nnozomi | Entries tagged with disaster

Re current events

Same like before, I’d like this (my particular corner of DW, not complaining about other people’s) to be a place I can think about other things than US politics etc. etc. I’m trying not to be an ostrich, I don’t want to know everything that’s going on but I do want to do what I can; if you think there’s something I should be doing, let me know about it. Otherwise, to quote Tove Jansson, “…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.” (Kenahora I don’t think the immediate issue is rocket-propelled missiles, but mutatis mutandis.)

I’m sorry about all the posts I haven’t managed to comment on; like I said, if you’ve posted I’ve read it and thought of you, for what it’s worth. Will try to be better from here on.

Visited my mother last month for a week or two; stressful for reasons that are no one’s fault, but could have been worse. Apart from seeing my mom and eating (way too many) delicious things, some of the good moments included buying a couple pairs of reasonably priced jeans in a great hurry without trying them on, guessing wildly at the size (I don’t understand US sizes any more, if I ever did), and finding that they fit almost perfectly; getting to meet a DW friend in person and hang out for a leisurely chat, a rare and lucky coincidence of travel timing; hearing a performance of the spectacular Bartók piano quintet, one of those where-has-this-piece-been-all-my-life moments (the program said it’s an early piece influenced by Brahms, no wonder I liked it so much); and on the way to the airport to go home, finding out that the cab driver hailed from Shanghai and getting to chat in Chinese for an hour (he was very patient with my terrible pronunciation, and apart from some regional words like the Chinese transcription of the local Chinatown neighborhood, I actually understood him okay).

Latest farmboy Chinese vocabulary:
薰衣草: lavender (as in the plant)
美滋滋: delighted, thrilled, on cloud nine
如释重负: relieved at having set down a burden or fulfilled a responsibility
有难度吗: what, like it’s hard?
私吞: to embezzle (literally, to swallow privately)
饭撒: This word delights me. It’s made up of 饭, food, and 撒, to scatter/discharge/distribute, so it literally means “scattering food” (think feeding birds, etc.); the two characters are pronounced fànsā, so that in both content and sound they approximate their English meaning: fanservice.

Writing and translation: I think I was right to let my Yuletide assignment percolate quietly away in the back of my brain for a while; today I discovered I have a plot outline which feels like it should be writable in…maybe 3-4K? Very self-indulgent indeed but also in line with my recipient’s requests, so knock wood it should work out.
Original thing also proceeding, very very slowly but still on the rails, and I’m more pleased with the most recent part when I read it over than I was when I was writing it. I don’t know why I’m still having so much trouble giving AGENCY to A, though. Maybe because she doesn’t know exactly what she wants to do either? I’m doing my level best right now to help her figure it out…
Still playing with bits of Chinese translation and working on the Japanese pseudo-romance novel: I’m surprised at how short it is, I don’t think it’s going to come out to more than 50K-odd in rough draft. It’s so fun to do, though. I could get addicted to this sort of thing.

Reading: A new YA novel in Japanese by Hamano Kyoko, whose work I generally enjoy—airy and sweet, with a sad edge but hopeful endings, and more or less avoiding the pestilential Japan Sentimental tendencies which so many writers are prone to. This one is basically Feminism 101, Japanese context, for middle schoolers, through the medium of three ninth-grade girls and their respective single mothers; it gets quite didactic at points (I am not the intended reader, on account of I already know what power harassment and mansplaining are, among other things), but manages to hang on to the realness of the characters enough to be a good read. Would really like to know what actual teenage readers make of it.
Rereading, for the first time in quite a few years, Marilyn Hacker’s novel-in-sonnets Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, about finding and losing a new love; I’m an unthoughtful and uneducated poetry reader, I read everything like it was prose, but there are so many delicious lines. “I can’t say, ‘When you coming over?’ yet./Until we get at where we’re going to,/I need as much hugging as I can get.” “It’s what in this bright world I would like best:/Your mind on my mind; your breasts on my breasts.” “’Mom, how come things never are/as good as I could make them up to be?’/’There’s still ice cream on the Île Saint-Louis!’” “Baby, the rain must, April rain must fall/--and I would just as soon stay home and wait/the storm out, wait for you to get to me/your way.” “What’s happened to your letters? Is the mail/clerk in love with you and hoarding them/to read, herself, in bed at 5 AM?”

