nnozomi

I’m gonna have to start off yet again with “I’m way behind on comments but if you’ve posted something I’ve read it and been thinking of you,” which, though true, I feel should only hold a limited number of times. End-of-year busy, away for a night or two, sick for a while, winter hibernating tendencies, no genuine excuses. Posting right now a bunch of accumulated paragraphs because I have too much work to do and I don’t want to do it, so I am pretending I have time to do this… .

New Year’s cards not sent yet; expect them, well, in the New Year. (As noted in my last entry, if you’ve gotten one from me before expect one again unless you notify me otherwise; if you haven’t and you want one, let me know a name/address to use.)

More math workbook translation—there are numerous problems in which two brothers (or occasionally two sisters) leave the house at the same time and proceed at different paces toward the library or the station, and I can’t help wondering why they’re all on such bad terms, why not just walk or bicycle together and get there together? And are the younger brothers(/sisters) old enough to be left to walk on their own? Also, there are problems like “express the relationship of these line segments etc. using symbols,” which always make me want to respond with “AB❤️C” or similar. I mean, it’s asking me about relationships!

A very old friend from college emailed me for the first time in something like twenty-five years to let me know he and his wife were visiting Japan and could we get together for lunch or something, so we did. We had a kind of difficult friendship in college (also I was, I think, unusual among his friends of any gender because I didn’t ever go to bed with him), but we were close and it was really nice to sit down together and catch up on the last few decades, finding out that each of us is doing okay, knock wood, with some shared interests and many new experiences.

I’m still not 100% (I always get sick around New Year’s anyway, it’s just a thing, I’ve decided) but a definite improving factor was a big pot of lentil soup made from, I think, trobadora’s recipe; I don’t know if it was the lentils or the paprika or the feta, but now I’m craving more of it. Also today a bowl of o-jiya for lunch; I like this very simple meal so much I put the recipe into a fic at some point, it’s just rice, tofu, egg, soup base, and sesame oil but so good.

Yuletide fic safely posted before deadline; needs a little tweaking (and a new title and summary) before reveals, but holds together (although for anyone who knows me it might as well have my name signed all over it). I think this is going to be the first year when I just do my assignment and no treats or pinch hits, for the reasons above along with just generally drifting away from fic writing (though not giving it up altogether!). Still, looking forward to all the good reading.
Most Saturdays I go to the free Saturday juku a couple towns over to spend three hours with junior high schoolers and their English homework, which is sometimes fun and often frustrating (mostly not the kids’ fault, they’re all nice kids if wildly varying in ability and effort). Sometimes there’s a gap of time while they’re doing test/workbook questions on their own, and I use it to write in longhand; I got about half my Yuletide fic this year done that way, along with a lot of what I wrote for the Guardian wishlist, and today—with no remaining fic obligations—about 300 words of my original thing, which felt very satisfying. I hate longhand, but maybe I should do it more often. (For the record, my handwriting is so terrible that it serves as an effective cipher no matter who might look over my shoulder.)

Rereading Helen Thorpe’s The Newcomers, an account of a year spent in an ESL classroom at a Colorado high school, with kids from the DRC, Burma, El Salvador, Mexico, Iraq, and various other countries, which is a lovely piece of writing (Thorpe is a terrific nonfiction writer in general), somewhat similar to another favorite, Brooke Hauser’s The New Kids, about a Manhattan high school serving similar immigrants. So many individual stories worth knowing about. Also makes me think of the nighttime junior high near here, where I hang out in two classes; English for Class E, mostly Korean-born ladies with an average age somewhere in the sixties, many of them Japanese-Korean bilingual, some of them obviously very bright and deserving of the education they didn’t get to have (also one man of similar age with a Japanese name, who may be one of the people born roughly before 1965 with a physical disability who missed out on the special education schools first established in 1977). Also Japanese for Class B, three Nepali teenagers, a Chinese-Japanese kid from Guangdong, and two recently arrived older Korean ladies, none of them fluent in Japanese yet. The Nepali kids in particular (one boy with a bright grin and a mustache, three girls with long hair and little high light voices) are all on the ball and quick to learn, I don’t know if that’s a culturally acquired habit or if they’re just a particularly with-it random selection. Everyone makes the same mistakes we did when I was first studying Japanese, よんがつ for ４月, はいてください for 入ってください。

