Off the Cliff

Very achy at work yesterday, went to get muscle relaxants from backpack, muscle relaxants weren't in any of the compartments. Could have sworn I had half a pack's worth left, but they weren't anywhere in my house either. This morning I reached into backpack to check for something and the first thing my hand touched was half a pack's worth of Robaxacet. I hate my bag of holding so much.

In a happier mood, last night was devoted to atmospheric dreaming. In one I was at a tony wine tasting laid on for my father by my godmother at the old-fashioned law office where he used to work, all walnut panelling and brass fittings and discreet lighting. (His real office was in a sterile 60s office building lit by fluorescents.) My brother was there too, but I had a feeling we'd kind of crashed the event. I wasn't supposed to, of course, but I opened one of the bottles, which is to say I sliced it in half down the middle and remarked in surprise to John that there was no core or pit in the centre- it was all yellow wine right through.

An earlier dream was about doing cleanup at the daycare, which wasn't the daycare but a second floor open-concept loft-like space with wooden walls. I was trying to get the last kid to go home with his parents (kid is the son of our local trans activists) but he kept on talking as is, in fact, his wont.

And in between was a sexual dream about the two oldest dragon brothers who sort-of kind-of kept morphing into Papuwa's Magic and Servis. I'm happy to encounter either set of brothers again in my dreams, and more than happy to have an erotic dream at all, because that just doesn't happen in the post-hormonal state.

Yesterday's dank and heavy turned into last night's dank and uneasy. Couldn't sleep at all. At last turned on light and for no good reason, rousted out one of my long ago id-fics from Papuwa fandom and reacquainted myself with it. Fic, if left long enough alone, works as well as smells to bring another time vividly back to life. How long ago and other-universe the mid-90s were, and how much I'd forgotten the fact.

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

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

Finished my reread of Channel Five on the 20th, the day before my 21st fannish anniversary which I totally forgot about in the press of work and new babies. I wish I tagged my LJ entries better because I seem to recall talking about this the last time I reread Channel Five, whenever that was; or maybe I was just musing aloud about getting the reissued manga that came out in 2010. There was something said somewhere about 'added material' that had me hoping maybe she'd given us something to offset that very unfinished- not ending, even, just a stopping point. But then I remembered that she altered parts of the tankoubon from what had first appeared in Animage: late enough that you can see the change in her style; and that's probably the new material the adverts meant.

So no, I'll never find out what happened to Jan (who is canonically dead but evidently also very much alive) or, fairly clearly, what Takamatsu did to alter Jan, or what happened to Servis, or what happens to the five brothers, or anything. This makes me very sad indeed.

No idea why I pulled up one of my ancient Papuwa fics this afternoon, written nearly 20 years ago in Japan and never reformatted out of word perfect. I know I was lonely and sniffly a lot in Tokyo, but I'd forgotten how that got written large into my characters' chronic longing for whichever other character it was that didn't love them back.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

(The psychic gestalt of Me-in-Tokyo is as much a place as the physical city, and a very odd place indeed when viewed from here. Thrilling and amazing at times, but it weirds me out when I visit it again by chance.)

Pratchett, Nation
Gaiman, American Gods
Powers, The Drawing of the Dark

-- so three of the Big Names in SFF. And generally all very well, but give me the 100% Brit over the expat and the American. He passes the Johnson test at least, and possibly the Bechdel but I'd have to check.

McKillip, The Changeling Sea
-- a non-twee McKillip. How wonderful.
( More )

One Sunday in 1993 I bought a copy of GanGan Something, and was overjoyed because I thought I'd got a Papuwa episode. But no, it wasn't the GanGan that Papuwa ran in, so I left it in someone's bike basket out front of Hourindo in Ikebukuro. Ikebuk's Hourindo first moved across the street and then closed. But after nearly two decades the universe has paid back my (doubtless unwanted) present, by mysteriously depositing in my bike pannier a set of nightlight bulbs. Which I have no use for either.

The garbage pickup has moved back to Thursday mornings. This feels far more natural and way it s'posed to be than Tuesdays. Of course, natural is two pickups a week, but that we haven't had in decades.

There's been much shifting about of boxes next door, as s-i-l's work office moves into bro's home office, bro's home office moves down to basement, and what was in the basement since 1989 gets left for the garbage or the scavengers, whichever comes first. Thus I discover that the early issues of Horizon magazine, from the late '50s, did *not* go to the Art Gallery's library. They've been next door all along, and that vanished snapshot of a vanished time is now mine. Alas it's a faintly mouldy mine-- not enough to make me sneeze, but with a distinctive smell and a tendency for pages to want to stick together.

It remains a fascinating snapshot of the pre-British Invasion/ Vietnam War world that I saw and read as a child: the Beat poets and modern American architecture (all of it hideous to my eye) and execrations of the growing emptiness of growing suburbia; profiles of up-and-coming entertainers like the young Stephen Sondheim, the young Marlon Brando, the young Mike Nichols and Elaine May; homages to the grand old men Andrew Wyeth and Robert Frost, encomia of the new Italian directors Fellini and Antonioni, pictures by (the young) Ronald Searle; and articles on odd corners of history and art, popular stuff but still informative. It just looks--- different, 50 years later with an adult understanding of what's being said. I think Horizon shaped my idea of what kind of world adults ought to live in, a world of style and ideas; I believed that New York or Paris in the 50s was some kind of heaven. But it wasn't that way at all, even from the viewpoint of the time.

