nnozomi

Reading, or rather rereading: Peter Dickinson, In the Palace of the Khans. I think this was Dickinson’s last novel, or at any rate very, very late on in his career/his life, and in some ways it shows: the underlying themes that would have been woven seamlessly into the whole story in a peak-Dickinson book kind of lie uneasily on top, not really integrated and as a result not as emotionally effective as they might have been. That said, Dickinson is one of those creators who’s still better at 70% than most people are at 110%. The book is set in one of his imaginary but plausible countries, this one a small Central Asian state called Dirzhan, where Nigel, the teenage son of the British Ambassador, is summoned to help the President-Khan’s daughter Taeela perfect her English. Nigel is one of Dickinson’s viewpoint characters who is good in all senses, without coming off like a Mary Sue, and spending time in his head is deeply satisfying (although I’m kind of sorry that the constraints of the book made it impossible to get Taeela’s POV too). There are also a lot of interesting minor characters—Nigel’s mother Lucy (a whole unwritten novel in herself), Mizhael “Mike” the Oxford-educated chieftain’s son who makes his living designing video games, his brilliant, impatient Singaporean wife Lily-Jo, and so on. Working out the central puzzle of the palace map is one of my favorite parts of the book (almost nothing actually happens, but it’s just as exciting as any of the action sequences), and the symbolic gesture which closes the book and allows another long-awaited resolution is wonderful.

Listening to some of Alma Deutscher’s more recent stuff, the Breaking News Polka, which is very cute, and the Japanese Fantasia. I like that her work is so neoclassical, but I kind of wish she hadn’t taken this to the extent of using two of the most predictable Japanese traditional songs possible for her classical variations. (At least she didn't use "Kimigayo," which is as jingoistic as any other national anthem and more than some, although I do kind of like it musically.) I’ll admit that “Akatombo” is much more interesting in her hands than when I hear it signaling five o’clock (linking back to my other endeavor, it has lyrics by Miki Rofu, son of Midorikawa Kata, and music by Yamada Kosaku, brother of Tsuneko Gauntlett), but Clare Fischer did sakura sakura better. I’d just as soon have heard what Alma would do with something by Mr.Children or Dreams Come True.

Jiang Dunhao song of the post (because it’s my post and I can): 选择的归路, an older OST that I like for the way it shows off his low range and slides back and forth between minor and major; the first shift to major, around 00:35-36, is terrific.

We’re doing movie music in the orchestra right now (almost done, concert coming up this weekend, knock wood [knock woodwinds?]), and just in case not everybody was sure of what the Star Wars suite was expressing, one of the oboists sent everyone a heartfelt manifesto on the in-universe context of each section (the annihilating force of the Empire, Yoda lifting the shuttle out of the swamp, Luke feeling the Force, Leia summoning help and so on) just for reference. Nothing I haven’t known about since I was fifteen, and I do think about it when we’re playing; I find Yoda’s theme some of John Williams’ best work, the main theme with the little clarinet interjections in particular always kind of makes me cry, around 1:14 to 1:24 here; but I was pleased to find the oboist signing his email off appropriately with “May the Force be with you!” (If we’d only pushed the concert date off by just a week, it could’ve been on May the Fourth…)

New class of Japanese learners at the weird high school, a big one this year with eighteen kids. Mostly Chinese (including one from Hong Kong), as well as two lively Nepali boys and one girl each from Thailand and the Philippines. Last year’s class featured two tall, slim, incredibly poised idol-style princesses; this year they’re all more typical fifteen-year-olds, personalities not yet coming out in full at their new school, although it’s fascinating to watch the subgroups forming already. Several speak good English and have to be told NOT to speak English with me when I volunteer in class, they’re here to learn Japanese! They have so far learned to introduce themselves with regard to name, age, and nationality, the last a little complicated; the Thai and Filipina girls are both half-Japanese, I think, and so is at least one of the Chinese kids, and since they’re all still young enough to hold dual nationality, they have some choices to make when it comes to this elementary piece of language practice.

Work: Somewhere in one of the Janet Neel mysteries, Francesca Wilson remarks “Fraud gets in everywhere once you have it, like moth,” and I have found that this also applies to mismanagement/incompetence at work—like, there is this one long project in which everything that could go wrong has gone wrong (not, for a nice change, any of it my fault to speak of). I think the root of all evil was the client demanding extremely unrealistic deadlines, and then the sales guys promising to meet them without bothering to consult with the people actually doing the work (sorry, I have a long-standing and permanent grudge against the people in charge of sales), but even after that there was a remarkable failure to do any of the elementary checking (spelling! glossary words!), agree on basic conventions, or do anything resembling version control. Like wrestling a plate of spaghetti, but it’s not like the spaghetti fork hasn’t long since been invented.

A couple of very silly things from long ago that came to mind recently, one talking with the brass players at orchestra rehearsal: way back in high school I had a friend who was a trombonist in the band, and who would bring her instrument to school on the school bus, as one did. One of the little kids looked at her getting on the bus one day with this big black case over her shoulder, and called out “Hey, look! Sarah plays the bazooka!”
Also, since we’re into baseball season now (a mixed bag so far), I was reminded of Deanna Rubin’s baseball musical, which remains a delight. (I should look Deanna up again—we hung out a few times many years ago and she was lovely.)

This is just plain bragging and I’ll put it under a cut: ( in brief )

Photos: My bassoon teacher’s magnificent cat, trains within trains, Shanghai-style fried dumplings (apparently you can tell because they’re folded like little paper hats, and yes they were as tasty as they look), and assorted flowers.

Be safe and well.

Reading The Tempest with yaaurens and company; I think it’s the first time I’ve read it through. I was Sebastian, who is a minor conspirator nobody’s ever heard of and gets some remarkably good lines (“He receives comfort like cold porridge,” “[in response to “He misses not much”] No; he doth but mistake the truth totally,” “Thou dost snore distinctly; there’s meaning in thy snores”). The play also inevitably brings to mind Jason of Jason and the Bard, dreaming up a quaint device to make the banquet vanish, and of course Antonia Forest’s production—Ginty finding Ferdinand interesting only when he’s played by Patrick (not unreasonably, I think), Lawrie relishing Caliban’s most colorful speeches, Miranda longing for Jan as Prospero and making Nicola laugh with her line readings, and then her eerie, wistful “…were I human.”