Not enough farmboy Chinese words accumulated yet to list here, but I was thinking how lucky it is for learning purposes that Chinese isn’t as gendered/socially inflected as Japanese. There are certainly some words the farmboys use that I (as a semi-respectable middle-aged lady) would probably not, but compared to their Japanese counterparts…look, let me give you a couple examples. (Vaguely sociolinguistic waffling follows)

I probably wouldn’t say 贼 as an intensifier or 不 alone as a tag question on the whole (although I could most likely get away with them in casual chat with A-Pei, for instance, it’s not like she hasn’t heard me say 特么 and other minced oaths anyway), but most of the language the farmboys use is something I could use too. Whether it’s me or Farmboy A, we can both get away (I think) with saying something like 我饿死了，吃饭吧 (I’m hungry, let’s eat) without drawing a second glance. On the other hand, Imaginary Japanese Farmboy A, talking to his peers, is probably going to say something like 腹へった、飯食おうぜ (hara hetta, meshi kuō ze) in that context, where I would say お腹空いた、ご飯食べようよ (onaka suita, gohan tabeyō yo). You will notice that although Imaginary Japanese Guy A and I are saying the same thing in the same language, there isn’t one word pronounced the same (kind of an extreme example, but then again I didn’t even put in any pronouns). This is one of the fun things about Japanese in its way, but I’m kind of glad for practical purposes the same does not apply (much) to Chinese… (Or am I wrong? Correct me if so!)

Photos: Seasonal.

Be safe and well.

Recent good things:
· My morning glories got carried away today and produced two dozen blooms all at once, a few lavender and the rest purple-spotted (see photos). I have no idea what their standard of timing is, but it was a nice thing to wake up to.
· Reading fic in Chinese and getting so absorbed in it I almost missed the train (not going into detail about the fic for reasons, but man, that was one of the best hugs I’ve come across in fiction in a while)
· Semi-homemade Thai green curry (curry paste etc. from a kit, plus chicken and shiitake and bamboo shoots and baby corn and a whole lot of eggplant) with a homegrown habanero thrown in for mellow high heat
· Actually getting to like most of Sibelius 3. The second movement is still dead boring, but after six months of rehearsal I now find the first and third movements exciting both to play and to listen to, who would’ve thought.
· The farmboys singing their theme song—half a dozen of them are genuine tenors with solid upper ranges, and the clear high note at the end of the chorus rings like a bell.

Writing and translation: Original thing still proceeding in company with the snails. Amused to see a novel I was reading use the same little coded “f/f is happening here” gesture I put in between two characters—clearly it works!
· JA-EN translation for fun, still working slowly on the romance-novel-deconstruction-novel. Tricky switching between the pseudo-Harlequin-medieval tone and the narrator’s whimsical/world-weary one. Also struggling with the names in the pseudo-romance-novel, which are all spelled out phonetically; Warwick and Alienor are okay, but I’m pretty sure the lady-in-waiting is Marie and not Marié, and I’ve guessed at Chandos (as in the Handel anthems) for シャンドス, which is no name I ever heard of. As for the place name ノザンプール, your guess is as good as mine, I’m not even sure if it’s supposed to be pseudo-French or pseudo-English—Nozampoule? Northern Poole?
· ZH-EN translation: I got through a short fic (not for publication), which was a fun effort if trying. Chengyu are everywhere; the fics I’m reading are mostly in modern settings and not featuring, like, especially poetic or literary characters, but they’re still overflowing with assorted chengyu. Other assorted issues: Can I translate 撒娇 as “flirting”? How about “acting like a girl” as “acting prissy”? Can I use “I wish…” for 后悔, given its contrafactual implications? Chinese sentences tend to go on for ages, with commas between clauses; is that an excuse for me to indulge my semicolon habit? (Er, self-referential much)
· EN-ZH translation: I chose my shortest Guardian fic (about 250 words) and tried to render it into Chinese, which is very difficult. With a dictionary, I can pretty much express the meaning (I think. I hope), but forget tone or nuance, and I’m sure there are sixty zillion grammatical mistakes. Still, again, a fun effort. This one I might actually post just for the hell of it once I polish it a little more, then anyone who cares to can point out the errors.

