little about the book would change if instead these references were Norse- or Ukrainian- or Indigenous Australian-inspired. (The blurb keeps saying “anime-inspired,” and in fact it would probably be a fun and very pretty anime, but it doesn’t work as a novel.)
*Part of my quibble is just that I’m sensitive to names, and the main characters’ names seem to have been chosen based on “heard this somewhere once”—Mei is from Totoro, and Toshiko is from that Doctor Who thing that isn’t, by osmosis? Also, though the character is in her teens, it pings very old-fashioned to me from real life, good luck finding a Toshiko who isn’t over fifty if not seventy. Their family name, Kawakami, is a common Japanese surname and does indeed mean “above the river,” but the mystical reading thereof while not exactly WRONG is, well, original; in Japanese, to the best of my knowledge, it just means “upstream” or maybe “uphill from the river.” Likewise the main villain’s name, Ken Saito, is like naming your villain, oh…Mike Johnson or something, in English? First and last names both super common and unremarkable. The other characters’ names, place names, etc. all seem “vaguely Japanese or at least Asian but with no attempt to create a linguistic background that holds together” (Mailee, Ava Song, Eleanor Minami), which always annoys the hell out of me. Also, most of the other believably Japanese names are also almost generically ordinary—Jun, Haru, Kei, Hana, Reiko, Daichi, etc.—which while not a sin, and certainly preferable to choosing obscure and wrong names, makes them feel like placeholders to me.
(Also, while it’s not to my credit, I have to say I got to the acknowledgements section, saw “and my father, Kazuo Ishiguro,” and went OH WELL THEN.)

E.K. Johnston, Aetherbound and Sky on Fire

I have actually read quite a few of E.K. Johnston’s novels at this point (they’re short, and I keep being hopeful) and have finally arrived at a theory: everything I’ve read by her in first person has been, if flawed, generally impressive: convincing emotionally, plot-wise, and in atmosphere, with main and minor characters who feel fully realized and pacing that pulls off what it’s trying to do, as well as entertaining and sometimes moving voices. Everything in third person, on the other hand, has featured clunky writing, unlikely plots, flat characters whose personalities and emotional journeys couldn’t mean a thing to me, and occasionally really morally dubious stances. I don’t get it.

Ursula Le Guin, Telling is Listening

I picked up a volume of Ursula Le Guin essays, even though I’ve read most of them before, mostly because it was such a charmingly formatted little book; to my infuriation it contains more typos than any book which cites the copy editor by name on the colophon should, such as “1985” for “1895,” “Orisinian” for “Orsinian,” and, remarkably, “George Elliott” for the obvious. Trying to decide whether to write the publisher a snide email on the topic. With regard to the content, I’m not as convinced by “Elfland and Poughkeepsie” as I used to be: it feels more like Le Guin arguing for the kind of fantasy she likes reading, and using bad examples of the kind she doesn’t as a tool in her argument. Speaking as someone who tends to like…what’s it called, in fic it would be modern with magic, this-world only with fantasy in it? a primary’ world fantasy?...I’m not entirely sure I buy Le Guin’s take any more.

Hermione Lee, Willa Cather

Another borrowing from my mom, Hermione Lee’s biography of Willa Cather; though not anything as engrossing as her Penelope Fitzgerald one, it was still an interesting read. Almost unrelated to Cather herself, it set me off on an interesting chain: Cather’s long-time not-quite-partner was a woman named Isabelle McClung, who eventually married a man called Jan Hambourg. He was the brother of the pianist Mark Hambourg, among whose daughters were Sonia—a student of Winifred Holtby’s—and Nadine—Frances Partridge’s sister-in-law. None of this is relevant to anything, I just like the way Willa Cather, Winifred Holtby, and Frances Partridge all come together through this random connection.

Rym Kechacha, The Apple and the Pearl, and Andrew Eliopulos, The Fascinators

While The Apple and the Pearl and The Fascinators are very different in concept, style, and execution, my mind is grouping them together a little bit as fantasy novels where the fantasy aspects, while—as far as I can tell—not intended as an allegory, and not immediately discardable, still somehow take a back seat to the real-world-ness. This may be just a function of my interests, but in both cases what stays with me is [the personal and professional struggles, long-term and daily, of a full cast of dancers, musicians, and tech people | the difficulties of being an out gay teenager with an unfashionable hobby and a complex friend situation in the US South], as opposed to the [Fairyland | magic-as-accepted fact] parts. Thinking about much older books I’m fond of, take Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin—while the fantasy aspects are not trivial to what the book is doing, I can imagine a purely mundane novel about Janet the English major and her appealing and somewhat messed-up friend group which would do a lot of the same things and leave the reader feeling much the same way. Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, on the other hand, could not be rewritten without the fantasy elements without becoming unrecognizable, they’re so densely interwoven with the themes and characters and events and ideas. I’m not in fact arguing for one over the other; I almost inevitably read primarily for characters, relationships, and plot, more or less in that order, and both varieties of books can deliver there if well done.
On the specific new books, The Apple and the Pearl—I think this was chestnut’s recommendation?—is beautifully written and the author clearly knows what she’s doing with regard to music and ballet; much of it is too, mm, quietly sad for my tastes, although I appreciated the hopeful ending to at least one of the little vignettes. (Also, as a musician I have to say that playing the same damn ballet score every night for a year, or a decade, would drive me up the wall; at least the dancers get to switch parts around.)
I can’t remember where I heard of The Fascinators, but someone mentioned it, it sounded interesting, I found it in the library. On the whole kind of a missed opportunity as a book? Unusually for fantasy, it needs MORE infodumping—the magic system sounds interesting and a little different (“associations” which affect spells, for instance), but we never really find out how it works, there’s so much page space spent on fairly generic teenage angst. Also, while the ending may be intended as a sequel hook, it’s one of those “well, the main character is A-okay now, so what if his two best friends are both fucked over in different ways?” conclusions, which I do not care for.

Jo Walton, Everybody’s Perfect

I blow hot and cold on Jo Walton, but I think Everybody’s Perfect is one of her better efforts; she, like E.K. Johnston above, has a style that’s better suited to first person than third (her characters tend to infodump relentlessly in a particular chatty voice, and in third person they all start blending together after a while), the worldbuilding is lovely, and the interlocking stories hold together beautifully.

Nicholas Kilmer, A Butterfly in Flame

Off my mom’s shelf, Nicholas Kilmer’s series of art mysteries (he is one of her long-distance boyfriends, by which I mean someone she wrote a fan letter to and became good friends with); very well written, very funny and interesting, probably an even better read if you live in Boston or are better informed than me about fine art. Once in a while they get a little too action-thriller-ish, but you can skip that. The best parts for me are Fred the ex-special ops art fixer himself, laid-back and thoughtful and possessed of integrity, and his girlfriend Molly Riley the reference librarian and her two kids (although if these books were about music instead of art, Molly’s daughter would not be named Terry). My favorite is A Butterfly in Flame, where what could have been a gloomy, cynical portrait of a failing art school for the untalented is actually a really exciting view of a hopeful and functioning institution.

