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Sat Jul 11th, 2009
08:19 pm - The dawn comes up like thunder
Well, not exactly. The dawn came up kind of flat pre-storm tropical, the red-tinged grey I associate with Tokyo. Of course I was awake to see the dawn, which peeves me, but one cannot fight those light = awake instincts. The storm came along a little later and was occasionally louder than it needed to be; but mostly it just rumbled constantly, in the way non-TO storms do, and monsooned rain as if from fire hoses. And I read the first chapter of Cloud Atlas which definitely suited that weather, and in the sunny warm blowy afternoon the second chapter, which was fun. I love epistolatory novels except when they forget they're epistles; and yes, Mr. Richardson, I *am* looking at you. Now I'm reading the third chapter, set in the 70s, and wondering sourly if the flat unconvincing female protagonist is a clever shout-out to those flat unconvincing 70s female protagonists written by men-- we could be channeling Pyncheon here-- or if Mitchell is just incapable of writing women, the way China Mieville is. You know where my money lies.
As for why I'm reading Cloud Atlas, ( that's another story. )
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Tue Jul 7th, 2009
09:59 pm - Pleasant pastimes
Came home from my cortisone shot to a package in the mailbox. Good, my Judge Dee from England arrives almost promptly. Gather necessary impedimenta ie current manga, wordtank, current novel, current 3K volume, package, and mandatory icepack for the mandatory six hours with feet up following shot. Finish current novel (Gifts), current manga (Ouchy Romanse 2) (both gifts from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kickinpants saved for just such an occasion as the present; and thank you again, TTG) and turned to open package to suss out my new book. Which was smaller than I'd thought-- somehow I had the idea it was a hardcover-- and heavy, and was not a book at all but nojojojo's prezzy zooming up from Noo Yawk.
Chinese vocab fridge magnets; children, Chinese studying, for the use of. Equally useful for Canuck obasans doing the same. I can't put them on my fridge as yet because a repairman's coming to look at it tomorrow; but I spent a happy half hour trying to express Kliban's poem in Chinese:My cat is fat so I will dine
And eat up all this cat of mine. '我的貓是大;我吃我的大猫' Well OK, 'my cat is *big*', and I'm not sure how the future works in Chinese, if it works, or intentionality, if that's what it is, and the grammar book is downstairs. But this is still loads of fun. Thank you so very much, N!
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Mon Jul 6th, 2009
Sun Jul 5th, 2009
10:32 am - The blue-green storm
This, you see- this is what we've lost with global warming and built-up inner cities: the cool nights after the hot July sun. Averages this time of year are 14C/ upper 50sF. But that's an average. There should be nights when it goes down to 12 or 10, the low 50sF, and there rarely are anymore. But Friday night it was 12, and Saturday I woke to a lovely blue green world free from smog. Wish we could have that all the time. (And no, sadly, when it does cool with rainy season weather, grey wet and humid, it isn't invigorating at all. As in Tokyo, bearable and melancholy-pleasant, but not invigorating.)
Unfortunately my insides were reacting to Refrigerator Stress (I assume, because there's no other stress I can think of) and so I spent the afternoon in the rocking chair reading a cheerful mid-series Kirishima manga and starting on Ouchy Romanse 2. Which is pleasant and sweet except that mangaka /will/ draw 14 year olds that look 10 (and 6 year olds that look two) so the whole thing reads just a tad shota to my eye.
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Fri Jul 3rd, 2009
09:17 am - Revenons a nos ragamoutons
It's July, so we pick up the Three Kingdoms reading again. Our ragamuffin bully boys are being as unlovely as ever. Governor surrenders to Ma Chao, Ma Chao is furious-- 'You didn't surrender from sincerity but from necessity! Kill him and all his family!' Liu Bei: OMG Ma Chao is so kewl! I must have him on my side! I will blow sweetly in his ear and then he'll follow me everywhere! (Ma Chao learns nothing from having his own wife and infant sons and relatives chopped up before his eyes and dropped on his head from the city walls. Ma Chao does not learn, end story.)
