Off the Cliff

Summer returns for hopefully a brief interlude: high of 27, humidex of who knows what. Still cool enough at night that I'm not tempted to turn on the AC, though with the mug stink out there I may forego the window fan tonight.

Still trying to make Persian lima bean and dill rice. My preferred brand of frozen limas turns out to be American so I bought tinned instead. Large lima beans, it said, which was fine, whatever, until I got it open. Larger than fava, larger than broad beans: those suckers are huge. Am also seeing why the webpages say to use dried dill. I mean my dill is dried but it started fresh, and though nowhere near as gritty as some I've had, there was still something small and hard that started the Agh a tooth/ filling/ crown has crumbled!!!! panic reaction. But true dried dill doesn't taste like dill, is the problem. And yes I know I shouldn't be having rice at all, even resistant starch cooled rice, but my innards do badly with low-carb abd I can't afford to irritate them when they already want to take exception to my magnesium.

Beaver on through The Lotus Palace, my Tang dynasty mystery cum romance (alas). Am still waiting to find out who the female protagonist is supposed to be They Fight Crime!-ing with. Alas again, is probably not the dour constable of the court whom I favour, but the playboy (but is he *really?!*) dorky love interest. Dommage.

Well yes, that humidex was certainly hot, largely because of the blazing sun that we haven't had to contend with for a few weeks. I mean, I'll take it over smoke any day, but the smoke certainly made a difference to the temps. On the plus paw, a midday wash dried in short order on the line; on the minus, once again did not get out to the library to return holds, nor did I bag up the vines in the back yard. Now that dusk approaches and it's slightly cooler I could, but dusk also brings the mosquitoes out so here I am, indoors still.

Across the street neighbour with the strollers had a wading pool out front and the hose on and his two kids cooling off. So now I know they have two kids, which I was never certain of: a preschool boy, maybe rising four, and a toddler girl of 18 months or so. Front yard because the back faces the burning west, and my guess is it lacks any sort of shade tree. The Sicilian influence is still strong in this 'hood: trees are supposed to earn their keep and anyway, grape vines are better. Though I observe that NND's tulip tree is now a proper tree after four years of being a spindly twig, so Strollers could well plant a tree of their own.

Also Inventing the Renaissance suddenly appears in transit, a good four weeks before I could reasonably expect it, and that will probably knock Terra Nostra on the head while I beaver through it, because of the umpty many other people who have it on hold. Of course, could be that it's just too heavy a book for the dog days and that's why I have it so early.

And of course there's still Return to Dragon Mountain to finish, even if Zhang Dai begins to wear on me. Also sent me haring down the side path of Tao Yuanming whom I hadn't heard of in spite of him being evidently so famous. I mean, I may have, because Home Again and its lack of carriages in front of the house rings bells, except I think I'm thinking of somebody else referencing him, even if I can't remember who. 

The weekend did see me finally putting books out on the front sidewalk. Saturday Whoever only took two of the art books, but when I put them and a whole bunch of others out front again, Whoever took them all and, more importantly, left me the box they were in. Which is not always the case, even if I also provide bags (cloth, from Walmart, copped from someone else's front yard freebie) to facilitate carrying away. 

First wine after ten days abstinence is whee! 

After getting soaked in yesterday's 26C 31 humidex going to the library and back, I was not looking forward to going out today. But it was infinitely dryer and a wind was blowing so really quite bearable except in the sun.

Put my green bin, open, out on the front path to catch last night's rain. And it caught some but at some point my kind neighbours closed it and put it back under the porch overhang, so must still swish it out properly some time.

Maybe just yesterday's muggy grey wanhope, but my reading was fantodding me last night. My Victorian mystery went on and on, and Alison Bechdal's The Secret to Superhuman Strength depressed me in the odd way that Bechdal in bulk does. Fortunately Return to Dragon Mountain, Spence's book about Zhang Dai, is still delightful with his connoisseur's tea brewing and lantern collecting and music playing. Though I wish I'd kept The Way Spring Arrives longer, to reread the story that recollects his winter boat journey and the Moon Orchid tea he and his uncle contrived.

