flemmings | Entries tagged with language

Paupers is only having its turkey dinner on the 24th and 25th so it was today or never. (Yesterday had too much snow to go out.) Crunched out over salt and/or untreated snow on twinging feet (feet do not like boots) and had a reasonable dinner with a lot of wine because wine is exempt in the HST holiday. Then discovered the wine store was unaccountably open so threw caution to the winds and bought pseudo-Bailey's Irish Cream and will stay drunk on same until Friday.

Have finished at least two or three of Martin Edwards' collection of Golden Age detective stories. Go down easily, leave no traces. Have another on the go plus a Michael Innes, Lament for a Maker with its pleasant Scots vocabulary, most of which I understand either from R L Stevenson or my childhood or, for all I know, those Middle English classes in uni. (Which have me puzzled. I remember taking Chaucer my last year, and remember that somehow I knew Gawain in either '71 or '72 because I remember telling the plot to a sick housemate to distract her from her acheypains, but can't for the life of me recall anything else from that course.)

Got a promising mystery from the library about a mummy in the Brit.Mus and various shenanigans attached thereto, but it began with an amateur yobbo assistant at same measuring and weighing and unwrapping the specimens. Then I come on a sentence where said assistant is vivisecting a mummy and no, I really can't go on.

So am reading Thief of Time instead. Oddly, because that and Night Watch were what got me into Pratchett finally, back in 2008, I'm finding it rather a mishmash. But second class Pratchett is still better than most people's first class, so shall continue.

Library holds continue to trot in with no regard for 'four weeks wait' notices. Thus Murderbot 3 appeared yesterday, which is a problem since my hold on Murderbot 2 was still showing umpty many weeks wait. But amazon gave me a credit for my delayed envelopes so I got 2 for about five bucks. At which point library tells me 2 is in transit. Oh well. Cancel that and proceed with Artificial Condition. Only it appears that what I thought was no.3 is actually no.4 and the real no.3 is 'eleven weeks wait.' (Really, Murderbot titles are as bad as Dick Francis' for confusibility.) Do I believe them and buy the kindle edition for 15 bucks, or do I trust that it will come in before my no.4 is due back at the library?

Bro was by on Saturday to pick up mail, which was not tax stuff, since he's already done his taxes, but an application for some government program that my accountant deals with for me. Weird that Service Canada would send his T5s to the new address but not this. Governmental right hand not knowing what the left does, even within the same ministry. But that aside, bro says he does an hour of duolingo French every morning, which amazes me. Quite apart from finding Duolingo annoying and thinking my French is better served by actually reading French, I can't summon the discipline for even mild language study. It seems pointless now. I know I'll never go back to France and certainly never to Japan so why bother? S-i-l was doing Russian because she intended to go there before Putin happened and for all I know still intends to after history deals with him, but my s-i-l is not a Johnson.

My front yard is covered in easy care ivy, which is fine by me, but I notice that the ivy has deserted the front third of the yard. Maybe there's too much dead wood, or maybe-- as I noted today-- the ivy prefers to grow up the birch tree instead. I was happy to let it do that because ivy strangles trees and that would solve my problem with the birch. But not if it's going to denude my front yard. So have pulled down a good swathe and will pull down more once I get the clippers out because it's climbed out of my reach and clings tenaciously to the upper trunk.

Was feeling hungry on my morning erranding and not disposed for my pricey restaurants-- accountants must be paid this month so economy is advised. Thus I stopped by the Tim Horton's down by the subway station and stood in the very long line and listened to the babble of conversation around me in, conservatively, about five different languages I don't know. The Korean grammas like to congregate there, but there were also a goodly number of turbans and saris, also what I thought were niqabs but couldn't be because Eid isn't till this evening. Although the possible niqabi may just have been with the white guy who was ordering. And this is why I really don't want to move away from this area.

Mh well, that was interesting. Clouds parted just enough at the beginning to make people believe they'd actualy see the eclipse and then rolled back in. Even so the err 'whatever you call the 99% point' we got here was pretty Tartarean apocalyptic: sky went a pre-serious-storm purply grey, street lights came on, birds shut up. But it wasn't any four minutes that I could see. Two minutes later the light was back, SND's fairy lights turned off, birds went back to their mating calls. Still, much more satisfactory than 2017's 90% 'pale afternoon' eclipse.

I was thinking last night that I'd heard nothing about the latest Hyakki Yakki, supposedly bought for me on March 10 by the company that buys these things. Was resigned to not seeing it in this life, but this morning comes an email from Buyee: book has arrived at our facility please choose delivery method. Yes well. Buyee doesn't offer my preferred SAL delivery: they pretty much force you to choose between DHL and sea mail. The exchange rate is very much in my favour, but still. The book cost me eight dollars; shipping is more than four times that. Ouch.

They also think the series is called Hyakki Yagosho which had me doubting my sanity and my eyesight for a bit until googling said that yes, the voiced g is a possible reading of the kanji but no it's not the one Ima Ichiko uses, and it's still a long o. Faith restored.

(Am reading a YA novel set in Korea about, basically, Korean youkai, and I have to say, one reason I prefer Japanese is that Japanese only has five vowel sounds while Korean has more than I can count and, for sure, more than I can hear. *But also*, Korean insists on voicing its consonants. And the bias of an English speaker is to unvoiced: k is elegant, g is not, ch is elegant, j is not, t is elegant, d is not, p is elegant, b is a peasant. Li Po and Tu Fu are elegant poets, Li Bai and Du Fu are clodhoppers. And a kitsune in Korean is a gumiho, which, well, is too close to gummi bear for comfort.)

People are going on about how Korean is so easy to learn because it's so close to Japanese and hey it's got an alphabet! No kanji! Anyone can pick up Korean! And I'm over here weeping because I don't care how beautiful and elegant hangul is, I don't care that the letters show you what shape your mouth is (lies, all lies)

a) all hangul look the same to me. As bad as the indigenous alphabets where < and > are actual letters

and

b) I *need* kanji to know what a language is saying. This is like when I tried to learn Cantonese after a year of Japanese and had to stop because my mind insisted that Chinese had to have particles so I'd know what part of speech that word is (hint: it doesn't) and the word order is all wrong even though it's basically the same word order as my native language. Bref, Japanese has burrowed into my brain so deeply it's become a crutch

and

c) Korean *sounds* are different from Japanese. Especially the vowels. Especially those vowel&consonent sounds that don't exist in English. I know there's a version of Korean that sounds like Japanese-that-doesn't-make-sense, and evidently it's an accent not a dialect, but generally that's not the Korean I hear around here. Basically, I can't hear the Korean they speak around here. It won't resolve into syllables.

Anyway I'd rather learn Welsh or Maōri, if I could find a decent tutorial. Two languages that I will never have an opportunity to use.

To the best of my knowledge David Wishart is Scots, so I was pleased with myself when my subconscious parsed the 'porkies', that people often tell Marcus Corvinus, as cockney rhyming slang: pork pies = lies. I still figured 'the whole boiling' for a Caledonianism until my subconscious suggested 'boiling pot = lot.' Ah well. It would appear to be impossible for an outsider to learn all the cockney rhymes available.

The trouble with sleeping past 11 is that I can't roll over and go back to sleep as I can do if I wake at 9. Yes, well. Life is rough.