Photos: A cat on watch over its colleagues’ naptime (do they take it in turns?), a very old ad uncovered by construction, a tipsy drunk-hibiscus, some berry things, some turtles and reflections, a shrine (between the building, the camphor tree, and the kimono lady this photo turned out almost stereotypically Japanesque, but I just like the windows), another view of the camphor tree plus the edge of a torii, and a full moon with bonus train station.

Be safe and well.

·I think most people on my f-list have seen this by now, I’m late to post, but the latest regarding the OTW, generally from

synonymous, specifically from

dhobikikutti, both much appreciated and referencing among other important things a gracious, eloquent, and brave statement by the Board candidate Zixin, which she shouldn’t have had to make in the first place.
I am still in hopes of a less reprehensible future for the OTW/AO3 (knock wood, I’m hopeful about the new Board candidates at least); I am not clear right now on what people who are not OTW volunteers can do, after the new election, in terms of concrete action to support change (hopefully, in a framework of coalition). I’m going to be hypocritical enough to say that I don’t want to get into extended discussion of this here, for me it makes more sense to keep an eye on information sources elsewhere, but if anyone has links/related information helpful to this end please do feel free to drop them.

·In the spirit of extremely fucked-up situations, have a performance of Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik Suite.

·Am I the only one who feels that this July has lasted about six months so far? I was traveling among other things and have fallen way behind on DW socializing, but I’ve been reading everyone’s posts and thinking of you.

·Three days in Hokkaido, a work trip to do some interpreting for a lecture given by Song Mingwei, a scholar of Chinese science fiction among other things, and the reason I was reading about Qing-dynasty SF.

Very long Hokkaido story

The job started off with a delightful serendipity. I got lost trying to find my way into the enormous Hokkaido University campus, and resorted to asking a student-type coming the other way if I could get into the campus up ahead. “Sorry, I don’t speak Japanese, I’m from Taiwan,” he said blankly, so I thought, well, I can work with that, and tried repeating the question in Chinese (thanks to the Guardian script I knew the word for “college campus”!). He was delighted, answered promptly and saw me to the building I needed to go to, while we chatted in Chinese along the way about the relative difficulty of the three languages (he kept saying jingyu was difficult in Japanese, which I couldn’t convert mentally to 敬語 until he said something about 长辈: ohhhh, honorifics, now I get it). Clearly a good omen.
You’ll be better off googling Professor Song Mingwei than me trying to summarize him here, but I think a lot of cdrama people, and SF people in general, will find his work extremely interesting. Here is a place to start. I had spent the week before translating his lecture text from English to Japanese, with the help of a grad school friend to edit my decidedly non-native Japanese; all about Lu Xun and Liu Cixin and related personages. In the event his lecture, delivered in English, was lively and fascinating and skimmed all over the place; as far as the actual lecture text, handed out to all the attendees in two languages, was concerned, I would say it fitted where it touched and not much more, so that the non-English speakers must have been wondering what the hell he was talking about a lot of the time, but it was extremely interesting.
Finally there was a short question-and-answer session, which was where I actually had to interpret; I would not say it was a long enough time to make it worth paying for me to come all the way up to Hokkaido, but who am I to complain? Topics mentioned, drawing on the lecture, included Marko Vovchok and Xue Shaohui, “why didn’t SF in China develop more in the 20th century,” using SF to bring the world home to China, effects of the West and Japan and the USSR, late-1990s Chinese SF’s similarity (in terms of the nerd/otaku social class) to the mid-20th-c SF scene in the US, how Lu Xun’s mother didn’t like his work and preferred to read romances, translations of science by Yan Fu and classic literature by Lin Shu [no, not that one], “unfaithful translation,” and Max Planck. It went much better than I’d feared; there was one questioner who had an unfamiliar accent, mumbled, and spoke very fast, so I had to ask him to repeat the second half of his question, but otherwise it all came across pretty clearly, mostly English into Japanese. Exhilarating. I took notes on paper and kept my phone out so I could do some very fast Googling as needed, on topics like the characters to write Mo Yan (so I would know how to pronounce the name in Japanese) and the Japanese word for relativity, which I had forgotten.
Afterward I got treated like a celebrity (look, the white lady speaks more than one language! and she has a West Japan accent!), which was kind but embarrassing. As with all Japanese events, there was a dinner party at a little neighborhood restaurant afterward; walking to the restaurant I had a chance to talk (in English) in a leisurely way with Professor Song, who was very friendly. I asked him about the story mentioned in my previous post with the Chinese colonists and Black and Jewish refugees, and he said it might have been a free translation/rewriting from a story originally in English of some kind, but that there wasn’t much research on it that he knew of. I also took the chance to ask him what he thought about the Chengdu Worldcon, and he was uncomplimentary: the organizers had been very hopeful, but the city had basically taken it over, the anti-LGBTQ rules weren’t good and it didn’t make sense to put a lot of Chinese-language texts on the ballot when so many voters wouldn’t be able to read them. Finally we talked about dramas and language learning—I didn’t quite dare mention Guardian by name, but I mentioned DMBJ which he knew, and talked about Under the Skin a little (sadly unable to remember its Chinese name) because he said he liked crime dramas. I really liked him, very bright, very widely concerned, and also extremely low-key and nice.
I talked a little with a handful of Chinese girls at the restaurant, students at Hokudai; they all gave their hometowns in Japanese pronunciation, which they must be used to doing, and I couldn’t follow at all. We talked fannish stuff and one said she’d been a fan of the DMBJ books in middle school. I confessed to being a Zhu Yilong fan and they all knew the name—“Ooh!” and one asked me if I’d seen Guardian—“you know, that BL science fiction one?”.
After that I had a day to myself and spent it mostly wandering around Otaru, see photos below. I love the city I live in, but oh my God it was lovely to be up north where it’s not in the high 30s every single day.

