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Fri Nov 20th, 2009
08:06 pm
Finally realize the reason-- no, scratch that-- *one* reason why vol 10 of Onmyouji makes no sense is that I don't have vol 9. Should have picked it up at bookoff, I suppose, but reading amazon and bk1 reviews of my missing volumes, with their perennial phrases 'hard to understand' and 'not easy to make out,' kind of makes me glad I diidn't.
So why am I trying to read vol 10 again? Oh, practice for Youmi 4, I suppose. Even if reading Okano does tend to induce a 'despair and die' frame of mind. OTOH I suppose I should be cheered that the people whose native language this is have no idea what she's saying either.
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Thu Nov 19th, 2009
07:32 pm - Senmon kotoba
So, Heisei Ghostbusters vol 2 is attempting to explain... something. Something vaguely onmyouji-ish but not exactly: in short, what it is the mysterious main character does. He's a 龍脈師, a 'dragon pulse master.' "We seek out and control the 地龍 (earth dragons) that run the length and breadth of the earth, and use them to expand the human world.' What are earth dragons, asks the naive uke character. "Earth dragons are a form of energy that runs concurrent with the lines of the dragon pulse". And then the dialogue gets lost in matters of plate tectonics and faults and sea-mounts and technical stuff I don't understand even in my own language.
So I go back to FMA vol 17, in translation; and here's May talking about alchemical transformation in Xin. And look look see! she's explaining what a Dragon's Pulse is too. 'The earth itself has an energy. Like a life force, the energy maintains harmony in the world. You could think of it as a river of power that flows in the ground like a pulse. By understanding the harmony of the pulse, it's possible to ride that flow and transmute something to a distant location.' At least there are no plate tectonics in FMA.
What there is, is a lot of 'feel bad and about to get worse' stuff that makes me reluctant to read further. Also another female general more-or-less (major-generals are superior to brigadiers and subordinate to full generals, is all I know.) My world is littered with female generals lately. Sumeragi's, Flora's Mamma, Peking Opera Wang generals, and of course Great Big Honking Spoiler which I will discuss under the cut. Granted it's a spoiler for something not generally (haha!) available, still. You have been warned.
( Read more... )
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Tue Nov 17th, 2009
09:17 pm
To report only that Heisei Ghostbusters is still tough and still wordy, but not nearly as tough and wordy as Okano's Onmyouji which covers the same territory; that Youmi Henjou 4 is reported by Japanese readers to be as obscure as later Onmyouji, which is midnight obscure; that the brush writing of Youmi Henjou (all of it, but 2 at the moment) makes me wonder if I'm reading the actual words correctly; that this Kouring series of Okano's is dear God The Forgotten Beasts of Eld manga-ized: my spirit faints within me at the thought of what so innately perverse a mangaka has done with what I recall as a fairly yang-type story; and that, ray of sunshine maybe, Sumeragi Natsuki has been translated into French.
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Sun Nov 15th, 2009
02:07 pm
The flow bites me again. I put on my DVDs of 大汉天子/ Prince of the Han Dynasty to see how my Chinese is doing, intending to ff through the part I'd seen. But stop to watch the opening sequence of the aged Han Wudi reminiscing about the cronies of his youth-- him and him and him and *especially* Uncle Ming playing WTF Dongfang Shuo/ 东方朔???
( Explanation )
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Sat Nov 14th, 2009
09:39 am
My computer told me today it couldn't find my profile and rerouted me to generic user XP. I hope this doesn't happen again.)
Was talking about Novik and Temeraire last weekend with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) nojojojo and paleaswater. Shall continue to do it here. ( Bolstered by some floaty lying awake at 2 am Tuesday morning thoughts, listening to Newark being as silent as Newark ever gets )
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Thu Nov 12th, 2009
09:41 am - No sun, no moon
O useful Friends' FL. Here is a happy November poem
who are you, little i
(five or six years old)
peering from some high
window; at the gold
of november sunset
(and feeling: that if day
has to become night
this is a beautiful way)
--e.e. cummings
And my own long-ago semi-haiku (there are pedantic arguments why 17 English syllables are much longer than 17 Japanese syllables, one being that by Japanese count November has 4 syllables, but I'll spare you them)
November sun.