Speaking of different on re-view: Sunday I finally saw Sen to Chihiro in Japanese on a big screen. It was good, of course; but my memory says the Bloor's screen was bigger and the whole thing more engrossing, the colours richer and more mysterious, when seen that first time, even from the balcony. Like the first time, I was seized mid-film with a need to pee, but this time I held out, slightly to the detriment of my concentration. Also was troubled by an attack of those chest knocks that are either anxiety or fluid in the lungs, and I never know which. But a nuisance, whichever. Because though I woke Sunday morning feeling better than in weeks, with energy to spare, by the time I finished with the film and got me home I was yawning at 11 and slept ten and a half hours, and was a draggled wreck the next day.

Thus I am not going to Omohide poro-poro this evening (starts at 8:45), having been up early for a sick child this morning and landed with an 8:15 shift for tomorrow. I'm yawning at 7:30 and anticipate a very early night. (Out the window a grey November sky is backing the blooming plum blossoms and the buildings are all shades of tan in the filtered western light. That was what the 50s looked like to me.)

Ok. This is complicated. Pay close attention.

Back in November '05 I bought a comic from Bookoff called Madara (青). The 青 is actually surrounded by angle brackets but I can't be arsed to look up the code for them, and in fact I didn't even notice that detail until last night. It was also vol 2. I tried reading it in summer '06-- the manga has grey moistness and Temeraire as its associated images in my head-- and gave up. Too much katakana, too much back story from presumably vol 1, couldn't follow it. Started again just recently and have been hacking through it ever since.

We begin a flashback to our hero, Kaos, abandoning Jamila, the mother of his children, to go off with his pal Yudaia in search of someone or something called Madara; an event which apparently happened several milennia ago, because now Jamila is Zenobia and immortal, having sold her soul to a demon. And off we go.

Who is Madara? Whoever he is, Kaos says he'll drop whatever he's doing to go off with him once he-- or his incarnation-- is found again. At which point I start having flashbacks to that White Hart novel series last fall with much the same premise. From in-manga flashbacks Madara looks like yer average genki spiky-haired shounen hero, yawn, but his current avatars, of which there are two, are much more interesting in their smooth villainy and high-handed diplomacy. Lotsa hints of plots and counterplots and betrayals lurking in the shadows; fascinating reading.
( And then it gets complicated )

rasetsunyo associates me with

1. Aestheticism
2. Papuwa/Eroica crossover
3. Classical Studies
4. Classical Chinese poetry
5. Japan

and I natter. ( Natter natter )

amazon.jp pushes stuff at me, of course. Any time I go to them, they're doing 'wouldn't you like to look at these...?' Now, what I've bought from them is Ima Ichiko and Nemuki and Hatsu Akiko and Akino Matsuri, all in quantity. Do they offer me more ghostly and/or historical fantasy shoujo? They do not. They offer me FMA. I do read FMA, yes, but I've never bought it from them. O-susume no riyuu? (Why do we mention these?) 'Cause you bought Papuwa 12 from us so we're sure you'd love FMA 17. And this shounen Jump series over here as well, and...

Well, fine. But. ( *But* )

However, paleaswater, the next Phantom Moon Tower is due out on the 25th. I have it on pre-order; but if Book1 gets it in maybe I'll try them instead, since careful squinting at their info suggests they send by mail directly to Canada.

In same-language reading, I finished Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee. *Now* I know where Mieville's coming from. ( Read more... )

The yen-dollar rate is lovely these days. 3390 becomes $32 Canuck, the first time in fifteen years that you don't do '100 yen = 1.00 plus up to 50%' for conversion. Now I subtract. Oh joyful day, the millennium is here. Which is great but ya know, I still don't think one slim Papuwa tankoubon is worth $32.00. So, sorry, amazon.jp: it was nice, it was a slice, but I'll get my manga either through Iwase these days or through your second-hand affiliates, who only charge 1900 yen for shipping and not 3000.

It is so nice to have extra money these days. Means I can buy books, and sometimes safer books than the latest Ishiguro, which I still haven't finished. ( Let me count my countless blessings one by one )

I have FAXed off my order to Vancouver's Iwase Books and am hoping they got it and will be able to provide me with ZeroSums and Shounen Gangans in a prompt and uncustomised fashion. (FAXes, she scoffs. How last century. The Japanese love of the FAX machine is beyond my understanding. So is the love of .pdf documents, and Iwase requires using both.)

( Cut for border bitching )

Googling in vain hopes of finding magazine codes, I discover Shounen Gangan has become much bigger than when I read it a dozen years ago. FMA will do it to you. But I'm getting it for Papuwa which continues to exert its old fascination over me in the old way: the family's backstory. In the last ep I have Magic is leafing over a family album, and there's a picture of *his* father with his four sons, and oh how we would have drooled for that back in the day. But more: there's a picture of some tall guy in glasses standing in back of a group portrait. 'What- *still*-?' Magic snarls and rips the picture out and tears it apart. Ahh, the old deadly poison works in my veins. Who is this man? What did he do? Why does Magic feel strongly enough about him to destroy all his photos?

So I want to say- C'mon, Iwase, deliver. But knowing Shibata, who dangles hints for years occasionally before resolving them, I shall say- deliver with all deliberate speed.

Happiness is...

a four-day weekend (yes, it was supposed to be a whole week off but I'm an adult who doesn't believe in the Holiday Fairy, at least not in August) and seven volumes of Papuwa Redivivus and eleven volumes of FMA/ Hagaren and...

the first Hagaren DVD, come across by accident at the rental place. See, I read Hagaren 1 a while ago and found rereading it an exercise in both squint and futility (I've read this and I know what happens only there's stuff I probably missed so I suppose I should read it again only it takes time mumble grumble.) But here's a fast refresher, with subtitles and nice colours and nice music. I can see why people'd fall for the series from the anime: I probably would too.
( Cut for arrant elitism )