nnozomi | Entries tagged with music: jazz

this is mostly just self-satisfaction

I passed HSK6! Well, technically apparently you don’t actually pass or fail levels 5 and 6, you just get a numerical score, but the pass/fail line for the other levels is around 60% and I ended up with 76%, so I feel okay about saying I passed. The listening test was a bitch, pardon my French; listening is so hard without context, plus my mind tends to wander…but I scored just about the same as I’d been doing on practice tests, so at least not worse. For some reason my score on the reading/grammar part was MUCH higher than on any practice test, thanks Xi-laoshi for going over the awful grammar questions with me a million times (I hate this section, you have to choose which of four long sentences contains a grammatical error). The writing section (where you have to read a passage and then summarize it from memory) was all about Liu Ying, a charisma train conductor from Changchun, who is a fun person to know about. Incidentally this was the online test; I would never pass the version where you have to write an essay by hand, thank God (or rather 谢天谢地) for computers and smartphones. (The test itself was a bit odd—I was expecting, from the strict rules, a huge auditorium, lockers for belongings, etc., but it was a little battered classroom with a couple dozen people spread across HSK2, 4, and 6, presided over by a middle-aged Chinese lady speaking Japanese with a heavy local accent—“your bag? oh, just put it under your desk.” It was nice to think about absolutely nothing but the content of the test for two hours or so.)

I’ve been reflecting on how different my Chinese study experience has been from studying Japanese. I had four years of classroom Japanese in college, including six months as an exchange student and a summer at Middlebury; I also watched some anime with friends, started reading Japanese books as soon as I was up to it, went through a period when I was watching all the Toyokawa Etsushi dramas I could get my hands on…but definitely laid my groundwork in the classroom, where I was fortunate enough to have good teachers. For Chinese I haven’t done any formal study at all, unless you count a weekly hour of conversation with Yu-jie and then Xi-laoshi; otherwise I’ve had Duolingo (not good, but not bad practice for a beginner), teaching myself from the lifesaving Chinese Grammar Wiki (and the Anki deck made from it), more Anki decks (HSK vocabulary and my homemade vocab one), A-Pei and our text-chats, the lovely people who kindly hang out at

guardian_learning, and of course incomparable teachers in the form of Zhu Yilong (in part via the blessed Wenella), Bai Yu, Liu Chang, Jiang Dunhao and his fellow farmboys, and their various c-ent colleagues. I think I got extremely lucky with Chinese study, in terms of a) having the time available to spend, which many people do not, and b) getting born on third base by knowing the characters already from Japanese.
Oh dear, that got long. Anyway, unfortunately passing the HSK does not magically confer fluency, but it’s a nice milestone to hit and hopefully motivation to keep going.

Other random Chinese-related stuff. Gu Lin Ruei-Yang is a pitcher for one of the Japanese baseball teams, a Tayal indigenous Taiwanese guy from Taichung who uses two family names (his mother’s and father’s), an interesting collection of characteristics; the history of indigenous Taiwanese success in baseball goes back to the legendary prewar Jiayi Agricultural High School team.
Silkworms are called 蚕宝宝, a word which adorably contains an affectionate diminutive (a lot cuter than silkworms are to look at, appreciate their work without googling them).
Listening to an interview with my favorite singer in which, doing a little self-PR, he says 我不挑活儿，可盐可甜. I was very pleased with myself (sorry, more bragging) for hearing and understanding this; 我不挑活儿 just means “I’ll take any work that’s going,” but uses more colloquial phrasing than the classroom words 选择 and 工作. 可盐可甜 I had to look up, but got the general sense of: it’s literally “I can do both salty and sweet,” and figuratively “I can be hardcore or soft and cute,” roughly. A fun phrase.
Also Zhu Yilong’s birthday vlog, in which some inspired person got him to go to a park and have a barbecue; he looks gorgeous and seems to be genuinely enjoying himself, singing along to the car radio, relaxing in nature, and earnestly cooking noodles. <3

Music: João Gilberto’s Disse Alguem, which is “All of Me” with Portuguese lyrics, and William Bolcom’s Graceful Ghost Rag, an old favorite of my dad’s and also of mine (the link is to Yeol Eum Son’s performance, which is one of the closer ones to my father’s).