The Shadow Book of Ji Yun is proving to be great fun. These are trufax! stories of things Ji Yun himself witnessed, or his relatives and friends. Already we've had an experience of Immortals confronting human beings in what the translators point out is very like an alien abduction, and a pair of stranded merchants in Tibet being rescued by what sounds like a group of yeti. There's also the father of Ji Yu's tutor, an inventor who constructed something similar to Pratchett's Gonne. The Chinese had firearms by this time but they were all single shot muskets. This man devised a repeating revolver that could shoot 28 times in a row. He was about to send it off to the military authorities but dreamed that night of an Immortal who chided him for creating such an instrument of death, so he swore never to make another and to keep this one hidden. A pity, I think.

Ji's childhood friend remembered his past life but forgot it bit by bit after the age of five: "...up to the age of four years he had very clear memories of his previous life-- including specific events,  friends,  and family members. But around the age of five these memories began to slip away-- tree by lover by co-worker-- until, in a few years, he only recalled that his former life's hometown was close to Chang-shan village..."

Ji himself, when a child, was able to see in the dark as if it were daylight "in a windowless and lampless house in the dead of night" but also started losing the ability about the age of seven. From time to time the 'light at night' ability would return but only for a split second.

One night he dreamed that his dead servant, who had been 'criminal and treacherous' in life, came to him and said, "I humbly offer my services to my master who has been conscripted into the army three thousand miles away." Next day one of his students gave him a black puppy, who went with Ji when he was exiled shortly thereafter, became very attached to his master during his time at the borders, and was indefatigible in guarding the baggage on their return. I don't know if Ji Yun suspected he was for the chop when he had that dream of being conscripted, but he was certainly convinced that the dog was his rascally servant come back to make amends.

Weird Chinese tales are still weird, though the chapter on the netherworld is very homelike, as in, these guys who have near death experiences don't see tunnels and glowing lights. No, it's all bureaucrats and government office buildings, which may just be that the dying brain sees what it expects to see. And when people do see their relatives, they're miserably in a Buddhist hell because they didn't worship Buddha when alive. Those stories one can safely discount as Buddhist propaganda while being annoyed at how all religions seem to default to We Are It. Well, maybe Shinto doesn't.

Also all ghosts seem to be ten feet tall and wearing black caps, which sounds just as bureaucratic to me.

But when I look at the footnotes where the editor gives variant readings from different mss, all 'hanzi hanzi hanzi hanzi hanzi I don't know any of these guys', I feel a distinct hope that next time around I'll be born Chinese and start studying these at a young enough age to remember them.

Otherwise gardening fallout was as expected ie stiff as a board when I woke up. Some day I'll learn to stretch before and after. Or maybe it's that I woke up yesterday with things spasming and shouldn't have been gardening at all. Dommage. Had to be done because all next week is supposed to be, what else, rain, and even today, which was forecast sunny and gave me hope of getting a wash on the line, yielded to thunderstorms mid-day. At least I got the garden waste bags indoors/ under cover before the rain began.

It's a pleasant enough life I lead these days‐ squaredle every morning, Questionable Content every (weekday) evening,  tiktok videos of sheep herding dogs (that's shepherding dogs, Border Collies to be precise) from which I learn that 'Come by' tells the dogs to go clockwise and 'Away' means 'go counter-clockwise', which Pratchett failed to inform me  in the Tiffany Aching books. Also Chinese webnovels at need. Approach the end of vol 3 of MDZS and discover the library doesn't own vols 4 & 5 in any form, alas. There are kindle versions for not excessive amounts though I'd hoped to be done with amazon and kindle for at least a month after having glutted myself on David Wishart through most of October. And in any case I have not merely two volumes of Heaven Official to get through but Hild as well, appearing at the library just as the library's computers went down, and I doubt Hild reads as quickly as Chinese BL.