Of course I also woke out of a frustration dream of trying to get three babies back to daycare, at night, in a triple stroller, through the University College (UofT version) campus, gone suddenly baroque with steps that aren't there and narrow gas lit passages, also with steps, that lyingly promised to take me up to Hoskins and Trinity College (again, UofT version: universities in the Brit-sphere have no innovation with respect to either names or architecture.) Could gave done without that, especially as my Christmas Eve dream was a charming cosy murder mystery. I believe the white-haired Miss Marple-ish sleuth was in fact the murderer.

Weather is mild but grey and dank, and is supposed to rain all week, which is par for the Dead Days but also dispiriting. We may see some sun on Saturday. I went out today since the PoP was only 56% and got misted on. Tony Korean restaurant was fairly full, even at 3 in the afternoon, but the Koreans make the most of their holidays. When they get them, because the big supermarket and greengrocers were open. Bought celery for future turkey salads but was so full from egg and beef donburi that I skipped dinner.

To get xmas music out of my head I went looking for that Kenyan song from many years back Mama nipeleke kwa baba (Mama, take me to my father.) Then started googling around to find what the swahili means and discovered that nipeleke is a very useful phrase for things like 'take me to a hospital' (hospitalini)- I mean, should you find yourself sick in east Africa some time. They also tell you how to say please, which I can't remember because there's no catchy tune to teach me tafadhali. So then I had to look at Duolingo for swahili which starts you with pronouns: mimi (I), yeye (he, she), sisi (we), wao (they), and wewe (you, sing). Oh. Years ago a roommate told me how to say The elephant is about to step on you in Swahili. Tembo is elephant and wewe is you but my memory of the verb, after 40 years, must have become corrupted, because I remember it as 'na piga' but you can't prove it by any Swahili verb chart. And after googling a bit about verbs in Swahili, I once again resigned myself never to learn that language. Verb prefixes for both subject and tense? No way. Might as well learn Basque if you're going that route.

Honestly, why do people think Japanese is a hard language? Yeah, there's causatives and passives and passive causatives, but they're quite regular. Presumably if you hear the Swahili version of I am going, you are going, he is going often enough, the sound sticks in your head as easily as, well, 'I am going' etc. (or wasuresaseru). But life is too short at this point.

Oh yes. The first week of September was bloody hot too. Now I remember. No matter: slept with the window AC on and this morning, for the first time in a week, my knee didn't scream at me when I first bent it. Or stood on it, because mornings all week have seen me seriously considering going back to the zimmer frame to get me down the hallway. Between a spasming TFL thingy on the left and a crumpling knee on the right, it has not been fun. I hope when the cool comes back that things will improve, because what have I been doing clam shells and pilates and glute strengthening for two months for otherwise? Will remind me that before that I could do sit-to-stand exercises the requisite number of times while this last week my knee objected violently to the exercise.

Because life can't be all Marcus Corvinus all the time, I've started doing Duolingo in French. Probably below my level but revision never hurt-- and it wants me to talk as well, which Ishiguro translated into French doesn't. Also Ishiguro is still very much himself even in French, meaning oogey foreboding. And no, I have no idea how he manages it, or if in fact I'm the only person who has anxiety attacks reading him. There are nasty things hiding in his prose even if I can't see them-- even if I never see them-- and that makes him so much worse. It's kind of like the background intro of any M R James story before the real horrors show up: something is off, something menaces. Of course with James you *know* you're going to meet horrors so the anxiety is warranted. Ishiguro has the same off-ness to me but the horrors are rarely so obliging as to show themselves.

Once again, after a mere thirty years, I come across someone who thinks an 'access' of some emotion ought to be 'excess'. Which it isn't, but you might have to read French literature to know this. As in, I first encountered the construction in the translation of Claudine at School, where she has 'a sudden access of stupidity.' What was the French original? Probably accès, because Larousse will give you the medical definition of 'sudden and transient disorder, usually violent.' But English is quite happy to follow, because there it is as definition no.2, literary, 'an attack or outburst of an emotion.' (Really, there's a point where 18th century French reads exactly like 18th century English, because both were modelling themselves on Latin; and then alas the vernacular took over and I could no longer read French writers.)

Good, that's settled. Now back to the conundrum in Cohen's Here It Is: what's the meaning of 'list' in the line 'and here is the love/ that lists where it will'? Always assumed it was a variation on 'the wind bloweth where it listeth' (which is the Gospel of John, surprise surprise, because I thought it was OT: mind, read the whole chapter and it's very much John being umm transcendental John again.) But list there, which this keyboard keeps rendering as its cognate lust, just means 'pleases', 'as it will', which thus turns Cohen's line into that rhetorical device whose name I've forgotten, saying the same thing twice. (Tautology, and you wouldn't believe the googling it took to find that.) Ergo it must be a different list, but which one? Lean to one side? Surely not itemize? Or did Cohen simply misremember, or misunderstand, John?

Yes, well, it's the Ides of March again. But the only reason that matters to the English-speaking and largely non-Latin-reading world is because Wully Shaxper wrote a play about Julius Caesar. Otherwise the Ides and Caesar himself would mean as little to us as, say, the Emperor Nerva and the Pisonian conspiracy. This strikes me as very odd somehow. A century ago there were other ways to get to know Caesar, largely that primer for Latin school infants De Bello Gallico. We spent three and a half years in high school learning Latin grammar and vocab before being gingerly let loose on a Latin text, and the vocab during those years was all about camps and ramparts and arrows and sallies (cf the Beatles' song Longa Alta Eruptio). Rather like the military leaning of that 'graded course in Japanese reading' with its just-postwar concern with armies and commanders-in-chief and tanks. If the first thing you'll ever read is Caesar, better learn Caesar's vocabulary. I believe that newer primers start you out with different vocab and readings, and a good thing too.

But this makes me me wonder if in days to come (supposing there are any) Shakespeare's plays will be considered too arcane for modern ears, and will survive only as modernized movies. Charlotte Bronte? Jane Austen? Almost certainly Dickens and Henry James, who work much better as drama than as novels. Sic transit and all that.

Do I want to read a translation of the Aeneid into 16th century Scots? It's prime Life is Too Short territory- I have enough trouble with Dunbar, god knows-- but I'm really seriously tempted. Though I'm sure the edition that's just come out is hideously expensive, libraries, solely, for the use of.

Also those quality of life articles that say an essential to happiness is deep and meaningful relationships, or at least deep and meaningful conversations. Meaningful is as you define it, so I can't speak to the former, but I don't think I've ever had the latter with anyone but a therapist. Pleasant conversations, enjoyable conversations, yes those: but I notice that in the ones I remember I did very little of the talking. Other people's stories, other people's ideas, none of my own. Are those deep and meaningful?

Went and looked at bank balance today. Balance was oddly hefty so called up individual transactions. City did not deduct my property taxes on the 15th. Now, sometimes the withdrawal is delayed if it's a weekend, but usually it shows on the 16th. So maybe this is my Poor Old Woman tax rebate? Which if so means I'm more flush than I thought and can buy both a vacuum cleaner and another quarter's worth of lenses.

As a hint that this might be so, I put on my hapi coat to go to the super in today's heat and discovered a five dollar bill in the pocket.

And after going out, I turned around at the corner and came back because the western sky looked extremely unsettled. Downpour commenced fifteen minutes later. My weather sense for TO's climate is the finely honed result of decades' practice.