Translating a table of chemicals, some of which cracked me up. “Glacial acetic acid” sounds like what happens when you put vinegar in the freezer; “methyl cellosolve” should be the brandname for a luthier’s tool (do you think they offer violinsolve and violasolve too?). And I certainly don’t plan to go anywhere near “fuming nitric acid” until it calms down. Also, this particular source text confounded me for a LONG time with 息化, breathification, which wouldn’t turn up anywhere, until I realized it was a visual typo for 臭化, literally stinkyfication and chemically bromide.

Random other things: I rediscovered cobalt.tools and am delighted to find that it downloads not only YouTube but also bilibili; now how long will it take me to download my huge backlog of bookmarked B站 videos? and will my computer have enough storage space? (I’m grabby about things I like online, whether music or fics etc.; I want to download everything, just because you never know when someone will see fit to delete it.)
For writing purposes a few days ago, I honestly genuinely found myself googling “why is the sky blue.”
So there’s a recent commercial on Japanese TV (I see CMs when I’m watching baseball games, I can’t help it) in which a giant, besuited salaryman is fighting off a monster amid a Japanese cityscape, Godzilla-style, while his wife and teenage daughter watch from their apartment window: “Oh dear, it’s your dad again. I hope he won’t knock down the supermarket this time.” “My boyfriend asked me if I can turn giant-sized too…” with a look of teenage angst. I’m entertained by the possibilities for stories here. (I don’t think this commercial has fulfilled its original mandate, on account of I don’t actually know what it’s advertising for, but it’s fun.)

Photos: Seasonal azaleas, irises, maple leaves, and other flowers I don’t know by name, as well as some carp flags and interesting machinery.

Be safe and well.

Along with the general global worry I have one particular, somewhat related personal worry at the moment which isn’t going anywhere and will just have to play itself out over the time required; I suppose it’s the least I deserve. Otherwise, it’s spring and there are cats and I have (non-work-related) projects I’m excited about, life should be enjoyed when it can be.

Small language stuff. Xi-laoshi taught me 谷子店 in Chinese. 谷子 literally means “valley” or “grain,” but here it’s used for its sound value of guzi, which is phonetic for グーズ gūzu in Japanese, which in turn is phonetic for “goods” in English and in this case refers to fannish-type goods or what I think would be called merch…
Ear in Japanese is 耳, mimi. Worm, as in our pink wiggly friends on the sidewalk after rain, is ミミズ, mimizu. Therefore by all rights an earworm, as in the song, should be a mimimimizu (or, more efficiently written, 耳ズ), but unfortunately it’s just the English word transcribed. (Chinese apparently does use 耳虫 or 耳朵虫!)
I never remembered to say thanks for votes in the what-should-I-translate-next poll, here (if you still have an opinion or a question, feel free to let me know now as well!); in accordance with the majority vote, I’m working on Li Kotomi’s essays, but I may branch out into a novel or similar as well for added fun, since we’re hitting the dead time of the fiscal year. In passing Li introduced me to Selinker’s idea of interlanguage, which you’d think I would have come across before; I guess I did, just didn’t know there was a word for it. Reminds me, among many other examples, of Japanese-speaking teenagers learning Korean and sticking Korean verb endings on Japanese words to get by when they didn’t know the vocabulary (similarly, my frequent joke that if I don’t know a word in Chinese I can just use the Japanese word and add 子, cf 妻子，筷子，栗子 and so on), or the farmboys’ preferred use in English of Chinese duplication (我来试试, let me try try).