Music lately: Revisiting the Brahms first piano concerto, one of my all-time favorite pieces even among Brahms. I’m sure I’ve linked it before, but the slow movement’s long piano solo passage over a pedal point in the orchestra (from about 31:00 here, although you really need to listen to the whole thing) is just…anybody would believe in God. One of the fullest expressions of that Brahmsian sense that life can be painful and terrible and irrational and tragic, but it’s still and always worth it. And the reviving energy in the third movement coda (around 46:36) is a joy. (Linked performance is the great Arthur Rubinstein; Seong-Jin Cho recording when, he would do a better job with that second movement passage than any pianist I can imagine).
On another note entirely, a couple of my favorite Dreams Come True songs, いつもいつでも and サンキュー, Yoshida Miwa’s high energy and beautiful voice enough to make anyone’s day.

Some stuff (re)read on openlibrary.org, bless it.
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Chao Yuen Ren

A collection of essays by my 偶像 Chao Yuen Ren, some largely of interest to linguistics scholars but all full of his brilliance and irreverent good cheer. Some of the lighter quotations: “Sometimes, to be sure, I overdo it and create such fancy words as 胜利八菜汁, which is the favorite juice for breakfast at our house, if you know what I refer to. I had not realized until long after it became established in our household that the V in V-8 did not stand for 胜利 but simply the V in vegetable!” / “Chinese students who have studied some English have made up potential forms for English verbs and say things like ‘quali-de-fy’ and ‘quali-bu-fy.’” / At one stage, when Little Aunt had been correcting Canta [CYR’s toddler granddaughter]’s geng for deng ‘light’ by making her say de-de-deng, she began to call a light dededen. Then, passing the Bay Bridge one night with its many lights along the way, she said, ‘De-de-de-de-de-de-…den!’”

·

Jean Little

Rereading, for the first time in many years, some of Jean Little’s middle-grade? YA? novels. Listen for the Singing is still my favorite; I love watching Anna (of From Anna) come into her own, supported by her friends and teachers and family but doing the hard work herself. (Quibble: I wish there was one line to reassure us that Isobel finds friends at her new high school too! I always worry about her!) Anna’s changing relationship with her older brother Rudi is very moving, and I like the cameos by her other siblings too, especially Gretchen, and her new friends—in particular Paula Kirsch, with her sharp wit and indestructible good humor, is a delight. One thing I noticed about Jean Little this time around is that she makes the adults into real people too, not just background props—Anna’s parents have their own personalities and viewpoints, and one of my favorite parts about the book is the way we go, with Anna, from despising Mr. Lloyd, the merciless homeroom teacher, to empathizing with and even in a way admiring him. (It’s also a book about disability written by someone who has been there and knows, and it taught me about low vision the same way Tim Kennemore’s Wall of Words did about dyslexia, more effectively than anything I learned in education classes.)
Stand in the Wind is not really one of my favorites, the “going to camp” theme doesn’t interest me enough and I feel like Ellen, the forbearing older sister, deserves her own book, but I still chant to myself “stand in the wind and eat peanut brittle” once in a while, and it helps.
I’d forgotten how good the Look Through My Window and Kate duology is—Emily and Kate (and their poems) are wonderful, but reading the books as an adult, I almost find myself more interested in the grownups, Emily’s parents (who are, like Emily herself, conventional but not boring or unimaginative), and Kate’s parents, April and Jonathan, harried intellectuals who are clearly individuals before they’re husband-and-wife or mother-and-father, but who also love each other and Kate in their own distinctive ways). I wonder why Little, a gentile, chose to write a book focused not just on being Jewish but on living in that nebulous Jewish-but-culturally-estranged state of being where Kate’s family is (with which I empathize very much); I guess it was just the story she wanted to tell, and she pulls it off.