Would that other abilities remained finely honed. I blanked on the word 'quantum' and not only couldn't think of it, I couldn't even think of any related words that might lead to it. Flailing about I got to Somebody's cat-- not Schrodinger but some kind of blind stab at it. Luckily Google intuited my intention.

Prof Islamic Studies has an apple tree in his back yard. Apparently he's had it for years but this spring was the first time it flowered and this fall the first time it's borne fruit. Alas, tree is now so tall that half the apples fall on their neighbour's garage roof, and the other half get gnawed at by various urban fauna.

The other bad news is that New Balance is owned by a Trump supporter/ major donor. I hope my shoemakers remain open so I can get my current pairs resoled at need, because one can't support the man but equally, nothing is as good as New Balance shoes.

Weather here is warm but pleasant. Went out to library, to Ninetails coffee shop with its beautiful androgynous Japanese baristas, and the new banh mi place at the end of the street. Was trotting home with my banh mi when I espy Josie from up the street standing with two rollators at the house cattycorner from me. One rollator was her own and the other was a freebie and she was debating how to get it back home. And since I'm semi-mobile, maybe, at times, I offered to take it over to my place and come back. Which did, but by that time Josie had also acquired a silver tray and some china odds and ends. She doesn't have a basket on her walker and I do, so shou ga nai, I ended up taking her finds up to her place, walking back to my place, taking her rollator up to her place, and walking back. She has a ramp to her front porch so I didn't have to do steps but the ramp (built by her sons) is unnervingly bouncy and I'm still not steady on my feet when in shoes, which is depressing. Did however score a Psmith book from the clean-out. I gather someone's surviving parent died and daughter was emptying the house of stuff no one wanted, like school texts of Shakespearian plays.

Finished Half a Soul, first of Atwater's regency fairytale. Enjoyed it but the author and her editor (if any) has no notion of the difference between will and shall. I know usage may differ by region (in Scotland at least) and by person for sure, and I'd have to think to tell you what the rules are: but my ear says that Atwater gets it wrong and it's like fingernails on the blackboard.

Someone on my FFL has been reading The Worm Ouroboros (cue chorus of "Mister, you're a better man than I") (The Yardbirds, you say? Amazing.) I could as soon read Spenser as Eddison, meaning my attention span is too short to swim through treacle like that. I *have* mastered our later speed and shortness, thank you Fenodyree, so I can't be having with the earlier leisurely prolix.

But the Someone quotes Le Guin as proposing "that all fantasy protagonists should speak in an elevated, heroic style." Good heavens, what *was* the woman thinking of? I hope it was a very early essay written when fantasy was still overshadowed by Tolkien and urban fantasy hadn't been invented. Though apparently she slammed Zelazny for making his 20th century America-dwelling Amberites speak like, good heavens, 20th century Americans. (That's not the reason I dislike Amber, btw. It's because they speak like wise-ass 20th century Americans. Likewise Eddings.) Equally, Paarfi's pastiche is all very well for the time he was 'writing', but modern man Vlad should speak in what we recognize as a modern idiom.

Perhaps she was indeed thinking of Tolkien's style, which is high and heroic a lot of the time but never, to my taste, turgid. It knows where it's going, and gets there. Possibly an English professor of English literature has a better grasp of the historic styles available to him than someone less familiar with the canon. Or his sense of style just knew to choose Tacitus' diction over Malory's.

Nice as it would have been to be carted off to a rehab place where people brought me meals in bed, I reflect that most of the pain of the last ten days was muscle aches, and nothing worked for those but Robaxacet and hot beanbags. Which I wouldn't have had, or had so conveniently, anywhere but at home. So all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Have so far reverted to my wonted ways as to order in food. Wanted to try Malaysian stuff, since Indonesian is hard to come by, got mie goreng, thought it had no flavour to speak of. Wonder if nasi goreng tastes different? Had it ohhh fifty years ago in Holland, but will probably not be able to reduplicate *that* experience, any more than the Vietnamese food here tastes anything like the divine Vietnamese food in France.

One forgets names at my age, but when the name in question belongs to a clerk at the Kimi Ryokan back in 1991 perhaps no wonder. She came from an island in Indonesia and said it was the name for November in her mother's dialect. Since there seem to be as many dialects in Indonesia as native languages here, that's not much help. And if I'm remembering correctly, her parents came from different islands and on her mother's island there was a female form of the language quite distinct from the male. One wonders how her parents communicated, though I think by then Bahasa Indonesia had been declared the standard. Anyway, she married a Scots guy and mentioned how her mother-in-law called her Rrrita. From which I deduced that her name was Nofrita, which is a real Indonesian surname, 'origin unknown'. I know the origin: it's November in an obscure women's dialect on some island in the archipelago.

Set up cordless phone in bedroom, though why call it cordless when it has both a plug and a watchamacallit that goes into the lines I don't know. Yeah, because the receiver isn't connected to the phone by one of those perverse cords that ties itself into knots even though anchored at both ends. Anyway. I don't like phones and think texting was a brilliant idea (for people without arthritis but still) but now I have a phone that will go in and out with me along with the cell. Now all I need is pockets to put them in. I see me wearing a lot of hoodies post surgery. Mind, hoodies are brilliant too because they keep your head warm.

Then screwed courage etc etc and called walk-in clinics to ascertain whether they do indeed remove staples from knees as was so blithely informed by hospital. I don't like phones and I hate phoning but I knew my anxiety levels would rise the closer I got to the day so early something and wise in season* called the ones in my area.

Number one doesn't answer its phones.

Number two said oh no we're all booked up-- 'It's for a month from now-' no no we're all booked up you have to go down to King St-- 'That's a little far for me-' sorry we're all booked up the hospital will take them out for you-- 'The hospital very specifically said they wouldn't-' oh no they will--- Jobsworth. Sigh.

Number three said yes we do that, do you want to come in today? No, it's a month from now, do I need an appointment? No, just come in. You can call ahead of time to see what the wait time is, if you like. There. A walk-in clinic that's an actual walk-in clinic. Is that so hard?

*I have these phrases in my head that I know are quotations but google has never heard of them, no doubt because I've altered a significant word or two. 'Early something and wise in season' is one of them, and I'm convinced it ends with the wise in season person putting a bullet through their head, but can I find it? No. Google treats wise as a proper name and talks about footballers.

Because I never saw all of ST:TNG, I never heard Patrick Stewart retelling the story of Gilgamesh and therefore I never knew until last night that the accent in Enkidu comes on the second syllable, not the first.

Everyone else's life is being so traumatic just now that I'm trying to be grateful that the only thing bothering me is that the plumber somehow got my metal shower hose twisted about in such away that the shower head won't stay facing out, as it has for the last fifteen years, but wants to turn its face to the wall, thereby rendering it useless as a shower. I've fixed it in place with electrician's tape so it now functions just fine as a shower but can't be used to wash the under bits that showers don't reach. This is why we can't have nice things.

Clearly I was stressed about the plumber because today my system decided to rebel against, oh I don't know, could be any one of several things it's been known to rebel against: pad thai or Johnson cocktail or peanuts or wine or some combination of same. Which is fine. I need to stop the daily gin even if I hurt so much without it. Put braces on elbows and curl up under the quilts with bean bags.

As for reading Wednesday-

Finished?