Latest farmboy words: 不灵(了), it won’t work, a wish won’t come true; 望梅止渴, to comfort oneself with illusions (literally, to quench thirst by thinking of plums); 冰美式, an iced Americano, exactly what the characters say; 珐琅锅, a ceramic pot a la Le Creuset; 抬杠, to argue for the sake of arguing; 举一反三, to infer many things from one thing; 香饽饽, very popular, delicious, the belle of the ball.

Music: Gabriella Liandu singing Speak Low and Bach via Cuba.

Writing and translation: As noted above, I’m working on Li Kotomi’s essays, but they go quite slowly because there’s a real need to think about each word, as she does. Also, she’s often writing about Japanese in Japanese, which is hard in the technical sense to translate—her childhood misunderstanding of the word 召し上がる, for instance, which relies on the characters used. Likewise, she writes “「中間言語」という硬い漢語に飽きたら「真ん中の言葉」と和語に言い換えてもいい,” for which I tried “We could also dismiss the intimidating Romance-language sound of ‘interlanguage’ and replace it with ‘the words in the middle,’” substituting Romance-language for 漢語 or words written/pronounced entirely in Chinese characters…is that a legal move on my part? Also there’s a place where she writes “不可能だと思っていた。思い込んでいた”—which I rendered as “I thought—I misconceived—that I could not,” and I wonder a little if she’s just playing with the variations of 思う in Japanese or also has the Chinese 以为, to think something wrongly, in the back of her head.
Translating/attempting some Chinese stuff for fun, not for public consumption; very difficult but still a fantastic way to acquire more vocabulary and phrasing.
v e r y s l o w l y with my original thing, mostly because until today I had a lot of work and my brain wasn’t up to it; determined to get back to 500 words a day. My timeline suggests that, in accordance with my usual screwed-up pacing, now (roughly halfway through the book lol) is when things actually start HAPPENING, which should be fun. I have about a million plot strands of various thicknesses going on, and theoretically I almost sort of kind of know how they all fit together, and I think it COULD be very good, but that’s a very large subjunctive.

Photos: Capybaras from the zookeeper school, also…what are they called…maras? I always think of them as Zen rabbits, for their habit of sitting still and staring off at the day after tomorrow as if meditating. Green-eyed monster (politely taking time off from cuddling to be photographed). Also more plum blossoms, camellias (or sazanka?), and an alley with a flower curtain.

Be safe and well.

I’ve been dithering over posting, or mostly just too busy/disorganized to take the time, since getting home from my trip over a month ago; here is a tacked-together five-things-ish post to cover the bases.

New (to me) books: Blackgoose, Broad, Biggs, Gilbert, Ford

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose: fantasy novel narrated by Anequs, an Indigenous girl from an island off a continent being rapidly colonized, who…I don’t want to say Impresses a baby dragon but that’s basically what it is? She talks her way into attending the mainland Academy for what the colonizers call dragoneers, where she encounters, not surprisingly, a lot of prejudice about her background and her gender both; she also makes some good friends, falls in love a couple of times, discovers a talent for blending the colonizers’ academic takes on magic/science with elements of her own culture, and makes it through her first year intact. I enjoyed it for the worldbuilding (including Anequs’ brother, a budding steampunk engineer, and his colleagues) as well as Anequs’ stalwart selfhood, and for the way, on the whole, the author tries hard to avoid creating a cast of flat good vs bad characters sorted by ethnicity, to show a range of people with different prejudices, positive and negative, based on their own varied experiences and personalities. (One quibble is that, except for one or two moments, the dragons feel like plot devices rather than characters in their own right; maybe in future books as Anequs’ dragon grows up?) (It’s invidious to compare this with R.F. Kuang’s Babel, since the only thing they really have in common is being school/college stories told from a minority perspective, but for me at least, it does some of the same things better, in that the author cares about her characters and their relationships and sees some hope therein.)

