·I think most people on my f-list have seen this by now, I’m late to post, but the latest regarding the OTW, generally from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
synonymous, specifically from dhobikikutti, both much appreciated and referencing among other important things a gracious, eloquent, and brave statement by the Board candidate Zixin, which she shouldn’t have had to make in the first place.
I am still in hopes of a less reprehensible future for the OTW/AO3 (knock wood, I’m hopeful about the new Board candidates at least); I am not clear right now on what people who are not OTW volunteers can do, after the new election, in terms of concrete action to support change (hopefully, in a framework of coalition). I’m going to be hypocritical enough to say that I don’t want to get into extended discussion of this here, for me it makes more sense to keep an eye on information sources elsewhere, but if anyone has links/related information helpful to this end please do feel free to drop them.
·In the spirit of extremely fucked-up situations, have a performance of Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik Suite.
·Am I the only one who feels that this July has lasted about six months so far? I was traveling among other things and have fallen way behind on DW socializing, but I’ve been reading everyone’s posts and thinking of you.
·Three days in Hokkaido, a work trip to do some interpreting for a lecture given by Song Mingwei, a scholar of Chinese science fiction among other things, and the reason I was reading about Qing-dynasty SF.
The job started off with a delightful serendipity. I got lost trying to find my way into the enormous Hokkaido University campus, and resorted to asking a student-type coming the other way if I could get into the campus up ahead. “Sorry, I don’t speak Japanese, I’m from Taiwan,” he said blankly, so I thought, well, I can work with that, and tried repeating the question in Chinese (thanks to the Guardian script I knew the word for “college campus”!). He was delighted, answered promptly and saw me to the building I needed to go to, while we chatted in Chinese along the way about the relative difficulty of the three languages (he kept saying jingyu was difficult in Japanese, which I couldn’t convert mentally to 敬語 until he said something about 长辈: ohhhh, honorifics, now I get it). Clearly a good omen.
You’ll be better off googling Professor Song Mingwei than me trying to summarize him here, but I think a lot of cdrama people, and SF people in general, will find his work extremely interesting. Here is a place to start. I had spent the week before translating his lecture text from English to Japanese, with the help of a grad school friend to edit my decidedly non-native Japanese; all about Lu Xun and Liu Cixin and related personages. In the event his lecture, delivered in English, was lively and fascinating and skimmed all over the place; as far as the actual lecture text, handed out to all the attendees in two languages, was concerned, I would say it fitted where it touched and not much more, so that the non-English speakers must have been wondering what the hell he was talking about a lot of the time, but it was extremely interesting.
Finally there was a short question-and-answer session, which was where I actually had to interpret; I would not say it was a long enough time to make it worth paying for me to come all the way up to Hokkaido, but who am I to complain? Topics mentioned, drawing on the lecture, included Marko Vovchok and Xue Shaohui, “why didn’t SF in China develop more in the 20th century,” using SF to bring the world home to China, effects of the West and Japan and the USSR, late-1990s Chinese SF’s similarity (in terms of the nerd/otaku social class) to the mid-20th-c SF scene in the US, how Lu Xun’s mother didn’t like his work and preferred to read romances, translations of science by Yan Fu and classic literature by Lin Shu [no, not that one], “unfaithful translation,” and Max Planck. It went much better than I’d feared; there was one questioner who had an unfamiliar accent, mumbled, and spoke very fast, so I had to ask him to repeat the second half of his question, but otherwise it all came across pretty clearly, mostly English into Japanese. Exhilarating. I took notes on paper and kept my phone out so I could do some very fast Googling as needed, on topics like the characters to write Mo Yan (so I would know how to pronounce the name in Japanese) and the Japanese word for relativity, which I had forgotten.
