mid-week rambling at length
Jun. 30th, 2021 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiDaily life: For a change I like my haircut, what I now think of as a Qi Jin hairdo after watching LTR: just below chin-length, center part, kind of curving off the face.
My spicy plants are starting to fruit, habaneros and chili peppers, yay; the tomato is drooping, though. Looking up plant health online is just like the human version: you get five possible different answers for any kind of symptom, of which at least two are fatal (and in the case of plants, one is invariably “you watered it too much” and another “you didn’t water it enough”).
Music: Orchestra back again, knock wood. I like Tchaik 2 more and more as we do it—a weird mix of 20th-c. avant la lettre and pop music, which is surprisingly delightful. “One of Tchaikovsky's favorite anecdotes resulted from his nearly losing the sketches for [this symphony]. ...Tchaikovsky presented himself [to the postmaster] as "Prince Volkonsky." Later he noticed his luggage missing—including his work on the symphony. Fearing the postmaster had opened the luggage and learned his identity, he sent someone to fetch it, but the postmaster would only release the luggage to the prince himself. Steeling himself, Tchaikovsky returned. His luggage had not been opened, much to his relief. He chatted with the postmaster and eventually asked his name. "Tchaikovsky", the postmaster replied. Stunned, the composer thought this was perhaps a sharp-witted revenge, but learned it was true. Afterward, he delighted in recounting the story.”
Books: Rereading Natasha Pulley’s The Bedlam Stacks, which I can never decide how much I like. I love the setting? the eponymous glass, the light pollen, the floating whitewood and so on. And it’s very, very readable. (I can’t speak to the accuracy or appropriateness of the Peruvian setting, unlike her Japanese ones.) But I get frustrated with her tendency toward...protagonist-centered characterization? making all the minor characters’ personalities warp around the central couple? She does it particularly egregiously here with Clem Markham, who starts out as a rather excitable but clever and genuine friend, and ends up a violent, classist, closed-minded schmuck (whose convenient death no one, including his appealing wife, seems to care much about), so that Merrick and Raphael can come off better by comparison. It’s not good writing in terms of characterization, and it’s less interesting than it would be if Clem were written as flawed but someone that Merrick, and the reader, could continue to care about. She’s such a good writer in many ways that I wish she’d be less heavy-handed with the GOOD PERSON, BAD PERSON brushstrokes.
Also the discussion of translation is interesting (if somewhat obscured by the above problem): that too-literal translations, or those relying too heavily on the mores of the target language/culture, can be harmful as well as just wrong. She describes something I do sometimes: “I had to forget the English, hang the meaning up in a well-lit gallery, stare at it hard, then describe it afresh.“ I don’t buy everything she has to say on the topic, but I like the phrasing for this phenomenon.
Chinese: On the topic of untranslatable family words: Lin Nansheng, mentioning his brother, says “my gege” to his new boss and “my xiongzhang” to his not-yet-girlfriend (the first time I’ve ever heard that one refer to someone other than Lan Xichen). I feel like it should be the other way around, based on relative formality; but he’s kind of playing a role in both contexts, and maybe “gege” seemed more, er, naive (less 天真 than 腼腆, I guess) and “xiongzhang” more serious and scholarly?
Writing: I had a couple of genuine inspirations about overarching themes and how they can be made to appear specifically, although mostly to be realized in book 2. I solved (or found the key to) the problem that one character spends literally all of book 1 struggling with (not least because until now I had no idea how to solve it either). I’m not sure he is going to like the solution, but that’s his problem.
I’m trying to keep a balance between making the magic neither too painstakingly explicated (as Harriet Vane puts it, phantasies too careful to tuck their shrouds neatly about them and leave no loose ends) nor too wand-wavingly aerie-faerie (it’s a skilled art/science and the characters are experts in the field). Tricky.
Photos: So you know how the physicists (?) talk about spherical cows? I have found a spherical (or at least perfectly round) cat. Also some cherry tomatoes, grown by me, and some pretty birdberries, grown by someone else.
Be safe and well.
My spicy plants are starting to fruit, habaneros and chili peppers, yay; the tomato is drooping, though. Looking up plant health online is just like the human version: you get five possible different answers for any kind of symptom, of which at least two are fatal (and in the case of plants, one is invariably “you watered it too much” and another “you didn’t water it enough”).
