Off the Cliff

So after a little episode Wednesday night of scatter-brain and Johnson Spot Blindness ('Where's Silver Diamond 3? I know I brought it upstairs because it's not on the downstairs shelf any more. But it's not in the bedroom. It's not in the study. It's not on the kitchen table. Ohhh what did I doooo with it?') Thursday evening I picked it off the downstairs shelf where it was all along (SD has the most invisibly ignorable spines I've ever seen) and read it in an hour. It breaks off a good breaking point but this is no consolation. I itch for more, to the extent last night of looking at the prices posted in the discount air fares shop on my way home (snowing lightly so I walked) and calculating 'mhh $350 to New York I could go for a day even I mean people *do* right?'

Then went and started Halfway to Paradise 2, which is no kind of distraction. Just not my fave Ima series, and the hero gives me hives with his greasy long hair and his sunglasses and his exuberant seme puppyishness. Le sigh. (So read that Silk Roads one of hers you bought in the summer, twit.)

Have started taking my contact lenses out early and reading manga the rest of the evening. Winter dry eye and cataract mean the lenses are a constant frustration for close work. And it's just so *easy* without them. Probably a good thing, because after Feb 1 I'll be in glasses anyway.
( The weather, as ever )

Thinking back fifteen years to Christmas in Japan, a day rather like this. Morning coffee at Chat Noir, the muzak playing 'Past three o'clock and a cold frosty morn', and very nice too. Alas, in a coughing spell at work that afternoon, tore a whole bunch of intercostal muscles, and was very uncomfortable for several weeks after. Glad that's behind me, whatever. Here in TO, I open my present from incandescens which is I Shall Wear Midnight. Happy holiday reading indeed, and thank you very much. Also the Ikea knife from deepfryerfire which I'd forgotten about, since shortly after she said she'd buy it for me she fell into a moshpit and broke her elbow, IIRC. Lovely to have-- chopped veg for soup with its intensely sharp blade. Believe I'm supposed to give you a penny for it so it doesn't cut our friendship; shall do that when the PO opens again, some time in the middle of next week. PO employees are indeed the salaried leisure class in this country.
( And otherwise )

I detest the song Walking in a Winter Wonderland. Also Have a Holly Jolly Christmas, and OMG most definitely Santa Baby, and I hear them everywhere. But let's not talk of unpleasantnesses. The reality of a winter wonderland is yappari not bad at all.

If it were merely an overcast Toronto day with greige sky and grey streets today would be dispiriting indeed (aka why I could never live in Vancouver.) But a light snow is falling, not enough to impede locomotion, just enough to make a nice contrast to the greige and grey. Takes me back all the way to high school, the greyer city Toronto was then, and how much better the solid Presbyterian buildings looked in snow flurries. Takes me back too to the rare Tokyo snowfall, which believe you me impeded locomotion, as well as the Yamanote line and anyone mad enough to go out in a car. "I'm cancelling your class," my boss told me one Saturday after a two inch/ 5 cm dusting. "The mothers won't let their children out in such dangerous conditions." What madness is this, I wondered; and then on the way to the station observed what happens when non-snow tires meet two inches of slushy snow. Feared for my own life once or twice, there being no sidewalks in that end of Nerima.
( Read more... )

November reading

English
The Chinese Emperor

Japanese
Kohri no Mamono 6-17
Yakumo Tatsu 1-17

which is almost a manga a day. And if Kohri is fluff, and repetitive fluff, Yakumo is wordy and occasionally obscure. Reading four volumes online with those blownup kanji obviously helped. But also it's a well-plotted dokidoki story with enough twists and turns and character development to satisfy, and enough local atmosphere and stangeness to satisfy me. (Whatever really happened in Kojiki days, the Japanese way of remembering what happened ie the Kojiki itself, has an unplaceable weirdness to this westerner's mind, far beyond anything Ima Ichiko has come up with. Usually starting with the names dear god the names. How did they do names back then? It feels like they just took a bunch of syllables and attached kanji to them regardless of the kanji's meaning. Unless there really was someone called Downward Dog.)

