flemmings: (Default)
flemmings ([personal profile] flemmings) wrote2013-03-17 02:58 pm

Random

1. It's one of those cold sunny Marches when the blue sky goes on forever and I am cheerful and invigorated. This is *March*-- but of course, it's only one of March's avatars. March is also the sullen sleet and grey and freezing rain tantrum-throwing child; is sometimes a dry clear pseudo-November, but with wild winds shaking the empty tree branches; recently is the warmer-than-average enervating drainer, April come too early. Last year was that (so was '10); year before I was in no shape to notice what the weather did, with tsunamis and DWJ and personal crises. So effectively this is the first time since '09 that I've seen these pale blue skies and thin clear light. Love it while it lasts, as always at this season. Snow is forecast for the rest of this week, giving us that other trad Toronto topos, snow on the first day of spring.

(Mind, yesterday evening I walked out in the pale blue pre-sunset and had a flashback to, I think, November of 1964: Queen's Park in fading sun, covered with fallen leaves.)

2. The things people use for bookmarks. The forgettable Caitlin Kittredge I'm reading has someone's hand-drawn half-done sudoku puzzle. White is for Witching had a pack of condoms, fortunately empty.

3. Look, Fiesta Farms. If you're charging me $1.99 a pound for kabocha squash, could you please give me kabocha squash? Here is what kabocha is not: pale yellow, watery, and tasteless. Here is what kabocha is: orange, solid, and sweet. Why you call *that* buttercup squash I could never tell why.

4. Forging on with My Name is Red, heart sinking ever lower. He's one of *those* writers. Calvino and Borges and their imitators. Clever clever chappie introducing what sounds like clever clever conceits that in the end make no sense to me. Much less here than meets the eye, is the feeling I'm getting. And not nearly enough sensaplace.

5. Also dragging feet on my other two books (the Kittredge, different series from the earlier one I read, but identical snarly heroine and macho love-interest, and the Oyeyemi, which is signalling All Will End Badly.) Kind of want to have another crack at The Silmarillion, though if I do I'm sure Kittredge and Oyeyemi will at once appear irresistible. Tolkien's Deep Time gives me the heebie-jeebies: there's just so *much* of it, and with the further antsiness of 'I'm just calling him Sam in English but his real name is Banazîr Galbasi.' To me there's quite a difference between Samwise and Banazir, even if Tolkien didn't think so.

[identity profile] i-am-zan.livejournal.com 2013-03-18 06:15 am (UTC)(link)
When I lived in England, I think the only March I can recall with any clarity is the Easter holidays I chose to stay at school. It should have been either 1985 or 1986 at Padworth College (http://www.google.com.sg/imgres?imgurl=http://www.padworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Padworth-College-Campus-Aerial-Picture-r.png&imgrefurl=http://www.padworth.com/&h=146&w=344&sz=1&tbnid=eOIg9p4iI5_kqM:&tbnh=146&tbnw=344&zoom=1&usg=__PUy7Hi805B5IorTQ0KFxU7PYvYQ=&docid=pA2JsAOuaDxHLM&itg=1&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bapGUY_GIInqrQfv24DwBA&sqi=2&ved=0CIwBEPwdMA0) Reading, Berkshire. From the eye in the sky photograph, still looks like it used to then, with the addition of what looks like an outdoor pool. Which we never had!

It was chilled mornings with frost, covering the ground. It wouldn't have been till the sun was high in the sky (not noon though, because time works different in England, kind of almost fey sometimes) with the icy dew giving way to shy, but brave breaking through of daffodils and bluebells. Memories of walks through the woods from the chapel just before lunch where we had a surprise snow shower one afternoon. Chilled hands, mugs of hot cocoa and echoing laughter through the almost deserted school buildings.

It's probably very different now. The school looks to have gone co-ed at some point after I left. With very much younger students. At Easter time, if we had nowhere to go, we lived with minimal staff on hand. As both teachers and pupils were away. Quite actually a lovelly time and not as bad ass it sounds. Again now it looks like the school holds courses and whatnots through the year. But natsukashii, is where I'll leave my memories for the moment.

Ahhh kabocha .... I was just thinking of what we should have for dinner ... so I may make pumpkin and potato curry with some either haloumi or paneer thrown in. Curries are always good to make as I can usually get two evenings worth of dinners then. ^__^

And ugh! The Silmarillion ..... you are brave. Is why I never read the Lord of the Rings for a while, taking that up first, after The Hobbit. I was put of by sheer amount of (my humble opinion which might not be the same as others and please be kind I was only 14 and impatient at the time) prose which just did not grab me at all. It was only years later that I read the Rings trilogy, and am still undecided if I ever will pick up Silmarillion again.

As to reading ... after dragging my heels through vol.1, I finished volumes 2 and 3 in a good time of Harukami's 1Q84. Am uncertain whether to proceed with The Tale of Genji (vol.1, the Seidensticker translation, not Waley) or continue with Mieville's Kraken which I had started some six months ago and got sidetracked somehow.

I am sure you will somehow find happy reading some where. ^__^

Long comment is long, I do apologise. Is what happens when nostalgia takes hold of me.

[identity profile] flemmings.livejournal.com 2013-03-18 11:36 pm (UTC)(link)
Daffodils and bluebells, growing in the wild? How very English that sounds, especially the 'growing in March' bit. In an ordinary year we get those very late in April, or possibly in May (along with everything else.) In unseasonable years-- well, maybe late March, if there's enough sun.

I just want more Tolkien that isn't LotR. But my copies of both Silmarillion and Last Tales (no, of course, Unfinished Tales) have unaccountably vanished from the shelves where they were for decades. I suppose there are always the appendices, which should prove quite enough in very short order.

Haven't looked at 1Q84 in nigh on a year. Got to an antsy section in vol 2 and found better things to do with my time. I had Kraken out from the library in December, but am waiting for my used bookstore to get it in because I can't read Mieville fast enough in library book form. I remember Seidensticker's Genji as an oddly fast brisk read, that made everyone quasi-American, just as Waley's made them quasi-Brit.
Edited 2013-03-18 23:37 (UTC)

[identity profile] petronia.livejournal.com 2013-03-18 09:51 pm (UTC)(link)
You can do like me and read Unfinished Tales which is a million times better than The Silmarillion. I'm telling everyone this now. I wish someone had told me this in the 90s. XD

[identity profile] flemmings.livejournal.com 2013-03-18 11:41 pm (UTC)(link)
I swear I had both Tales and The Silmarillion down on the mudroom shelves with the rest of the pre-1996 fiction. Are definitely not there now. I suspect me of having concluded that I'd never read either, and putting them out on the Front Lawn Library. (But then wouldn't I also have ditched A Companion to Middle-Earth?) Shall take your kind suggestion if ever I replace them.