Duckworth, Carolingian Portraits
-- deadly deadly history: doctrinal disputes* and internecine backstabbing. Enlivened only slightly by the Charles and Camilla saga of Lothair II and his wife and his mistress. Wife was in fact twice widowed before marrying him, he'd already had several kids with his mistress, wife couldn't have kids, Lothair tried for an annulment or a divorce such as several of his relatives had indulged in, most notably his great-grandfather Charlemagne, but his uncles and his uncles' tame churchmen (Hincmar, who does not come across to me as the shining light Duckworth thinks him) were having none of it. The fact that Lothair had no legitimate heir was exactly as his wicked uncles liked it: 'more land for us!!' Empire fell apart because the Carolingians couldn't stop coveting their brothers' territory long enough to put up a united front against the Vikings, the Magyars, the Saracens, the you name it.

*I have always maintained that you can't argue theology in Latin because Latin is just too damned vague, and several of these disputes prove my point. You have to argue in Greek, which at least has articles, but once you start arguing in Greek there's literally no end to it.

Reading now?

The Woman in White showed up in a crossword puzzle the other day and I thought, in my loose-ended fashion, that it might prove diverting. Alas, I'm not particularly diverted, except by the pencilled marginalia some appreciative previous owner has added, admiring Collins' more purple passages.

I tried rereading Neverwhere and I tried rereading The Napoleon of Notting Hill , but I'm in a 'man delights not me nor woman neither' mood, and both Gaiman and Chesterton are quirky enough to bug me.

Reading next?

Maybe I should reread some of the Pratchetts I've only read once, like Reaper Man or Monstrous Regiment.

Dear God but Piranesi is oogey-making reading. Like a bad dream or the faintest recollection of something else I read somewhere else but can't trace. For no good reason I think that something else is certain scenes in Hamabe no Kafuka, which doesn't read at all the same in English as in Japanese. In Japanese it's all quite straightforward, almost commonplace, because the language is, even when everything else is surrealistic. In English it's both oogey and menacing, and I'm not sure if that's due to the removal of the language scrim- which normally makes things look more resonant, not less- or the translator's word choice. Am not good at noticing stylistic choices in English unless they're anvil-to-the-head stuff like Lovecraft.

Finished Claudine a Paris. Finally. Suck fairy attack: what a nasty piece of goods that girl was. But done and onto the reject pile it goes.

For my next French language exercise I thought I might read that French historical novel La Dame de Kyoto, about Murasaki Shikibu, but as I was looking over the shelves in the downstairs front room, eye was caught by The Poems of Francois Villon, a facing page French-English text. It's the equivalent of the Muromachi poetry book: read the original, chance a guess at the meaning, check the English. Might go with that, except--

--shriek opera next door has made me start up my sound system, untouched for nearly a decade because it clanks and grinds when changing CDs. It's nice to have something that will play any CD- my much loved and much-lamented Sony boombox won't read anything now- and yes I have music on my side of the wall, but I can't read when music is playing. I subvocalize and music- and songs certainly- interrupt the process. So... we'll see.

Had a dream last night, a proper dream with resonances that actually stuck in my head, about being back in Japan and meeting my former kiddy students who were now only a few years older than then, all of whom were fluent in English and showing me how they could write it. And their handwriting was beautiful and I was so impressed. And there was a long-ago Mom from the daycare who was called Naomi in my dream, though I can't remember if she was in RL, with her four children (I think in reality she *may* have had three sons) 'but one of them died', who was Japanese in my dream but still looked the same. Time telescopes this year: turns out I last saw her in the spring of 2018, going down to the Yayoi Kusama exhibition with no.2 son, and no idea why she's in my dreams now.

Took till nearly the end of August for me to register that there are no nightly fireworks because there is no Ex(hibition) this year which means there will be no air show either, which last I am grateful for.

Weather has gone warm and muggy again after that brief and intermittent cool down last week. Autumn will come eventually, but meanwhile my joints hate me.

Jean de Florette is all about brital murderous peasants, so I went searching for something more congenial and am now reading Arsène Lupin. His vocabulary is, oddly, more obscure than JdF's in spite of the latter's all landscape all the time.

Since I'm getting nowhere with ancient Greek, onaccounta I have to memorize vocabulary that's given casually in the examples, not even in a table for each lesson that I can refer to, I'm reading French instead. Alas, I'm reading Jean de Florette because that' s what was to hand on the living room table. With a little effort I could have unearthed a Simenon someplace. The idea is just to read and not bother looking up vocabulary, but of course that doesn't last, not amid all these countryside terms. So I hauled out the large Robert's I rescued from the gomi many yeas back and use that. Am amazed we used paper dictionaries for so long. Heavy book, thin paper, ages to find the right entry. Even my unsatisfactory phone browser would work better. (Phone's google app is useless. Molasses.) But no one seems to have ever made a wordtank equivalent for French, one with a comprehensive F-E / E-F dictionary. It's all phrases for travellers. What do they expect students to use these days? Their phones, I suppose.

If I were reading Hamabe no Kafuka in English, it wouldn't have taken me so long to figure out that Major Chord 2 (二長調 ) is D-major, not B, and I could have gone off to youtube and listened to Schubert's sonata in same much earlier. Not that Schubert is my man at all; I have little use for either the unaccompanied piano or the romantics in general. But of course there's a long disquisition about that sonata in Kafuka, which implies it's kind of 平凡 erm uninspired. Which to me it is. But of course everyone else who turned up at Youtube for it was there because of Murakami.

Accomplished today by getting to Korean super and buying enough gyoza to see me to the winter. Bought a new kind as well as the old reliables and hope they're good, because the last new brand I tried wasn't. Chicken doesn't work with potstickers, or not for me. But at least I have some defence now against those urges to order them online, that assail me periodically.

Also washed the stairs after far too long. Had to stop halfway to rest. All the core strengthening doesn't seem to have touched the lower back that simply has to sit down if I've been standing for more than five minutes. I hope that a new knee will alter some of that, as it does for hip replacements, but I'm not betting on it.

Someone on the FFL uses the legal phrase time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, very much in a nonlegal setting. Natsukashii: it was one of my father's bywords. And while it originally meant 'before the reign of Richard I', in Ontario it has now been reduced to a paltry 10 years.

Poem by Carol Ann Duffy.

Not one for poets laureate, me, but occasionally they hit things out of the ballpark.

Not that I'm one for baseball metaphors either. Musing in my morning float, I was wondering how best to render kimoi in English. It's a truncated 'kimochi warui- the feeling is bad- but you can't say 'it gives me a bad feeling' because I've been assured that 'I have a bad feeling about this' and its variants are now, in the cultural zeitgeist, copyright in perpetuity by George Lucas. And as far as I have a handle on kimoi, it seems to take in both yucky and unheimlich. But I haven't read much colloquial Japanese in years.

To have it here where it will stay, unlike tumblr and FB.

Via mooncustafer, the ultimate list of utterly insane old money names . "If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction." But there's the 正真正銘/ realio trulio John Jacob William Waldorf Astor, so Plesanton Conquest Jr and Peachy G Harrison must be real too.

Peachy. Peachy. I feel like Vimes faced with his new dwarf recruit.

Since they're calling for snowflurries tomorrow, my winter boots are still in the hallway. May snow never sticks around anyway: doesn't get mentioned in the Historical Weather stats, even as 'trace', though I can distinctly remember snow showers that were more than a trace, even in this century. But the unwonted stiffness of the Everything lately has rendered all housework twice as difficult, so I'm in no rush to tidy the whinter wardrobe away. I put the winter coat in the bunker after Sunday's mid-20sC/ low 70sF, only to haul it out again yesterday.