My neighbour's garden
is back again
Yesterday back in TO amid the smell of dry fallen leaves and brilliant blue skies. 'Fall is the best time to do anything' someone said in a New York article long ago. Is true.
( Have some more; culled from following links )
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Wed Nov 11th, 2009
06:40 pm
Oh, and because today is today--
Ask me no more, for fear I should reply;
Others have held their tongues, and so can I;
Hundreds have died, and told no tale before:
Ask me no more, for fear I should reply --
How one was true and one was clean of stain
And one was braver than the heavens are high,
And one was fond of me: and all are slain.
Ask me no more, for fear I should reply.
AE Housman
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02:10 pm
There's a fourth volume of Youmi Henjou Yawa.
It came out two and a half years ago.
Why was I not informed of this?
Have ordered along with the maddening vol.3. And because I'm acquainted with the infinitely treacherous ways of mangaka, I ordered a Hatsu Akiko with it. And because I'm still train lagged, didn't order the Hatsu Akiko I'd intended to. I mean, it's good, or looks good in its Chinese version, but it isn't the one with the Chinese stories. Dommage. There's still a fourth volume of Youmi Henjou and who knows what it might tell me.
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10:08 am - First pedantry, then reflection
The Night Revels of Minister Han Xizai was painted in the 10th century by Gu Hongzhong (another representation with linked closeups is here.) 'Painted in five panels' doesn't mean 'reproduced in five panels.' Good, that's cleared up.
Wandering about NY on Monday, trying to locate Kinokuniya while passing Saks 5th Avenue here or observing the mouth-watering sales on denki seihin there, I realized that many people come to NY to shop for, well, other things than I come to shop for, certainly. But these days, with cheap bk1 shipping and increasing numbers of- feh- translated manga not only at Kino but at Bookoff itself, I don't really come to buy manga anymore. (Though I'm sorry to have missed Kino while I had US money during loonie-daka-- Saiyuki Reload and Onmyouji and Ravages of Time would have been mine without waiting for shipping. OTOH I'd probably have bought a new Wordtank for heart-stopping prices, just for the ability to see what it looks like and does, and there goes my VISA. Sai Weng's horse and all.)
( No, what I really go to NY for is... )
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Fri Nov 6th, 2009
02:18 pm
I survived Amtrak (half hour late due to freight trains.) I survived NJ Rail (30 minutes late due to downed wires + 20 minutes waiting at a bridge by Secaucus for all the backed up trains to pass us into NY.) I survived NJ taxi drivers who couldn't find a building right round the corner even though he told me it was right round the corner when I said I can't walk the two blocks to Mulberry St. I survived the desk clerk who didn't believe I was the person whose name was written on the envelope with the keys in it. I even survived me who managed to lose my wallet inside the bedroom of the apartment and *then* managed to lose (ie not find) half the money that was in the wallet.
It only took 15 hours but I am in New York. Or rather New Jersey. Tell me again why people travel?
And happy birthday, Fearless Leader.
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Wed Nov 4th, 2009
08:10 am - What, in our house?
I know Canadians have a reputation for polite low-key inoffensiveness, but I think it's one of those statistical distributive things I don't really have a handle on. You know, like the one where intelligence in one group tends to split between absolutely utter genius and slightly duller than normal, while the other group occupies the python's bulge in the middle of the graph? Yes, well. Doubtless the mass of Canucks are polite and low-key, but I observe too often that if someone is being an infuriating smite-worthy fandom ninny all over lj, when I go to her user info there she is occupying space above the 49th parallel. Much too often, in Toronto. As in Japan, where the people who made me swear on a day to day basis were usually Americans, but the two most obnoxious gaijin specimen I had to deal with came from fair TO. And not even the 'burbs: from those bastions of privilege, Rosedale and Forest Hill.