Am currently in the middle of Liu Bei and smrterthanu being cheap and underhanded and oh so pleased with themselves about not returning the province they said they would. Go die in a fire despair, you smarmy little hoods. And I sooo look forward to the chapters where you do.
Paradoxically this all makes me feel better than I have for a month. So does returning to a fic. Yappari, I am a writer, even if an amateur writer, even if an unoriginal writer, even if a blocked writer; and I never feel properly at ease in my skin if I'm not writing.
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Wed Jul 1st, 2009
09:08 pm - Meme on the beach
Leave me a comment and I will give you a letter.
Then, write 10 things that you love starting with that letter.
Post the list in your journal.
Give out letters to your commenters in return.
tammylee gives me a B (after giving me a G just as feliciter did a year ago.) ( Cut for predictable results )
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04:00 pm - Ima Ichiko makes me feel dum
Second time through with a dictionary and third time through looking closely at the pictures, I finally get what's happening in the grandfather story in 100 Demons 16. Half of me thinks manga shouldn't *be* that difficult and the other half is rather charmed. Ima makes you work for your story but the work is very satisfying. Of course, I bet native speakers don't have to work like this. *They* always know who the absent subject refers to and what the absent verb is and the exact identity of that sketchily drawn person at the end. (deep sigh)
Now to find where the streetside palmist who lures Akira away somehow in the first story comes from, because it seems I'm supposed to know who he is and I can't remember him at all. While I'm at it I might try to figure out what it actually *is* that happens to Akira in that story, because first she's gone missing for a two days and suddenly there she is, no explanation at all. But I'm tired.
( Cut for stats )
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Sun Jun 28th, 2009
09:43 am - Grey Sunday morning reading
If I embroidered, I'd make framed samplers of certain of petronia's observations, like this oneanti-warnings people don't actually know why warnings rub them the wrong way, to the extent that they're willing to be assholes about it. Adorned with sweet fat roses and pixel-square puppies and kittens. People are certainly being assholes today over at ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) metafandom, is why I should be reading post secret instead.
(Warnings rub me the wrong way. They also make me not want to read any story they're attached to for the same reason kink fic challenges make me not want to read-- 'Yeah, that sounds like a surefire invitation to same old same old'.) ( Cut for tangential thoughts and self-interrogation )
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Sat Jun 27th, 2009
09:23 am - The unexpected reincarnations of a Tang magistrate
Mh. Finished le Chateau du Lac Tchou-an. OOC, M. Lenormand, totally OOC. As also is Ti's obsession with the quality of the food he gets to eat. Thus we redraw canon characters to meet our society's values, or our own kinks, pick one.
I mean yes, au fond, it's Judge Dee fanfic, as van Gulik's Dee was Di Gong An fanfic. (And Gulik redrew the Judge to meet modern sensibilities and his own preferences quite as much as Lenormand does.) In a case like this one sees the true accumulative story telling tradition at work. One assumes the anonymous author of Di Goong An was drawing on oral versions but adding his own takes; reinterpreted by van Gulik, reinterpreted by Lenormand. Van Gulik is the better detective writer, for sure; and I'm not competent to judge whether Lenormand's French reads as jauntily as van Gulik's English.
But still--- it's French fanfic. If I want to read French, and I do, I'll read this before anything else I have in the house. (Gide and Sartre and dear god *what* was my mother thinking of? Whatever she was thinking of when she bought Steinbeck and Faulkner, I dare say.) I, umm, think I may order vol 2, if the loonie is as high as it was. And vol 1 goes out to incandescens after my new fridge arrives and I'm free to leave the house.
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Fri Jun 26th, 2009
11:21 am - Not that I concern myself much with American political parties--
--sleeping with elephants aside, which is not what you think--
but I Am A Suck For A Pun Especially When It's Unintentional, and hence we have Emocrats and Prepublicans.
Myself I wish there were more publicans around. Bartenders don't quite make it.