It also addresses something that most shoujo BFF/ soft-BL/ call it what you will manga don't: the fact that the non-sexual but overwhelming connection between these BFFs has social repurcussions, at least in RL scenarios. Fine for Blood and Ishuca, but Japanese young men? Mh. Now mostly one likes one's happy homosocial friendships to remain gloriously problem-free, but it's interesting to see the problem addressed. Even if there's the out of Kuraki's chronic 'noli me tangere for kami's I am.'

Two more volumes to go. But I really want to get hard copies of vol 17 at least, because that's a stunner.

(The pixel problem is of course IE alone's. But Foxfire has much more serious font problems ie never the same size two pages running. My lj, too small, enlarge. Go to friendslist, argh enormous, reduce. Click on link in FL, argh miniscule, enlarge. IE's font remains whatever I set it at everywhere; FF doesn't; no one else find this a problem.) (And it looks like IE may be back to normal. Fingers crossed.) (No, not. The preview pane is normal. Nothing else.)

I wish time was geographical, so one could go to the 60s for a week's vacation. This because of the sudden realization that autumn cities I have loved no longer exist. Yes, Pau and Paris and Tokyo are still there, but they're not the cities I saw. The feel of them has changed; and in Tokyo at least, the buildings have changed as well. Almost as bad as Toronto, if one goes by Streetview.
( Cut for surprising October stats )

In my mind, O'Brian belongs to the fall.
( Cut for dry chronicles )
And then it seems I read no O'Brian for two and a half years, until a sudden whim started me on The Far Side of the World on the Labour Day weekend. Finished it last night, and promptly went out to get the next volume. It always vaguely surprises me how O'Brians can be so different from each other, while often being so much the same. I found the international politics of The Ionian Mission and Treason's Harbour tedious; but this one-- oh dear, so many doujinshi moments. Castrating Amazons and near-death experiences, plural, oh my my.

There is also, as Jack remarks, an awful lot of weather in it-- weird and violent weather. In an instance of pathetic fallacy, the cool fall weather we've been having for two and a half weeks changed last night, as I bicycled over to BMV, to an uneasy greasy warm mug, which was followed at 2 am by violent thunder and lightning. Very tropical tempestuous indeed.

And The Reverse of the Medal turns out to be the book I've been avoiding all these years, and now I suppose I have to read it. Or possibly, skip to The Letter of Marque.

August reading aka these long gaps in my memory, where do they come from?

English
Buried for Pleasure

Japanese
Phantom Moon Tower 2
Aoneko 5
--both rereads

Kasho no Yume

-half of which I read in July anyway. This month I only read the title story and almost all of the last one, because the so above it all prince of Sou annoys me, wandering the world and observing tilting kingdoms (yes OK, that's 'declining' but tilt is what the kanji means) to see what will happen to them. Also because I can make *no sense at all* of the arrangement of the palace of Sou whither our prince has gone to report, so screw that.
( Cut for literary thoughts and health grumps )

It's not hot, not really, but it's the humid mug that drains just as effectively as heat does, and makes me scratchy and uncomfortable and out of sorts. I didn't say, 'Well since I'm scratchy and uncomfortable and out of sorts anyway it can't hurt to read Tantei Aoneko 5' because I started reading it for other reasons; but Motoni Modoru does not help. At all. The obscurities of Ima Ichiko are there for a purpose (generally) and can be unravelled (generally.) Her weird tales are meant to be weird tales; her mysteries are meant to be mysteries; there are solutions and explanations if you look closely enough for them, though I still remain uncertain who Yosaburou is getting his info from in several different stories.

But Motoni's obscurities are caused by something else. And increasingly I think the something else is that she's writing witless BL (only taking it very very seriously) and would be quite surprised that you think she's writing a mystery or a drama or even a psychologically complex love story. She puts in 'notes towards' all those things in the course of the story, but the story is really an erotic fantasy about guys screwing, and that's why all these people are screwing for unlikely reasons under unlikely circumstances. Which I could live with if there wasn't all this other bumpf getting in the way, to say nothing of extended conversations about 品 and 格 in which those extremely general terms are never defined.

