flemmings | Entries tagged with language

The Salvation Army ads print in Chinese on my browser.

An Artist of the Floating World is an incredible downer. That I never noticed what was going on in the plot when I first read it, thirty years ago, must be due to my single-minded fascination with how Ishiguro rendered Japanese speech in English. Except that I knew no Japanese at all thirty years ago.

Wandered into a Christmas Craft Fair yesterday, and wandered out with new crocheted pot holders to replace the ones K-chan sent me from Japan a dozen years ago, that finally succumbed to the pilot light gas-grunge of my stove. Also home-made rose potpourri from someone's garden, which proved, alas, to have something distinctly ungardenly chemical in it. Had to toss it. Also a notebook covered in black washi with dragons on it. Alas again, writing longhand in notebooks is a lost art with me.
( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/753435.html

A longtime ambition has been achieved. Not that I knew it was a longtime ambition until I achieved it, but still.

So I went to see a specialist at Toronto General Hospital, which may be less of a warren than it was when mentally confused patients regularly wandered off their wards and were discovered, dead, in unused stairwells, but is still a warren because half of it is, literally, Mars. But that's by the way. A helpful Indian woman set me straight, and I walked down the block to discover the facade of the Eaton Building nestled prettily among hills and bright yellow autumn trees. The hills have been landscaped and it is, yes, pretty, but also a hike from the street. These architects...

But this is still by the way. The specialist I'm seeing is English and we start getting into symptoms and history and 'how long have you's and he says at one point, 'So when you were a child in England' and I say 'England?' and he says 'You're not English?' and I say, beaming, 'You're literally the first English person I've ever met who thinks I am.' Americans, yes, all the time, and even some Canadians (because I call the place To-ron-to and not Trawna), but up to now the English have always recognized their own, and known that I'm not it.

(In fact, just recently I was thinking that my accent has flattened out over the years and is much more Trawntonyan than in my youth.)

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/744997.html

Someone called this immatura autumnus, premature autumn. Aside from the fact that autumnus is a regular first declension masculine, google only recognizes the phrase in the same place I found it. Make of that what you will. Leaves turn yellow or red, depending on whether it's my cherry tree or the neighbours'; enough leaves fall to fill a leaf bag, even as the region tomatoes remain firmly green. I am grateful to the arborists last spring who said the cherry was in very good shape, or else I'd be worried. As for the tomatoes- well, it was a cold summer, by and large.

So the days are cool and grey with a frisson of mug, as in long ago Septembers in grade school, or mild dry blue and white with shrilling cicadas, as in my first bicycling season in Tokyo. ('93, which started late August.) Nostalgic and unmemorable. I note the resemblance in passing, but what I recall day to day is both very little (where did August go to?) and not anything I see either on foot or bikeback.

If there was more on foot I might remember more, but the physio is still saying 'stay off your feet.' I don't, at work, and the result has been an achy and twingy three weeks. And not likely to improve. The staff who is never ever sick was sick this morning and called me at 6:30 to cover her 8 am shift; regulars are leaving to go back to school or to get married or for other, full-time, positions. What has been an unusually lazy summer is set to turn into a very busy fall, and I have no desire to be busy. Ah well. It will all work out somehow.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/729965.html

James Nicoll and his commenters are an education in themselves. In one post I come across 'Pecksniffian', a word I'd heard but never bothered looking up, and 'sedevacantist', which I'd never heard of at all. Latin might have given me a clue as to the latter- 'the seat is empty' ie we don't have a Pope, except we do have a pope, but certain reactionary Catholics hold that there have been no legitimate popes since Pius XII died, because all his successors have espoused the 'heresy' of Modernism. Including John Paul and Pope Palpatine, which gives you an idea of how ultra-reactionary reactionary Catholics can be.

Pecksniffian I'd need to read Martin Chuzzlewit to know, but it's basically a variant of hypocrisy as regards benevolence and morals.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/729798.html

Pulled another old book from the basement boxes, translation of a classic Edo work, Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige (東海道中膝栗毛), called in English Shanks' Mare. From which title my dear readers may deduce that the translation was done by an Englishman of my great-grandmother's generation (born 1867) whose language may therefore prove elusive to a later generation. Or maybe not. But leafing through it I'm struck anew by what's been lost when stripped-down Americanized English became the standard international lingua franca. For there, behold, is the perfect translation of oyaji: gaffer.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/724176.html

Ah, the sweet druggy fall-out of working a seven hour day, 8:30 to 5:45, with an unfortunate 90 minute break that let me buy pastry and eat it all. Periodically stretched IT band; we shall see to what effect.

Don't know why my s-i-l gets so worked up about the raccoon buzzer. Doesn't work. Tuesday night a very large raccoon was moseying about my yard in the rain. Did not eat the squash flowers, and last night I discovered a single female bud, which I fertilized from one of the many males.