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Thu Jun 25th, 2009
08:54 pm
Continue to read Judge Dee in French, hindered by not knowing words like 'paving tiles' and 'grumble' and 'wizened.' It's still close but no cigar. Surely it's not merely the fact that I'm reading it in French that makes le juge Ti seem more French than the original? Gulik's Dee was a moral Confucian prude, sniffily disapproving of Buddhism and brothels-- viewing the latter as a necessary evil, the former as an unmitigated one. Ti however has an eye for female charms, thinks in terms of Divine Providence and fate, and is impressed by large quantities of gold, without moralizing on the evils of any of these.
I should like to pass my retirement in writing Judge Dee in English, but of course there's always the problem of plot. Those three-stranded Ima Ichiko type Gordian knots are beyond me (and beyond the French writer as well, though I grant you this is only the first book in the series.) So I fear anything I did would resemble late van Gulik only, and only if I was lucky. I could still do van Gulik pastiche better than Wossname; the only question is would I want to? sniggery chauvinist piggery and all...
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Wed Jun 24th, 2009
08:11 am - Today's happiness
Very very short zombies in daycare.
Every word of this is true. The observation in the original post that everyone who's worked in daycare wants a boy is not, though if they only work one day a week maybe it is. Insufficient sample, guys. 'Oh you won't play with me? OK' my foot. 'Oh you won't play with me? Then I'll go push that other kid over/ grab her toy/ claw his face/ howl' is more like it. Not to mention the POW-POW-POW with imaginary guns when they get only a little older, which has prompted our long-standing rule of 'No guns at daycare.' Even in self-defence.
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Tue Jun 23rd, 2009
06:19 pm - Why I love the Japanese, part the next one after yesterday's installment
That whimpering sound of slavering desire and eternal frustration is me reading about shiso Pepsi. Shiso and Pepsi are made for each other, I tell you, made for each other. How can such beauty be, and I an ocean and a continent away?
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Mon Jun 22nd, 2009
09:39 pm - Why I love the Japanese, part the whatever
Ganked from telophase--
They adopted a western navy and a western post office and a western school system and western graphic art...
and they did it exactly the same, only utterly different.
Incidentally, all blogspot blogs used to have the templates in Japanese. This one has its template and author's information- age, astrological sign, etc etc- in simplified Chinese. Is this peculiar to me? And if so, does anyone know how I can make it appear in English?
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09:45 am - Ahh, soo ieba..
Oh yes. daegaer's last entry reminds me that I had a dream last night where the 60s Beatles, all clean mop-haired youths, were assassins of a particularly unpleasant kind, and being clean mop-haired youths, wanted to stop being assassins. Except for John, as nasty a bit of goods as ever, who manipulated/ terrified them all into continuing the murders.
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Sun Jun 21st, 2009
10:40 am - Lowest common denominator is not the only denominator
You know, the whole tone and purport of this article annoys me. I suppose it's intended partly as humour? Then it's not the kind of humour I find funny. It's snide, shopping mall cynical, and cheap.
Wrapping up broken glass so the garbage collectors don't cut their hands is no badge of sainthood. It's common sense, which I fancy rather more people possess than (either) writer believes. And supposing the story of transplanting a human brain into a monkey isn't total fabrication, the brain probably came from someone who donated their organs after death. No need for the snotty 'swiped from some homeless person.'
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Sat Jun 20th, 2009
06:39 pm - OK, so maybe we're not holographs after all
So, about those vanishing texts.
I try to persuade myself that it's just me remembering incorrectly what book the thing I'm looking for is in. In the one case where I finally found the missing text, that's what happened. The story of a wastrel son that I remembered being in Tales from a Ming Collection was actually in An Anthology of Chinese Literature. I've never succeeded in finding the story of the girl who elopes but leaves herself at home, that I remember being in the same Tales.
It is, in fact, in Black Water 2, a copy of which I picked up off someone's lawn ten days ago and opened today, because starting Charles Williams' All Hallow's Eve made me wonder if BW2 had the short story by him that I remember as being in one of the Black Water collections. It doesn't. Must be one of the others, unless it's in 'The New Yorker Book of Short Stories' or something.