Daniel Hahn, If This Be Magic

Daniel Hahn’s If This Be Magic is an absolutely delightful book about Shakespeare in translation, which I recommend to anyone fond of languages or Shakespeare or both. “For the target language, which is the specific, detailed, consistent language of the south London characters in this translated production, the phrase ‘Do you kiss your teeth at me, fam?’ proved to be a perfect translation of ‘Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?’ The syllabic shape of the line, the rhythm, the tone and contemporary energy—everything.” Hahn quotes a Chinese translation of Henry V in which “We few, we happy few” becomes 我们几个，幸运的几个, which I can’t help wanting to make 咱哥几个… . He also mentions that “One of my favorite discoveries while collecting translations for this book—albeit not the best translation in itself—was an edition published in Boston in 1870 of La tragique histoire d’Hamlet, Prince de Danemark ‘translated by the graduating class of Miss Putnam’s School’,” reminding me that when my 偶像 Edward Seidensticker’s translation of the Tale of Genji became public knowledge, he received a polite letter from a group of young ladies at Shitennoji Girls’ School (then as now an elite girls’ high school in Osaka) saying that they had themselves embarked on a translation and would be glad to be of help to him if required. Also, the reason I feel Hahn is a kindred spirit: explaining that “Give me some music” from Twelfth Night begins momasmeninet in Georgian, he lists the five parts of the word which agglutinate to form its meaning and adds, “I really, really want to learn Georgian.”

Hettie Jones and Helene Dorn, Love, H

Something I picked up at random while cruising my favorite bookstore section, the letters and diaries shelf: Love, H, the correspondence between the poet Hettie Jones and her friend the sculptor Helene Dorn, from 1965 to Dorn’s death in 2004. I very vaguely knew of Jones as the ex-wife of Amiri Baraka and mother of the writer Lisa Jones, and I’d never heard of Dorn at all, but something grabbed me about the book and I was so, so right: it’s wonderful. Helene, 1990: “I spent yesterday going over all the [rent] figures again. Woke up this a.m., sensibly quiet in heart—somebody must have talked to me while I slept. Why get so traumatized over something over which one has no control! It either happens or it doesn’t. Yeah, Mama, where is bohemia now?” Hettie, commenting after the fact on a letter of her own from 1993: “Forty years before this letter my father’s response to my first Village apartment was, ‘Ach, why live like this!’ So I had by this time long lived like that—in a walkup sans doorbell or doorman—and thus thrown the key [down to the street to let someone in] a lot, often into astonishing weather or event. The question was never why, but why not.” Hettie, 1996: “Write me if you have time but mainly try to chill, absorb yourself in something mindless while your mind heals. ‘Become a pearl / of a girl / yeah momma!’ (Hee hee, isn’t it great to have a poem for an occasion?) Hope you’re asleep, resting, reading, something, anything but brooding. But if brood you must, then do it to the max—and then it’ll be done, it’ll get boring. Good night!” Helene, 1996: “We’re both tired from different things. Ain’t it sompthin’ that there’s that care across states…I am ok but not ok, and nobody but you all those miles away has any sense of it.” Hettie, 1996: “I think I’m going to sneak a look at one of my unfinished, maybe never-to-be finished, poems because it’s 11:15pm. In my flaming youth that was about the time I’d have my second cup of coffee of the night, and then that silence wld settle all around me, and then I’d have the third about 1 a.m.” Helene, 2000: “Well never mind. I’m just in one of my very down moods, and shldn’t pass it on, but it helps sometimes to wail to a friend. Like Creeley’s ‘you hold it’… At least it’s mildly raining now. And I feel better for having you-hold-it-ed.”

No photos today because I’m tired. Next time. 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.

I’ve been almost completely absent from commenting on DW for the last…month? more? I was swamped with work and then I was sick (just a bad cold, now gone) and traveling internationally (still abroad for the rest of the summer, sigh) and just not there mentally, although I think I’ve read everything posted on my f-list. Right now I’m in that state where I can either have a vicious circle of do nothing, have no energy to do it, or a delicious circle of do something, have more energy, so I’m trying to select the latter. (tinny reminded me of Ogden Nash’s wonderful poem about velleity, and while looking up Icelandic things for reasons described below, I found their similar word nenna, as here. (Interesting to me that all three of the words cited in this particular article translate perfectly well for me, although not into English: nenna as やる気 (Japanese), glatað as 完了 and vesen as 麻烦 (both Chinese).)) Oh dear, I think I really did just stack up three parentheses. Sorry.

I finished the silly iddy thing I’ve been writing since… March or April 2025, maybe? and now I’m very homesick for it. I’ve always said I wouldn’t write RPF (no shade on those who do, God knows; it’s just a line I drew for myself), and this is only not-RPF in the most technical of senses (different names, different setting). I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t not write it. I’m not going to post it anywhere, but if anyone has a long plane ride or something coming up and would like to read 177K of farmboys in space (including much gratuitous Chinese, a modest amount of worldbuilding/sociopolitics, six cats, three concerts, one (1) sex scene, and a lot of handwaved technical issues), let me know and I’ll send you a copy (I am most grateful to the two people who have been kind enough to read along).
So what to write next? My proper original thing is still in the middle of Book 3, and I still want to finish it. I’ve been rereading it all from Book 1 to remind myself what’s going on; some of it is very good but I’m sorry to say the first third of Book 1 is really boring. On the other hand, if I leap right into the interesting parts, I’m not going to find them interesting either, because they depend in part on established characterization and context (I don’t want to read a slow burn between people whose only purpose is being there to have a slow burn, for instance, and if you start off by breaking various practical, ethical, and creative rules it’s not going to have an impact if you haven’t emphasized why they matter…). Oh dear. But I owe the characters a proper ending to Book Three (which is about halfway through a rough draft), and I want to find out exactly how the ending is going to happen, so I do want to write at least some version of all of it (even if so far no agents are at all interested).
Plus I might want to write something else set in the worldbuilding of the aforementioned silly iddy thing, which I kind of like and want to play with more… oh dear.

I went to see Turandot, because I can never resist a chance to do so; I had a seat waaaaay up and over on one side, so I could only see half the stage, but didn’t really care; I just like to listen. The singers were fine, no one whose voice really blew me away but all, as the theater reviewers say, adequate for the role; I liked that the conductor was an Ukrainian woman, Oksana Lyniv. Turandot has a fantastic orchestra part and they did justice to it (the riddle scene!). Ping, Pang, and Pong really have some of the most beautiful music in the whole thing in their trio (although I spent much of it wondering about Henan dialect lol). For me “Nessun dorma” is the most boring part of the whole opera and Liu's first-act aria comes second to it, but Turandot’s Louling aria and the subsequent riddle game are riveting, not to mention its sequel in which Turandot pleads not to have to get married, and I love the very end, Calaf’s introduction of himself and Turandot’s introduction of him to her father. I was tickled that the opera ended in classic C-pop concert style with a rain of 彩带|confetti (one element of Chinese culture they got right!); also, the one Turandot fic I’ve written got a new kudos the following morning, making me wonder if the reader had been in the audience along with me.

Lots of new (to me) books! I’ll order them by my reactions to them.

NO: Just one, fortunately: a mystery by Katy Watson whose books I saw recommended somewhere and was curious about, but nope. Maybe my fault for starting with the second book in the series—the only one the store had—but the characters were flat, the prose was flat, I got bored about a third in and just skipped to the end to find out who got murdered and why, and didn’t care when I did find out. Oh well.