Hence I am scratchy and itchy and may have to drop Japanese entirely in favour of some Aubrey Maturin sunlight and common sense.

Spent something like five days wading through the 12K story with the regicide of Hou navel-gazing about his motives. Either the heat or the high level Japanese or both made the thing a midnight black slog. Not helped by the fact that the mass-murdering King of Hou is lovingly (and endlessly) recalled by his assassin as 'a clean man', a phrase that bewilders me now quite as much as it did when the Beatles used it about Paul's uncle in A Hard Day's Night. Actually, I have a better idea of what clean (or pure or spotless or however you wish to translate the word) means in Japanese than of what it conveys in northern England English. Not a *clear* idea, mind you, but a better one. Am also convinced that one of the things it means is 'I am hero-worship idealizing this person out the wazoo', but then an admiration for spiritual impeccability is something the west hasn't done for a while. Call it 'integrity' and we can agree; call it 'untainted' or 'pure', and yuck.

So I'm glad the next story is Rakushun and all, but IIRC it's Rakushun being a Confucian counsellor, so instead I'm reading those Silk Roads anthologies that defeated me three years ago. They don't defeat me now, even the Ima Ichikos (but then I've read those stories once and sometimes twice before.) No, the biggest qvell is that I can read the Three Kingdoms pastiches without pain; or rather, the only pain is having lost mvrdrk's list of Who's Who In 3K, which I came across while tidying the front room last spring and put in a safe place where I will never find it again. So I must have recourse to mandarintools and google, but they've not let me down yet.

It rains and I'm reading the first 12 Kingdoms novel, in Japanese, finally. (Bought five years ago, couldn't get into it, abandoned.) Somehow the combination takes me back to Yotsuya or thereabouts in 1992 or thereabouts. Again, do not ask me why. Actually, the lovely cool sun of the last three days first made me want to read Pratchett, which I did-- happy reread of The Truth, which I liked better second time around-- and then made me want to read Japanese. The weather changed overnight but the urge remained. I shall see if the goodness of fit between 12K and TO's changeable weather survives the heat and storms forcast for the end of the week, but I'm not sanguine on that front.

mvrdrk, your cards came. And so *many*! I thought there must be a notebook or something in the bag as well. Thank you very very much. (Now if only the vocabulary book would arrive from bk1, that was sent two weeks ago by airmail, so I can start putting vocab on my flashcards...)

Heat is another country. I do things differently there. Granted, this is heat (31C/ 87F) that stops when the sun goes down, so I turn back into myself; unlike real heatwave heat (38, 40) that doesn't, so I don't either.

Finished The Hollowing. Huzzah, a happy ending in Holdstock! Or- well... I thought Lavondyss had a happy ending-- look, Tallis comes home, right? which The Hollowing proved was nothing of the sort. So, mh, maybe not. Thus, instead of forging ahead with the next book, which in fact goes back and deals with those utter bores from the first book, I picked me up a collection of Kipling's prose and poetry, vol 2, where vol 1 was all from the children's books. Started in on some of the poems, and um err oh dear. Kipling's hair-raising tendencies are muted in Puck of Pook's Hill, and even the Jungle Books by and large; but in the adult stuff Oh Em Gee. So I have nothing to read in the current heat spell, and must study Japanese idioms instead, which put me to sleep.
( Cut for lost time )

Started Robert Holdstock's The Hollowing. I see the oddest parallels with Mushishi. Both happen in a kind of-- umm, call it mythic version of their respective countries. But it doesn't feel mythos-myth to me so much as popular image myth. An England of Morris dancers and folk customs still observed-- a Shropshire Lad sort of England: did it ever exist and if it did, when? I know Holdstock dates the books to pretty much just post-War, but was post-War England at all like that?

Like Mushishi, it feels like a conflation: 18th century elements grafted on to 20th. Mushishi is pure Edo in anything I can identify, except for Ginko himself and his button shirts and his cigarettes. Is why one thinks Mushishi happens in Meiji, because the countryside was still Edo but people did occasionally wear western clothes. But really it happens in the mythical Japan of jidai geki TV shows crossed with tourism ads that play on the furusato-longing theme. (Sun settting behind deeply wooded hills, views of thatched farmhouses and rice paddies, bento boxes with soba noodles and bright pink fish paste, plangent flute music or something sentimental from Meiji.)