I walk even when it rains because my wonted sedentary life will barely get me a hundred steps. Today was sun and dry and brilliantly yellow, so I didn't have to deal with the leaf mat that sticks to the walker's wheels and requires carrying a water bottle and a cloth to remove them periodically. Can only conclude that I never went out walking in the days before my operation, or not in the rain, because I don't recall having this problem at all two years ago and now it's a chronic one, spring and fall. Of course, what I did get today was a dry leaf secreting itself invisibly in the casing and driving me mad with its rustling. Rain returns tomorrow,  of course, and temps fall to normal or below. Got a last laundry on the line- shall rely on the furnace hereafter- and filled a garden waste bag with leaves from the front yard trees. Elbows and back screamed at me for doing so. I hope tomorrow's acupuncture will ease the former at any rate. And then I can go back to sleeping in in the mornings. I have no objection to waking at 9:15 but I hate getting up then, and people *will* give me 1 p.m appointments that obviate against sleeping in till 11:30.

And may I say how very very much I hate those paper garden waste bags? They're too deep to reach into to unfold the bottom quarter but if you don't they fall over and fall down and generally induce screaming rage in me. I swear I'm going to start cutting the top foot off just to ease the frustration.

Seen today: two guys tipping over one of the huge recycle bins (a good 1.5 metres in height) so the idiot raccoon that had somehow got itself inside it could get itself out. Also two hopping insects, a bit small and dull to be grasshoppers, disporting themselves amongst the fallen leaves.

Being late as ever to current trends, and having a resistance to actually watching things, I passed by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's oeuvre, whether novels or anime, after a very brief dip ito both. But a tumblr post about Heaven Official's Blessing led me to believe there was a manhwa about that so I checked out our library system and put holds on the first volumes. Then figured if there was manhwa around, they must have done MDSZ as well, and put holds on those. Vol 1 trotted in today so I limped over (bad knee day, bad IT band day, crippled day, in short) to get it because it's going to rain tomorrow. And of course it's not a GN, it's a thumpingly thick novel, vol 1 of what? 5, 6? whose style isn't much better in the authorized translation than in the fan sub.

Oh, and for some reason the pages are perfumed. Not sure if that's intentional, or just someone reading with hands carefully washed in strong soap.
 
Volume 2 arrived later in the day but it can wait till Saturday. But I'll be interested to see what it smells like.

Yesterday was a total write-off, not only because it was raining but because my right side everything went sproing and I could barely move. Hip flexors and glutes, mainly, which sometimes complain but not like this. So it was beanbags and muscle relaxants all day, meaning I dozed periodically and finished Mr. Currelly furnishing his museum with a lot of coincidental luck and a lot of wealthy friends. Pirate Bishop White didn't turn up until page 245. Currelly admires Pirate Bishop White who, he says, once held off not one but two Chinese warlords intent on sacking the town of which he was bishop. This might or might not be true. I mean, Currelly also believes the story that it was Armenian activists intent on bringing down the Turkish government that started the Armenian genocide.

One can't expect someone born in the 19th century to question whether it's a good thing to amass goods from other cultures for the edification of one's own, but at least he thought it was for edification: since people can't go to China to see how wonderful Chinese culture is, we'll bring Chinese culture here. Sacking of summer palaces aside, at least some of the works he brought here were sold by mandarins anxious to raise cash to get them the hell away from the warlords. Others-- like the famed Buddhist reliefs-- were sold by starving monks whose food had been confiscated by said warlords. So you might argue for some sense of preservation there.

Today was some better, after vigorous stretching and rolling on foam rollers and tennis balls, enough that I walked to acupuncture and back, which was probably a bad idea. Also wrote out a holograph will on a form that I bought decades ago, since the dates all start 19. But now I need two witnesses to sign in my presence and each other's, which is a slight nuisance since people come to my house in singletons and it's not that easy going to my neighbours'. Requires going up steps. However, I suppose I can manage it. I also seem to recall, from my younger brother's law classes, that holograph wills with no witnesses have been admitted to probate, like the guy who died out in the wilderness and wrote 'all to Minnie' on his shirt before doing so. And of course, one hopes it won't be needed in the near future.