Went to graduation at the nighttime junior high (from which you graduate after you acquire a certain number of credits, not a certain number of years; many people take five or six years or more and that’s fine). Nine people graduating: a big cheerful young Nepali guy, an equally big cheerful fortyish Japanese lady, and seven middle-aged to elderly Korean ladies, at least one in her eighties. C, the Japanese lady, has a son in his late teens who graduated from the same nighttime junior high school the previous year; he was there to cheer his mom on, and she will be following him to nighttime high school, as will M, who is in her late fifties or sixties, quiet and modest and very bright. They were both in snazzy skirt suits; several of the other women had on glorious chima chogori. Lots of enthusiastic applause and speeches, singing the school song and also 乾杯, not to be confused with its Chinese counterpart 干杯 lol (although I think the Chinese one would work as a graduation song too!). Curiously, there were very few family members there apart from C’s son F; I wonder how many of the older Korean women were only able to start school once their husbands were out of the picture.

The nighttime junior high is in a neighborhood with a skyrocketing Vietnamese population (judging from the fact that every time I go there there’s a new Vietnamese restaurant or grocery); since I won’t be back there for a few months I took the opportunity to go into a little café and buy a couple of banh mi for dinner. Immediate positive impression because the song playing when I went in was 小幸运! (not Bai Yu’s version, but still). There was a bookshelf behind the cash register containing the complete Harry Potter series (I know, but) in both Japanese and Vietnamese. The sandwiches were also pretty good—one roast pork and one ham-and-fried-egg, with all the tasty trimmings (although my idea of a good sandwich is one with just barely enough bread to retain its structural integrity, the bread is always too thick for me regardless of what kind it is, oh well).

It's high school baseball time and I have been collecting the most remarkable names among the players, as usual; this season’s bunch includes 慈愛久 (Jake), 満詩 (Miuta), 空飛 (Takato) and his teammate 蒼海 (So), whose “sky and sea” combination I like; 覇 (Howl, I am not kidding, a) how do you get that pronunciation from the character, and b) are his parents fans of DWJ and/or Ghibli); 芽空 (Hisoka, God knows how), and 夢生愛 (Muua, poor kid), whose older brothers are 飛美希 (Hibiki) and 輝夢 (Kiramu). It’s not even that none of these are nice names, they’re lovely! If not necessarily what you’d expect from tanned crewcut kids whose main preoccupation is getting to first base. Just, parents all, please think of your kid having to spend his whole life explaining how to spell and/or pronounce his name!

Music for today: something I came across at random on YouTube, a concerto for flute and flute orchestra. The piece itself isn’t all that exciting, but the sound of so many flutes together is fantastic, mellow and melting and cool as water, why aren’t there more pieces for this kind of group?
Also listening to Seong-Jin Cho play the Chopin Scherzos, just dazzling.

Y’s project of getting me to watch 1980s anime movies continues; this time it was Oshii Mamoru’s Patlabor, which was really surprisingly good. Not as pretty visually as the Gundam ones, on the whole, but (except for some comic distortion here and there) realistic in a way that makes you feel you’re watching live-action postwar Japan with big robots, including wonderful visual scenes of ordinary-Showa-era downtowns and abandoned areas. There’s a lot less in the way of big robot fights than in Gundam, and the ones they do have are significantly plot-related as opposed to “big battle scenes are fun” (sorry, Gundam, I’m oversimplifying, but still); the whole thing is almost like a murder mystery in the way they gradually work out what’s happening and why and how to stop it, it’s fascinating. Also, nobody dies! I was sure Captain Gotoh was going to be a dead mentor guy, having made his stirring speech and gone off on his own into the storm, but nope, he was fine. Shinohara the male lead is actually not nearly as annoying as he might be, and again there are more women and less fanservice than I would have expected from the eighties—Izumi is fine too (and I do like it that she’s the pilot and Shinohara is the data guy), but I love Nagumo and her ponytail and her professionalism.

I finished reading The People at No. 1 Siwei Street (or rather I finished reading the Japanese edition; now I have a copy of the Chinese original from the library which I am trying to work my way through before I have to return it. It is mostly not hard to follow, except reading in 繁体字 gives me a headache; my brain has no problem reading 历史 as lìshǐ, but it insists on reading 歴史 as rekishi, and as for something like 號, my brain wants to know why I’m suddenly reading something published before the war (this book is from 2023). Oh well, if I lived in Taiwan for a while I’d get used to it). It was a lot of fun, with very memorable characters (including a Jiajia whom I keep picturing as the one from Guardian, since she’s happy and feisty, even though this one is explicitly described as strongly featured, beautiful, and very tall, plus she’s 家家 instead of 佳佳, but still). Happy ending allowing for a sad flashback which I still don’t understand in full, other than as a way to examine late-twentieth-century Taiwanese sociopolitical history through the relationship of two not-quite-cousins who hate each other but have a close bond). I would love to make an English translation and may play with one, but it really should be done by someone who can read the original fluently and really knows from Taiwan.
Also reading The Luka/Chika Sisters by Nagano Mayumi, an old favorite who likes to play around with gender and sexuality in interesting, weird, low-key ways; will report back.

Photos: Magnolia, forsythia, some things that are probably not pink lilies-of-the-valley, and some early cherry blossoms. The most unexpected vending machine I’ve seen yet, with flavors from dark chocolate to raspberry, pistachio, and yogurt. Scenes from a recent day trip, including three gorgeous vessels, holding respectively sake, abalone stew, and the most delicious yokan I’ve ever tasted, containing raisins, figs, and apricots. (One of the deer around here, not pictured, is recently said to have wandered about 30km to our city to prowl around eating people’s gardens; maybe even deer get bored in the countryside?).

Be safe and well.

So it’s entrance exam time, and all the ninth-graders have Red Books (collections of past exam questions for practice, which have red covers). At the junior high school attended by some of the kids from the Saturday juku, it is apparently a thing to write each other encouraging messages on the Red Book covers, like a yearbook in advance. Most of these are very sweet. I was looking at Sakura’s while she worked her way through a practice test, noticing that one long and enthusiastic message was signed with a boy’s name and included 사랑해 at the end. “Sakura, did you know this kid is confessing to you?” “Oh, sure. He said I could rub it out if I wasn’t interested.” Since she left it there, I’m curious to know whether Yusuke-kun will have some good news after exams are over… (I still don’t know why Japanese teenagers are using Korean to say “I love you” to each other, but I think it’s another fad. Very cute regardless.)

