nnozomi

[Unrelated to the general topic of this post, I was clumsy when trying to fix the printer (it didn’t work) and got ink all over myself, so now my hands are blue for the duration. A minor nuisance, but at least it was cyan and not magenta, so I don’t have to look as if I’ve just come from murdering someone…]

I’ve always had very good Yuletide fortune and this year was no exception, with an elegant, perfectly characterized post-canon fic for The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water; I’m delighted with it. Still working my way very slowly through the collection as a whole.

Books recently ordered and read (may contain spoilers), in general a very satisfying batch.
Ben Aaronovitch, Winter’s Gifts: ( Read more... )

Chaz Brenchley, The Crater School series: ( Read more... )

Zen Cho, The Friend Zone Experiment: ( Read more... )

Alice Degan, Neither Have I Wings: ( Read more... )

Rebecca Fraimow, Lady Eve’s Last Con: ( Read more... )

Ursula Whitcher, North Continent Ribbon: ( Read more... )

Buwei Yang Chao, Autobiography of a Chinese Woman: ( Read more... )

良いお年を！ Be safe and well.

[So this morning when I was running I met the usual black cat and crouched down to pay my respects; the cat put a polite paw on my knee and then climbed up to settle comfortably in my lap and get thoroughly stroked. I figured I was just going to have to scrap my plans for the day and sit there for the duration.]

Weird Chinese-Japanese false friend of the day: 暧昧, which means “vague, fuzzy” in Japanese (it’s used for fuzzy matches in translation software, but I was taught never to call them 暧昧 but always ファジー, in order not to make the client think we were doing sloppy work), but as far as I can tell means something more like “ambiguous, dubious, obscure, subtle, it’s complicated [romantically in particular]” in Chinese—what I might call 妖しい in Japanese, in short.
(My other recent 中日 confusion: I keep trying to say 客气 kèqì for “stingy” when I should be saying 小气 or 吝啬, because my mind goes to けち kechi first…)

Latest farmboy Chinese vocabulary:

丝滑 smooth, either literally smooth to the touch or matters proceeding smoothly
日思夜想 to think of (or long for) something day and night
吃得消 to endure (and its opposite, 吃不消, to find something unendurable)
造孽 to commit a sin, to let yourself in for trouble, hard luck
骗你是小狗 cross my heart and hope to die (literally “I’m a puppy if I’m lying to you”)
扛不住 I can’t hold up my end any more (literally or figuratively)

Brief notes on brief trip to Korea! Also see various photos below.

Y’s time off comes in such odd ways that he likes to make the most of it, so we took a few days and went to Pusan. I had been there before and liked it; it was fun this time too, although almost unrecognizable. We stayed a night in Haeundae near enough to the sea to go wading, and I couldn’t resist collecting shells; also a wander around a fishing village, passing a boat with my name on it (sort of). Also visited Gamcheon, up on the hill with its pastel houses, which was about five million times more touristy than I remembered, but nice when we went down a back stairway and everything went quiet, apart from an unreasonable number of cats; we emerged on an avenue that could have been the main street of any sleepy Korean provincial town.
Unsurprisingly lots of good food, including the special treat of abalone congee. Really the best meal was in one of the hole-in-the-wall cafeterias that are a dime a dozen everywhere in Korea, looking like a revamped living room and run by an ajumma more interested in the drama on TV than her customers; I ordered the most straightforward thing on the menu, tofu sprinkled with sesame seeds and served with a pile of piping hot stirfried kimchi and pork, rice on the side. I like my kimchi (the napa cabbage variety) sour as well as spicy, and this was perfect.
We walked around the edges of Yongdusan Park, which I did remember and which is still lovely, and visited the markets for Y to sample three different varieties of hotteok (all good) and me to give in to roast chestnuts; the rest of the time we just walked here and there, up and down more hills than I care to remember, and enjoyed the city-watching. Saying “wow, Korea is so much like Japan” is a fraught remark at best, but there are enough structural similarities that it feels very close to home, if unmistakably foreign as well.
I had a terrible time with the language—I was never anything like fluent in Korean but I used to have passable communication skills, but this time in order to say literally anything, up to and including yes and no, I had to consciously and forcibly set the switch in my brain to “Korean” or else everything would come out in Chinese. Frustrating! How do real polyglots do it? It was tantalizing to understand tiny bits of things, though; if I had nine lives I’d certainly spend one of them mastering Korean for real.
On the way back, instead of going straight home, we took the night ferry to Fukuoka. (The ferry was nice! It involves at least as much sit-around-and-wait as an airplane, but you get to lie down and sleep once you’re on it—we had a zakone room, just a carpeted space shared with half a dozen other people, but everyone was quiet and no one was sick, and it was just a very peaceful way to travel.) In Fukuoka we visited the shrine of poor exiled Tenjin-san and rode in the swan boats (pedal boats rented by the hour) in a local park, seeing hordes of napping ducks and a few meditating turtles. And then finally home.

Winifred Holtby in letters to Jean McWilliam from the 1920s, mostly about writing:

11/13/21: They say it is bad manners to type one’s letters, but I want to get this new wheel into running order, so perhaps you will excuse this temporary lapse of good behaviour. Personally, if any of my correspondents wrote as badly as I do, I should be only too pleased for them to adopt some method of communication which did not necessitate my struggles with their calligraphy. Did you know—but of course you would—that you can spell calligraphy with one L or two? I didn’t until I looked it up this minute. I have adopted the family dictionary, because I considered that my need of guidance was greater than that of my parents who continually say they can’t think why I spell so badly.
6/20/22: Now, my idea of a happy ending is where circumstances go right and wrong higgledy-piggledy, as they do in life, and at the end the hero or heroine is still undaunted, with plenty of hope and enjoyment of such fine things as are left, and a kind of promise of better luck next time—perhaps.
6/28/22: I am trying to write a novel that won’t write itself. It nearly drives me crazy. I can’t get the words, although I know what I want to say. I ought to let it alone a bit and can’t.
5/12/23: I am having the devil of a time with my book. First it was too short; now it’s miles too long, and back and back I have to go, wasting time over the beastly thing that will probably be no good in the end. The minor characters simply refuse to stay minor. The major ones insist on telling me everything about their perfectly ordinary pasts as well as their somewhat amorphous and uninteresting presents.
7/21/24: I did not interfere [with a confused public speaker], because I always pray myself that when I am confused in a speech an angel of the Lord shall confound the minds even of my brethren also.
5/19/25: But oh, my feet! I take the poor things all over London to find pretty shoes for them. Says the young lady, “Not in that size, moddam,” and my poor feet grow more and more depressed. I have to bring them home in a bus.
9/7/25: I am going to spend the morning at [Stella Benson’s] house to-morrow going through her new book with her and one or two of her friends. She has scrapped most of the book, she says, and feels too depressed to embark on it again alone without some one telling her that it is worth while. It is so very encouraging to hear of people who can write books like hers scrapping them.
10/1/25: Everybody dies in my present book, which is not really sad. After all, it simply means that I take the tale on rather further than most. We hardly ever any of us write about immortals, so I suppose that all heroines die one day. Mine, however, kills its heroine in the first quarter, and the hero is most of the time over fifty. But I can’t help that.
10/6/26: It is queer how one goes on making the better acquaintance with one’s characters, just as though they were people. I could no more make mine do what I want them to do, once I have created them, than I could make you do something. …When I am writing, I am so happy—no, not happy, but interested—that I don’t want to do anything, go anywhere, or see any one. Only one can’t go on all the time—and the real world keeps coming in.
1/10/27: I believe that there is little prose which can stir me in the same way as Sir Walter Raleigh’s. Isn’t the Discovery of Guiana an endless joy? He will keep appearing quite irrelevantly in my novels, because I am so much in love with him that I cannot keep him out. That is, I suppose, wrong, but I am coming to the conclusion that one must sometimes write in that sort of sublimated idiocy which comes from being in love—with a person, a place, or an idea. It doesn’t much matter.

Photos: Lots of photos, see above.

Be safe and well.

I didn’t sign up for the Guardian Wishlist this year, but I did have a lot of fun with the many lovely things in the collection, and also wrote four short fics because I couldn’t resist; many thanks to trobadora and china_shop and everyone else for making it happen.

Latest Chinese vocabulary from the farmboys:

一筹莫展 at wits’ end, hitting a wall, up a creek without a paddle
个鬼 stuck onto words, verbs in particular, to indicate “my ass,” “the hell I will,” etc. (I’m glad this one snuck under the wire of the cursing allowed on the show, on account of it’s fun)
么么哒 mwah!, onomatopoeia for a kiss
社恐 short for 社会恐惧症, social phobia/social anxiety, but used colloquially to refer to general shyness/social awkwardness
呼噜 to snore (also to purr, if you’re a cat)
冰溜子 an icicle

Other Chinese-related bits and pieces. Dumb joke (actually doesn’t work in Chinese) for the day: so if someone made a version of the farmboy show that was just the same except in a xianxia setting, would they be cultivators practicing cultivation?
Today’s Chinese/Japanese confusion: me staring at 床の上 and thinking blankly “on the floor? on the bed? ???”. Solution: as long as the の is there it’s probably “on the floor,” if it’s just 床上 it’s probably “on the bed.” Goddamn 假朋友.
Serious question. In English (or in Chinese, for that matter), is there a simple way to refer to “people who sing in Sinophone languages/dialects” that isn’t linguistically/geopolitically difficult? I mean, if I’m talking about Zhou Shen I will say “a Chinese singer” without demur, but what happens when I add in, for instance, A-Mei, Wu Qingfeng, Stefanie Sun, Li Hao, Jike Junyi, Ayanga, Karen Mok…who cover a range of ethnicities/language groups/nationalities for which “Chinese” alone doesn’t seem sufficient, but what’s the alternative? “C-pop” seems awfully vague. Per a-Pei, “Chinese singers” would work when talking to mainlanders but wouldn’t fly with people from Taiwan or Singapore. “Sinophone singers” is kind of awkward (also elen pointed out that “Sinophone band” sounds like somebody invented a new instrument, as in “oh, cool, you played the sinophone in high school too?”). Ideas?