Which probably goes to prove that the rest of the country is right, and Toronto is not Canada.
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Tue Nov 3rd, 2009
08:06 am - Blameless pastimes
Y'day's kanji study led me to this fabulous derivation.司 SHI, tsukasa(doru), ADMINISTER, OFFICIAL
Once written (picture of early form) being a mirror image of anus 后 ie an opening 口 under buttocks 尸. It is not known how this character came to mean administer, official. Some scholars feel it results from borrowing or confusion with chronicler 史, but in view of the fact that buttocks in building 官 came to mean sedentary work and hence government/ official, it is not impossible that anus/ posterior similarly came to symbolise sedentary work and hence official. Thus: the Chinese character for bureaucrat is the picture of an asshole. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as *my* ancestral wisdom has it.
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Sun Nov 1st, 2009
Sat Oct 31st, 2009
05:21 pm - Favourite Five Fantasy Nonhumans
Ganked from nojojojojojojojo's entry (there was a character in Arslan, I think it was, that did that to my fingers too; had to keep going back and removing a's and consonants from the name that never never ends...)
Unlike her source, I tend to individuals over species. Species are a problem, as I'll discuss later.
( Read moar )
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Fri Oct 30th, 2009
Thu Oct 29th, 2009
07:47 pm
One of these days I'll restart my reading of Three Kingdoms, possibly aided by this site ('ware ads) that I can't tell is it a RP 3K game or is it treating the 3K characters *as if* they were part of a RPG.
This because I, currently very porridgey in the brain, first read the lj entry about writing POC for Yuletide and saw that Red Cliff has made the YT cut; and then read an entry observing that feminine utopias are somehow always peaceful and one-with-nature, which prompted rushthatspeaks to observe "the old perception of women states very firmly that you can't be a mother and a warrior, a mother and a scientist." Porridge brain then presented me with a female Zhao Zilong fighting with a lance in one hand and a baby in the other. Which I like enough to start considering gender-bender AU 3K. This requires either finishing 3K or seeing Red Cliff somehow or possibly reading what there is of Ravages of Time in Japanese, which may not go nearly far enough. Cannot think which would be the least painful of these.
(OTOH there's a female general in the current Sumeragi Natsuki. And I wonder are there any female generals in Yue opera, or are they all delicate scholars? Shall find out next week.)
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Sun Oct 25th, 2009
02:58 pm
Henh. They're expanding the jouyou kanji list. As I review the current 2000, painfully trying to learn to envisage the upper ones and/ or remember how to write them. (Writing Japanese is, famously, use it or lose it, and some of these I think I never had in the first place. Visual memory is soooo not me.)
OTOH I'm pleased to observe there's nothing in the newcomers that I can't *read*, which is good if reading's what you're about.
(Am also taken with a comm called aramatheydidn't, even if looks to be generally as vacuous as its Over Here counterpart.)
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Fri Oct 23rd, 2009
08:01 pm - The happy highways where I went
A link from aidan_mutou reveals that there are google maps of Tokyo. You realize what this means? aerial views of 東京都練馬区平和台３丁目, my old stomping grounds (with a little tweaking, because that one takes you to Nakano).
Spent a vain hour this morning trying to find my residence, and then had to cab it to the doctor's or be late. Left the page open, came home, and suddenly saw the numbers in each chou. And then clicked something else-- and I wish I remembered what-- and got the street view. Nothing is as it was (well, one or two landmarks still exist) but I did indeed find Azalea House again. Utterly weird-- oh yeah, that rococo Spanish building down the street, I'd totally forgotten that, and the overpass on what I discover is route 441, and oh my god the street by the fields, oh yes, now I know where I am-- happily pressing the arrows along the nameless ways, exactly like being on the bicycle again, and then I get lost once more-- the conveni isn't there now, the whole plaza looks different, and that great big house on the left, I can't find it now, am I on the wrong street after all? But happy somehow to see those streets again and have proof they still exist.