Music: Orchestra back again, knock wood. I like Tchaik 2 more and more as we do it—a weird mix of 20th-c. avant la lettre and pop music, which is surprisingly delightful. “One of Tchaikovsky's favorite anecdotes resulted from his nearly losing the sketches for [this symphony]. ...Tchaikovsky presented himself [to the postmaster] as "Prince Volkonsky." Later he noticed his luggage missing—including his work on the symphony. Fearing the postmaster had opened the luggage and learned his identity, he sent someone to fetch it, but the postmaster would only release the luggage to the prince himself. Steeling himself, Tchaikovsky returned. His luggage had not been opened, much to his relief. He chatted with the postmaster and eventually asked his name. "Tchaikovsky", the postmaster replied. Stunned, the composer thought this was perhaps a sharp-witted revenge, but learned it was true. Afterward, he delighted in recounting the story.”
Books: Rereading Natasha Pulley’s The Bedlam Stacks, which I can never decide how much I like. I love the setting? the eponymous glass, the light pollen, the floating whitewood and so on. And it’s very, very readable. (I can’t speak to the accuracy or appropriateness of the Peruvian setting, unlike her Japanese ones.) But I get frustrated with her tendency toward...protagonist-centered characterization? making all the minor characters’ personalities warp around the central couple? She does it particularly egregiously here with Clem Markham, who starts out as a rather excitable but clever and genuine friend, and ends up a violent, classist, closed-minded schmuck (whose convenient death no one, including his appealing wife, seems to care much about), so that Merrick and Raphael can come off better by comparison. It’s not good writing in terms of characterization, and it’s less interesting than it would be if Clem were written as flawed but someone that Merrick, and the reader, could continue to care about. She’s such a good writer in many ways that I wish she’d be less heavy-handed with the GOOD PERSON, BAD PERSON brushstrokes.
Also the discussion of translation is interesting (if somewhat obscured by the above problem): that too-literal translations, or those relying too heavily on the mores of the target language/culture, can be harmful as well as just wrong. She describes something I do sometimes: “I had to forget the English, hang the meaning up in a well-lit gallery, stare at it hard, then describe it afresh.“ I don’t buy everything she has to say on the topic, but I like the phrasing for this phenomenon.
Chinese: On the topic of untranslatable family words: Lin Nansheng, mentioning his brother, says “my gege” to his new boss and “my xiongzhang” to his not-yet-girlfriend (the first time I’ve ever heard that one refer to someone other than Lan Xichen). I feel like it should be the other way around, based on relative formality; but he’s kind of playing a role in both contexts, and maybe “gege” seemed more, er, naive (less 天真 than 腼腆, I guess) and “xiongzhang” more serious and scholarly?
Writing: I had a couple of genuine inspirations about overarching themes and how they can be made to appear specifically, although mostly to be realized in book 2. I solved (or found the key to) the problem that one character spends literally all of book 1 struggling with (not least because until now I had no idea how to solve it either). I’m not sure he is going to like the solution, but that’s his problem.
I’m trying to keep a balance between making the magic neither too painstakingly explicated (as Harriet Vane puts it, phantasies too careful to tuck their shrouds neatly about them and leave no loose ends) nor too wand-wavingly aerie-faerie (it’s a skilled art/science and the characters are experts in the field). Tricky.
Photos: So you know how the physicists (?) talk about spherical cows? I have found a spherical (or at least perfectly round) cat. Also some cherry tomatoes, grown by me, and some pretty birdberries, grown by someone else.
Be safe and well.
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Date: 2021-06-30 12:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-01 07:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-30 01:50 pm (UTC)So PAINFULLY TRUE.
Good luck to your tomato plant! What a great color. ^_^ (I want to guess that they're Sungold, but my knowledge of tomato varieties is pretty limited and I assume the types vary depending on what side of the planet one's on...)
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Date: 2021-07-01 07:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-30 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-01 07:16 am (UTC)yup, me too ;) My theory (allowing for very minor spoilers) is that he's conducting himself as a very reserved and serious academic when he says that particular line, so maybe the formal old-fashioned word seems the most appropriate. (Or maybe I'm just overthinking it)
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Date: 2021-07-01 08:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-02 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-30 02:53 pm (UTC)Oh, that is fascinating!
And the tomatoes and the berries both look lovely. :D
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Date: 2021-07-01 07:16 am (UTC)and thank you <3
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Date: 2021-06-30 08:25 pm (UTC)I absolutely thought that cat was a lump of dough on first glance.