Japanese translation headaches: do I let these characters say “jeez”? I wouldn’t have them say “Jesus Christ” or “oh my God” (interestingly, I might feel okay about using “oh my God” for a text originally in Chinese/a fic for a cdrama, etc., having literally heard people say 我的老天爷 more than once, but the same does not apply in Japanese), but then again “gee” is also (I think?) derived from the same place and it certainly wouldn’t bother me. Where does the line fall?
Chinese translation headaches: in a word, or three, fucking sibling words! 哥 and 姐 in particular are so often used and so flexible that trying to come up with alternatives that do the same job and sound natural is a pain in the ass.
Original stuff: I’ve just hit 30K, which is about right for where I am in my outline; progress has been very slow because I keep putting off writing until the very last thing at night when I’m already sleepy, so I just want to hit my minimum and go to bed. I do not need to do that! I have time in my day I could use for it! but somehow I don’t. Currently I am listening to A asking all the people in her life weird questions and waiting to see what she’s going to do with the answers she gets, since I don’t know either.

I love academics with a sense of humor. Encountered for a work thing, the English-language website of a Peking University|北大 professor whose pocket bio reads “Ruixuan Chen is a man from Middle Earth. He seems to have received some education, and claims to have discovered something – but the details remain obscure and suspect. Little is known of his early life, even the last character of his given name is an issue of dispute. He is now working in Beijing as a translator of Buddhist texts from arcane languages. When he procrastinates, he considers himself a gourmet (de gustibus non est disputandum).”

Rereading Gregory Rabassa’s memoir of a career in literary translation from Spanish and Portuguese, which is very funny and occasionally thought-provoking.

“Then there are those people…who assert that God’s name is, in fact, Howard, as in ‘Our Father which art in Heaven, Howard be thy name.’ I can’t see how anyone could be an atheist with a God named Howard and it also might explain why the universe is such a mixed-up place.”
“There were two types of parlance that I encountered in the army. The first was official military-speak, which to my still-civilian ear seemed backwards and silly, as in ‘gloves wool olive-drab.’ The second was soldier-speak, much more colorful and inventive… I remember the posted outcome of some court-martial proceedings that combined the two aspects into a delightful linguistic merger. It seems that a soldier had been brought up on charges of insubordination and the specific charge said in part ‘…and upon being reprimanded by Sgt. [So-and-So] did call Sgt. [So-and-So] a mother-fucking son-of-a-bitch or words to that effect.’ The intriguing problem is trying to ascertain what other words might have had that same effect.”
“I’ve tried to figure out if [knowing an author personally] is of any help for a translator beyond direct questions, whether a sense of nearness lets me hear the voice of these particular people as I interpret their words. If I am the translator I am supposed to be, it really shouldn’t make any difference and yet I do hear their voices along with their personal pronunciations and intonations. This is that misty world of translation that is hard to describe.”
(Also Rabassa employs the neologism “tauroscatic” (referring to a particular manner of speech) which I find delightful.)

Photos: Bad smartphone photo of the full moon celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival dramatically; more morning-glories (no, my chili pepper plant is not actually blooming with morning glories, it just looks like it; more crepe myrtle and something else pink; a summer maple; a dinosaur in a company window; and the weirdest vending machine I’ve seen yet, which promises to squeeze you a glass of fresh orange juice on the spot.

Be safe and well.

The radio had a good idea the other day and programmed the Bach Coffee Cantata (basically a very short comic opera about a young lady who refuses to marry anyone who won’t let her drink coffee) with a piece written to go along with it called the Green Tea Concerto, by the modern composer Fujikura Dai. I liked it, and now I can’t find a recording of it anywhere! It’s not on YouTube, it’s not on the composer’s page. Oh well, maybe it will turn up later on; in the meantime, have a Flute Concerto also by Fujikura, nice and cool for the summer.

Reading bits of Lafcadio Hearn on account of last week’s

senzenwomen post about his wife Setsuko. From a letter to a friend:

For me words have colour, form, character: They have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations; --they have moods, humours, eccentricities; --they have tints, tones, personalities. That they are unintelligible makes no difference at all. … Because people cannot see the colour of words, the tints of words, the secret ghostly motions of words; -- Because they cannot hear the whispering of words, the rustling of the procession of letters, the dream-flutes and dream-drums which are thinly and weirdly-played by words; -- Because they cannot perceive the pouting of words, the frowning and fuming of words, the weeping, the raging and racketing and rioting of words; -- Because they are insensible to the phosphorescing of words, the fragrance of words, the noisomeness of words, the tenderness or hardness, the dryness or juiciness of words, --the interchange of values in the gold, the silver, the brass and the copper of words,--
Is that any reason why we should not try to make them hear, to make them see, to make them feel? -- … Why should the people not be forcibly introduced to foreign words, --as they were introduced to tea and coffee and tobacco?
Unto which the friendly reply is, -- “Because they won’t buy your book, and you won’t make any money.”
And I say: --“Surely I have never yet made, and never expect to make any money. Neither do I expect to write ever for the multitude. I write for beloved friends who can see colour in words, can smell the perfume in syllables in blossom, can be shocked with the fine elfish electricity of words. And in the eternal order of things, words will eventually have their rights recognized by the people.”

okay, July is over (thank goodness; only the back half of summer to go); how much progress have I made with my self-imposed Chinese study plans? Some? I think?

I’ve been pretty diligent about doing a couple of hundred Anki cards daily, HSK words plus my words-grabbed-from-fic list (so many chengyu, I can’t do this) plus the Chinese Grammar Wiki sentences (with tinny’s Spoonfed Chinese deck lurking in wait when I need a new one). I’ve done several HSK6 practice tests, including the writing question, which is set up diabolically: you get ten minutes to read a passage of about 1000 characters, no taking notes, and then you have 35 minutes to summarize the paragraph in 400 characters or so, from memory. I assumed the passages would be impenetrable articles about the economy or the environment, full of complex words and 于s and 以s, but in fact they’re human-interest stories—how this couple met, what happened when the chef won the lottery, and so on—which are surprisingly easy to handle.
Otherwise, reading quite a lot of fic here and there, translating bits of it into English for my own consumption, also translating one very short fic of my own into Chinese—an excellent exercise but very difficult, and after all ZH-EN is a potentially achievable, if distant, professional goal, EN-ZH not so much. The trouble with using two lexically (?) related languages on a daily basis is that they keep sending out tendrils invading each other; my brain still has an embedded Japanese setting so that I can’t read the names of the songs 光 and 芽 as anything but hikari and me even though I know they’re actually in Chinese and thus guāng and yá. Conversely, Chinese words have started trying to fool me into thinking they’re Japanese; I caught myself saying to Y the other day 明日は何も安排してないから、I don’t have any plans for tomorrow, where 安排, plan, should have been something like 予定. (Not surprisingly he looked at me funny.) Also I was searching for a passage in a document at work and kept wondering why no matter how many times I typed “nuli” it would only convert to 塗り; finally I realized I should be typing “doryoku” 努力.
Also I’ve finished watching season 1 of the farming show (it only took me FOUR MONTHS of daily watching, with season 2 and then some yet to go); I don’t know if it’s having a measurable effect on my Chinese ability, but I remain singularly obsessed. To commemorate me having gotten halfway through, have three songs: the farmboys singing 后陡门的夏 and 麦芒 (this one is a live video, warning for flashing lights), and the theme song 芽 sung of course by Zhou Shen.
The latest in new words:
・无语 literally “speechless, wordless,” often used to indicate “I can’t be doing with this” or similar
・狗东西 a schmuck, a bastard, literally “dog thing.” This one I encountered when one of the farmboys was splashing frantically around in their duckpond trying to catch one of the ducks: he yelled something like 你这个狗东西！ to which another of them said 它是鸭东西, roughly “You son of a bitch!” “You mean, you son of a duck.”
・大名 full name, formal/government name; literally “big name,” opposite of 小名, “little name” or nickname (see also Zhao Yunlan introducing Da Qing to Shen Wei with 小名死猫)
・有一说一 telling it like it is, literally “have one, say one”
・钝感力, a Japanese loan word literally something like “power of obtuseness,” used to mean “stubbornly doing your thing without letting people throw you off course” (I think)

If you recall the Japanese book I was talking about a few weeks back, the pseudo-pre-war-travelogue featuring a Japanese woman writer, Aoyama Chizuko, and her Taiwanese interpreter, Oh Chizuru|Wang Qianhe—I finally finished it.