The is-it-a-linden? tree on the front lawn has shed a carpet of seedlings which in the rain became a carpet indeed, and impossible to get off the soles of one's shoes. May contribute to the violent sneezing when home and the still very genki sore throat and owie ears.

Have reached the bit about Arabella's brother being rector at Grace Adieu. It was this morning, waking regularly at 4 and 5 and 6 because I had to be up at 7, that I realized I'd been thinking of Grace Adieu as an English word, something to do with the Fall of Man and Original Sin. It could just as easily be French with the opposite meaning, grâce à Dieu, thanks to God.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/720090.html

I've often thought about this myself. Not just the loss of Shakespearean and biblical references from people's backgrounds, but the loss of references to several decades of English humour. Flanders and Swann, Beyond the Fringe, possibly even the more obscure parts of Python? OTOH, even though I studied Latin from the age of twelve, what's absent from *my* background are the treasury of Latin tags and allusions that educated English people had at their fingertips up to the mid-20th century at least. Can't say I've missed it at all, not knowing all of Vergil and Horace and oh god no Cicero. I can find a use for 'Quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore', perhaps, but very few people are likely to get the allusion, so might as well phrase it another way.

Must go by Bakka and get the Pratchett essays, supposing they're out this side of the pond. Weren't, last April.

Warm muggy holiday Monday. Knee decides to object to the way I've been staying off it for the last two days (ie bicycling, weeding, housework, short walks) so now I *am* staying off it, and dull it is too. Have rousted out my sidewalk-found 'Introduction to Greek' to see what I remember, and find the s-i-l is right: what's most needed is memorizing vocabulary.

Either eyes have grown worse in the last few months or are gunked up with allergy, but I can't read anything but English with any ease, and that not always. Therefore, perverse, am reading last volume of Ze, which involves reading second to last volume of Ze, which leads to playing addiction solitaire, even though I can't see the suits that easily either.

A sudden heavy shower this morning and white petals whirled down from cherry and plum, nature exactly imitating Pound's 'apparition of these faces in the crowd'. A short season and a small scentless crop, but two doors down's spreading branches still glow at night the way mine used to, sniff. To balance, the lilac has a dozen or more flowers waiting to bloom, first time since it was cut back in '09.
( Read more... )

My lord, Alan Garner is a classicist and no mistake. Have had to look up words as I read him, not something I'm used to in these latter degenerate and above all non-academic days. Onomastic, apotropaic, euhemeristic... and of course he expects his listeners to know the meanings as well. I mean, they're actually useful words, describing concisely a particular thing: but not something one runs across all the time.
( Cut for definitions )

Finished The Serpent's Tale, second of the Mistress of the Art of Death books set in the reign of Henry II and no more HA than you'd expect. Another 'eunuch castrated before puberty who's fully sexually functional' topos, and someone else (and her editor) who don't know how 'who' differs from 'whom'. Shall not pursue the series.

So turned to A Slight Trick of the Mind. Holmes and Japan: what's not to love? Well, Holmes disembarking from his ship in Tokyo itself, for a start. I suppose one could, even in 1947, and the Royal Navy is not the same as a commercial liner. But then, feeling the need for exercise after several weeks on a boat, the 93-year-old Holmes, using two canes *and* carrying his own luggage, walks over to Shinjuku to catch a train to Kobe. That's a good five miles as the crow flies, assuming Holmes is somewhere near Shinagawa, and takes no account of the winding roads and still flattened areas between.

But why is he walking to Shinjuku in the first place? The trains to Kobe, then as now, follow the Tokaido route from Tokyo station and Shinagawa. And since that passes through Yokohama, why not just get off the boat there? Unless Cullin knows something about trains in '47 that I don't, the route makes no sense. He has a page worth of acknowledgements to a large number of Japanese names, so maybe he does, but still...

Also I wonder if a Japanese man who learned his English in Oxford just after the first war would naturally ask someone "Are you OK?". Too much influence from Occupation Yanks? Is that why he comes to the station to meet his distinguished guest in shorts and tennis shoes? The war, I tell you, was the end of Japanese society as we know it.

And what am I to make of Holmes in disguise being 'an imminently forgettable soul'? That people seeing him will shortly forget him? Or does he in fact mean 'eminently'? (He does. So why didn't he say it?)