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Date: 2021-07-01 07:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-01 06:05 pm (UTC)I never really thought about how other countries/languages might nickname similarly. I suppose composer names stay relatively the same so they would get shortened the same way. Poor Brahms, though!
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Date: 2021-07-02 12:30 am (UTC)Yes! I love the weird little dance tune in the fourth movement and the way it gets deconstructed especially.
I suppose composer names stay relatively the same so they would get shortened the same way. Poor Brahms, though!
lol, poor Brahms indeed. Japan is infamous for its own shortenings of long foreign words, musical and otherwise (the Meistersinger overture is usually shortened to "Meisin"...).
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Date: 2021-07-02 01:32 am (UTC)Other than Tchaik 2, what are you playing, if you don't mind me asking?
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Date: 2021-07-02 08:10 am (UTC)Some of both! German and Russian words are notoriously unsuited to Japanese pronunciation, too many consonants; Japanese words are often likewise abbreviated the same way English would use acronyms etc. (文科省 for 文部科学省, = MEXT for Ministry of Education and Whatsit, etc.)
Other than Tchaik 2, what are you playing, if you don't mind me asking?
The Beethoven "Consecration of the House" overture (I forget the German title) which is nice straightforward Beethoven with some jazzy bits, and excerpts from the Mendelssohn Midsummer Night's Dream suite. Not the most ambitious program ever (to be fair, we are a very middle-of-the-road amateur orchestra), but some nice stuff.
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Date: 2021-07-02 07:28 pm (UTC)I love the Mendelssohn though!
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Date: 2021-07-03 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-03 04:20 pm (UTC)I doubt I've talked about it, but in school I was a flautist, then switched to cello in high school and college, but now I'm mostly just playing piano due to RSI and tendinitis in my left shoulder and wrist. I actually ended up on a 3/4 size cello, but a little too late and the damage had been done. I'm left-handed in general, so keeping that arm functional was kind of important, y'know?
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Date: 2021-07-03 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-04 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-30 10:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-01 07:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-30 11:41 pm (UTC)Yes. I had mixed feelings about The Bedlam Stacks, too, iirc.
Yay for writing inspirations and beautiful pictures of round things! :D :D :D
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Date: 2021-07-01 07:21 am (UTC)yup, chestnut_pod had a lot to say about it elsewhere in the comments to this post, suggesting that our mixed feelings were well founded, oh dear.
and thank you! I realized after posting that the theme was definitely "photos of round things." Imagine Da Qing in that pose ;)
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Date: 2021-07-01 12:25 am (UTC)Perú is physically Not Like That, and the ceja de selva is not where you find chinchona, I mean, WIKIPEDIA could have told her that. Like, don't just turn random non-European places into fairytales, for one, but if you DO, no amount of wry self-awareness is going to get you out of the fact that you've painted yourself into an, "England is bland and these other places are so exciting so magical so EXOTIC" trap. And once you HAVE done that, maybe don't make your only major Indigenous character into a self-hating Quechua-skeptic who says an extremely nasty thing about "Quespañol" like it's freaking 2007 when NONE of the other Indigenous characters get to provide an alternative perspective. You are not actually that clever about language and translation when it is clear that you have put exactly 0 effort into really understanding Indigeneity and Quechua poetics, particularly when, let's not forget, you shouldn't even be dealing with Quechua speakers because that's not where chinchona lives. I mean, I don't think we are expected to take Raphael's words as unproblematic, but when he is the only Indigenous character carrying that amount of narrative weight, that's a bad move. And when the other two who speak are Inti, who doesn't have a personality, and Anka, who is a senseless murderer, that's EXTRA bad.
And the way Raphael literally becomes paler throughout the book? yIKES! So he talks like an Eton boy already, because ??? that's not how Ell, even really fluent ELL, English works, but I guess that's the only way Pulley knows to indicate to us that he's meant to be smart and attractive, and he hates his fellow Indigenous people, and he literally becomes whiter… I mean, how much good faith am I supposed to extend here?
God, it's such a fantasy of benevolent imperialism. I hate this book. If I want to deal with white authors writing racist drivel about Perú in a pretty style, I'll stick with Vargas Llosa, who is at least Peruvian.
