nnozomi

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be safe and well.

Once again I went to get a corona shot with a headache and now I have a worse one, ugh ugh ugh. Not actually as bad as it could be, but still, I can do without this unholy alliance between the vaccine and the fucked-up back of my neck, sigh.
So I am distracting myself with a bunch of little tiny things here.

Writing thoughts: I have realized that in original stuff, at least (not sure about fic but maybe that too), I specialize in people NOT having relationship talks of any kind, just kind of figuring out unspokenly what’s happening between them and leaning into it (the more successful the relationship, the more so). Not sure a) if this is realistic or b) what it says about my tastes.

There’s a Chinese song I like a lot called 我怀念的; I’ve listened to it in various versions, Stefanie Sun’s original as well as covers by JJ Lin, Li Hao, and Liu Chang (responsible for introducing me to it in the first place, bless him), and there’s one line that I heard every time as “And baby, [something something].” It’s not at all unusual for c-pop songs to throw in bits of English in their lyrics, especially something along the lines of “love,” “beautiful,” etc. (although see also the Cantonese romp 一格格, which randomly drops the English words “cream cheese” in), so I took this for granted until I finally looked the lyrics for that line up: “狼狈比失去难受,” lángbèi bǐ shīqù nánshòu… Well, now I know.

Other Chinese stuff: a pleasing phrase acquired from fic and presumably a back-translation from English, 打不过就加入, if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em. New farmboy words: 拖沓, dilly-dallying, laggard; 孽缘, an ill-fated relationship; 攀比, the urge to compete regardless of actual reality; 梅开二度, pulling off a success twice in a row.

The little senzenwomen community I run (pocket biographies of women in Japan active between 1868 and 1945) reached its one-year mark a little while back, and now has about fifty subscribers which seems like quite a lot given the circumstances; I am learning new things every week and still enjoying working on it, although man, I’m still only up to women born around 1870, with HUNDREDS left to go.

I haven’t signed up for Yuletide yet but I am planning on it. I nominated a bunch of obscure book fandoms and am wondering whether to request ONLY those and see what the hell happens or throw in a few other things as well; we’ll see what happens.

I got through my first orchestra concert on the bassoon—not unscathed, I made one really stupid mistake where it showed, where I’d practiced a lot, because I was so nervous, but otherwise more or less not disgracing myself. (I did realize that I was less tense than I might have been because I’d practiced the music so much more than I ever did when playing the cello…). Dumb joke for the day, reminding myself to look up something in the score when I got home, “must put Liszt on the list.” Really the best thing about the bassoon is the low notes, C and B and Bb below the staff—a huge column of vibrating air which starts in your mouth and feels thrilling.

Just a couple of photos: Jiji-chan out for a stroll, accompanied by her reflection in a puddle, and my blended family of morning-glories, which have completely taken over the veranda.

Be safe and well.

Two neat links from my f-list: Article via Amedia on a version of Star Wars dubbed into Ojibwe. The guy who voices Han Solo says he “felt he knew his character intimately, having portrayed him ‘every day in the backyard … But nothing like this had ever crossed my mind as a possibility. So it's a dream come true,’ he said. ‘I hope there's more opportunities like this … for Indigenous people who want to work and practise their languages.’" Also a couple of songs via geraineon from a band that does Indonesian folk songs in old-fashioned jazz styles, Kisah Mencari Seorang Raja and Teman Seperjuangan.

Chinese stuff: No farmboy words today, on account of I’m watching season 2 very slowly and haven’t accumulated enough yet, but some other bits of things. False friends and true (?) ones: I was using one of those automatic supermarket checkout machines, and it told me “if you are finished, please press 完了,” and I looked at it for a moment going “but nothing’s wrong, why would I press 完了…?”. Confusion. Japanese 完了 kanryō just means “finished, complete,” while Chinese 完了 wánle is slang for “had it, done for, messed up”… . Elsewhere, I’m finding it irresistible to translate 脾气 píqì “bad temper” as “pique” for obvious reasons. Finally, since I can’t leave the farmboys completely out of a post, a scene (about 30 seconds' worth) in which one of them not very patiently explains Chinese measure words to another one (“I swear I’ve told you this eight hundred times”), reassuring to see native speakers struggling with these things too! (also it’s funny).

My mother, who tends to go to the ballet and other events where they look into your purse as you enter, says she sometimes asks the security guards if they dream about their jobs (I don’t know how she comes up with these things, or indeed gets away with them). At least one of them told her that yup, he does, and in dreams he sometimes finds things like kryptonite in people’s bags. (I wonder how his dreaming self handles these situations?) Thanks to this friendly guard, my mother, who is over eighty, has now researched kryptonite for the first time in her life!

