Off the Cliff

Well, that could have been more painful. The direct line the physio gave me was 'this number is not in service,' the booking dep't goes to lunch at 12:30 not 1, and I somehow got the MRI people not the CT scan ones. But I wasn't on hold for much more than ten minutes when I called at 1:30 and they don't play muzak. I have an appointment now in October (gulp) which she apologized for but apparently it's a much in demand service. So that's  done.

Finished Yangsze Choo's The Fox Wife, very pleasant as her books tend to be. Also 100 Demons 31, not all about the Niigata family but still with Ritsu trying to finish up his master's thesis.

Currently on Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries, a short term loan that I must persevere with, and the most recent Flavia Albia, whose blurb is a major spoiler, and Equal Rites, another 'somehow never read' Pratchett.

DNF Only a Monster: intriguing premise but lacklustre treatment and of course YA with mandatory love triangle, Y oh Y? Because mandatory, I suppose.

Have a Japanese novel waiting for me at the library which I can probably renew easily if it takes me longer than three weeks since no one has a hold on it.

This morning's lie in dream was an almost coherent From Eroica one where Dorian was throwing a birthday party for Klaus with a fancy cake, which Klaus didn't want to eat of course, and an incursion by spies of some sort, as well as a gaggle of teenage boys who were there for some other reason, and distracted Dorian was trying to keep all these things together.

Then as I was sitting on the couch there was a tremendous banging at the door, which left me uncertain if it was my door or NND's. But then Guy (it's always guys who bang on the screen door; women ring) found the doorbell and pressed that, so yes, my house, and what does he want so insistently? He wants me to sign for my 100 Demons, is what, so how lucky I answered the door.

Meanwhile the next installment of Murderbot arrives at the library so off I trot to get it. Then drop by Ninetails coffee shop for a cold brew and look, today they have the smoked salmon and yuzu mayo croissant, so I get one of those. Barista says 'you can sit down, I'll bring you your coffee' and I say I'm outside, where I've parked the rollator, and he says he'll bring me my coffee anyway. This is pleasant.

White haired woman in sunglasses stops as she's leaving the café to ask what I'm eating, so I tell her, and consequently get a slice of her life story about how her teenage rebellion against her fisherman father took the form of refusing to eat fish and she still doesn't but now takes omega-3 capsules even though she doesn't trust most supplements but needs to keep her brain in good order because she lives alone and now she challenges herself mentally by for instance setting up her new modem and router herself which she didn't want to but two years ago she'd just have hired someone to do it and this year she managed it alone. I do miss conversations, which this wasn't, it was someone talking at me. Yes, old women living alone are starved for human interaction: but I'm an old woman living alone and you don't see me buttonholing strangers to talk about my cinnamon tablets and turmeric. Which said, just about the only people in TO who will talk to strangers are indeed old women.

The croissant btw is nice enough but the yuzu mayo is loaded with wasabi so shall not repeat.

Roused myself this evening to make the chickpea, spinach, and coconut curry I've been intending to for the past few days. Is very good but if I ever do this again shall use light coconut milk because regular makes things very greasy.

When eholds come, they come not single spies but in battalions. I had to put off A Memory Called Empire for five weeks because I just started Ancillary Justice. Yes, late to the party, but generally I don't read science fiction. Even SF written by women, after the head-hurty show not tell antics of Cherryh. However, shall give these a whirl, though I'm looking dubiously at my other holds that promise me 2 to 4 weeks. Yeah, well, so were the Leckie and Martine supposed to be 2 to 4 weeks away. Either someone stayed up all night to finish them or someone bounced off them hard.

Ancillary Justice came out in 2013 which was also, according to the weather channels, the cloudiest January on record until this one just finished. I don't remember it as such, but I'm clearly thinking of February 2013.  Generally I don't mind cloud: most of the year it's my preference. Grey dry Octobers and Novembers are the weather of my soul. I have a distinct memory of being in some hot sunny place and visiting a museum where there was a painting-- Flemish, I'm almost sure-- of shepherds coming over a hill, and behind them the grey cloudy skies of a northern winter, and being so homesick for same I couldn'tstand it. I can't trace the painting and I can't remember the city. It's unlikely to be Florence or Vienna, but might have been Tokyo with one of those department store exhibitions from the Hermitage. (Not Breughel. The shepherd were facing the viewer and were the largest element in the picture, standing  in the upper left quadrant.)

