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like morning glory vines
Jun. 15th, 2022 07:39 pm・Here's the Chinese word for the...duration: 一片浆糊, all confused/muddled up.
・grayswandir taught me how to use Anki for active as well as passive practice, which is great. I need more vocabulary (and more listening practice) but I'm always either too busy or too lazy/out of it, when will I get serious.
・I've been listening to the "Spanish Hour" (L'heure espagnole), Ravel's gorgeous, funny, moving 1-hour opera set in a clock shop. The comic would-be lovers, Gonçalve the poet and Don Inigo the businessman, actually have genuinely beautiful music [I mean, they are both would-be lovers of Concepción, the heroine, not of each other, although that staging could also work!], and then there's calm Ramiro the postman who spends the hour moving clocks back and forth upon demand, until Concepción finally asks him to come up to her room one more time. "And which clock would you like me to bring?" he says obligingly. "Neither one!"
・With help from china_shop at write-every-day (I find it easier when the person posting is closer to my time zone, I guess?), I've been making some progress on my original thing. The problem is kind of opposite to the first volume, where the pace started out very slow; everything is happening at once and I need to keep all the plot strands together and making sense.
・Photos. Some flowers etc. (the white and purple ones from my in-laws' garden); a hairdresser offering an unusual service; and two more which need a longer explanation. I've been reading Kakehashi Kumiko's account of a train trip around Sakhalin (the long skinny island north of Japan which was a Russian colony and then a Japanese one and then Russian again), and it brought to mind an old photo album I bought years ago at a used book fair. A few times a year there are large-scale used book fairs held outdoors at temples or shrines, with dozens of stalls and huge numbers of books; they are lovely to browse but also kind of frustrating, because you know there are books you want somewhere, you just may never find them in the confusion. The English selection is smaller but dependably weird and sometimes promising; I found a very old edition of Rebecca West's Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (or is it the other way around) once for the equivalent of two dollars. The other thing I always look for is ephemera, old photo albums and school yearbooks, prewar if I can find them.) This one has photos taken from a 1930s boyhood in Sakhalin (Karafuto) when it was Japanese, with occasional comments like "with my brothers" and "everyone says this picture doesn't look like me" and so on. God knows how it found its way here, but I feel like it's an honor to have. A couple of photos of photos--a baseball team in "Saghalien" uniforms, a group of friends.
( Read more... )
Be safe and well.
・grayswandir taught me how to use Anki for active as well as passive practice, which is great. I need more vocabulary (and more listening practice) but I'm always either too busy or too lazy/out of it, when will I get serious.
・I've been listening to the "Spanish Hour" (L'heure espagnole), Ravel's gorgeous, funny, moving 1-hour opera set in a clock shop. The comic would-be lovers, Gonçalve the poet and Don Inigo the businessman, actually have genuinely beautiful music [I mean, they are both would-be lovers of Concepción, the heroine, not of each other, although that staging could also work!], and then there's calm Ramiro the postman who spends the hour moving clocks back and forth upon demand, until Concepción finally asks him to come up to her room one more time. "And which clock would you like me to bring?" he says obligingly. "Neither one!"
・With help from china_shop at write-every-day (I find it easier when the person posting is closer to my time zone, I guess?), I've been making some progress on my original thing. The problem is kind of opposite to the first volume, where the pace started out very slow; everything is happening at once and I need to keep all the plot strands together and making sense.
・Photos. Some flowers etc. (the white and purple ones from my in-laws' garden); a hairdresser offering an unusual service; and two more which need a longer explanation. I've been reading Kakehashi Kumiko's account of a train trip around Sakhalin (the long skinny island north of Japan which was a Russian colony and then a Japanese one and then Russian again), and it brought to mind an old photo album I bought years ago at a used book fair. A few times a year there are large-scale used book fairs held outdoors at temples or shrines, with dozens of stalls and huge numbers of books; they are lovely to browse but also kind of frustrating, because you know there are books you want somewhere, you just may never find them in the confusion. The English selection is smaller but dependably weird and sometimes promising; I found a very old edition of Rebecca West's Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (or is it the other way around) once for the equivalent of two dollars. The other thing I always look for is ephemera, old photo albums and school yearbooks, prewar if I can find them.) This one has photos taken from a 1930s boyhood in Sakhalin (Karafuto) when it was Japanese, with occasional comments like "with my brothers" and "everyone says this picture doesn't look like me" and so on. God knows how it found its way here, but I feel like it's an honor to have. A couple of photos of photos--a baseball team in "Saghalien" uniforms, a group of friends.
( Read more... )
Be safe and well.