(To give it its proper title it’s 台湾漫游录 in the original, by 杨双子, and 台湾漫遊鉄道のふたり in Japanese, translated by 三浦裕子.) It was sadder than I expected—not a bad ending, but a very bittersweet one, made inevitable by the situation of the time. Also much more f/f than I expected, subtext pretty much textual, not surprising considering the afterword in which the author, Yang Shuangzi, says she writes 百合小说 (baihe or yuri novels). Going into detail, Chizuko falls hard for Chizuru, effectively proposing marriage more than once, but while Chizuru devotes herself not just to interpreting but to explaining Taiwan to Chizuko and preparing/tracking down all kinds of amazing Taiwanese food for her, she never quite lets down her guard, and eventually she breaks with Chizuko altogether. With some instruction from the Taiwanese-born Japanese civil servant Mishima (美島, an unusual name which has to be symbolic, suggesting “Formosa” as it does) who acts as substitute interpreter, Chizuko is eventually able to figure out that for all she adores Taiwan and loves Chizuru and declares herself against Japan’s imperialist tendencies, her protective/(m)paternalistic/I-know-what’s-best-for-you tendencies toward Chizuru are a mirror of Japan’s colonial attitude toward Taiwan.
This all makes the book sound like issuefic, but it’s well done enough that it feels real.
Reading it in Japanese is in itself a weird experience. The translator, Miura Yuko, is very good—I obviously haven’t read the original published in Taiwan and so can’t speak to the translation’s accuracy, but it feels natural, fluid and coherent (although I do think she should have let Chizuko speak Kyushu dialect occasionally). It makes more sense being in Japanese, because Chizuko, monolingual in that language, is the first-person narrator. Reading it in Chinese would be weird in that sense, although I’m curious about what it’s like. (Writing about it in English, or translating it likewise, brings up a problem not present in Japanese: what to call Chizuru? Chizuko thinks of her with the Japanese reading of her name, but are there points at which she should be Qianhe or Chian-Ho instead?)
The afterword notes that Chizuru is based in part on 杨千鹤 | Yang Chian-Ho , Taiwan’s first female journalist, and Chizuko in part on the Japanese writer Hayashi Fumiko, who traveled extensively in Indonesia as part of Japan’s wartime/colonial cultural programs (I wouldn’t have expected that; I have an idea of Fumiko as less resistant to nationalism than Chizuko in the novel, and also a lot more interested in sex (with men, not women, as far as I know) than in food).
The book brought to mind something else I was thinking about lately, what meikuree wrote about here as “first- and second-order description.” Her whole post (linked with kind permission--tell me if I've misinterpreted anything drastically here?) is worth a careful read and goes into a lot more things than I can discuss here, but to relate it to the book in question alone, Chizuko’s reactions to Taiwan and to Chizuru are dedicated to second-order descriptions (many of them food-related), what Mei’s post calls “interiority: the sculpting of perception, experience, and interpretation,” adding that it’s “also something you'd find in colonial anthropological writing, where the Other is treated to the exoticising gaze of a (presumed) white audience.” “White” is not in the equation here, but Chizuko’s gaze is, as she discovers to her regret, unquestionably coming from the suzerain direction. (The reserved and unfriendly Mishima specializes in the more “objective” first-order descriptions or exteriority, perhaps as a formal defense against his own mixed-up interior identity as a Taiwanese-born Japanese.) Chizuko’s aim, in spending a year living in Taiwan and writing a travelogue (which in fact eventually becomes an autobiographical novel) about it, is what Mei calls “the ability to refract the big hegemonic cloud of ‘culture’ through the prism of individuated senses and impressions, supposedly,[ ] what demonstrates a writer's real thoughtfulness about what living somewhere is like.” And it takes her most of a year with Chizuru to realize how she has been failing at it and why; how her individuated senses and impressions are refractions in ways she can’t see herself of her own big hegemonic cloud.
(and to put different bits of this post together, getting into the question of first- and second-order description in Lafcadio Hearn would be a whole ‘nother post or possibly a dissertation…)
This is getting very long; I want to look again at this first- and second-order description idea (along with the related concept of emic and etic?) in the context of SFF worldbuilding, but I think that’s going to happen on another day, if meikuree will forgive me for dragging her post all over… .

Photos: Some more morning glories, other people’s nice flowers (a hibiscus and a purple thing I don’t know the name of), and my peppers and habaneros, which like the sun.

Be safe and well.

My early-morning runs (nothing very ambitious) have been interrupted lately by a couple of local cats looking for attention, one black (the same one smart enough to shelter in the shrine lantern on rainy days) and one three-colored, both friendly enough to let me もふもふ抚摸抚摸 their fluffy bellies without repercussions. (No photos because I don’t have my phone with me when I’m running…)

Chinese: I’ve been doing HSK practice tests, which are very trying. Result so far: assuming that I took an internet-based test and NOT a paper-based one, I’m pretty sure I could pass HSK5 without much trouble. For HSK6, I am hovering right around the pass/fail line for listening and reading; God only knows as far as writing goes, it’s such a weird test anyway. Maybe I’ll think about taking it sometime next winter or spring…or not…we’ll see.
I am finding that diligent Anki practice actually does mean I know more words when I’m reading fic. I mean, it’s only logical! but nice to discover anyway. (I’m trying to make a virtuous circle (when I was little I always thought the opposite of a vicious circle should be a delicious circle) out of it: recording words new to me with the Zhongwen extension, bless it, when I read, and then putting them into an Anki deck for practice.) I’m a little in despair about the fifty gazillion chengyu that I will never be able to memorize, especially because they would actually be fun to know, but one step at a time.
More slang from the farmboys, mostly on the argumentative side today:

· 活该 serves you right
· 賊 slang for “very”
· 秋千 a swing/swingset (why does “autumn thousand” mean swing?)
· 缺揍 slang literally meaning “short of a good spanking,” used in context for “cheeky, smart-mouthed” etc.
· 牙痒痒 infuriating, frustrating (literally “teeth itchy”)

I’m becoming a bore about my veranda plants. The morning glories are blooming less but growing vines EVERYWHERE, I need to put up some extra wire for them to crawl all over. Tomatoes flowering again, which is a relief; I still need to figure out how to repot them. Chili peppers turning nicely vermilion and red; habaneros FINALLY starting to blush orange, I guess they didn’t like the rainy season? Lemon tree still refusing to lemon but putting out leaves in all directions, starting to look genuinely more like a baby tree than a plant. Four-season strawberries reluctant but alive, which is good; mint growing like mint does (it’s in a pot, everything is safe). I deprived it of a cup’s worth of leaves (plenty more where that came from) to make mint syrup and thus mint soda, which is startlingly sweet even with half the sugar in the recipe but very tasty with a high ratio of seltzer and a slice of lime.

Still writing a few hundred words a day of my original thing. This one feels more like a rough draft than Books 1 and 2 did, as if I’m going to have to come back and rewrite EVERYTHING once I get it finished (ha) and know where it was actually trying to go. Still, forward motion is something, and I have about 21K so far and that’s a start.

Rereading Nella Last’s wartime and postwar diaries, which can be very sad but are never less than absorbing. Some excerpts here

August 8, 1940
I always think “one man’s meat, another man’s poison” applies to married life as much as it does to anything.
November 5, 1940
He had to rise at 5:15 to catch the 6:30 train, and I don’t trust the alarm clock since it went all temperamental and will only go lying on its face. I took it to the clock-maker and he said there was nothing wrong, and why worry? Still, it’s the look of the thing—so inefficient and untrustworthy. It looks as if it has lain down on its job!
May 13, 1941
On reflection, I think I was more than a bit bitchy, to say the least of it. I did a bit of resurrecting of old history and a bit of “yes and anyway; and I can remember saying that I was tired of always having to do all the thinking and planning for the house, and that it was time he grew up. So undignified and tiresome to be so tired and edgy as to lose control of a temper schooled for thirty years.
This war seems to have no end—it’s like a stone dropped in a lake where waves and surges are felt as unknown or unexpected edges and shores.
October 19, 1942
Sometimes I could YELL. I feel I’d like to peel off the layers of “patience,” “tact,” “cheerfulness,” “sweetness” that smother me like layers of unwanted clothes. What would I find under all the trappings I’m credited with? I might be surprised! I know how people feel who “disappear.” They get up one morning and look out of the window—maybe just up a long road, maybe the sun is shining, or there’s a bright poster on a wall, or a ship’s siren is hoo-hooing its way out to sea—and they go and go and GO.
September 8, 1945
Aunt Sarah has a quaint saying which has always been a joke—“As we get older, Dearie, our heads won’t stand it”—and she is not far wrong.
September 20, 1945
It’s a great blessing when one can lose all sense of time, all worries, if only for a short time, in a book.
January 19, 1946
I said to my husband, “Have you never thought of leaving me?” I said it jokingly, but he considered it very seriously and said, “No—why should I? I would have everything to lose.” I said, “Tell me then—what do you consider my greatest attraction for you?” I didn’t expect him to say “Your beauty,” but did think he would say “Because you are such a good cook,” or at least something “positive.” Instead he said, “Because you are such a comfortable person to live with.” I felt all flat feet and red flannel—as others see us!
March 7, 1947
Shan We [Siamese cat] seemed to lose his head—he took a header 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, nearlyl sent me into hysterics of laughter—helped by the same “Why should this happen to me?” look on my husband’s face as he shoveled snow. He said, “I don’t see there’s anything to laugh at,” but as I said, he wasn’t standing where I was!

Photos: once again just a few, it’s too hot to take pictures. Jiji-chan sunbathing, sarusuberi…ah…crepe myrtle, and one of my veranda morning-glories.

Be safe and well.

As various people have noted, Zhu Yilong is going to have blue hair for his new movie; I love it that he’s never satisfied unless he’s doing something completely new. No worries though, in this picture it’s clear that blue hair or not, his habit of hugging pillows remains.

Rereading a very good translation of Tove Jansson’s letters, which are wonderful (although on reflection I wish the editors had just lined them up chronologically rather than dividing them by recipient). Mostly more fun in the aggregate than in specific quotations, but a few that I enjoyed:
August 14, 1946
And if rocket-propelled missiles are eventually going to blow us to smithereens along with everything we’ve done, I want to be as calm and happy as I can now and work in peace.
December, 1946
That was when I realized [that I was in love with her], as we were dancing. It came as such a huge surprise. Like finding a new and wondrous room in an old house one thought one knew from top to bottom. Just stepping straight in, and not being able to fathom how one had never known it existed.
June 27, 1956
Everything I do, everything new that I see—there’s a parallel reflection: I shall show this to Tuulikki.

Reading a Japanese book—or rather a book originally published in Taiwan and translated into Japanese—which is a historical novel presented as a travelogue written by a (fictional) Japanese woman author touring Taiwan in 1938. Aoyama Chizuko is a young woman from a good Kyushu family who has just written a bildungsroman that became a huge hit and made her much in demand as a lecturer; when she visits Taiwan, her translator is a modest, immensely competent young Taiwanese woman called Oh Chizuru|Wang Qianhe, who instantly gets Chizuko’s quirkiness (and her absolute passion for eating huge quantities of every new and delicious food she can get her hands on, don’t read this one while hungry). I’m only a few chapters in, but it's clear that the book is going to take on colonialism and class, along with female friendship, in Chizuko’s idiosyncratic voice. More to come when I finish it.

Chinese: I don’t think I’m quite managing three to four hours a day, but I am doing the best I can and getting caught up on my daily Chinese Grammar Wiki Anki deck for the first time in ages. I probably need another deck full of sample sentences at all levels… . Still messing with translation, very slowly. I have finally ventured onto Lofter—if I have to have WeChat for Chinese conversation lessons I might as well make use of it?—and am very confused, but I’m enjoying meandering around tags reading bits of fics.
New words, slang and otherwise, from the farmboys:

· 神不知鬼不觉 without anyone knowing (literally, God doesn’t know and the devil has no clue)
· 裸考 to take a test without studying (literally, a naked test)
· 给你个麦 Guangdong slang (?) for something like “you want a piece of this?” in the aggressive sense
· O不OK? just means “okay or not,” but I adore this piece of Chinese-English (or English-Chinese)
· 嘴硬 stubborn, refusing to back down (literally, hard mouth: used punningly in the show to describe a Sichuanese guy eating a hot pepper without changing expression)
· 无法无天 out of control, unruly, going too far
· 马虎 careless, sloppy

Music: A handful of random things I’ve been listening to lately. Eliane Elias and her trio doing “Aguas de março” (one of the best Tom Jobim songs ever) and “Agua de beber”; Seong-Jin Cho playing Chopin Preludes, with one of the most thrilling openings I know of; and for something completely different, Leroy Anderson’s little novelty piece The Syncopated Clock, which I’ve always found very charming.

