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…all of a sudden I have a lot to write about? Mostly watching and reading. But first let me tell you about the Karasu Jiken! So I was walking home the other day, and there are several guys trimming the trees on a local boulevard, as they do, and several crows flying around cawing, as they do, and I only consciously noticed either when one of the former started yelling, from up in his tree, “Fuck! It’s coming for me! Leave me alone! Fuck!” while the nearest crow answered at similar volume and in similar language. He came sliding frantically down from his tree and said to his mates on the ground, who were all laughing their heads off, “It came down right in front of me! Fuck!” The relevant crow in the tree branches was going CAW CAW CAW at the top of its lungs, both furious and smug.

I’m slowly working my way through the lovely rec list provided here (come and link me to your fics/other works if you haven’t already?) and enjoying myself a lot.

Exchange reported between a-Pei and her nine-year-old daughter a-Hua, in which I was pleased to be able to recognize the pun (based on a-Pei’s Taiwanese pronunciation of guo as gou):
A-Hua: 今天有没有淘宝的包裹?
A-Pei: 还没寄来。
A-Hua: 那有包猫呢?
And the other useful Chinese word I learned this week (from my ongoing fic reading), 起床气, bad temper due to getting up in the morning.

Was reminded of Liu Chang singing a very silly Japanese anime tune, just for a boost. For something completely different, have Takemitsu Toru’s To the Sea for alto flute and guitar; I love low flute music.

Three watching things
Three watching things: Going over the Guardian script once again, and man I am just so fond of Lin Jing, saying with injured dignity “I’m telling you, I’m the National Sweetheart of STEM, I’m NOT a science weirdo.” To which Zhao Yunlan reacts with an illuminated “Ah!” followed by “Wang Zheng! Cut his bonus for next month!” “More and more responsibility, less and less pay,” poor Lin Jing grumbles, getting busy fixing the car.

Thanks to mumble, an episode of this farming reality show 种地吧 featuring Wang Yang. (If we have the blessed Wenella for Zhu Yilong, lately mumble, sakana17 and grayswandir have been the Wang Yang trinity and I approve.) It’s very cheerful and very silly (I learned 石头剪刀布, rock-paper-scissors, or rather rock-scissors-cloth) and Wang Yang is a delight as usual. I might go on and watch the other episodes available even without him as quasi-background noise, just for the listening practice of a lot of (helpfully subtitled) casual conversation.

Parallel World (as of ep 8): I’m curious about the mystery, and I like the parallel-world concept itself, but I am basically watching it for the chemistry between Bai Yu and Ni Ni. I don’t care if Chang Dong and Ye Liuxi ever get around to sleeping together or not, I just love their partnership, the weird...calmness of their relationship, two people fucked-up by circumstance who have accepted each other on a fundamental level (plus a bit of competence kink on both sides), skipping the intermediate steps to near-total trust (and, because the actors are that good, making it believable). They’re also funny when they’re fucking with each other (“I didn’t call you Liuxi out of any, you know, intimacy! It was just a moment of urgency when two characters were faster than three!”) and Ni Ni is dazzlingly beautiful, although the more so when she’s wearing more clothes and has her hair braided. Bai Yu as Chang Dong strikes me physically as sort of…a nice-looking ordinary guy? which lead actors often don’t achieve for obvious reasons. Plenty handsome enough (and the baseball cap suits him) but not stunning, which if anything is part of his warmth.


Three rereads
Much Ado last week with yaaurens and company—every time there’s a different line that catches my attention, and this time it was Leonato’s “Being that I flow in grief…”, which makes me cry; it’s such an evocative phrase for that feeling of having your feet pulled out from under you, losing control of the narrative to the worst of times. I requested and got Borachio, whose stricken post-facto confession always fascinates me, though I don’t know that I did it justice. I saw a high school production years and years ago in which the whole auditorium was pin-drop silent and riveted during that speech, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Marjorie B. Kellogg’s Lear’s Daughters, a huge SF novel about a mission from a climate-ravaged Earth to a new world, which may be ruthlessly exploited for its resources or safely preserved for its existing alien society. Hard to summarize but worth the read: it’s real SF, setting and problem and solution all, and if not exactly character-driven it still has characters who bring the book to life. Not surprisingly I most identify with and enjoy Megan Levy, the grumpy, out-of-shape, middle-aged Jewish anthropologist; her expertise along with all her teammates’ is vital to working out what’s happening on this planet and how to deal with it, all the disciplines matter, linguistics, biology, meteorology, anthropology, geology, medicine, even spaceflight and game theory and music. I am less gripped by the quasi-protagonist Stavros’ religious/linguistic epiphanies—although I really like the way his increasing, circular understanding of one particular alien word illuminates what’s happens to him—but the way the central problem is shown, and solved, is terrific.

Jan Mark’s Handles--I don’t think I’ve posted about this one before, but maybe I have? Eleven-year-old motorcycle nut Erica, packed off from her home in Norwich to spend a boring holiday with narrow-minded rural relations, discovers a motorcycle shop and its eccentric proprietor. Erica’s dry tight-third-person narration is hilariously funny, while her need for motorcycles and city living and an imaginative inner life is real and almost painful. (“…and another, all in lower-case handwriting, william birdcycles. Erica got no further than William Birdcycles. Was his name William Bird, purveyor of bicycles, or was he Mr Birdcycles? Or did he in fact sell birdcycles, and if so what were they?”) (“’We’ve been smitten by an occurrence of frogs.’”) I actually read a Japanese translation of this book at one point—the translator didn’t attempt to represent the Norfolk dialect, sadly (I think both geographically and culturally, the kind of North Kanto accent with べ on the end of all the sentences would’ve been perfect), but otherwise they understood the wordplay well and did some nice things with it. Erica thinks derisively of her cousin Robert “That must be why he never thought, in case he sprained his brain; but if she called him Sprain-brain to his face he would never be able to work out why.” Here Robert’s would-be nickname becomes ノーみそ, a pun on 脳 (nō), brain, and ノー (no), none which I actually like better than the original.


Photos: Three cats (one with entourage of passing ten-year-olds), three maple trees, and three out of the one zillion cherry blossom photos I’m accruing as usual, more to follow at some point. One includes a cherry-blossom-viewing turtle.




Be safe and well.
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Graduation at the nearby elementary school, eleven-year-olds in unaccustomed finery: clusters of chattering girls in colorful haori-hakama with fancy artificial flowers in their hair, groups of uneasy-looking boys in suits (some with their school-issue yellow baseball caps still on) and a few like refugees from costume dramas in sober mon-tsuki hakama.