I noticed that both Japanese and Chinese have adopted the English word “get,” but in different senses, both legit in English. Japanese uses it to mean “acquire,” usually but not always in the physical sense (Y will occasionally text me to say 苺ゲット, ichigo get, meaning he’s laid his hands on some of the hometown strawberries the supermarkets don’t sell here; I might text him back to say Kuro-chan get, meaning that I ran into Kuro-chan the cat who deigned to let me do some stroking). Chinese, on the other hand, uses it to mean “understand, empathize with, grok,” usually with the completion-complement as in “get到.” (Baidu offers sample usages as in 突然get到, to understand all at once, 永远get不到, an eternal lack of understanding, and 被get到, he gets me etc.) (Japanese also doubles the final consonant while Chinese pretty much swallows it, but that’s a thing the two languages will be 永远get不到 about each other.)

Courtesy of the farmboys I have learned that Winnie the Pooh in Chinese is 小熊维尼, Weini the Little Bear, and Tigger is 跳跳虎, bounce-bounce-tiger. (Also I did not expect to find out while looking this up that Winnie the Pooh is quasi-banned in China for use in political satire? Surprised that the farmboys were allowed to reminisce happily on camera about their favorite characters, also including 屹耳 the donkey.)

I’ve been watching little snatches of the Winter Olympics on TV while I do other things; I like all the flying events, ski jump most of all, although I can’t imagine how anyone ever makes it to Olympic level without breaking themselves into little pieces along the way. Along with everyone else in Japan I was very happy to see Rikuryu (Miura Riku and Kihara Ryuichi) win a gold in pairs skating, coming back from fifth place after their short program. Very touching and amusing that Kihara, nine years older than his partner and three times her size, is the one who bursts into tears on the spot (happy or sad) while little tiny Miura keeps her cool and comforts him.

Reading a new book by Yang Shuangzi (author of Taiwan Travelogue) called The People at No. 1 Siwei Street or words to that effect; the edition I have is a Japanese translation (also by Miura Yuko), I don’t know if there is an English version and I can’t get my hands on the Chinese original. I’m only about a third in but it is very fun, modern-era but with callbacks to the colonial period, about four young women renting rooms in an old Japanese-style house (and falling in love with each other along the way, I think, will keep you posted). Maybe I should trouble A-Pei to go out to a bookstore and send me everything by Yang Shuangzi she can lay hands on.

A new favorite and an old one: Schumann Six Canonical Studies, arranged by Debussy for two pianos, one of his love letters to Bach. Why isn’t there an orchestration of this? (I have found some chamber-music versions, but it’s not the same. Also the Pergolesi Stabat Mater, a version with soprano and countertenor that I wasn’t familiar with (and just to show that poor short-lived Pergolesi had a range, my favorite aria from his comic opera).

Y and I went up to the outdoor track one station over this morning to run for a while. He has very mild asthma and prefers to start and stop—“or I could just run slower?” “Sweetheart, you know what it’s called if you’re running slower than me? Walking.” I do have some staying power, however, and today I got through twenty laps of the little track without stopping for a break, so about 6K if my arithmetic is right. We were entertained along the way by an invasion of hiyoko-chan from the nearby nursery school, little knee-high kids in bright yellow hats, running and somersaulting and in one case meandering along hand in hand like it was a romantic date opportunity, adorable. (Their teachers wear signs on their coats saying “No photography please” in three languages, so I can’t record it for you.)

Photos: Flowers, a very patient dog outside the supermarket, an alarming bakery sign (I was good, I didn’t go up and tell them about it), actual snow on my balcony plants (a once-a-year occurrence if that), and somebody’s paper art on their doorstep, with a sign saying “Help yuorself” [sic]. I took a little tiny origami star.

Be safe and well.

Just after I wrote up Makiko Vories at senzenwomen, Y said “let’s go out to Omi-Hachiman and see some Vories buildings,” entirely coincidentally. So we took a two-day trip, stayed in an inn by the lake with a hammock on the balcony, saw a lot of beautiful buildings in both Japanese and Western styles (they all have big windows everywhere, which I love), went on a punt trip down the river, took a cable car up the nearest mountain to see the site of an ex-castle, and enjoyed ourselves in general.

I’ve been working on one of those awful software translations—I hate software stuff, give me machine tools, screws and bolts, or motion control any day of the week—and it has various This Units and That Units, which is at least mildly amusing because it keeps bringing to mind Murderbot. I wonder if the SecUnits ever came with manuals and if anyone had to translate them.

I’m volunteering with a Japanese class for Chinese teenagers, eight fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds with only very rudimentary Japanese; tiring because they are reluctant and easily distracted compared to my Saturday juku kids (who vary hugely in motivation but are remarkably well-behaved and 乖乖), but a fun challenge, everything from a girl who looks like an aspiring idol (hair to her hips, very slim, very well-dressed) to a kid on the autism spectrum who sticks firmly to his OWN pace in everything to a shy little anime otaku to a smart-mouthed young man who tries to use his fluent English to get away with things with me (I resorted to 这小子! to put him in his place). I can follow maaaybe half their talk among themselves, it’s too fast and too slangy, but it’s good practice for me (although I’m so used to “Speak English! Not Japanese!” that deliberately trying to shift into Japanese and make them speak it too is a real challenge). Haven’t yet had a chance to ask any of them if we have any fannish interests in common.

So when I bought my bassoon it came with a repair contract at the store, a large, high-end-ish musical instrument chain store; I’ve taken it back a few times for tuning up, always with the store clerk who sold it to me in the first place, a helpful, personable young man I’ll call S here. Last week I got a letter from the store in very formal terms: “we would like to inform you that [S] has resigned under the provisions of Employment Regulations Article ###. If you have any concerns about his work with you, please contact either the woodwind department or the accounting department as below…”. I took this to Y to see if he had any ideas and he’d never seen anything like it either; we concluded that S must have embezzled something??? but I certainly wouldn’t ever have guessed at such a thing, and I kind of feel bad for him. Need to check and see if my bassoon teacher knows anything more (all bassoonists have about 1.5 degrees of separation). I feel like I’ve brushed up against the first scene of a detective story. (Also, who am I going to get to fix my bassoon now if I need it?)

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 最好的我们, a duet from some years ago with Zhou Shen (they are close friends). Apart from being musically lovely it’s kind of amusing visually: the two singers are rather similar in features and coloring to begin with, and on this occasion they had almost identical haircuts into the bargain, so there’s a kind of 水仙 effect an octave apart.

Photos: Just a few, I haven’t been taking that many lately. Might add some of Y’s Omi-Hachiman photos later on. Lake Biwa, decorations on a mountaintop shrine, and a striking evening sky seen from a train.