Quartet, Leah Broad: group biography of four 20th-century British women composers, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen. Very well-written and well-researched; I can sort of see why she chose the four-person format but I’m not sure it works entirely. Howell and Carwithen, who had less prominent careers and about whom less is known, seem like supplements to the other two, and Ethel Smyth’s far-out Ethel Smyth-ness tends to unbalance the book a bit (not the author’s fault, I think Smyth just did this to every context she ever appeared in, and for that matter kudos to the author for getting that across). I was most interested in Rebecca Clarke, including her work as a violist; not totally grabbed by her Viola Sonata, but I should go back and listen again.

A Life of One’s Own, Joanna Biggs: short essays on eight women writers melded with the author’s own personal-essay musings. Picked it up because I liked her previous book, a very short UK version of Working, and it didn’t disappoint, although I think it might not be satisfying for anyone who specializes in any of the writers mentioned. The essay on George Eliot reminds me that I really should read Middlemarch, especially having encountered my own version of Dorothea and Casaubon in Yuriko’s life. “I used to want desperately to be a ‘proper critic’…[but now] I want to know what it’s like to be someone else.” The author loves Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, making me want to go back and reread it for the first time since high school, when I remember loving it also. On Toni Morrison: “Her attitude toward [non-Black readers] was: sure, you can come in, but these books are not for you,” and yeah, Morrison isn’t writing to make white people understand, is she? She has that effect in passing but it’s not what her point is. (Disappointed that this book focuses on Beloved and barely touches on Jazz, which is my favorite.) “Much of [Morrison’s] teaching was reminding her students that you do not destroy what you’ve written by working over it, you discover, rather, what you are writing in the process of rewriting.”

The Country-House Burglar, Michael Gilbert: This is cheating, it’s not a new book at all, it was published in 1955 and I purloined it from my mother’s bookshelves. The amount of books she has, she can spare it /guilty. I like Michael Gilbert’s mysteries and this one, unusually, has a female POV character, Liz Artside, a middle-aged widow with a fine bass singing voice, a difficult son, and a general air about her of having wandered in from a Peter Dickinson mystery instead. The whole thing is very entertaining even apart from Liz, especially the way her son Tim goes from annoying to endearing as we get more of his POV (although I think Sue should wait ten years to marry him…).

Aspects, John M. Ford: The first book of a proposed fantasy series, published posthumously. John M. Ford can be hit or miss for me but I enjoyed this one, and am very sorry there’ll be no more, since in many ways the book is mostly setting the scene for events to come. I have to say, if his estate ever decides to hand it over to someone else to continue, my vote would go to L.D. Inman of the Ryswyck series, because for some reason it struck me very similarly—the austere worldbuilding, the vaguely post-war feel [post- a war in text, I mean, not our war], the friendly dueling, the religious background notes, the author’s passions coming through, Longlight very much a Speir in some ways… . I liked the different dialects, and the food, and the trains of course! (Also kind of in conversation with Yamaguchi Akira’s paintings, in terms of trains?) The naming conventions annoyed me—either use “English” words or non-English words but don’t mix the two together so awkwardly, and if you’ve got a major city with major-city bureaucracy, you need to have last names or patronymics/matronymics or SOMETHING to keep people straight, although I guess they manage in Indonesia—and the male lead I did not find especially interesting, unfortunately, the more so because all the other characters think he’s so special. Oh well. Was sorry not to see more of Brook, instant face-casting as Zhao Xinci, or rather Wang Weihua. I liked Silvern and Edaire a lot, and Alecti, who in two short scenes has infinitely more chemistry with Longlight than Varic does in the whole book…oh well.

For the Zhu Yilong fans, I’ve discovered another of our number in a funny place: some idle googling led me to the Acknowledgments section of a scholarly work on international relations, in which, along with her colleagues and her family, the author thanks “Mr Zhu Yilong, an esteemed actor from China, who…epitomises hard work and a zest for life, …maintaining a humble and unpretentious demeanour, and remaining steadfast in pursuing his dreams, a quality that I deeply admire” and quite a bit more in that vein. For some reason I am totally charmed by this straightforward fannishness in an entirely un-fannish context, good for the scholar in question!