Going through the Guardian script again in search of chengyu, and getting stuck on one of Shen Wei’s lines in his opening lecture: 我在这里请大家先放弃掉我们是无所不知的这种想法, here I ask everyone to abandon the idea that we know everything there is to know. I love it that the show, which has so much to say about gaining new perspectives and learning, begins by stating its theme this way in Shen Wei’s voice. (Unrelatedly, how much do I love it that Da Qing’s cuss word is 喵的!)

Request for New Zealanders: if you were moving to New Zealand to start a business, what would you want to know? I have an ex-student who is thinking of doing this. He’s up to date on actual visa issues etc. etc., but has in mind questions about what city, what kind of neighborhood to settle in, what are day-to-day NZ things a new resident would want to know, etc.

Music: Clara Schumann’s G minor piano trio, which is great. (I usually do not seek out composers new to me, not that Clara Schumann is new exactly, just because they’re women or Jewish or Black or whatever, but it’s an added bonus when a composer from an underrepresented group writes something I really like.) Also Jacob Koller playing energy flow, my favorite Sakamoto Ryuichi piece, among many other things.

Chinese: I continue to be addicted to the Zhongwen Firefox extension in my Chinese fic reading, having belatedly discovered that not only can you look up words on the spot, you can instantly save the words you look up to a list. This means that (if I can remember how to go from Excel to Anki) I can make myself a big new Anki deck full of the new words I’m acquiring. (There are also some I’m not planning to acquire: I have to say I could use a little more fade-to-black instead of extended sex scenes in this fic, I’ve already learned two euphemisms I could’ve lived without knowing…).

Watching: my progress with Parallel World is very slow, at least partly because I’m enjoying it and I don’t want to use it up too fast. Also continuing to watch 你安全吗|Are You Safe with elen, one of Tan Jianci’s modern ones, and amused that…it’s certainly not a BL, but all the romantic contexts for the main character (candlelit dinners, declarations of 有我在 and so on) are either with his best friend (male, with girlfriend) or his teenage apprentice (also male). The latter is played by Rong Zishan who does amazing work for a sixteen-year-old, I’m really curious to see what he’s going to be doing in ten or fifteen years. He and Tan Jianci have excellent chemistry in a sort of not-exactly realm—not quite friends, not quite brothers, not quite mentor/student, not quite boss/employee, not quite romantic.

Japanese reading: a diary by a sociologist I know very slightly (in this diary-heavy culture, it’s not uncommon to have prominent academics, etc. etc. write “diary” columns in magazines, which are later published as books). It’s thought-provoking and a lot of fun when read in little bits at a time (the way I usually read Japanese books, which are my train-reading), ideas and concerns about oral histories and Okinawa and local communities mixed up with adoring accounts of the household and local cats, a lot of drinking in good company, strolls around the city with “O-Sai-sensei” (his wife), and assorted general grumbling and silliness.

Writing: making shamefully little progress, along the lines of daily alibi sentences. I do kind of wonder why, in original fiction where I can literally write anything I want to (it’s not as if it was likely to be published in any case), I have deliberately steered myself away from, in fandom terms, what’s most iddy to me. I think this may be a sound decision, because otherwise the id parts would take over the story, but it sure calls for a lot more thinking and discipline and less just pouring words out.

Photos: assorted flowers and rain-flowers, an old temple tucked into an urban alley.




Be safe and well.
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Just coming out of a couple of super-busy weeks (end-of-fiscal-year stuff; we’ll see how March goes) in which my work has been confusingly divided among deathly boring contracts (they could be satisfying in the Lego-ish way technical translation is if I actually knew the relevant terms and phrases, which I don’t), transcripts of seminars on international relations (genuinely interesting; I now know the general outlines of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which I knew 0 about before, not to mention a lot of internal and international politics surrounding the Okinawa reversion of 1972; relatedly, there are a lot of diplomatic telegrams and other documents from the relevant era available online and they’re a rabbit hole, salted with little bits of personal impressions and feelings around the politics of the time), and first chapters of light novels (the first one was almost unreadably bad, repetitive and boring and with character names like Astrothorn and Lily-Gemme, only even sillier; the second one was apparently dom/sub stuff between high school girls, which, well, it’s a change).

As so often, I’ve been putting on Guardian episodes as background listening here and there, and I’m finding that I can understand aurally better than I could; however, I think this is less that my Chinese listening is actually improving and more that I know the script backward and forward by now, so I already know what I’m hearing. Well, better than nothing.
Still reading this very long Under the Skin fic in Chinese (you can expect to be hearing about this one for a while, it’s got 82 chapters at last count and I’m only on chapter 24), and enjoying it a lot. Part of that is just self-satisfaction at being able to read in Chinese at all, even with a lot of dictionary help; the repeated words and grammatical constructions natural to a longfic are hugely helpful for internalizing their use. Also I do (so far, anyway) think it’s a good fic in itself, with decent characterization and a nice balance of a main arc, smaller case arcs, and Du Cheng/Shen Yi. My favorite character, Lu Haizhou, also shows up with some interesting character notes, although I am not sure just what the author has planned for him. The main flaw is not enough ensemble—needs more Jiang Feng, Li Han, and Director Zhang!

Also Chinese-related—does anyone know a good way to download videos from Bilibili? The SaveTube thing I use for YouTube, which is a godsend, tends to be hit-and-miss for B站.

Some Zhu Yilong links just because. (Other than YouTube, I’m losing most of my access to the blessed Wenella on account of nitter.net failing and something about her Tumblr settings; very regrettable. I’ve been relying on onlyzhuyilong for Z1L news etc.) This image, for instance—between the intense gaze and the slow blink, can you imagine? I’d be a puddle on the floor. Also this very dramatically shot black-and-white interview in which, asked about his MBTI thing: “Um, I’m I-something but I forget the rest.” How many times have you been asked that interview question, Long-ge?

Things I’ve been listening to: (usually I post Chinese songs to 第七天 posts at guardian-learning, but I’m sure I have posted this one there before) Two versions of 下雨天, Liu Chang on one of his livestreams and Shan Yichun in full concert. I just really love this song.
And for something completely different, in honor of February 29th, a little bit of Gilbert and Sullivan (although it’s the wrong one)—the first-act finale from Mikado, which I adore in musical terms—the “For joy reigns everywhere around” theme really is lovely, and Katisha’s “My wrongs with vengeance shall be crowned” is both a great contralto moment and harmonically fantastic as it returns to the tonic. (Also of course I sympathize with Katisha, who doesn’t? Give me a production where there really is chemistry between Katisha and Ko-Ko, please.)

