nnozomi

Short clip of Zhu Yilong making friends with a shy cat; linked because a) adorable and also b) I hope Bai Yu saw him saying to the cat 你知不知道喵喵喵什么意思呀 and called him up to say YOU OWE ME ONE.

I have a translation job involving a lot of junior-high level math worksheets, which is taking me back. I was okay at math, but uninterested, up through eleventh grade, with just occasional flashes of algebra-related ooh, that’s neat; I damn near failed calculus my senior year (with a teacher who’d won national teaching awards, too), and have pretty much managed to avoid math and its relations ever since. I’m awed by people who are not only good at it but find it interesting, it just makes me think there’s something fundamentally different about the way our brains work (the same way it’s hard for me to understand that not everybody finds language learning intrinsically fun).

Veranda report: my morning glories are not good at multitasking, they can bloom or grow but not both at once, and for a while they’ve been specializing in the latter. The veranda is now a complete tangle of wires and morning glory vines. I’m hoping they will make good on their growth and bloom more in September or October, knock wood. Lemon tree growing more pointless leaves, enough already, give me some lemons! Mint syrup achieved again, time for mint soda or maybe something more adventurous if I can think of it, any ideas? Cherry tomato plant successfully repotted and seems to be growing with a little more energy? although it hasn’t managed any new flowers yet, knock wood again.

Chinese: mostly Anki and fic reading, with some ongoing translation practice. New words from the farmboys, somewhat game-related:
· 拿铁 the phonetic word for “latte” as in coffee, why they chose these characters I’ll never know (and why it’s nátiě instead of latiě).
· 头头是道 entirely logical, perfectly correct
· 绝了 slang for “too much,” “incredible,” used both negatively and positively
· 接龙 shiritori—I can’t remember the English name for this game, the one where you say a word starting with the last letter of the word the person before you said?
· 捉迷藏 hide and seek
· 说了算 what I say goes, that’s the final word on the subject

High school baseball tournament, featuring as usual sunburned buzz-cut teenage boys with improbably kira-kira names. Some of my favorites this time around: 利朱夢, pronounced “Rhythm”; 凱塁 (pronounced “Kyle”) and 球児, both clearly destined for baseball from birth, since 塁 is a base and 球児 is another word for a high school baseball player; 七聖, 吏紗, and 琥珀, all charming names more typically used for girls (琥珀, not a common name either way, means “amber”), and 空輝星, whose family name means “sky” and first name means “shining star.”

Some music that’s been in my head lately: Who Cares, one of the Gershwins’ best; He Can Do It, from Purlie; Les Barricades Mysterieuses (Couperin), and Jiang Dunhao singing a slow version of his 麦芒.

Rereading some Cynthia Voigt; like (the very different) Peter Dickinson, I think she’s one of those writers who would be considered a major 20th-c. author if genre (in her case, MG/YA and some fantasy) wasn’t a thing. She really needs a whole essay, not a paragraph in the middle of another post, but lately the one I was reading was The Vandemark Mummy, which is kind of about the importance of integrity and scholarship and family and feminism, as seen by a perceptive (and slightly psychic) but not especially academic or introspective twelve-year-old boy, in the context of a well-constructed mystery. It’s beautifully written in her deceptively straightforward style, with some incredible set pieces (Phineas going through the basement in the middle of the night). I also think it would make a very good movie, if they cast Althea right and didn’t make her too conventionally pretty.
ETA as it occurred to me: it would be really interesting to read The Vandemark Mummy alongside Gaudy Night, because although obviously very different they treat some of the same themes in (mutatis mutandis) similar contexts... it's the middle of the night right now, but I want to think more about this one...

Photos: quite a lot today. Bubbles against a shrine background; a cleverly concealed Jiji-chan, too hot to do anything more than open her eyes and give me the fish-eye; another cat I don’t know, eating her vegetables; some fresh figs; some sarusuberi, ah, crepe myrtle; a house with its own greenery; a humongous, translucent hibiscus; trees and sky; a fried-egg flower (no, I don’t know its real name); the neighbor’s morning glories; and a road sign that tickled me because all four of the place names on it are 難読地名, ie you have to live around there or you’ll never figure out how to pronounce them.

Be safe and well.

My early-morning runs (nothing very ambitious) have been interrupted lately by a couple of local cats looking for attention, one black (the same one smart enough to shelter in the shrine lantern on rainy days) and one three-colored, both friendly enough to let me もふもふ抚摸抚摸 their fluffy bellies without repercussions. (No photos because I don’t have my phone with me when I’m running…)

Chinese: I’ve been doing HSK practice tests, which are very trying. Result so far: assuming that I took an internet-based test and NOT a paper-based one, I’m pretty sure I could pass HSK5 without much trouble. For HSK6, I am hovering right around the pass/fail line for listening and reading; God only knows as far as writing goes, it’s such a weird test anyway. Maybe I’ll think about taking it sometime next winter or spring…or not…we’ll see.
I am finding that diligent Anki practice actually does mean I know more words when I’m reading fic. I mean, it’s only logical! but nice to discover anyway. (I’m trying to make a virtuous circle (when I was little I always thought the opposite of a vicious circle should be a delicious circle) out of it: recording words new to me with the Zhongwen extension, bless it, when I read, and then putting them into an Anki deck for practice.) I’m a little in despair about the fifty gazillion chengyu that I will never be able to memorize, especially because they would actually be fun to know, but one step at a time.
More slang from the farmboys, mostly on the argumentative side today:

· 活该 serves you right
· 賊 slang for “very”
· 秋千 a swing/swingset (why does “autumn thousand” mean swing?)
· 缺揍 slang literally meaning “short of a good spanking,” used in context for “cheeky, smart-mouthed” etc.
· 牙痒痒 infuriating, frustrating (literally “teeth itchy”)

I’m becoming a bore about my veranda plants. The morning glories are blooming less but growing vines EVERYWHERE, I need to put up some extra wire for them to crawl all over. Tomatoes flowering again, which is a relief; I still need to figure out how to repot them. Chili peppers turning nicely vermilion and red; habaneros FINALLY starting to blush orange, I guess they didn’t like the rainy season? Lemon tree still refusing to lemon but putting out leaves in all directions, starting to look genuinely more like a baby tree than a plant. Four-season strawberries reluctant but alive, which is good; mint growing like mint does (it’s in a pot, everything is safe). I deprived it of a cup’s worth of leaves (plenty more where that came from) to make mint syrup and thus mint soda, which is startlingly sweet even with half the sugar in the recipe but very tasty with a high ratio of seltzer and a slice of lime.