Given that honto.jp will cease its paper book ordering service at the end of March, I'm greatly relieved that the next 100 Demons is coming out on March 10. Preordered and registered and y'know what, the yen is on par with the Canadian dollar, maybe I should buy the recent Rainy Willows as well? Or not. I don’t think she's as enthusiastic about them as she was thirty years ago. No rest for the mangaka.

 Temps have been just above freezing for the last three days, weather has been grey and dank and miserable, and joints have hurt in a different way than any time before. Can only assume that side effects of the booster were delayed this time beause my arm didn't really bother me noticeably until two days later, and is still sensitive. So my right knee may have hurt because of the weather and my left because scars ache when you're sick. 

Sitting on the sofa yesterday evening, not wanting to get up because getting up hurts, not wanting to do acrostics because my head wasn't up to it, nothing to read at hand except, well, those three phonebook Nemuki magazines from who knows how long ago that I keep thinking I should throw out. But grabbed one and read the Shinohara Udo story from the series I don't care for, and then the Ima Ichiko that I've already read three or four times, and when I put it down I was in another world, maybe ten years or more ago, when she was still doing weird stuff involving Ritsu and hadn't even thought of the complicated sideline of his great-aunt's homicidal grandchildren and great-grandchildren that I've never been able to get straight.

Which put me in a good mood, but also emphasizes the need to get my eyes checked and a new prescription for my left lens and possibly a custom made pair of reading glasses for special occasions, because at the moment I need a pair in every room in the house except the bathroom, and another in my backpack.

I heard some of Loreena Mc Kennitt's work when I was in Japan and bought her whole backlist after I came home. Now all her earliest stuff says 'spring of 1996' to me. 1996 was a weird alternative dimension, precisely because I was just back after five years in Japan. So when I come across it again- as now, when my exercise music has started into the vocal stuff- I'm in a double reality shift. The oddness of 2020 looking back at the oddness of 1996,

Saying oh it's been so long, you've been so long on the sands
So long on the sands, so long on the flood,
They have married your Jeannie, and now she lies dead.

P/T staff from work dropped by today to deliver an orchid and a goodie bag from herself and one of the F/T staff. (Also a take out Ethiopian dinner and a latte. Dinner will last me three meals, the way I eat now.) It was sweet of them and I'm sad, but also, from things said and unsaid, aware that the place is as dysfunctional as it ever was and I'm well out of it. A. is now into her ninth month of pregnancy, and though it's a bad time to have a baby (grandma can't fly in to help) I'm glad A. will also be out of it too. 

Last finished?

Ovidia Yu, The Betel Nut Tree Mystery
-- I see there's a third volume of this which I'll give a miss. It's 1936 and the Japanese army is already devastating China.

Ima Ichiko, Hundred Demons 28
-- my heart fails within me. See, the last three or four volumes have been all about a collatoral branch of Ritsu's family, his great-aunt's children, grandchildren, and for all I know great-grandchildren as well. One of whom is supposed to have killed another girl when she was young but I can never remember who she was because these are all female children etc who marry and change their names. And now it seems maybe the murdered girl wasn't murdered after all? or it was someone else who died? And I really don't want to have to wade through the last four tanks in an attempt to figure exactly what's going on.
 
Reading now?

Down in the cellar was a box with the umptymany volumes of Kaguya Hime which, on evidence of the first tank, is an unholy mess. 'He found this dead baby in a bamboo grove but she wasn't dead so he raised her himself and neglected his wife so that they separated so he had to put the child in an orphanage from which his estranged wife adopted her five years later and made the girl her artist's model and also her lover only now the teenager has been abducted by these American army brats with yellow hair and Japanese names one of whom can fly jet fighters perfectly the first time because he's practised on flight simulations...'   It's Japanese practice, I suppose.