Photos: Way too many photos, mostly of plums and other flowers I can’t identify by name, belligerent-looking stray cats, and an umbrella I took for R2-D2 at first (it’s the bullet train, which is almost as cute).
pinkplums1 redpink1 pinkplums2
whiteplums1 notplums whiteplums2
redpink2 sittingcat barscat
carcat twocats shinkansenkasa


Be safe and well.

爆睡中

Jan. 30th, 2024 12:09 am
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The little park nearby where I run in the mornings, adjacent to an elementary school, has some empty flower beds with construction-paper signs reading “Baby tulips are sleeping under here.” I’m incredibly tempted to add a little note saying “Colorless green ideas are sleeping furiously…”. (Contemplating the translation into Japanese, you’d have to decide whether green was 绿 or 青 to begin with, and then there kind of is a Japanese word that means “sleeping furiously,” 爆睡, “explosive sleep”—equivalent to sleeping like a log, being dead to the world.)
ETA: omigod, all I did with the Wikipedia article was remind myself of the pretty tulip bulb quote, I didn't even notice till now that in the section right above that my 偶像 Chao Yuen Ren is doing the same thing! Trust him.

Working at Book 3, trying to stay at about 500 words a day; sometimes yes, sometimes no. The best thing is when a path opens up somewhere I didn’t expect one. Yesterday and today I took time off to write a fic, more or less on the spur of the moment—sometimes I just miss Shen Wei.
What little random headcanons do you have, about favorite books/dramas/etc. etc.? I think I’ve written maybe half a dozen fics which touch in passing on glassmaking as a traditional Dixing craft—they have sand and fire, after all. Now I can’t shake the idea of it.

LannaMichaels was asking for fic prompts and I requested some more of her Vorkosigan radioverse, and got a truly fantastic new installment in the series—very canon-divergent, sort of epistolary, Greg(or), Duv, and Ekaterin. Highly recommended, along with the series as a whole.

Assorted musical notes
🎵Orchestra concert coming up in two weeks, so that we had an extra-long rehearsal including a complete run-through. By the time the Schubert symphony was finished, fifty minutes with practically no rests, everyone was in rags and tatters; I expect it’ll be somewhat less exhausting on the day, thanks to adrenaline, but jeez!
🎵Listening to Moszkowski’s Joan of Arc a lot, also very long (and probably just as tiring to play). Not as purely gorgeous as the E major piano concerto, but for some reason very satisfying for me, although I don’t know that I would recommend it to anyone not already fond of Romantic orchestral music.
🎵My mother had cause for some reason to quote the jazz pianist Hampton Hawes, upon being asked how he felt about electronica: “Man, I don’t put nothing down. If they want to play a cabbage, it’s all right with me.” (My mom had for some reason misremembered the phrase and its context as the even more liberal “If you want to fuck a cabbage, it’s all right with me.”)

Be safe and well.
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·Reading a Japanese book on Qing- and Republican-era Chinese SF (for work, believe it or not). Some neat things. Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days was first translated into Chinese (via English) in 1900 as 八十日环游记, by the husband-and-wife team of Chen Shoupeng and Xue Shaohui (she quite a bit the more distinguished of the two): he read a translation out loud and she wrote it down in Wenyan, the literary written language of the time. Then there’s the Chinese novel 冰山雪海 (Icebergs and Snowy Seas), published pseudonymously in 1906, in which—among a very long and complex plot—some would-be colonists flee poor conditions in China and end up at the South Pole, where they are joined by several ships full of Black and Jewish Americans fleeing prejudice in the US. What next, I say. Also, “Tarzan” was first serialized in a Chinese magazine in 1923, translated as 野人记 by Hu Xiansheng, with letters from readers proving that anxiety about ongoing WIPs is a constant: “I’m most moved by and most interested in reading Tarzan. …The first section has just finished, but for some reason the second section hasn’t been serialized yet. This is making me very anxious and I can’t enjoy anything. When will the second half come out and bring me joy again?”

·Speaking of WIPs, I have just started posting a fic as a WIP for the first time ever, hoping not to disappoint: the long Zhao Xinci fic I’ve had bits of in my head for a while now. With my original thing with beta readers just now, plus guardian-wishlist not starting until late August and Yuletide, of course, not till Octoberish, I need something to be writing… .
It has occurred to me that if I were more serious about becoming a published author, I would—like one or two people on my f-list—be using this time to write not fic but (theoretically) publishable short stories, among other methods of getting my name out there. And maybe I should, but I’m very resistant to the idea. With only very occasional exceptions, I’ve never been a reader or writer of short stories (fanfic seems different somehow), and I’m not enthusiastic about trying to become one. If I could spend, say, two years writing and submitting short stories and definitely end up with a contract for a published novel, I would certainly give it my best shot, but God knows there is no such guarantee. So, well, it might happen sometime, but not this year.

·A possibly relevant quote in regard to the above, from the one and only Captain Nancy Blackett (I’ve been rereading Swallows and Amazons): “So mother told us he was writing a book and had to be left alone. But we thought it wasn’t his fault to be writing a book, and that we would show him we didn’t think any worse of him for it. But he wasn’t pleased at all.”

·One of the saving graces of summer: frozen tea. Do people do this outside Japan? Take a 500ml bottle of tea (or water), drink a gulp and close it up again, and then put it in the freezer. When it’s thoroughly frozen, wrap it in a towel or similar (so it doesn’t drip everywhere) and sip at lovely cold tea as it gradually melts again.

·Chinese: playing with more interview translations just for fun, no results yet. Because I can’t copy-paste subtitles, I have to apply to the mdbg dictionary to look up characters I can’t read, a process which reminds me nostalgically of using the enormous New Nelson when I was studying Japanese in college. The character 飒 annoys the hell out of me because all reasonable practice would suggest that the radical is 立, but it’s not, it’s 风. Whose good idea was that?

·Orchestra concert next month; Nielsen and Borodin (oh yeah, and Mozart, the Magic Flute overture, which is fine). Borodin usually annoys me with the sentimental melodies, but he also does wild things with rhythm, as noted here before. The second movement opens with just second violins, cello pizzicato, and woodwinds, and then the whole orchestra comes crashing in and the rush of sound is immensely satisfying, especially when seated right in the middle of it. I never think people just listening can have anything like such an immediate experience.