For reasons I’ve been writing by hand a bit lately, and finding it almost impossible to write legibly (my handwriting has always been appalling, even seven years as a teacher didn’t help, I’ve been told it looks like Arabic). Took me back to the long period when I kept a handwritten diary. A friend showed me how she did it in seventh grade (B5-ish ruled spiral-bound notebook, write as much or as little as you want per day) and it stuck, lasting in various quantities until grad school when most of my RL was taking place in Japanese and it was easier to write about it in Japanese, except I never have learned to handwrite Japanese easily, so I switched from the notebooks to a computer document. Which is what I still use, although it’s a lot more fragmented lately. Embarrassingly, I have to say that the core of my diary-keeping has always had to do with whoever I’ve had a crush on at the given moment (sometimes reciprocated, more often not), and now that I’m comfortably married to Y my diary tends to be mostly fannish (fortunately Y is entertained by my fannish passions and has no objection to sharing my heart with various versions of Zhu Yilong, etc. etc.). Who else keeps a diary, and what is it like? If you feel like sharing.

Original thing: Why are some characters SO MUCH EASIER to write than others? Such a relief to get out of K’s viewpoint and into R’s, no shade on K; maybe it’s just because he’s in his head right now about a lot of things and I find it claustrophobic, but oh dear. Once again I am struggling with my decision to use ONLY these three points of view, I know why I did it and I think it’s right (even though I’m cheating a little in this one with some epistolary flashbacks), but it doesn’t play to my strengths and it’s HARD. (Sorry about all the capitals!)

Photos: Some new morning glories, an alley, two views of a sunset from a train platform, a melting cat, and two window views I liked (nice old building).

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be safe and well.

I’m traveling and worrying as usual about the flight etc. and I should be working and/or doing other useful things, but as per usual for stress relief purposes here I am posting various bits and pieces. I owe a bunch of DW and other comments/replies, which…may not happen yet for a little while…

Making glacially slow progress with my revisions, as usual. Maybe I will be more efficient while traveling…? (oh yeah sure). I’ve been very fortunate to have multiple beta readers, and I love hearing their various different opinions and perspectives, but man, no two of them agree on most things! That said, at least two of them have agreed on the fact that, of all things, my romance subplot could use to be more romance-y, which I am finding difficult. With original characters in general, I never feel comfortable getting into the details of romance, whether it’s feelings or physical actions; I feel like it’s private to them and I don’t have any business sticking my nose in. This makes literally no sense, I made them up, they only exist in my imagination! Any privacy they have is inside MY HEAD! Plus in fanfic, while I still tend toward the gen side, I have enjoyed writing romance (and, for the last-named below, occasionally sex) for couples as disparate as Harriet and Peter, F’lar and Lessa, and Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan. So why the hell not for original characters?
I suppose partly, in this case, I’m writing from the perspective of the person who eventually realizes he’s having a slow burn as opposed to the one who essentially fell in love (much to his horror in terms of his ideological beliefs) at first sight, so there’s less consciously going on in his head to write about; and while their attraction is not asexual per se, it seems to tend more to I-need-you-to-be-part-of-me than I-need-you-to-be-fucking-me (or vice versa), so the details of physical attraction don’t quite seem to fit. Still, there should be something I can do.

Zhu Yilong promoting his latest movie and looking, as always, dazzlingly beautiful, in Meng Yinan’s photos in particular (oh dear) as well as various videos. In one of his better examples of duality (or I guess he’s well into multiple facets by now), we also get to see him 15 kg heavier, wearing glasses, and passing the time between filming scenes by learning to knit. (I don’t know what he’s currently filming, but it seems to call for a kind of hyper-Wu Xie look, by which I mean his hair is grown well out (not quite ponytail-length yet) and he’s so thin his cheekbones go beyond beautiful all the way to ow. Someone please give him a role (in a drama, if I’m wishing anyway) for which he can keep his natural weight?) (Also it will never cease to be relatable that at his degree of experience and fame he’s still so shy that he can appear in front of people and be nervous enough to say not 大家好，非常开心 (hello everyone, very happy to…), but 非常大家 (very everyone…)).
There are a couple of longer interviews with him and the other associated movie people available—I imagine the blessed Wenella will provide a translation of them in good time, but I’ve been watching them on B站 and as always feeling very frustrated with my lack of listening skills. Oh well, I suppose that makes it the more satisfying when I can actually follow something—“I don’t choose scripts by their genre, I choose them for the story and the characters.” I’m always interested in how the way Z1L talks about his work overlaps with (from my amateur perspective) the work of writing, especially with regard to thinking about backstories, evoking character through small moments, etc. (As an actor he only has to create one character at a time, but he has to do it in three dimensions, or rather four, I guess, since the character has to change over time as well, not to mention reacting and interacting with those created by other people; us (would-be) writers have to handle all the characters at once, but we get to do it all through text on the page… and other obvious considerations.)