Still writing a few hundred words a day of my original thing. This one feels more like a rough draft than Books 1 and 2 did, as if I’m going to have to come back and rewrite EVERYTHING once I get it finished (ha) and know where it was actually trying to go. Still, forward motion is something, and I have about 21K so far and that’s a start.

Rereading Nella Last’s wartime and postwar diaries, which can be very sad but are never less than absorbing. Some excerpts here

August 8, 1940
I always think “one man’s meat, another man’s poison” applies to married life as much as it does to anything.
November 5, 1940
He had to rise at 5:15 to catch the 6:30 train, and I don’t trust the alarm clock since it went all temperamental and will only go lying on its face. I took it to the clock-maker and he said there was nothing wrong, and why worry? Still, it’s the look of the thing—so inefficient and untrustworthy. It looks as if it has lain down on its job!
May 13, 1941
On reflection, I think I was more than a bit bitchy, to say the least of it. I did a bit of resurrecting of old history and a bit of “yes and anyway; and I can remember saying that I was tired of always having to do all the thinking and planning for the house, and that it was time he grew up. So undignified and tiresome to be so tired and edgy as to lose control of a temper schooled for thirty years.
This war seems to have no end—it’s like a stone dropped in a lake where waves and surges are felt as unknown or unexpected edges and shores.
October 19, 1942
Sometimes I could YELL. I feel I’d like to peel off the layers of “patience,” “tact,” “cheerfulness,” “sweetness” that smother me like layers of unwanted clothes. What would I find under all the trappings I’m credited with? I might be surprised! I know how people feel who “disappear.” They get up one morning and look out of the window—maybe just up a long road, maybe the sun is shining, or there’s a bright poster on a wall, or a ship’s siren is hoo-hooing its way out to sea—and they go and go and GO.
September 8, 1945
Aunt Sarah has a quaint saying which has always been a joke—“As we get older, Dearie, our heads won’t stand it”—and she is not far wrong.
September 20, 1945
It’s a great blessing when one can lose all sense of time, all worries, if only for a short time, in a book.
January 19, 1946
I said to my husband, “Have you never thought of leaving me?” I said it jokingly, but he considered it very seriously and said, “No—why should I? I would have everything to lose.” I said, “Tell me then—what do you consider my greatest attraction for you?” I didn’t expect him to say “Your beauty,” but did think he would say “Because you are such a good cook,” or at least something “positive.” Instead he said, “Because you are such a comfortable person to live with.” I felt all flat feet and red flannel—as others see us!
March 7, 1947
Shan We [Siamese cat] seemed to lose his head—he took a header into the deep snow and disappeared, except for the tip of his brown tail. I leaned forward and heaved, and we both fell backward into the hall, bringing a pile of snow. The cross-eyed look of reproach he gave me and the anxious look he gave his tail, as if surprised to find it still on, nearlyl sent me into hysterics of laughter—helped by the same “Why should this happen to me?” look on my husband’s face as he shoveled snow. He said, “I don’t see there’s anything to laugh at,” but as I said, he wasn’t standing where I was!

Photos: once again just a few, it’s too hot to take pictures. Jiji-chan sunbathing, sarusuberi…ah…crepe myrtle, and one of my veranda morning-glories.

Be safe and well.

Note on politics:

Here and elsewhere, I don’t want to talk or think about US politics/election/etc. until further notice; I’m voting and donating and hoping for the best while expecting the worst, so not ignoring it altogether, but that’s it. I might at some point temporarily unfriend people who post a lot about it—not criticism at all, I know some people need to chew over upsetting stuff to deal better with it, just me doing my thing. Please don’t comment on this either, this is just for the record.

Work: I had a job translating one family’s handwritten family register (koseki), which was hard on the eyes but fascinating. Wait, the date of their oldest daughter’s birth is only three months after their marriage! And she later married an American and became a US citizen. Why does the register skip from second to fourth daughter, did the third one die young? …oh no, good, she was adopted by her aunt and uncle as a child, they must have been childless. Oh look, both brothers moved to colonial Korea with their whole families and worked for the railroads, I wonder when they moved back to Japan. Wow, daughter #2 must have been over fifty when she married, I hope it was a happy one … and so on (details slightly randomized for privacy). (Also reminded me of the GHQ-era joke recounted by Seiden-sama: the US army sergeant applying for permission to marry his Japanese girlfriend, “and have you seen her koseki yet?” “Oh no sir, I swear we haven’t done anything like that!”)

Veranda: My veranda plants are mostly thriving, either because of or in spite of the recent heavy rain. The morning glory vines are growing almost visibly in real time, twining everywhere, and I get one or two blossoms a day, the three different plants (lavender, purple, and purple-spotted) trading off blooming duties. They have also wound themselves up with the chili peppers and cherry tomatoes (God help me the next time there’s a typhoon and I need to move the plants indoors, they’ll just have to take their chances), I’m a little afraid that the morning glories will take on a spicy scent and the peppers will ripen purple instead of red. Lots of cherry tomatoes to start with, but the tomato plant seems to have stopped growing/flowering and I don’t know why. Outgrowing its strength? Outgrowing its pot? How do I repot a huge sprawling tomato plant without killing it? More happily my habanero plant also got HUGE when I wasn’t looking, with something like three dozen fruits at last count (eat your heart out, Zhuo Yuan). I’m going to have to eat a lot of Thai curry this summer… .