·Photos: A canal in Kyoto and one in Osaka for contrast, some 百日紅, um, crape myrtle? which I always find an underappreciated flower, and some random other stuff.
kyotocanal1 kyotocanal2 osakacanal
sarusuberi1 sarusuberi3 sarusuberi2
hamarose bird powerlines


Be safe and well.
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·Still working on the last few episodes (out of order) of the Chinese Guardian script. Episode 7 is such a good one for me and the other rare Lin Jing fans out there: his impassioned recounting of the webnovel plot (not well received by his colleagues, cf Chu Shuzhi “You’re sick” and Zhao Yunlan taking a nap), his gloomy “I just hope my ouxiang isn’t guilty,” his righteous tirade at the hapless webnovelist (to which Zhao Yunlan says “We’ve never seen him throw such a tantrum,” and he really seems to mean it: a new side of Lin Jing’s character for his colleagues), and the way he closes Lai Su’s eyes after his death.

·Asked to identify the character pronounced fàng in a Duolingo question, I knew the right answer was 放 but I was tempted to select 牙 instead: “tooth” in Chinese, “fang” in Japanese. (No, Duolingo is definitely not my main Chinese study source, but it’s a handy baseline even on really busy days.)

·One (more) annoying thing about novel revising is that it’s harder than writing to do in my head or in a notebook when I’m out and about, at least for the stage I’m at, which requires messing with the existing text. I’m at the “adding things” stage right now and just about to hit 92K, oh dear. I keep running into more minor inconsistencies and telling myself I’ll fix them when I do line-by-line revision, let’s hope I remember. Also I distracted myself by making a Dramatis Personae, and between the two books there are like seventy-odd named characters (counting walk-ons), what the hell, self.

·It’s the time of the year when I reread my stack of favorite fics; it brought to mind this game from this time or so last year, so anyone who feels like playing again, give me three random numbers between 1 and 743 [ETA: 1 to 808! Forgot my other fic list. Will add a bonus fic for people commenting before edit, don't say this establishment does not give fair service] and I’ll give you three fic recs (earliest numbers date from 2012 and before, cdrama-heavy from somewhere in the 500s on). And/or a number from 1 to 150 for a random rec from my YouTube playlist.

·Keeping myself busy in a slack period with a little bit of online transcription volunteering, in this case a whole lot of records from early-20th-c. Chinese Exclusion Act cases (in English). Depressing in the way the inhumanity of bureaucracy and the law never changes, but also fascinating glimpses into the lives and practices and phrasing of the time.

·Still practicing the bassoon but probably not much improved on whenever the last time I posted about it was; I am really bad at it. I can finally mostly play G below middle C without hooting, and the flick thumb isn’t as hard as I thought it was at first, but the fingerings for C# and everything above high F are kicking my ass. Neither rhyme nor reason!

·Photos: Purple something I don’t know the name of, lilies of some kind, trumpet flowers (or that’s what I always call them), two kinds of hydrangeas, and a very black cat.
purplegray yellowyuri trumpetflowers


Be safe and well.
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So out of frustration with various (relatively minor) RL stuff I took a half day off from revisions hell and wrote some extremely self-indulgent Guardian fic. The fic proper is canon-compliant; the coda is not, and has a very different mood, so read or not as preferred.

Shen Wei should have known better than to fall asleep.
Set the day after the video game/bomb sequence. Warning for minor (imaginary) gore. Also please note that Shen Wei apparently doesn’t know what printer toner is.


It started as the kind of mundane anxiety dream that Shen Wei had read about and heard about (Cheng Xinyan’s descriptions of her dreams early on in med school had been particularly vivid) but rarely experienced. He was on his knees on the hard linoleum floor of the Bioengineering Department copy room, both hands inside the hard plastic and metal nest of the big copier, trying to find and ease out the wads of torn, crumpled paper so that the machine would forgive him his wrongs and return to its smooth thud-bang-slide processing. But the paper kept tearing away in his hands, leaving him with thin useless shreds while the rest remained clamped within the machine, and it was almost time for class and he had to finish preparing his handouts—

He heard Li Qian’s step behind him and sighed a little with relief. She knew how to handle the copier; she would have everything fixed in no time, and he’d pack her a lunch tomorrow in thanks—“Li Qian?” he said, and turned his head a little to look at her.

The copy machine rumbled into motion, trapping his right hand so that he couldn’t turn, sinking aluminum jaws into his left wrist. Shen Wei caught his breath as pain ran down to his fingertips. Behind him he heard Li Qian scream, a long wail of anger and despair, shredding into nothing as if someone was tearing her away. “Li Qian!” he called out, yanking at his uninjured hand desperately as if he could get some kind of purchase on the machine’s innards.

“Shen Wei, don’t move!” Zhao Yunlan shouted, right behind him.

Shen Wei froze. Something was trickling along the inside of his wrist, maddeningly ticklish, and he couldn’t tell if it was blood or printing ink. “Zhao Yunlan,” he said, hating that he couldn’t turn around.

“Shen Wei, do you know that’s a bomb? Pull it just the slightest bit out of alignment and it’ll go up.”

Of course it was a bomb; what else was he doing here? He had to get it away from Zhao Yunlan, that was the only thing that mattered. Shen Wei twisted his good wrist against the machine’s grip, finding the right angle to set dark energy pooling in his palm. Metal screamed around his hands.

“Shen Wei!”

“It’s all right,” Shen Wei told him, wishing he could see his face, “I’m used to being hurt,” and the bomb went off, taking most of his left hand with it.

He couldn’t see Zhao Yunlan. He couldn’t see anything. He was blind now—it was all right, he had Zhao Yunlan’s blind eyes and Zhao Yunlan had his seeing ones—no—

Shen Wei clawed his glasses, coated in jets of printing ink, off his face and blinked his vision clear. His left wrist was bleeding gouts of dark energy, big sickening arterial pulses. The fingers of his left hand were ghost-white and he couldn’t close them when he tried. First he had to heal the jagged tear in his wrist—

Agony shot from fingertips to shoulder, the clean terrible burn of light energy. Shen Wei staggered, barely caught himself on the kitchen counter. Something crunched under his foot. His glasses.

He couldn’t leave broken glass underfoot for Zhao Yunlan to step on in the morning. Shen Wei sank clumsily to his knees and began to sweep together the sparkling fragments, using his right hand to collect them in the palm of his numb, shaking left hand. He kept seeing more twinkles of glass and then finding nothing there, as the pain-tears refracted in his eyelashes.