Photos: Just a few today; my morning-glories (still blooming steadily, anything from one to five flowers a day, rain or shine), and a tree decorated for Tanabata (on a windy day).

Be safe and well.

Note on politics:

Here and elsewhere, I don’t want to talk or think about US politics/election/etc. until further notice; I’m voting and donating and hoping for the best while expecting the worst, so not ignoring it altogether, but that’s it. I might at some point temporarily unfriend people who post a lot about it—not criticism at all, I know some people need to chew over upsetting stuff to deal better with it, just me doing my thing. Please don’t comment on this either, this is just for the record.

Work: I had a job translating one family’s handwritten family register (koseki), which was hard on the eyes but fascinating. Wait, the date of their oldest daughter’s birth is only three months after their marriage! And she later married an American and became a US citizen. Why does the register skip from second to fourth daughter, did the third one die young? …oh no, good, she was adopted by her aunt and uncle as a child, they must have been childless. Oh look, both brothers moved to colonial Korea with their whole families and worked for the railroads, I wonder when they moved back to Japan. Wow, daughter #2 must have been over fifty when she married, I hope it was a happy one … and so on (details slightly randomized for privacy). (Also reminded me of the GHQ-era joke recounted by Seiden-sama: the US army sergeant applying for permission to marry his Japanese girlfriend, “and have you seen her koseki yet?” “Oh no sir, I swear we haven’t done anything like that!”)

Veranda: My veranda plants are mostly thriving, either because of or in spite of the recent heavy rain. The morning glory vines are growing almost visibly in real time, twining everywhere, and I get one or two blossoms a day, the three different plants (lavender, purple, and purple-spotted) trading off blooming duties. They have also wound themselves up with the chili peppers and cherry tomatoes (God help me the next time there’s a typhoon and I need to move the plants indoors, they’ll just have to take their chances), I’m a little afraid that the morning glories will take on a spicy scent and the peppers will ripen purple instead of red. Lots of cherry tomatoes to start with, but the tomato plant seems to have stopped growing/flowering and I don’t know why. Outgrowing its strength? Outgrowing its pot? How do I repot a huge sprawling tomato plant without killing it? More happily my habanero plant also got HUGE when I wasn’t looking, with something like three dozen fruits at last count (eat your heart out, Zhuo Yuan). I’m going to have to eat a lot of Thai curry this summer… .

Chinese: See my previous post about doing more Chinese study in July, many thanks for many useful suggestions and encouragement. So far I think I’m putting in about three hours plus a day (if you count show-watching, which is fun rather than work). Will report further later.
Trying to translate a couple of short fics (purely for my own amusement, not for publication, for various reasons) and finding that translating from Chinese feels very different from translating from Japanese. Obviously the biggest reason for this is my hugely differing fluency and experience, but I feel like there are language-specific things that are getting to me too? (Not making sweeping statements about the actual nature of the languages, just reflecting my senses at the moment. Also, talking about literary translation as opposed to commercial/academic/technical work, which I’m pretty sure is more straightforward in Chinese as in Japanese.) Notably chengyu and similar expressions, which are less common in Japanese and which I find hard to translate without being either poetic in a way that doesn’t hit right in English or just long-winded compared to the compactness of the source text. Also, in a way that I find similar to some prewar Japanese texts, the syntax of a given sentence or even paragraph doesn’t always clearly indicate what its main point is, so that you have to think it out to figure out how to structure the English. Also I feel like there’s more…this is very abstract…more intermediate space between the two languages? I spend less time thinking C word → E word and more time with C words → intermediate space rearranging meaning in my head → E words (if that makes a lick of sense). I mean, it’s fun! I am terrible at it because my Chinese just is not good enough yet, but it’s still fun to do.
Latest gathering from the farmboy show as below:

One of the neat things about this being a documentary/reality show rather than a drama is you get the regional accents as they are. They’re all speaking standard Mandarin/普通话, but with various accents and local quirks; the one native Cantonese speaker has a very pronounced accent that only goes away when he’s really concentrating; to me the most prominent aspects are zh → z and sh → s, so that the name of the well-known singer becomes “Zou Sen-laoshi.” (My guess is that his tones are probably different too, but I can’t hear tones well enough to tell.) The northerners, especially the two Shanxiren, have 儿化 for days: 宝贝儿，路边儿，一块儿and so on (also 网儿, confusing a colleague who keeps hearing 瓦 or 碗 instead of 网). One of them is prone to making W’s into V’s when speaking emphatically (玩, 为啥 and so on). The Inner Mongolian guy (ethnically Han, like all the rest of them; I wonder if any of the original applicant pool weren’t?) says meiwanle for 卖完了 (cf Bai Yu’s “Bei-laoshi”) and tsifan for 吃饭. The guy from middle-of-nowhere western Xinjiang has a few distinctive regional words (皮芽子 for onions, apparently from the Uyghur) and they all tease him about a song he recorded back when he was fresh from the hinterland, in which 走吧 becomes zu ba. I’ve picked up less from the southerners, other than fewer 儿s (点 rhymes with “when,” not with “far”); of the three southern guys, one is the Cantonese speaker above, one is what they call 话不多, not of many words (except on topics of money, which I can’t follow anyway) and the third went to college in Beijing and got some of his southern edges rubbed off (although he can occasionally be heard talking on the phone to his family in thick Chongqing dialect). Needs further study.

Reading:
Winifred Holtby’s letters to Vera Brittain; I forget if I’ve posted bits from them here before, but they’re delightful.

June 30, 1921: History and fiction both offer new interpretations of life, only viewed from a different standpoint. I believe the best history to be as creative as the best fiction. If historical writing is “largely synthetic and borrows from the work of other people,” bless you , my dear, so is fiction! Merely a synthesis of the things people see and hear, with constant plagiarisms from the conversation and characters of their friends and enemies.
June 29, 1925: At present I am not a person, but a List. It is an exceedingly diverse and attractive List, and I have been living in this incarnation for about five days, and have on the whole rather enjoyed it.
July 20, 1925: Hilda has told me what is admirable for my soul. I have a woolly mind. Well, well. One can card wool and spin it, and dye it with rare colours. One can make it into ropes for strength, and garments for warmth, and carpets for beauty and elegance. I may have a woolly mind, but it is not to be fleeced.
May 11, 1925: Damn the Capitalist Press. Damn the contradictious imperfection of things, which present no single clear issue for choice, allow no perfect cause, no uncomplicated loyalty, in this tedious, embittered world. Damn. Damn. Damn. Now I feel better.
August 21, 1928: At Monte Carlo everyone is so much afraid of complexes and inhibitions that they all run about having relations with men, women, and both—and get more and more hot and bothered. Now when one watches the Russian ballet one realises that one’s own body is full of inhibitions. Discipline and training relaxes and liberates. Control liberates. Lack of control binds and makes clumsy in a thousand ways.
September 13, 1931 [Vera to Winifred]: Have written 50 pages of book since I came; it’s very bad, but I’m going on the principle that it’s psychologically better to get it down somehow; even though one has solidly to write the whole thing out again, it’s a stage further than having it all toiling and moiling in one’s head.

Writing: Nothing whatsoever exciting to report but managing about 100-300 words a day. Me and the turtle, we are in there.

Photos: Various veranda views; also the beauty salon cat, on the job at nine am, and the same cat on the same day at noon.

</details Be safe and well.

So A-Pei and I were talking about chocolate chip cookies, and I had cause to ask her for the Chinese word for “pecan.” She said 胡桃, which horrified me, since in Japanese that means “walnut.” Come to find out that (I think) in Taiwan 胡桃 is pecan and 核桃 is walnut, while on the mainland 胡桃 is walnut and 山核桃 is pecan…give me strength! [Then again, as long as neither of them ends up in my chocolate chip cookies I’m okay—cookies should be warm and melty and goopy, not crunchy.]

Reading Naomi Mitchison’s short autobiography You May Well Ask, which is all kinds of entertaining: a couple of things about her early writing that I found very relatable.
“The Conquered, my first book, came out at white heat and, what is more, I wrote all the best bits, the juicy bits, first, the bits that were most exciting and satisfying to write, like the very end. Then I filled in the rest, but I enjoyed that too.”
“I got a great many letters about The Conquered. This is something writers need, and a phone call isn’t the same; you can’t pick it up and look at it again years later, when you are exhausted and unhappy.”
Also, I know where I’ve heard of that book before! “She had time to…wonder what she would do if They said nothing could be done, her hand must come off, and produced block and chopper, and hacked—like Meromic in The Conquered--with dunking in hot tar to follow.” It delights me that Nicola Marlow has read Naomi Mitchison. [For the non-Forest readers, nobody chops Nicola’s hand off, she gets it stitched by the one character of color in the whole series, a cricket-loving Pakistani doctor, and recovers sufficiently to win a cricket match a few weeks later.]

Listening, not for the first time, to an old mixtape [now a mixCD] of my father the classical musician’s favorite pop songs. “Once upon a time I drank a little wine, was as happy as could be. Now I’m just like a cat on a hot tin roof, baby what do you think you’re doing to me,” to which my mind immediately appended “—Lan Wangji, probably.”
Also, on the Brazilian side, I don’t think I’ve posted Se todos fossem iguais a você before—another of my very favorite Jobim songs, very singable and very loving, with the irresistible Portuguese plural of iguais for igual. (Link goes straight to the song, but just listen to the whole album, it’s about the best full album ever recorded in any genre).