A machining term new to me which turned up in a technical translation, and struck me as the new and improved way to get hold of utility actors: centrifugal casting.

Someone among the Yuletide letters has requested a BL manga I’ve translated a few chapters of, not named here because I’m not especially proud of it, but it cracks me up to find the streams crossed this way.

Re my last post’s mention of Angela Brazil, cyphomandra suggested Dorita Fairlie Bruce, who proves to be harder to find online but quite entertaining. Two passages I enjoyed: one which strikes me as a very faithful rendition of dialogue among English schoolgirls required to speak French in their dorms, one a discussion of the fledgling writer’s troubles by someone who has clearly been there.
“And, Jean, est-il true que vous faites choses comme ça? Parce que vous savez bien c’est entirely against les regles, and must be stopped. Comprenez-vous?” / “Oh, oui, je comprends all right, mais c’est tout-a-fait fair, parce que je suis much slower to apprendre que le rest de vous.” / “Nonsense! Besides, ce n’est pas le point.” (Dimsie Moves Up Again)
“Well,” said Pam thoughtfully, “it seems to me simply putting temptation in their way to enclose the customary self-addressed envelope. Stamps you must send, but think how easy it is for a harassed editor to put your MS. straight into the enclosed envelope and post it back if he hasn’t got time to read it at the moment. Whereas he might think twice if he had to find an envelope and address it.” / “Oh, Pamela!” exclaimed Jean, shocked at such cynicism. “They always say they are panting for fresh talent.” / “I know,” said Pamela, “but they get such a lot of it.”(Dimsie Grows Up)

Photos: The hair salon cat, awake and asleep, plus another less pampered cat; the long, long, long flight of steps up to a serene café at the top of a very small urban mountain, in company with a DW friend I won’t name unless they’d like me to, but it was a very nice time; autumn persimmons, not quite ready to eat; and a drunk-hibiscus plant (white in the morning, pink at night).

Be safe and well.

・As seen elsewhere, petra and associates are making the OTW membership fee available for anyone who would like to vote in the elections but has difficulty with the fee. Registration required by June 30. I am one of the people offering financial support, so if anyone would rather contact me directly, please feel free to DM as well. It should go without saying, but all confidentiality upheld, also whoever you vote for is your own business.
Re OTW issues in general, right now I will limit myself to saying that I do plan to vote in the election, which I haven’t done before, and that among the people talking about it, in addition to petra above, starandrea in general and lunarriviera in specific have also had good things to say.

・Amazingly enough not related to the above, an old diary entry reminded me of the song that was playing everywhere during a college summer vacation many years ago: Jill Sobule’s Bitter. I like it musically and I can do with repeating to myself “I don’t want to get bitter, I don’t want to turn cruel…” every now and then in life in general.

・In Zhu Yilong news, he and Chen Sicheng, the director of 消失的她/Lost in the Stars, did an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, filmed for some reason in black and white; it has C-subs and I decided rashly that I was going to translate it, so I did. I think there’s already a subbed version somewhere, and I have no doubt the blessed Wenella will make a proper version at some point, but this was a fun endeavor. You can find the interview here (on B站) and my translation here (ZH and EN). Probably full of mistakes. Among other things it establishes that Zhu Yilong writes songs, can liquefy himself, has 大痣 and 大志 (which defeated me as a translator, there just is no equivalent pun), and owes his director a pair of pants. (He also looks beautiful and sounds more bass than baritone, too much smoking or too little sleep?). (A-Pei helped me catch a few unsubtitled words, and her judgment was “I like his intelligence and reserve, but he’s too thin!”)
In even more Zhu Yilong news, genuinely breathtaking photographs by Meng Yinan here.

・In Chinese study, I found a site called Speechling which offers online dictation practice; I have a feeling the range of sentences isn’t all that large, but there are multiple levels, male and female voices, slow and normal speeds, and it’s a good place to start.