Quick music link: Thad Jones’ 61st and Richard, once heard on site at the Vanguard, where it made me cry a little—there’s something about it that sounds like “yeah, things have been hard, but it’s gonna be okay” to me, who knows why. (Also discovered that the Vanguard jazz band’s long-standing first alto sax player, Dick Oatts, shares my birthday. I can remember him when my father used to take me there in my teens, when he had plentiful black hair, and now what hair he’s got left is all white, but he still plays, and smiles, like an angel.)

Photos: A few mostly autumn-themed pictures from my trip back to the States last month (for some reason I always feel odd about revealing my hometown on here in an unlocked post, so if you happen to recognize the city, please leave it nameless).

Be safe and well.

·Y and I treated ourselves at a new gelato shop recently, with outlandish flavors: coconut, praline/gianduja (always a favorite), blood orange, gorgonzola.

·I think the busy season is winding down; I still have a lot of deadlines for Monday but I'm taking the evening to catch up on DW. Translating a long, very technical paper about the Okinawan Kunigami dialect; most of it is clearly a close relation to Japanese, but there are occasional words like ma (to scold) or oshan (danger) that sound as if they wandered over from Chinese instead, geographically not unlikely.

·For the last few days I've been plotting rather than writing with regard to book 2; every time I think I know how the rest of it is supposed to go, I have to work it out all again, fractally. There are still a lot of gaps, but I think I have a structure that should let me get writing again from today on. I've given up on alternating POVs one for one for one; surely it makes more sense to have A a little bit in the background here, because that's where she is in this book, right? She's at the bottom of her arc while K is at the top of his and R is on his way back up, sort of. To simplify drastically. Oh dear.

·Funny to see YouTube recommending me “Zhou Shen: Sleeping Music” right next to the “Goldberg Variations.” If you can't fall asleep one way, try the other? In other musical news, we're doing Borodin's 3rd (partial) Symphony in orchestra, with a second movement in 5/8, one-two one-two-three, and it always brings to mind Blue Rondo a la Turk. (Rather have an a cappella version, which is how I first discovered it, but I can't find one on YouTube where they're scatting instead of singing the lyrics.)

·Another of my LTR fics (in my scherzanda guise) was kindly recorded by Thimblerig; it's always an honor to have someone spend the time to make a podfic, and she does really nice things with it. (Also it's always kind of a trip to hear something I wrote in a completely different accent from the one inside my head; makes it sound like it's not me?! Neat.)

·Bits of Guardian, listening as background Chinese: wow, Zhu Hong’s speech in episode 31 has to be the longest unbroken piece of dialogue in the whole show, that is A LOT in one place (580 characters, I checked). And Gao Yu'er pulls it off beautifully.
Also, listening to the audio of ep 29 breaks my heart; Zhao Yunlan makes more emotion felt in ten seconds of silence and one laugh than Wang Xiangyang does in all that crying and yelling.

·Rereading two books about dragons: E.K. Johnston's The Story of Owen duology vs Robin McKinley's Dragonhaven.

may contain spoilers

(E.K. Johnston has written three books I like and one I detest, and the latter kind of influences my view of the former now, but I still enjoy them. Also, nobody including McKinley seems to consider Dragonhaven among her best work, but I do like it.) Really the dragons in the two books are only comparable in being large flying things that breathe fire; Johnston's are mindless toxic menaces, and McKinley's are sentient, mindful, language-using and with vast emotional reserves. Johnston uses them to talk about (if generalizations of this kind are meaningful) grass-roots community organizing/collaboration, making sacrificial choices, and how storytelling changes what happens; McKinley is talking about being a parent, being a parent's child, and the long slow process of building communication. In terms of problems, people who know more about it than me have criticized Johnston's use of Canadian First Nations content; as for McKinley I don't much like the way she uses (or doesn't use) Martha and Katie in the storyline, even though I can see how it works thematically. Things I do like--I love the way Johnston's Siobhan thinks in music, especially with instruments, and I like what she does with the character of Owen himself. McKinley makes me care about her weird cast of characters, human and dragon, and the way she works through the dragon language (?) is really fascinating. Anyway. Maybe I should go back and read my ur-dragon books, Dragonflight and Dragonquest, for a parallax view...