I’ve read Diana Wynne Jones’ Charmed Life so many times I can recite good chunks of it from memory, and even so—and reading it in Chinese yet!—the climactic scene still grabs me so hard I missed my stop on the train. Comical and thrilling and quietly numinous and upsetting, all at once.
The Chinese translation is terrible, even I can tell, flat and inconsistent and inaccurate, but you take what you can get. ”And he needs us like he needs two left legs,” Bernard remarked, jerking around in the hammock as he tried to eat a jelly comes out as “我们对他来说就像左膀右臂。“伯纳德从吊床上一跃而起，去拿冰淇淋, that is (I think) “And according to him we’re the staff he depends on,” Bernard said, sitting up in the hammock and going to get an ice cream.” [The ice cream, at least, is a source text difference.] And that’s just one thing. Between the “he needs us like…” and the stocks and shares and the name, it suddenly occurs to me that Bernard might be Jewish. Neat.. When Chrestomanci tells Gwendolen “Stay here and learn how to do it [use magic] properly,” it comes out as 留在这里学学怎么做人吧, stay here and learn to behave properly. I like 做人 as a phrase, though—be a mensch. Translation faults aside, I will say it cracked me up that when Cat yanks the silver handcuffs off, Chrestomanci’s “Ow!” comes out as 哎哟！.

Still rehearsing the Brahms violin concerto in orchestra—I love this piece so much, especially but not uniquely the first movement. Last week was our first time with the solo violinist.

interpersonal grumbling

I was low-key infuriated the whole time for reasons unrelated to the music—I’m sitting inside first stand this time around, meaning that the person on my left is the first chair = leading the cello section. At this rehearsal a younger guy was asked to substitute for the usual first chair, and IN SPITE OF not being totally sure of the music he didn’t refuse when he should have done, so I spent the whole rehearsal mentally snarling that’s a tricky entrance, if you don’t come in properly with confidence no one else can either! or pizzicato on the OFF-BEAT wtf is your PROBLEM and so on, on account of if he didn’t get it right, I had to be the one responsible for doing so. Which was not ideal at the first soloist rehearsal, when it really matters to be able to follow the conductor and get it right.

That aside, it was a wonderful experience anyway. The soloist (a professional violinist) was a smallish, mild-mannered, fortyish guy from Hiroshima with a big wide lush tone, very secure. Going through the concerto without stopping felt like setting off on a life-or-death adventure, exciting, knife-edge, important, heartwrenching. The best thing about rehearsing a piece for six months is that you get to know not just the parts you hear in concert or on a recording but also all kinds of little things in your own part and others—there’s a place in the violas near the end of the first movement (around 23:27 in this recording), for instance, just a little three-note motif under the solo line that absolutely moves me to tears every time.

Zhu Yilong doing his usual thing, behaving like one of his own frequently whumped characters (I wish somebody would explain to him that putting his health at risk also means putting his career/his work at risk, then he might listen?) and still somehow managing to look absurdly beautiful.

Photos: The beauty salon cat having a nice outdoor bath in the sun, another cat glaring at me, geometric creepers (?), a village lane in the middle of the city, a rose, a camellia (either tsubaki or sazanka but I can’t tell the two apart to save my life).

Be safe and well.

I have given up on catching up on DW comments, but if you've posted to my f-list I've read it and been thinking of you. It seems like it’s now tradition that I or my partner or both of us will end up sick over New Year’s; this year it was both of us, he with the tail-end of a bad cold (not corona, as far as we know) and me with a series of headaches + bonus sinus stuff. Not serious in either case, just enervating enough that we both spent the holiday mostly at home and sleeping. There are worse ways to spend New Year’s, of course, and the poor people in Ishikawa discovered one of them: we felt the New Year’s Day earthquake too, just a slow wobble that did no harm here, but long and strong enough to scare me but good (Y was a lot calmer, but he grew up with earthquakes, I didn’t). As far as Japan in general is concerned this year, a-Pei taught me a useful chengyu, 否极泰来, nowhere to go from here but up. Knock wood.

Among more cheerful topics, it was a very good Yuletide; I wrote four fics and got four fics, the latter an unprecedented quantity and all (as with all my past Yuletide gifts, I’ve always been very lucky) very good. Likewise, my recipients were all extremely kind and thoughtful. My assignment was an Under the Skin fic for elenothar, very much to the point since it was elen who introduced me to the drama in the first place; I had fun with it. Didn’t manage as much in the way of treats as I would have liked to, but I got to mess around with Turandot, do some future fic for a book that could use still more of it, and play with Huo Daofu a little more. (Strictly speaking, the Turandot fic also contains a tiny DMBJ crossover, with an elderly Iron Triangle making a guest appearance as the three ministers…).

With Yuletide over I’ve finally made a return to my original thing. Some of the more major revisions called for by one or two beta readers I’ve given up on for the moment: my brain just isn’t cooperating and I’m afraid of getting so stuck that I lose motivation in general, so I’ve set the (all valuable!) feedback aside to come back to later, when I figure out what I’m doing in book 3. No actual writing so far, just trying to turn three single-spaced pages of notes into a simple outline that will let me start; as always, trying to walk the line between “I have to plan this or I won’t know what to start writing” and “I have to write this or I won’t know what’s going to happen.” Still, I’ve been missing my characters and I’m glad to be back doing mean (and sometimes less mean) things to them!

I finally got around to adding that Firefox extension where you can mouse over a word in Chinese and get the pinyin and the meaning, and with that in hand I’ve started reading a longfic in Chinese (also for Under the Skin; it’s not the fandom I feel strongest about, but for that reason I’m okay with reading entirely blind, as it were, I would be more fussy about Guardian or LTR, although if anyone has any recs in Chinese…?). Progress is slow but ridiculously fun and hopefully useful, we’ll see.

Listening to the Schumann piano quintet, one of my (many) all-time favorites; poor screwed-up Schumann, how could he write so many pieces of such dazzling joy and fulfillment when he spent so much time unhappy? Listen to the last movement, my God.

Japanese trivia for the day: in this country taxis are living organisms, you heard it here first. (No, really. Japan has two verbs of existence (forgotten the proper grammatical term), one for inanimate and one for animate subjects, and while buses and trains and so on take the former one, ある, with taxis you use the animate いる. Me to Y: What gives? Y: “Well, uh, buses and trains have set routes while taxis kind of run around all over the place at large??”

Quotations I liked from things I’ve been rereading lately, a novel and some letters and diaries

“a cherrywood bedstead with a bassoon carved into one of the fat headposts, so that it could be played as you lay in bed and meditated” –John Bellairs, The Face in the Frost [I like the idea but I am not sure Bellairs ever actually saw anyone playing the bassoon; the idea of playing one while lying down is pretty fanciful. Then again, it’s far from the wildest flight of imagination in this book!]
“You say your mind is a rambling rubbish box, and your youthful desires for improvement remain unfulfilled. Congratulations on getting the rubbish in a box, mine spreads in a heap. I don’t remember having many youthful desires (except that I do recall Madeline Carroll featuring in one of them).” –Chris Barker to [his wife-to-be] Bessie Moore, 21 February 1944
“So when you feel desperately tired and unhappy about bombs, the weather, your colds and other ills, don’t take them as personal deficiencies, remember you are not responsible for them. … Think about things as little as possible, and remember that no amount of worrying can alter them.”
--ibid., 10 December 1944
“Meanwhile I contrive to write about 500 words a day of the spy-thriller under cover of a scribbling pad. I write semi-shorthand in a very tiny script halfway through the pad so that when anyone puts his head round the door I seem to be adding up figures. Also I am protected from discovery by the improbability of finding a cost-clerk writing a novel under his scrap-pad.” –George Beardmore, 5 January 1940 [clearly the 1940s equivalent of switching between tabs/windows]

Photos: Three cats (an orange teenager with the cat equivalent of resting bitch face, Jiji-chan pretending to hide behind a handy bicycle, and Koron-chan making green glass eyes at Y), some leftover autumn leaves, winter persimmons, and a clutch of ducks.

Be safe and well.

…wow, it’s been a while. I was traveling and then…I don’t know…and I haven’t commented anywhere in such a long time either, I apologize, but if you’re on my f-list I’ve been reading your posts and thinking of you.
Lots to write up.

·Working very hard on the climax of book 2 of my original thing; just hit 78K with five scenes still to go, so my best guess at the moment is somewhere between 85 and 90K final. No idea if it's good or not but I'm enjoying watching everything fall into place so much. I really want to finish it, but at the same time when I do finish, I get to plunge into revision hell... .

·Work notes: a couple of months back I was working on papers about rural Laotians’ patterns of migration/出稼ぎ to Vientiane and Bangkok, and now I’m working on 1940s statistics about rural Koreans’ patterns of migration to Japan. It hardly needs saying that the viewpoint is not the same (respectful sociologists vs. at-best-paternalistic colonial suzerains), but man, the more things change. (Less seriously, among the rarer occupations listed in the statistics, I spent a long time staring at 牛乳詐取業 and wondering how you could exploit milk for a living, until I realized that it was a harmless reference to getting the milk out of the cow.)

·Still working on the Guardian script, going back to fill in some of the earlier episodes. The university’s big sign says “Dragon City University,” but Lin Jing’s locator program in episode three says “University of Longcheng.” My fussy proofreader/translator-brain takes exception to this.
Oh dear, episode 4, when Zhao Yunlan asks about the Wei character, Shen Wei’s whole face: does he remember? is this when--? no, no he doesn’t, oh I miss him so much. Oh right, I still have to play the innocent professor—and you can see the effort it’s costing him to answer calmly and easily. And Zhao Yunlan doesn’t know what’s going on but he can see he’s really gotten to Shen Wei somehow, and he offers a mention of his mother in return.
And a little later, Zhao Yunlan starts bawling Shen Wei out for pricking his finger and stops halfway when Shen Wei gives him big innocent eyes; and then starts in with “Don’t you know that could give you tetanus?” and Shen Wei actually cracks up.

·Thanks to YouTube, I discovered another unknown composer I like, Robert Kahn. I am totally fascinated by his “Tagebuch in Tönen,” little short pieces which he wrote as a musical diary over fifteen years, in Germany and then in exile in the UK, coming to over one thousand of them. (Nobody has recorded them as a set that I know of, but you can hear them here.) I’m not even halfway through yet. Bits of Bach and Schumann and Brahms in inspiration, and some straight-up 20th-c. stuff too.