·Photos from Hokkaido, mostly Otaru. The usual flowers, including hydrangeas, blooming more than a month later than they do where I live. Also some fruit things I can’t place at all: if I didn’t know better I would say (pace Ivan Vorpatril) they were squid growing on a bush, after all Otaru is a fishing town… . The canal, the coast, a disused railway line, a carving outside a long-defunct shop, some views of Otaru overall with stone warehouses and mountains, and the inside of the Stained Glass Museum. Also, just for amusement, a page from my interpreting notes.

too many photos

Be safe and well. <3

As so often I'm gloomy about a small but persistent health issue, which still makes me a damn sight luckier than most.

Re the current global situation, while most of my f-list has probably seen them/etc. already, sovay and naraht among others have posted some relevant links for helping/learning more about the situation in Ukraine (not verified by me but I trust them as a rule). Oh dear. :(

Otherwise, with apologies for the tonal shift: some minor amusement from work lately, because we cope how we can. A technical manual mentioning FRAM memory made me say "Who is sleeping in the Fram?" to myself. A paper about NSWS (non-standard work schedules) was hard to translate because I kept typing it as NSFW. Also, unusually, I have a light-novel excerpt to work on (at first glance it looks like Escaflowne crossed with Harry Potter?), which almost did for me in the first sentences, with a conversation that ran "I had a dream about falling." "Well, duh, you've got exams coming up." "No, not failing, falling!" where, in Japanese, 落ちる can mean both "falling from a great height" and "failing a test."

Photos: A lot of plum blossoms (some from one of the Tenjin shrines, famous for plums, thank you Fujiwara no Michizane) and a window that pleased me. (ETA: SUGAWARA no Michizane, not Fujiwara, how could I do that, Heian period history fail. Tenjin-sama, please forgive me.)
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

・Many thanks for useful and interesting dream-related comments on my last post; I really love it that I can post some idle linguistic curiosity and immediately get responses in TEN different languages. Results: “have dreams” in English, Swedish, Polish, and German, “see dreams” in Japanese, Russian and Finnish, “do/make dreams” in Chinese, French, and Italian, “dream dreams” in Icelandic and Korean, and other variations in Russian, Polish, and Spanish! Good grief. I’m fascinated by the variation within language families, which I wouldn’t have expected.