Be safe and well.

Thanks to osprey-archer’s reread, I’ve been rereading the Joan Aiken Dido books for the first time in years and years (bless openlibrary and its ilk), including some I never managed to read before at all, for one reason or another. I have to keep stopping or skimming now and then because the tension is SO MUCH, they’re thrillers really, but full of the most bizarre and wonderful (and horrific) flights of imagination. Captain Hughes breaking out of jail by designing the flying craft he's always been obsessed with, Dr. Talisman (whom I kept picturing as Wen Xiaoliu the whole time), the frightening witch antagonists drifting suddenly into wistful, genuinely poignant raptures about going home to the Caribbean, the Birthday League, Dido entranced by her scoundrel father's compositions...and I’ve still got like half a dozen books to go. In particular it occurs to me that Aiken makes Dido immensely brave, clever, funny, resourceful, and caring—heroic, as Captain Hughes says—without ever making the reader draw away from her as they would from a worse written Mary Sue-type.

If you have been blue lately, as which of us hasn’t, and could use a momentary burst of sheer elation, go listen to the ending of this Kapustin piano sonata—the timestamp should take you right there but really the whole thing is a lot of fun. Exhilarating.

I was infuriated and amused by a client comment on the math workbook I had to translate recently: the original question was about averages, “if you have five ミカン (mikan) of the following weights, what is their average weight?” or something along those lines. I translated mikan in the normal way as “tangerines,” and the client commented “The weights given would be too heavy for tangerines, so we should make this ‘oranges’ instead.” First, if they’re too heavy for tangerines they’re too heavy for mikan too! The words are synonyms! What did you want me to do, make it “clementines” like my dad used to call them? Second, who goes and LOOKS UP the average weight of a tangerine? (And where do you even look that up?)

Also vaguely on the same theme: for some reason the English textbook they use at the nighttime junior high, which I think is originally designed for sixth-graders, happened to have Boy A saying “I like math!” and Girl B saying “I don’t!” and I could not stop myself pointing out “you know, that’s not a very good stereotype,” before remembering that the half-dozen Korean-Japanese ladies who make up the class were undoubtedly familiar with sexism in much more straightforward and intimate ways (to start with, among the reasons they had to wait forty to sixty years to attend junior high). Oh dear. They saw the point, though.

I ran across Aoyama Akira in a work project the other day and I just thought he was neat; he was a prewar civil engineer who was the only Japanese surveyor involved with the Panama Canal, and then went back to Japan and built a bunch of drainage canals which prevented deadly flooding. Also he has the rare distinction of looking pretty good with a mustache (in his 1928 Wikipedia photo, at least). He seems to have been a gentleman of integrity: during the massacre of Koreans after the 1923 earthquake, he sheltered Korean laborers from his current construction project in his own home, and when asked by the government during WWII what would be a good way to demolish the Panama Canal, said “I know how to build it but not how to destroy it.” He also enjoyed poetry and Esperanto, gave his daughter a dagger when she got married, and believed women should have technical skills.

For all my ongoing farming show obsession I still remain loyal to Liu Chang and his livestreams as low-key background listening; in one recent one he streams himself playing a video game called What Remains of Edith Finch (I’m not a game person, I had to look it up; it‘s a bit dark for me but very interesting). Not the first game I would have expected to get a Chinese release, but why not? In language-learning terms it’s extremely fun to watch him play. His version of the game has the original English voiceover plus very artistically inserted on-screen Chinese text, and his English is good enough that he picks up the phrases in the voiceover from time to time and responds—“…but I had no idea what was behind that door.” “我也没有 idea!” and so on. Also he reads on-screen English text out loud in English with dates/numbers in Chinese, which seems to be a universal first-language constant (I still count rests in English, for instance). Plus, while he himself is not subtitled, it’s much easier to follow what he’s saying by ear when the visual context of the game is right there.

Latest farmboy words: 卖萌, to act cute (lit. to sell cuteness); 交卷, to hand in a completed test (interesting because it uses 卷, a scroll, although I don’t think many people are taking tests on scrolled paper these days); 刷刷的, smoothly, a breeze; 虎头蛇尾, starting strong and finishing weak (lit. tiger’s head and snake’s tail); 无籽, seedless, as in grapes; 弄巧成拙, to try to do something clever and end up the worse off for it (very roughly, “do smart end stupid”)

Photos: Lots of plum blossoms and assorted local cats. The matched pair live near the nighttime junior high and will let me pet them only at very irregular intervals, I never know when they’ll be in the mood, but the day I took the photo was a lucky one and I ended up with both of them bonking their foreheads into my knees and alternating purrs and meows. The other three I often see (and sometimes get close to) on my morning runs; Kuro-chan senior, a free-range pet (note the extravagantly long fur) who must be quite an elderly gentleman or lady judging by the brown tint; Kuro-chan junior, much younger and sleeker and more skittish; and Miké-chan, usually friendly and amenable (except occasionally when preempted by another cat).

Be safe and well.

Listening recently to Elis Regina sing Ih! Meu Deus do céu, a fantastic song that I tend to forget about in favor of “Amor até o fim” or “Aguas de março” and so on. “Espontaneidade eu sou, eu sou / Na misticidade eu vou, eu vou…” jeez.

Latest farmboy words: 劈叉, the splits; 哇塞, which just means “wow,” usually positive, but I like the way it sounds; 大波斯菊, cosmos flowers (literally “large Persian chrysanthemums”); 熟鸡蛋, boiled eggs (literally “mature eggs” although technically that’s a different usage); 克隆人, clone (a transliteration); 五花八门, all different kinds of something (literally “five flowers and eight doors”)

My friend A-Pei is also a technical translator, in her case from English to Chinese, and the English source texts she receives are sometimes not what they might be. The other day she texted me a line from an agricultural machinery manual: “This combination will reduce the risk of serious injury or death, should the machine be upset.”
We agreed that the machine would certainly pose greater risks if it got emotional or lost its temper. (机器难过时风险变大，请大家注意安全!) It took both of us a moment to arrive at what the source text actually meant to say…

At the Saturday juku last week I happened to work with two siblings in a row, seventh-grade Yuki and his ninth-grade sister Satsuki (pseudonyms). She said cheerfully “My brother’s smarter than me, his English grades are better than mine were in seventh.” Me: Well, how much time did you spend studying English every day in seventh grade? Satsuki: Maybe ten minutes? Me: How about your brother? Satsuki: I don’t know, half an hour, no, an hour? Me: Are you sure this is a question of who’s smarter than who?