·Weird minor news items. In early April, a missing iguana from the extremely wealthy suburb of Ashiya (“I just looked around and his cage was open!”) with twelve (12) police officers searching for it (and video of them strolling around admiring the cherry blossoms). Also a stolen statue from a Nagano temple, one of the wooden ones that you stroke for healing, which returned home in record time thanks to random people videoing the culprits. Also something my mom found in the news, a lady in a historical district of Edinburgh who was censured by the city council for painting her front door pale pink. I’d like to send the city council a box of copies of The Big Orange Splot.

·Books bought while traveling, some more successful picks than others (this gets long).

Books to give away again Ryka Aoki, Light from Uncommon Stars. The music parts should have worked for me, but…it seemed to combine cheerful children’s-book level silliness (the donut aliens just reminded me of Gregory Maguire’s Fixipuddlings) with sustained main character misery/whump, and I gave up partway through; Uli Beutter Cohen, Between the Lines, a collection of chats with people on the subway based on what books they were reading. A fun read! Nothing wrong with it! Just that reading it once was enough; Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others, essays about her shift to writing in Italian, which again should have been my thing, but…I don’t know…I think I wanted more about her process, more grammar and vocabulary and less philosophy? My brain is not abstract enough.
Books to keep in storage somewhere Paul Clements, Jan Morris, a perfectly serviceable and very flat biography. I like Morris’ essays and I think she was probably the first trans person I ever heard of (my reaction at age 10 or so: oh, that’s a thing you can do? huh), but this isn’t an exciting book; Hao Jingfang, Vagabonds, a novel translated from the Chinese (by Ken Liu) which I really wanted to like, but…what it’s doing with political and economic and philosophical allegories I’m not smart enough for, and the characters and setting never come to life. (In terms of plot it is just barely similar to John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless, a book I love, but Matt and his parents and his friends are so much realer compared to Luoying and her surroundings.) It’s entirely possible that this is deliberate. Also, its future society is very, very sexist and heterosexist, and no one in the book ever raises this as a problem, and while I can’t imagine the author is not doing that deliberately, it’s not much fun to read.
Books to reread now and then Freya Marske, A Restless Light, second in her fantasy trilogy; somewhat lighter-hearted than the first one, fun, relatively unmemorable. The sex scenes would work better in fic when we already know the characters; Virginia Nicholson, How Was It For You?, the 1960s volume of her history of women in Britain, lots of wonderful oral history but a little too much about people on the extreme ends of experience for me; William Helmreich, The Queens Nobody Knows, which sounds like either a history of women monarchs or of drag queens, but in fact is a (posthumously published, sadly) walking guide to the New York borough of Queens, by the guy who walked every street in New York. Straightforward, generous, sometimes funny, written by an elderly white guy but one genuinely devoted to New York as a wildly diverse city; Taqi Shaheen and Annelys de Vet ed., Subjective Atlas of Pakistan, bought for very distantly related background research for my original thing, but also a fantastic wander through idea maps, prayers, soccer balls, hijabs, jewelry, gorgeous urban and rural photographs, you name it. Look it up.
Books to reread often Ruthanna Emrys, A Half-Built Garden, which I pulled off a bookstore shelf on a whim based on, I think it was sophia_sol’s review? Its individual components don’t really match my interests, but it does just what I was complaining that Hao Jingfang’s book above doesn’t do—the characters and the places they live are real enough to drive the book. Reminds me a little of Sage Walker’s The Man In The Tree, which I’ve posted about often; both with very complex, precisely thought-out near-future quasi-utopian worldbuilding in the background, serving as a plot engine but not drowning out the essentially character-driven narrative (and both with lots of descriptions of luscious food). I thought Emrys’ book did not quite stick the landing—the thing the aliens did near the end I found upsetting, and it all sorted itself out a little too neatly—but I’m still looking forward to the reread.

·Photos: Mostly flowers today, plus an old Kyoto building and some riverbank scenes (two different rivers). Can you find the hidden koi?

Be safe and well.

·Still working on the Guardian script; April is such a quiet time I ought to get ahead. In episode 33 at the pillar, the shadow man starts talking and Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan turn their heads to him in unison, obviously remembering the existence of other people for the first time. And in their sunlit moment on the bench, the music is so damn sad when they smile at each other, this is a tragedy going to happen all right.

·Writing book 2 fairly steadily. At 60K+, I’ve finally gotten to the part where everything happens at once (why is my natural writing structure “nothing happens for 2/3 of the book and then everything happens”?), and it’s scaring me to death—big irrevocable events and my characters having big irrevocable emotions in reaction to them, and also making some of them happen, and creating an actual shape rather than “this happened and then this happened” is not easy, and also (yet another thing that works against me), a lot of the things happening aren’t even going to be resolved in this book, they’re all getting pushed forward to book 3, working title The Aftermath. To be fair, I am enjoying it! I keep thinking, aah, I’m tired and it’s late, what would happen if I didn’t write tonight, and then I start reluctantly and I end up with at least my daily quota of 500 words. But, aah.

·So I really did not do this on purpose, but my favorite chocolate in the world is a flavor of Ritter Sport called Olympia, containing a mixture of yogurt, honey, and hazelnuts. It’s hard to find and doesn’t exist in Japanese stores, so I ordered myself some for my birthday. Three bars, to be precise. I was expecting the usual bars—divided into little square four-by-four grids—but when they arrived, I found I had ordered three VERY LARGE bars of EIGHT-BY-EIGHT grids instead. I mean. I can’t say I regret it?

·Rereading Erica H. Smith’s Waters of Time series, one of my annual rereads, and as always being awed by her long-distance plotting skills (including throwaway lines that become important plot points hundreds, if not thousands of pages later) and ability to expand from two to, what, a dozen POVs and keep them all in character. (George and Olivia are lovely, but I personally favor Rinaldo and Janet most—the dry-voiced consummate outsiders who like to see the work done right—and among non-POV characters, I adore Gerrit and his proverbs and his glass art.) As she says of one of her own characters, “One began to feel, even if one knew better, … that he was real.” If the world was in better shape, people would be talking about this series as among the major works of early 21st-c SFF.

·Listening to the Arensky piano trio and piano quintet, a couple of old favorites—one of those kleinmeisters (what’s the proper German plural?) who got absolutely inspired twice in his career. Big warm melodic Romantic delight. (I’m in two minds about the quintet performance linked, but I like their name—Take 5 Piano Quintet—so much I couldn’t resist, and they seem to have an interesting repertoire.)

·Reading the diary of Barbellion (pseudonym of a British naturalist who died of MS in 1919, very young) and enjoying its self-deprecation, humor, frustration, and moments of beauty. Some of my favorite entries are excerpted below.

July 14, 1914
Have finished my essay. But am written out — obviously. To-night I struggled with another, and spent two hours sucking the end of my pen. But after painfully mountainous parturition, all I brought forth were the two ridiculous mice of one meretricious trope and one grammatical solecism. I can sometimes sit before a sheet of paper, pen in hand, unable to produce a word.

October 7, 1914
To me woman is the wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, ‘WOMAN.’

May 30, 1915
After a lunch of scrambled eggs and rhubarb and cream went up into the Beech Wood again and sat on a rug at the foot of a tree. The sun filtered in thro’ the greenery casting a ‘dim, religious light.’
‘It’s like a cathedral,’ I chattered away, ‘stained glass windows, pillars, aisles — all complete.’
‘It would be nice to be married in a Cathedral like this,’ she said. ‘At C—— Hall Cathedral, by the Rev. Canon Beech. . .’
‘Sir Henry Wood was the organist.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and the Rev. Blackbird the precentor.’
We laughed over our silliness!

June 1, 1915
Sunlight and a fresh wind. A day of tiny cameos, little coups d’oeil, fleeting impressions snapshotted on the mind: the glint on the keeper’s gun as he crossed a field a mile away below us, sunlight all along a silken hawser which some Spider engineer had spun between the tops of two tall trees spanning the whole width of a bridle path, the constant patter of Shrew-mice over dead leaves, the pendulum of a Bumble-bee in a flower, and the just perceptible oscillation of the tree tops in the wind. While we are at meals the perfume of Lilac and Stocks pours in thro’ the window and when we go to bed it is still pouring in bv the open lattice.

March 11, 1917
In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I.

·(Almost) literally one zillion photos of cherry blossoms and other spring flowers, so I gave up and put them in their own post, see next.

Be safe and well.

Okay, so it seems like I should be able to order books from overseas once again, knock wood kenahora, and the problem is that I have a HUGE list of books I want. Please help me narrow down what to prioritize! (Obviously I am not going to order these things all at once, but you know, a little at a time.)

I amused myself sorting out my list of books I want by type, alphabetization, etc., and came up with:
·novels by Ben Aaronovitch, Ryka Aoki, Megan Bannen, E.J. Beaton, Chaz Brenchley, Zen Cho, Alice Degan, Diane Duane, Rod Duncan, Bernadine Evaristo, Guo Xiaolu, Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Ren Hutchings, Candice Iloh, L.D. Inman, Grace Li, Freya Marske, Nicole Mones, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, A.J. Pearce, Christopher Priest, S.E. Robertson, Iona Datt Sharma, Dawnie Walton, Edward Christopher Williams, and Cynthia Zhang;

·memoirs/diaries/letters/essays by Kate Briggs, Wayson Choy, Parnaz Foroutan, Emily Shore, Guo Xiaolu, Shirley Jackson, C.L.R. James, Jhumpa Lahiri, Hsiao Li Lindsay, Betty Liu, Margaret Mahy, Delphine Minoui, Janet Neel, Nina Mingya Powles, Huma Qureshi, Ruth Seid, Jane Smiley, Abby Chava Stein, and Meline Toumani;

·social history etc. by Chloe Angyal, Amy Helen Bell, Seth Berkman, Rey Chow, June Cummins, Christina Kelley Gilmartin, Miriam Glucksmann, Saidiya Hartman, Louise Heren, Hirose Reiko, Suma Ikeuchi, Sarah Lonsdale, Wendy Moore, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Michiko Suzuki, Jing Tsu, and A. Zee;

and poetry by Marilyn Hacker.