Have the first Phryne Fisher in e-format but it's not grabbing me, partly because Phryne was poverty-stricken in childhood but now wears designer clothes huh? And wears a lot of designer clothes, I mean seriously this is fashion porn.

Next?

The Dark Archive arrived from G today. Am tempted to drop everything else and just read that.

It's a comment on my sad lockdown life that a visit to the dentist leaves me feeling so cheerful! for the human interaction. And a little sad that neither of my cabbies was the chatty type. But I got to talk! with the assistant! about politics! and travelling! and idiots who won't wear masks! and the emergency clinic that was supposed to give me my xrays but didn't, and when asked to fax them over to my dentist, sent a photo of them taken with a cellphone, oy vey. But we decided to wait and see what my tooth does before bringing in the heavy artillery ie root canal from a specialist (= add a good $1000) plus a crown and possibly a partial plate. Teeth, man.

Not helped by me throwing prediabetic concerns to the wind afterwards and ordering in from a dessert company: grilled cheese, ice coffee, chocolate cake. Yum. Back to vegetables tomorrow.

Ima Ichiko grows no clearer with time. First story in the tankoubon is a Kai clear as mud one. Wish I had a living dictionary, not so much for the Japanese as to point out the detail in the picture that I'm so obviously missing in my oblivious gaijin fashion.

I was yesterday old when I learned, courtesy of Rainy Willow, that the Ichiko of Ima Ichiko- 市子- is the word for a psychic-type medium, a speaker to the dead.

Some advice to the depressed I came across on tumblr-I-think said 'you don't have to do everything. Just floss your teeth.' As I sink into my spring SAD, I've decided that whatever else I do or don't, I will at least floss my teeth. Supposing I can stay awake long enough because lord! but narcolepsy has me in its clutches these days.

Weather doesn't help. Monday I went out without gloves and regretted it bitterly (see what I did there?) Yesterday wore my winter coat and last night still had the heat on, as winds made bicycling a pain. Today was tshirt weather until the sun went in and a thunderstorm blew through. And now I want the heat on again though tomorrow will be back in the low 60sF.

Finished?
Tanith Lee, Companions on the Road
--plucked off the shelves, fairly certain I never read it, finished in an afternoon on Sunday. Everything is vaguely kimoi these days, and Lee is no exception, even though this has a happyish ending. Maybe it was the overlapping kimoi of As I Lay Dying, begun right afterwards, that coloured my experience.

Reading now?
Perennially, and getting nowhere:

Seraphina, which I must decide am I reading it or not because it's due back at the library on Saturday. Does it spark joy? No, but it's good enough. Which is good enough until it ceases to be, and then I want something else.

Edmund White, Inside a Pearl
-- subtitled 'my years in Paris.' I had no high hopes of this: expected it to be 'newly famous American author goes to Paris and is feted by the French literati: expect many famous names.' Well, not quite. White goes to Paris as a Vogue writer, having assured them he speaks French fluently, which he doesn't, at all. This would give me anxiety attacks; but White is one of those guys who thinks faking it is a lark. Except that he does then have anxiety attacks over his interviews, which, well, you knew that when you signed on, guy. Still, compared with the bumptiousness of men who go to Japan and fake things, White has a certain charm. For one thing, he works really hard at improving his French, by spending hours lying on a sofa and reading everything he can get.

His American fame doesn't open doors for him, or not for long. He notes that the literati will fete him *once*, and then move on to the next new thing once they've seen this new face that everyone must see. This doesn't bother him because he's busy with his sexual pursuits and affairs with foreigners. It's the foreign lovers who get him into film festivals and the art world, which run differently from the intellectuals, and thank god.

