Off the Cliff

Am having one of my Christmas marathon reads, aided by minimal hours at work and much phthisic languishments on sofas still. But because I'm a visual reader my mind is the most unholy stew of fragments and moods in consequence. Moods partly because I read Gene Wolfe's There are Doors in a day or so, where the narrator's dreams and his reality have exactly the same flavour, and the flavour is 'Something's happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?' When you live alone and have minimal social contact with other people, it's as well to keep that kind of book balanced by more mundane stuff, or your own reality starts looking iffy. Thus I finished Point of Dreams finally, sad that the glimpse of Ruling Women wasn't quite as I'd remembered it, and Castle Rouge to have it finished, irked by CofE Englishwomen who call themselves Episcopalian and writers who don't know the difference between ravaged and ravished.

Oh, and PoD does a Hammett. Someone shoots at Lord Whatsisface and they forgot to tell us who it was.
( Cut for bibliomania )

1. Severed tooth was essence of no big deal. Mid-afternoon I was thinking 'This is a doddle, maybe I'll go hang out with some babies.' Then it started to hurt, but half a tylenol-3 (= two over the counter tablets, a dose I regularly take anyway) put it to sleep again. Great strides in the science of tooth extraction since 2003, of which all I remember is weeping in pain and waiting desperately till I could take another 292 (aspirin and great amounts of codeine.) I do miss aspirin and codeine, which gave a lovely high when it didn't give strychnine poisoning stomach cramps; but tylenol-3s will do, evidently. (I can have '1-2 every 4-6 hours', evidently. The zombie walks.)
( More )

(Err, lj, where's the preview button gone to?)

Though I'm not a huge fan of the Riverside series, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman seem to be very nice people, and I wish them very well and very happy, which they seem to be anyway. But when I read about their New York jaunts and con-going events, and when Riverside side-stories show up in people's charity auctions, I can't help a small wistful desire that Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett were doing it too, and blogging about it, and that it was Points gaiden I was bidding on.

Also I r slo. Always wondered about Coindarel's Dragons, that military outfit Philip was attached to at some point, and what it was. Took someone's typo to inform me that that's their version of dragoons.
( Thoughts obscurely inspired by the Dalai Lama )

Four Faultless Felons is alright, but as the foreword says, GKC could *not* leave the anti-Semitic snidery alone, and it grates. OTOH I almost laughed when a character has a frisson of obscure horror at the sight of a blond Jew, as of something unnatural. The fairest-haired bluest-eyed people of my acquaintance are Ashkenazi Israelis; but if GKC had known any Jews, he might not have been such an ass about them.

And while his heroines are interesting and angular people, they're still only romantic heroines, whose role is to appreciate the wonderful hero. The eccentric felons of the title, the ones with strange and admirable ideas, are men. Saki had individualistic female protagonists in several of his stories, as Shaw did in his plays; so it shouldn't have been so unthinkable for Chesterton. A product of his times and his times are past-- very fortunately.

The best thing in the weird!Holmes book was the Kim Newman story, and even that I'm having trouble finishing.

Surely someone must have done Sherlock Holmes meets Father Brown?

Concise and brilliant comparison of Journey to the West and Minekura's Saiyuuki to be found here.

Finding myself near Bakka yesterday, I bought The Kingdom of Gods. Wondered why my backpack was so heavy coming home. N, that one's a doorstopper and no mistake.

In my current state of slightly uncomfortable loose-endishness, all I seem to want to do is read Sherlock Holmes pastiche. There's certainly enough of it around. Alas, what remains to me now is a series that might be called Mrs Hudson Knows Best, and the inevitable had-to-happen: a Canadian writes Holmes and at once puts him on a steamer bound for Canada with a bunch of Irish refugees who are probably (horror!) the dreaded Fenians. That the Fenian threat ended by the early '80s is neither here nor there. We are going to see Holmes in the middle of bitter winter Ottawa, god help us.