Dreamed an actual coherent ghost story last night, most of which stayed with me on waking. I was staying at a kind of northern cottage, or a house in the lake region, with an old man and woman, and everything was fine until she wanted me to move downstairs to another room. And after that they started acting weird in ways I couldn't define until the cops showed up, led by a black guy, and they started poking and knocking on things.  There were corpses inside the hollow trunk of a tree that grew inside the house- 'maybe 150'- and the old man certainly and his wife maybe were also dead. But then the old man's wendigo spirit took over the head cop, whose eyes went milky, and that's when the phone woke me up.

The phone was probably another scam call and not the dentist I assumed it was, because there was no message. Some time thereafter I got a call from the accountancy firm, who has my return ready. 'So can you come and get it?' My sweet summer child, there's a pandemic on and you're at the ends of beyond and your letter said this would all be done online. But that was the chief accountant's letter and this was one of the underlings. She's going to courier it to me and it will arrive 'some time in the next five business days' oh joy. Because I will be out Friday and out Monday. 'Is there some place they can deliver it instead where someone will be in?' Sweet summer child, no. We do not all have concierges or workplaces, not in the current pandemic-have-you-noticed.  So I hope they call the number I provided before attempting a delivery.

Finished?

Gaiman, Neverwhere
-- the best of Gaiman's oeuvre, I think. Everything else of his is not quite quite for some reason.

Reading now?

The Medieval Murderers, The Tainted Relic
-- sort of a samplar of various medieval murder writers, generally undistinguished. Though I'm checking out the one who writes Elizabethan players.

Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets
-- academic study of guanxi, the Chinese version of コネ I think, the grease that oils the social wheels. Heavy-duty bicycle reading. 

Gaiman, Stardust
-- because I remember absolutely nothing about this. So far, it's Gaiman does Mirrlees.

Next?

I suppose I could reread The Princess Bride,

Because my reflex when things go wrong is to throw money at it, when my doctor said I had to get more exercise to lower my cholesterol I immediately went online and ordered an under the table pedal machine, something I'll need anyway if I ever get my knee fixed. It came yesterday, and while I'm hoping the cholesterol stats are another lucky accident, I ignored my technophobia and unpacked it today. Cheapo brand so cheapo action but it will do. Trouble is the stirrups have velcro straps and the straps are too big, but then I realized it's for yahoos who wear their shoes indoors, so I will use it with running shoes. 20 minutes a day three times a week, they say, which is eminently doable.

Also ordered missing Judge Dees from the Canuck equivalent of Amazon, which is bad but at least not as bad as Amazon. On a hunch got Judge Dee at Work and am relieved to find that the missing page was reinserted in later print runs. So that's ok.

Fasting blood test today meant going without meds for eighteen hours (take with food anti-inflams) which demonstrated that I really can't go without meds for eighteen hours. Especially when I arrive at the lab at the busy time (9-10:30) and must stand social distancing in hallway for fifteen minutes. Can no longer stand for long periods of time or back seizes up, which it ought not to do given how much I stretch it and do core strengthening. Blah.

Newcomers in the neighbourhood: north NNDs' four year old returns from extended visit with Grandma while parents move in. Plays in the back yard in the evening gloaming, shooting a miniature basketball into his miniature basketball hoop, while Turkish father smokes outside. South NND's Very Good Girl Sadie chews her bone and barks forlornly when N goes inside instead of playing with her. And mysteriously: at night something technical goes Bingley-bingley-beep at random moments (actually more, bing-eley-boop!) and I can't or the life of me think what it could be. I never hear it during the day and I can't even tell where it's coming from.

 Oh, here it is. Rather where I expected it to be, in the Chinese poetry collection Huajian ji xu (among the flowers), edited by Ouyang Jiong. This one is by Wen Tingyun.