Joan Aiken is an odd duck, agreed. But then I think

bookelfe is also a bit odd in the duck department for calling The Whispering Mountain a Gothic- if I didn't misread that entry completely. (She was talking about another book that does indeed sound gothicky.) tWM is just one of Aiken's James III series, weird by definition: with a Prince of Wales who speaks highland English and a bunch of Welsh villagers who sometimes speak Welsh, usually speak Welsh-English, but mostly speak Yoda. "Weigh no more than a feather, this boy do! Help to you he will be, too." "Regular cloudburst there must have been up at Pennygaff. Owe all our lives to you, we do, Owen, I reckon!" I can't believe Lucas' screen writers were conversant with Welsh-English word order and did that deliberately, so I must assume Aiken Got It Rong. Mind, my standard for these things is The Owl Service, and maybe it shouldn't be.

Then read The Islands of Chaldea, DWJ's last. Mh, speaking of odd ducks: she and Aiken were two of a kind-- both regard loss of close relatives as no big deal. And Wynne Jones is generally much less genial. Why yes, I could guess where Ursula took over: it was when the signals for a happy end came so neat and quick. DWJ would have been much more problematic about it.

Time for something completely different: probably continuing with The Steampunk Trilogy which is a bit more like, except for that steampunk obsession with whores and brothels. The absence of which is one sign of good steampunk, in my book.

1. So when one has finished all the Carrington and Cogman available and goes to look for more steampunk-- as it might be the Whitechapel Gods that one bounced off of back autumn-- one at once and naturally wishes for more Carrington and Cogman, because WG not only presents a cast of thousands with no telling who is who, it gives you sentences like "He stood up, his legs taught" and "Since Grandfather Clock and his pet baron almost certainly know by now, your compatriots aught to." Are there no editors anymore? are there no *literate* editors anymore?

2. When

petronia was here, she wandered down to the Korean super and wandered back with shingo pears. I'm not a fruit eater, and am supposed to stay away from pears and apples anyway, but shingo pears are sweet and mild and the best of both apple and pear: crunchy and juicy. Goes perfectly with Jarlsberg cheese. (And no, I never had nashi in Japan. Way too expensive.)
( Read more... )

1. Am given to understand that Royall Tyler translated Genji without using the usual sobriquets (like, yanno, 'Genji'.) Always wanted to see how that worked in English, or if it worked, but was reluctant to fork out for the full text. (There's one available on ebay for about $30 Canuck, plus $23C shipping. Truly, even a 1200 page paperback doesn't cost that much to send up here.) Discover there's an abridged version available at BMV and cop it for a fast $7 plus tax. Then discover that the abridged version uses the sobriquets.

(I know the word as 'soubriquet', and I assure you I haven't been reading 17th century French either. But the net is unanimous that the correct form is sobriquet.)
( Read more... )

16C yesterday, jacket weather. 4 today. An early and cold winter and a one day Indian summer. (I seem to recall someone saying the phrase was invidious, for reasons I forget. I always thought it was what the First Nations themselves called the last warm weather, which I know makes no sense; but from my childhood semi-British standpoint, a non-British phenomenon naturally required a non-English phrase to describe it. And of course there's an England-English phrase for the thing- St Martin's summer. The Japanese call it 小春日和- koharu biyori: 'little spring day(s) peaceful' because November is such a warm month there.)

Doctor says to me, 'I started seeing you in '96, which makes it-' pause- 'Eighteen years,' I supply. 'So I suppose I should stop thinking of you as 40-something.' That might be an idea. 'But you haven't changed at all!' And don't I wish that were true.

Cold- head cold cold- is making signs of a comeback. Sore throat, full sinuses, tiredness. Doubtless the extreme weather changes are to blame.

Blearily noted another grey greasy wet day out the fogged up windows as I got my breakfast ready. Sat down at computer, called up Environment Canada's wp (I can call ~~spirits~~ pixels from the vasty deep), see current weather is 'light snow' WHAT??? Look more closely out window. Snow flurries indeed. Oh I am so not ready for boots, especially this week when my right knee has decided to yell about the damp.
( October's sad stats )

I keep trying to impress my daily perceptions of the lovely weather-- deep blue skies, cool breeze, sun-- into the long-term memory, but my mind has no good-weather memory ability. Mug and heat haze, that I remember perfectly. Sad, because there have been a lot of splendid days this month. But I have been at work with new babies etc, and nothing much else registers.

Twelve days' worth of Shibata Ami takes its toll, so I give myself a break with Bill Bryson's Shakespeare- The World as Stage, which I was very happy to find until I realized it's not Steven Greenblatt's Will in the World. A fun fast read nonetheless. ( Cut for Shakespeare's vocabulary )

For the paranoid. What happens/ed when you type placeholder text into Google translate. 'China is suffering.'

1. Lovely day, feeling much cooler than the purported temperature. Jacket weather, and in the morning's raw cloud, jacket and fleecy weather. Culminated in an evening of golden western sun and glowing purply clouds like those of the autumn preview, that brief cold spell in early Augusts in the early 70s. After July's heat and mug, five or six days of highs near 15 and lows near 6: not the way autumn actually looked when it came but a sort of ur-version or Platonic form. Remember the roar of the furnace turning on in the bowels of the house, and the cocoon of warm dry air blowing from the (really very odd) heating outlets we had at home.

