Off the Cliff

Had one of my 'won't get out of bed' mornings, because the window fan was blowing cool air and I was warm under the duvet and if I got up I'd have to do my exercises and I didn't wanna. So it was noon when I finally got up and there went half of a pleasant summer day. Did none of the things I might have done, like laundromatting sheets and towels, or taking broken lamp to Wieners to have the switch replaced, if they still do that. This partly because, though I haven't worked in four years and change, a holiday Monday will still sometimes screw my time sense and I kept thinking it was Saturday, when both laundromat and Wieners will be crowded. And laundromat  tends to have pop up second-hand clothes sales on weekends as well as that blasted coffee shop, so one can't get at the machines for the happy couples labbing and jorking and literally coffee shopping.

Also thought it was the Glorious 25th, but that too is tomorrow.

Did get up to Loblaws for the thing I knew I needed but hadn't been able to recall earlier in the week, which was Lysol tablets for the toilet tank, now I observe the mold begins to grow again. Maybe I should buy gingko biloba to aid my deteriorating memory, but deterioration may owe more to heat and vodka than age. Did have virtuous egg white and turkey bacon muffin and watched the trees do their summer Hasui thing. Rain tomorrow, of course. Couldn't recall what happened last month and checked entries to find out. Last month rained. And had an eclipse, but since April also snowed and this week the temps scraped 30C/ 85F, last month is ancient history now.

Thin snow falling all day but not sticking to the ground. Yesterday looked out the back window at the snow covered roofs, smelled the sweet tang of  wood smoke, thought how very December this March scene looked. But because the snow, whenever it fell- Friday, I guess, two weeks in a row- had disappeared from the sidewalks, out I went with my walker both days. Shopping, of course. Necessities, or what the mind conceives of as such: duck paté, pickled onions, rye bread, and then up to the wine store for a bottle of Chardonnay. Today over to the Palmerston greengrocers for raspberries, and a fried chicken sandwich at Mary Brown's (home grown Canuck Maritimes, infinitely preferable to KFC or Popeye's.) Moving does, yes, keep things limber(er) so must go on doing it. The left knee is beyond hope now, and odd things will tighten up elsewhere, but never the same things two days running, which I suppose is progress.

Beaver on through Palimpsest, getting the same odd oogies as I got from Edmund White's autobiography. You can't call it name dropping when the Names are actually people Vidal knew, and at least I can keep them straight because (unlike White) they're people I know of too. But the whole thing has a distinctly lowering effect. I'd prefer to keep on with When the Angels Left the Old Country, but that's tablet reading and my tablets keep runnjng out of charge. Yes, it would help if I read my ebooks on them instead of scrolling through Bored Panda for hours, which is what I do after I've been walking.

Yesterday was Pratchett's eight year yahrzeit and today is the third anniversary of our entry into the new world order. At least it's become familiar now, and has lost the bright strangeness of those first months. But with me the straitened Covid world is also inseparable from my straitened crippled world, even if three years ago I was much more able-bodied than I am now. I have to remind myself that I had the same lower back issues for years before anything blew up: always had to stretch out before getting on my bike, always had the same tightness in the hips. I just wonder if that's ever going away.

Sotheby's, or is it Christie's, is having a sale of woodblock prints. English prices are double what's being asked over here. The same Hasui I own is valued at £1000-2000 and might bid higher. This is nice should I ever want to sell through an English auction house, supposing I knew how, but disastrous for estate valuation purposes. Better gift them in good time.

Days like today, all cool green and blue, make me think, for no good reason, of Chesterton:

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?

The flowers are irises, blooming in every garden throughout the neighbourhood in impeccable Japanese fashion, and possessing for once a distinct perfume. (The Japanese iris festival is traditionally on the fifth day of the fifth month by the old calendar, so *not* May 5: much more like June 7.)

Days like today remind me of bright late summer afternoons in the house I grew up in-- sun through the wind-blown branches making flickering patterns on the blue carpets. They recall, just, an afternoon walking the back streets of Waseda, brown wooden houses surrounded by rare tall trees, or a Saturday afternoon walking the perimeter of the imperial palace before ending up in... Kojimachi? Akasaka?; or the end of Nerima-ku where friends lived that I crashed with from time to time, most illegally: odd corners of Tokyo seen in my first year there.

Days like today make me think the Buddhists are right: now is the perfect moment.

(This all blew in yesterday evening in an even more marvellous fashion, which now I can't quite recall: glowing grey&white cold-front clouds, rents of blue sky, western sun shafts through the gleaming green world. Hasui may have a picture of it somewhere, but it's not really something that a moist country like Japan does often.)