Some of these have their own priorities; Zen Cho, L.D. Inman and Iona Datt Sharma are DW friends/acquaintances whose published work I’m already familiar with and fond of, and while I don’t know S.E. Robertson fannishly or in person, I had the pleasure of beta reading their third book. The books by Ben Aaronovitch, Diane Duane, and Cynthia Harrod-Eagles are the latest in continuing series I enjoy. Otherwise it’s pretty much “somebody mentioned this somewhere and I thought it sounded interesting.”

So: if you have recommendations for what I should start with among the above, let me know! Or if you’ve read (or written) something recently that isn’t on this list but should be?

· Well, I learned the Chinese word for “olive,” 橄榄, which has to be useful somewhere.

· I made a lot of applesauce in the big Mai-san pot, so called because it was a wedding present by a friend of my partner’s of that name, a huge cast iron cauldron; it’s the only option if I want to make more than, like, a serving and a half, apples cook down almost as bad as spinach. On the other hand, there is no shortage of apples, I can make applesauce every other day all winter if I feel like it.

· My veranda plants are having a last hurrah; the morning glories have finally conceded to winter, but the cherry tomato and the strawberry both have a lot of ripening fruits. Knock wood I might actually be able to keep the strawberry plant going through the winter?

· At work, I damn near translated “aerial survey” as “avian survey.” It’s a bird, it’s a plane…

· Middle-aged to elderly Korean ladies singing “Country Roads” at the nighttime junior high—I couldn’t help imagining the lyrics changing “West Virginia” to “Cheju Island” or “Kyongsang namdo” or whatever, a song about wistfulness for home is all too appropriate in a community of immigrants. I don’t know if any of them thought about it this way. On the way back to the station, everyone who passed me was speaking Vietnamese.

· Silly question: what do you have on your desk? (or in/around the space where you write and do stuff). I have a large desk which holds two computers (Mado-chan for work and Rin-chan for personal stuff); a stack of books about Miyamoto Yuriko and Chao Yuen Ren; a clear drawer thing which holds postcards, stamps, clinic cards, all that jazz, with a small monthly calendar on top of it; a mug of pens, pencils, toothbrush for computer cooler cleaning, nail-clipper, scissors; a repurposed Godiva box, brown suede nap, which holds necklaces (the chocolate divisions help keep them from tangling up), memory sticks, and medication, and has a Mucha brooch and a paperweight stegosaurus on top; a small radio on which I listen to the classical programs; a sticker of Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan (drawing by skeptical_lynx, gift from clevermanka); my notebook, a plain A6 ring-bound lined one that holds work deadlines and other lists; and usually my phone and assorted temporary paperwork.

· Rereading Naomi Mitchison’s wartime diaries, immensely relatable. Reading something from the 18th century: “By and bye I found myself sitting crying over my books in the Signet Library, because he was so nice and I could never tell him so, never give him back kindness, only two hundred years away in time, one could get at what he was and what he wanted.” Tearing down Eric Gill: “He says ‘I do not gather that women have, in general, much of an eye for the beauty of their lovers’ bodies…They are not inflamed by images…they do not make or go to or see or buy pictures of men as men do pictures of women.’ The hell he thinks that. … And as to being inflamed by images--! The interstices of my days are full of erotic images. Quite often, of course, I use them as current to turn the mills of the imagination. I am 44 and should know what I’m doing by now. … I should suppose that most women thought rather more in terms of touch and less in terms of vision (or perhaps a writer thinks more in such terms than a sculptor)….”.

· Photos: various moments of autumn, more train bridges, and a restaurant (unfortunately not serving hotpot) that amused me.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

· Still working slowly on the Guardian Chinese script, except now I'm stalled because I dislike the end of 24 and all of 25 so much. Must get on with it. Otherwise fortuitously, this process means actually rewatching the whole thing in little bursts; I always forget how intense the bomb scene is, how they're both out of breath from tension by the time the bomb is disarmed.
(Reminded me of setting Guardian to Rachmaninoff 3 as here, where you can "hear" the wires being cut; maybe if the wishlist fest happens again I should ask for a little snippet of this as an actual vid?)

·Speaking of requesting fannish things, clevermanka and I were talking about Yamaguchi Akira's artwork, and I realized I should nominate the general world of his paintings for Yuletide next year. Ideas?

· Happy translation of the week: writing about the freethinking educational journal ひと (person/people) and trying to come up with an appropriately nuanced equivalent English title, I settled on Mensch.
In other translation/interpretation news, I had to fill in as interpreter for a business colleague of my partner's. D, the colleague, spoke mostly Korean, put into English by his wife S, which I then put into Japanese for my partner, and back... They were very nice and it went fine, but it was the first time I've listened seriously to Korean in a while and I could tell how much I would have been able to understand ten years ago. I also found myself, unhelpfully, totally unable to say anything in Korean myself without having to cycle through Chinese words and syntax first. It was like having my brain braided.

· Two nice encounters on my way home the other night. The cats that live behind the temple usually meow demandingly at me and then run away; this time one said "meow!" very loudly and ran right up to me to head-butt me and slither around my knees, letting me stroke it all over. Its friend saw this and decided not to get left out, so for about five minutes I had two very demanding cats to cope with. Maybe they decided it was cold enough that humans could come in useful?
Also two ladies chatting in Chinese outside a little Chinese deli; one dropped some change and, when I [saw my chance and] picked it up, said absently 谢谢. Before she could switch to Japanese I said 不客气, and got to practice Chinese with them for a few minutes--speaking okay, listening terrible as usual, but they were very nice and the deli lady sold me a delicious 蛋挞 egg tart (h/t Wang Zhuocheng). Promising for future conversation practice and snacks...

· Rereading Sylvia Plath's early letters, another writer whose letters and diaries I prefer to her fiction and poetry. As a college senior, she writes to a boyfriend "my new philosophy of life is...in times of crisis Assume-The-Worst-But-Serve-It-With-Parsley (that last is out of my 'joy of cooking' book from the section on what to do with leftovers)." Words for our time.

·Photos: Two varieties of persimmons, a green-eyed cat, a Gaudi-esque train car, park lights at night (long story), parent turtle being roused from a nap by insistent baby, two morning glory views (the edge-on ones are on my veranda, where the morning glory, after months of sulking, has suddenly decided to bloom daily), and a shrine tree...umm...camphor tree.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

・ I'm not not writing, which is something. Haven't signed up for Yuletide yet but hope to do so early next week (yet another strike against my original writing...time management! it can be done! theoretically.) As usual my signup will probably be divided between "obscure books nobody has ever written fic for" and "Zhu Yilong in one form or another."
I'm translating a huge, very badly written book about Dewey and education, and it brought to my attention a line from one of his books: "as a painter places pigment upon the canvas, or imagines it placed there, his ideas and feeling are also ordered," which perfectly expresses my feelings about longfic/original novels--I learn what I'm writing about by writing it!

・ Speaking of fic, a belated notice of the two awesome gifts I got in quick succession at the end of the Guardian wishlist fest: a gorgeous post-canon fic from china_shop, who understands my obsession with Zhao Xinci and gives it shape beautifully, and a podfic of one of my own short fics from flamingwell and her lovely voice.

・ Rereading Vere Hodgson's WWII diaries, which are full of entertaining bon mots in shared times of trouble. "One can have too much good taste and self-control in not criticizing a Government." / "I asked for [macaroni] the other day, and a man behind me said 'Can I have three bowls of gold dust, please.'" / "[Cows] are one of the things of which I am not afraid. Bombs yes. Cows no." / "Our copy of Magna Carta with the Declaration of Independence have been put away somewhere in America in a bombproof place. Those two historical documents cuddling each other...". / "The enemy did not seem to understand what was expected of them, and failed to fall in with our plans. Grrr! As Miss Moyes says it makes you see green, pink and heliotrope."

・ In scarce new books, reading R. F. Kuang’s Babel and Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms in rapid succession was a really weird experience. I did not do it on purpose, it’s just what the bookstores presented me with, but both are magical alternate historical Britain settings with half-English, half-Chinese queer male protagonists, and both involve a lot of violence and questioning of loyalties and issues of sovereignty. Otherwise they are very, very different. Won't go into detail here but I did not really like either one; I thought they both tended to hit the reader over the head with their points, Kuang's an accurate if unpleasant premise, Pulley's her all-too-usual protagonist-centered characterization (and in this case, setting). Kuang has important points to make, and her description of language-magic was wonderful; Pulley remains very good at sentence-level readability and interesting, compelling characters. I wish I'd enjoyed the books more. Curious about what other people have thought.

・ I have been making weird bassoon noises daily, and even learned the Chinese for it, 巴松管. It's hard! However, antisoppist has been kindly commiserating, and I will say it's a lot more noticeable to acquire just one or two percentage points of skill when the baseline is 0%.

・Photos: Lots of morning-glories (sadly none mine), some artifacts from a walk in the country (the rice is almost ready for harvest), elderly gents sketching in an odd place, and a polite bit of darkness.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

・The Guardian wishlist fest happened (thank you, trobadora and china_shop!) and I got two gorgeous fics, a gentle quasi-fixit for The Rebel by elenothar and a lovely Guo Changcheng-and-language drabble by Amedia, along with all the other amazing things posted. I wrote about 10K-odd spread over a handful of fics and had a lot of fun doing so, as well as trying out a translation of a (C-subtitled) interview with some help from presumenothing. (Conclusion: Bai Yu likes to begin almost every sentence with 就 and end it with 嘛.)

・One of my wishlist fics focused on (the aftereffects of) Shen Wei kneeling in the rain, and I belatedly found the perfect epigraph for it while reading this week's Shakespeare with yaaurens and company: "Who cannot feel nor see the rain, being in ’t,/Knows neither wet nor dry."

・Listening to a couple of favorites on the radio. Jenůfa is still breathtaking. The Strauss oboe concerto is delightful, and always takes me back to hearing it for the first time at a summer concert in high school with my crush of the time, an oboe player himself (I have a long history of falling for oboists lol).