・Whining: Japan is such a fucking mess right now in corona terms, my city especially. If I see one more elderly person strolling around without a mask on, I might scream.
・I’ve had very little work this week, mostly because of the new fiscal/academic year, but it’s hard not to feel that I’ve somehow offended the work gods (yes, I can be kind of abrasive in my work personality from time to time, but I don’t think I said anything particularly obnoxious recently...?). I worked a lot in February and March, a week or three without much in April won’t matter, but it makes me feel extremely at loose ends. The smart thing would be to say “fuck work until it comes in” and do something boring but useful (sorting out papers, etc. etc.) or interesting and personal (Yuriko, or the rest of the books-I-want-to-translate stack). sigh

・Fannish: I was watching one of Liu Chang’s livestreams, this one dating from last summer when the Lost Tomb thing started showing; in honor of which he was wearing Liu Sang’s sharp suit and had invited most of the main cast to join in via a Zoom-type thing. Bonus unexpected Long-ge! Without C or E subtitles I could only follow bits, but the general sense from Zhu Yilong was “大家好，我是朱一龙，I play Wu Xie...um...what else should I say?”, on brand.
・The other day’s complaint about mismatched musical tastes aside, my brain seems to like coming up with songs for MDZS/CQL characters; one of the songs I listen to on my morning run is “Nightswimming,” which somehow brings to mind post-canon Jiang Cheng for me.

・Photos: ( June in April )

Be safe and well.

( I rambled on a bit today, just putting the whole thing in a cut for convenience )

On Sunday I went to a Black Lives Matter march in the next city over (my furthest venture afield since February…). Serious but not somber in mood, no right-wing harassment or other issues as far as I was aware, well attended in context. I heard both five hundred and a thousand people but I don’t know? A lot, anyway. Maybe 1/4 Japanese-from-Japan, 3/4 not, but hard to say based only on appearance and the language people defaulted to in overheard conversation. (I would probably have gotten more out of it if I hadn’t been too shy to talk to people; just a couple of words to the Japanese couple marching next to me, and a quick exchange at the end with three young women (I think American? hard to tell) in organizers’ armbands, who were extremely kind.) Quite a few kids under ten, many of them mixed-race, some on dads’ shoulders. Quite a few rainbow flags, Black Trans Lives Matter signs. Everyone in masks (a requirement for attendance).
Huge painted banner being held by two middle-aged Japanese woman, saying in Japanese, stop Japanese ethnocentrism, masculinism, colonialism, … . Other Japanese signs that gave me pause for dumb linguistic reasons: 黒人の命を尊重しろ (respect black lives), 黒人の命を大切に (treat black lives with care). Both true and valuable but as translations missing the integral sense of “matter”—being inherently important, before and regardless of external respect or care. 黒人の命は大切なり? (I know the phrasing can be anything as long as people care; just my brain can’t help working this way…)
A Japanese woman in her fifties saying how young everyone was, that she was used to being the youngest one at protests.
Lots of polite, harried, inoffensive-looking city police shepherding the column along; extremely incongruous in context. I wonder what they made of it.
The chanting as we marched gave me trouble at first—I’m so used to avoiding the customary Japanese greetings-in-unison—but became easier later. Slogans all in English, maybe aimed more at overseas than at the people passing.
Eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence in memory of George Floyd, under a vast muku tree in the park.

Daily life: I don't even know where to start with the state of the US; all I can say is I hope no more people will be hurt or killed, and to quote my mother, hope that it will make a difference, a good difference. I'd like to think all the terrible things are happening at once in 2020 so that the next few years will be better, but... kenahora.
In ordinary close-to-home news: fuck headaches. I have so much respect for people who deal with chronic illness/pain/etc., given how demoralized I am by a few days of not-even-migraine headaches.
Slightly brighter news: I took some of the photos I've posted here and tried making postcards out of them and it worked a treat, so now I have a stack of pretty cards to send to my mother and my parents-in-law. Long-distance filial piety has to be better than none...

Music: A lot of my dad’s piano jazz recordings, because I needed soothing. Cradle music.

Books: Rereading Helen Thorpe’s amazing nonfiction books, in this case The Newcomers and Just Like Us. Compassionate thoughtful well-informed journalism that reads like a novel.

Chinese: Still Duolingo. I need to pick up some other practice methods—Anki, Memrise, ChineseSkill??—to reinforce a lot of vocabulary and just see more different sentences, but I haven’t managed it yet. (I do have the Guardian Anki deck I managed to make, and could at least review that…)

Writing: Reasonably steady progress; just hit 35K. I learned one interesting thing about a minor character that could come in useful. The next scene involves specialized knowledge/awareness well out of my wheelhouse, though, so I'm not sure how it will go or if I should just veer around it.