Lj crawls like a crawling thing. The icons, as ever. Hence my default.

Finished Liza Dalby's The Tale of Murasaki, on zan's long ago rec. It works for me. And brings back a whiff of how I conceived the Heian world back in my teens, influenced less by Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu than by Waley and Morris. But still, that intimate female world of the court ladies, sending messages to each other, and poems attached to sprays of flowers. How I wanted to do it too. Made me very careful of the paper I wrote my letters on, and wishing I had more of the scented French stuff the parents picked up for me on a visit over there; and of course sad that my handwriting was so undistinguished and scrawly when I did write, unlike my best buddy's distinctive penmanship devised I know not how, because Canuck schools don't teach you to write that way. And now, of course, the whole exercise has gone by the board.

Equally, visiting Japan and seeing how Heian is refigured for modern consumption (meaning the tourist trade, largely, with the usual caveat that the Japanese tourist trade caters mainly to in-country tourists and what other country does that?) made me forget my early imaginings in the presence of acid colours and acid sachet scents. (I snorted at one Japanese critic's suggestion that Kaoru's innate scent was that of semen. But the sachets compounded from classic ingredients for Kyoto dep't store sale run rather to that end of the olfactory spectrum.) Dalby has brought it back again-- wrapped in layers of silk and hair, looking out at a moonlit garden in the company of another lady, and murmuring poems to each other about the view.

Finished The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. It's sufficiently unlike anything I've ever read to leave me a tad discombobulated. For one thing, I didn't expect something that the Romantic Times raved over to be so angular and comfortless for so much of its length. Had trouble finishing it because, hell, horrible people doing horrible things + unlikable people doing unlikable things + mad destructive gods massacring populations whenever possible like 3K warriors does not add up to a pleasant afternoon's read. Besides, if you subvert the romance trope that's JUST SCREAMING TO HAPPEN (I mean, kudos for subverting both Animus Romantic Figure and Mary Sue protag, but it's not what I'm used to) clearly the normal rules are off and maybe I should be bracing myself for a dose of Mieville unpleasantness at the end, to get no more spoilery than that. Thus my feet-dragging trepidation.

Also, and going by the reviews this is just me, I don't much like Yeine as a person. Stoic warrior pragmatically doing what must be done, which is admirable and all, but it's not an endearing trait. The interesting thing is that I don't DISlike her, the way I do (cough) certain protagonists that certain male writers wish me to admire. She's not actively unlikable, but ohh is she a chill April morning. And since it's Yeine's POV, the emotional temperature of the book remained pretty cold for me. I like Sieh, and I think Yeine doesn't appreciate him properly, and though I suspect he's quite as nasty a bit of work as the other gods are, his POV is intriguing. So roll on book three.

Have started the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Have a feeling I'm not supposed to conflate Sieh with Enki from Twelve Kingdoms. Ah well. No doubt they'll straighten themselves out in time.

Diffugere nives, meaning the snow has gone for the moment, so I can bike again for the first time in a week. So after the day's trials and tribs, all of which were less trying and tribbing than they would have been had I been hoofing it, I biked down to Bakka in a brilliant gold and black and blue sunset that made the Victorian workers' cottages on Palmerston look beautiful and homey and desirable, and finally got my copy of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. And listened to staff chatting with a regular about their upcoming move to Harbord and Spadina, essentially two blocks from where I work. In the old Atticus Books, which is going online. 'There needs to be some work-- the building has an apartment on the second floor but the owner used it for storage. You should have *seen* it-- bookshelves on every wall and all the space between them on the floor just *piled* with books.' I wish I *could* have seen it.

But sad as I am the departure of a landmark-- I had friends who worked at Atticus in the mid-80s-- Bakka is going to be two blocks from where I work. Which suggests the need to solicit more work, like the 3-6 someone wanted me to do tomorrow. But not just yet; I have The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and an afternoon off and I mean to hold on to both of them.