Photos: weeping plums, daffodils, two cats in striking settings, and a bridge.

Be safe and well.

·Signal boost, via Goss:

drawesome's January Art Challenge:
BIPOC Diversity in Fantasy

As a non-artist, I also appreciate the mention of other creative works related to BIPOC diversity in fantasy, though obviously the focus here is on art <3

·New Chinese phrase from A-Pei, 鸡蛋里挑骨头, looking for bones in a chicken egg—someone who is always looking for something to argue about or make into a problem.

·Music. Been back on my Moszkowski kick, as in the last post—I know I’ve posted about the Moszkowski E major piano concerto here before, but the first theme—honestly—I think part of the reason it gets to me so much, here at 1:25, is that the harmonies are so close to the Gershwin-via-Romantics flavored piano chords my father loved to play around with, it’s like hearing someone using an intimately familiar dialect to talk about something both joyful and heart-wrenching, I don’t know. (Sorry for the purple prose. It just gets me so much, every time.)
Sort of in the same vein but also completely different, have Clifford Brown and company playing Joy Spring, honestly the most accurately named tune ever; if that canard about “whom the gods love die young” were true, it would at least explain Clifford Brown a little bit. Also have the vocal version just for the hell of it; I don’t like the performance that much but the lyrics are neat. And while we’re on Clifford Brown, have some Finders Keepers for just plain serene happiness.

Rambling below (why is this post so R-themed, if sadly not R-rated?) One thing I have become more aware of through a) working on writing original novels which I actually show to people, and b) having the chance to read other people’s original novels in progress is REVISION.

For me, at least, this rarely comes up much in fanfic: I have an idea, I write it out at a go or in pieces, I put the pieces together as necessary, I post the fic. (I imagine the same does not apply to people who write novella/novel-length fic, that’s a different story, as it were, but so far my longest fic hasn’t ever topped 20K.) But novel-writing seems to involve a lot of revision of all kinds, and it’s something I really struggle with.
One of the new books I read recently is the final version of something I had a chance to beta-read in draft form, S.E. Robertson’s The Healers’ Purpose.* I enjoyed the draft version, and offered some suggestions about keeping characters straight, some POV things, making motivations and cause-and-effect clearer. Reading the final version, I can see how it’s been made tighter and more elegant, with some minor plot changes and streamlining holding the whole thing together better and making the characters’ behavior feel more natural. (I mentioned this post to the author, who said “yeah, well, the draft you read was itself the result of five years of revised drafts!”).
I’ve also been following along with naraht’s posts about her work on her novel, which I also got to beta-read some time back; while I haven’t read the revised versions (looking forward to the final version when it’s ready), I’ve been admiring her willingness to dig in and make active revisions to something I thought was already pretty good.

This is one of my major difficulties with revisions—my tendency in most situations to settle for “pretty good.” (See also, why I’ve never been more than a mediocre amateur as a performing musician.) A lifetime as a dedicated reader has gifted me (I think) the ability to write fiction that is “pretty good” (technically competent, makes at least surface sense, has reasonably plausible characterization and some emotional resonance), and in the way of the bright kid who never got very good at hard work, it’s hard for me to say “but what if I decided pretty good wasn’t good enough?”.