Last Fiesta shop got me some mid-fat hamburger, a rare treat in these wrong-headed days of fat= bad. Wanted to make meatloaf but discovered I don't have a loaf pan, so made my even rarer treat, beef fried rice. This was a recipe my cousin gave me when I first left home. (My mother only taught me to make porkchops, corned beef hash, and lasagna from a box mix.) The recipe is very 70s student: saute onions, then brown hamburger, then add cooked rice (Uncle Ben's quick cooking), pour over enough soy sauce to colour the rice, mix all together. Make a well in the middle, of the rice, melt butter in well, break an egg into the butter, and quickly spread it through the mixture. In my old age I add celery and bok choy to all this, but of course the main taste is soy sauce. No matter. Rice and butter and salt together is my comfort food, and anything made with them not only registers as delicious, it removes my sense of 'full' completely. Which is why I rarely make this.

Today was a 'never get out of pyjamas' day, which I'm allowed occasionally. Accomplishment was to finish the interminable couch book, an examination of courtly love literature from who knows when, that I thought might be amusing but which was either dull (the troubadors) or impenetrable (the philosophy behind the Italian 'sweet new style', which involves unfamiliar definitions of soul, spirit, will, intelligence, and you name it.) Courtly love is pretty recherche at the best of times, and is worse when the author doesn't translate the works he cites. He says he'll translate the Provencal ones, but he figures the reader can manage 12th century French and 13th century Italian themselves. Mh, no.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/1026021.html

Young Master Boswell has just caught a dose of the clap and is sequestered in his rooms, medicating himself with I dare not guess what and reflecting with satisfaction on his genius and his prospects, how he can join the Guards and have his own regiment, or join the bar and become a rich lawyer: that is, when he's not feeling low and fixing to die. I am sequestered at home medicating myself with anti-inflammatories, and in neither of Boswell's frames of mind exactly. Certainly not the 'what a fine fellow am I' one.

But a little scratchy nonetheless. Partly the continuing nonappearance of Purolator. Partly the acrostics I armed myself with last winter to while away my convalescence, which are doing a bad job of whiling away my sequestration. (The oddity of the clues and their answers. Everywhere = on all hands. Roundabout, going astray = devious. Constantly wanting more = insatiate. No cigar, guys.) And partly my loose end reading of Ellis Peters mysteries.

I know she has her kinks. In every book there must be a pair of young lovers. The he lover may vary but the she lover is a teenager of glowing beauty, utter poise, and fine insight into the nuances of social interaction, the psychology of her boyfriend, and the emotions of absolutely everybody. I do not believe people like that exist, let alone sixteen year olds. But I'm at a loose end and can't be having with doorstoppers just now. Left to my scratchy devices, I might go through the entire Brother Cadfael oeuvre except that I can't be having with reading on the tablet either. Hurts my eyes, hurts my elbows. So one more book and then... well, I have batteries now, so I might go back to Murakami.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/1021156.html

Cripdom is back with a vengeance, alas. I can't even complain of the bone rub: it's when the bones don't rub together click-clack that my knees yell at me. We won't even talk about hip flexors and such.

Reading Wednesday? Why not?

Last finished?

Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
-- the trouble with reading Nancy is that one has read Jessica, so one knows that all these mad! happenings are just anecdotes from the Mitford family history. Plus a little schadenfreude re: Diana, I'm assuming. The takeaway is that Lord Redesdale ought to have been shot, but whether before or after breeding I couldn't say.

Also for crap's sake, U and non-U Nancy, in what kind of society does it matter if people say 'notepaper' and 'mirror' and 'mantlepiece' instead of writing paper, looking glass, and chimney piece respectively? This isn't the 19th century, and wasn't even when you were writing 90 some years ago.

Reading now?

Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater
-- bad enough to be born in the bush of ghoxts, much worse to have the ghosts inside you. Or whatever they are. I wait to find out, not certain that I will. Wakaru hito wa wakaru, I think.

Pamela Dean, Tam Lin
-- the classic, now available as an ebook from the library. Feel obligated to read this fast, since a million other people are queued up behind me, which of course makes me stubbornly not want to read what I'm told everywhere is a classic. Tam Lin has never been a favourite archetypal story of mine, not since Diana Wynne Jones' head-hurty take, but maybe this will be more accessible.

Next up?
-- there's a Hilary McKay on its way from the library which should settle my stomach

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/1005071.html

'To cover my head now and have a good cry.' Aka vanity (ie futility) and vexation of spirit.

So I trot down to the bank this morning and end up reciting my woes to the bank manager. Should be simple enough to straighten out, says he, but we can't do it on our computers here, it has to be on your own device. Do you have a laptop? No, but luckily I do have a tablet. Go home to get it, come back, he's with another client. I sit until his no.2 comes asking can she help me. She can't, actually, and ends up handing me back to the telephone support guys. This time we manage to reset the password- I'm convinced it's because in defiance of logic and the facts I tick the 'I do not have a phone to receive my password' box, even though I'm talking on a phone at the time.

But my trading privileges were suspended in May pending an information update to my trading account. So he walks me through that and nothing needs changing till we get to 'State your annual income and net worth' which wants new figures. I enter them and oh here we go again the webpage won't accept them. Guy is puzzled. 'Try putting a dollar sign before it.' Nope. 'Try adding a decimal point and two zeroes.' Nope. Guy is increasingly perplexed. Calls up his own account, puts in new values for those fields, no problem. We go through the familiar routine: close browser, open browser, reenter webpage, reenter all info, reenter new figures, webpage won't accept them. After forty minutes he says he'll send me the forms, I can fill them out at home and email them back. My heart sinks, but I say OK.

Go to coffee shop for belated latte, open email, there yes indeed is a .pdf form. DL it, open, it's read only. Save it as .docx, open doc, there's a little edit button but tablet won't give me a keyboard. This 'fill in the form online' schtick only works if you have the right magic formula and the few times I've managed it I immediately forgot what the formula is. Close everything up and go for unsatisfactory acupuncture session. Then get my blood tests done so the day isn't totally wasted and go home to wait for bro to come back from the cottage so he can tell me how to fill in forms online. Still picking at the scab I turn on desktop, go to Investorline account, and try reentering my info. Get to the annual income line and a little voice says try leaving the commas out. And *of course* that works. But why did no one else know to tell me that's what you have to do?

No matter. Is done. Now can sell my paltry stocks, take my substantial capital loss to offset any gains elsewhere, and close the thing down, because I am so done with technology and banks.

And I still don't have my new bike.

(Also I see that the King James cttee's vexation of spirit should more properly be Donovan's 'try and catch the wind', which to me is a great falling-off.)

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/990692.html

Further adventures in People Not Being Called What They Should Be: just as Tolkien has two syllables instead of the proper three, so it appears Gaiman is not pronounced Guyman either. I'd assume my misreading is Japanese-influenced, except that I thought 'Tolkien' had three syllables decades before I knew anything about the language.

I can't think of any words where ai is pronounced as a long i and not long a, but does this mean Leguin's Genly Ai is Genly Ei?

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/980093.html

Hot enough today, but not the 37 and 38C of the late 80s, and the wind blew as well, so I won't complain. Humid, however, in a very nostalgic Tokyo fashion. When I went to hang tank tops out on the line, I discovered the lianas had taken over the back yard, so spent maybe twenty minutes with the clippers clearing the back path. After which I was soaked to the skin- which is actually the wrong phrase because the wet was *coming* from my skin, wasn't it?