Also the neighbourhood is presently awash in lilac scent because lilacs burgeon on every lilac bush-- except, of course, mine. Am of two minds here: lilacs are a lovely sensual experience, but the scent of fruit tree blossoms is much more restrained and therefore elegant. Also they're much briefer and therefore never go rotten rank the way lilacs and orange blossoms do.

2. Learned a new word today: epigone - an inferior imitator of some distinguished writer or artist of musician. This in a discussion of Tolkien. OTOH I only recently discovered that Tolkien has two syllables, not three. I cannot say how much this crushes me. Tol-keen? Really??

3. I should be liking The Eyre Affair better than I do. It has all sorts of pleasant Library overtones, and I'm by nature fond of punning names. But I can't follow the action if I stop reading for a bit, and I can't remember who everyone is. First novel-itis, perhaps?

Translation of the Latin placeholder text. ( Cut for acid trip English )

The translator, Jaspreet Singh Boparai, is quoted: "my basic challenge was to make this text precisely as incoherent in English as it is in Latin - and to make it incoherent in the same way... When you spend eight hours a day reading Renaissance Latin texts you get used to elaborate Ciceronian syntax that makes no sense whatsoever, and so the absurdity of this content left me serenely unperturbed."

(He spends eight hours a day reading Renaissance Latin texts because he's a postdoc fellow, poor bunny. But his suffering is our gain.)

Ah well- last week was fairly intense, which may explain why I've only just finished my first book in March. Who Fears Death is also fairly intense, which may explain why I dragged my heels on it. Am glad I read it, wouldn't want to read it again, but do want to read something like it. Alas, the library doesn't have Redemption in Indigo in borrowable form and it's just outside my price range at Bakka, so I bought The New Moon's Arms instead. Not full-out African fantasy, perhaps, but does have unsinkable old women.

This was probably subconsciously inspired by a visit to the coffee shop Saturday morning. Can't remember what I'd brought as portable reading- Pema Chodron, probably- because what I wound up skimming was my gift copy of Lords and Ladies that no one's taken, though someone took the other three duplicate Pratchetts. Periodically I'm reminded how much I like Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg; and I discern resemblances to them both in Hopkinson's Calamity.

(True, I'd probably have bought Anne Lyle's Alchemist of Souls instead if the Elizabethan English had been anywhere near the standard of either Antonia Forest or The Armor of Light. Alas, a skim suggested it wasn't periodic at all. Carpenter to his last, then.)

Not sure where I saw the rec for George Mann's Newbury and Hobbes series, but I had high hopes of it as I continue my steampunk reading: hopes which were at once dashed by the opening chapter. Three soldiers in India are attacked by something that seems to be a zombie: 'The creature was like something raised from the depths of Hades itself. It was dressed in the torn rags of an Indian peasant and may once have been human (J note: when I learned sequence of tenses, 'may' in past discourse became 'might', but no one seems to care about that rule anymore) but now looked more like a half-rotted corpse than like anything resembling a man. The creature's skin was desiccated...' and so on clunk clunk clunk through the fight that follows: the 'horrifying creature' did this, the 'monster' did that, the 'creature', the 'monster', the 'vile thing', the 'creature', the 'thing'... and that's just two paragraphs' worth.

Mr. Mann needs an editor, but alas, it seems Mr Mann *is* an editor. Then why, I ask, does he write things like 'Veronica was hard at work, clearing the spare desk on the other side of the room, unpacking her small box of belongings and filing the many sheaves of abandoned notes she continued to find in drawers and random piles all around the office. She had... attacked the mess like it was some sort of villain in need of appeasing.'

I don't know if this is carelessness, ignorance, Humpty-Dumpty Rule, or straight Inigo Montoya, but between the clunk and the catachresis I find the book unreadable. And the odd thing, she says chauvinistically, is that Mann's English. He should have read enough required 19th century lit to know the words in context, and not just as something to be memorized for the S.A.T. (If you read enough 19th century lit- and if you're writing England-based steampunk or Holmes pastiche, that comes recommended- you also know that a gentleman doesn't say Hell! in front of a lady. Lord, what *do* they teach them in these schools?)

Yes, that's exactly what it's like. Well played, sir. My own wandering doggie is 'officious', except I found a mnemonic for that one. Predictably, I can't remember what the other word is that I always forget. Possibly 'gratuitous'.

Ounce of prevention dep't: the salt I laid down last night turned the falling ice into a brittle crust, easily swept away this morning. Looking up and down the street, I mourn that I'm the only one with such foresight. Where are the Italian nonni of yesteryear, who not only would have salted pre-storm but would be out at 7 am shovelling it all away? Tell ya, this is what happens when you let yuppies into your neighbourhood...