I have temporarily (?) finished revising the translation of the Miura Shion novel I’ve been working on (revising a translation is SO MUCH easier than revising my own writing, I don’t have to worry if the plot or structure or emotional beats work, just make sure the words are where they should be, phew); next comes the far more difficult process of trying to figure out how to get it published, oh God. In the meantime, I need something new to translate! Based on past lists of possibilities, if interested please cast a vote or two below? (I have never made a DW poll before, I hope it works).

Poll #32655

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 11

View Respondents

What should I translate next?

View Answers

Akasaka Mari’s essays on Japan’s struggles immediately postwar
0 (0.0%)

Letters and diaries of Chujo (Miyamoto) Yuriko and Yuasa Yoshiko in the 1920s
0 (0.0%)

One or more of Hara Takeshi's books about trains, emperors, 1970s Communism, and history in general
0 (0.0%)

Haraguchi Takeshi’s book on the Osaka day laborers’ district and its history and sociology
0 (0.0%)

Hasuike Kaoru’s accounts of his abduction to North Korea, eventual return to Japan, and later visits to South Korea and work as a Korean to Japanese translator
0 (0.0%)

Imaizumi Takayuki’s book on his imaginary city maps
1 (9.1%)

One or both of two random books about falling in love with Finland and Finnish, by Inagaki Miharu and Takahashi Erika
0 (0.0%)

Kisaragi Kazusa’s YA book about a boy who figures out he has a good singing voice in the guise of a girl
0 (0.0%)

Komatsu Ayako’s YA book about a high school girl who discovers Arabic calligraphy and Islam through her sister’s half-Turkish classmate
0 (0.0%)

Kuroiwa Hisako’s biography of Sakai Toshihiko
0 (0.0%)

Li Kotomi|Li Qinfeng's essays about foreignness and language and sexuality
5 (45.5%)

Maekawa Masayuki’s book about bicycling around South Korea and revisiting its colonized history
1 (9.1%)

One or more of Miyabe Miyuki’s mystery novels involving telepathy and/or time travel
0 (0.0%)

Nakajima Atsushi’s letters to his wife and young children from the South Pacific in 1940 or thereabouts
1 (9.1%)

Tai Shotaro’s diary of a year working as a conductor on the Osaka city trams in 1930 or so
1 (9.1%)

Hiko Tanaka’s MG trilogy about the first year of junior high school
0 (0.0%)

Tawada Yoko’s essays on language, writing and translation
1 (9.1%)

Yamamoto Yukihisa’s novel about a bus tour guide, her company problems, and the power of Pino ice cream
0 (0.0%)

Yonehara Mari’s novel and essays about her childhood at a Soviet school in Prague and its effects on her later life as a Russian interpreter
1 (9.1%)

Various present and prewar oral histories
0 (0.0%)

Favorites from my Chinese song list, part 3 of 3. Three from Liu Chang: 再睡五分钟, making “let me sleep in another five minutes” sound extremely sexy (and 我以为是伦敦时间 always makes me laugh); 谢谢你来听我唱歌, with its lovely syncopations and wistful lyrics on 不怕轻易受伤; and 雨人 (this particular video has a terrific English translation), with the long sad note on 不闻不问 and the way 天大地大的 almost comes out as scat syllables. Along with that one, LTR has the best soundtrack going as far as I’m concerned: 往下跳 still makes me sad, the grief all the way through actually emphasized by the major third of 笔记已合上, and the title song 重启 is for my money some of the best singing Zhu Yilong’s ever done, from the playful-wistful catch in 人们在追寻答案 to the short phrases making up 河川自由奔流会流向哪里, where the melody is major but the harmony wanders into the minor and his voice knows it. Elsewhere, 灵光 because it’s the only sodagreen song I know where you can imagine a whole arena full of people singing along (and probably crying); the way Wu Qingfeng hits the chorus on 霎时灵光拨弄我心弦 is dazzling. Two different versions of 麦芒, fast and loud (warning for flashing lights) and sung by all ten people (this is the farmboys) with each one’s style distinct (and I do like syncopations, okay, the verse makes nice use of them), plus a quieter version sung by Jiang Dunhao solo, where his lower range is lovely. Finally 水星记; the version I really like best is Liu Chang and Wang Leda fooling around, but there are a lot of others, so I’ve linked Shan Yichun. The rising phrase on 还有多远才能进入你的心 does me in, along with the sudden minor on 那个人; I could listen to that so many times.

Photos: This year’s first plum blossoms, some other assorted outdoor moments, a cat that will complain loudly about how cold it is but not actually let you do anything about it, and Jiji-chan thinking I can’t see her.

Be safe and well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos: Seasonal.

Be safe and well.

I’ve been, still am, ridiculously busy—among other things a huge job that is way out of my wheelhouse and also boring, which I only took when I could get it into writing that any client complaints would be the agency’s problem, not mine. So I should be either working or sleeping right now, not catching up on DW, but you know how it is.
This particular job involves contracts, ugh ugh ugh—I did get a momentary smile out of it when I hit the verb at the end of a given sentence and realized I needed to use “must,” not “shall,” thus reminding myself of Kira’s dilemma in The Stolen Law.
Also an entirely different job for which I couldn’t remember the English word for a common gardening task, and tried not to write “debugging plants.” I mean, that’s what it is!

Y had dealings lately with an accordion shop (who knew there still was such a thing) in town, and I tagged along: lots of elegant squeezeboxes of all sizes and shapes, presided over by an enthusiastic lady who chattered about the efficiency of the button system, under the supervision of an extremely friendly, customer-service-oriented cat, see below. An orgy of suri-suri. The shop also had a tiny café, which absolutely delighted me by serving ジャバラ茶 or tea flavored with jabara, one of the many untranslatable Japanese citrus fruits. The thing is that jabara also means “bellows,” as in what’s inside an accordion…

Because the Meiji Restoration looms so large in everything on senzenwomen so far—and will keep on doing so until the twin dislocation of WWII starts to cast a longer shadow—I’ve been thinking about writing fiction focusing on this kind of huge societal change, or rather not on the large-scale sociopolitics etc. but the way it’s always there in the background even when the foreground is focused in everyday life. Obviously this is, like, a major literary theme anyway, but I’m trying to think of SFF examples—Ursula Le Guin’s Orsinia for one?
I sneaked a little bit of that into the “reforms” in my ZXC fic, which is pure worldbuilding with nothing to back it up in the drama that I know of--I wanted something in Haixing that might have been history-textbook stuff for Zhao Yunlan’s generation but would have been foundational for his father’s. I’m not even sure anyone noticed it, but it was fun to play with.