So, anent the current kerfuffle about Why are there no Jewish fantasy writers? or rather, why are there no Jewish Tolkiens and Lewises--

I was a bit startled that Weingrad thought Narnia was High Fantasy when AFAI'mC Narnia is a children's series. Yes, it's fantasy, but all it has in common with High Fantasy is a general northern European and specifically English cultural background. Otherwise-- well, its focus by me is other than dragons and derring-do. Talking animals, guy, are a staple of British kidslit. Or possibly you haven't read The Wind in the Willows (full disclosure: neither have I) or Winnie-the-Pooh. (Should note that when I was a kid, which was when Narnia was written, most fantasy was to be found in children's books, and not much elsewhere. E Nesbit, Edward Eager, Hilda Lewis, Philippa Pearce, Allison Uttley, and a little later Susan Cooper. It was the late 60s before anything else started coming out, and the first stuff still came from English authors.)

For me Tolkien was succeeded not by any of the Tolkien D&D clones, but by Moorcock, who had the virtue of doing far away and not-earth and occasionally not-human. Moorcock was succeeded in quick order by Fritz Leiber, with his city settings, and Leiber by Avram Davison, et voila. Three degrees of separation merely and we hit a major Jewish fantasist. And one could make an argument for Leiber's mindset being as much Jewish as Christian, because in western terms, once you're into cityscapes you're into Jewish territory.
( Gold in them thar hills )

Vice-Fearless Leader, listing her top ten fictional crushes a year ago, mentioned the Duke of Avon from These Old Shades. Now I see why. Avon (and how Blakes 7 resonant *that* name is) is a shoujo manga character, and not just the kewl/ shibui oyaji Heyer probably intended him as. (cf Yakumo Tatsu) No no; not when he minces down the street in heels *and* is a master swordsman. This is the scintillatingly dangerous, brilliantly debauched, hopelessly fascinating effeminate guy who dazzles and/or rapes the younger male protagonist as per genre. (Examples never come when you want them, because all I can think of is Berg Katse.)

So could we can these tedious and unconvincing references to the Duke's female liaisons? They're unnecessary and out of character.

(No, I know we can't, not when Heyer was writing. But she's clearly going to draw out the Duke's obscure intentions in re his (safely aged up) page as long as she can get away with it. Note that no one really believes Leon is actually 19. He's obviously a precocious 15-year-old bishie.)

Have now lost my excellent Ikea kitchen knife as well. Things hate me.
( Cut for stats )

Aarghity week. The provinces of my body revolted, with the result that my shoulders ache and I'm two kilos lighter than I was on Thursday. However, the up news is that the late-Meiji weird tales novel I ordered, with illos by Ima Ichiko, has a manga story by her at the beginning. This is nice. Though when I ordered it, I think I was hoping for something more Hatsu Akiko-ish-- misty rains, damp Japanese-style houses, dank western-style houses, pale and phthistic Meiji literati. OTOH the novel's setting is 1900 when I believe the uneasinesses of earlier Meiji, that Hatsu sensei illustrates so well in her Rainy Willow series, had been replaced by the burgeoning self-confidence that led to the Russo-Japanese war. The literary types who surround the hapless sub-editor protagonist certainly seem burgeonly self-confident enough. But I should read the stories themselves and see what the actual author has to say.

(Should note that all the phthistic Meiji literati I can think of, except for Higuchi Ichiyo, died after 1900. Should also note that this collection is something like the fourth in the series.)

Because it was a cold and snowy and bitterly windy day yesterday, I... went out and cashed my paycheque at the bank machine and bought strawberries. Otherwise I'd have failed in my Canadianly duty. (Did not shovel. The snow wouldn't stay in one place long enough for that. See: wind, above.) Then I created a Goodreads membership and looked at people's book lists. I'm cheered that half the books on Best Books In The World also appear on Worst Books In The World. De gustibus etc, though why would anyone hate The Life of Pi that much?

Alas, I'm finding Locke Lamora less than enthralling. This is only partly because of an earworm that sings 'How are things in Locke Lamora?' at me every time I open the book.