The moon rises on high, shining in the sky at midnight
It is quiet in the screens, there is no one to talk to
In the deep recesses, incense still lingers
As she sleeps, she wears a trace of make-up.

Long ago she held her flowering beauty dear
But how can she endure memories of the past?
The flowers wither, and the moonlight fades
Under the quilts she feels the cold of days.

The collection is all qi poetry, verses written to set tunes. As if a whole bunch of people had written new lyrics to Greensleeves, as the translator says. The theme of all Wen's poetry, at least, seems close to Kipling's Queen Elizabth

The Queen was in her chamber, and she was middling old.
Her petticoat was satin, and her stomacher was gold.
Backwards and forwards and sideways did she pass,
Making up her mind to face the cruel looking-glass.
The cruel looking-glass that will never show a lass
As comely or as kindly or as young as what she was!

Beauties faded by time and abandoned by their lovers, mainly.
The poem that has qingming day in it is the previous one in the series; I was conflating them.

The Chinese series 庆余年 | Joy of Life has Uncle Ming in it, apparently still stealing scenes. Now I *have* to get my laptop repaired.

Oh, did we think we'd get through July without a blackout? Hardly. Ninety minutes this morning from 7 to 8:30. But hahaha, it went out on the coolest night in three weeks and hohoho I was sleeping the sleep of the ativanned just, so the fans suddenly stopping didn't wake me until quarter of eight. Thus I had to endure a mere forty-five minutes of merely mild anxiety, because ativan has a holdover effect that way as well: it's not just for getting to sleep after AGO coffee. (Note that the AGO Bistro's Karma Chameleon cocktail is a neat trick- it changes colour when you pour the tonic in- but otherwise it's just a G&T with a frozen ice-flower in the middle. Also the chameleon effect is better seen at the bar's blond wood than at a table already covered in burgundy something.)

Just finished?
Oh, whichever Christie it was, or were- Elephants Can Remember, 4:50 from Paddington, A Caribbean Mystery, A Holiday for Murder aka Hercule Poirot's Christmas.

Reading now?
Nemesis, because it's easy.

Possibly I'm still reading Molly Tanzer's Creatures of Will and Temper, but will stop if something doesn't happen soon. Dorian Grey isn't my cup of tea, and it doesn't matter if it's a gender-switched Dorian.

Not finishing?
Patricia Finney, Unicorn's Blood, because while I'm happy to read all about how Elizabeth I got dressed and toiletted in the morning, I do not care for John le Carre hommages, or indeed for John le Carre period. If I absolutely had to choose something to read, among spies, zombies, and gangsters, I'd choose spies as being just marginally the least boring. But I find all three genres about as fascinating as the user's manual for an outdated technology.

Tiptree, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
-- my own fault. Having waited months for this library collection of Tiptree stories to come round to me, I discover that Tiptree, a science fiction writer, wrote science fiction short stories, oddly enough. (And these all seem to be novella length.) Marvellous if you like SF, but I'm a fantasy person. Shall pass it on to the next waiting hands.

Next?
I shall run out of Christies eventually.

But there are my beaver bread-and-butter readings, that I return to periodically: The Kalevala, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (which I cherish for the simple prosiness of the events: no awe and terror here) and recently, Piers the Ploughman, with glosses, because I never got anywhere in it without.

1. Poems of the Late Tang, exactly where it should be, on the Chinese shelf in the study. Or one copy of same, because it's much more dilapidated and about to fall apart than I remember it being. Re-reading, am not sure why I found Li He 'Harrowing' the first time around, not in Graham's translation. Online is a different story:
( Cut for verse )

2. Grey pants. 'Could I have left them on the line?' I thought last week, glancing out the back door. No. But when I went to hang today's wash on the line, there were my pants carefully folded over the porch rail, where they'd been in all weathers for two weeks, not one. Well-aired at least.