Chinese: See my previous post about doing more Chinese study in July, many thanks for many useful suggestions and encouragement. So far I think I’m putting in about three hours plus a day (if you count show-watching, which is fun rather than work). Will report further later.
Trying to translate a couple of short fics (purely for my own amusement, not for publication, for various reasons) and finding that translating from Chinese feels very different from translating from Japanese. Obviously the biggest reason for this is my hugely differing fluency and experience, but I feel like there are language-specific things that are getting to me too? (Not making sweeping statements about the actual nature of the languages, just reflecting my senses at the moment. Also, talking about literary translation as opposed to commercial/academic/technical work, which I’m pretty sure is more straightforward in Chinese as in Japanese.) Notably chengyu and similar expressions, which are less common in Japanese and which I find hard to translate without being either poetic in a way that doesn’t hit right in English or just long-winded compared to the compactness of the source text. Also, in a way that I find similar to some prewar Japanese texts, the syntax of a given sentence or even paragraph doesn’t always clearly indicate what its main point is, so that you have to think it out to figure out how to structure the English. Also I feel like there’s more…this is very abstract…more intermediate space between the two languages? I spend less time thinking C word → E word and more time with C words → intermediate space rearranging meaning in my head → E words (if that makes a lick of sense). I mean, it’s fun! I am terrible at it because my Chinese just is not good enough yet, but it’s still fun to do.
Latest gathering from the farmboy show as below:

One of the neat things about this being a documentary/reality show rather than a drama is you get the regional accents as they are. They’re all speaking standard Mandarin/普通话, but with various accents and local quirks; the one native Cantonese speaker has a very pronounced accent that only goes away when he’s really concentrating; to me the most prominent aspects are zh → z and sh → s, so that the name of the well-known singer becomes “Zou Sen-laoshi.” (My guess is that his tones are probably different too, but I can’t hear tones well enough to tell.) The northerners, especially the two Shanxiren, have 儿化 for days: 宝贝儿，路边儿，一块儿and so on (also 网儿, confusing a colleague who keeps hearing 瓦 or 碗 instead of 网). One of them is prone to making W’s into V’s when speaking emphatically (玩, 为啥 and so on). The Inner Mongolian guy (ethnically Han, like all the rest of them; I wonder if any of the original applicant pool weren’t?) says meiwanle for 卖完了 (cf Bai Yu’s “Bei-laoshi”) and tsifan for 吃饭. The guy from middle-of-nowhere western Xinjiang has a few distinctive regional words (皮芽子 for onions, apparently from the Uyghur) and they all tease him about a song he recorded back when he was fresh from the hinterland, in which 走吧 becomes zu ba. I’ve picked up less from the southerners, other than fewer 儿s (点 rhymes with “when,” not with “far”); of the three southern guys, one is the Cantonese speaker above, one is what they call 话不多, not of many words (except on topics of money, which I can’t follow anyway) and the third went to college in Beijing and got some of his southern edges rubbed off (although he can occasionally be heard talking on the phone to his family in thick Chongqing dialect). Needs further study.

Reading:
Winifred Holtby’s letters to Vera Brittain; I forget if I’ve posted bits from them here before, but they’re delightful.

June 30, 1921: History and fiction both offer new interpretations of life, only viewed from a different standpoint. I believe the best history to be as creative as the best fiction. If historical writing is “largely synthetic and borrows from the work of other people,” bless you , my dear, so is fiction! Merely a synthesis of the things people see and hear, with constant plagiarisms from the conversation and characters of their friends and enemies.
June 29, 1925: At present I am not a person, but a List. It is an exceedingly diverse and attractive List, and I have been living in this incarnation for about five days, and have on the whole rather enjoyed it.
July 20, 1925: Hilda has told me what is admirable for my soul. I have a woolly mind. Well, well. One can card wool and spin it, and dye it with rare colours. One can make it into ropes for strength, and garments for warmth, and carpets for beauty and elegance. I may have a woolly mind, but it is not to be fleeced.
May 11, 1925: Damn the Capitalist Press. Damn the contradictious imperfection of things, which present no single clear issue for choice, allow no perfect cause, no uncomplicated loyalty, in this tedious, embittered world. Damn. Damn. Damn. Now I feel better.
August 21, 1928: At Monte Carlo everyone is so much afraid of complexes and inhibitions that they all run about having relations with men, women, and both—and get more and more hot and bothered. Now when one watches the Russian ballet one realises that one’s own body is full of inhibitions. Discipline and training relaxes and liberates. Control liberates. Lack of control binds and makes clumsy in a thousand ways.
September 13, 1931 [Vera to Winifred]: Have written 50 pages of book since I came; it’s very bad, but I’m going on the principle that it’s psychologically better to get it down somehow; even though one has solidly to write the whole thing out again, it’s a stage further than having it all toiling and moiling in one’s head.

Writing: Nothing whatsoever exciting to report but managing about 100-300 words a day. Me and the turtle, we are in there.

Photos: Various veranda views; also the beauty salon cat, on the job at nine am, and the same cat on the same day at noon.

</details Be safe and well.

Okay, travel over, safe home. It was a good trip, but part of me hates traveling even to places I know and like; I always get sick (not actually sick, but tension-symptoms, which is dumb). Still not great on that front but at least now home!
While traveling I bought a half-dozen new books, which are now in the mail on their way to join me; when I’ve actually read them I’ll post to discuss. Spent most of the time eating all the things I can’t get at home (Afghan food, Cuban, southern barbecue, Middle Eastern, Greek, American-style Chinese food, and a great many sweets of all kinds), walking about four hours a day, prowling through bookstores, and sorting out a dozen-odd boxes of books and other oddments which I had left with my mother years ago. I could have done without the tour of my younger self (couldn’t bring myself either to open or to throw away my high school yearbooks and so on), but did come up with a few nice things I’d forgotten about.

Went to the opera once, to see Turandot, of which—having sung in the (amateur) chorus of a concert version years ago, and now written a fic about it—I feel very possessive. I did not much like the singers, especially Turandot herself; Calaf wasn’t bad but shouted a lot on his high notes. (The only operatic tenor I really love is Klaus Florian Vogt, who at his best has this wonderful crystalline floaty tone, and he doesn’t seem to do Puccini.) But the orchestra was great, and it’s SUCH a good opera. I think my actual favorite part isn’t any of the more famous arias but the one near the end of Act II where Turandot is begging her father not to make her marry this oaf, it’s just spectacular musically. Also, surprisingly enough, the three ministers’ “casa nell’Honan” trio, which is much lovelier than it gets credit for (now indelibly “the Yucun song” in my brain). And the very end, Calaf names himself, and then where she tells her father his name is Love. (Also I realized that “Figlio del Cielo” is actually straight from the Chinese 天子, who knew.) The opera was further enlivened for me (?) by one of those incredibly chatty ladies who sat next to me and talked in a constant stream during all the intervals—her name was Susan and she was seventy-three and she went to the opera ten times a year and to the ballet much more often, she’d seen Swan Lake a hundred times, and which of these photos of her did I think was better, and what was my name (I told her Rebecca, which it isn’t, but I dislike telling people my name because it’s rarely pronounceable, and I look like a Rebecca) and where did I live and what did I do and… . Even having a book open in my lap was not proof against her, but it was kind of endearing in the end.