Reading Spence's book about the late Ming essayist Zhang Dai, can't help thinking what a lovely time the rich Ming literati seemed to have had.

Zhang Dai mentions other clubs or groups that his own relatives convened-- his grandfather had a history club, one of his uncles had a humor club and Zhang's own father loved to meet with a select group to discuss etymologies of old place names and to set geographical conundrums.

I mean, not very different from online society in terms of activity, back in the days of MLs; but how much pleasanter to meet face to face over tea or wine.

Zhang Dai sounds to me like a Chinese counterpart to Sei Shonagon, writing brief polished vignettes of aesthetic moments in his life that stuck in his memory-- moon viewing with a group of actresses, tea brewing with his refined uncle, a boat trip on a lake after a great snowfall. He wrote these down after the fall of the Ming, when he was living in solitude and partly in hiding from the new Manchu warlords, because he refused to shave his head in the ugly Manchu style. Zhang's memory became sharper with privation, having what I'd call detailed flashbacks to his glorious past in his reduced present. I envy him: the best I can do is fleeting phantom impressions, out the corner of the mental eye, that says '*this* is like something you saw in Tokyo, or Spain, or 1958, if only you could remember what it was.' In the absence of memory, I have to let Hasui do my remembering for me.

AMLA has disappeared from yahoo groups. Or possibly I, the list maintainer, have somehow been bounced from AMLA. But so far it appears to be gone.

In other news, I have two Hasui calendars hanging on my walls. Well, four, actually, because 2009 and 2010 have been turned to my favourite prints therefrom. The other two, 2011 and 2012's, arrived from kickinpants earlier this week, which is commendably fast (it usually takes two weeks plus to get anything here from Seattle.) I suppose it was because she sent them traceable and requiring signature. She also gifted me with a personally dedicated volume of Connie Willis short stories (where have you been, TTG?) and Havemercy. I take it this is Lady Jaida turned pro? It is all very lovely and I am extremely happy, especially with Hasui's Meiji Iris Garden and the rainy hot springs. This outfit rather tends to fixate on Hasui's snow and temple scenes-- there's four each in both calendars-- which I think is a mistake. Seen one red temple in snow with umbrella-carrying kimono-clad woman and you've seen them all.
( Cut for earworms )

This month's Hasui calendar print is the stunning Evening at Itako. There's a later print with the same name that I think is the one I'm half-remembering when I look at the May trees from my study window. Nice to have that settled. (And the Sanno Shrine that looks like Japan did in '89. And the Rain at Kawarago This site has the colours 'right' ie possibly not the way the prints actually look, but the way the country does in my mind.)

Oh and hmm, who is Gekko Ogata? He looks interesting.

Otherwise, May's embarrassing stats:

Holdstock, The Hollowing
Pratchett, Going Postal
Francis, Odds Against
Francis, Comeback

I wish that this was due to my assiduous studying for the JLPT but I think it's caused more by chronic dry eye and the inability to see out of my lenses by evening. Took me ten days to read the Holdstock alone and explains the absence of any Japanese at all, bar textbooks.

This is a good time of year to do that 'what makes you happy' meme. Many disked sets of Uncle Ming is a good start, but today it was followed by kickinpants' Christmas package. It contains a Hasui calendar, and I nearly wept when I looked at the plates.
( Reason being-- )

JagNORmous hunter's moon near the horizon tonight. Lost half its size once in the sky, but still. Big. Big and SCAReeee.

The weekend was gorgeous. Clearest blue skies, softest warm sun, trees gold and red and purple. Went for a walk yesterday evening and kept saying 'Hasui. Hasui. All these Hasuis *everywhere*.' Yellow autumn trees against dark green ones. Bands of sunset clouds across an innocent blue sky. Dark tree branches against a salmon coloured background.

But I started collecting Hasui twenty years ago. How come it's only in the last five years that I've started seeing him all over the place?
( Broadband, is howcum )

Does anyone else do this? For the last few days I was reading a short story collection where Sherlock Holmes solves real murders of the time- Drs. Crippen and Cream and the brides in the bath etc. Yesterday I was playing with Hasui prints online, making icons (oh the fun of running the masters through Photoshop) when I wasn't scanning bits of Hana to Ryuu and putting the translation together. The result is the most appalling mental soup, with me wandering about thinking in the back of my mind that I've been away somewhere where people were dealing with yakuza crimes back in early Taishou. (Hasui was actually Shouwa, but hell--) No, that was just something you read. Now I'm reading a manga set in unspecified medieval Japan; I wonder how that will go with the curry I made today?

( About that Hasui though... )