I ought to lap up Jeanne Larsen's Silk Road like cream. In fact I've been trying to read it since 1996, which is apparently when I bought it, in Tokyo (vaguely vaguely, a 2nd hand English bookstore in Ebisu), from someone who evidently bought it in Malaysia, going by the bookseller's stamp on the title page. I should lap it up even more now when I understand the pastiches that she's using (Ming storytellers, Buddhist chronicles, Daoist tales) plus the varying version of events these sources give to supplement the first-person narration (oral tradition in action, playing with texts, meta meta yum) plus the delight of a Karin-like gallimaufry of duelling Great Western Mothers, Jade Emperors, Guan-yin, petty bureaucrats in the Heavenly order, and uppity pearl spirits. I still find it a slog, alas.

Breaking news! Melissa Scott is working on the Points series again. A novella called Point of Knives now, that happens between the two existing books, and a novel called Fairs' Point to follow! Christmas comes early this year.

It's not that I spoke to no one on this long weekend. I had daily conversations with my 90 year old neighbour across from me, and a prolonged gossip about house prices with Prof and Mrs Islamic Studies two doors up; I passed the time of day with the gardening grandmother down the street and saw a ridiculous number of young friends in passing. But in general I was antisocial. Passed up the Sunday morning zazen because my knees hurt-- my knees always hurt too much for zazen-- and decided not to go to the 'pay what you please' Chinese language classes because they require a (refundable, granted) $75 deposit and I'd just splurged on a new boombox; and for the same reason denied myself another Thai massage. And besides my eyes *hurt* and I couldn't *see* and I was feeling ill-used by the world. Zazen and massage might have helped with that; but then again, maybe not.

Nor did I paint the black keys of my stairs. Bought the paint, but my knees hurt and I couldn't *see.*
( What I *did* do... )

1. Root canal over. Anesthetic wore off hours ago. I seem not to be in cringing terrible pain. In fact the tooth hurts less than before, which has (ahem) not usually been my experience of dental surgery. Going by the endodontist's muttered remarks-- 'What's *that* doing there? *Two* posts?? Well, we can go round, I suppose'-- getting to the root through the crown was like working one's way to the burial chamber of the great pyramid of Cheops, which was protected by misleading walls, false passageways, and corridors blocked by jagnormous stones. Made me feel quite adventurous.
( Read more... )

I don't read chicklit, which sounds to me like a chewing gum, or romance novels either, so I'm not sure what chicklit and romance novels read like. But my current book, Song of the Silk Road by Minmei Yip, is proving not quite the travelogue/ mystery the cover advertised, and full of what I expect the other two genres to contain ie slightly airhead heroine who attracts and beds hunky men wherever she goes. Beds in detail, as when doing it naked in the desert: '...more sand had come between his fiery desire and my deep, mysterious valley' which doesn't prevent full-on coupling a few sentences later without a whisper of an ouch. Oh, and as nekonexus said about someone else, one must mentally erase every third (or fourth or fifth) adjective, or go mad. They're all pillow words anyway: two /impeccably dressed/ attorneys in a /posh / law firm located in one of the /most expensive districts/ in Manhattan.'

The owner of the fiery desire is the Hunk ex Machina who rescues her from the Chinese police when she deliberately falls atop a terra cotta warrior down in his trench:

I kept racking my brains while staring at the warrior as if he were my eternal and only love... Suddenly, as if pushed by some mysterious force, I slipped and fell against my 'lover.' With a will of its own, my hand reached to scrape a tiny piece from the terracotta soldier, then swiftly put it inside my jeans pocket.

Somehow this is not what I expect from someone who was born in China, got a Ph.d from the Sorbonne, and taught in Hong Kong. I should have read the acknowledgments: "(her husband) Geoffrey's love and support are like an oasis in the desert-- nurturing and protective amidst the infinite mystery of life. I feel a perfect balance of yin and yang in my life because of him.'