I have celebrated getting home again with new spring plants for the veranda. Two of last year’s managed to survive: I came home to find my four-season strawberry covered in bright pink blooms and the lemon tree which never lemoned producing its first buds ever. They have been joined by the usual suspects: three different colors of morning-glory, cherry tomatoes, chili peppers, and habaneros. I’m still in need of some herbs, maybe basil or mint, and possibly some fruit. Let’s hope this year I do better than last.

Speaking of growing plants, I am currently EXTREMELY hooked on this silly Chinese farming show I mentioned last time, originally encountered courtesy of Wang Yang via mumblemumble. Summary: ten aspiring singers/actors in their 20s spend a year? several months? running a farm in the middle of nowhere. It’s hard to explain why watching ten random young men work out the minutiae of farming should be so enjoyable! They are sure enough cute, and their interactions are entertaining; also it’s partly because I love slice-of-life stuff and that’s basically what it is, about a hundred hours (literally) of extended slice-of-life. Also well, I wouldn’t exactly call it competence porn on account of they are quite often pretty incompetent, but it’s functionally a string of problem-solving exercises, and it’s satisfying to watch them figure out a) how to accomplish a given task and b) how to get it done effectively. (This also gives a lot of scope to my favorite among the kids, a good-looking, high-strung engineering-student-turned-actor(-turned farmer) who always has a better idea.) Plus the whole thing is painstakingly subtitled in Chinese, and it really is good language practice, from slang to agricultural terms… . Fortunately for me, sakana17 is just as obsessed and is willing to join me and chatter about the show at length! Anyone else want to succumb?

Relatedly or not, I think my listening is actually getting better! I watched Zhu Yilong’s birthday livestream with no subtitles (C or E) and actually understood, like, somewhere from 40 to 70 percent? Easier because a) I’m familiar with the general content/context and b) Z1L is himself not great at auditory processing when he’s nervous and tends to repeat all the questions his manager relays to him before he gets around to answering them, so I get to hear everything twice; but still!
Bless him, he does seem to be a little more comfortable being himself in front of the camera than he was, but I wish he’d figure out that his fans would be just as happy if he spent the whole hour ignoring the camera and just noodling peacefully with guitar, piano, etc. You can see him relax more as he gets into the song he’s playing, when he’s just thinking about lyrics and guitar fingering and not about “ai, what do I say next,” although he’s almost comically self-deprecating about his performance. That was one place where my listening failed me—I heard him say 没怎么lian and guessed he was saying 脸, I don’t have the face to [sing in public], but it was actually 练, I haven’t practiced that much. When will I learn to hear the tone difference…
Also I got curious about the red bracelet thing he seems to be fond of lately, and it’s apparently a thing you wear during your 本命年, the zodiac year of your birth, especially pertinent in his case since he’s named for the year as well.
Also the number of gorgeous photos of him has been unreal, thanks to the faithful Meng Yinan and God knows who else. These two, from Geneva, I think get to me the most of all—the angles in the piano one, and the incredible combination of strength (his hand and wrist) and delicacy (eyelashes and cheekbone) in the other, along with the rich coloring.

Photos: various from my trip. (Mostly just flowers, but if you recognize the city they’re in from context clues, please don’t name it, although I’m sure it doesn’t matter one way or the other.)

Be safe and well.

·It is so hot and soupy. Maybe in another month the average high temperature will go down below 35?

·Silliness for the day: the DMBJ character known as Hei Xiazi is also called Hei Yanjing 黑眼镜, usually translated literally as “Black Glasses.” I think it would be both a more idiomatic translation and a lot more in keeping with his personality if he went by “Shades.”

·Still practicing the bassoon and still really terrible at it, although I’ve ventured into the territory of accidentals and dynamics by now; gradually transforming from “person attempting to play the bassoon” into “really terrible amateur bassoonist”? The instrument doesn’t like the hot humid weather any more than I do, making assembly and disassembly difficult ( ”very ). Next up is tenor clef, which is going to be a nightmare: it’s not that I can’t read it, it’s that I read it as cello fingering, not note names, so I’m going to have to translate it through two different fingering systems in my head, not conducive to, like, playing anything faster than a Largo.

·Calligraphy studio posting children’s efforts outside, including one reading 階段をおりたら出口, the exit is at the bottom of the stairs. Y and I couldn’t decide whether this meant “there’s always a way out even when things seem to be at their worst” or just “go down the stairs in order to exit the building.”

·So Zhu Yilong went on holiday (probably a working holiday, knowing him) to Indonesia, and his studio posted a short video from there, mostly diving and eating. I sent it to an Indonesian friend/ex-colleague (I’ll call him John Woe for reasons I can’t go into without explaining his real name, but he speaks seven languages and I think he’d appreciate the pun(s) involved), who identified the town without difficulty and turned up his nose at the “15x spicy” rice flavoring that pleased Z1L so much (“I have a 50x one, it’s not that hot”). He also recommended a local Indonesian restaurant, which (even if they didn’t serve 50x levels of spicy) was very good, especially the corn fritters and the black-rice porridge with coconut milk for dessert; thanks, ex-colleague and Zhu Yilong!

·Title from Arthur Ransome, of course; I had a technical manual a while back with a GNAD part number in it, and had akarabgnadabarak in my head the whole time, Bridget’s reproach to Daisy. One of the bits in which Ransome approaches period-typical racism, unfortunately; although I think he can be called “somewhat-better-than-period-typical,” for what that’s worth, if only because Titty’s sensitive imagination puts herself in the place of the people she’s imagining rather than othering them. As below, also a fine pocket sketch of three personalities (or two and a Ship’s Baby).
“Civilization,” said Titty. “I don’t suppose the people in the town ever dream they’re so near the Secret Water and the Country of the Eels.”
“What is civilization?” asked Bridget.
“Ices,” said Roger, “and all that sort of thing.” He looked hopefully at a cloud of thin blue smoke that, in the windless air, hung lazily above the town.
I approve of Roger’s priorities: Some people always forget things like chocolate in making out a list like that. But Mrs. Blackett, after all, was Captain Flint’s sister. Chocolate was in it, and oranges, bananas, tins of steak and kidney pie, tins of sardines, a large tin of squashed fly biscuits. It was a decidedly good list and Roger had had no criticisms to make. That one is, I think, from Pigeon Post. Not one of my absolute favorites—the long Timothy misunderstanding and the short fire one upset me—but the scene where Titty finds water is mesmerizing, both the dowsing itself and the way it affects her (and John’s understanding of how her mind works and what she needs). And the very relatable feeling of Roger […] telling and re-telling his share in the fire-fighting, not because he wanted to boast, but because by telling it he somehow made sure of it for himself. At the time, things had been happening too fast.
Also, from Winter Holiday, one of the funnier lines that doesn’t involve Roger, Dorothea Callum to her absent-minded professor brother upon having failed to get his attention, “Well, you ought to hang out a notice when you’re not there.”