Afterward I got treated like a celebrity (look, the white lady speaks more than one language! and she has a West Japan accent!), which was kind but embarrassing. As with all Japanese events, there was a dinner party at a little neighborhood restaurant afterward; walking to the restaurant I had a chance to talk (in English) in a leisurely way with Professor Song, who was very friendly. I asked him about the story mentioned in my previous post with the Chinese colonists and Black and Jewish refugees, and he said it might have been a free translation/rewriting from a story originally in English of some kind, but that there wasn’t much research on it that he knew of. I also took the chance to ask him what he thought about the Chengdu Worldcon, and he was uncomplimentary: the organizers had been very hopeful, but the city had basically taken it over, the anti-LGBTQ rules weren’t good and it didn’t make sense to put a lot of Chinese-language texts on the ballot when so many voters wouldn’t be able to read them. Finally we talked about dramas and language learning—I didn’t quite dare mention Guardian by name, but I mentioned DMBJ which he knew, and talked about Under the Skin a little (sadly unable to remember its Chinese name) because he said he liked crime dramas. I really liked him, very bright, very widely concerned, and also extremely low-key and nice.
I talked a little with a handful of Chinese girls at the restaurant, students at Hokudai; they all gave their hometowns in Japanese pronunciation, which they must be used to doing, and I couldn’t follow at all. We talked fannish stuff and one said she’d been a fan of the DMBJ books in middle school. I confessed to being a Zhu Yilong fan and they all knew the name—“Ooh!” and one asked me if I’d seen Guardian—“you know, that BL science fiction one?”.
After that I had a day to myself and spent it mostly wandering around Otaru, see photos below. I love the city I live in, but oh my God it was lovely to be up north where it’s not in the high 30s every single day.
·Photos from Hokkaido, mostly Otaru. The usual flowers, including hydrangeas, blooming more than a month later than they do where I live. Also some fruit things I can’t place at all: if I didn’t know better I would say (pace Ivan Vorpatril) they were squid growing on a bush, after all Otaru is a fishing town… . The canal, the coast, a disused railway line, a carving outside a long-defunct shop, some views of Otaru overall with stone warehouses and mountains, and the inside of the Stained Glass Museum. Also, just for amusement, a page from my interpreting notes.
Be safe and well. <3
synonymous, specifically from dhobikikutti, both much appreciated and referencing among other important things a gracious, eloquent, and brave statement by the Board candidate Zixin, which she shouldn’t have had to make in the first place. I am still in hopes of a less reprehensible future for the OTW/AO3 (knock wood, I’m hopeful about the new Board candidates at least); I am not clear right now on what people who are not OTW volunteers can do, after the new election, in terms of concrete action to support change (hopefully, in a framework of coalition). I’m going to be hypocritical enough to say that I don’t want to get into extended discussion of this here, for me it makes more sense to keep an eye on information sources elsewhere, but if anyone has links/related information helpful to this end please do feel free to drop them.
·In the spirit of extremely fucked-up situations, have a performance of Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik Suite.
·Am I the only one who feels that this July has lasted about six months so far? I was traveling among other things and have fallen way behind on DW socializing, but I’ve been reading everyone’s posts and thinking of you.
·Three days in Hokkaido, a work trip to do some interpreting for a lecture given by Song Mingwei, a scholar of Chinese science fiction among other things, and the reason I was reading about Qing-dynasty SF.
Very long Hokkaido story
The job started off with a delightful serendipity. I got lost trying to find my way into the enormous Hokkaido University campus, and resorted to asking a student-type coming the other way if I could get into the campus up ahead. “Sorry, I don’t speak Japanese, I’m from Taiwan,” he said blankly, so I thought, well, I can work with that, and tried repeating the question in Chinese (thanks to the Guardian script I knew the word for “college campus”!). He was delighted, answered promptly and saw me to the building I needed to go to, while we chatted in Chinese along the way about the relative difficulty of the three languages (he kept saying jingyu was difficult in Japanese, which I couldn’t convert mentally to 敬語 until he said something about 长辈: ohhhh, honorifics, now I get it). Clearly a good omen.