Be safe and well.

Daily life: ( Cut for rumination on the Current Situation )

Music: Some Eliane Elias piano stuff, delicious Brazilian jazz.

Books: Rereading Jan Mark's Handles, a lovely weird piece of character study in Norfolk dialect about 11-year-old Erica, who prefers motorcycles to anything else, and Elsie, who feels the same, and their interactions at his cycle repair shop with motorcycles, marrows, tiresome relatives, human tadpoles, and would-be plagues of frogs.

Chinese: Courtesy of kind fellow enthusiasts, I've been listening to Zhu Yilong singing a lot, and it sounds like he sometimes pronounces the "h" words (海星, 很 etc.) with almost a "kh" sound. Is that a thing singers do to make the lyrics clearer, a dialect thing, an individual quirk, just me overthinking?

Writing: I enjoyed the discussion in my last post about the different ways we write--linear vs nonlinear, stable vs fluxy, among other things. I do have in mind to try the Scrivener free trial and see what it does for me.
I was thinking about the major stresses in society, with regard to worldbuilding. If I'm going to say that in this particular AU class-based issues are the most important stressors (and their overlap with religion, and religion's overlap with ethnicity, but that's several more kettles of worms), I have to have that in the back of my head (but not the front of my head) all the time, inflected differently for each POV character and their very different experiences of class.

Be safe and well.

The title comes from a Portuguese novel which was published in English a couple of years ago, translated (I think) by the great Gregory Rabassa, who refers to it in passing in an essay and renders the title as "What shall I do when everything's on fire?". I haven't read the book, but the title has been running through my head lately. At first it had to do with the ever-increasing levels of mismanagement and chaos at work; then it came to refer to the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear reactor disaster in northern Japan.
It's a long, long way from where I live; we had a gentle wobbling at the time of the initial quake, if I'd been alone I might have taken it for a momentary dizziness, it might have knocked down a house of cards if you'd happened to be building one then but that was about it. After that, no shakes, no tsunami, electricity and trains and gas and water all intact, everybody going about their business in the normal fashion. People in Tokyo and Yokohama had a much stronger quake, but with almost no serious damage/injuries.
The scenes--TV news, newspaper photographs--from up north are beyond belief, reminding me first of photos I've seen of the lacerated fields of Tokyo after the 1945 firebombings. Everything just destroyed, ripped to pieces. Whole towns swept away. I don't even know where to start thinking about it.
I seem to keep ending up on the edge of disasters--I had the dubious privilege of being in New York on 9/11, and there too I and my friends and family were all safe, even a couple of people who were in/near the towers that day. I just plain don't know anybody that far north, which means I didn't have to lose anyone. One of the public broadcasting channels has been carrying brief messages from people looking for friends and family: "From so-and-so at such-and-such-address, to so-and-so at such-and-such-address. Worried about you, get in touch" or words to that effect. These are heartbreaking, especially when both have the same address, and you know one hasn't come home, or both are unable to make it home. They remind me a little of the posters which went up all over the city in the days after 9/11, "Have you seen...".
The big scare now is the Fukushima reactor and what it will do, which nobody knows. The news says there is not a big problem outside of the immediate vicinity, at least not yet. My aunt has been sending my mom emails urging her to get me to come home immediately, because the Japanese government is certainly lying about how much radiation there is, etc. I really wish my aunt would a) remember that I'm an adult and b) try not to alarm my mom any more than necessary.
Ironically, I've been planning to fly home for spring vacation this Friday and come back a week later. I'm not sure if I'll be able to get to the airport, if the plane will fly (although that seems to be the least of the problems), if I'll be able to get back if I go. Should things so sort themselves that I can go but not come back, I'm not sure I want to go. Apart from the radiation question and the issue of filial piety, not a trivial one, I've spent almost my whole adult life in this country. If I leave for any amount of time, it means leaving my job, my apartment, almost all my belongings, my coworkers, the kids I teach, the close friends who got me through grad school, the people I play the cello with every weekend (and their children), and the man with whom for almost seven years I've been unrequitedly in love with and still somehow managed to stay friends. That adds up to a lot.
Hope for the best, expect the worst? Que farei quando tudo arde?

Current Mood: stressed
Current Music: Edward Murray