·

Dorothy Crayder

Am I the only one who’s ever read Dorothy Crayder’s Ishkabibble? I had completely forgotten about this middle-grade book, which is very good and VERY weird. Lucy is a bullied fifth-grader who accidentally acquires a guru, a middle-aged lady from Hackensack, New Jersey, who teaches her that bullying is all about alphabetical order (except maybe it’s not) and the word “ishkabibble” is the key to solving her problems (except it’s not always that simple). It’s one of those books written for younger kids that rewards adult rereading, as indicated below.
“When you say ishkabibble you gotta mean it, heart and soul. Them victimizers can tell a fake ishkabibbler from the genuine article.”
“Is [this little dog] the one who bites?” “Nah, Lawrence wouldn’t hurt a fly.” “Then, why does the sign say to beware of the dog?” “Wadda you want me to do, put up a sign that says BEWARE OF WOMAN?”
Her parents said to each other, “Our child is too young to feel frazzled.” But being happy-go-lucky parents, they quickly reminded each other that their child had also been an early teether, walker, and talker. So why not an early frazzler? And they let it go at that.
“But what made Three Ts suddenly pick on me anyway? What did I do?” …“Ooh, yes, I sort of remember. But—” “But what?” “It sounds so dumb now. It was the day you came to school wearing your hair tied in two bunches with different-colored ribbons. Wasn’t one red and one green?” Lucy was speechless. Then she groaned, “Ribbons! Ribbons! Gawd-amighty—victimizing is crazy! Kee-razy! Only, Maureen, they were not red and green. I wouldn’t be caught dead looking like a Christmas tree in September. They happened to be blue and green, which is a very beautiful combination.” “But Lucy, they didn’t match.” “They weren’t supposed to.”
That, Lucy thought, is what a real victim looks like. In the midst of her happiness, Lucy felt a big sadness for Ricky [whose drawing of a horse was just ruined by accident]. “Ricky,” she pleaded, “Ricky—say ‘ishkabibble’!” …Finally he shouted, “No! I won’t say it. It’s not supposed to work for dapples. In case you want to know something. Dapples are too—too--important!” …As [the art teacher] walked away, he said in his most casual manner, “I don’t know what this ishkabibble business is all about, but you kids were just taught a lesson about art.” And about something else, Lucy thought. About how you were lucky if you cared enough about something beside yourself to feel as hurt as Ricky did. Who would have known that Ricky was lucky? Now Lucy knew.

Photos: All morning glories today; the purple-spotted ones are mine, the fuchsia ones belong to a neighborhood lady (or rather to her grandson; the local elementary school sends its kids home with morning glory plants over summer vacation).

Be safe and well.

New orchestra music includes Sibelius 3, which I can do without—like so much of Sibelius, it’s both strenuous and unrewarding to play. On the other hand, I hated #7 the whole time we rehearsed it but now I quite like listening to it, so maybe there’s hope, we’ll see. The main symphony is the Rhine, Schumann 3, an old friend—I think this is the third, maybe fourth time I’ve played it, and while there isn’t much new to discover what’s there is wonderful, especially the exuberance of the first and fifth movements, and the sad, stately glory of the fourth (between the minor-key start and the counterpoint, I always think of it as if captioned with “The people mourn as Bach ascends into heaven”).
In other recent listening, Elis Regina singing Cartomante—I think I link to this here every time I listen to it, but it’s just that good. “Porque na verdade, eu te quero vivo…”
Also I went back to some half-forgotten William Bolcom songs recently—I have mixed feelings about Bolcom, but if you need something to make your day a little brighter try Amor. The linked recording is one I found more or less at random on YouTube, with Adèle Charvet singing; I looked her up and found that her grandfather, Charles Ewanjé Epée, is a singer-songwriter from Cameroon, this is one of his songs (watch out for flashes in the video).

Reading a nonfiction Japanese book about women graduates of the National Defense Academy (the college for the Self-Defense Forces). A little too much in the way of broad strokes and for-public-consumption (I also can’t help wonder if the women in the book would have been more natural and forthcoming if the author weren’t a man), but interesting, especially the account of daily life at the Academy itself, obviously modeled on West Point (I have a thing about unique educational environments and own a handful of books about West Point, where I’ve never set foot), and reacting in essentially similar ways to the initial introduction of women cadets (in 1992). Among the other points that strike me is that, while I’m not halfway through yet, three out of the four women profiled so far ended up divorced; the exception, married to a fellow SDF officer and stationed separately, is managing childcare with help from her father-in-law (not her mother-in-law), who moved in to share the load. Also, there’s a family of four sisters who all went to the Academy, good grief.