·Photos: mostly from our annual visit to the wind-chime temple, in hopes of bringing a little bit of coolth. Also my veranda morning-glory, the same blossom at morning and evening.

Be safe and well.

·I don’t think I’ve posted about this year’s veranda plants yet—I have cherry tomatoes (promising green fruits), eggplant (purple flowers and gigantic leaves), chili peppers (I bought the wrong kind! These are huge, longer than my index finger and about as thick, pardon the innuendo), habaneros (rather wimpy flowers so far), last year’s strawberries (still just about hanging in there), this year’s strawberries (one very promising fruit and a few others on their way so far), a lemon tree (no lemons but some new leaves), and three morning-glories (very small and feeble so far). This basically takes up all the free space on the veranda. On the bright side, no pun intended, the rainy season means I don’t have to water them very often.

·Writing: As noted in my previous post, I finished my zeroth draft of book 2; now I’m struggling with revisions, or rather cheating by inserting three scenes that should have been in there in the first place. So much easier to write than to revise. I do have a lot of ideas about what needs done, and I think they will work, it’s just HARD. (clevermanka and I were saying it would be fun to have an open thread somewhere for chat about the writing process in general, although I’m afraid I would just end up complaining like mad…).

·Rereading Lois Lowry’s Taking Care of Terrific, a favorite all the way from fourth grade. Enid and Tom and Seth (who, on reflection, I bet is Jewish, not that it’s relevant, but I like seeing a member of the tribe in there) and Hawk and the bag ladies, putting together their loneliness to make something extraordinary. The Swan Boat ride always makes me cry—“…their voices almost magically grew stronger; they began to blend together. They became less hesitant. They became a choir.” Splendid Enid.

· Aguas de Março covered by the pianist Rogerio Plaza, with his 11-year-old daughter Bia Plaza singing, adorable and also a damn good musician.

·New adventures in eating: plum and chili pepper tea is delicious, more like broth than tea. Also I learned the Chinese for granola bars/energy bars, 燕麦棒 or 能量棒. (Just the same word for energy as in Guardian; do you think they sell 黑能量棒 down in Dixing?)

·Oh dear, this thing that made me laugh (and kind of scream) at work; I do a little bit of manga translation, and some of it is X-rated, BL stuff. (I asked them not to give me eromanga, they gave me it anyway, aagh.) I’m not going to cite the exact line I was translating, but let’s say it was a very explicit request pertaining to a specific m/m act then in progress in the manga. The proofreader left a note reading, I quote, “if you haven’t ever heard someone say this in real life, then it’s probably not gonna work.”

·Less funny work stuff: translating the last of these 1940s files, a long round-table transcript among various big wheels of Fukuoka Prefecture in 1940 on the topic of Koreans there, and oh God, the more things change.

assorted depressing examples

“Training programs” for Korean farm laborers, ie getting dirty work out of them at low pay for a few years, see also Japan’s technical trainee program now; landlords who won’t rent to Koreans, who have to get Japanese friends to rent apartments for them, just the same now; achieving success in the form of “the child who managed to graduate elementary school without anyone learning that he was Korean,” see also passing names now; adult Koreans learning Japanese who struggle with voiced/unvoiced consonants, I hear these accents all the time; the distinction between 朝鮮人 (Korean, a word disliked by Koreans, if this discussion is to be believed) and 朝鮮の人 (person from Korea, preferred, ditto)*, see also “colored person” vs “POC”, and so on.
*They also mention the hated 鮮人, a derogatory version, sometimes used in the expression 不逞鮮人 “malcontent Koreans,” which the anarchists Pak Yeol and Kaneko Fumiko played on in their journal 太い鮮人, pronounced the same way but meaning “cheeky fucking Koreans” or words to that effect.

·More cheerfully, just a few photos, not that exciting. Two cats: the beauty salon cat in the process of melting (what it does best), and a little half-stray near the school I volunteer at, who comes out of the shrubbery when it’s raining and meows like hell at me and purrs reluctantly when stroked. Cats who understand the value of an umbrella, I’m telling you. Also some early hydrangeas and some…I don’t know what the pink ones are? I always want to say windflowers, but I think that’s wrong. Also some baby persimmons, and a closeup of an old Chinese apothecary cabinet in a drugstore window, partly for research purposes and partly because I like it.

rainy season photos

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.

This got quite long...

Random language questions:
・I found myself saying "a ways to go" elsewhere, and started wondering if that was a regionalism. Do other people use this phrase, and if so where is your English from?
・For metaphorical dizziness, people in China (I'm told) say 晕了, I'm dizzy. People in Taiwan say 昏倒, I'm out cold. People in Japan say 目が回っている, my eyes are spinning. What do other languages/dialects say?

Random in general:
・Today, as it happened, we hit 200 days' straight posting at the guardian_learning comm, and I'm feeling pleased with myself and everyone else there.
・I tried my hand at tzatziki the other day, on account of someone gave Y way too many cucumbers, and it turned out very well. Very easy, except that the grating is a pain. Greek yogurt, grated cucumber, grated garlic, chopped dill, chopped mint, lemon juice, olive oil, perfect summer snack/light meal.
・For the first time I can remember, my three favorite baseball teams (the Swallows, the Carp and the Tigers) are all in the top half of their (six-team) league. Let's see if they make it to the end.
・I remembered the city-guessing site; it's very restful, you just drift along a street in a random city and observe until a useful hint comes up.
・Still very slowly reading Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, in the interstices of other things, I might be finished by autumn? “The pile of books was impossible to read in my lifetime and I involuntarily took a liking to the owner of the room. Anyone who liked books couldn't be a bad person.” I am growing increasingly fond of Kim Dokja himself, but otherwise I think my favorite character is Han Sooyoung, who unquestionably has all the best lines (and knows from transformative works).