You’ll be better off googling Professor Song Mingwei than me trying to summarize him here, but I think a lot of cdrama people, and SF people in general, will find his work extremely interesting. Here is a place to start. I had spent the week before translating his lecture text from English to Japanese, with the help of a grad school friend to edit my decidedly non-native Japanese; all about Lu Xun and Liu Cixin and related personages. In the event his lecture, delivered in English, was lively and fascinating and skimmed all over the place; as far as the actual lecture text, handed out to all the attendees in two languages, was concerned, I would say it fitted where it touched and not much more, so that the non-English speakers must have been wondering what the hell he was talking about a lot of the time, but it was extremely interesting.
Finally there was a short question-and-answer session, which was where I actually had to interpret; I would not say it was a long enough time to make it worth paying for me to come all the way up to Hokkaido, but who am I to complain? Topics mentioned, drawing on the lecture, included Marko Vovchok and Xue Shaohui, “why didn’t SF in China develop more in the 20th century,” using SF to bring the world home to China, effects of the West and Japan and the USSR, late-1990s Chinese SF’s similarity (in terms of the nerd/otaku social class) to the mid-20th-c SF scene in the US, how Lu Xun’s mother didn’t like his work and preferred to read romances, translations of science by Yan Fu and classic literature by Lin Shu [no, not that one], “unfaithful translation,” and Max Planck. It went much better than I’d feared; there was one questioner who had an unfamiliar accent, mumbled, and spoke very fast, so I had to ask him to repeat the second half of his question, but otherwise it all came across pretty clearly, mostly English into Japanese. Exhilarating. I took notes on paper and kept my phone out so I could do some very fast Googling as needed, on topics like the characters to write Mo Yan (so I would know how to pronounce the name in Japanese) and the Japanese word for relativity, which I had forgotten.
Afterward I got treated like a celebrity (look, the white lady speaks more than one language! and she has a West Japan accent!), which was kind but embarrassing. As with all Japanese events, there was a dinner party at a little neighborhood restaurant afterward; walking to the restaurant I had a chance to talk (in English) in a leisurely way with Professor Song, who was very friendly. I asked him about the story mentioned in my previous post with the Chinese colonists and Black and Jewish refugees, and he said it might have been a free translation/rewriting from a story originally in English of some kind, but that there wasn’t much research on it that he knew of. I also took the chance to ask him what he thought about the Chengdu Worldcon, and he was uncomplimentary: the organizers had been very hopeful, but the city had basically taken it over, the anti-LGBTQ rules weren’t good and it didn’t make sense to put a lot of Chinese-language texts on the ballot when so many voters wouldn’t be able to read them. Finally we talked about dramas and language learning—I didn’t quite dare mention Guardian by name, but I mentioned DMBJ which he knew, and talked about Under the Skin a little (sadly unable to remember its Chinese name) because he said he liked crime dramas. I really liked him, very bright, very widely concerned, and also extremely low-key and nice.
I talked a little with a handful of Chinese girls at the restaurant, students at Hokudai; they all gave their hometowns in Japanese pronunciation, which they must be used to doing, and I couldn’t follow at all. We talked fannish stuff and one said she’d been a fan of the DMBJ books in middle school. I confessed to being a Zhu Yilong fan and they all knew the name—“Ooh!” and one asked me if I’d seen Guardian—“you know, that BL science fiction one?”.
After that I had a day to myself and spent it mostly wandering around Otaru, see photos below. I love the city I live in, but oh my God it was lovely to be up north where it’s not in the high 30s every single day.
·Photos from Hokkaido, mostly Otaru. The usual flowers, including hydrangeas, blooming more than a month later than they do where I live. Also some fruit things I can’t place at all: if I didn’t know better I would say (pace Ivan Vorpatril) they were squid growing on a bush, after all Otaru is a fishing town… . The canal, the coast, a disused railway line, a carving outside a long-defunct shop, some views of Otaru overall with stone warehouses and mountains, and the inside of the Stained Glass Museum. Also, just for amusement, a page from my interpreting notes.
too many photos
Be safe and well. <3