Yes, but…: Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory, which was in some ways right up my street and some ways not; it’s a very open, except probably not happy, ending and that makes it hard for me to expect to enjoy rereading—I don’t want to read a book where I don’t care about the characters, but I don’t want to care about the characters knowing they’re destined for unhappiness or worse! That said, it’s supposed to have a sequel coming out next year some time, so I will look for that and put my final judgment on hold. It's a very smart, thoughtful book with a lot of good worldbuilding, that’s for sure. Predictably I loved the language stuff, the way it works and the way it’s thought out, including the way the character voices are differentiated; the underground argot, which is basically Polari (“everycove had vadad his eek”) crossed with Russian-heavy Esperanto (“abra your slooshers, veck”), was a lot of fun and cleverly written to be followed by the reader (also it made me think of Antonia Forest’s Thuggery-speak in the self-conscious way it’s used by the rebellious young).
It was disconcerting to read that one immediately before Fonda Lee’s The Last Contract of Isako, since the former is about a generation ship on its way to a new planet and the latter is about life on a new planet long after the generation ship has arrived, both books involving fraught issues around relations to Earth (or the lack of them), class stratification based on positions within the ship, terraforming, etc. I liked Isako herself and I found her…what’s the word…deuteragonist Martim very interesting, but most of the other characters didn’t quite stand up to their importance in the narrative, and there were SO MANY action scenes. I mean, it’s kind of a Kurosawa & Mifune movie in space with an older woman in the Mifune role, which is neat in itself, but as always I kept wanting more slice of life and less fighting.
Also To Ride a Rising Storm, the second book in Moniquill Blackgoose’s alternate-world fantasy ?trilogy, which I enjoyed more than the first one; I like established-situations more than fish-out-of-water, I guess. They’re a little bit frustrating as bildungsromans (what’s the proper plural?) because Anequs is already right about everything, the problem is that the society of colonizers hasn’t caught up with her; there’s kind of a sense that there are Right and Wrong ideas about everything and everyone around Anequs can be measured by where they fall on the spectrum from Right to Wrong, but the worldbuilding is very fun, including a lot of Chemistry 101 if all the terminology came from Norse instead of Greek/Latin.
As always I can’t help being fussy about writers’ uses of languages I know something about—in the Anequs books, while it tickles me that half of China should be Cantonese-dominated, it’s not going to be called Shiang-Gang (at least, not internally; the outside world might know it that way) on account of Xianggang|Hong Kong includes the element of “-port” which is not going to be applied to a whole country. In The Republic of Memory, Taki’s not going to call Hilal “sosen” (at least not as a form of address to her face), although she might call her go-senzo-sama, and An Miaozong should be called Miss An, not Miss Miaozong. A good lesson to research anything I write myself even if I think I know what I’m doing.

YES: Two Nordic mysteries, a new-ish Helene Tursten; her younger cop protagonist, Embla, tends to have gloomier books than the previous Irene (who makes the occasional pleasant cameo in Embla’s books), but still has smarts and a sense of humor, interesting colleagues, and a taste for good food and good sex. Also one of Quentin Bates’ Icelandic mysteries, which also have a woman cop as a protagonist, the pragmatic middle-aged Gunnhildur. Also dark in places here and there, but without that kind of “see how unflinchingly grim I can be” that turns up in a lot of Scandinavian mysteries for some reason. And the Icelandic setting is fun (I love reading about the names and contemplating the use of patronyms/matronyms; apparently along with -son and -dóttir it’s now legal to use -bur if you are nonbinary in Iceland).
The new Murderbot book, which I enjoyed, although I think the bits around the edges with Three were the best; still, I will like going back to reread it without the oh-dear-what’s-going-to-happen tension; also it was very funny. One of the characters has not-quite-my-name, which was disconcerting.
Emma Törzs’ Ink Blood Sister Scribe, fantasy which I really liked—interesting, likeable, entertaining characters and a happy ending, although once again there were more action scenes than I wanted. I found the magic system, mm…okay? it’s well worked out and it makes the plot work, but it doesn’t feel especially interesting on its own; the book succeeds because of Esther and Joanna and their allies, who are great (I think Esther in particular carries the book, and I was delighted that she got the ending she did). Because of the Abe-and-Joanna coincidence of names, I kept picturing Abe as the protagonist of Peter S. Beagle’s Summerlong, oh dear.
Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory, which I picked up belatedly because I liked The Incandescent so much: happy to report that, although it’s not as much designed-specifically-to-my-interests, it is also a fantastic read and left me very satisfied; the setting feels real and the ending feels earned. Why are there never sequels to the books one wants sequels for? I would like more Ursa, whom we only get in glimpses. I would DEFINITELY like more Yiso (I keep misreading his name as Yibo and picturing him as an alien version of my farmboy!Yibo, which is entertaining and seems surprisingly in character). Avi is fun but more interesting in people’s fics than in the actual book (there aren’t many fics but most of them are very good, still working my way through). I love the Sparrows and would like more of them interacting; for some reason I think my very favorite scene was the one in the middle timeline when Cleo finds out about what’s happening and the way she reacts to it and to Kyr|Val, just tone-perfect.

Photos: Pretty self-explanatory except for the last two, which are respectively “accidental abstract composition with live cat in background” and “new name for the NYCB?” (that one’s for chestnut and maybe qian).

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, or rather rereading: Peter Dickinson, In the Palace of the Khans. I think this was Dickinson’s last novel, or at any rate very, very late on in his career/his life, and in some ways it shows: the underlying themes that would have been woven seamlessly into the whole story in a peak-Dickinson book kind of lie uneasily on top, not really integrated and as a result not as emotionally effective as they might have been. That said, Dickinson is one of those creators who’s still better at 70% than most people are at 110%. The book is set in one of his imaginary but plausible countries, this one a small Central Asian state called Dirzhan, where Nigel, the teenage son of the British Ambassador, is summoned to help the President-Khan’s daughter Taeela perfect her English. Nigel is one of Dickinson’s viewpoint characters who is good in all senses, without coming off like a Mary Sue, and spending time in his head is deeply satisfying (although I’m kind of sorry that the constraints of the book made it impossible to get Taeela’s POV too). There are also a lot of interesting minor characters—Nigel’s mother Lucy (a whole unwritten novel in herself), Mizhael “Mike” the Oxford-educated chieftain’s son who makes his living designing video games, his brilliant, impatient Singaporean wife Lily-Jo, and so on. Working out the central puzzle of the palace map is one of my favorite parts of the book (almost nothing actually happens, but it’s just as exciting as any of the action sequences), and the symbolic gesture which closes the book and allows another long-awaited resolution is wonderful.

Listening to some of Alma Deutscher’s more recent stuff, the Breaking News Polka, which is very cute, and the Japanese Fantasia. I like that her work is so neoclassical, but I kind of wish she hadn’t taken this to the extent of using two of the most predictable Japanese traditional songs possible for her classical variations. (At least she didn't use "Kimigayo," which is as jingoistic as any other national anthem and more than some, although I do kind of like it musically.) I’ll admit that “Akatombo” is much more interesting in her hands than when I hear it signaling five o’clock (linking back to my other endeavor, it has lyrics by Miki Rofu, son of Midorikawa Kata, and music by Yamada Kosaku, brother of Tsuneko Gauntlett), but Clare Fischer did sakura sakura better. I’d just as soon have heard what Alma would do with something by Mr.Children or Dreams Come True.