Oh dear.

I couldn't get into Alexander McCall Smith's Precious Ramotswe series. It felt just a bit... off? Condescending? Something oogey, whatever. But my bro gave me one of his Isabel Dalhousie mysteries, which went down much better. Sort of. Except, er well. Something just a bit off there too. Possibly the man shouldn't be shelved under mystery: I kept waiting for the crime to emerge and be solved, and it didn't and wasn't. And Isabel using moral philosophy to resolve purely emotional issues doesn't strike me as amusing, assuming it's supposed to. It made me want to tell her to face facts and get a grip.

Equally, the weird tales of Rudyard Kipling are far more unpleasant than I'd remembered, not for the weirdness but for the bland arrogance of the narrators. I keep hoping that they're meant to come off as morally reprehensible (I am not at all a subtle reader) but somehow I doubt it. When someone *is* morally reprehensible, such as the narrator of The Phantom Rickshaw, several people say so bluntly. Nothing of the sort happens in The Mark of the Beast or The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes. Then again, this webpage has corrective interpretations for the nonsubtle. 'Kipling has created a genuine Anglo-Indian nightmare, a vision of what it would be like to be one of the least of the ruled instead of one of the rulers.'

(And is the phantom rickshaw where paleaswater's soubriquet of Kitty Mannering came from?)

On an up note, Yoshimoto Banana's Lizard is marvellous: tales of people touched by grace, or whatever the non-Christian version of that is.

Happy Birthday to incandescens, even though it's tomorrow where she is.

I thought I wanted to read Sorcery and Cecelia but could never find a copy. Then I found a copy and read it and thought it, honestly, a bit of a mess. "How strange you should mention So-and-so." But I can find no mention of So-and-so anywhere. The afterword tells me why it's so unfocussed, but still. Such a pity. It could have been quite stunning with a little effort.

I got The Glass Castle from the Front Lawn Library. My s-i-l got it from the real one and thought it stunning. As I was fantasizing about borrowing money to rebuild the crumbling back extension of my house, the s-i-l said, 'Do that. But read The Glass Castle first.' I'm trying, I really am. But it's such a downer that I'd rather read about Irene Adler taking on Jack the Ripper instead, which is pretty far down.

Am in one of my 'let's clear the shelves of those books I bought fifteen years ago' moods. To which end, last night or rather, in the early hours of the morning, I finished Tanith Lee's Reigning Cats and Dogs, set in a sort of steampunk sorta A/U sorta 19th century sorta London. You can tell I haven't read much steampunk because for all I know that's pure by the numbers for the genre. Whatever, I liked it, at least as far as the steampunk details went: flying bicycle dirigibles and advertisements projected on clouds and so on.

The emotional action however is Tanith Lee being Tanith Lee. I bet she does this sort of thing in her sleep by now, which is the the downside of being prolific. It gave me the usual Lee oogey hangover, helped some by that insomnia-caused 2 am reading, and also by being read in tandem with Hard-boiled Wonderland. Now that one is genuinely weird.

(I still want to throttle Birnbaum for thinking that the past tense of lay is lay. It is not. 'I lay the book on the table and went to get a beer.' Argh. OTOH while giving both the Japanese name for a food and its English translation is a little clumsy, I'm glad he did it, because I'd have no idea what a 'tofu puff' was if he hadn't preceded it with karaage.)

1. Kafka on the Shore is amazing. (cough) I didn't know the Japanese *did* things like that. That's why I'm now 100 pages into The Wind-up Bird Chronicles and unable to put it down.

2. I'd kind of like to see what the Japanese of Kafka reads like. The translation is slightly clunkier than Bird or Sheep, ie I can guess what a lot of the original Japanese was, but Kafka's voices are quite different from the other two narrators. OTOH I know from comparing texts that Birnbaum slicked up Bird's narrator, in ways that may be legitimate or may not. I don't think that's true of Kafka, but I wonder if it too sounds flatter in Japanese.