Clearly I'm not going anywhere today-- unless the temps go up enough to let me chop ice on my route to the bus stop, against tonight's cold snap.

1. There's a name for it: prosopagnosia. Which is "where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing (e.g., object discrimination) and intellectual functioning (e.g., decision making) remain intact." I have it to a fairly marked degree, and a nuisance it is too.

2. People must have seen this before, but Ursula Leguin posts a rejection letter that should cheer any aspiring writer.
( Read more... )

Matt Kressel posts about Yiddish, and suddenly I have a great desire to learn the language. We had The Joys of Yiddish at home (can't believe it came out when I was 18: I seem to remember reading it in high school) and like any large-NA-city-dweller my vocabulary includes a buncha Yiddish words that register to me as English-- spiel, kvetch, shlep, kibitz, schmooze, nosh, glitch, schlock, schmaltz, dreck, kitsch, shmatte, schmuck, nebbish, tuchus, schtick, and the one I only just learned from English writers, shtum. Suddenly I realize it's an actual *language*: verbs and nouns and adverbs and everything. Which probably conjugate and decline, if it's as High Germanic as all that, but likely not as hard as German, because err well very few European languages are, outside of the Slavic ones.

But of course there's a fly in that ointment. Yiddish is written in Hebrew. Teeny tiny Hebrew with its teeny tiny dots that make furigana look like child's play. Alas, I'm too old for that. Cobbler to his last: back to Japanese.

As I may have said before. It's not just the ambiguous subject-less, object-less, conversational demotic Japanese-- with, all too often, an unindicated speaker, either someone whose face you can't see or just nobody shown at all. It's that visual decoding that other people (thesis has been proposed: kanji/ hanzi reading people) seem so good at and that defeats me. Kanji/ hanzi readers may note without thinking the difference between two people, exact same features and exact same shape of face, one of whom has bangs that curl up at the right side and the other of whom has bangs that curl down at the left, but I do not. (And if kanji/ hanzi readers are good at this because of early education, then by me the Israelis should be utter shoo-ins because cripes I can't even *see* those vowel-indicating dots in Hebrew.)
( Cut for mildest spoilers )
( October stats )

1. For the Benefit of Mr Kite.

Pablo Fanque was a real person, which I kind of knew, while doubting that his name was really Fanque. (In fact it was William Darby.) He was also "the first black circus proprietor in Britain." The things no one ever told you in 1967.

I discovered this anent wiki's speculation that 'A splendid time is guaranteed for all' is an hommage to the title of Stevie Smith's first poetry book, A Good Time was Had By All; which "itself became a catch phrase, still occasionally used to this day... Variations appear in pop culture, including Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite by the Beatles."
( Read more... )

I think I'd enjoy the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences more if the language wasn't, to my ear, ever so slightly off, for something that's supposed to be about Victorian Englishmen and New Zealander ~~Mary Sues~~ female agents.

A clamor caused him to start, a tiny yelp echoing in the chamber.

When have clamours (and where'd the u go to anyway? Oh right- the American half of the duo took it out) consisted of one tiny yelp? The OED defines it as 'shouting; confused noise'-- something that persists, in any case. 'Urk!' is not clamour.

"Chaos and mayhem comes naturally to you, don't they, Miss Braun?" he seethed.

No, they does not. And while I'm not draconian about using substitutes for 'said' that don't involve speaking (like "'Yes,' he nodded") I'm not at all happy with that 'seethed.'

The scrawling of Books' pen was louder than usual.

Scrawl is a visual word, marking hasty and/or illegible handwriting; it has nothing to do with sound.

Well, and so on and so forth. Maybe it improves. In any case it's either this or Toby Daye being unintelligent in her inimitable fashion, so I'll take the pseudo-Victorians.

Finished the Parasol Protectorate and sad it's over. Perfect summer reading. I do wonder though about some language points. The author's dress research sounds perfect, but I wonder if English people really said 'pretty darn (adjective)' in the 1870s. I mean, there are surprises in language, like the first usage of 'literally' meaning 'figuratively' dating to the mid-18th century, and Fanny Burney a generation later writing 'Tell it to the marines!' But the first known use of sadist is 1888, ten years after Lyle says it. Maybe shifting Krafft-Ebing and Freud's dates earlier is part of the A/U, but I think it's just our present unconscious use of psychiatric vocabulary.

Something the same with PD James' Austen. One needn't expect pastiche, but it sounds odd to me when a housekeeper says 'There's a bed in the adjoining room. I can get it made up with pillows and blankets.' 'Can get' to my ears is modern, and not suitable servant's language. Doing a fast search through Pride and Prejudice suggests that 'get' has a slightly invidious sense:
( I mean, look at who's involved in all of these )
It doesn't feel at all like the neutral verb we now use it as.