Jiang Dunhao song of the post (because it’s my post and I can): 选择的归路, an older OST that I like for the way it shows off his low range and slides back and forth between minor and major; the first shift to major, around 00:35-36, is terrific.

We’re doing movie music in the orchestra right now (almost done, concert coming up this weekend, knock wood [knock woodwinds?]), and just in case not everybody was sure of what the Star Wars suite was expressing, one of the oboists sent everyone a heartfelt manifesto on the in-universe context of each section (the annihilating force of the Empire, Yoda lifting the shuttle out of the swamp, Luke feeling the Force, Leia summoning help and so on) just for reference. Nothing I haven’t known about since I was fifteen, and I do think about it when we’re playing; I find Yoda’s theme some of John Williams’ best work, the main theme with the little clarinet interjections in particular always kind of makes me cry, around 1:14 to 1:24 here; but I was pleased to find the oboist signing his email off appropriately with “May the Force be with you!” (If we’d only pushed the concert date off by just a week, it could’ve been on May the Fourth…)

New class of Japanese learners at the weird high school, a big one this year with eighteen kids. Mostly Chinese (including one from Hong Kong), as well as two lively Nepali boys and one girl each from Thailand and the Philippines. Last year’s class featured two tall, slim, incredibly poised idol-style princesses; this year they’re all more typical fifteen-year-olds, personalities not yet coming out in full at their new school, although it’s fascinating to watch the subgroups forming already. Several speak good English and have to be told NOT to speak English with me when I volunteer in class, they’re here to learn Japanese! They have so far learned to introduce themselves with regard to name, age, and nationality, the last a little complicated; the Thai and Filipina girls are both half-Japanese, I think, and so is at least one of the Chinese kids, and since they’re all still young enough to hold dual nationality, they have some choices to make when it comes to this elementary piece of language practice.

Work: Somewhere in one of the Janet Neel mysteries, Francesca Wilson remarks “Fraud gets in everywhere once you have it, like moth,” and I have found that this also applies to mismanagement/incompetence at work—like, there is this one long project in which everything that could go wrong has gone wrong (not, for a nice change, any of it my fault to speak of). I think the root of all evil was the client demanding extremely unrealistic deadlines, and then the sales guys promising to meet them without bothering to consult with the people actually doing the work (sorry, I have a long-standing and permanent grudge against the people in charge of sales), but even after that there was a remarkable failure to do any of the elementary checking (spelling! glossary words!), agree on basic conventions, or do anything resembling version control. Like wrestling a plate of spaghetti, but it’s not like the spaghetti fork hasn’t long since been invented.

A couple of very silly things from long ago that came to mind recently, one talking with the brass players at orchestra rehearsal: way back in high school I had a friend who was a trombonist in the band, and who would bring her instrument to school on the school bus, as one did. One of the little kids looked at her getting on the bus one day with this big black case over her shoulder, and called out “Hey, look! Sarah plays the bazooka!”
Also, since we’re into baseball season now (a mixed bag so far), I was reminded of Deanna Rubin’s baseball musical, which remains a delight. (I should look Deanna up again—we hung out a few times many years ago and she was lovely.)

This is just plain bragging and I’ll put it under a cut: ( in brief )

Photos: My bassoon teacher’s magnificent cat, trains within trains, Shanghai-style fried dumplings (apparently you can tell because they’re folded like little paper hats, and yes they were as tasty as they look), and assorted flowers.

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.

Reading The Tempest with yaaurens and company; I think it’s the first time I’ve read it through. I was Sebastian, who is a minor conspirator nobody’s ever heard of and gets some remarkably good lines (“He receives comfort like cold porridge,” “[in response to “He misses not much”] No; he doth but mistake the truth totally,” “Thou dost snore distinctly; there’s meaning in thy snores”). The play also inevitably brings to mind Jason of Jason and the Bard, dreaming up a quaint device to make the banquet vanish, and of course Antonia Forest’s production—Ginty finding Ferdinand interesting only when he’s played by Patrick (not unreasonably, I think), Lawrie relishing Caliban’s most colorful speeches, Miranda longing for Jan as Prospero and making Nicola laugh with her line readings, and then her eerie, wistful “…were I human.”

Went to graduation at the nighttime junior high (from which you graduate after you acquire a certain number of credits, not a certain number of years; many people take five or six years or more and that’s fine). Nine people graduating: a big cheerful young Nepali guy, an equally big cheerful fortyish Japanese lady, and seven middle-aged to elderly Korean ladies, at least one in her eighties. C, the Japanese lady, has a son in his late teens who graduated from the same nighttime junior high school the previous year; he was there to cheer his mom on, and she will be following him to nighttime high school, as will M, who is in her late fifties or sixties, quiet and modest and very bright. They were both in snazzy skirt suits; several of the other women had on glorious chima chogori. Lots of enthusiastic applause and speeches, singing the school song and also 乾杯, not to be confused with its Chinese counterpart 干杯 lol (although I think the Chinese one would work as a graduation song too!). Curiously, there were very few family members there apart from C’s son F; I wonder how many of the older Korean women were only able to start school once their husbands were out of the picture.

The nighttime junior high is in a neighborhood with a skyrocketing Vietnamese population (judging from the fact that every time I go there there’s a new Vietnamese restaurant or grocery); since I won’t be back there for a few months I took the opportunity to go into a little café and buy a couple of banh mi for dinner. Immediate positive impression because the song playing when I went in was 小幸运! (not Bai Yu’s version, but still). There was a bookshelf behind the cash register containing the complete Harry Potter series (I know, but) in both Japanese and Vietnamese. The sandwiches were also pretty good—one roast pork and one ham-and-fried-egg, with all the tasty trimmings (although my idea of a good sandwich is one with just barely enough bread to retain its structural integrity, the bread is always too thick for me regardless of what kind it is, oh well).

It's high school baseball time and I have been collecting the most remarkable names among the players, as usual; this season’s bunch includes 慈愛久 (Jake), 満詩 (Miuta), 空飛 (Takato) and his teammate 蒼海 (So), whose “sky and sea” combination I like; 覇 (Howl, I am not kidding, a) how do you get that pronunciation from the character, and b) are his parents fans of DWJ and/or Ghibli); 芽空 (Hisoka, God knows how), and 夢生愛 (Muua, poor kid), whose older brothers are 飛美希 (Hibiki) and 輝夢 (Kiramu). It’s not even that none of these are nice names, they’re lovely! If not necessarily what you’d expect from tanned crewcut kids whose main preoccupation is getting to first base. Just, parents all, please think of your kid having to spend his whole life explaining how to spell and/or pronounce his name!

Music for today: something I came across at random on YouTube, a concerto for flute and flute orchestra. The piece itself isn’t all that exciting, but the sound of so many flutes together is fantastic, mellow and melting and cool as water, why aren’t there more pieces for this kind of group?
Also listening to Seong-Jin Cho play the Chopin Scherzos, just dazzling.