・Reading a YA novel by Komatsu Ayako about a high school girl who discovers Arabic calligraphy and Islam through her sister’s half-Turkish classmate…it’s quite a complicated setting for a short book, but I like it because there are still very very few Japanese books, especially YA/MG, which deal with differences (the “homogeneous society” myth is still strong, even though it’s blatantly not true), and for the lovely depictions of calligraphy and the likable characters, Maho and her slightly weird family and her friends Leyla/伶来 and Sena/千凪.

・Still in revisions hell. Finished one pass of adding things (now at 94K) and about to start another, after which the line-by-line revision is waiting, along with the overall theme that should be in there somewhere…

・Photos: Assorted flowers; a stream, phone, and cat from one of the big shrines; a park cat gradually deciding how snuggly to get.

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.

·I think most people on my f-list have seen it by now, but chestnut_pod has an extremely thoughtful and constructive post up about what to do with the OTW, including a huge discussion in the comments (mind the content warnings added).

·Last week I went up to Fukushima to play in a concert of 500 cellists, amateur and professional, in memory of the earthquake. Y tagged along and we did some sightseeing in advance, see the suspension-bridge pictures below. Dreamlike, gorgeous, all green and stone, like wandering into an ink painting. It was raining and cold, and we went into a souvenir shop where the lady cannily served plum-and-chili-pepper tea, and I bought a bag of teabags… . Lunch at a traditional noodle place where he ate soba with a huge leek, and I ordered tempura and took a bite of what looked like a shiitake mushroom, which turned out to be a red bean bun…shock. But tasty.
The concert was kind of an experience one is glad to have had, but not hugely satisfying for me in musical terms—partly because all the music was boring and partly because five hundred people is just too many, you can’t hear or see properly what’s going on. I was glad to be there, though.

·I am struggling lately with Chinese; not working as hard as I should on the Anki etc. I already have, not figuring out how to get further. I really don’t want to take an in-person class, but I’m not sure what the next step is. Among the latest Zhu Yilong videos posted by the blessed Wenella, I watched the same 10-minute interview three times in a row, once with no subtitles, once with C-subs (and then once with English), understanding going from 5% to about 75%. Listening is impossible.
(Relatedly, a drinking game for anyone who wants to get drunk: take a sip every time Zhu Yilong says 还挺 when he’s being interviewed. It just means “quite,” but he’s very fond of it.)

·I have one more scene to go in book 2 of my original thing, an epilogue really, and I’m very stuck; in terms of personal issues, all three protagonists are very much in a To Be Continued status, I’m not sure how to wrap it up in a way that feels like the ending of a book even if not the ending of a series. Also I have provided myself with sixty zillion assorted plot lines that have to be touched on in some way. I think at this point I might should just start writing and let it happen. When/if I do finish I have so much revision to do, aaargh.

Photos: Suspension bridge environs as above. A couple of nice roses and a somewhat less hidden koi. Turtles sharing rock space, and the "turtle rock" in Y's hometown, of which it's said that if it ever changes the direction it's facing, trouble will follow. Many cello cases all lined up. A very fortunate cat which lives in a stall next to the butcher's.

Be safe and well.

Some rambling about writing to distract from RL worries.
Thinking a lot about antagonists and how they’re introduced, and also the flip side of, I don’t mean protagonists exactly, “good” characters? When I was reading Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light a little while ago I was disappointed by it on these grounds: I felt like all the characters were very clearly presented as “good, you should like this person” or “bad, you should dislike this person,” making them flat and uninteresting to read about, especially the bad ones. To be fair, I’ve only read book 1 of a trilogy, but I did not get the impression that she was setting up for more character development later on. I wonder if she did it deliberately that way, or just was not interested in focusing on this particular kind of character work? I feel bad about criticizing Marske’s book this way, but she’s obviously a very talented writer and—okay, speaking to my personal interests alone—I wish she had put her talent to work less for her sex scenes and more for her characterization.
I mean… to take three examples of media that I think do this right.

Waters of Time>

I was talking about Erica H. Smith’s Waters of Time series in my last post; the author has a (spoilery) post on her antagonists which makes it clear how few are of them are simple un-fleshed-out baddies, and how many of the others change over time from villain to comrade or from villain to terrible-person-who-is-also-complicated-and-relatable. She notes that “writing antagonists can be fun, but it’s more fun when they are complicated people and have at least a partial redemptive arc, or when they appear to be one thing and turn out to be another, or keep changing roles,” and I think this applies to reading (or watching) antagonists too.

Guardian

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

Marlows

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

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

Be safe and well.