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Thu Oct 22nd, 2009
11:00 pm
Dipping into The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes as a break from Dragon Kings' Souls. Read The Adventure of the Yellow Face, which is simultaneously 'GO! Conan Doyle' and 'Oh Conan Doyle NO' ie amazingly advanced for its period (or a good fifty years after its period, if not more) and still oh dear oh dear oh dear.
Which is indeed a Neat Trick.
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Wed Oct 21st, 2009
Mon Oct 19th, 2009
01:14 pm
From a similar source as 'Sanzou is his overbeast at least', we have rushthatspeaks' realization that Leonard Cohen is secretly an Ent.
It... makes no sense but it makes total sense.
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Sun Oct 18th, 2009
11:11 am - Can we do it? Yes we--- err, no. We can't
100 50 Female Characters I Love Meme
Maybe I read the wrong stuff or don't watch the right things, or maybe I take that 'love' too seriously, because there aren't that many characters anywhere I actually *love*. Even here, a number are 'strongly like.' You observe there's nobody from Utena, an *anime* I love, nor from Amelia Peabody, whom I still find perfectly readable, but less so as the kids grow up and turn the whole thing into a romance series.
Might be enlightening to make a list of characters I really do love and see what that looks like. You see that Ya Yu tops my female list, but neither Gou Jian nor Fan Li would make it to a male one. Fascinating, absorbing, provocative, but I don't love them. I love Wen Zhong.
( In no particular order )
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Fri Oct 16th, 2009
09:28 pm - Why the To Read bookcase never gets any emptier
Oh look. I *do* have a copy of Vol 3 of The Soul of the Dragon King. It was down in the front room all along, while I waded through 40 pages of vol 4 wondering Who are these people anyway?, convinced that 3 was the volume I failed to find back in '96.
Of course, now I have to *read* it. Oh well.
Equally, it's fine to be lavish and pound foolish and to buy five volumes of the English translation of FMA in a single fell swoop. (Must look up 'fell swoop' and find what it refers to. Birds, I bet. And yes, birds it is. Also Macbeth, a play I've never got far with because it has, well, too many famous quotes that get in the way.)
But of course, now I have to *read* them. Oh well.
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Thu Oct 15th, 2009
04:48 pm - FFLs
Tai Chi for Cats by Ursula LeGuin.
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Tue Oct 13th, 2009
09:13 pm
Spent a chunk of yesterday with Youtube and Noh choruses (Noh has to be heard live to sound resonant) and then randomly googled Bugaku and watched another bunch of out-of-focus weird figures dancing to weird music. Random incongruous shot of Tokyo wires and apartments behind the Bugaku dancers reduced me to nostalgic tears.
And I thought, suppose dragons looked like Bugaku dancers, and dressed like them too? No more familiar domesticity. Something quite primeval and strange. (Couldn't find any with the birdy masks, alas, but this is better quality than most.)
And now I shall go view JR commercials...
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Mon Oct 12th, 2009
03:40 pm - Braaaains
Reading in English is a tremendous brain suck. No, scratch that. Reading Amelia Peabody is a tremendous brain suck. I had trouble getting through the last two books (Camel and Snake), so what do I do? Start on another (Hippopotamus), like the will-less puppet I've become. Last time I did this was with Pratchett who varied wildly in story and setting from one book to the next, and required some recup time after each. Peabody is all the same, except it's different enough from book to book (and well-written enough, an important point) to keep me going. Truly insidious.
I so want to be done so I can start making inroads on my stack of indifferent Japanese novels and indifferent manga, and I don't want it to end because it's so comfortable and it's *cold* outside and it's pleasant sitting in the rocker wrapped in a quilt and reading Amelia Peabody while all ambition goes down the drain. Arghities.
ETA- also I want to bike to the 24-hour 365-day grocery and buy a mint truffle pig. I don't need a mint truffle pig. I want one anyway.