3. Lost: went out to bring the bicycle in. My rain cape was lying beside it on the lawn. Could it have fallen out by itself? No, because my head-light has disappeared, stolen by one of the pesky youth in the neighbourhood, who seem to have made an attempt on the rear light as well before taking off. Just when I thought it was safe to leave things outside. At least pesky youth lack the skills to detach my various neighbours' bicycles from their various porch rails: or lack so far.

PS. The harrowing translations are by Frodsham, whose book I must get. Two reviews that quote even stranger verses can be found here and here .

I am grateful that the snow hasn't started yet and I can still bike, because my knee and ankle are very upset about something and I don't know what.
( Speak, Memery )

paleaswater used to get fantoddy about the folk practices in 100 Demons, like bringing rocks down from the mountains or walking a certain route in the countryside without looking behind you. She said something to the effect of 'these people just didn't think like us.' A daughter of the Revolution might well look askance at something so foreign to her milieu. Cradle Catholic me, who unblinkingly accepted saint's hearts put on display in glass reliquaries and thin wheat wafers that are really and truly, no *really*, the body of a man murdered two millennia ago on the other side of the world, had no difficulty at all with these benign Japanese practices that only fleetingly, if at all, recall bloody dark deeds and obscure beliefs.

(The Japanese used to have human sacrifice. They'd wall someone up in the foundations of a bridge, for instance. And the one story I read about this custom- one of Yumemakura's Seimei stories- had the spirits of the sacrifices making a ruckus to alert the world that the foundation of their bridge was about to collapse. Like, you may not want to be a human sacrifice and you may insist that the wife who informed the authorities that you had the marks needed to be the sacrifice also die with you, but in the end *of course* duty trumps everything. Whatever happened to that Japanese staple, urami? In Ima Ichiko, it's saved for people who starved during famines.)

But the oddity is that the Chinese stories in The Classic fantod me in spades. They recall a dark and primordial world where, yes, people don't think like we do.
( Maybe it's the translation? )

1. OK, autumn says, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Forget those balmy lows of 15/16 and those daytime humidexes of 30. We're going for COLD (ie under 10) with a north wind to back it. Close the windows, wrap up in quilts and flannel, pray you don't need the furnace this early. And now I'm almost wishing I had a space heater, though those things suck electricity, just to warm up the bedroom, the way the window A/C cools it down.

2. One positive reinforcement of adulting is the nice clean fresh-smelling terrycloth robe. Oddly, this doesn't work for sheets and pillow cases, but that's because I do those at home in energy-efficient cold water detergent, which doesn't smell nearly as nice as the laundromat's hot water Tide.

3. Note trees going red, street gutters golden with fallen ash leaves (if they are), pure white clouds in blue sky etc. A brisk Thanksgiving, I think, unlike the past two or three years: but then look at past stats and discover it's quite as warm as those past Thanksgivings. Try 2012 with its highs, not lows, of 8 and 9. And last night my bro and s-i-l went swimming in Lake Erie, so yeah.
( Cut for reading )

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 )

The tropic-dwelling will think I'm barking, but for this Canuck, a low of 20C is nowhere low enough for comfortable sleeping. Dry, I can manage, but give it a little mug and I want the AC on.

I ache in odd places after yesterday's cleaning, unless I just ache from the mug. Plans for trimming hedge and cutting up dead wood branches have been put on hold.
( Cut for July stats )

What have you just finished?
Sorceror to the Crown. Review in Bakka said it clearly could have been longer. Yes, exactly. A Jonathan Strange type novel needs Jonathan Strange type largeness. (Mind, look how long JS&MN took to write: not everyone has that kind of leisure, esp not when they're a full-time lawyer as well.) Sorceror needs more space for the characters to expand into because almost all of the characters could happily be expanded. In omniscient third, preferably. This might give us a little less unremitting Everyone Hates Zacharias except his Two True Friends (one of whom doesn't count.) A little more variation in people's response to him would work a fair treat.

What are you reading now?
Peony in Love by Lisa See. Delighted that what I thought would be a fairly ordinary social novel set in Qing China (riffing off Red Chambers but of course) just turned into a ghost story. I await developments.