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Date: 2021-07-01 07:34 am (UTC)I have more background to judge the Japanese setting she uses in her other book, and while I wouldn't go so far as "racist drivel" on the whole, there are a lot of little careless errors that would not have been hard to avoid, and the same kind of...self-deprecation from within the society?...that you're talking about here and there, which when you put all the books together... . In regard to Japanese as well she has a way of stating standard language learners' realizations as if they're clever and unique arguments.
I'm annoyed with the whole thing because I do think her writing has strengths elsewhere, but...yeah, as you say.
into really understanding Indigeneity and Quechua poetics,
if you have any recommendations for reading on any of this, that would be great. (If corona ever settles down so I can order books in peace of mind, anyway).
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Date: 2021-07-01 06:16 pm (UTC)I read on this topic mostly in Spanish and Quechua, but I do have some English-language sources.
The first of these is for fun with translation: Pichka Harawikuna: Five Quechua Poets, which is triple-faced poetry that does very interesting things with both translations and can provide a sense of the rhythms of Quechua, the concerns of its modern authors, their relationship to their past and present.
The second is theory: Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar's Rhythms of the Pachakuti, particularly the first three chapters. This is set in Bolivia, not Perú, and deals with Aymara as well as Quechua in that context, but it's as concise a meeting of Andean cosmology with Western sociology as you can get in English.
As for "Quespañol," because that remark irritated me so much I remember it all these years later, you can get a taste, even in translation, about what actual Quespañol as praxis can do in José María Arguedas' Yawar Fiesta (though if you can even Google Translate this article on the one available English translation's errors, it's worthwhile as a reading companion). Similarly, it's possible to scrounge up some English translations of Juan Wallparrimachi's 17th century Quespañol efforts.
Lastly, I want to talk a little about "huaca," usually translated as "sacred shrine," because that is the basis of Pulley's critique-through-Raphael of translation from Quechua, the calling-things-gods-or-alive critique. I think this just goes to show how little research she must have done, because basically the first thing anyone reading in this area gets recommended to them are Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios reales,literally the first generation after conquest. De la Vega makes clear that there is no proper translation into Spanish, and that huaca indicates something well out of the norm in both physical and metaphysical senses: something extraordinarily beautiful, something different among its peers, also something hideous -- anything that creates a sense of heightened reality. De la Vega tries to make this fit with Spanish-Catholic concepts of transcendence, and I think mostly fails, because that leaves out the sense of huaca that is also about the political-spatial organization of state power in the Andean-reciprocal mode.
Reading de la Vega is very worth it, I think, and English translations abound, but I would also recommend Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture by Regina Harrison, who deals directly with this passage in the Comentarios and brings in a lot of secondary literature on it too. That's in the second chapter, if I'm remembering correctly. The book is several decades old by now, but I think it holds up.
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Date: 2021-07-02 12:43 am (UTC)you can get a taste, even in translation, about what actual Quespañol as praxis can do in José María Arguedas' Yawar Fiesta
I'm interested in the ways languages bleed together at the edges in use, so I might see what I can find. I can sort of cheat my way through reading a Spanish text by guess and by God on Romance cognates, but... .
Anyway, many thanks! If/when I manage to lay hands on any of these I'll keep you posted.
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Date: 2021-07-02 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-02 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-03 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-06 12:52 pm (UTC)That sounds worthwhile! Writing novel-length really is a challenge, and you're writing multi-book-length. : )
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Date: 2021-07-07 01:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-07 09:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-08 04:50 am (UTC)I think we have different definitions of ambitious ;) We're both doing AUs in a way, just mine is way more skewed toward the "alternate" end. Fun and challenging in either case.
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Date: 2021-07-04 01:46 pm (UTC)Lolol, yup, so true. It makes me feel better about all my plants always dying. :D
I solved (or found the key to) the problem that one character spends literally all of book 1 struggling with (not least because until now I had no idea how to solve it either). I’m not sure he is going to like the solution, but that’s his problem.
Awesome! \o/ His problem indeed! :DDDDD
some pretty birdberries, grown by someone else.
Love the spherical cat! :D
Those look like redcurrant (Johannisbeeren, Träuble, or Ribisel, as we call them here, which I think comes from "ribes"). They're edible. (If very sour.) I don't recognize many plants, but those I know. :D
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Date: 2021-07-04 09:45 pm (UTC)I thought the berries might be currants! I can never tell the difference between actually edible and just pretty, but they do look like that. "edible, if very sour" would be my thing, so if I pass by there again I'll try to catch the attention of the person growing them and ask.
<3