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Fri Oct 9th, 2009
03:45 pm - Tremble
I have discovered Toronto's Street View at Google maps. How fortunate that I seem to have trimmed my hedge some short time before the car went by. (For those tempted, Google maps thinks I live at 560 Clinton.)
(Oh, and there's the daycare with the triple stroller out front! I wasn't working that day because there's S's bicycle but not mine.)
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12:56 am
Amelia Peabody and her Master Criminal are getting on my nerves, so I've been having recourse to Sherlock Holmes, both the original and in pastiche. Both the original and the pastiches move me to reflect that the Victorian Era had many conveniences (for the middle and monied classes, of course) that must have proved a major impetus to the rise of labour unions. Three mail deliveries a day, for instance. But even this lavish attitude to other people's time and convenience fails to make me believe that there was *always* a train to the most god-forsaken reaches and the tiniest towns inside England, not merely several times a day, but usually within half an hour of whenever the need to get there first arose.
Though for all I know, maybe England really was as wrapped about with railway tracks as an overdecorated Christmas tree with lights and glitter chains. One just wonders how this left enough space for, yanno, fields and forests and the like.
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Tue Oct 6th, 2009
11:43 am
Looking at various graphic novels reminds me why I can only read manga. From Sandman to Girl Genius to Marvel Comics, my god do these guys love a) their full-saturated colours and b) their panels chock-full of detail. It's like every work is modelled on Where's Wally? So much detail to distract the eye, so much busyness to confound the senses, so much insistence (to my reading) that the viewer get sufficient bang for her buck. White space? No one'll pay us for no white space. (To say nothing of those wordy and oppressive speech balloons filing up any space left.)
Even mangaka who luuurve their ink, like Yuki Kaori, love their black and shades of grey ink. That I can live with. Time was when I couldn't parse Japanese manga-- too floaty, too boundaryless. Now I can't parse English graphic novels-- too full, too busy.
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Sat Oct 3rd, 2009
10:34 am
Ah, paleaswater's birthday hard on the heels of the Mid-autumn festival. Happy birthday, paleaswater!
The fic prompts at ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) 31_days this month come from Issa's haiku. Today's is an obvious one for Gaiden.
Title: Half remembered names and faces
Day/Theme: October 3- There are no strangers under cherry blossoms
Series: Saiyuuki Gaiden
Character/Pairing: Goujun and acquaintance
Rating: G
( Read more... )
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Fri Oct 2nd, 2009
01:53 pm
I had a long post about why I don't support the Lambda decision and my annoyance at the way the debate is going, if I may dignify it with that name. I don't appreciate self-identifed straight people lambasting self-identified gay bloggers for failing to bow meekly to the Lambda overlords. (Not you, N; f_w denizens and so on.) I consider this, oddly, an unwarranted invasion of our territory; but I seem to be the only one who sees any irony in the situation at all.
So instead I'll just mention Natalie Barney. I'm happy to see that someone else thinks more people should emulate the France of a hundred odd years ago. Am I the only ancient dyke in town who yearns for those far-off treacherous shores of love? I look with sorrow at the audience at the k.d. lang concert and pine for the Belle Époque. It’s not that I mind my sisters looking like men: far from it. It’s the sort of men they emulate. Boring ones who wash their cars on Saturdays, get a number four from the barber on the corner, and buy their wives Valentine gifts from the Argos catalogue.
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Thu Oct 1st, 2009
Mon Sep 28th, 2009
04:54 pm - Satori
Ah hah! Have finally learned to parse inorite as 'i no, rite?' and not 'in or'ite', which I always took to be some British dialect for 'you are absolutely correct.'
Back to considering how much I can have Goujun steal from the end of Hamlet and the dedication to the First Folio without being in your face about it.
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11:53 am
There is right brain writing and there is left. Left is when I sit at the computer and try to impart some life to the words on the screen, an undertaking made difficult by the screen size, the font size, the font face, and you name it. 'Twas ever thus, BTW, even when I was using Word Perfect. Writing rationally has never been fun.