Rereading various things in English.

G. Willow Wilson’s The Butterfly Mosque, which is a gorgeously written account of becoming a Muslim, marrying an Egyptian man, and living in Cairo (not actually in that order). Her description of having learned all the things she needs to live as an adult in Cairo (shopping for live ducks for dinner, sharing Friday prayers with other women at a shrine, dancing at family weddings, mastering Egyptian Arabic idioms, choosing tomatoes without maggots), and how little she knows about living as an adult in the US, her home country, got to me.
Kate Gilmore’s Remembrance of the Sun is also about a romance in a Muslim country, this one a novel rather than a memoir: Iran on the eve of the revolution, where Jill and her pleasantly weird family are spending the year, and Jill meets the proto-revolutionary Shaheen because, improbably enough, they both play French horn in the high school band. Funny, sad, and romantic, full of incredibly evocative descriptions of the setting, pulling no punches about the fucked-up complexity of the political and social situation, using the Egmont Overture beautifully to link Shaheen’s revolutionary vision and the passions (for music as well as each other) he and Jill share.
Also a novel by Kate Gilmore but totally different is Jason and the Bard, set at a professional summer stock theater putting on a repertory of six Shakespeare plays, where the titular Jason is one of six high school apprentices taking part. There is a plot, having to do with a string of practical jokes and an actor with poor recall, and there is some romance, but basically they’re just excuses to write a whole book about the joy of Shakespeare summer stock, and it works. The discussion of the plays is sometimes really moving and always thoughtful, especially Antony and Cleopatra (the image of the dawn light shining onto the dying Cleopatra in the last exhausted moments of a tech rehearsal!), and the description of all these strong and disparate personalities—technicians as well as actors—coming together to make them happen is a delight. It’s a book from thirty years ago, but I think it stands up. Two of the major characters are Black; their characterization is not limited to being Not White, but the narrative is aware of the microaggressions they run into as well. Some of the adult actors and at least one teenage apprentice are heavily implied to be gay—in a 2024 edition I think this would be much more up-front. (The treatment of hapless twelve-year-old Colette, the villain of the piece in many ways, is pretty ruthless, but always makes me smile on account of I knew a dead ringer for her, who by her mid-teens had become a thoughtful, sardonic, attractive person with many talents, so I have hope for Colette too.)

I found some deleted scenes from one of my LTR fics (written when I thought the fic was going to be Bai Haotian/Huo Daofu/Liu Sang, which it ultimately refused to be), and actually I kind of like what they’re doing? I’m not in the habit of writing AUs of my own fic and also porn is not my forte, so this may never go anywhere, but here’s a bit to get it out of my system.

this part is more or less SFW

Bai Haotian perched on the windowsill, feeling the curtain ruffle her hair, and took the opportunity to wriggle out of her tights and panties while she watched the two men undress.
They were both dressed to the nines and it was a complicated process, not helped by the fact that both of them seemed constitutionally incapable of just dropping a piece of clothing to the floor once they took it off. When she saw Huo Daofu fold his waistcoat, crisp as new lettuce, and look up to make eye contact with Liu Sang, who was hanging his jacket carefully on a padded hanger, Bai Haotian started to giggle and didn’t even try to stop herself.
She was no longer concerned about whether either of them really wanted to do this: it was there in the heightened color across Liu Sang’s cheekbones, in Huo Daofu’s elevated breathing. He was the first to finish undressing, and Bai Haotian settled back on the palms of her hands to watch as, the last step, he took off his wristwatch with deliberate care and set it on the tidy pile of folded clothing.
Liu Sang, who had started by taking his watch off, was down to boxer shorts and undershirt. He hesitated, as if a little unnerved by suddenly finding someone else naked in his bedroom, and Huo Daofu went to him and slipped his glasses off.
“What--?”
“Take your shirt off,” the doctor said, in a reasonable facsimile of his usual crisp tones, and Liu Sang did. The color in his face was spreading down to his throat. He tried to reclaim his glasses and Huo Daofu pulled them away. “You’ll manage without them.”
“Then—” The one word came out husky and he cleared his throat. “Then you’re taking yours off.”
Huo Daofu hesitated.
“You heard him, Huo-ge,” Bai Haotian called from her windowsill perch.
Huo Daofu took a visibly deep breath and took his own glasses off, setting them carefully down along with Liu Sang’s on the bedside table. That meant neither of them had anything left to take off. Bai Haotian slid down from the windowsill and stood where she was, suddenly breathless with tension.