( what is this subgenre called anyway? this gets long )

Photos: also way too many, they seemed to pile up all of a sudden. Notably, the two white-striped morning-glories are growing on the same plant (on my veranda), just taken at different times and in different weather.
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Be safe and well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

・Visiting a park in a nearby city (all due precautions taken) where a kiosk was lending out those little half-tent things? not big enough to stand up or lie down in, but enough to have a bit of a picnic in the shade? and also free-standing hammocks. We didn’t have time, but I was so tempted. Can you imagine?

・Being proactive: I have sent some emails on spec and gotten myself a tentative volunteer gig translating for one of the children’s-cafeteria projects here, as well as an agreement to do some beta reading for a writer I like (not someone I know from fandom, although I’d be surprised if they’re not on AO3 somewhere under a different name). I’m looking forward to both. As we used to say, be careful what you don’t ask for, you may not get it.

・I’ve been pretty good about doing five or ten minutes of very easy yoga a day, and it does feel like I’m having fewer headaches, even on low-atmospheric-pressure days when I normally would?

・Veranda status: The pansies are still flowering, amazingly enough. All the other fruits/veg are also putting out flowers (tomatoes → yellow, chili peppers and habaneros → white, strawberries → bright pink), which is a hopeful sign? The strawberry flowers have little proto-strawberries in the middle of them, very spiky, like a hedgehog plant.

・Have a very short excerpt from the world’s-grumpiest-buddy-cops AU that I’m still not writing, brought to you by the fact that I just noticed Lao Chu calls Zhao Yunlan “boss” (I think) but not the same word as Lin Jing uses, 头 instead of 老大:
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・Photos: A view from on high and a tramway that used to offer access there, some homemade koi-nobori flags, some nice tree scenes and a lot of roses.
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Be safe and well.

・I’ve actually been doing some Japanese reading for a change: finished a non-fiction book of essays about the city where I live, very relatable in their delight in city walking and wistfulness about never quite belonging to any given city or neighborhood, and wrote the author a fan email (I don’t know him, but one of his colleagues helped examine me for my MA back when). Now reading a more academic book about Chinese bildungsroman (what’s the plural of that word anyway) written by women, introducing me among others to Chen Hengzhe (Sophia Chen) and her remarkable life. I’m only a couple of chapters in so will probably report more later. (It annoys me, in passing, that the book gives Japanese readings for all the Chinese names, perfectly useless for looking them up in Chinese or English. Otherwise I’m liking it, though.)

・My veranda plants are growing like gangbusters, the tomato plant is doing that thing where I look away for two minutes and it gains two inches. Not many actual fruits yet but it’s still early. The two pansies I picked up from a tray marked “Free, help yourself” in the laundromat are blooming again, yellow and purple, and even the strawberry plant has a couple of bright pink blossoms. Also this thing called eau de cologne mint? bergamot mint? which I thought was more minty than it is, please tell me what to do with it before it takes over my whole veranda?

・I took an (old) HSK4 practice test online and got about 85/100 allowing for writing; however, I think that says more that I’m good at test-taking than anything else. I guess it’s a start. Unrelatedly, watching one of Liu Chang’s livestreams and talking back to the screen thus:
LC: 我在吃什么？我在吃蓝莓。(What am I eating? [a question from a viewer] I’m eating lanmei.)
Me: lanmei???
LC: Blueberry!
Me: 谢谢你看我心里，畅弟！(thank you for reading my mind, hon!)
So now I know a new word.

・I don’t think I’ve been listening to much new lately, but here’s Makoto Ozone doing jazz things to Chopin. My father did it better, but he was pre-YouTube (and probably wouldn’t have cared for it anyway), and I do like Ozone’s work.

・My original thing has been horribly in arrears, mostly because of demotivation due to persistent very minor ill-health—not “I don’t feel well enough to work on it,” more “I’m discombobulated mentally and I don’t want to concentrate,” you know how it is. The health thing might be getting better, or not, but anyway today I said I would write 500 words and I did just that, let’s see if I can write it tomorrow too. I learned something about a particular folk religious belief that I didn’t know that might come in handy, anyway.

・Photos: Some variations on white and pink. A little victory of nature over artifice in the middle of the city. Train pantagraphs (I can never spell that word). A cat by a stream, in two lights. A bird under a bridge.
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Be safe and well.

・I feel like half the people on my f-list, self included, have been sick, or taking care of someone sick, or otherwise under (more than usual even these days) stress; let’s hope spring will bring some good hope, or autumn for the lucky southern hemisphere people.

・I got my first set of veranda plants for the spring: strawberries, yellow cherry tomatoes, chili peppers, a weird mint. I usually have about a two out of three success rate, so we’ll see which ones actually grow. I still want a habanero and maybe something else green...

・I finally laid hands on A Desolation Called Peace, the second book in Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan duology. I really loved the first book, and was very happy to find I enjoyed the second one just as much. ( mild spoilers follow )

・Still very slowly rewatching LTR, and wow, I forgot how much they stuffed into 2-15. Not just the much-admired sequence at the beginning, Wu Xie all but dying and summoned back by Xiaoge, but his sad (and ominous) goodbye to Wu Erbai, his (physical and emotional) near-breakdown afterward all alone, the clifftop scene with all its different forms of love and loyalty, the dreamy parachute float down accompanied by the Chongqi song which always makes me cry anyway, Xiaoge’s little “it’s Wu Xie, he’s come for me” not-quite-smile, poor Liu Sang’s look of big-eyed wistfulness when Pangzi just barrels in and hugs Xiaoge...it’s a lot. (In general, to repeat myself: how is Zhu Yilong that beautiful and also that good at what he does...).

・I learned that the Chinese word for pistachio is 开心果, happy fruit.

・好可爱，Liu Chang singing something bluesy in English with slightly iffy pronunciation (a little bit non-native speaker, mostly his idea of what the genre calls for) and crisp final consonants: once a trained choral singer, always a trained choral singer lol.

・Another Seidensticker quote, something they amused themselves with in a class on the Genji: “Someone to the Third Princess: ‘And what color hair did your little boy’s father have?’ Third Princess: ‘I don’t know. He didn’t take his hat off.’” Irresistible as an MDZS joke, replacing the Third Princess with poor Qin Su...