Would somebody please invent apples that don’t shrink? Six HUGE apples I chopped up for applesauce, and they produced maybe three smallish servings. (How on earth did my dad make this with Macintoshes, back in the day? He must have bought them by the bushel.)

Lunch with a former student—he’s now the age I was when I first taught him, which, oh dear. You’re not supposed to have favorites but he was always one of mine, a smart, practical, artistic, obsessive kid who would come in after classes when he was in high school to ask me a list of English grammar and idiom questions as long as his arm, staying truculently on my case until I could explain everything to his satisfaction. I am incredibly proud of him, he’s worked really hard, made the most of all his talents and grown up capable and likable and thriving; it was so nice to get to sit down as adults together and talk.

Photos: three shots of Yuzu, the owner of the accordion shop, and two of a vegetarian tiger; more plums and some other things that caught my eye.

Be safe and well.

Thanks to a cascade of deadlines, I got a-Pei to teach me some useful Chinese words for “super busy”, 瞎忙 (blind busy) and 忙到晕头转向, (along the lines of “so busy my head is spinning). Sadly they don’t have the Japanese 忙殺 (murdered by busy-ness).

I’ve been trying to catch up on DW comments, but I think there are some older posts I meant to comment on that have vanished into the ether… oh well.

Thinking of sending my New Year’s postcards out soon. If I’ve sent you a card before and your address/etc. has changed (or you’d rather not get one), please let me know; likewise, if I haven’t sent you a card before but you’d like one, please send me an address and preferred name!

A couple of little things that tickled me. There is/was a Japanese law officially called the Omnibus Decentralization Act; it just means “decentralizing a bunch of things,” but it sounds like privatizing the bus system.
Also, a small joke that requires a lot of explanation. Most of the students at the nighttime junior high school nearby are middle-aged to elderly ladies of Korean background, quite a few native Korean speakers who are also fluent (if not necessarily fully literate) in Japanese. The English teacher at the nighttime junior high was, God knows why, teaching them the English Zodiac words; when he got to “Gemini” and its phonetic pronunciation, one or two of the ladies cracked up, and eventually managed to explain to him why it was funny. In Korean the word for “uninteresting” is 재미 없어 chaemi-opso, where the “opso” part is the “un” negative. “chaemi” sounds like the first half of “Gemini” in English, and if you translate “opso” into Japanese, you get ない nai, which sounds like the second half. So for a bilingual speaker of Korean and Japanese, “Gemini” sounds like “boring”… I was tickled by the pun, and also by the code-switching skills required to make it in the first place; the ladies may not have their junior high school diplomas but they know a lot more than many.

My Yuletide fic is finished and posted, phew; I have a couple of treats in mind which I really want to write, except I’m not sure I can actually pull them off at the length they want to be in the time remaining. Ten days should be enough to write 10 to 15K, right? oh dear.

Photos: An assortment from the last month, mostly autumn leaves, a two-colored morning-glory (brunch-glory?), and a cat at night.

Be safe and well.

· 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.

Be safe and well.

· Well, I learned the Chinese word for “olive,” 橄榄, which has to be useful somewhere.

· I made a lot of applesauce in the big Mai-san pot, so called because it was a wedding present by a friend of my partner’s of that name, a huge cast iron cauldron; it’s the only option if I want to make more than, like, a serving and a half, apples cook down almost as bad as spinach. On the other hand, there is no shortage of apples, I can make applesauce every other day all winter if I feel like it.

· My veranda plants are having a last hurrah; the morning glories have finally conceded to winter, but the cherry tomato and the strawberry both have a lot of ripening fruits. Knock wood I might actually be able to keep the strawberry plant going through the winter?

· At work, I damn near translated “aerial survey” as “avian survey.” It’s a bird, it’s a plane…

· Middle-aged to elderly Korean ladies singing “Country Roads” at the nighttime junior high—I couldn’t help imagining the lyrics changing “West Virginia” to “Cheju Island” or “Kyongsang namdo” or whatever, a song about wistfulness for home is all too appropriate in a community of immigrants. I don’t know if any of them thought about it this way. On the way back to the station, everyone who passed me was speaking Vietnamese.

· Silly question: what do you have on your desk? (or in/around the space where you write and do stuff). I have a large desk which holds two computers (Mado-chan for work and Rin-chan for personal stuff); a stack of books about Miyamoto Yuriko and Chao Yuen Ren; a clear drawer thing which holds postcards, stamps, clinic cards, all that jazz, with a small monthly calendar on top of it; a mug of pens, pencils, toothbrush for computer cooler cleaning, nail-clipper, scissors; a repurposed Godiva box, brown suede nap, which holds necklaces (the chocolate divisions help keep them from tangling up), memory sticks, and medication, and has a Mucha brooch and a paperweight stegosaurus on top; a small radio on which I listen to the classical programs; a sticker of Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan (drawing by skeptical_lynx, gift from clevermanka); my notebook, a plain A6 ring-bound lined one that holds work deadlines and other lists; and usually my phone and assorted temporary paperwork.

· Rereading Naomi Mitchison’s wartime diaries, immensely relatable. Reading something from the 18th century: “By and bye I found myself sitting crying over my books in the Signet Library, because he was so nice and I could never tell him so, never give him back kindness, only two hundred years away in time, one could get at what he was and what he wanted.” Tearing down Eric Gill: “He says ‘I do not gather that women have, in general, much of an eye for the beauty of their lovers’ bodies…They are not inflamed by images…they do not make or go to or see or buy pictures of men as men do pictures of women.’ The hell he thinks that. … And as to being inflamed by images--! The interstices of my days are full of erotic images. Quite often, of course, I use them as current to turn the mills of the imagination. I am 44 and should know what I’m doing by now. … I should suppose that most women thought rather more in terms of touch and less in terms of vision (or perhaps a writer thinks more in such terms than a sculptor)….”.

· Photos: various moments of autumn, more train bridges, and a restaurant (unfortunately not serving hotpot) that amused me.
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Be safe and well.

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.)
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Be safe and well.

・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:
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・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.
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Be safe and well.

I don't know where I've been lately; working and writing and dealing with small stressful bits of RL, I guess. Semi-hibernating. Eating a lot of roast chestnuts.