There's still a veil of- alright, here's that word again- kimoi that hangs over the text. Whether it's me in my current funk, whether it's the 80s AIDS crisis background to White's life, whether it's that partial memory I have of reading Caracole in Tokyo where, trust me, its bizarreness read doubly bizarre, I can't say, but I feel I have a 100 Demons' type fuzzy black Thing lowering over my shoulder as I read the list of Famous People White runs into in Paris: none of whom seem at all happy, let alone cheerful.

G.K. Chesterton, Thomas Aquinas
-- bought years ago from a guy selling his library outside the quondam Rochdale, once a counter-culture drug haven, now assisted housing. I figured I could read Chesterton without pain. Not sure I can now. To quote poliphilo over on LJ:
"Chesterton was a polemicist- which is a fancy name for pub bore- and is always banging on about his blasted opinions. He once accused H.G. Wells of having sold his birth right as a story teller for a pot of message- and if there was ever a case of the pot calling the kettle black..." And this isn't fiction, so Chesterton can rant away for pages. Can, hell: does.

Reading next?
Some ebooks may be coming from the library in time for the long weekend. Maybe I should do a reread of 100Demons or even Rainy Willow, just because.

Yesterday was warm, very warm, but S still had the babies wear jackets to go outside. Wind and cloud make a difference. But the evening turned into that unheimlich May topos, close, humid, grey and threatening. Goes with the smell of lilacs and a sort of claustrophobia; I've felt similar once when a tornado passed by several miles away. Light-headed: slightly exhilarating in its unreal fashion but ultimately kimoi.

Chanced on a brief passage in Hyakkiyakki 25, the last grandfather story. Kagyuu's parents died when he was young, and his father's younger brother raised him and his sister. Uncle was also heir to the house and whatever kind of estate there was, passing over his older brother. At uncle's funeral, two business-type men are chatting. 'So the estate goes to the older brother's line after all. Why didn't he inherit in the first place?' 'He made an unfortunate marriage,' end koma. No details as to what was wrong with his choice of wife. But then there are all these youma in the story telling Kagyuu 'you're one of us' and Kagyuu wondering if he's really human. Yes, well. Could it be that his mother was a kitsune or something? Meaning that the oddness in the Iijimas isn't from the Iijima side at all. Of course there's also uncle being quite at home in limeral places, but that might be down to his current state (dead) rather then any inherent onmyouji-like abilities.

I konmari'd my tops and t-shirt drawer the other day. Not sure if this will stick. It looks nice enough, but the refolding and rerolling when you pick a top that clashes with your trousers is a pain.

It's possible that tonight I won't have to turn the heat on, but I'll still have to bundle up well. As ever, temps are set to drop again the next five days, and some lucky folk will get snow.

Accomplished one item on my feet-dragging list. Took bike to store and asked about tune-ups. "Leave it today and you'll have it back in a week." Yes, well.Next step: check out new bikes. Foot-dragging on this is a luxury. In the past I've always had to buy a new bike because the old one was stolen. Maybe being bikeless for a week will give the same impetus.
( Reading )

In an attempt to avoid finishing the latest 100 Demons, I plucked an ancient unread book from the poetry shelf- Norse Poems by W.H. Auden and Paul B Taylor. Read the first one, The Lay of Volund, with a plethora of confusable names. Mh. Volund the crippled smith. Wieland, by any chance? Google a bit, get involved in the Volsungs, sheesh the whole of Scandinavian literature can be summarized as Men Behaving Badly and that includes the Finns. The Norse are at least equal opportunity, since the women behave just as badly as the men.

Then I check my shelves, pull out my Oxford copy of The Poetic Edda, and yes, that's exactly what Auden was translating. Not sure I want to read it anymore.

Meanwhile, Benadryl and codeine cough syrup together guarantee a long protracted sleep, especially if it's dark and raining. Not all that protracted really, since I woke several times to pee or just to float to the surface of consciousness. But back to sleep instantly, or roll onto my other side and sink back down, because delicious delicious sleep is a luxury. Consequently didn't wake up until noon by the clock. Actually I don't mind cold rainy days, but I wish it would stop thundering now. Enh, April. Possible snow tomorrow...