Elsewhere, I am actually terrified of making serious revisions to my current original novel(s), because—what if it all falls apart in my hands? What if I don’t have a plot strong enough to stand up to being rejiggered—if my plotting essentially doesn’t make sense or hang together logically, or if my characters don’t have enough internal consistency or emotional weight to survive the joggling? Part of this is related, I think, to the way the current project seems to be working against my strengths in some ways—the choices made, consciously or otherwise, about POVs, about some of the pivotal themes, about the settings, are not ideal for what I actually know about (in terms of historical/social/cultural information) and what I’m good at in technical terms, so I don’t necessarily have a deep well to draw on in order to make changes which work.
Something else is that it’s relatively rare for me to think logically about how a plot element is going to work and come up with something that I like—the results tend to be dry and uninspired. The things that work better for me tend to be sudden flashes of “oh but what if THAT happened” or “oh, now that you mention it, she would do that and it relates back to that other thing.” They are not illogical per se, but they come from either lucky random inspiration or as the gradual result of ideas percolating for a long time in the back of my brain, and I find it hard to summon them on the spot on account of I decided I was going to do some revision on any given day. Which means that revision has to be a long-term, patient process, aargh.

Do I have a point or am I just whining? Mostly the latter, but I’m curious to hear other people’s ideas and experience on the topic.

*This is the third book in a series; I can’t remember where the hell I heard about them, but I read the first and second books and liked them, and when I saw the author asking for beta-readers for the third one, I cold-emailed them and they took me up on it. The books are gentle, slice-of-lifey secondary world fantasy, with a lot of attention to gradual character growth and completely fantastic worldbuilding, from the smallest details of spices, hobbies, and regional accents to large-scale political and demographic issues across multiple different countries. Definitely recommended.

Be safe and well.

·It's so damn cold, the worse for this 中途半端 locale where it never snows but it's freezing inside. I made a lentil soup roughly combining a recipe of my mother's and one from trobadora; very tasty, with added cumin seed and chili powder, and less liquid than called for because I like my lentils mess-of-pottagey rather than soupy. In fact, I basically reengineered ersatz dal curry; I'm gonna make it again with that in mind, sautéing the cumin seed properly first and adding some extra spice.

·Chinese, much as usual; making good progress working through the Guardian script on account of it's an excellent method of procrastination. Latest study problem: I know 成语 like 中途半端 ("neither t'one nor t'other," roughly) above exist in Chinese, on account of they exist in Japanese, but to know the Chinese pronunciation I have to know what the characters are. And I never do! I can SAY them in Japanese, and READ them no problem, but I can't bring them to mind independently. (I got as far as 中途半 and had to look up the last one, "what the hell is pa, it's not this, it's not that...oh, duan, aagh.")

·I'm irritated, as always, by the profusion of Christmas themes in shopping arcades, at school assemblies, and so on and so forth. Different from the Western assumption that everyone is BASICALLY Christian, here there's a) a lack of awareness that Christmas stuff actually has a religious meaning, and b) even when aware of that fact, a lack of awareness that syncretism with Christianity isn't always okay.* In general I enjoy Japan's casual, almost areligious syncretist habits, but not this one.
*I am not especially pro-Christianity but I know/know of a number of people, including some DW friends, whose practice of Christianity I respect the hell out of, er, as it were. So you know, not all Christians.

·In music terms, listening to Eliane Elias' piano work a lot--very good Brazilian jazz--except the tune of hers I like best is buried on a CD made from a tape of my father's and I have no idea what it's called. Also practicing the bassoon daily--fingering is much easier, except for the middle G, but reeds are a problem. Still, I like it, it feels right.

·Yuletide fic posted; it needs a final editing pass but it should mostly stand up as is. Still writing other bits of things for treats etc., we'll see which end up taking form, or rather filling in the form I can see.

·Photos: Autumn into winter: Japanese lanterns (photo by Y), maple, kumquats, gingkos, ivy, camellias, coffeepots, a cat framed by a kimono (no, the context didn't make any more sense in person).