Y’s project of getting me to watch 1980s anime movies continues; this time it was Oshii Mamoru’s Patlabor, which was really surprisingly good. Not as pretty visually as the Gundam ones, on the whole, but (except for some comic distortion here and there) realistic in a way that makes you feel you’re watching live-action postwar Japan with big robots, including wonderful visual scenes of ordinary-Showa-era downtowns and abandoned areas. There’s a lot less in the way of big robot fights than in Gundam, and the ones they do have are significantly plot-related as opposed to “big battle scenes are fun” (sorry, Gundam, I’m oversimplifying, but still); the whole thing is almost like a murder mystery in the way they gradually work out what’s happening and why and how to stop it, it’s fascinating. Also, nobody dies! I was sure Captain Gotoh was going to be a dead mentor guy, having made his stirring speech and gone off on his own into the storm, but nope, he was fine. Shinohara the male lead is actually not nearly as annoying as he might be, and again there are more women and less fanservice than I would have expected from the eighties—Izumi is fine too (and I do like it that she’s the pilot and Shinohara is the data guy), but I love Nagumo and her ponytail and her professionalism.

I finished reading The People at No. 1 Siwei Street (or rather I finished reading the Japanese edition; now I have a copy of the Chinese original from the library which I am trying to work my way through before I have to return it. It is mostly not hard to follow, except reading in 繁体字 gives me a headache; my brain has no problem reading 历史 as lìshǐ, but it insists on reading 歴史 as rekishi, and as for something like 號, my brain wants to know why I’m suddenly reading something published before the war (this book is from 2023). Oh well, if I lived in Taiwan for a while I’d get used to it). It was a lot of fun, with very memorable characters (including a Jiajia whom I keep picturing as the one from Guardian, since she’s happy and feisty, even though this one is explicitly described as strongly featured, beautiful, and very tall, plus she’s 家家 instead of 佳佳, but still). Happy ending allowing for a sad flashback which I still don’t understand in full, other than as a way to examine late-twentieth-century Taiwanese sociopolitical history through the relationship of two not-quite-cousins who hate each other but have a close bond). I would love to make an English translation and may play with one, but it really should be done by someone who can read the original fluently and really knows from Taiwan.
Also reading The Luka/Chika Sisters by Nagano Mayumi, an old favorite who likes to play around with gender and sexuality in interesting, weird, low-key ways; will report back.

Photos: Magnolia, forsythia, some things that are probably not pink lilies-of-the-valley, and some early cherry blossoms. The most unexpected vending machine I’ve seen yet, with flavors from dark chocolate to raspberry, pistachio, and yogurt. Scenes from a recent day trip, including three gorgeous vessels, holding respectively sake, abalone stew, and the most delicious yokan I’ve ever tasted, containing raisins, figs, and apricots. (One of the deer around here, not pictured, is recently said to have wandered about 30km to our city to prowl around eating people’s gardens; maybe even deer get bored in the countryside?).

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.

So it’s entrance exam time, and all the ninth-graders have Red Books (collections of past exam questions for practice, which have red covers). At the junior high school attended by some of the kids from the Saturday juku, it is apparently a thing to write each other encouraging messages on the Red Book covers, like a yearbook in advance. Most of these are very sweet. I was looking at Sakura’s while she worked her way through a practice test, noticing that one long and enthusiastic message was signed with a boy’s name and included 사랑해 at the end. “Sakura, did you know this kid is confessing to you?” “Oh, sure. He said I could rub it out if I wasn’t interested.” Since she left it there, I’m curious to know whether Yusuke-kun will have some good news after exams are over… (I still don’t know why Japanese teenagers are using Korean to say “I love you” to each other, but I think it’s another fad. Very cute regardless.)

I noticed that both Japanese and Chinese have adopted the English word “get,” but in different senses, both legit in English. Japanese uses it to mean “acquire,” usually but not always in the physical sense (Y will occasionally text me to say 苺ゲット, ichigo get, meaning he’s laid his hands on some of the hometown strawberries the supermarkets don’t sell here; I might text him back to say Kuro-chan get, meaning that I ran into Kuro-chan the cat who deigned to let me do some stroking). Chinese, on the other hand, uses it to mean “understand, empathize with, grok,” usually with the completion-complement as in “get到.” (Baidu offers sample usages as in 突然get到, to understand all at once, 永远get不到, an eternal lack of understanding, and 被get到, he gets me etc.) (Japanese also doubles the final consonant while Chinese pretty much swallows it, but that’s a thing the two languages will be 永远get不到 about each other.)

Courtesy of the farmboys I have learned that Winnie the Pooh in Chinese is 小熊维尼, Weini the Little Bear, and Tigger is 跳跳虎, bounce-bounce-tiger. (Also I did not expect to find out while looking this up that Winnie the Pooh is quasi-banned in China for use in political satire? Surprised that the farmboys were allowed to reminisce happily on camera about their favorite characters, also including 屹耳 the donkey.)

I’ve been watching little snatches of the Winter Olympics on TV while I do other things; I like all the flying events, ski jump most of all, although I can’t imagine how anyone ever makes it to Olympic level without breaking themselves into little pieces along the way. Along with everyone else in Japan I was very happy to see Rikuryu (Miura Riku and Kihara Ryuichi) win a gold in pairs skating, coming back from fifth place after their short program. Very touching and amusing that Kihara, nine years older than his partner and three times her size, is the one who bursts into tears on the spot (happy or sad) while little tiny Miura keeps her cool and comforts him.

Reading a new book by Yang Shuangzi (author of Taiwan Travelogue) called The People at No. 1 Siwei Street or words to that effect; the edition I have is a Japanese translation (also by Miura Yuko), I don’t know if there is an English version and I can’t get my hands on the Chinese original. I’m only about a third in but it is very fun, modern-era but with callbacks to the colonial period, about four young women renting rooms in an old Japanese-style house (and falling in love with each other along the way, I think, will keep you posted). Maybe I should trouble A-Pei to go out to a bookstore and send me everything by Yang Shuangzi she can lay hands on.

A new favorite and an old one: Schumann Six Canonical Studies, arranged by Debussy for two pianos, one of his love letters to Bach. Why isn’t there an orchestration of this? (I have found some chamber-music versions, but it’s not the same. Also the Pergolesi Stabat Mater, a version with soprano and countertenor that I wasn’t familiar with (and just to show that poor short-lived Pergolesi had a range, my favorite aria from his comic opera).

Y and I went up to the outdoor track one station over this morning to run for a while. He has very mild asthma and prefers to start and stop—“or I could just run slower?” “Sweetheart, you know what it’s called if you’re running slower than me? Walking.” I do have some staying power, however, and today I got through twenty laps of the little track without stopping for a break, so about 6K if my arithmetic is right. We were entertained along the way by an invasion of hiyoko-chan from the nearby nursery school, little knee-high kids in bright yellow hats, running and somersaulting and in one case meandering along hand in hand like it was a romantic date opportunity, adorable. (Their teachers wear signs on their coats saying “No photography please” in three languages, so I can’t record it for you.)