And while we're at it, why are they called tank tops, a term I can never remember and must google every time. To me they're singlets and always will be.

House remains cool even with central AC off, but I'm at a hot weather loose end. I want the net to distract me, as I used to want TV to do when I had cable so many decades ago, and the net doesn't do that any more than TV ever did. Tumblr, FB-- not enough people are talking to meet my needs. I wish we still had active MLs as in the old days.

(Where are all these little flying insects coming from? My windows are all closed, y'all.)

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/979284.html

I'm a touch bemused by the fact that 35 year old me not only had no trouble with the language of The Book of the New Sun, I didn't even notice any oddness to it. There are indeed advantages to a classical education, a minor in medieval history, and a semi-European upbringing. But I think I just let most of the terminology roll over me. If I didn't know that a misericorde is an actual kind of knife, or that khaibit is an ancient Egyptian term for a person's shadow self, no matter. The general sense was clear enough. But now I'm tempted to look all these terms up online just for the fun of it. And to marvel that Wolfe himself had that erudite and occasionally obscure vocabulary available to him *without* the Net.

On a different tangent, I've been experimenting this last week with overnight oats (which sounds like a Pratchett character.) Am convinced that the stubborn weight gain since the spring is due to me eating French bread toast for breakfast (with butter and jam and fake PB) instead of my long-time cereal and berries. French bread has more calories than sliced rye, for one thing, never mind what you put on it. Given my druthers and my touchy insides, I wouldn't eat breakfast at all, but I need meds to move and meds-cushioning food for the meds, so... Instant oatmeal is great, but not nutritionally so, and hot things on muggy mornings aren't great at all. I'm still not sure how I feel about cold oatmeal. It involves more milk than I've had in a while, even if lactose free- good for calcium and aging bones, iffy for digestion. I suppose I should try the nut milks, expensive though they are, and see if that feels any lighter. Or track down the one elusive rye bread that I can stand to eat a nd go back to that.

One odd thing I've noticed in this season of never-quite-awake (heat and antihistamines). I've never needed coffee in the morning, or wanted it. Home-brewed coffee upsets my stomach. (If I must have caffeine, it needs to be cold and carbonated to work.) I do go to my coffee shop for a latte, but the need is social rather than physical. Get out of the house, see familiar faces, exchange a few words, etc, But recently drinking my latte gives me a feeling of well-being that I've never had before. I mean, it could still be psychological: Starbucks doesn't have the same effect. But there certainly seems a perk-up physical component to it now as well.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/976987.html

I conclude that the only way to combat the inequity of early morning shifts and appointments is to get so drugged/ drunk the night before that one falls asleep at 8 pm, wakes three hours later, takes out lenses, turns off lights, and goes back to sleep again. Then I wake naturally at 6 something, which allows me to do exercises, have breakfast, take meds, and be at work at 8:30 or whatever. This worked like a charm last night: an antihistamine and a muscle relaxant and a long rainy day with cabin-fevered infings got me happily to sleep well before nine. But I doubt tonight will work as well, since I had the day off and spent it erranding and seeing doctors and acupuncturists. Though I *did* chop some more off the hedge as well as the honeysuckle vine down the street, which is 30% deadwood and is cracking the concrete hydro pole it's growing around, and which catches at my hair/ hat as I ride my bike down the sidewalk to where my street starts going in the right direction.

Anyway, happy sunny day saw me getting opioids of choice from doctor and Zen Cho's latest from the one Indigo Books that had it, so I could use my Indigo book token from Xmas. (People don't call them book tokens anymore. You have to say 'gift certificate' now. When did that happen? And is 'book token' a Britishism? It's what they were called in the veddy English Toronto of my childhood.) Had less luck with my other efforts. Called the arborists who will get back to me eventually rather than same day, is the difference between booking in April and booking in June. And my attempt to return wrong kind of socket computer mouse for right kind was forestalled by store being out of mice. I deal with a local spare parts guy rather than big box, because he's local and a friendly maritimer and was a sanity saver when I was going through trauma eight years ago. More mice expected by Friday, by which time I may also have bought new Birks as well.

But first there's a 9:30 to 6 day tomorrow to be got through. Bed soon, I think.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/973316.html

A December thunderstorm. How charming. -_-

Possibly not surprising after the October temps today- 10 or 12C, into the 50sF. Wore a tshirt under the winter jacket, because until the sun came out mid-afternoon it was a grey and dank 10C. Also wore the Mystery Trousers, which are the only non-elasticized waistband pants I own, and which I now fit into after the recent 10 lb loss. But. I bought-- and more importantly, wore-- them in 2007 when I was thirty pounds heavier than now. Thirty pounds is a lot of me: you'd think they'd hang on me now. But no: fit nicely, no more. I can only assume that, post-menopause, my weight redistributed itself again, putting it where ten pounds ago made the pants fit tight.

Finished The Furthest Station, which is another lost text. Lost because my mind retained the impression of pages and pages about High And Over which required me to google the real building to see what it looked like. That description isn't in the book. What *is* in the book is the unexplained (AFAICT) fox slaughter. OK, maybe the neighbours did it; but why include it at all?

Got Moriarty as an ebook from the library, and well enough, but the constant misuse of 'shall' is driving me batty. Yes I had to look it up to find out why it struck me as wrong, but turns out my ear had it right. As a future tense, 'shall' can only be used with first person. You can't say 'It shall be very enjoyable.' Has to be 'will'.

If solitary, be not idle: so to combat accidia I did the weekend laundry and dishes (bare minimum achievement, though why must this single person do so much laundry? I did two washes during the week as well.) (Answer: in winter I wear long-sleeved tops that sticky-fingered infings grab hold of, so one top = one day. Thus: extra dark washes.) Then vacuumed the downstairs and kitchen, mended my one remaining nightshirt, and darned a sock that's been sitting waiting for me to do it this last month. Might even write a few more Christmas cards to crown the day.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/947085.html

The twins have lost their hats. The twins didn't have hats yesterday when they needed them but their father was certain they'd had them today, except they were nowhere to be found. Probably K&M tossed them into a black hole, being the kind of twins that are pillow-worded with 'terrible'. So just to double check I looked amongst the cubbies where the hats ought to be, and looked in the infant cubbies beside them, and then under the adult coats and paraphernalia across from the infant cubbies, because all these are at toddler height and toddlers waiting for diaper changes have been known to shuffle objects from one place to another. I found no twin hats anywhere but under the adult coat rack I did find a black knobbly thing which turned out to be my headlight-on-a-strap, not stolen from my pannier after all. And a good thing too, because the replacement one I had does not light no matter how many new batteries I put into it, and the strap somehow got severed as well, and was thus a total bust. So, happiness.

Crossed off the 'Don'wanna' list as well was renewing my Ontario ID card, useful thingy for people who don't drive. 4-6 weeks, said the uncivil servant. 'And if there's a mail strike?' I asked, since rotating strikes start on Monday. She shrugged, indifferent. Maudit espèce d'un petit fonctionnaire. (Hmm- does that change gender if the Babu in question is female?) Anyway, if I need ID befoe then, I still have my passport-- erm, here somewhere.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/940690.html

Hope this twitter thread will export. It's about Chinese usage of poetic references and/or mmh 'four character phrases' that draw on a common cultural background to convey much in little. The effect of "boom, here have lots and lots of associations over all the times you've seen this cascade into your head".