Finally the glass was all there in his palm; now all he had to do was fit the shards back into the lenses so that he could be Professor Shen again. His hands shook. The glass sang and shifted, eluding him, until the tears on his face were of frustration as much as pain. It was almost time for class, and he had to finish preparing—he had to—He couldn’t go to class without his glasses, or they’d see he was afraid. No, that was wrong, that was the other mask—without his glasses, the students would see he was Dixingren, they’d—

He turned to correct the spelling on the blackboard, feeling his throat tighten with fear and frustration. Chalk stained the sleeves of his robe, standing out ludicrously against the eponymous Black Cloak. Jiajia had her hand up again. “Professor Shen,” she said, “could you take off the mask, please? We can’t hear.” Shen Wei dropped the chalk, hearing it crunch underfoot. The other students were talking too, all at once, he couldn’t follow the Haixing accents any more.

Enough!” said Zhao Yunlan from the door, and grinned at Shen Wei in the sudden silence. “Professor Shen, you dropped something.” My glasses, Shen Wei thought with huge, disproportionate relief, and then watched helplessly as Zhao Yunlan held up a gun.

He pressed the muzzle to his own temple, eyes closed and lips moving. Before Shen Wei could read the words on his mouth, the gun went off.


Shen Wei was sitting bolt upright in his desk chair, out of breath, tasting his heartbeat. His left arm throbbed fiercely, hot and tight-swollen the way he remembered from a wound he had taken in his teens, too young yet to have mastered healing himself before the slash got infected. He couldn’t bend his fingers.

Reluctantly he looked at the arm and hand, and found—nothing out of the ordinary. No sign of redness or swelling, no unusual heat, no unhealed wound. The savage ache was already fading, whether it had been the light energy or an artifact of his dream. Or both.

He had been too tense—what Zhao Yunlan would call, ironically in this case, wired—to sleep the night before, only to lie close against Zhao Yunlan, listening to his breathing. Da Qing had lain across their feet for a while, he thought. It had been a long night, and come the morning Shen Wei could feel the light energy outlining every one of his bones. The last thing he’d meant to do was fall asleep at his desk, but he was so tired.

He made himself a cup of heicha, the strong black tea that Professor Shen rarely drank (because it was the closest approximation to Dixing teas, and Professor Shen was a Haixingren) and drank one cup and then a second slowly, leaning against his desk where he could see out the window. Then he set the pot and cup carefully aside for later washing, checked the knot of his tie and the hang of his jacket, and picked up the folder of handouts and notes lying on his desk, marked as usual with a sticky note labeled Junior Seminar 3/21. It was almost time for class.


Coda(Set in the plum’verse, in which Lu Ruomei survived and Li Qian remained a DCU student.)

“Are you sure you weren’t the one asleep?” said Jiajia dubiously. “I mean, you said it was right after lunch.”

“Absolutely not!” Xiao Quan only went a little red. “I know what I heard. He was snoring.”

“Never!”

“Snoring is caused in part by the sleep position, degree of fatigue, et cetera—”

“—I know, I took intro bio with you—”

“—it’s a physiological reaction. Even Professor Shen has them.”

“I’m not always so sure of that,” said Li Qian, coming up quietly behind them. “Which physiological reaction are you talking about?”

“Snoring,” said Jiajia and Xiao Quan together, and snickered.

Li Qian blinked. “Professor Shen? But he never sleeps in his office.”

“And even if he did, I’m sure he wouldn’t snore,” Lu Ruomei added from her left, leaning in to Jiajia for a high five.

But Jiajia was biting her lip, looking at Xiao Quan. “Do you remember last week’s class…?”

“Of course I do. You didn’t really need to pick him up on that spelling mistake, you know.”

“But he’d rather know then than—Oh, I’m not having this argument all over again. I mean, that wasn’t like Professor Shen, wasn’t it? Maybe he’s not getting enough sleep at night.”

“Let’s go and see if he’s in, his junior class should be done by now,” said Lu Ruomei practically, and they trooped down the hall to Professor Shen’s office.

The door was closed and no sound came from within. “The light’s on,” Jiajia noticed, looking at the window onto the hallway with its closed venetian blinds.

Li Qian brushed her knuckles across the door, and then opened it a crack. “P--?” she began, swallowing the word as it came out. Beckoning the others frantically with one hand, she put the first finger of the other to her lips.

Professor Shen had folded his jacket tidily, laid it on his blotter, and used it as a pillow, face buried in his folded arms. His tie, equally neatly folded, lay on the desk next to his glasses. He was not (quite) snoring.

They regrouped hurriedly in the hallway, while Li Qian closed the door very gently. “I told you—” from Xiao Quan and “He was tired—” from Jiajia mingled. “Should we leave him to sleep?” Lu Ruomei wondered.

Li Qian had her phone out. “I’m texting Chief Zhao—he’ll come and take Professor Shen home.”

“I’ll make sure everything is ready,” Lu Ruomei said, turning back toward the office. She shooed Jiajia and Xiao Quan back when they tried to follow. “Let xuejie. You two are noisy.”

She got two identical glares from two very different faces in reply. “You think we can’t be quiet if it’s for Professor Shen?”


Shen Wei woke slowly, stiff but less exhausted than he had been. The second nap had taken away some of the aftertaste of the first.

It took him a moment to realize that the room was not quite as he had left it. His teacup was clean and dry; the teapot on its little stand was hot to the touch. The untidy pile of student response papers which he had brought back from class was squared off and, he saw, placed in order by student number. Next to his glasses was a sticky note that had not been there before.

Professor Shen (in Li Qian’s tidy handwriting): Please don’t hesitate to ask for help if you need it. Chief Zhao is coming to pick you up. From your students, and she had signed her name, along with Xiao Quan’s comical 100% mark, Jiajia’s 佳2, and the petalled swirl of pink highlighter that was Lu Ruomei’s plum blossom.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help if you need it. Words that almost no one would have dreamed of saying to the Black-Cloaked Envoy.

If Professor Shen was so much a part of Haixing as to have students like these, perhaps there was some way still for Haixing and its light energy to become a part of him.

Shen Wei tucked the little note safely under his blotter, hearing Zhao Yunlan’s knock on the door.


(Name silliness: Jiajia is written as 佳佳, so 佳2. Xiao Quan’s family name means “all,” so 100%. The “mei” in Ruomei means “plum.”)