What will you read next?
Probably a very bad idea, but License to Quill is on its way to me at the library. "License to Quill is a page-turning James Bond-esque spy thriller starring William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe during history's real life Gunpowder Plot." Oh dear oh dear.

Possibly some solid bread and butter reading like The Poetic Edda or Piers the Plowman, books acquired to be read on long cold winte evenings, which is what we're having now.

Dear god, I would so wear these if I could ie if I had a waist. Especially the pants. 2016 Chuyan spring&summer collection; inspired by traditional Chinese clothes hanfu. Colors and patterns from dunhuang murals.

Never thought I went for the orangeys, but I suppose there's another name for these colours?

So, well, went to a Buddhist lecture finally, go me. Speaker for the Kadampa sect of Tibetan Buddhism. Sounded promising- 'Buddha taught that happiness and suffering are feelings- parts of our mind- and so their main causes are not to be found outside the mind. If we want to be truly happy and free from suffering, we must learn how to control our mind.'
( So far, so good )

Today I finally got myself to the museum for the Forbidden City exhibit. Pretty interesting, but I should have brought a list of the Qing emperors with me, because I kept getting the 4th, 5th and 6th ones mixed up. The exhibit has a way of putting these Emperors' quotes on the walls accompanied not by their name but their portrait. -_- The history line with portraits and names was back at the entrance-- and yes, I did keep making my way through the winding and confusing layout to go check which was the Yongzheng Emperor and which the Qianlong. Luckily it wasn't crowded: this would have been impossible at the terracotta warriors. Also the aerial view of the city itself, available on any number of i-pad-type installations with pop-up labels, was all very well: but nowhere was there a map with all the buildings labelled, even though the exhibit kept mentioning individual structures by name. (Nor did I realize these things on the wall were tablets until I saw the usual tech-savvy eight-year-old swiping one to enlarge the picture.)

Didn't-quite-finish-it book of January was Qiu Xiaolong's When Red is Black, an Inspector Chen mystery set in Shanghai as all his books are, so far. Much is made of the local style of architecture, the shikumen house, which is essentially what we'd call a row house with a front wall and gate, and evidently a courtyard where we would have a front garden.
( But no one tells me what I want to know )

I'm not as great a fan of Po Chu-i (properly, Bo Juyi/ Bai Juyi/ 白居易) as Waley was, but then maybe Bai is one of those Does Not Translate guys. OTOH there are occasional gems like this:

Rising Late and Playing With A-Ts'ui, Aged Two

All the morning I have lain snugly in bed
Now at dusk I rise with many yawns.
My warm stove is quick to get ablaze;
At the cold mirror I am slow doing my hair.
With melted snow I boil fragrant tea;
Seasoned with curds I cook a milk-pudding.
At my sloth and greed there's no one but me to laugh;
My cheerful vigour none but myself knows.
The taste of wine is mild and works no poison;
The notes of my lute are soft and bring no sadness.
To the Three Joys in the book of Mencius
I add the fourth of playing with my baby-boy.

Supposing that he kept the usual way of counting ages, this really was a baby boy and not a two year old. (By our way of counting, Tsui died at two.) Nice domesticity and all, but guy, really? Was the baby in bed with you all the time you were sleeping in? And didn't demand to be fed, not once? That's the part that defies belief.

It occurred to me to wonder how epsom salts work. I googled and at once came across a Canadian page telling me they don't and can't. Like acupuncture, you know? Like acupuncture, best damn placebo I know of, because a saltless bath doesn't make me unhurt the same way.

Virtue is its own reward dep't: it snows every night, half an inch, an inch, enough to get trodden into ice. So every day I go out with the trusty ice chopper and scrape away the new accumulate from my block. Was doing it yesterday before work when a voice calls me from the porch of whatever house I was in front of. Is Mama Paisani next door, with a bottle of Valpolicella wine for me (bought, a rarity in this neighbourhood.) Ah, pseudo-boeuf bourguignon, here I come.
( Read more... )