Be safe and well.

Daily life: Very summer-doldrumsy for various mostly trivial reasons, 没办法。A little torn between "I want the chance to go out and spend time with people" and "but that would mean I'd have to, like, go out and spend time with people." Also our vaccine cards came, which might mean being vaccinated sometime in August or maybe September...?
On the upside, Y commemorated the rainy season by getting me a gorgeous Art Nouveau-ish stained glass umbrella (I mean, it is not made of stained glass, it just looks like it), a great comfort on rainy days.

Music: Holly Cole, an old favorite. "Everything I've Got Belongs To You," which I first heard sung by Blossom Dearie, is a wonderful drop-dead song, and "You So-and-So" is kind of halfway between a drop-dead song and a torch song. Lots of other good stuff too.

Books: Rereading The Language of Power, the most recent of Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series (next volume when...). The overall arc is exciting, but I like all the small-scale character work too. Poor messed-up Reeder and his private tragedy. Lorren and Eamer's recounting of their first meeting, three quarters of a century in the past, never ceases to be delightful. And what was the word in the song that Rowan couldn't read?

Chinese: Still very slowly watching The Rebel (at my current speed it's going to take me well into September to finish it all, I'm only on episode 12). Although spoilers suggest I will hate him later, and he's clearly supposed to be awful in both personality and ideology, I find Wang Shi'an (the deputy station chief) kind of endearing: he sulks and complains and loses his temper pettily and compared to the blaze of patriotic devotion (however misexpressed) everyone else lives in, it’s just so relatable.
Also, the Grammar Wiki gave me a wonderful wonderful sample sentence. First there was a sentence about how there are between 170,000 and 200,000 foreigners (外国人) in Shanghai, which at least pre-corona seems quite likely; the next card was this.

Writing: For good or ill I can see the light at the end of the tunnel on book 1 revisions (it would be appropriate in one sense if it were an oncoming train, but I hope not). Whether they have accomplished their purpose I can't tell, but I'm also beginning to feel more prepared to outline book 2 properly rather than plunging in at semi-random as I did before. I have a couple of delightful ethical dilemmas now prepared for the characters...

Photos: Our landlord's parsley plant, ducks on the job in a rice field, a turtle at leisure, and so on.
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Be safe and well.

Gotta have 'em sometime.

1) My mom. Enough said.

2) I succumbed to the Dark Side and wrote fanfiction. Almost the first one I've ever written, definitely the first I've ever put on the internet for other people to read. (For a fanfic fest, so there were some built-in readers.) And people liked it. Not everybody, I'm sure, but several people wrote sweet appreciative comments. I think I will end up writing more, because it's so damn easy and fun compared to the original stuff. Makes me feel as if I'm cheating on my Y and his world, but--call it finger exercises.

3) The Monday night band at the Village Vanguard. Sixteen people creating a basement full of pure powerful focused delight. You know the first line of the Ode to Joy--Freude, schöne Gotterfunken? A guy I know once memorably mistranslated it into Japanese as something like "Fun and beautiful and holy explosion!" and that's pretty much what happens with Dick Oatts--who apart from being a hell of a sax player has the sweetest smile I've ever seen--and John Mosca and their colleagues. This time John Riley the saturnine drummer was off, sadly, but the pianist was a gifted young guy with a lion's-mane of hair, the bassist a young Chinese-American guy with that placid, happy, just-walkin'-the-line expression good jazz bassists tend to have, and they did LOTS of Thad Jones. Love it.

4) While at my mom's place, I collected a bunch of her cassette tapes to rerecord onto CD; among them was one of my dad playing jazz piano that I haven't heard in years and years, if ever, though I have other recordings of his. Having lost my dad is not a good thing, but being able to hear his "voice" on the piano--and occasionally, his literal voice on the recording, it was a pretty casual gig--makes me pretty damn lucky among people whose fathers are gone.