・Someone was playing the Liszt sonata on the radio the other night and I was reminded of why I love Seong-Jin Cho's performance of it so much--it's here along with the Berg sonata, one of my very favorite piano pieces, and both performances are just...amazing. His playing is just--big, I don't know how else to put it, the music takes up a huge space, but it's never bombastic or just loud (he's been described as having exquisite pianissimos as well), every note matters. (I would never make a music reviewer.) Really recommend the whole of the Berg--it's only ten minutes--and, for instance, 19:25 or so in the Liszt, where the fireworks go off.

・Along with various Yuletide stuff, I've been slowly and stubbornly putting in at least one or two sentences on book 2 of my original thing every day. It is not easy but at least in the process what I thought was basically an expository scene has developed some interesting interpersonal dynamics that may do fun things with the plot later on.

・The weird high school where I volunteer is in fact Christian-affiliated^* and is holding a Christmas service for which they roped in one of the girls in the JSL class because of her good English; they're doing a bilingual reading of the Gospel of St. Luke and she gets the English part. So I spent some time helping her with pronunciation and some of the odder King James words--I mean, a Christian service at a school in a country with only about 3% Christianity, with the gospel read by a non-observant Muslim girl (from Afghanistan via Dubai; her parents said it was okay) and coached by a mostly non-observant Jew. You couldn't make this stuff up.
(For me the text mostly brings to mind Christmas carols (I was a choir singer in US public schools, come on) and the End of Term play. Lois Sanger, this would be your moment.)
*I have qualms about Christian institutions in general, but this school admits anyone regardless of creed, keeps its religious events strictly optional, and seems to consider its mission that of welcoming and supporting kids who might struggle elsewhere, not policing their sexuality, appearance, etc. etc. Works for me.

ETA: a couple of things from my recent WWII diaries rereading. Andrew Biggar, an Oflag POW: "A very bright lad appeared on parade one very cold day with a jersey the envy of all. Within a few weeks 50 per cent of the camp were either knitting or scouring the camp for wool. It was hardly safe to put a pair of socks on the drying-line--the next time you saw them was probably incorporated in your arch-enemy's new spring jumper."
And on the homefront, May Smith the irrepressible elementary school teacher, who has no hesitation following up a diary entry about bombs falling nearby with the metaphorical "Terrible bombshell! Schools are to open in August!".

Be safe and well.

・ Someone whose English I correct online was telling me about the source of her fresh chestnuts, a cousin-in-law who owns a (local) mountain. “(People normally don’t have a mountain!)” she added, which for some reason I found absolutely adorable.

・ The other day I walked past one of the local North Korean elementary schools (it’s a very long story), with kids playing to recorded music in the yard, running around in their little color-coded caps. The tune was the Hokey-Pokey, sung in Korean.

・ I was translating a Hayashi Fumiko travelogue about Japan-occupied Indonesia in 1943; charming, evocative, informative, densely colonialist. Wondering whether she genuinely believed all the Japan-banzai stuff she put in, or whether it was there to please the imperialist powers that be (who were responsible for the career boost of sending her to Indonesia etc.). Something seemed familiar about this query...oh yes the Rebel. 哎哟, the more things change.

・ There is a thing that I want that I can’t have, and it really doesn’t matter in the grand (or even the pretty small) scheme of things, and it’s annoying me. (This is not in reference to chocolate but come to think of it THAT ALSO APPLIES.)

・ The above notwithstanding, how old am I going to be before I can stop losing my temper like a spoiled brat? (Almost entirely offline, in this case. I am, on the whole, peaceable in non-work-related online stuff because a) time-delay and b) I can walk away whenever I need to. Offline I occasionally have a hair-trigger snap reflex and I would like to get it under control and be a less unpleasant person any time now.)

・ I tutor a couple of Filipino-Japanese kids weekly for the Saturday juku, and while waiting for them to finish writing their essays, I get out my notebook and write notes to myself about my original thing. Occasionally whole scenes, more often lists of questions and tentative answers which are basically primitive meta. It’s a surprisingly good environment for figuring out what’s going on.

・ I have a ton of unposted photos, have a handful to start with. Purple flowers as usual, a street view with mountains, a cat (actually two cats) standing guard in the soldiers’ graveyard, and what I can reassure you is not a caterpillar.
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Be safe and well.

・In general I love the weird high school where I volunteer for its determined stance of “everyone here is a little weird and that’s okay,” which makes it a refreshing change from, well, most schools in general. The 11th-graders in particular are adorable. (Whether it’s a result of Japan’s particular school system or worldwide I can’t say, but I have noticed at multiple schools and classes a huge jump in maturity from 10th to 11th grades, or roughly ages 15+ to 16+. Rebellious wild kids calm down and get responsible, tense shy kids relax and get comfortable, the class as a whole is suddenly a bunch of reasonable semi-grownups instead of large kids.)
・I mentioned Chinese dramas in passing and two of the girls got !!! eyes all of a sudden, so after class I went over to chat with Saki and Chieri—they confessed to being fans of “Chinjorei,” which I was able to parse after a moment as 陳情令, CQL/Untamed. Curious to hear if they also use Japanese readings for the character names—the story of Gi Musen (the wifi joke works in Japanese too) and Ran Boki? (Fortunately for him it’s not Ran Bokki...). (While I would be glad to introduce the baby cdrama fans to Guardian as well, I feel like somehow it’s not really for...it hits harder if you’re older? I don’t know.)

・I got the not!lime thing I’d ordered online, a cute little tree, and managed to repot it without pricking my fingers on any of its numerous thorns (hopefully Y would have been able to awaken me from enchanted sleep when he got home from work that day, but why take the risk). I did end up spilling soil and fertilizer all over the tatami, though, making me glad I don’t live in a DWJ novel, in which I would probably have found a little bamboo forest growing by the next day.

・Liu Chang, who has no shame (and why should he), recorded himself singing a very silly Japanese pop tune, and I realized that the chorus invariably transmutes into this in my head. Well, we all know Bach was ahead of his time.

・Looking for some staircase vocabulary, I found a site describing staircase styles with reference to various New York buildings, including a sentence I particularly liked: “The divided stairway shown above is at Carnegie Hall in New York City. People bend the stairway path rules for various reasons including oblivion, patience, and the presence of obstructions.”