・Photos: I treated myself to this glass thing which I think is called a Galileo thermometer; it’s not of much practical use but I just really like looking at it. Also a few last cherry blossoms, some...snapdragons?..., and tulips which I love for their stained-glass quality in the sun.
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Be safe and well.

・I can tell that I'm kind of using Yuletide fics and so on to distract myself from various global and personal tensions, which...is okay as long as I can cope in January when the immediate distraction isn't one any more. Knock wood. Ugh.

・Some botanical things: we live on the sixth floor, how are there weeds on the balcony? Some have invaded my garden pots and some are freestanding; however, they have recently all flowered and revealed themselves to be something like dandelions, which makes them harder to resent.
A local park is selling autumn tulip bulbs, which always makes me think of that lovely reading of "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

・Another local park has opened its ice rink; our climate is not icy and it must cost the city an astronomical amount every year, but I love it. The rink usually features a few classy figure-skating types in the middle, novice adults tentatively clomping step by step around the edge, and little colorful bundles of kids trailing on strings behind lesson instructors. Y and I, who were both taken skating as kids ourselves, fall somewhere in the middle and can sail around and around without doing anything fancy, it's great.

・I confessed to Yu-jie that I get 方便 (convenient) and 便宜 (cheap) mixed up, as they share a character. "But it's not even pronounced the same!" she said. "我知道!" (I know!), which is one sentence I can pronounce right, having imprinted on Wu Xie in full sulky-nephew mode saying it. ;)

・This joke may not really be funny when explained, but: for a work project, there was a text written in English by a student and translated into Japanese by a teacher, both native Japanese speakers. The student had written, in part, "and thus a sense of peach can be achieved by all." I looked at it and snickered a bit at the funny typo for "peace." Then I looked at the teacher's version, which was それでみんなで桃源郷を目指せる "and thus we can all aim for utopia." What? where did utopia come from...? OH. The Japanese word for it, 桃源郷, literally means "peach haven" or similar...

・Some fairly random photos from my recent wandering.
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Be safe and well.

Daily life: For a change I like my haircut, what I now think of as a Qi Jin hairdo after watching LTR: just below chin-length, center part, kind of curving off the face.
My spicy plants are starting to fruit, habaneros and chili peppers, yay; the tomato is drooping, though. Looking up plant health online is just like the human version: you get five possible different answers for any kind of symptom, of which at least two are fatal (and in the case of plants, one is invariably “you watered it too much” and another “you didn’t water it enough”).

Music: Orchestra back again, knock wood. I like Tchaik 2 more and more as we do it—a weird mix of 20th-c. avant la lettre and pop music, which is surprisingly delightful. ( A silly Tchaikovsky story from Wikipedia )

Books: Rereading Natasha Pulley’s The Bedlam Stacks, which I can never decide how much I like. ( Read more... )

Chinese: On the topic of untranslatable family words: Lin Nansheng, mentioning his brother, says “my gege” to his new boss and “my xiongzhang” to his not-yet-girlfriend (the first time I’ve ever heard that one refer to someone other than Lan Xichen). I feel like it should be the other way around, based on relative formality; but he’s kind of playing a role in both contexts, and maybe “gege” seemed more, er, naive (less 天真 than 腼腆, I guess) and “xiongzhang” more serious and scholarly?

Writing: I had a couple of genuine inspirations about overarching themes and how they can be made to appear specifically, although mostly to be realized in book 2. I solved (or found the key to) the problem that one character spends literally all of book 1 struggling with (not least because until now I had no idea how to solve it either). I’m not sure he is going to like the solution, but that’s his problem.
I’m trying to keep a balance between making the magic neither too painstakingly explicated (as Harriet Vane puts it, phantasies too careful to tuck their shrouds neatly about them and leave no loose ends) nor too wand-wavingly aerie-faerie (it’s a skilled art/science and the characters are experts in the field). Tricky.

Photos: So you know how the physicists (?) talk about spherical cows? I have found a spherical (or at least perfectly round) cat. Also some cherry tomatoes, grown by me, and some pretty birdberries, grown by someone else.
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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.
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Be safe and well.

Daily life: At least one thing that is not (knock wood) depressing, my veranda plants this year so far. I think it was salamandras who kindly suggested growing spring onions/green onions from rooted ones, and so far (see photo below) it's worked a treat, although it feels like getting a free lunch. My first chili pepper plant of the year dropped dead in two seconds flat, a disappointment after I had such a good crop last year, but I've replaced it and am holding my thumbs. I've ordered a not!lime thing online which I'm very curious about, details to follow; also I just got a brand new habanero and some basil, we'll see. Then there's this year's cherry tomato plant, which is like--I take my eyes off it for two seconds and it doubles in size. One day I'm going to wake up and find it posting on DW instead of me.
Very little happening otherwise; rain, some volunteer stuff, not enough work to keep me distracted. I might post about my own putative translation projects in a day or two.

Music: Brahms piano quintet opus 34, another piece I should have known long ago, courtesy of smalin on YouTube (a guy who provides visual renderings of classical music which are very soothing to watch as well as listen to).

Books: Mostly rereading favorite fics, a delayed version of my usual yearly habit. I wish there was a "Reread, still great" button next to the kudos one on AO3 for already commented fics.

Chinese: I will use any expedient to memorize tones, including drawing shamelessly on Guardian etc. 糖 tang2 (sugar), rising, as in Zhao Yunlan offering a lollipop (棒棒糖) to little!Shen Wei; 醉 zui4 (drunk), falling, as in Shen Wei's reaction to getting drunk; 支持 zhi1chi2 (support), steady-rising, as in Chu Shuzhi jumping to his feet to declare "I support Changcheng!" in an SID argument; 床 chuang2 (bed), rising, as in Zhao Yunlan looking up at Shen Wei from his bed...(I think there's a theme here)...

Writing: Struggling. I want to get back to where it's fun...

Photos: The usual flowers, a half-melted cat, a sign that just says "It's OK," some loquats (someone else's), and some spring onions (grown by me).
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Be safe and well.

・ Finally less work and less headache, this past week was not fun. Oh right, two sets of taxes, writing and revising, other patiently waiting tasks...