Right brain writing is when I lie in bed with the walkman and see stories happening on the near side of the music, if you follow; or become the characters and walk around in their flesh and know what they're feeling. And then if the picture is strong enough or internalized enough, I write it out at the computer. I used to do that like breathing, but as with everything else it's apparently a function of hormones and in the last few years I've stopped doing it. I fancy this is why writers drink. It's to get that detached but intimate look into another world, that sureness of feel. (I also believe, without foundation, that people who touch type do this more easily than people who don't. It's hard to Zone when you have to be watching your fingers all the time, but time was I could Zone easily, even two-finger typing. True, I used to do that when I began writing about the time I now go to bed, and finished up a few hours before I now awake. Maybe the sedentary habits of age/ tendency for people to call me at 7 am to come into work have something to do with it as well?)
Or maybe I need an ipod and infinite downloads of 60s Golden Oldies.
(Is lj being trimmensely slow lately or is it just my connection?)
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Fri Sep 25th, 2009
08:26 pm - In which I am large and contain multitudes
On Wednesday I wrote "Amelia Peabody and I are not long for each other's acquaintance." On Thursday I went to Eliot's Books and bought four more volumes in the series.
I blame Pratchett for this. I read him last year after the op and now recuperative periods, even if they aren't *actually* recuperative, require an easy series of English language books to distract me from the lack of small people. (Easy series of Japanese books require coffee shops and the ingestion of bakery items which I cannot afford in any sense of the word. Alas.)
Thus, Amelia Peabody. ( However-- )
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Wed Sep 23rd, 2009
Mon Sep 21st, 2009
12:28 pm
I hate reading tiny kanji so thanks heaven someone else did it for me.
And this:
"Ah, the one and only thing that changed from my original plan was Goujun’s ending. I had planned to have him commit suicide at the end, but I didn’t like having the man who witnessed Kenren’s last cry, take his own life."
Is smug, again. (Eight and a half years. 'One's life takes long strides between Olympics.')
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Sun Sep 20th, 2009
06:37 pm - The dizzy autumn festival round
Hari Raya is already over in S'pore, but Happy Eid to i_am_zan and anyone else who celebrates. Next up-- mid-autumn festival. I told me I couldn't have mooncakes unless I broke the weeping-point 200 lb mark. I have done that, quite unwittingly. Thus-- mooncake. Singular. When I'm quite sure lotus paste won't upset my fragile innards again.
Otherwise have succumbed and am reading my first Amelia Peabody. Also Komahoshi, which at the end of vol 10 suddenly reverted to the desperate edgy happenings of the first volumes after about five tanks of Happy Skool Daze rabu-rabu.
( Vol 10 also has a family tree, and needs it )
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Sat Sep 19th, 2009
11:11 pm
Henh. Discover by accident how to make the pixellated fonts look solid(er). Control Panel- Display- Appearance- Effects button-- Use the following method to smooth the edges of screen fonts- and select Clear Type. At some resolutions this may do horrible things, as it does in IE for some people, but suddenly everything is much clearer. (And to my eyes, smaller as well, but that may be an illusion.)
Of course, now I wonder if I've altered font sizes here in IE somehow, but I don't think you can do that through the Windows control panel. In fact, I don't think you can set default IE font size period, which is vexing.
Even Word's fonts look better than they did, but 2003 is still having trouble with Courier 13. What font face and size do you guys regularly write in?
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10:48 am - Festivals
It is, as someone else said, 'Talk like a Jewish Pirate Day.' Err... lessee. 'Aaarhh me hearties, L'Shanah Tovah t'ye all! Aarrh, and a happy birthday to nojojojo as well!'
Yes, well, moving right along here.
My FFL is a source of inspiration. There's an Eid fic community for fanfic about Muslim characters. In my current light-headed state (involuntray fasting puts you in a strange place, truly) I think, maybe I could write a drabble about Zhang He, maybe?