Be safe and well.
nnozomi: (Default)
…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?
iris2 kamo1 ishigame
triangle tworoses manyroses
twotsutsuji 2kai hiddenkoi


Be safe and well.
nnozomi: (Default)
Some rambling about writing to distract from RL worries.
Thinking a lot about antagonists and how they’re introduced, and also the flip side of, I don’t mean protagonists exactly, “good” characters? When I was reading Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light a little while ago I was disappointed by it on these grounds: I felt like all the characters were very clearly presented as “good, you should like this person” or “bad, you should dislike this person,” making them flat and uninteresting to read about, especially the bad ones. To be fair, I’ve only read book 1 of a trilogy, but I did not get the impression that she was setting up for more character development later on. I wonder if she did it deliberately that way, or just was not interested in focusing on this particular kind of character work? I feel bad about criticizing Marske’s book this way, but she’s obviously a very talented writer and—okay, speaking to my personal interests alone—I wish she had put her talent to work less for her sex scenes and more for her characterization.
I mean… to take three examples of media that I think do this right.
Waters of Time>I was talking about Erica H. Smith’s Waters of Time series in my last post; the author has a (spoilery) post on her antagonists which makes it clear how few are of them are simple un-fleshed-out baddies, and how many of the others change over time from villain to comrade or from villain to terrible-person-who-is-also-complicated-and-relatable. She notes that “writing antagonists can be fun, but it’s more fun when they are complicated people and have at least a partial redemptive arc, or when they appear to be one thing and turn out to be another, or keep changing roles,” and I think this applies to reading (or watching) antagonists too.

GuardianGuardian has an assortment of villains-of-the-week, but nearly all the “villains” who get notable amounts of time on screen are more complicated than they appear (Sang Zan in a way, Zheng Yi, Ye Huo, An Bai and friends, Ya Qing, Sha Ya, Zhao Xinci in a sense, not to speak of Ye Zun (and as for the evil administrators, Gao Jingfeng is clearly in over his head and failing to cope, while the Regent is skillfully never quite evil enough to be absolutely on the bad side)). Most of the straight-up “bad person because the narrative says so, the end” characters (Zheng Zhongyuan, the Rebel Chief, the fight-promoter guy) have very little screentime, so we’re not bored by them. (I could go on at length about this issue in cdramas in general…see also Chen Moqun and Wang Shi'an...).

MarlowsAntonia Forest kind of specializes in flawed characters who may be on the “bad” side of the narrative to various degrees, but who also come with complex internal lives and motivations—Lois Sanger, Marie Dobson, Lieutenant Foley, Ginty, Patrick, Jukie, Tim, Edwin. Which makes them stay with you (in contrast, I remember the name of exactly one of Marske’s “bad” characters, and very little else about him, because what is there?), and makes the narrative itself more complicated, and thus makes the “good” characters more complicated too. We feel growing sympathy and even admiration for Foley, blended with a growing awareness of his amorality and ruthlessness and just generally being a horrible human being, which makes it clear why he becomes an untouchable but ever-present part of Peter’s mind later on; the virtuoso scene describing Lower IVA’s reactions to Marie’s death comes off in part because Marie is unlikeable but also someone hard to feel good about disliking as it becomes clearer and clearer how hapless she is, particularly posthumously. Edwin Dodd is an antagonist who’s also someone placed in an impossible position and struggling on his own terms.

In part instinctively, I’ve been trying to do this in my own original thing. (There is one unambiguous antagonist who is just a straight-up bad guy, but he’s off-page.) I’m still struggling with the other two major ones; by trying to make my antagonists ambiguous and—not relatable exactly—imaginable as fellow human beings?, I feel like they keep slithering away from me qua antagonists, which makes it hard to hang on to the conflict., But just setting them up as the evil X or the would-be evil Y isn’t very helpful; one is very determined but also very alone and trying to work out whether she was right to cut off most of her private feelings (aagh, very little of this comes out on the page, not sure how to work it in) and the other is driven by selfish and self-centered motives but also believes he’s doing the right thing. (Plus one other newish potential antagonist whom I have modeled gleefully on a favorite cdrama character not to be revealed, who is deliberately ambiguous; I’m gonna keep him that way, it’s more fun.
In terms of the other side of the equation, I am so damn fond of my main characters at this point, I’m afraid of doing that thing where the author loves the characters but hasn’t put in the work to make the readers love them too. In a way I’m better off having my three distinct protagonists, since they can have a range of flaws and good points which compensate one for the next? I feel like “putting in the work” is the keyword here on all counts—taking the time and effort to make the three-dimensional framework where all the characters’ motivations seem like “yeah, that’s what they would do in this context” as opposed to “Because The Author Said So.” Sorry, I feel like I’m just restating extremely obvious tenets of writing fiction, but--? Any thoughts, advice, good or bad examples welcome.

Be safe and well.
nnozomi: (Default)
·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.
nnozomi: (Default)
· I’ve been in end-of-fiscal-year mode all month, ie not “when is my next deadline” but “how many deadlines do I have today,” meaning I don’t think I’ve commented anywhere on DW to speak of, apart from daily Chinese study; very sorry to be so unsocial, I have been reading my f-list faithfully and have a list as long as my arm of posts to comment on once things settle down. Starting by posting here instead, which does not seem really fair, but I don’t want to deal with machine tools, 1960s experimental films, 1940s laws on education, or the anthropology of baby teeth any more today. Sometime next week I will sit down and comment all over the place.

·A little bit of 自画自赞, very sorry again: at my Saturday volunteer gig I was scheduled to work with Umi, an eighth-grader I hadn’t tutored before. She was talking to Ai (a classmate of hers who has been around since she was a cheeky ten-year-old), saying something like “but she’s foreign, I’m gonna be too embarrassed, I’m too shy.” “No worries!” Ai said cheerfully. “She’s funny and she’s really nice.” So that gave me something to live up to, but it was good to hear.

·Listening to bits of Guardian as background Chinese while I work, and episode 21 is no good because I have to stop and watch the 黑袍大人好!scene every time. Shen Wei’s face, and Zhao Yunlan cracking up in spite of himself, and Shen Wei’s straight back as he apologizes to Chu Shuzhi, and Chu Shuzhi’s “No matter what, I support you unconditionally”—the way the mood flips around to this steadfast devotion from the silliness of the greeting, emphasizing both—and Zhao Yunlan defusing the intensity of the moment, and the way the corner of Shen Wei’s mouth tightens because he can’t quite not smile.

·Something I was looking up for work: the anthropologist Mary Douglas, on purity and taboo in 1966: “I am personally rather tolerant of disorder.”

·Something I was looking up for writing purposes (I wanted grammatical moods for magic, so far I have alethic and deontic), found on Wikipedia: “While not a mood in English, expressions like like hell it is or the fuck you are are imprecative retorts. These consist of an expletive + a personal pronoun subject + an auxiliary verb.”

·Listening to Porgy and Bess a lot, not linking because I can’t find a version I like unreservedly, but it’s so damn good. (Years ago I heard a wonderfully vicious rendition of the “I hates your guts!” scene on YouTube, but I can’t find it now; they all take it too fast.) Along with the resonant, poignant, gorgeous emotion of “Bess, you is my woman now,” the music shows you Bess unable to resist Sportin’ Life, the flowing Impressionist delight of all his lines to her. And so much else, all the choral stuff in half a dozen different idioms.