Some day I'll fire up the desktop and not only post at length but answer other people's replies. It just feels like too much trouble, even if the html is easier than on a tablet. My mouse jumps and double clicks and won't highlight properly and it's all so vexing that even tapping with a stylus feels preferable.

Dinner at swanky French restaurant to celebrate mine and my sister's birthdays last January and my brother's today. Aches and stiffness meant I didn't manage even a card for him, and to make matters worse, both he and my sister gave me presents. The presents are alcoholic in esse and in posse (LCBO gift card) so the latter might well be repurposed as one giri no ongaeshi. People who live on tylenol aren't supposed to drink at all, and certainly alcohol hates me these days. Dinner was at invitation of my cousins, aunt's surviving daughter and husband, partly at least as thanks for weekly visits for the last six years. Which still dictate my reflexes: I automatically check the long range weather report for Saturdays and only belatedly recall that there's nowhere I have to go on Saturday.
( Wednesday )

The current state of the me may be indicated by the fact that the latest Hundred Demons arrived on Tuesday and is still in its mailing envelope. This is mostly because I think I can't read Japanese anymore and am afraid of being proved right.

However I made up for some of my feet-dragging today by housecleaning and putting in a new shower curtain and weeding a little in the hall closet. Discovered my suitcase was full of discarded control-top underwear from my hernia days in the early oughties. Have added them to the bag of cloth to be taken to the recyclers since I seem to recall that the menopause weight shift rendered them unwearable, even though I weigh thirty-plus pounds less than I did then. OTOH I spent the day in a pullover from the 80s, just to demonstrate that thirty pounds less is still thirty pounds so long as it's not near the abdomen.

My net surfing turned up a method of journalling- paper journalling- that the writer swears takes no more than a few minutes. You divide the blank page of a notebook into four squares. In the first you write five things you saw that day, in the second five things you did, in the third one thing you heard (more, I suppose, if that's your forte), and in the fourth you do a quick sketch of any of these. Possibly when you're used to this it takes minutes but I had to rack my brains to find five sights of note, and in my now cloistered weekends, even one thing heard. I'm not even going to try sketching. But this may give me something to hook memories onto, different from the bland monotony ofmy daily routine.

I suppose healing takes energy; or maybe allergies drain it. But I seem capable of two hours' usefulness a day and not much more. However, since one hour today was devoted to cleaning out and rebagging several inches of sodden and misplaced garbage from the dilapidated wooden bins at work, I am content. Didn't get it all, especially the stuff that's so casually tossed *behind* the bins, because I can't reach and bend that far or pull out the plastic bins in the way. But I got enough, before it freezes in place, and that's what I was aiming for.

Also Plague has thinned the kiddy ranks at work so I don't even feel the necessity to go in and be a body on Horrible Thursday tomorrow. (Horrible because it's granola for snack day and the clean-up for that requires much more than the half hour allotted to it by people who have never done clean-up.) Unless Plague hits one of the staff as well...
( And in my enforced idleness: reading Wednesday )

Haven't posted because nothing has been happening aside from the usual- work and wandering aches. Lower back/ lumbar at the moment, making walking unpleasant. Have had this pain before, many times: it recurs in spite of chiropracty, physiotherapy, acupuncture, and weight fluctuations. Can't remember what if anything made it go away the last time, and the time before, and back in 2015 when it seriously interfered with meditation, and and and.

But today I went down to the AGO to see what 2018 calendars they have. Not many and nothing that says 'This is IT!!' like last year's Emma Haworth calendar with its long distance views of London. Hokusai, Carr, and O'Keefe, of course; a whole calendar devoted to sections of The Garden of Earthly Delights which I have hanging over my bed and don't need to see in greater detail; and a Canadian artist who does odd representations of animals, so far the best bet. (Midoco had a Hasui calendar with all the warhorses, most disappointing. Maybe when they get more stock in... I mean, I always buy next door a Mucha calendar- the man was beyond prolific- and have no idea what to do if they stop producing art nouveau calendars.)