( Equally... )
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Fri Sep 18th, 2009
10:02 am - Update
I was going to write the Sep 16 prompt at 31_days-- had it started and was hacking away because writing is no longer an easy act for me. Intended to have it done at least for i_am_zan's birthday yesterday. ( Best laid plans and all )
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Wed Sep 16th, 2009
Tue Sep 15th, 2009
10:52 am
People are talking as if WriteRoom was the second coming of the Messiah. It fills up the screen! It removes your desktop! You can't click on your email or Firefox icons! No distractions!
My Word 2003 fills up the screen automatically, which annoys me because it makes the screen too big. So I stick the Find menu on the side to narrow my writing space. (Equally, I hate writing spaces that /don't/ take up the full screen cause the icons do indeed distract my eyes. Can't believe most people operate that way. Do they?) But when I get stuck or lose interest-- which is always-- I minimize the Word screen and go play Addiction Solitaire for hours instead. Unless I'm missing something, can't people minimize WriteRoom as well?
Possibly the option to get back the old WP green on black format (or white on blue in my case) might help productivity, but I remember the sense of freedom I found back in '99 when I first went to a black on white format. It looks like a real ms, glory be! Truly, those of us who started on typewriters think black on white is normal. Yes, that statement dates me, but then I'm dated by definition.
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Mon Sep 14th, 2009
03:49 pm - The ides of September sort of
September is pulling a classical classy act this year. It's the essence of all those Septembers half-noted in passing and later vaguely recalled as, say, a warm afternoon in the porch-bedroom on Madison hacking my way through the Prometheus Bound. For reference's sake I shall note September's non-calendar calendar:
( Under the cut )
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Sat Sep 12th, 2009
01:13 pm
Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo (Japanese that the Japanese don't know) is a riot. It's a manga by a woman who teaches at a Japanese language school, about the questions she gets thrown at her by students. (Ahhhh the section on counters!! 'So if chairs are ikkyaku (一脚) then toilets are too?' 'When have you ever had to count toilets?' And in fact toilets are sue/据; which raises the question for me, is it ichisue or hitosue? Sueru is the kun-yomi and that usually takes a kun-yomi counter, ie hito） As also the chance inter-cultural difficulties encountered, like the Chinese guy who happily counts 'Hebi ippon'/ 蛇一本-- "one 'long thin thing' snake"-- only to be told that in Japanese snakes are ippiki-- 一匹, one small animal.
I of course am enamoured of the older Frenchwoman who introduces herself with the historical yakuza formula O-hikae nasutte, and the Swedish woman who learned her Japanese from jidai-geki films like The Seven Samurai, because (ahem) *I* learned my yakuza introduction formula from jidai-mono television like Mito Komon and Shimizu no Jirocho. This section had me up at midnight searching the shelves in vain for that stupid book on learning Japanese that I kept only because it has the o-hikae nasutte formula written in full. Failing that, one must fall back on the Japanese version. Or watch it happen here, with translation of a sort.
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Fri Sep 11th, 2009
05:29 pm - 'I have seen the old ladies sail, like swans asleep..'
J'ai un peu moins, peur de vieillir
Song by Pauline Julien, never released on CD that I can tell, alas. Deux Vieilles/ Two Old Women. 'When I hear them burst out laughing, I'm a little less afraid of growing old.'
And there's also Hazel McCallion, while we're at it.
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03:21 pm
My Gaiden tank arrives (along with Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo manga. The things I find through the FFL.) Am realizing the extent to which I cannot parse manga onscreen: I never registered that Goujun was in a wheelchair.
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Wed Sep 9th, 2009
09:51 pm
My current life is eerily reminiscent of post-op back five years ago. Walk two hours every morning (slowly, this time because my knees and feet hurt), eat small lunch, browse internets, read Japanese all afternoon, eat small dinner, browse internets, read some English, go to bed exhausted at ten. (I miss the 'write dragon story' part of that. I also miss the 'drop ten pounds in ten days' bit.) This regime is supposed to lose me weight, strengthen muscles, and increase reading speed. Can't see that it's doing any of those.
( Chronicles of wasted time )
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