·Back to orchestra today for the first time in half a year; it’s complicated, I feel I’ve failed there in a lot of ways, both musically and interpersonally (is that a word?), but I still enjoy being part of the ensemble in musical terms, plus there are a few people I like and trust, and quite a number who said “hey, welcome back.” This is cello playing; separately, I’m still tooting away on the bassoon every day and making disgracefully slow progress, but I'm not bored with it yet. Maybe in another six months or a year I will have reached the point where I can find a beginner-level orchestra that wants a bassoonist.

·Comforting and amusing myself by reading Miura Shion’s latest essay collection; she’s always funny and relatable (“I’ve started buying e-books because otherwise I’ll have to give my apartment over to the manga volumes and take a sleeping bag out onto the veranda”; “The problem with potted plants is that it’s inconvenient when I don’t know their names. I end up saying ‘hey you over there, the second from the right, do you need more fertilizer or what?’”).

·Photos, today’s 梅通信 in five variations on plum blossoms, plus a decorative bridge railing.
cutouts templeplums1 templeplums2
pinkplums1 pinkplums3 pinkplums2


Be safe and well.
nnozomi: (Default)
Mostly little language-related things:

·One of my Guardian fics, "a language without an army," was translated into French by Loaric; it's an honor to have any fic translated, especially this one, which is all about language anyway. My French is only just about good enough to follow along, but there are some lines which sound far more gorgeous in the translation--"les consonnes coulissant les unes dans les autres," "égrainant du Haixinghua vif et aiguisé," and the rhythm of the last line, "sans l’accent, Zhao Yunlan aurait compris."

·Still very slowly organizing the Chinese Guardian script; amused by a passing moment in episode 30 when you can see Minister Gao think “one Zhao is more than enough stress, now I have to cope with two of them at once?”

·The meta-ness of translating a text that's all about the value of transcribing versus the value of writing (the meaning of creativity, especially for women), with reference to a Tawada Yoko story. (Tawada Yoko's novels are too weird for me, but I like her essays about language a lot.)

·(mildly icky content) The irony of writing in my original thing about magic done with a drop of the caster's blood, when my actual real-life hands are cracking and bleeding here and there (nothing serious, cold weather + frequent handwashing). Inspiration where we can get it!
So far, knock wood, writing is going well, a fairly steady 500+ words a day (minus one day when I just fell stone asleep). Well over 40K now, getting into the second half when basically there's always something dramatic happening; I don't know if I can make it work but it's fun to try, and I love the way that the more I write, the more ideas and themes seem to fall into place.

·New Chinese conversation partner, Xi-laoshi, a friend of a friend in Beijing. Sadly she had not heard of Zhu Yilong; she was coaching me through pronouncing his name correctly (shows you how terrible my accent is, you'd think that's one word I could get right) when I remembered that interview clip of Z1L and Bai Yu teaching each other to say their names in dialect ("Zhu-laoshi? Ju-laoshi?"), and had a hard time keeping a straight face... .

·Music: A YouTube channel based on the history of music compiled by Otto Maria Carpeaux, an Austrian-Brazilian Jew who seems to have been a piece of work. I don't necessarily agree with all his choices of major works in the history of Western classical music, but there is a lot of good stuff in there, and if you want a playlist of almost 400 pieces in chronological order from 13-something to 1962, this is where to go. (The one thing I object to is that the performers aren't cited; that needs fixed.)

Photos: just a few. The year's first 梅通信, letter from the plums; they're hell to take good pictures of but I can never resist trying. Also my four-season strawberries, living up to their name in a modest way; if they survive into a second year maybe they'll be bigger?
Read more... )

Be safe and well.
nnozomi: (Default)
· 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.
nnozomi: (Default)
This is something I wrote a while ago and for some reason didn't feel like posting on AO3; it feels a bit...slight? But I still kind of like it so I'm throwing it on here just for fun.

Zhao Yunlan, Li Qian, post-canon, locked-room not-mystery, friendship )

Be safe and well.
nnozomi: (Default)
・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.
nnozomi: (Default)
・Reading a fascinating collection of essays by Li Kotomi|Li Qinfeng (李琴峰), a Taiwanese writer who mostly writes novels in Japanese, about foreignness and language and sexuality; she's translated her own work into Chinese and I'd love to talk translation with her, among other things, her examples of Chinese ⇄ Japanese translation are striking. One line about writing that caught my eye:
"For instance, there is some discourse to the effect that 'a brilliant writer is one who can express deep ideas in simple language anyone can understand,' but I am loath to agree. A writer is a deep-sea fish stroking broadly through the great ocean of language, liable to shrivel up and die if placed in a small, shallow pond. The more words freely accessible, the better. ..."
I don't know, as by me good writing could be either one or neither again, I can think of a number of examples of both. Lately my idea of good writing has been incredibly abstract--something that resonates, where both writer and reader can feel the novel or story or fanfic or whatever coming to life and vibrating with a clear sound. Which is ridiculous, how do you even define that, but I can tell when it's happening (and not) in my own writing at least.

・That said, I'm really struggling with the ongoing part of my original thing--it's a mixture of "scenes I really want to write" and "I have to do something here to get from A to B" and I'm finding it very difficult to deal with the latter. Fic is so much easier and also comes with kind comments from readers as soon as it's posted; it's important to me to do original writing too, but man it's hard!

・As I work on the Guardian script thing, I keep finding lines I didn't know were funny on my first watch because I couldn't follow enough of the Chinese, like Shen Wei to Zhao Yunlan: 你知不知道危险两个字怎么写? do you even know how to spell danger?

Short, pretty video from Liu Chang in which for some reason he felt the need to speak English, saying "...take you guys look look...," a deliberately literal translation of 带你们看看, take you [pl.] to have a look, which amused me especially for the Northeastern US second person plural that crept in there somehow.

・Some new and lovely Seong-Jin Cho recordings since I looked last, to be found here--I need to go back and listen a few more times, but I'm thrilled that he's done the Brahms Second Concerto, on account of it means he might do the First Concerto soon, and I would give anything to hear him play that slow movement.

・I need to just give up and recognize that I'm getting to an age etc. when you have to be quite lucky to have unblemished consistent good health and I'm not quite that lucky. Knock wood it could all be much much much worse.