Photos: Flowers, a very patient dog outside the supermarket, an alarming bakery sign (I was good, I didn’t go up and tell them about it), actual snow on my balcony plants (a once-a-year occurrence if that), and somebody’s paper art on their doorstep, with a sign saying “Help yuorself” [sic]. I took a little tiny origami star.

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.

I’ve had a dispiriting week—nothing seriously wrong other than the usual perennial personal and global worries, just a variety of little demoralizing things—and so I am posting a bunch of silly bits of things that have been piling up.

Y and I took a walk early in January and found one of the big shrines still full of people for the New Year; we did our own 初詣 elsewhere (up in the north of the city where I used to live there’s a small shrine on a hill with a beautiful, ancient camphor tree), but we stopped at the stalls offering food outside. These included such traditional Japanese snacks as candy apples, fried chicken, and of course takoyaki, as well as corn on the cob and kebab. The corn stall was run by several Chinese ladies, one scolding another “talk Japanese in front of the customers!” and the kebab stall, as far as I could tell, by a genuine Turkish guy. Both were delicious.

Music: chestnut got me to go listen to the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto (this one is my 偶像 Seong-Jin Cho’s version) and it’s wonderful; I need to spend a lot more time with it. Prokofiev is hit-or-miss for me but this one’s a hit.

Tickled by a Chinese song (this one, very comforting lyrics-wise) which uses the English term “happy ending” in passing, pronounced “HAPpy enDING” with a strong back-of-the-throat Chinese h sound; the English ability of Chinese singers seems to cover a range from Zhou Shen, among whose many talents is sounding like a native speaker whatever language he’s singing in, to a number of others who apparently consider consonants one hundred percent optional. Still, they’re all doing better than me singing in the shower in Chinese.

Where Japanese says “mofumofu” for petting a fluffy cat or dog, Chinese slang has “rua,” written in roman letters—you see “想rua” for something (or someone) fluffy and adorable.

In Chinese you sometimes hear 哈 (ha) at the end of a sentence, apparently in the sense of “—right?” “—okay?” “—yeah?” (It’s one of the invisible speech particles, i.e. (in non-scripted speech) subtitles sometimes don’t include it even when it’s there; 嘛 and 嘞 are others.) I’m curious if anyone has investigated whether it’s related to its soundalike, the similar English “—huh?”

My morning running course goes past a large boys’ school, and one day I encountered some of their junior high baseball team (in semi-uniform) on the uphill past the entrance, where a teacher/coach was checking off their times. Some of them were not faster than me, which means they were pretty slow. Around the corner on the flat, where the coach couldn’t see them, they slowed down to a walk/trot; I couldn’t resist teasing “don’t let this old lady beat you! 頑張って!” as I went past, and one gave me a big grin and shouted back “Thank you! 頑張ってください!”

Because Client N can’t make up their minds about terminology from one month to the next, I had to spend some time lately changing all the terms translated as “Post Type” to “Pillar Type” and I’m very sorry it wasn’t the other way around, so I could have worked from pillar to post.

Y took me to see an old Gundam movie from his childhood, prudently making me read a plot synopsis first. Gorgeous animation, they knew what they were doing in the 1980s, very strange plot (everyone is motivated by both complex political opinions and high-school-level “I’ve never forgiven him for taking my girl” or “She doesn’t get to have you!” emotions). Very good worldbuilding, both the beautifully realized settings and giving a lot of nameless characters throwaway lines that made them three-dimensional, and also thinking through things like people working at weird angles to each other in zero gravity. Speaking of which I could have done without the damn miniskirts, but that said there were more women as competent pilots, soldiers, and mechanics than I would have expected from the era. Not surprisingly I rather fell for the minor character in glasses who has his own little tiny rebellion.

Photos: Three from a New Year’s Eve visit to a temple: the raw material of mugwort mochi ready for pounding, some thousand-crane strings, and the temple roof with its sky. Also persimmons, ducks, and something pink (a rose? a camellia?). The last one is for maggie, a poster I saw in a subway station of Machida Keita warning the public not to get caught up in fraud.

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.

Things are a little up and down, but I got two really lovely Yuletide gifts, so making sure to note them here: What Abigail Did When She Housesat, a Rivers of London fic with wonderful Abigail and Indigo and an absolutely inspired original character of sorts creating the plot, and Names Give Us Away, which is exactly what I wanted with regard to Rachel Abramoff at the Crater School. Delighted with both of them <3 <3 <3
Best mid-holiday-or-otherwise wishes to everyone!

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.

While I’m thinking of it: December’s coming up and about time for me to think about sending New Year’s cards. You know the drill: if I haven’t sent you a card before and you’d like one, DM me with a name and address to send it to, likewise if your name/address/etc. has changed, or if you’d rather not get one this time around.

Silly language stuff: I realized the other day that I’d inadvertently done a Tom Swifty in the thing I was writing, along the lines of “he was making tea adroitly with one hand.” (Of course, it could have been his left hand! But still. I guess in that case he would have been making tea gauchely, or else sinisterly… .) Also, I keep seeing people refer to the well-known dictionary as “Miriam Webster,” and now I want to work a minor character with that name into a story somewhere, just for fun. I always liked the name Miriam.

While Y is not what I would call fannish per se, he is sort of fannish-aware thanks to a long history with manga, anime, and games, plus he looks tolerantly on my fandom-related hobbies (“oh, is it time for the Christmas transformative-creation event already again? good luck!”). He texted me the other day to say “there are two girls in archery-club gear sitting in front of me on the train canoodling like nobody’s business, pure yuri!”

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 赫马佛洛狄忒斯, an enormous transliterated mouthful of a title that renders down to “Hermaphroditos” (nicknamed 小赫马 by fans). The lyrics, by the pseudonymous 沃特艾文儿 (“Whatever”), always strike me as really surprisingly queer for a mainstream Chinese song, when you put together 每个名词都分男女，标签贴给我也贴给你，可仍有人坚信不疑牵手同行就能做情侣 (all the nouns are divided between male and female, with labels stuck on me and you, but there are still people who never doubt that you can be a couple if you hold hands and journey together) and 愚人的眼光里才没彩虹悬挂天际 (it’s only the fools who can’t see the rainbow hanging in the sky) and 世界是个什么东西，是个巨大的柜子而已…容纳谁都容纳不了你 (what is the world, it’s just a giant closet…no matter who they enclose, they can’t enclose you) and 深知爱就该百无禁忌 (deeply knowing love means having to ignore all taboos) and 我爱你是你，只因你是你 (I love you being you, just because you’re you). All that aside, it’s also a just plain good song with an irresistible rhythm in the chorus.

In ongoing architectural exploration, we went to see another Vories building, the Osaka Church, which is very simple and very lovely, although I have to say if you’re going to have a rose window I want it to be stained glass, not plain. Planned down to the angle of every pew. Old-fashioned portative organ in very beautiful wood sitting next to a modern piano, plus a pipe organ up in the loft. The church is open to visits on condition that visitors attend a service first, so we sat through half an hour of a noonday service: organ music (a Messiaen piece and something from the Messiah, I forget which one, and one I didn’t know), hymn-singing, the Lord’s Prayer (having spent six months in my youth attending a CoE school for reasons, I found I could still back-translate from the archaic Japanese to the “hallowed be Thy name” version), and a short sermon by a young woman pastor, possibly Chinese or Korean from her first name and very faint accent, wearing an immaculate trouser suit. No proselytizing of the visitors, much appreciated; if I lived nearby I might even visit the services regularly for the organ and the windows.