I so, so want a day when I don't have to be up at a given time. I believe this is known as 'Saturday.'

Did finish Paris Requiem, which is sort of bearable once you get past the notion that the chief of the Paris police will not object when a brash young Boston lawyer interferes in his investigation, says (frequently) 'This is what you must do now', lies more than once, and absconds with material evidence which he keeps forgetting to give to the police. Read as Belle Epoque fantasy if it all gets too much. It still has those odd word usages that segue into malapropism. A criminal threatened with murder charges 'catapults'-- 'he still denied the two murders but admitted he knew about the white slaving.' Reminds me of the slash writer who made an aged-down Avon become Blake's catamount.

So yesterday, cooler for some values of cooler, I was updating my sad reading stats when the brain said 'But wait! Didn't you read this other book? The one from the library sale? The uhh murder mystery wasn't it---' I wasn't sure if that wasn't brain short-circuiting, like the 'but did I feed the rabbit?' glitch I had for a while there. (I don't own a rabbit. Never did.) I had no recollection of plot or setting or even was it a mystery and not a fantasy, but vaguely remembered buying something at the library. Had to search three rooms' bookshelves, but yes-- a forensic mystery called Skullduggery, set in Mexico, and referencing a physiological condition (delayed epiphyseal union) last run across in my teens in attempts to date the mummy that might have been Akhenaton's. You'd think I'd have retained something of it, but I'm not even sure when I read it.
( Read more... )

What a lovely day. In the morning find I've won a copy of the new Melissa Scott, Death by Silver. In the evening, have dinner with

petronia at a local loud upscale izakaya. S remarks that loud and rambunctious seems to be the mode for izakaya at least on this side of the Pacific. I mean, they're not upscale dining in Japan either, but I don't remember them going in for loud thumping music either.

Being in some people's company, even for an evening, is like being on vacation. It's exhilarating. I just wish I knew why some people feel like Elsewhere and others feel like Everyday; I don't think it's just familiarity or the lack of it, because I've been in Elsewhere people's company on a daily basis and they're still different. Part of it might be the difference between online friends met in RL, and strangers met in the flesh. There's so much more work involved in meeting the latter, that online interaction takes care of for you.

Otherwise is jacket-cool weather, meaning timeless no-time, because when has June ever been jacket-cool? (1996, is when; otherwise, occasionally in the 70s.) The topos of 'November with flowers' is familiar enough in May, but June just doesn't *do* that. And anyway, it's 'October with flowers.' I love it, whatever.
( Wednesday reading meme )

I really have no idea what Max Gladstone is doing in Three Parts Dead. Cover blurbs keep mentioning John Grissom, which may be the problem, since I've never read any Grissom. Nor am I sure if one should view his Craft-workers as straightforward versions of our own lawyers (and not just any lawyers either: corporate and contract, of all the yawn-a-minute fields) or if that does an injustice to his world-building. For sure what happens in their 'judicial' hearings isn't fine argument and close interpretation of statute.

That view, however, may be what accounts for the outfit the heroine is wearing on the cover-- though in fact the heroine does wear what she, at least, calls a dark suit. I'm just wondering if that automatically equates to jacket, skirt and white blouse. (Given the magic tattoos and knife. Just sayin'.) Whatever, because Gladstone uses a show don't tell kind of world-building, it's taking me a while to read. I suppose I can see why people want a this-world-parallel shortcut to help them in the process.

Plus point: there's no physical description of the heroine for what seems pages and pages (but remember I read slowly.) I was almost hoping someone had done a 'black as default' cover for a character who could be anything. Well, not yet, but maybe some day.

Minus: Gladstone has an American verbal tick that twitches me as much as Griffin's 'was sat.' 'A couple books.' People don't say 'a pair books' or 'a set dishes', so why does 'a couple' drop the 'of' so often?

The Kitchen Table stack throws up a gem-- Isak Dineson's Winter Tales. Half way through and each story is a delight. This is odd. She wrote them in the dark days of the Nazi occupation, but so far they're all immensely genial. I was a little disappointed by Last Tales and even by my reread of Seven Gothic, but these hit the spot exactly.

Her punctuation OTOH would make me scream if the stories weren't so engrossing. Never has the comma been worked so hard, taking on all the tasks of the colon, semi-colon, co-ordinating conjunction, and 'no dammit you need a new sentence here.'

Do not ask me why finishing Child of Fortune with its heroine wimping about nearly to the end, and then reading the Lapland witch in Winter Tales during an odd rolling-booming thunderstorm yesterday evening, combined to have me dreaming of my old house on Bedford with the back yard full of blooming cherry trees, and dream!

petronia and her dream!father (who both show up rather often in my dreams) doing something there with bicycles. The connection was quite clear as I was waking but now survives only as a feeling of texture to the day.