・Visit with Y to Tenri, a town not too far away which is dominated by the New Religion that gave it its name. As religions go it's one I think fairly well of, with its emphasis on hinokishin (a kind of subset of tikkun olam, expressed mostly as cleaning) and leading a "joyous life." The residents seem to be doing well at it: we passed a shoe store where the proprietor was playing tenor sax in the back office, giving us a little bow when we clapped, and a café with two five-year-old salespeople handing out flyers (we were not proof against the adorableness, we went in). The central temple is enormous, beautiful, solemn, and overwhelming, especially with believers scattered around the space singing their prayers, and black-robed priests (in Jin Guangyao hats) pacing here and there. Maybe in my next life I'll believe, who knows.

・Photos: just a few today, another flower I don't know the name of, an old vine on an old roof, and some train lace.
Read more... )

Be safe and well.
nnozomi: (Default)
・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.
nnozomi: (Default)
Happy Tanabata! Have some nice (and/or silly) things.

・At the night junior high school, learning "headache," "stomachache" and so on in English class. "先生! What about 'heart'?" from one of the elderly Korean ladies. "Can you have a heartache?" "Um, yes, sure. Or a heartbreak." "Oh, like Elvis," with great satisfaction. The teacher, a brisk Japanese woman in her early twenties, looked puzzled, and all the other ajummas laughed.

・From yaaurens' Shakespeare reading, "I have no other than a woman's reason / I think him so, because I think him so." The problems are obvious but I still have times I want to say this now and then.

・A mixed Chinese-Taiwanese-English sentence from my not!niece when she was a bit younger: 妈咪,你看那边,怎么有di-du-web?

・Bits of rewatch things. and fic thoughts )

・I've been looking at the Tanabata streamers which are up everywhere, people making wishes. Along with the general ones for world peace, end of corona, etc. (from their pens to God's ears), some of the more individual ones are as below (quoted with respect, no invasion of privacy meant).
tanzaku )

・A representative photo of the above, plus two immovable objects and a morning glory from my very own veranda morning glory plant! the very first bloom! (There are two plants, but the other one is too busy twining all over the railings to flower. Who knows.)
Read more... )

Be safe and well.
nnozomi: (Default)
・I am just really tired of endlessly unresolved small miserable ailments. I'm still a lot better off than most people, but ugh.

・There's a kind of Japanese ice cream called Pino, a little box containing six little circles of vanilla ice cream (occasionally other flavors as a seasonal special) dipped in chocolate. Yesterday I had the proverbial four-leaf-clover stroke of good fortune, finding not just a crown/star shape in the box I opened but also a heart shape, a super-rare occurrence which is supposed to be lucky? Here's hoping!

・I have been finding Take 6's A Quiet Place very soothing to listen to lately.

・Back at one of the nighttime junior high schools for the first time in ages, a class of about a dozen highly motivated Korean-Japanese ajummas, very energizing: they introduced themselves to me with a rundown of their favorite things, from earrings to kimchi to Tolstoy to that kdrama about the South Korean girl who parachutes into the North...? I'm going to have to work to keep up.

・My mother taught me a new word in passing, "zygomatic." Look it up; I choose to believe it's no accident that the first two letters are ZY.

・Working on Guardian episode 13 for the script project: the moment when Minister Gao fawns on Shen Wei and he and Zhao Yunlan momentarily abandon their angry tension to exchange a glance of mutual wtf?? is always funny. Also, my Lin Jing/Cong Bo thing: the first hand Cong Bo grabs when he’s doing his “you have to believe me!” thing is Lin Jing’s, and Lin Jing promptly invites him to go get some coffee... .

・A little bit more of my nonexistent Zhao Xinci post-canon fic wrote itself today:
Read more... )

・Photos: lantanas, hydrangeas, roses (I realized that my taste in roses invariably runs in the yellow-to-orange-to-pink range; there's one that reminds me of the "broken" tulips of yore), a while fluffy thing, also a nighttime canal.
Read more... )

Be safe and well.
nnozomi: (Default)
・I have become someone who can't pass the home-and-garden center without buying a plant? This time it was a couple of morning glories, intended to twine around the veranda railings; we'll see if they actually do their thing. Everything else is flourishing, cherry tomatoes starting to ripen, chili peppers fruiting and strawberries changing color.

・I gave a-Pei a laugh the other day by mistyping "Sorry, I was away from my electric bird"--电鸟 instead of 电脑... . (Imagine a computer that would perch on your shoulder when not in use?)

・First trip to the local pool, knock wood it continues to be possible, nice and soothing and good exercise. (Y, not usually especially prudish, was shocked at my selection of a normal leotard-style bathing suit--"that's for schoolgirls!"--and made me buy a super-modest one, more than a bit of culture shock on my part.)

・Rewatching bits of Guardian ep. 12 for the script project and thinking about a canon-divergence AU in which Tan Xiao did get taken to Dixing--how did he get by there? Who did he meet? And what happened to Zheng Yi on her own in Haixing? (informally adopted by the SID? where Sang Zan would sympathize with someone else with trouble talking, and Lin Jing would appreciate having an audience to run off at the mouth about his experiments to? Until he said something he shouldn't about his real reasons for being there...)
Also in the actual episode, there's a long conversation between Tan Xiao and Zhao Yunlan--both light-voiced--followed by the Envoy's dramatic entrance and voice naturally pitched half an octave lower, to very striking effect.

・Reading mostly fic, as in my last post (thanks all for playing the rec game with me! Offer remains open), but I also picked up a Japanese book composed of three writers sending each other travelogue letters from imaginary countries--this should be absolutely my jam, but it turned out a bit too satirical? absurdist? for me and I didn't get very far, although I may try again. It did put me in mind to make a post here sometime soon about, hm, realist imaginary countries? Peter Dickinson has quite a few, from Varina to Matteo, and there's Ursula LeGuin's Orsinia. Gondal and its Marlow echo are the ur-versions, I guess. Others?

・I've been eking out just a few sentences a day on Book 2 of my original thing, but yesterday I was very motivated and finished a scene with considerable satisfaction at the character voices. About 21K so far, suggesting that it's going to run to 100K or so if I ever get it finished. (My notes for this scene included "Z1L eyelashes" and I was a little disappointed that for various obvious reasons I had to substitute this expression with something like "fluttering vampy long eyelashes," a) it's an alternate universe b) it's the wrong country c) he wouldn't be born yet anyway d) the character in question wouldn't have noticed...)

・Photos: My veranda pansies with bonus strawberries, other random flowers, several from a trip up a local mountain by cable car (maybe avoid if acrophobic). Also the grocery store cat annoyed with me for waking it up, and the obvious complement (sourced from lurking on tumblr somewhere? who to credit?).
Read more... )

Be safe and well.

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