Photos: Various flowers, a canal, a very old photographer’s studio, a cat on a warm roof.

Be safe and well.

I wrote another fic, oh dear me. (Best writing motivation: have a playlist of my favorite pieces/songs and only permit myself to listen to it when I’m writing.) This one is entirely thanks to elenothar, who got me to watch Under the Skin; about 8K worth of my favorite character (Lu Haizhou) plus Shen Yi, Du Cheng and ensemble.

In other fannish news, the Guardian Wishlist is still open for signups (or for creating things without signing up). Also I owe a bunch of DW comments that I haven’t gotten to yet…

Speaking of music, here’s my obscure-composer-of-the-moment recommendation, Quartet No. 1 by Vitězslav Novak: introduced to me posthumously by Taka and I think it’s very good indeed. His CD (not the recording linked here, sadly pre-YouTube) pairs it with Beethoven’s Opus 130, which needs no introduction.

Another project, not fannish, that I’m thinking about. Would people be interested in reading a collection of biographical notes on prewar Japanese women (and occasionally Korean/Taiwanese/etc.), posted one person at a time weekly or so to a Dreamwidth account? Specifics: “prewar” here is my catch-all term for the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa periods, ie 1868 or thereabouts through 1945 ditto. I have a list of about 200 women who were active in that period, including novelists, doctors, murderers, religious figures, educators, activists, actresses, poets, politicians, and princesses, among others. Some lived past the three-figure mark, others didn’t even make it to twenty but made themselves remembered anyway.
Each entry would probably range from 500 to 1500 words or so, based largely on the various reference books I own (from various eras and standpoints, so I wouldn’t guarantee absolute historical accuracy, but it should come pretty close). Potted history of the woman in question and brief discussions of important historical issues/events relevant to her life; as many links as possible among entries, to create a cross-referenceable collection. Hopefully interesting to read as well as informative!

Reading Emily Post on etiquette via Gutenberg, as one does, and being struck here and there by her turn of phrase.