Because I do some volunteering for the local YMCA (very long story), I spent a day as a volunteer interpreter for…how can I explain this succinctly…a group of professionals (social workers, pastors, farmers, teachers, etc. etc.) from various developing countries who are spending several months in Japan studying to become “rural leaders.” They were visiting the day laborers’ district here, with a tour in the morning and a lecture and discussion in the afternoon.

All of them speak some amount of English but very little Japanese (although they had all picked up “daijobu”), so interpreters were needed. There was me and a younger American woman and two older Japanese women, one a high-school English teacher and one a sometime tourist guide, as well as two adorable high school girls. My group for the morning tour was me and the former-guide lady and half a dozen of the rural leader students (from India, Indonesia, Zambia, Cameroon, Vietnam and I forget where else), as well as the Japanese tour leader; I ended up doing all the interpreting (I urged the other lady to jump in but she just said “oh I couldn’t possibly)," which was not bad because I already know the district and its history quite well (a friend wrote a book about it that I might translate some day).
For the lecture in the afternoon, five of us switched off interpreting: it was clear that the two high school girls could only get through with constant help and even so managed only a sketch of the original lecture, while the American girl and the older Japanese lady did okay but missed some of the nuances in each direction; to brag unrestrainedly, I think I was the clearest and the most stable and accurate of the five. And really I should be ashamed not to be, after all, being the closest to a professional among them (although interpretation and translation are very different).
I had fun—interpreting is always exhausting, but almost always exhilarating as well—and enjoyed getting to interact with the visiting students a little (a very serious woman from Vietnam with a series of complicated questions, a Cameroonian pastor with a long beard and shorts, and so on). I was also really annoyed (typical, I’m afraid) at the way the whole thing was run. Mostly the people in charge of the event just sort of sat there looking hopeful rather than doing anything useful, and the group discussion was particularly badly run (the discussion questions were TERRIBLE, and I signed on to be an interpreter, not a facilitator. Although I did get to explain to a doubtful Zambian guy just why the Japanese birth rate hasn’t gone up in sociopolitical terms, with an Indian lady cheering me on). Also, in theory I am absolutely in favor of giving high school kids a chance to try out interpreting, but if the participants are actually going to get anything out of the event, the interpreters have to have more or less professional-level skills even if they’re not getting paid even professional-level peanuts.)

Translation work can give you a lot of access to other people’s family privacy. I felt very bad for the little girl whose documents passed through my hands the other day, to the tune of her baby immunization record, second- and third-grade report cards (it’s always a little surreal to translate report-card comments like “She paid attention in class very well this year, but needs to work on forgetting fewer things”), and her parents’ divorce and custody agreement. Then there was another little girl of similar age, transferring from a prestigious private elementary school in Kyoto to a similar one in Tokyo, maybe a professor’s child subject to the whims of university employment. Also a family register in which the date of marriage preceded the first son’s date of birth by only six months, making me wonder as always where it actually fell on the range from 100% shotgun to “well, we’re getting married soon, why wait.”
One of the other issues with this kind of work is that young children in particular tend to have far-out names, and the clients usually don’t advise you how to pronounce them. Japanese is (I think) unique this way, in that a) the writing system is mostly not phonetic and b) while there are standard character readings, most characters have multiple standard readings plus you can basically decide to pronounce them any way that comes into your head, which is the way a lot of parents name their children, presumably without considering that the kids will have to spend their whole lives explaining how their names are pronounced and spelled (speaking from personal experience, albeit through a different process). So all you can do with names is take a wild guess. Place names are just as bad, since they are often distorted by long history into weird forms; I had hundreds of addresses to transl(iter)ate lately and had to look up almost every single one, just to be sure. I think the worst offender this time around was a place called 福谷, which could be Fukuya or Fukutani or Fukudani just in normal terms; in context it turned out to be Ukigai, God help me. Places like this constitute regional shibboleths of sorts; a couple more I’ve come across personally include 酒々井 and 柴島, where you just have to know how to read them or you’ll never guess.

Photos: Lots of seasonal fruits and leaves. Persimmons usually look much nicer than they taste, but we recently received bounty from my father-in-law’s kumquat bush and the fragrance is wonderful. Also the railway at sunset, and Kuro-chan the elder who noticed me passing by and stopped me with an imperious meow, in order to make use of me as a heating device usefully equipped with a mofu-mofu function (not a good picture, but my other hand was occupied).

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.

Amended from past years:
Thank you for writing something for me. With the exception of the do-not-like stuff, please take any and all of this as optional suggestions only, and do what works for you.

Do not like: darkfic in general, incest, humiliation, graphic violence, PWP or graphic parts-and-fluids sexual descriptions (no moral objections, it's just not what I enjoy reading), blatant out-of-characterness, rape/dubcon, Christmas themes (not Christian myself), coronavirus/quarantine references etc.

Enjoy in particular: work (in all definitions) and people being competent at it, hurt/comfort, futurefic, ensemble pieces, playing with language(s), cuddling, scenes from everyday life.

Genfic is good, shipfic is good, although in the case of the latter I’d rather have a story that has something going on as well as pure romance, whether it’s a separate plot thread or a characterization arc.

I'm open to treats if anyone is so kind.

By fandom/characters (alphabetical):
The Crater School – Chaz Brenchley (Any)
The mixture of “boarding school story” with “science fiction” absolutely delights me and basically I just want more (set specifically at the school rather than in the larger setting, ideally). Of the characters I nominated, I love Mary Ellen “Mae”’s relationship with reading and writing, and Levity’s arc of getting comfortable at school, discovering her inherited talent for art, and falling in love; as far as Rachel is concerned, honestly I just want to see her (along with Jessica, of course) be explicitly Jewish (in whatever sense) on page, I refuse to buy that all the way on Mars even a girl named Rachel Abramoff has to be Christian! However, you can use any or none of these three, and/or other existing characters, and/or make up a set of original characters altogether; I’d just like to see the school doing its thing. (Something leaning more toward Antonia Forest than Elinor Brent-Dyer would be wonderful, but that definitely falls under optional-details-are-optional.) ETA: I finished reading Radhika's book just barely too late to nominate her, but I love her and I would be delighted to see her in a fic if you feel like writing about her too.

The Incandescent - Emily Tesh (Worldbuilding)
I have a thing about administration-saves-the-day (not that it does exactly here, but I love how big a part school administration plays in the book) and I love magic integrated into a modern-day setting, so this book did good things for me. Here again more than anything I kind of want a slice of life at school, set during the book itself or otherwise; I loved the A-level students, especially Aneeta, and would be delighted to have a fic focusing on them, but something from the teacher/staff perspective would be great too, or else feel free to make up entirely original characters if you’d rather. If you want to look into what the school (or one of the new schools/programs!) looks like after the events of the book, that would be fascinating too.