Still, I'm cheered. At this rate I may eventually find my disappearing Chinese poem about the east wind, with Chinese text and notes.
( Cut for brief gripe )
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Thu Jun 18th, 2009
08:46 pm - Melancholy
WARD arrived. Photocopies can be made for those who wish it. The story on Goujun ( is under the cut )
( And the story on me )
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Tue Jun 16th, 2009
10:41 pm - Update
My sort-of impromptu sort-of holiday continues on a perfect June day through a delicious lunch of tilapia and lemon and rice, and dinner al fresco with my next door family. I'd thought I'd spend the time in my rocking chair reading myself silly-- the more so as I must wear my bunion splints several hours each day since I find it impossible to sleep in them. But instead I continue this year's erratic tendency and *clean.* Today's object of attack was the bunker floor, probably untouched for seven years, and the garden pathway, awash in the cherry pits of yesteryear.
In amongst all this I finished Empire of Ivory which really was good, and started Victory of Eagles which has me all a-wibble. If god loves me I have another ten days of this and then comes work and heat, pretty much together. 3 Kingdoms vol 3 isn't going to happen this month but that's OK. No-brainers is what I need in July.
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Sun Jun 14th, 2009
04:56 pm - *I* wouldn't have minded if the arctic land bridge had been closed by magic
The local supermarkets have reasonable prepared meals, but I never buy an entree from the Italian one without being reminded of those poor Meiji envoys sent to the capitals of the west in search of culture, technology, post offices, school systems, navy organization and you name it. What they spent most of their time searching for was a bowl of rice. A plain bowl of rice. A bowl of plain rice. Something without butter, parmesan, herbs, bits of chicken, bits of mushroom and bits of things best not asked about, that hadn't been stewed in meat stock for an hour, stirring constantly until reduced to mush. Plain white rice cooked in just enough water for just enough time and separating into fluffy grains. They didn't get it, poor sods.
So basically, Fiesta Farms, I'll bear the tomato stock and peas but no, rot it, I do *not* want the corn niblets.
( Cut for speculation on heredity )
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Sat Jun 13th, 2009
Fri Jun 12th, 2009
10:52 pm - The joys of literacy
There's a package in the mailbox when I get home. Ahh, the latest WARD, hotfoot from NY! Ohh, last of the dragon kings! Now to see what Goujun was actually saying--- Only I won't. Because it's not WARD, it's my manga from Japan, sent SAL. Go Jpn PO, and Canuck land surface whatevers too. Six days door to door. Boo US postal service: can't get a parcel to TO from NY in five days.
( Read more... )
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Wed Jun 10th, 2009
09:53 pm - Horse Latitudes
When the still sea conspires an armor (*an* armor? Really, Jim?)
And her sullen and aborted
Currents breed tiny monsters
True sailing is DEAD blah blah blah
This is one of those sargasso 'I hate my life' periods, and so as a counteractant I bring you....
Medieval Arabic Poetry from Spain! ( Under the cut )
ETA: I remember someone trying to convince me, back in '68, that Horse Latitudes was all about having sex with a condom on. The horses are sperm. I suppose it works.
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08:13 am - Daily happiness
Let us snark at German.
Of course IE won't display the original page and one has to look at it in Firefox, but oh well.
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Tue Jun 9th, 2009
06:38 pm
Oh, the vampire Sforza duke *isn't* Ludovico. Funny, Ludovico /ought/ to be a vampire.
Been reading my old Saiyuki / Gaiden/ dragon stories. Almost as good as time travel. Still bothers me that they were all written six years ago and more.
On the plus paw, the latest WARD is in the mail and the new Ima Ichiko is in the mail. On the minus paw, how can it be only Tuesday?
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Sun Jun 7th, 2009
05:35 pm
(frets) The continued absence of the latest Gaiden and the latest WARD everywhere suggests to me that copies flew off the shelves in Japan, leaving the overseas fans dangling in unhappy limbo. Or maybe the delivery companies are being slow; but Kino said their shipment would be in last week and not a word have I heard. Yes the tank is coming out in six weeks, but (wistfully) I *would* have liked to see it in the large.