Shakespeare and the King James bible might have worked similarly for, err well, people a hundred years ago, but I get the feeling the effect for the Chinese goes deeper than any 'screw your courage to the sticking place' or widow's mite does for us. If only because 21st century Chinese clearly still say 梨花带雨 and no one mentions widows' mites, or would be understood if they did. No, we are not talking about tiny relatives of the tick.

H/t to incandescens for leading me here.
( Brief reading Wodinstag )

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/938034.html

Comment on a DW friend's post introduces me to a book called Fluent Forever, which contains the clever idea of using visual flash cards and making eg 'le chat' a picture of a cat on fire because all masc nouns are on fire, while feminine ones are ice or what you will. This would work perfectly for French, whose genders I can never remember though I know the nouns pretty well. I hesitate to buy the book itself on account of it being akin to buying grammars and then never reading them, but I'm intrigued.

Mind, a hanzi book from a decade ago had a mnemonic for remembering the tones as well as the meanings of the chracters, but I never found it workable. Really I should get back to my Japanese and once again get kanji and vocab into order. Though I wonder if FF has tips for Japanese and Chinese as well.

Reading has been more Christies: Murder on the Links, Five Little Pigs (where I'd in fact forgotten whodunnit), and Sleeping Murder, Miss Marple's last but not, fortunately, because she dies in it. Witches Abroad for fun.

Still reading Zora Neale Hurston's experiences with Haitian voudoun, interrupted by stomach-churning accounts of Haitian revolution. Taking Rainy Willow 16 very slowly. Have also one volume of Dinotopia, which is charming but simple-minded.

I was very chuffed to get An Unkindness of Ghosts on my ereader at last, only to discover it's SF set on a generation ship whose society is modelled, as far as I can see, on the atrocious plantation one of the Old South. Better go back to Nalo Hopkinson because Hurston's Haiti was enough for me, thanks.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/935329.html

There are many advantages to baths over showers- loosening of muscles, ease of washing feet, ease of shaving legs, general well-being from lying in water up to one's neck. One more advantage for me is that it gives me an opportunity to brush my teeth. Of course, I could do it in the half hour I save when having a shower, but then I don't want to. Whereas running a bath requires me to be in the bathroom to monitor depth and temperature, with nothing else to do. So yeah, I can then pick and floss and electric brush for two minutes, with no feeling of time wasted.

(Monitoring depth and temp is needed because I can't actually get into a bath of my preferred hotness. Evidently blood never reaches my feet because they're ice cubes always, and never more so than when dipping into a hot bath. So it has to be merely warm to start, and not too deep, so that I can fill it up with hot water once I'm in.)
( Memeage )

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/929117.html

Yesterday I was supposed to have had the massage that lets me walk but I wasn't in the computer at the clinic. I was booked for Saturday the 7th instead. How could this be? My conclusion: when I made the appointment last Sunday, I said 'Book me for next Saturday' and the secretary is one of those people who distinguish between 'this' and 'next'. If you want Saturday coming, it's this. If you want the Saturday after, it's next. I of course use them interchangeably which, yes, often requires disambiguation. At least I get a massage on Wednesday- this Wednesday, or next Wednesday, or this coming Wednesday.

FB is holding posts for ransom again. 'Find friends to see more posts.' Even 'most recent' which is regularly interpreted to mean 'stuff from three days ago' cuts off after four or five. Nothing will drive me to twitter but oh lord.

Finished Tremain's Restoration, an English version of The Radiance of the King. Still left me with a lowering feeling for reasons I haven't yet analyzed.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/925363.html

berm, as in 'snowplow berm' (thank you, FFL jhetley), that infuriating bank of snow that the ploughs throw up and leave to freeze into immobility or turn into crumbling quicksnow, depending on temperature.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/902829.html

1. Who says you never learn anything on FB? Someone posted a picture of the jerkface who shot a hibernating bear, and someone in the comments remarked 'Elender pisser.' So now I know the German for 'miserable prick/ asshole.'

2. Several weeks after the last vermin passed on (according to my nose) I have flies in the house. Thought it was fly- silly buzzer that dive-bombed the kitchen by day and the bathroom by night. Kitchen fly grew lethargic, so I caught it this afternoon and released it to the wilds- only to discover another lethargic fly in the evening, drooping on the living room table. Repeat. Came upstairs well-pleased, and discovered two more in the hallway, which I bashed with a broom. They disappeared somewhere to lick their wounds, and I begin to think about blocking up vents again. OTOH they're nothing like the real infestation we had at work when a squirrel died in the roof, so I shall hope this was pure coincidence.

3. Went to the local cafe, crowded as ever on a Saturday morning, but found a seat at the refectory table. Farther up the bench on my side two Japanese women were talking together in relatively comprehensible Japanese, being a little older than the rapid-fire twenty-somes who make me weep when I hear them. Still wasn't quite sure what they were talking about, which is depressing.

4. Yesterday and today were grey and white blustery November and almost warm enough for no gloves, with occasional shafts of silver sunlight breaking through. But the grey became greyer and the white vanished and I had my bike light on at 4:30. Now it rains, and they speak of snowflurries tomorrow.

5. I bought a chunk of Happy Beef of some description- all I know is it had a bone in it- and cooked it up in the crock pot last week. Having learned my lesson, I sauteed the onions and celery beforehand and parboiled the carrots. The russet potatoes I cut into chunks and just threw in, because we know that russets will go to mush with a mere five minutes of boiling and ten minutes sitting. Set timer for ten hours and went to bed. Next morning house smelled of... Worcestershire sauce, actually, of which I'd put two splashes into the four cups of stock. Very disappointing. Even more so was the just-done meat and the hard as rocks potatoes. Where is the melting beef and the veggie mush that oven slow-cooking gives you? So cooked it another four hours, which sort of softened the beef and sort of rendered the potatoes edible. I think the higher cooking temp may be what's needed, because for sure the lower one just doesn't work.

Had some of it tonight with mashed potatoes: the five-and-ten method that let me mash with a fork. The one thing I can say is that I have enough beef gravy to keep me forever, but maybe I should thicken it with some flour or cornstarch. Does flour keep in the fridge? I so rarely use it that it's a waste to buy a bag of the stuff.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/897385.html

Long weekend megrims? rainy ache megrims? muggy May megrims? Dunno, but I had a bad attack of the megrims yesterday which continued into today. Prompted a lot of unadvised eating. Fought them off this evening, finally, by the time-honoured ritual of Vacuuming Something. I wish cleaning wasn't so effective- so 50s- but one must accept that what is, is, and a clean(er) house is a mood-lifter.

(Oh, now isn't that interesting. Megrim and migraine have the same root. As well they might: megrims are the migraine of the soul. According to Meriam-Webster:

Megrim and "migraine" share a meaning and an etymology. Latin and Greek speakers afflicted with a pain in one side of the head called their ailment "hemicrania" or "hēmikrania," from the Greek terms hēmi-, meaning "half," and kranion, meaning "cranium." French-speaking sufferers used "migraine," a modification of "hemicrania," for the same condition. English speakers borrowed "migraine" from French - twice. First, they modified the French term to form "migreime," which in turn gave rise to "megrim" in the 15th century. Later, in the 18th century, they returned to French and borrowed "migraine" again, this time retaining its French spelling. Nowadays, "megrim" and "migraine" can still be used interchangeably, but "megrim" can have other meanings

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/863523.html

Onto a Vast Plain

Rainer Maria Rilke
translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

Book of Hours, II 1
( Cut for German )

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/861750.html

I'm glad Mary Robinette Kowal is devoted enough to make an Austen word list and not use anything non-period in her historicals; and I'm glad she has so many editors and beta-readers to help her out in the task. But for the love of God, Montresor, why did none of them disentangle her confusion over lie and lay? and why did she not notice Austen's usage of same? (Granted, Jane's grammar and punctuation is occasionally sui generis.) But the fact remains that the past tense of lay is not lay, and pregnant women in the Regency did not have laying-ins.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/860072.html

...for which English has no words but others do.