Lengthy selection from Emily Post, with occasional commentary

It would seem that the variability of the weather was purposely devised to furnish mankind with unfailing material for conversation.
[I]t is unnecessary to add that none but vulgarians would employ a butler (or any other house servant) who wears a mustache! To have him open the door collarless and in shirt-sleeves is scarcely worse!
A head can be shaken politely or rudely. To be courteously polite, and yet keep one's walls up is a thing every thoroughbred person knows how to do—and a thing that everyone who is trying to become such must learn to do.Rules for online interactions?
Introspective people who are fearful of others, fearful of themselves, are never successfully popular hosts or hostesses. If you for instance, are one of these, if you are really afraid of knowing some one who might some day prove unpleasant, if you are such a snob that you can't take people at their face value, then why make the effort to bother with people at all? Why not shut your front door tight and pull down the blinds and, sitting before a mirror in your own drawing-room, order tea for two? Yes, why not? Sounds nice to me.
The endeavor of a hostess, when seating her table, is to put those together who are likely to be interesting to each other. Professor Bugge might bore you to tears, but Mrs. Entomoid would probably delight in him; just as Mr. Stocksan Bonds and Mrs. Rich would probably have interests in common. Here I feel “Professor Bugge” is obviously Enrique Borgos. Would the intervention of Emily Vorpost have saved Miles’ disastrous dinner party?
One inexorable rule of etiquette is that you must talk to your next door neighbor at a dinner table. You must, that is all there is about it! Even if you are placed next to some one with whom you have had a bitter quarrel, consideration for your hostess ,,, and further consideration for the rest of the table exacts that you give no outward sign of your repugnance and that you make a pretence at least for a little while, of talking together. At dinner once, Mrs. Toplofty, finding herself next to a man she quite openly despised, said to him with apparent placidity, "I shall not talk to you—because I don't care to. But for the sake of my hostess I shall say my multiplication tables. Twice one are two, twice two are four——" and she continued on through the tables, making him alternate them with her. As soon as she politely could she turned again to her other companion. Making him alternate them with her!!
A very young girl may motor around the country alone with a man, with her father's consent, or sit with him on the rocks by the sea or on a log in the woods; but she must not sit with him in a restaurant. All of which is about as upside down as it can very well be.
If [a baby] cries in church it just has to cry! …It is trying to a young mother who is proud of her baby's looks, to go to no end of trouble to get exquisite clothes for it, and ask all her friends in, and then have it look exactly like a tragedy mask carved in a beet!
No one declined [to spend a week “camping out” with few amenities], not even the Worldlys, though there is a fly in the amber of their perfect satisfaction. Mrs. Kindhart wrote "not to bring a maid." Mrs. Worldly is very much disturbed, because she cannot do her hair herself. Mr. Worldly is even more perturbed at the thought of going without his valet. He has never in the twenty years since he left college been twenty-four hours away from Ernest. He knows perfectly well that Ernest is not expected. But he means to take him—he will say nothing about it; he can surely find a place for Ernest to stay somewhere. Result: Ernest was found a place to stay, made himself supremely useful, and was specifically invited back the next year. Mr. Worldly/Ernest?
The difference though, between letter-writers of the past and of the present, is that in other days they all tried to write, and to express themselves the very best they knew how—to-day people don't care a bit whether they write well or ill. Plus ça change…
Never put a single clinging tentacle into writing. No comment.
A very beautiful Chicago woman who is always perfectly dressed for every occasion, worked out the cost of her own clothes this way: On a sheet of paper, thumb-tacked on the inside of her closet door, she put a complete typewritten list of her dresses and hats, and the cost of each. Every time she put on a dress she made a pencil mark. By and by when a dress was discarded, she divided the cost of it by the number of times it had been worn. In this way she found out accurately which were her cheapest and which her most expensive clothes.This actually sounds kind of practical! Maybe not for evening dresses, but you know.
And if you happen to like to be talked to by strangers, and if they in turn like to talk to you, it can not be said that there is any rule of etiquette against it.

Photos: crepe myrtle/百日紅, which is nice this time of year but very hard to photograph well. Also a grape arbor, the gas bulbs and a passing train, an old house, some stealth figs, a deco-tora, and a lurking cat.

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.

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?

・I'm sure this has been remarked upon, but Zhao Yunlan's phone lock screen is a 酸浆 calyx, a Chinese lantern plant! (Baidu tells me that it has a number of alternate names like 灯笼果 with "lantern" 灯 in, so no way that was a coincidence...

・I was very sorry to see that I've come so late to Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint that it's long past Yuletide eligibility. That said, does anyone have any fic recs, self- included? (Shadaras kindly linked me to some gorgeous ones, including their own, but I still want more and I'm not sure where to start looking.)

・Y tracked down an old J-pop song that I've had the chorus of stuck in my head for years: Kiroro's 長い間, two Okinawan women who started performing together in high school and are now in their forties and still at it. The theme at 1:19 still gets me.

・I've been rereading John Bellairs for the first time in ages--The Curse of the Blue Figurine--and being reminded just how good he is. ( Read more... )

・Writing some stuff, maybe not what I should be, but what the hell I'm enjoying it. We'll see.

・Photos: some morning glories, a tree outside the local castle, and a rainbow! clevermanka sent me one of, I think it's skeptical-lynx?'s gorgeous Guardian art postcards, and being the lovely person she is she threw in a sticker for good measure. I had it on my desk, and the light coming through my glass bits and bobs did a 画龙点睛.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

Amended from past years:
Thank you for writing something for me. With the exception of the do-not-like stuff, please take any and all of this as optional suggestions only, and do what works for you. Not all of the stuff I like, for instance, may be applicable to all the fandoms I've requested; choose what makes sense to you.