( Cut for boring dreams )
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Sat Jun 6th, 2009
07:35 pm - Glum
Reading The Dragon Waiting. It's the kind of book that could stop a person writing entirely.
Mind, so could the sudden frequent inexplicable Word97 crashes. Open Office, here I come, I guess. (No, online advice person, Wordpad is *not* good enough. It won't let me open two documents simultaneously and it wants to save everything as rtf.)
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Tue Jun 2nd, 2009
10:27 pm - Crouching Tiger, Waiting Dragon
The Dragon Waiting-- which I must not think of as The Dragon *In* Waiting because that's another kind of court, another kind of A/U, and another kind of dragon entirely-- arrived today. The back cover blurb had me at 'the Vampire Duke Sforza.' Except-- except-- this had better be A/U in the time line as well, because if Lorenzo de Medici (d. 1492) is alive, that nasty piece of goods Ludovico de Sforza (reigned 1494-1499 after reputedly poisoning his nephew Gian Galeazo) is not yet duke of Milan.
We shall see in short order. Thank you, incandescens!
(Shaking head at Gian Galeazo's biography. 'We think he screwed himself to death but the doctor swears he was poisoned.' Truly, *why* is the Italian Renaissance considered a pinnacle of western civilization?)
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Mon Jun 1st, 2009
10:38 am - What's in a name?
It's cheering to know that when I'm doing my head-desky 'OK, his name is' (pick someone at random) 'Guan Yu and his uhh courtesy name (takes a while to figure out what a courtesy name is) is Yunchang (雲長) only sometimes it's Changsheng (長生) until he dies when he becomes Marquis Zhuangmou (and let's skip the string of Buddhist names entirely) but for our purposes he's Lord Guan (關公), or Lord Guan the Second (關二爺-- but who's the first?) or else 'Snazzy Beard, Man' (美髯公, and now I see that qwerty really wasn't kidding about that one.) He's apparently even 'Emperor Guan' on occasion except I don't think he ever made it to Emperor...'
( Are you still with me? )
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Sun May 31st, 2009
08:41 pm - I will make it through this book if it kills me vol 2
Does anyone know a 3K source that's hostile to Zhuge Liang? I mean, it's too much to hope it's been translated if there is. But it would make me very happy to know it exists, and that someone thought the sun did *not* shine out of the smug little git's bottom.
Now I see what paleaswater meant about most advisors standing aloof from the kings they advised and dying safe in their beds; not that anyone would want to be close to that utterly wet and a weed Liu Bei in the fist place. (And I wish I could recall where paleaswater said it.) The next chapter promises to show him weeping over Zhou Yu, but that notwithstanding, Zhuge Liang has ice water in his veins. 血もなければ、腸もない-- neither blood nor bowels. How brilliant of Minekura to have cast Tenpou in his role.
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02:02 pm - Novik question
Don't want to read Empire of Ivory. Will I be totally lost if I just dive into Victory of Eagles?
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Sat May 30th, 2009
11:15 am - Bechdel Test
The theory is I have Monday off, bar Dolorous Phonecalls. It will be interesting to have a holiday Monday that no one else has. If it happens. Note the fine line between 'pessimist' and 'realist.'
Discussion of fave female BFFs. Since I spent my early teen years wishing I was at Kingscote school with the Marlows while being at an all-girls Catholic high school in reality, female BFF to me was synonymous with adolescence. Now it's synonymous with LJ FLs. Am still trying to think, through the chronic mental fuzz, what fictional BFF I know currently, and conclude there aren't any, aside from Ya Yu and Yuan Luo swapping books, or Sybil and her coterie of well-born semi-aristos caring for sick dragons. Possibly there's something wrong with my reading habits.
( Cut for polix )
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Fri May 29th, 2009
11:06 am - My version of Zen
Read an article a while ago that said that certain inexplicable discrepancies in some scientific something I can't follow-- echoes from deep space?-- suggest that the whole universe is nothing but a hologram. A very detailed hologram, it must be, but still just a hologram. We are an imaginary 3D image somewhere; end story.