・ Dealing with, for work reasons, a catalog of English-language books from the turn of the 20th century on horticulture and agriculture, I was surprised at how many of the eminent authors were women: Eleanor Anne Ormerod, Muriel Wheldale Onslow, Mary Evans Francis, Nina L. Marshall, Gertrude Jekyll, Julia Ellen Rogers, Phebe W. Humphreys, Mima Nixon... . I hope the all-male staff of the Japanese botanical garden in question found them illuminating.

・ In surprisingly unrelated news: it's getting to be time for new veranda plants! Ideas for what I should buy? I already have an impulse-bought sachi no ka strawberry plant, which may or may not make it through the spring; I will definitely aim for cherry tomatoes, habaneros, and red chilis, which have done well in the past. A little lemon tree or some other citrus? Green onions like Y wants? Flowers of some kind? Basil (so I can have basil races with A-Pei) or mint or other herbs? Criteria are plants that will be happy with daily watering and sheltering from typhoons, because I have a black thumb for anything more complicated.

・ ( More photos of plum blossoms and territorial cats )

Be safe and well.

Daily life: Please take it as read from now until at least the end of September that every entry I post begins with “It’s hot and humid and horrible and I hate summer,” because it’s always going to be true. I chose to live in this city and I love it, but oh my God I hate its climate so much.
My husband got me to go play tennis (or, you know, attempt at a sub-novice level to do so) yesterday; given how much music he listens to on a regular basis that he wouldn’t otherwise for my sake, it’s the least I can do to go wave a tennis racket around every now and then for his. On the other hand, ow.
My grape tomatoes are now up to bra height, and still fruiting regularly, bless them. See below for various colorful spicy things.

Music: Bits of Figaro here and there; “Dov’e sono” is so simple and so exquisite, the absolute essence of Mozart.

Books: Looking at Sakai Toshihiko’s The Optimistic Prisoner for writing research. My copy is one of the original editions of 1911, in surprisingly good shape, complete with occasional characters replaced with ○○○ where the censor red-pencilled the original content. Sakai was a left-wing activist, writer, editor/publisher, feminist, and general early-20th-c. good guy, kind, humorous, practical, and honorable; there’s a fantastic biography of him by Kuroiwa Hisako which is in my one-day-I-will-translate-this-book pile. His letters to friends and family from prison are, allowing for the context, delightful and compulsively readable. Here’s a very scratch translation of February 24, 1909, with which I empathize very much:

Honestly language learning is pretty damn foolish anyway, but it’s a lot of fun. I gave myself a hard time over starting on French. A bird in the hand and all that, one oughtn’t to be having too many affairs, and I have a terrible habit of being dilettantish; look at the fuss I made over learning Esperanto last year and how quickly that fell off. I did think many times that instead of fooling with French I should go back and concentrate on German. But I just couldn’t resist giving it a try. It’s not as if I have to end up fluent, all I need is to be able to read the footnotes in English texts with a dictionary. No, never mind that, it would be interesting just to be able to do a bit of comparative study on the grammar. No, forget all that, it’s just so much fun to start new things from scratch as a way of getting through the day. As I get older and the future gets shorter, picking up new bits of work for myself gives me a feeling that the road ahead is longer, with more to look forward to. So I’ve finally plunged in, and once having done so I’m eager to move ahead. I may not be what I was as a boy, but I feel I’d like to prove to myself that I haven’t completely lost it either. So I’m studying quite eagerly. When I wake up in the night, I count un, deux, trois, quatre to myself in French up to one hundred, a pleasingly innocent custom, you’ll agree.

Chinese: ( Reading Chinese subtitles, sort of )

Writing: Making slow but reasonably steady progress. I think the whole framework is more or less there now, but there is a LOT of plot and feelings with which it’s to be filled in. It is possible I should schedule my day-job work efficiently and arrange a whole day for myself once a week or so with nothing to do but write. Theoretically doable, but scary!

Photos: ( Summer things )

Daily life: It’s been raining or cloudy for forty days and forty nights; the rainy season is taking itself seriously this year. I’m still not exactly complaining (I’ll take it over hot sun any day, looking at you, August), and unlike the poor people in Kyushu we’re not subject to flooding here, but it seems like yet another piece of 2020’s performative grimness.
My veranda plants are doing relatively well, except for the damn eggplant; I have lots of glossy green habaneros and chili peppers waiting to ripen. Not sure what I’ll do with the latter, which I haven’t grown before—string them up to dry? We’ve had about a dozen-odd tasty cherry tomatoes so far with another two dozen or so ripening on the vine, so I feel like I got my money’s worth.

Music: Turandot streaming from the Met—I didn’t like the singers much, but I adore the music, having had the chance to sing in the chorus of a concert production way back when. The second act testing scene and its aftermath absolutely blow me away every time, along with the rising line when Calaf tells her his name at the end (although in terms of plot I kind of agree with those who feel Turandot and Liu should just run away together).

Books: Rereading Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy books. I have a whole post about them somewhere in my DW archives so I won’t repeat myself too much, but like Peter Dickinson, she’s someone who, if genre books were taken more seriously, should be considered one of the great 20th-c. authors. Elegant clear prose with not a word out of place, perfectly evoked character and setting, warm and sometimes poignant without ever being sentimental, and also funny in a deliciously unmarked way (cf Mrs. Oliphant, an elderly friend of the Melendy children, declining to go out caroling: “We’ll stay at home and welcome Santa Claus. It’s years since I’ve met an attractive man of my own age.”).

Chinese: ( This counts as Chinese study, right? )

Writing: Things are happening! There has been very awkward bed-sharing. I have to decide what order the next couple of scenes need to come in for maximum tension; also whether either of these people will be embarrassed by inadvertent snuggling, and if so which one (I may have been slightly inspired by ratbones’ little!Shen Wei, though neither of them is that adorable). Also I have a list of unanswered questions a yard long, mostly depressingly political. I think the answers are all in there somewhere but it requires thought.

Photos: ( July showers )

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.

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nnozomi

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1: 良いお年を！
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Entries tagged with veranda

难读好读

summer trivia

rainy season ramblings

ho una casa nell'here

Akarabgnadabarak

quotidiana, rainy season edition

current to turn the mills

Omnibus post: randomness, book talk and photos

电鸟 chirp chirp beep

record of a quiet week or two (knock wood)

pantagraph? pantograph? train 鸟居?

开心果？

桃源郷

mid-week rambling at length

divided stairways

schlepping onward

double negative (mostly trivia and photos)

Mostly language-learning-related rambling

July showers

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