Photos: Some atmospheric buildings of various kinds, a very predatory flower and a more maidenly one, and my best (failed) attempt to photograph the sparklingly colorful raindrops on the wires during 狐の嫁入り, a sunshower.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

Daily life: The kids at the weird high school are giving me life, both Japanese and foreign-born. Big chubby irreverent Arapon (nickname), who chats cheerfully all the way through class to all and sundry, teachers included, but also does his homework meticulously in two colors; elegant Nida, Farsi-speaking, Afghanistan-born, Dubai-raised, who wants to practice her English conversation; little bespectacled Kotaro v2 (there are three Kotaros) who asks a string of questions, all starting with 先生的に ("as by you, teacher...") and so on, bless them all.
Also I made the world's best error in a translation project, finding via spellcheck that I had referred to a weather phenomenon as a "typohoon."

Music: Among other things the Good Soldier Schweik Suite by Robert Kurka, yet another composer who died too young to become really well known; a gorgeous jazz-influenced dark-toned wind piece.

Books: Another WWII diary, Vere Hodgson; she has some good things to say. "Irate Mother to daughter in one of the raided towns: 'For goodness' sake put that book down, and listen to the Air Raid!'". "The News shows no sign of improvement, so I am disregarding it. It is against the law to worry, so I just don't think--" . "Mr. Booker was saying that though he hates onions, when once more we can get them he will sit down and really enjoy one. I think we shall go in for onion binges when the war is over."

Chinese: Duolingo says, and my friend P confirms, that it's common to say 坠入爱河, not just falling in love but falling into the river of love. I was trying to think of fictional non-metaphorical examples of this; Peter Grant is the obvious one, and also Prudence from one of my favorite Zen Cho stories. Do any others come to mind?

Writing: A few days stuck, on account of headaches and work, but getting started again now. Finish the current scene and do one, maybe two more and I will actually have arrived at the part where dramatic things happen, I've waited for it so long I'm starting to lose confidence...

Photos: Two views of veranda tomatoes (they taste good, sweet and tart with a nice snap in the skin), and the world's most durable post box.
( images )

Be safe and well.

Daily life: Some good things. At the alternative high school they’re letting me help out with the non-native-speaker class a bit: five kids from Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, and China, at first glance a delightful mix of bold and shy, thoughtful and silly. I’m looking forward to it. All three of the schools where I volunteer have now settled down into the school year a bit, which—if nothing else terrible happens, knock wood—is a relief.
Also my veranda plants are coming into their own in defiance of my black thumb: rows of beautiful jade-green grape tomatoes (like Oliver Melendy’s monarch cocoons) which are finally starting to ripen, two ACTUAL EGGPLANTS (okay, just cute little globular purple things so far), half a dozen perky vertical chile peppers, and even the habanero has finally wised up to its purpose in life as a fruiting rather than just flowering plant.

Music: Among other things, the Grosse Fuge. So splendid. I wish it were possible to hear it with the ears of Beethoven’s contemporaries, to discover just how avant-garde it sounded. (I recall doing well in a 20th-c. music class in college where I ended up citing Beethoven in every paper I wrote. You’d think he had a time machine.)

Books: On the futurism theme, I’ve been rereading some SFF near-future mystery novels by Lee Killough; they’re basically a lot of fun, well-worked-out plots and fantastic worldbuilding with tons of integrated, believable details. However, the technology of 2080-as-imagined-in-1990 does not stand up to that of 2020; apart from the no mobile phones thing, the detective calls in to the records database for some information, and the computer delivers it to her…by sending a robot with a tray of hardcopy.

Chinese: You know what I wish Duolingo had is a “random review” function where you could get a lesson’s worth of questions selected at random from all the lessons completed so far. There’s a lot of vocabulary that is slipping through the cracks in my brain.
My so-called listening practice continues to be mostly Zhu Yilong-related; I was amused to notice that in propria (public) persona he’s just as prone to say 没事 (I’m/it’s fine) as Shen Wei and Luo Fusheng are, oh dear.

Writing: Making slow but steady forward progress; the love interest is now established as endgame in my head, even though they haven't even, like, called each other by first names yet, never mind held hands, kissed, etc etc. Music stuff keeps on slipping in around the edges which I'm sure it shouldn't.
( brief fic title thing )

Photos: Three variations on hydrangeas (these are a couple of weeks old, they’re in fuller bloom now), a tiger lily, a cloud tree (I don’t know its real name), and our umeshu, also from a couple weeks back.
( June things )

Be safe and well.

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

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

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

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

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

Photos: ( Only technically the rainy season )

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

Daily life: ( Saturday juku ramblings )
( Current Situation stuff )
Also I have a bunch of photo-cards made from photos taken before the rainy season set in this week; if anyone would like a postcard from Japan, let me know.

Music: I’ve been listening to the Prelude and Fugue on B.A.C.H., a piece I like so much I’ve put it into a fic in the past, certainly if there is anything like a heaven Bach is up there playing jazz to his heart’s content right now.

Books: Naomi Mitchison on the Current Situation (actually written in August 1940 but perfectly to the point eighty years later):

Personally, I think we are in a complete dilemma of the worst possible sort. The difficulty is that we must change very rapidly and practically nobody really wants that. We like our neighbours to change so long as it is not us. I think it was Augustine who said Lord, make me good, but not yet. This is universal. We can all stand a little change, but not a big one. Quantity alters quality. I do not think that the ordinary person can stand the amount of change which appears to be necessary. Still less, can I suppose that they can want or will it to happen. One can usually stand greater changes than one can imagine.

Chinese: I am not thrilled with some of Duolingo’s practice sentences this week but I’ll bring them back up when they’re not so Current Situation related. More divertingly, I misspelled motuoche as matuoche (Japanese habits doing me wrong for 摩) and ended up translating “My girlfriend doesn’t like motorcycles” as “My girlfriend doesn’t like horse-drawn carriages.”

Writing: Made it to 40K! Halfway point, theoretically, and also only 10K or so away from the endgame section, which I have been looking forward to the whole time. I need to finish the current scene and then work up a quick chart of the people, themes, and threads raised so far so I can see a little more clearly how everything should come together in the last part.

Be safe and well.

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nnozomi

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Entries tagged with teaching

フォースと共にあれ

meaning in thy snores

get到了吗?

a trip to the heart of the world

That’d be a long tale. That’d be several long tales.

espontaneidade

express the relationship

yuzu, jabara, apple, plum

就是忙死了

not a mood in English

current to turn the mills

七夕（七夜）

sheltered by tree and flower

reading angels

Do you have a mountain?

divided stairways

私的に

quotidiana

ladies beginning with F, P, and O

but not yet

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