But being there decided to eat in their restaurant: a $15 Long Island Tea and a $15 appetizer of smoked slamon and marble bread (two slices, I grant you) plus assorted obscure small vegetables. Wish I was rich enough to indulge in a $25 hamburger which has no meat in it, being- as I understand it- a portobello mushroom with trimmings and fries on the side. Pretentions go- well, a lot farther in fashionable restaurants, I believe- but for a sort-of common person's venue like the AGO, that's pretty pretentious.

( Wednesday )

Is cold this evening: autumn come early. Jacket weather in the daytime, closed windows at night.

The latest Hundred Demons is supposedly on its way to me, so I started a reread of the penultimate volume to refresh my memory. It was like opening a door into a forgotten room: oh yes! Ritsu and Akira and Uncle Kai and 'how changed from what he was' Aoarashi. Why yes, I remember them well.

Environment Canada has changed its webpage's coding so that it no longer displays correctly in this version of Chrome, the last version that will work with WinXP. I will will will get a tablet *soon*, because I dislike having to use my phone for something this basic. (And even my phone's browser is out of date, but its version of Chrome is even worse.) Use my laptop? The laptop is still in its box from last May.

Or new joints. Or a permanent nerve blocker. (Staff with rotator cuff injury was given a nerve blocker for her surgery. 'Why can't *I* have one of those?' I demanded. 'Because they're very dangerous,' said the Nurse Trainee, and proceeded to tell me why. So sad.

Last finished?
Matsuura, A Robe of Feathers.
-- reread of Gaijin Writes Youkai, more appreciated now I have more youkai under my belt. Made me wonder if perhaps I'd been rereading Ima Ichiko backwards, as it were: thinking of her as a disjunct from trad youkai (all those long-necked one-eyed bogles) when she was actually adapting them to the modern world. Matsuura does very much the same. I just wasn't seeing her as an Ima Ichiko manga, but should have been.

She has a blog here.

Reading now?
Still with the ack argh everything!

Getting somewhere with The coyote road: trickster tales. Datlow and Windling do good anthologies. Must comment on the stories before I take it back or in a week I'll have forgotten all of it.

Still forging through The Classic which is still in formulaic mode. Will tell you if I ever get to the myth parts.

Don't want to read The Secret Place. Tana French's Dublin blokes are too blokey for me.

The Pound Era and Women who run with the wolves sit and look at me reproachfully. Can I legitimately put them out on the boulevard on the grounds that I tried reading them, I really did, but they bore me? Same is true of The Decameron but I might actually read the second half of that just to say that I did.

And next?
Will there ever be a next? A mystery set in the 18th century is on its way from the library as is one of Shaun Tan's manga. May have better luck with those.

Last finished?
Parker, The Masuda Affair
- The Perils of Akitada. Superiors who hate him, wives who fail to understand him, henchmen who have lives of their own, and communication failures all round. Generally I have limited sympathy for characters who torture themselves about what someone else must surely be thinking or feeling or doing, and Akitada has turned into one of these.

Currently reading?
( Cut for fuman )

My but Li Yu liked putting the wind in his poems. This entry could as easily be called "Last night the wind and rain together blew/ The wall-curtains rustled in their autumn song", except it's this night and the rain hasn't started yet. In fact there's great swaths of blue-black sky showing between the clouds. But the wind certainly buffets my study and billows the curtains enough to knock things from the shelf.

And now I wonder why the English poet wanted the *western* wind to blow, 'That the small rain down can rain'?
( Memeage )

Oh central AC and ativan, how delicious the sleep you bring, how sweet the dreams, how gentle the wakening into a civil dry world that smells of nothing at all. One feels like a human being- one registers the way it 'sposed to be- for a half hour or so, before one leaves the house at Fartooearly.am and goes into the hazy sun and muggy polluted air, bound for a 90 minute dentist appointment.