( This simplifies life immensely )
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Thu May 28th, 2009
01:30 pm - Of fathers, poetry, and lj screwups
Finished Armor of Light in Sunday's sun. Not as much fun as the Astreiant books last March, and I missed having Tasty's restaurant as a backdrop to it this time round (sighs for the defunct Tasty's) but still alright. Also resonates a bit, which it didn't last time through.
One note especially clear in the resonance: Burleigh and Cecil. ( Who? say my American readers )
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Wed May 27th, 2009
09:58 am
My French Judge Dee arrived yesterday. I need a French wordtank; otherwise, the tone isn't *that* far off van Gulik's so far, except for the bit where Dee, mid-tempest, 'abandons his customary Confucianism to breathe a prayer to the deity of the river.' Mhh, don't think so.
For no good reason, this weather comment makes me happy.
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Tue May 26th, 2009
07:01 pm - Everybody's doin' it
Name your 10 absolutely favorite couples (het/slash/canon/fanon) and ask people to see what trends they notice about your couples. Try to pick different fandoms.
( Different fandoms yeah, sure )
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Mon May 25th, 2009
12:35 pm - The trials of fandom
Ahh Kinokuniya. I wish I knew how to quit you. (Well, I do. Pig in a poke subscription through Iwase, or go back to Tokyo. No more subscriptions for me-- I was one who had their GFantasy subscription *finally* get through the month Minekura took off-- and no more Tokyo either. Shall suck it up.)
( To explain )
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09:34 am - Hold the hard-boiled egg
Happy glorious 25th.
Is there actually a tune for 'all the little angels'?
( All the little bookshelves, how do they rise up? )
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Sat May 23rd, 2009
05:02 pm - Dark as the monitor on which I view this entry
You understand, those in my profession have a neutral attitude towards excrement. Shit is, end story. Nonetheless, there are things I'd rather be doing on my weekends than moving kitchen furniture and cleaning the mouse poo behind them. (Sighs.) Two bookshelves and a fridge down, one bookshelf and the cupboards to go. Maybe I should get a cat.
OTOH as long as I'm cleaning mouse poo I needn't assemble my Ikea bookshelves. Don't know when or why Ikea assemblage became as high-anxiety an activity as doing taxes, but it is. I want someone to hold my hand and feed me gin and tonics for both, and there's no one to do that. Maybe I should get married.
And I want *clear* *sharp* pictures of my dragon king writing his report, like Gawain, 'an hour before my death and so subscribed with a portion of my heart's blood.' I do not have them and will not have them until various Kinokuniyas lift, as the Japanese phrase has it, their heavy buttocks. Maybe I should move back to Japan.
(And where's my copy of the Once and Future King when I want it, huh? This is why I can never throw books away, only play musical bookshelves amid the crescendoing anxiety of Too Many Books, Too Little Time, and Too Many Books Still Left To Read Even If I Never Buy Another One.)
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10:04 am - End of days
Last Gaiden ep teaser. Not sure which is worse-- not having all the text or not being able to read the text that's given because it was taken with a cell phone. What I can make out of the line that's given has slave of duty! Goujun devoting his few remaining moments to singing Addio del pasato as he spits blood recording Our Gang's demise, except that the kanji sure look like 'their attachment.'
Roll on, Kinokuniya's copy and/or saiyuki_manga.
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Fri May 22nd, 2009
12:51 pm - And speaking of dragons...
Novik's website says Victory of Eagles paperback will be out July the something. Err uh hunh?
Book City doesn't have it but BC doesn't have much. So off I pedal to Bakka and look for VoE, which should be displayed everywhere if out. No displays. Ask the clerk. 'It'll be out in June." 'Anh, but, someone said it's out the 19th...' 'We don't have a definite date but we'll be getting it in June. You can pre-order it and I'll give you a call.' 'Ah no thanks, I'll come back.'