・Speaking of double reeds, I had my first bassoon lesson! Now I have a reed to toot on and a fiendishly complicated fingering chart to do my best to memorize before the next one. I discovered that the standard bassoonist's chest/shoulder harness (just like Lin Nansheng's shoulder holster, only not such nice leather) is not designed for, um, well-endowed female figures, and if I do decide to get my own instrument I'm gonna have to work something out. But it's neat to actually make sounds on it. I've learned, what, all told about 2.8 foreign languages, I should be able to memorize some fingerings?

・Rereading: the diaries of Jean Lucey Pratt, unfulfilled and lonely and sometimes, poor lady, a bit sentimental and tiresome, but not without humor. "I am an idle, vain, pea-brained, vacillating, silly wench, and have eaten too much sweet cake." Too close to home! "I hunger and thirst for an encouraging comment [on her newly published book] from a reputable quarter." Just like us upon posting fics etc.... "To every one of my friends I give what I can, but with each individual...I withhold some part of myself," a phrase that interests me in its Venn diagram of friendships.
Also Stephanie Wellen Levine on Brooklyn Lubavitcher girls, a non-fiction book that reads like a gorgeously vivid set of linked short stories, recommended for anyone interested in women and Judaism.

・Photos: one zillion photos today, mostly because of a visit Y and I made to the wind chime temple this week, where we listened to the glass chimes sing in the wind and visited their tearoom, he had shaved ice and I drank rose juice. Note the little frog (painted) and the camouflaged turtle (alive). Also various sky and light scenes, a nice voluptuous building, and the living room pothos in the sun.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

A...while earlier, what is time, both superborb and presumenothing posted very interesting and insightful discussions of translation; I’ve been meaning to post something on the subject myself, but it turns out I just have a collection of quotations and random comments, at great length, rather than any actual solid points to make. That said, in hopes of providing some interest and stimulating my own brain, please find what I got here below.

The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all the other essentials have already been provided, so he can just sit down and write his ass off.
( Languages... )
-- Gregory Rabassa (translator of Gabriel García Márquez and other Spanish- and Portuguese-language texts)

Waley once said to Ivan Morris, I think it was, that the translator, having taken so much away from his original, must add something by way of compensation. ( The principle is... )
-- Edward Seidensticker, translator of the Tale of Genji among other Japanese classics

To follow in Seiden-sama’s grumpy footsteps a little, ( some general points and some of my experience )

( Things that make translation fun for me )

Sorry for this endless blather. Let me know if it brings anything to mind!

I’m in the end-of-fiscal year lacuna which means I have next to no work (it’s okay, it will pick up again by mid-April judging by past experience), so I’m amusing myself on DW instead. Mostly-silly-language-stuff post here; the translation post I keep talking about in process also, plus I have a bunch of administrative stuff to play with on guardian_learning.

・Another baseball-player name, this one not baseball-related: first name 天真. Pronounced “Tenma” rather than Tenshin/Tianzhen, a big sturdy kid with no particular resemblance to any of the Wu Xies ;)

・I’ve been convinced for a while now that a good Chinese live-action adaptation of Nodame Cantabile would have cast Zhu Yilong as Chiaki, and I feel this photo proves me right.

・Y brought home some delicious roast sweet potatoes for dessert, and I ambitiously dipped them in chili powder and found that it actually worked! Only because they were VERY VERY SWEET, but if you like both sweet and spicy cf Zhao Yunlan I recommend it.

・I realized I’d had three Zoom engagements in three languages in three days: Chinese conversation with Yu-jie, academic reading group with old grad school colleagues in Japanese (mostly just listening, I never had much of a research brain), yaaurens’ Shakespeare reading in English A good line from Henry VIII: “’tis better...than to be perk’d up in a glistering grief, / And wear a golden sorrow,” which instantly brought to mind poor parentless Jin Ling for me. Now if only my Chinese would catch up to the others.

・For reasons that don’t need going into, a-Pei and I were talking about how to count mermaids in Chinese: 一个 like people？一条 like fish？(Also mermaids are 美人鱼 in Chinese and just 人魚 in Japanese; either Japanese mermaids are not beautiful (美) or it’s taken for granted that they are so the extra character isn’t needed.)

・naraht brought the Cheshire Novel Prize to my attention and, with her kind help with the synopsis, I went ahead and submitted something for book 1 of my original thing. I will eat my hat if it succeeds, but it’s a good exercise at the worst. edited for correct pronoun

・tinny and I were talking elsewhere about Esperanto, and about what a “universal language” which also contained non-European languages would/should look like. Her thoughts, kindly OK’d for quotation here, included ... to remove cases altogether and do it like in English (and Chinese most of the time) and define subject/object by word order within the sentence., ...showing plural through word endings.... Everything else, I would try and solve through particles. I'd remove tenses as well, and use the Chinese method of always putting the time particle first, so you know when something happens - and have particles for the cases where something happened "before" or "after" something else, as well as the "completed action." I’m not sure what my thoughts are, except that you would probably have to have a list of sounds which the largest possible group of people can pronounce, and draw your vocabulary mostly from words containing only those sounds (or else be willing to mutate sounds all over the place). Ideas?

・Still rereading the Mass Observation WWII diaries; I’m particularly charmed by Ernest van Someren, a research scientist, uxorious husband and involved father, cosmopolitan traveler of highbrow tastes in music and art, and jack-of-all-trades of a hundred hobbies—definitely what Japanese English calls “my pace,” someone who does his own thing happily regardless of what everyone else is doing. He must have been very much valued by his employers, because I went through and made a list of all the things he records doing at his workplace during work hours that are not work:
( In his own words to the extent possible )

Photos: There are so many cherry blossoms right now. If they bore fruit, we would be swimming in cherries. Also a few remaining stray plum trees.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

・Thank you very much indeed, anonymous benefactor (恩人？) who promptly followed up on my grumbling in the previous post by gifting me a paid account both here and at guardian_learning! Such a kind thing to do. Please let me know how to pay you back? Likewise if anyone is in need of a paid account but finding it hard to afford, or knows someone who is, drop me a line so I can do some paying forward. No time limit in either case.

・Still health-related gloomy, still (knock wood) in the tiresome rather than serious category. That aside, reminding myself to appreciate ordinary uneventful daily life... .

・For comfort, have Take 6 singing "Gold Mine". (I was going to say this is probably the only specifically Christian piece of music you'll see me post, but I forgot about, like, requiems and cantatas and so on and so forth. You know what I mean. For what it's worth, my atheist-Jew father absolutely adored this song...)

・Rereading the Mass-Observation wartime diaries, which deserve their own post sometime soon, both for funny and for painfully topical/relatable (see: pandemic, Ukraine, etc. etc.). “...Later in the day the depression wore off, but after 6 o’clock I asked a [nurse] what the news was; she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s too depressing.’” (Edward Stebbing, April 10, 1941) “There are the twin dragons, ‘too tired’ and ‘no time.’” (Edith Oakley, September 21, 1943)

・Random slightly silly Chinese question: You add 还 to good things to make them a bit less good, so 好 is good and 还好 is okay. So how do we translate 还OK?

・Just to confuse my Japanese/Chinese brain entirely, the Japanese novel I was reading included the word 那辺, with a pronunciation gloss of “nahen” and meaning “where.” Miura Shion, don’t do this to me.

・Watching bits of the spring high school baseball tournament and thinking about the various baseball players whose names suggest that they’re fulfilling lifelong expectations. The onetime Hanshin Tigers star closer, Fujikawa Kyuji, is named 球児 , kid who plays baseball. There’s a kid this year called Suzuki Rui, whose first name, 塁, means “base” as in first-second-third. The Yakult Swallows used to have a center fielder called Manaka Mitsuru, whose family name, 真中, means “dead center.” Another of this year’s high school kids actually goes him one better: he’s a center fielder whose family name is just 中, center, only it’s pronounced Atari, which is the word for a hit...

・I have some other (slightly less silly) language stuff to post about, and I’m still thinking about the post on translation I’ve had in mind for ages; sometime soon.

・Photos (now that I have all this wonderful paid-account photo capacity!) This year’s first cherry blossoms. Some not!lilies-of-the-valley, and some pretty blue starflowers (that’s not their name, I don’t know their name), and some flowers which are not actually flowers. A city canal, a real tree and a graffiti tree, and a vending machine which does not sell drinks.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

...a day or so late, but close enough for jazz. 新春快乐，祝大家很幸福的一年，happy new year!

More relatable words on writing, this time from Jessica Mitford, whose letters I have been rereading (highly recommended, Decca was a HANDFUL but/and her letters are enthralling):
"I’m getting on with it but in my own way--bits and pieces, which I hope will one day clatter together into a book. (Mary said she had told you that’s NOT the way to write a book; sorry, but it’s my way...” (November 22, 1985).

Watching bits of livestreams of the Prix de Lausanne ballet concours; ballet really is a foreign language for me but the kids' dancing is so beautiful, lighter than air. (There's an interpreter on hand for some of the competitors who don't speak English or French, and I'm curious about the specialized knowledge needed to be a ballet interpreter, maybe they're all former dancers, like baseball interpreters.)

Writing a bit of Zhao Xinci for stress relief (mine, if not his). This is the beginning of what I think of as the world's-grumpiest-buddy-cops AU. ( Read more... )

Photos: Accidentally auspicious for the Lunar New Year: a lemon tree (大吉大利 = 大桔大利 or so I'm told), some red lanterns, and a silver-dollar tree. The cat (on a warm tin roof?) is a bonus, I'm pretty sure it chose that location to nap for maximum aesthetic effect.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

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nnozomi

May 2025

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1: 麻吉で
2: 可盐可甜
3: 月亮圆圆
4: 四月之子
5: Some silliness before a stressful weekend
6: Lists of things
7: 白节快乐 (and yes, that sounds even weirder in English)
8: 种地吧 | Become a Farmer
9: That’d be a long tale. That’d be several long tales.

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Page generated Jul. 10th, 2025 08:34 am

Entries tagged with books: diaries

Yuletide and book reviews

Travel and other good things

mostly language stuff

syllables in blossom

summer trivia

嘴太软了

rainy season ramblings

aren't they lovely

明けましておめでとうございます

好久不见, omnibus edition

useful beauty

books I haven't read yet

current to turn the mills

笨蛋挞就是我吧

mostly reading and photos

(wood)wind chimes

in another hue

words and cherry blossoms

烦死了，啊我死了，还没死了

新春

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May 2025

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