Best unpacking of natsukashii I've ever come across.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/854166.html

Am reading Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars as much for its personal as well as historical evocation of a time when all the world was young. Is as charmingly confusing to me now as it was forty-five years ago. Waddell not only throws in untranslated Latin sentences at whim (and Italian and Provençal and who knows what all- because any fule with a classical education knows all that already and if not, they can teach themselves), she assumes you know the historical background as well. Thank god for broadband and Wikipedia.

So off she goes about Paulinus of Nola (who? google him; contemporary of Magnus Maximus, known to me from Kipling; and jeez, who calls himself Great the Greatest?) and Ausonius, his older friend and mentor, and here she mentions Sulpicius Severus- "barrister and biographer before Anatole France of the Desert Fathers, the father of French prose although he wrote in Latin' see footnote 3, which gives us hurrah! a biographical summary *and* a translation of the pertinent bit:

Sulpicius Severus, c. 363-425; born at Toulouse; lost his young wife and renounced the world, but not its humours. Vide Dialogus I, on the five men in the desert, and one of them a Gaul, confronted by half a loaf. "Facis inhumane qui nos Gallos homines cogis examplo angelorum vivere:" (which I think means 'It's barbarous to think we men of Gaul can live like the angels') "-and anyhow I am convinced that for the sheer pleasure of eating the angels eat themselves."

So *that's* where I got that quotation. I always wondered.

("Ausonius and Sulpicius Severus... are the first representatives in literature of the French haute bourgeoisie, perhaps the most intellectual in Europe." You think? Well... maybe.)

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/853835.html

Sunny March topos: blue and bright. And cold. The sleepies have me: still putting in ten hours at a stretch.

Books finished?
Nothing but that Motohashi Keiko on the (bright sunny but warm) weekend.

Reading now?
A few dozen more pages of A Distant Mirror, a few more (single) pages of The Death of the Necromancer, a bit of McKinley's The Blue Sword (because its limited third has a distinct voice, unlike Necromancer), some more stories from The Green Man. Nothing much inspires, alas.

Next?
Looked at Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars last week, might go on with it if attention will focus. I studied Latin from the age of twelve and took university courses in it, but it never struck me as a language anyone might actually *speak* until it hit the middle ages. (I remember Plautus and how impenetrable I found him. 'This is colloquial Latin? Colloquial Latin makes no sense.') Verse-wise, only Catullus was comprehensible, to say nothing of poetic; the tricks of the other poets turned what was supposed to be glorious verse into double crostic word puzzles. Could never see the beauty in that. So I'm bemused at these churchmen and scholars extolling this or that Roman writer, with quotes Waddell tosses off and doesn't bother translating. At least she isn't quoting Provencal or Occitan verse, or not yet, which puts her one up on her confreres who wrote about Chinese poetry.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/850480.html

Even if it's October. Wash hangs out on the line, which didn't get done on the rainy weekend last week and can't be done on the rainy weekend this week. The reckless extravagance of (gasp) doing laundry in the middle of the day stuns me- though it's about time the high rate period stopped being mid-day and started to be the cold morning and evening hours.

In the wine store the other day, music is black female singer doing something gospelly. I know nothing of spirituals aside from the ones 60s folk singers preempted (Kumbaya, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Michael Row the Boat Ashore): this was achingly familiar but certainly not from the folk era. 'What *is* that?' I asked the clerk. 'Um- Elton John.' Lord, lord, the Border Song. How long ago that was.

I should have started The Classic of Mountains and Oceans long ago. The preface alone is enchanting, not least because it exhibits a lovely range of old-fashioned obscure academic vocabulary, so different from modern-day obscure academic jargon:
( Cut for same )

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/816017.html

Reading The Pound Era which is... quite indescribable. Fun, but not at all what one expects of either an exegesis of a poet's works or a literary history of his times. Am glad it's not about someone I like, because Kenner's grasshopper approach and linguistic games would probably make me gnash my teeth if it were. As it is, if he wants to blather on about Henry James and James Joyce and Bernart de Ventadorn and Wyndham Lewis while dissecting Pound's Cantos, that's great, because Pound's polyglot Cantos never did anything except annoy me. (And the rest of those guys are pretty annoying too.)
( However )

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/811610.html

I suppose I must join

1word1day. I know some of the words, including yesterday's one, apogee. We have a kid who says something very close to that all the time. His dad actually called us once to ask what K was asking for when he kept saying abogee and ppointing to the fridge. We still don't know. It's not apple juice because he never gets apple juice. It's now distinguished from milk and water and cracker. I think it means 'that thing I want that might appear if I ask for it enough.' (This is a common and frustrating phenomenon. Kids will point to a shelf, and even though we offer them everything on the shelf, they reject it all and continue to point with increasing insistence and wails, hoping that we will make the phantom Whatever magically appear, since we make everything else magically appear. Tell you, sometimes it's hard being God.)

But I actually wanted to link to Larry's Pretty Good Word of the Day. Uhtcearu - n., (obs.) lying awake worrying before dawn.

"...to break that down to its Old English components, uht(a) is the last hour of the night, just before dawn, and caeru is the ancestor of care in the sense of concern, which at the time had added meanings of anxiety/sorrow. This is used (in surviving records) only once in Old English, which makes it a hapax legomenon, but has been reappearing in word lists of interesting forgotten words in its nominative plural form, uhtceare."

Old English poetry likes to stick words together to express lovely ideas. Like its descendent German, but not nearly as thumpingly.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/802709.html

Had a perfectly ripping idea how to break the chronic depressive playing of Addiction Solitaire: I would use Duolingo to start learning Dutch. This worked for two days. Then I disabled the annoying remind-you app, and I no longer wish to learn Dutch via Duolingo.

A parmesan cheese sauce is the hardest thing to get off of pans and spatulas. It forms a silly putty (who here has heard of silly putty?) coating that you can soak in boiling water and scrape with a knife and scrub with a plastic brillo, which gets it off the utensils, but then it sticks to the brillo. For something that's only butter and cheese, its adamant refusal to melt is amazing.

The Country Style, last east European restaurant on the Bloor strip, has closed its doors for good. Sic transit gloria annorum 50s&60s, when schnitzel was an exotic dish and pierogies were labelled dumplings. Next to it, Inticrafts, the hodgepodge bazaar that had beads and boxes and dragon sealing wax, has moved to smaller premises further west that was once, briefly, an upscale barber shop. The Futon Store next to Inticraft, run by turban-wearing white guys, vanished a while back, purportedly to become a restaurant. .Eastwest Futons down the block from them is now also boarded up. There goes the neighbourhood...

On the upside, I discover I can buy a real Japanese futon here, for only $500 and change.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/801865.html

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