3. The Japanese translations of Kafka must surely be quantitatively different from the English translations, because the Japanese associations with the name are *really* different from ours. Cf also Kaori Yuki. (No grand guignol in Kafka's works that I can tell; even In the Penal Colony reads rather bloodless to me.) Is this a case of Great God Pan syndrome?

(To refresh your memories-- various Japanese have written what an utterly shudderous feeling they got from that Machen story. I read it. Essence of 'meh.' Was informed that yes, it's all in the translation.)

Why do I read Peter Ackroyd? Why? He gives me the fantods. But I keep on reading him, as I do not keep on reading Chatwin's equally fantoddy Viceroy of Ouidah. The 80s were very good to me but I look back on its literature, the stuff I read then and mostly in Picador, and have claustrophobic attacks.

Equally Kate Elliott posts a picture of Salisbury Plain. Which makes me understand, even more than the Niagara Peninsula, Auden's prayer:

I cannot see a plain without a shudder,
'Oh God, please, please don't ever make me live there.

More happily, a Star reporter talks about learning to ride a bicycle at age 23. I was 29 and thought that an achievement; I also had an easier time. Start by riding on grass? or worse, Queen St? Lord no. School playground on the weekend, third try. Friend held the handlebars till I had my feet on the pedals, let me go, and suddenly I was bicycling. (I didn't learn as a kid because my mom was convinced that to ride a bike was to die. Even if my dad had got his way and tried to teach us, I'd have been like the reporter: fall off once, forget it.)

But my hat is off to the Toronto Councillor who learned at 45. Go him.

If I pushed I might finish Macdonald's Phantastes tonight, but then I'd go to bed feeling lousy and wake up the same way. Macdonald makes me feel grubby and unclean and soul-sick, like a muggy summer night crossed with an incipient migraine. No, I don't know why. Probably the way he writes women. Possibly his language. Maybe just his worldview. I read him as a kid and liked the Curdie books well enough, but everything else, I'm now recalling, gave me the fantods. Horrors just out of sight. Must look at some 100 Demons before bed and hope the clean invigorating air of Ima Ichiko's youkai, to say nothing of Ritsu's female relatives, sweeps away the Victorian vapours.

(Takahashi Rumiko isn't quite as bad, but she has the same sort of effect on me. All her clean-featured pert and/or genki characters feel like they're avatars of some hideous unseen inward rot.)

There's a nice little street near me, Olive Ave, that is a kind of neighbourhood to itself. Has been having street parties for 20 years, long before anyone else thought of such things. I used to think it rather bare and forlorn in the greenery department, but time has taken care of that-- the trees are now tall enough, if nothing like as thick and umbrageous as those on Palmerston Gardens a block north. So now I walk along it on my exercise strolls and enjoy its cozy ambience.

There's another reason: it has the best lawn books in the neighbourhood. Today I came across a selection literally laid out on the lawn, not stacked in boxes as is the usual custom. This display method saves wear and tear on the books, because natch people tumble the boxed books around and bend pages and curl covers and so on. And I'm not supposed to pick up any more books, but---
( I cannot pass up free books )

Rivers of London
-- in the grand tradition of Ackroyd, all the names of all the streets I don't know (to say nothing of boroughs), though I suppose it must be nice if you do. It always struck me as provincial when Toronto writers put in similar local referents, possibly because they seemed to be aping their betters. Their betters in this case are London and New York-- you can name streets in those cities and not sound like you're trying to establish the reality of the city, which is how TO writers come off to me. Yes, yes, there's Kensington Market and Queen St and University Ave (which doesn't go through the university, natch) but really, who cares? Only the local yokels.