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.
( Read more... )

Tokyo Eidan, I apologize. Commutation ticket is indeed proper English, even if outdated (first known use: 1848), and not a mistake for 'commuter pass'. "A commutation ticket was the American term for a season ticket."

(Also I hadn't noticed that the Eidan (帝都高速度交通営団) is now Tokyo Metro (東京地下鉄株式会社), though what differences it make I'm not sure.)
( Read more... )

Spent a chunk of last year reading random recs from here and there. Aaronovitch's I can usually trace to Aaronovitch: they have a certain genre similarity. Others came from the FFL, which is how I read Tim Powers, Michele Batchelor, and Hilary McKay. Usually I c&p the name into the Toronto Public Library system, note what branches near me have which copies, and go and get them. Occasionally none does and I have to put a hold. This will become more frequent now that winter has retired the bicycle.

The trouble is that I rarely note where I got a rec from, and Swiss-cheese-brained as I am, occasionally fail to remember that I've put a hold on at all. Thus I was surprised to discover that I'd ordered a copy of Deception by Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri, of whom I remember not a thing. It's set in Tang China, it has Judge Dee (must be the why of it) and it concerns the Always-Evil Empress (empresses being always-evil by definition) Wu. Who, the blurb says, deposed Confucianists and promoted Buddhists; and that's a bad idea, because IIRC the histories are written by Confucianists. So I'm thinking 'hostile tradition, here we come' and wondering if I want to read this thumping great door-stopper at all.

ETA: the wiki article on Wu Zetian contains the lovely line that she was responsible for 'the "Wordless Stella" at the Qianling Mausoleum.' Someone's autocorrect was too quick on the draw.

I bought a Wordtank IDF-4600 from a British seller for a tenth what the American was asking, including shipping. And a good thing too, because I'd be chizzed in spades at paying close to $400 for something as useless as the much vaunted IDF-4600. The rep Canon has for being gaijin-friendly, or at least Anglophone-friendly, is officially in tatters.
( Cut for electronic dictionary tsuris )

Well, several. To be found here at The Top 10 Relationship Words That Aren't Translatable Into English. Like Forelsket: (Norwegian): The euphoria you experience when you’re first falling in love.
( Cut for saudade: I can't translate it but I know it when I feel it )

Rather more happily there's Retrouvailles (French): The happiness of meeting again after a long time. I have it with books and places and manga eps (I'm looking at you, Minekura sensei) more than with people, but that's thanks to the digital age when people are there even when they're not.

Here we go. Make your own Shakespearian insults. For all your hi-falutin' cussin' needs.

A post on the saiyuki LJ sent me off to youtube in nostalgic search of Hakkai and Gojou. There I found eps subtitled in French (anything from vostFR, basically.) It's heaven. I finally have that bland but useful s'en vouloir construction pinned down. And kiyou binbou turns into a literal 'pauvre mais débrouillard'. I must watch all of season 2 this way.

I'm sure it's impossible, but Yahoo's Addiction Solitaire viewed on IE is far more difficult than the same site viewed in Firefox. Besides, FF has ads before the game and IE doesn't. Also, why can I go straight to the Yahoo addiction solitaire site but must login and do captchas to get to Pyramid? I need a higher quality of time waster. Ah well-- see above.

The weather goes cool and dry, and coincidentally I lose all memories of the last three weeks. Also experience a massive attack of wanhope and malaise. Oh but I hate working, I think, and then consider that the aching neck, the ring of pain about the eye, and the dark night of the soul might possibly relate to that part of work where I held a child with a 103F fever for an hour yesterday. Take pain killers and nap and begin to feel more human.
( These fragments I have shored against my ruin )

Treasure from the FFL:

"The countries of the world in their own languages and scripts; with official names, capitals, flags, coats of arms, political divisions, national anthems, and translations of the countries and capitals into many languages"

I am enchanted to discover that in Saterland Frisian, Wednesday is 'Midwiek'. And no, it never occurred to me that the German Mittwoch is the same thing. For closely related languages, German and English have very little in common that I can see.

Ben Aaronovitch was at a panel the other day: "a round table discussion about London based urban fantasy with China Mieville, Suzanne McLeod and Kate Griffin." Sounds like it'd be fascinating. Possibly a transcript online somewhere?

Had not heard of Suzanne McLeod. Anyone know if she's any good? Or only if you like vampires?
( Equally... )

Oh yes, the Matthew Swift books drive me up a wall. They drive me so up a wall that the minute I finished 'Neon Court' I trekked on over to Bakka-Phoenix prepared to shell out $20 plus for vol 4, and was delighted to find it available mass market paperback, light in the backpack and less than $10.