But all things pass, and the evening wind blows, and it's currently cooler than it was last night (is why the AC was on.)
( Cut for book and RL natter )

In search of an elusive author whose works the library system doesn't have- or has only in unborrowable form- I succeeded in getting my hands on a thumpingly huge short story collection called The Weird. Heart fell when I saw that the ToC included M.R. James' Casting the Runes. James isn't weird: he's terrifying. But if that's an exception: if the other stories are indeed weird tales, it occurred to me I could try reading them as 100 Demons episodes. Which I do, generally to dismal failure. Hand's The Boy in the Tree, Gaiman's Feeders and Eaters, Tagore's The Hungry Stones, Chabon's The God of Dark Laughter, Utley's The Country Doctor (and stories I knew from before: Russ' The Little Dirty Girl, Kafka's In the Penal Colony, Akutagawa's The Hell Screen) are, well, SF or horror or what-have-you, but not the simply Odd that Ima does. With the possible exception of Mieville's Details, which is certainly looking like an Ima manga so far.

Alas, I can't remember what writer it is I want to read. Possibly Michael Cisco.

Alas also, the ToC is in chronological order, which makes finding anything very difficult.

I believe that was Ole Golly from Harriet the Spy talking about being proposed to, but Harriet thinks later that reading makes the world feel bigger too. And reading something as personally and fannishly resonant as Fairs' Point in an out-of-time cool summer (that alas my scrambled brains won't recall, even if it was just this morning) also makes the world feel bigger. The other world of the book, the other world of fandom itself: a great big room with a blue ceiling large as the sky.

Am a little sad it's finished, though one could go back and reread to get the names straight (really wanted a dramatis personae, there.) But am happy there's a spring Ghost Tide, because I've always felt April should have one as well as November. Am happy to see the Prince-Marshal back, even if no one explains how or why he's a prince and a marshal. Really hope there's more coming in this series because I love it so much.

And if I want more fandom, my 100 Demons 23 arrived with great dispatch, a week after it was shipped (air mail all the time for me now.) Let me get through tomorrow's 8-5 day, as I got through today's sleep deprived 9-4 and back for an abortive meeting, and ah! how I shall indulge.

1. Kipling's autobiography is quite fascinating except when he starts being Kipling. Which is not what you're thinking, though there's some of that there too. More, the 'wakaru hito wa wakaru' aspect ('those who know will understand'): opaque sentences referring to some aspect of Indian army life or newspaper editing under the Raj or even his school's headmaster. *He* knows what he's talking about; those who were in the army or the newspaper or the school know what he's talking about; the rest of us don't, and sucks to be us. (Off the top of my head, I associate this opacity most with Stalky and Co, where I never know what on earth is going on, or why. Thi is why Kipling so often fantods me.)

Kipling in fact wasn't bad at rising above his innate prejudices. But in minor details he loses my sympathy. Do not whine to me about the heat of India that drives a man mad, and in the next breath say no really it's an absolute necessity to dress for dinner and you'd like a word or two with those modern slackers who sneer at the notion of wearing waistcoats and jackets in the sweltering months.
( Read more... )

I've never been much good at kissing the joy as it flies, though people all around me encourage me to do so-- from CS Lewis' "the one thing you must not say to God is 'encore!'" thirty years ago to but natch every Buddhist writer presently expounding on the Third Noble Truth.

However, I shall note a joy that flew yesterday: sitting in the local coffee shop finishing Hundred Demons 22, a story of Grandfather and little Ritsu (and how nice to see Ritsu's father before he died) while outside was a yellow-gold November day with the kind of blue sky that vaguely recalls Tokyo. And this, I finally figure out, is because Tokyo is full of ginkgo trees whose leaves turn yellow and stay yellow, lingering on the branches well into December, so the blue and yellow contrast is there for months at a time at the driest season of the year, when the sky actually *is* blue-- unlike, say, April and May.

Realize also that the appearance of 100 Demons is like Christmas: a very nice thing that happens only once a year (though not always in the same month.) So it's as unreasonable to say 'I want more Hyakki Yakki and I want it now' as it is to say 'I want another Christmas, in February this time.'

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 )