Do not like: darkfic in general, incest, humiliation, NC-17 for either violence or sex (no moral objections, it's just not what I enjoy reading), blatant out-of-characterness, rape/dubcon, Christmas themes (again, not opposed to their existence in general, just not Christian myself), coronavirus/quarantine references etc.

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

I tend to prefer genfic, but have no objection at all to background romance/relationships, or even a shipfic with a high gen ratio, as it were. Any pairing/threesome/etc. is fine as long as you can make me believe in it.

By fandom/characters (alphabetical):
( Read more... )

Thank you again.

Daily life: More school stuff: back at one of the night-time junior highs run by the city. This one serves primarily two populations, a) Nepali kids aged 17 to 21 or so who generally speak good English but need a lot more Japanese study for further education and/or employment, and b) Japanese, Chinese and Korean ladies aged 50 or so to 90 (I am not kidding, Mrs. O is 92) who for various reasons never got to go to junior high to begin with. Almost all of them are enthusiastic and inquisitive and have a lot to say.
Also my husband and I bet on the future (no, not that way) by making umeshu, plum liqueur: you put green plums, rock candy sugar and white liquor (I don't know any of the English names) into a very large glass jar, allow it to take up more than its fair share of space in the fridge, and wait a minimum of three months (or up to ten years). We'll see.

Music: Nothing immediately new, but it's a good time to bring up Florence Price and her amazing piano sonata among other works.

Books: Rereading Hermione Lee's biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, which I read in preference to actually reading Fitzgerald's novels because I'm strange that way. (Also, if I could write a biography this good of anyone I could probably die happy, knock wood.) A quote from one of the novels: "Prayer should be beyond self, and so Nenna repeated a Hail Mary for everyone in the world who was lost in Kingsland Road without their bus fares."

Chinese: I'll give Duolingo credit: I translated "their wives" as 她们的妻子 (in which "their" is feminine) to see if I could get away with it, and the system marked it as a right answer without hesitation. Right on.

Writing: Well, the above-mentioned Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote "Women, if they can, must write novels." I don't know if this is what she had in mind, but I'm trying. There's about one more chapter to go until "everything is quiet and peaceful" suddenly shatters bigtime; I've paused to try and sort out all the threads so far and see what I need to pick up and how.

Photos: ( Only technically the rainy season )

Also, if not already doing so, please see posts by naye and others recently recommending various useful things to do. Be safe and well.

Daily life: Winifred Holtby knew the score: "...until one almost feels as though a war were on, the unending war of mortality against man's brittle life...[h]owever, I'm not as gloomy as this sounds and we do dance forward." Sad news from friends (not even corona-related, what is this year), but nobody is dead, knock wood. We hang in.

Music: In lighter news I was reminded of some of my favorite Dreams Come True songs, I should revisit their back catalogue. In my uninformed opinion they are about the best of J-pop, good music and smart lyrics and Yoshida Miwa's gorgeous voice. (They also introduced me, through a drama theme song, to Toyokawa Etsushi, the only other actor who's ever gotten to me quite the way Zhu Yilong does; he's kind of a grand old man of the field now, but he was dazzling in all those 1990s dramas, with something of ZYL's ability to convey volumes with the subtlest of expressions.)

Books: All Strangers are Kin by Zora O'Neill, a wonderful account of studying Arabic and traveling in the Middle East/North Africa; a rare example of effective writing about how exciting and meaningful (and frustrating) the nitty-gritty of grammar and vocabulary study can be. The genuine thrill of figuring out a root word or conjugating a known verb to create a related but new one...

Chinese: That aside, implied grammar is getting to me! Bring back the agglutinative verbs! 了 is the past tense marker, except when it's the present perfect marker, except when there is no past tense marker...send help.

Writing: If I start thinking about how boring this part of the story is (for the readers) I will stop and never start again, so the hell with it, it's a first draft, it can bore everyone to tears because nobody will have the chance to read it anyway until I go back and edit it (somehow) into interestingness. So there.
I also succumbed to the lovely Guardian prompt fest and wrote 800 words of semi-accidental baby acquisition in Old Haixing, what even. (Also I am not writing a baseball AU, but enjoyed doodling about it with clevermanka in my last post...seasonal if nothing else.)

Photos: ( local flora and fauna )

Be safe and well.