We will not mention the other tradition referenced, that of Gaiman (and I suppose Mieville, only I haven't read his)-- unreal city; the city behind the city; but in this case, a city originating in the past that London has built up, a notion of which I approve. Past accumulates in certain places, like grime on buildings, and London is definitely one of them. So is Rome, what I remember of it from childhood. But French cities wear their past lightly, and Japan-- there the past happens on a different wavelength, quite beyond reach of a gaijin's senses.
( Cut for the rest, by category )

Ahh, long weekend, stuck inside waiting for the Water Meter Man to move my water meter. ('Our first available morning appointment is July 30' because it's the Saturday of a long weekend, a fact that didn't occur to me back in mid-June.) No matter. I have The Rivers of London and 100 Demons 20, which arrived yesterday a week ahead of expectation: thank you Escargot Canada and not-yet-o-Bon-ified Japan PO.

100 Demons feels strangely like an artifact from another lifetime ie last November when I was, evidently, someone else. Have had a small anxiety lately about whether I can still read Japanese (literally, can I read it; and psychically, will I understand it even if I do?) Yes, it seems, I can, though I'm getting resigned to the 'use it or lose it'-ness of Japanese, and the need for constant visual reinforcement to stop kanji and vocab that I've known for decades from vanishing from the memory banks. Also that certain sentences in Ima Ichiko will make no sense at all on a first, second or even third reading-- but that's a given of Ima Ichiko's.
( The aging brane )

LJ won't let me post, so I put yesterday's entry here.

If I found a medication that gave me the happiness and freedom and sense of possibility that half a litre of wine does, I'd take it. Especially if its effects lasted longer than half a litre of wine's does. But however briefly, I remember what life was like ten or twelve years ago. Let's go to Japan! Let's buy a ticket at the shop next door and make our reservations for a business hotel in Komagome and off we go! Or farther back-- let's go to France! Amsterdam! England! A rail pass and friends to crash with and no worries about knees or backs (though in '89 I did bring an orthotic pillow with me; even in those days...)

All this helped by odd flashbacks to the early 90s and my Papuwa obsession, whose flavour I'd almost entirely forgotten after almost twenty years. Hot weather and interrupted sleep will do it.

Otherwise, hot weather seems the time to read Holmes fanfic pastiche. Finished Caleb Carr's The Italian Secretary in today's early morning thunderstorm, and find ghost-apprehensive Watson rather like French Judge Dee breathing a prayer to the gods: no-I-don't-think-so. Am reading His Last Bow as a corrective. The Onlie Begetter is the onlie one who can get the voice right. I can accept and enjoy the Mary Russell books, somehow, as Leatherpants!Draco, ie we aren't trying for the real thing: but those who do try for Watson's voice tend to fail, IM ever so HO.

Someone's lj entry about preferring the less famous works of famous writers cited Brust's Agyar as more memorable than the Vlad books, or even most of Paarfi. Got it from the library, read twenty pages, and returned it to the library today even though the library is closed for Canada Day. Don't want that thing in my bag or my house longer than necessary. Now maybe if one keeps on, it turns into Lolita, unreliable narrator and all. But I couldn't read Lolita either. Some things are just inherently yuck, deconstructed or not.

Err well. It has been a week. A pity I remember nothing about it. Reading Russell all week, not ever quite enjoying it but not disliking it enough to read anything else.
( My unremarkable days )

I thought I was good at tagging my entries, but under 'verse' I can't find that Sherlock Holmes poem I ganked from incandescens. Hence I must post it here, under cut.
( 221B )

This is by way of noting that I've read one and a third of the Mary Russell series. Was desperately relieved that The Beekeeper's Apprentice didn't do the horribly obvious thing it looked like it might do. (Well, with all the ret-conning of the canon, anything might be possible.) But I grow just a little irked by King's dismissal of Watson, good-hearted generous Watson who is so not Holmes' equal while Mary so obviously is. So I shall remind me of canon and fanon in this respect, to say nothing of Yotsuya Simone's flat-out BL take, which otherwise I might want to forget.