But they still drive me up a wall. Pleasantly, unlike Ackroyd and Mieville, the other two Londoners on the go, but still. Wall. Vertical direction. Towards ceiling. 'Oh my God why am I reading this who's gonna get cut/ shot/ burned/ killed in unspeakable ways this time?' Violence is so not my thing.
( List of arghities that go with the Swift territory )

And an oddity that may not just be Swift. 'He was sat on the bed, reading a book.' This pattern occurs over and over. What happened to 'he was sitting'?

Yesterday's dream was some wonderful Miyazaki film about a boy and his huge plume-tailed wolf in the lush and teeming grasslands of their world, who had to rescue the same region in an alternate world that had become, well, southern California scrubland, basically. Last night was a mishmash that contained a not bad apartment I was subletting/ sharing with my old friend M back when he was M (diffident, considerate, bookish) and not the academic who drank himself to death two years ago. Living areas divided by curtains, shaded courtyard and outside stairs somehow filched from University College here. Featured also M's blond feckless roommate, some small child from work, and an Indian friend who said the original sublease hadn't run out so he was still entitled to share with M even though there was no space. All influenced by beginning Unseen Academicals before bed and the achey flu-like whatever that I currently suffer from.
( February reading )

Am having one of my Christmas marathon reads, aided by minimal hours at work and much phthisic languishments on sofas still. But because I'm a visual reader my mind is the most unholy stew of fragments and moods in consequence. Moods partly because I read Gene Wolfe's There are Doors in a day or so, where the narrator's dreams and his reality have exactly the same flavour, and the flavour is 'Something's happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?' When you live alone and have minimal social contact with other people, it's as well to keep that kind of book balanced by more mundane stuff, or your own reality starts looking iffy. Thus I finished Point of Dreams finally, sad that the glimpse of Ruling Women wasn't quite as I'd remembered it, and Castle Rouge to have it finished, irked by CofE Englishwomen who call themselves Episcopalian and writers who don't know the difference between ravaged and ravished.

Oh, and PoD does a Hammett. Someone shoots at Lord Whatsisface and they forgot to tell us who it was.
( Cut for bibliomania )

1. Severed tooth was essence of no big deal. Mid-afternoon I was thinking 'This is a doddle, maybe I'll go hang out with some babies.' Then it started to hurt, but half a tylenol-3 (= two over the counter tablets, a dose I regularly take anyway) put it to sleep again. Great strides in the science of tooth extraction since 2003, of which all I remember is weeping in pain and waiting desperately till I could take another 292 (aspirin and great amounts of codeine.) I do miss aspirin and codeine, which gave a lovely high when it didn't give strychnine poisoning stomach cramps; but tylenol-3s will do, evidently. (I can have '1-2 every 4-6 hours', evidently. The zombie walks.)
( More )

A winter coat, to start with. Was looking what prices Walmart had on machines and wandered by accident into Winners, as one does. Came out with cheapish plastic/ vinyl/ something jacket, figuring oh it will do now that my best beloved black cloth coat is ten years old and fraying badly. It more than does. It's waterproof. It's warm. The silly pockets that made me curse the first five times I wore it because they open *backwards*, open backwards so rain can't blow into them. It velcroes on top of the zipper (a good thing because I'm a button person all the way and zippers are counter-intuitive.) I can wear it without a fleecy underneath until the temps go below zero, and it's light. Ugly as sin, but light. Go me.

Then I went to Canadian Tire to get a vacuum cleaner and discovered a) what they have are Dirt Devil type things that b) don't have the kind of heads I'm used to and that c) are too heavy to get home on a bicycle anyway. But what CanTire had as well are solar powered Christmas lights, that I'd looked for in vain for several years. My house has no outdoor outlet. I can't wreathe my overwrought iron porch rails in fairy lights like next door. But I can wreathe them in a strand (these things are *expensive*) of solar powered lights that turn themselves on at dusk, so my house at last looks cheery at Christmas.

Also standing in line at the supermarket I saw a snack labelled, in our bilingual fashion, 'Maïs à la marmite.' Marmite-flavoured popcorn? Could not believe it. As well. That's 'kettle-popped corn' to you. This is partly why I'm taking French next year.

1. I can see I had better not try rereading The Three Musketeers. Last time I did (uhh, 30 years ago would that be?) I was astonished to find them all so *young*. Athos was my age! And I always did wonder about that reaction to his wife's brand, which struck me as weird when I first read it at 13-- why did he do that? Why didn't he wait till she'd recovered to ask her why she was branded? But nope-- OMG I married a convicted thief, I shall hang her at once!
( Moar )

Profile

flemmings

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

The rodents are running hurrah! hurrah!

Entries tagged with language

Expand Cut Tags