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary – Pamela Dean (Any)
I’m always about equally fascinated and frustrated by this book, and Gentian’s friends are what I like most about it—they have the most interesting takes on the themes of the novel, femininity and gender in general, religion, art and science, conventionality and unconventionality, romance and friendship, togetherness and solitude, what you have in common with people and what makes you different from them. I’d love a missing scene from the book, futurefic, or anything from their perspectives, especially if it provides a bit of comforting closure for the ending, or else a canon divergence where things go better in the first place. You can throw in romance in any combination among them if you’re interested or keep it to friendship, whatever works.

The Melendys – Elizabeth Enright (Rush Melendy)
I love all the Melendys and their friends (and would be happy to see any and all of them appearing, in and out of the tagset), but I’m especially fond of Rush, the sarcastic, cheerful, quick-witted, occasionally self-doubting polymath who spends hours at the piano; I would love to see Rush a little older and what he’s making of himself, in whatever context. Again, really an ensemble fic in which Rush has his fair share of page time would be great too. I’d rather no focus on romance for this canon (although if you want to give Willy Sloper a love life with any non-Melendy person, that would be delightful!).

叛逆者|The Rebel (Wang Shi’an)
I got a spectacular Wang Shi’an fic a few Yuletides back, and I have never quite stopped thinking about him and wanting even more. (You can find my thoughts on him AT LENGTH under the "pannizhe" tag here--please feel free to read or ignore as you like.) I can't help wanting a story in which, without necessarily being a better human being, he's compelled by circumstance to turn his talents (thinking on his feet, lying and deceiving as needed, planning ahead, balancing temper and calm...) to good purposes instead of bad ones. I know that is a weird, and weirdly specific request, and I will not hold you to it; basically anything Wang Shi'an-centric, whether canon-compliant or -divergent, would be wonderful.
I’ve requested only Wang Shi’an himself so as not to complicate matters, but please also feel free to bring in any other characters who occur to you—Lin Nansheng and Chen Moqun, with whom he has incredibly complex relationships; Lan Xinjie, Lao Gu or Lao Ji, Meng Annan, even poor dumb loyal Secretary Zhang or Wang Shi’an’s blink-and-you-miss-her wife. One request I do have for this canon is attention to the historical context--I don't mean you have to do a huge research project, but I feel like the story has to be grounded in the time and place for the characters to be who they are.

Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch (Abigail Kamara, Indigo)
Indigo and her foxspeak and her adoration of Abigail all delight me, and Abigail’s brilliance and teenage-ness and resilience likewise; I’d love to see them having an adventure of some kind, large or small, details up to you. Any other characters (original ones included) welcome too, although I especially enjoy the way Abigail looks to Nightingale as a mentor and her unlikely friendship with Simon. (My other favorite character is Kim Reynolds; I can’t exactly see how she could fit easily into an Abigail-focused story, but if something occurs to you, go for it!)

Taiwan Travelogue – Yang Shuang-zi (Any)
Because their futures are less determined by the canon, I’m especially curious to read about Ozawa Reiko and Tan Tshiok-bi (Chen Chueh-wei? Chin Jakubi? why is romanization so linguistically and sociopolitically complicated; come to think of it, should Reiko be piped with Ta-tse Li-tzu? sorry, just doodling); what their friendship/romance was like and what happened to them after the events of the book, in Taiwan or Japan or elsewhere, whether they mirrored Chizuko and Chizuru’s relationship, as they do in the book to some extent, or developed in their own unexpected directions. That said, if you want to focus on Chizuko and Chizuru (Chien-ho|Tshian-hoh…), either with missing scenes from the book’s history or giving them an alternate future, that would be lovely too. In either case, one request I do have for this canon is attention to the historical context--I don't mean you have to do a huge research project, but I feel like the story has to be grounded in the time and place for the characters to be who they are. (I speak Japanese and some Chinese, so the more of either, as needed, you want to throw into the fic the better, as long as you’re confident in it!)

Thank you again!

Just after I wrote up Makiko Vories at senzenwomen, Y said “let’s go out to Omi-Hachiman and see some Vories buildings,” entirely coincidentally. So we took a two-day trip, stayed in an inn by the lake with a hammock on the balcony, saw a lot of beautiful buildings in both Japanese and Western styles (they all have big windows everywhere, which I love), went on a punt trip down the river, took a cable car up the nearest mountain to see the site of an ex-castle, and enjoyed ourselves in general.

I’ve been working on one of those awful software translations—I hate software stuff, give me machine tools, screws and bolts, or motion control any day of the week—and it has various This Units and That Units, which is at least mildly amusing because it keeps bringing to mind Murderbot. I wonder if the SecUnits ever came with manuals and if anyone had to translate them.

I’m volunteering with a Japanese class for Chinese teenagers, eight fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds with only very rudimentary Japanese; tiring because they are reluctant and easily distracted compared to my Saturday juku kids (who vary hugely in motivation but are remarkably well-behaved and 乖乖), but a fun challenge, everything from a girl who looks like an aspiring idol (hair to her hips, very slim, very well-dressed) to a kid on the autism spectrum who sticks firmly to his OWN pace in everything to a shy little anime otaku to a smart-mouthed young man who tries to use his fluent English to get away with things with me (I resorted to 这小子! to put him in his place). I can follow maaaybe half their talk among themselves, it’s too fast and too slangy, but it’s good practice for me (although I’m so used to “Speak English! Not Japanese!” that deliberately trying to shift into Japanese and make them speak it too is a real challenge). Haven’t yet had a chance to ask any of them if we have any fannish interests in common.

So when I bought my bassoon it came with a repair contract at the store, a large, high-end-ish musical instrument chain store; I’ve taken it back a few times for tuning up, always with the store clerk who sold it to me in the first place, a helpful, personable young man I’ll call S here. Last week I got a letter from the store in very formal terms: “we would like to inform you that [S] has resigned under the provisions of Employment Regulations Article ###. If you have any concerns about his work with you, please contact either the woodwind department or the accounting department as below…”. I took this to Y to see if he had any ideas and he’d never seen anything like it either; we concluded that S must have embezzled something??? but I certainly wouldn’t ever have guessed at such a thing, and I kind of feel bad for him. Need to check and see if my bassoon teacher knows anything more (all bassoonists have about 1.5 degrees of separation). I feel like I’ve brushed up against the first scene of a detective story. (Also, who am I going to get to fix my bassoon now if I need it?)

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 最好的我们, a duet from some years ago with Zhou Shen (they are close friends). Apart from being musically lovely it’s kind of amusing visually: the two singers are rather similar in features and coloring to begin with, and on this occasion they had almost identical haircuts into the bargain, so there’s a kind of 水仙 effect an octave apart.

Photos: Just a few, I haven’t been taking that many lately. Might add some of Y’s Omi-Hachiman photos later on. Lake Biwa, decorations on a mountaintop shrine, and a striking evening sky seen from a train.

Be safe and well.

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sleepingly, as if while asleep

既来之则安之

it either happens or it doesn't

the glassy margents

the new word I found was better than the old word I lost

发帖ing

フォースと共にあれ

摩西摩西

meaning in thy snores

nothing but bonfires

get到了吗?

but she was far from asleep

rua你们一下

良いお年を！

Quick Yuletide post

life on a crocodile isle

Rambling about translation, interpretation, and so on

Mostly musical

Yuletide letter 2025

a trip to the heart of the world

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