Odd. I could swear Shay bought it. So off I pedal to the World's Biggest Bookstore. Which has Victory of Eagles, that isn't available to the independents until next month. I have no idea what this is all about, but I fancy someone's getting shafted somewhere along the line.
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08:20 am - Of seals and dragons and dragon seals
Armor of Light and 3K are being even less rivetting than usual. Or maybe that's yesterday's heat and teeth-grit near-migraine talking. 3K is at the battle of Red Cliff and I, frankly, am not impressed by anyone's behaviour there. Even ascribing most of it to authorial bias, Zhou Yu's 'look he's gonna win the battle for us kill him now' attitude stretches my belief oh, just a tad.
But Karin 1 was sitting by my bedside and I read a few pages of that instead until compelled, by the sudden appearance of the Dragon King of the Eastern Ocean, to go look up his name hanzi. The manga has them furigana'd in as close to Chinese as katakana can get and I was wondering how close that was.
( Cut for blameless pastimes )
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Thu May 21st, 2009
12:30 pm - It lives
So I'm on my old machine, checking how Word looks there as compared to the (chronically unsatisfactory) new. I can't actually *use* my old machine for much beyond WPing because Win98 doesn't give you enough space to enter the password for our encryption. I check Dreams of a Thousand Autumns and it isn't displaying right as either a .doc or an .htm-- still dropping characters-- so I go into OE to look at the version I have there. OE proceeds to DL all my mail since February. Truly, it was creepy. 'Ack! Ack! It's moving! What's happening!?'
So I click on IE. And here I am. Whether this net access *lasts* or not is of course another question.
(My eye has been put out by the high resolution. Must have this at 800x600 now, which of course makes all the fonts pale and pixelly which of course is my problem with the new machine.)
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10:29 am - 'Every single angel is terrifying'
Kenneth Rexroth is generally not my man. Chinese or Japanese, his verse translations don't do much for me. But cruising the train lines that leave Shinjuku Stn (FFLs, I mean) gets me this gem, which I include below.
( Cut for dragons and other stuff )
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Wed May 20th, 2009
10:33 pm - SAD
I has it. It starts with the first warm muggy stinky day in spring and doesn't go away till Thanksgiving (ours, not theirs.) It has started today. It'll be cooler on the weekend, but that's only a brief respite. June is coming, to be followed by July: hot muggy days in insufficient air conditioning, hot muggy nights that are both too warm and too clammy for sleep. And I grow old and stiff and nothing is as good as it was before, not that it was ever very good to start with, and nothing is ever going to be the way it could have been, and Zhuge Liang is not either a brilliant tactician, he's a hedge wizard who uses magic to make the wind to burn the ships that carried the men who marched in the army that Cao Cao led. Bah.
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Mon May 18th, 2009
09:39 pm - The persistence of vision
I don't follow sports news but I swear, *every single time* I look at The Star's wp and come across a headline attached to this ongoing saga, I read it as 'Batman' and do a double take.
In other news, The Armor of Light is better on a reread, with Sidney regarded as just yer average fantasy hero and not, you know, The Perfect Philip Sidney of history. There's still a bit too much of him and he's still not my kind of hero but at least I'm not going 'Yer kidding-- Philip Sidney??' every few paragraphs. Its Marlowe and Shakespeare are also much more believable than Ink and Steel's. Though I wonder why everyone wants to make these guys into fundamentally nice guys. I bet they were miserable rotters and back-stabbing self-absorbed pricks. 'What people /are/ is so different from what people can /do/'-- which was the whole point of Amadeus, after all. I can count the fundamentally nice great writers I've heard of on the fingers of one hand. Chekov and RLS, basically.
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Sun May 17th, 2009
02:17 pm
I have bought a dining room table and a vibrator and The Borribles and have nothing else to do. Actually I have a lot to do, but I like Austen's throw-away construction.
( Cut for natter and Karin )
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Sat May 16th, 2009
04:10 pm - Diem perdidi
I was very good after putting The Little Girls to bed last night.
( Cut for mundanity )
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