Off the Cliff

2013 was generally better than 2012 which was infinitely better than 2011 which was arguably better than 2010. 2013 still wasn't outstandingly good in any way. Have probably reached the age when 'outstandingly good' doesn't happen much anymore- bar unlikely strokes of luck like winning the lottery- and one must be grateful for 'not outstandingly bad'. Spent it reading: must be happy that I *can* still read.

Buddhism however seems to have started to stick, in patches: am a lot less irritable than for most of my life and am learning to deal better with the nipping dog of anxiety. Would still love to be a dynamic effective vibrant person who gets what they want through sheer blind charm, but that's even less likely than winning a million dollars.
( It's still Wednesday )

To wit, those last five days after Christmas and Boxing Day. (How glad I am to be living in a country that has Boxing Day, even if people have to work on it; at time-and-a-half, in the case of Blawblaws up the street, down from double pay, which is what one expects of ketchi Blawblaws. I was still happy, in my commercial Torontonian way, to have a place I could go and shop at, since doing it before Christmas, between crowds and ice and the freezer chill of the 24th, was literally painful.)

The Dead Days are usually warmer than usual, hence grey and wet and dank and suffused with wanhope: the emotional fallout of Christmas or a sense of tempus fugit, or in the worst years, tsunamis leaving hundreds of thousands dead. I'm actually pleased at the warmth of today, due to return to deep freeze slipperiness tomorrow; one takes one's mobility in winter when one can.
( Reading on same )

What have you just finished reading?
Mineko Iwasaki, Geisha, a Life, fun and informative about the geiko world, though still just echoing everything I learned via Kurotsubaki. Alas, the protagonist doesn't come off as a terribly nice person. If you don't like the fact that the Queen of England isn't eating anything at the banquet where you, my dear, are no more than the entertainment, suck it up. She probably had stomach flu and was soldiering on in spite of it. It's not for you to go flirting with Prince Phillip in order to piss her off and then smugly say, 'Bad manners are bad manners, no matter who it is.'

What are you reading now?
Ysabeau Wilce, Flora's Fury. Been three years since I read Flora's Dare and clearly retained nothing of it. I like the books in spite of Flora being predictable and tiresome: but then, I'm not the intended age range.

What will you read next?
Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand is on its way to me, as is Flora's Dare for rereads.

Also what he said, especially his reaction immediately post-read. We're obviously of the same generation.

Oh, yes, this. Thank you very much for saying what I've only vaguely felt. Especially after that 'Susan becomes an American and has a fulfilled life battling social injustice, which she couldn't have done in Narnia or England neener neener neener' story that was going around FB, and seriously cheesed me off.

Otherwise, read Geisha, a Life until 2 am and then prudently unplugged my phone. Thus I didn't get the dolorous phone call until 10, five minutes after I got up, and missed the 8 am one. Still had to cancel an acupuncture appointment for 90 minutes of work, which barely covers the cancellation penalty. Could have had a further three hours in the afternoon, but was feeling scratchy and shifted it about so I only had to do another 90 minutes and got to bicycle home in semi-light. Did however go out to Starbucks on my break, in Birkenstocks (-16C windchill) and rejoiced in the ease of walking. Bicycles and Birks will end Saturday with the return of snow. Can't complain: it's still not 2007.

I have finished The Difference Engine and must echo Kara's reaction of 'Errr- what?' Maybe if I knew more of the period and its figures I might be blown away, or just amused, by the alt.hist aspect; but as a narrative with a plot, it was a tad lacking.

However, this morning I discovered missing mitten under the front porch table. No idea how it came to be there, but now I have a pair and my hands are toasty warm again.

Otherwise I ache severely from walking everywhere in boots and (possibly) *not* working eight consecutive hours a day in Babies (bodies are weird that way.) So shall have epsom bath and curl up with a good book and sleep in tomorrow (ha ha) which I didn't get to do Monday or Tuesday.

What have you finished reading?
Nothing since ten days ago. Not sure what I've been reading since last week; not even sure what I've been doing since last week; but reading wasn't it.

What are you reading now?
The Difference Engine, still; Chodron, still; a book on Japanese connectives, still.

What will you read next?
No idea. Some of the undifferentiated books in the kitchen, maybe.

Bonus:
What have you given up on this week?
Cold Fire, maybe ten pages into it. I might have the energy for such an alt.Europe some other time. But once again, writers shouldn't blog. Elliott told me so much about the hows and whys of writing this that now when I read it I se the bones showing.

What have you acquired this week?
An Iain M Banks from a library sale. Looks interesting, whatever.

What have you just finished reading?
Wilkins' Tooth, a Diana Wynne Jones I somehow missed back in the 70s. Except this was the American edition, called Witch's Business, and featuring a cat and a cottage. So I was pleased and surprised, in view of the paleness of her later oeuvre, to find that the titular character comes from the West Indies. Fun fast read, but with the signature neglectful parents, and her 'old women are awful!' theme as well. Which I think she inherited from Jane Austen, actually; IIRC Austen doesn't have a single sympathetic female character over 30. (My guess at Mrs Gardiner's age FWIW.) This book probably needs to be balanced by some Granny Weatherwax, just because.

A Bride's Story, vols 1&2. Lovely detail and 'nicer than I expect anyone to be' manga characters. Feel it probably reads better in Japanese than English; might read the whole series when I'm feeling less apocalyptic.

What are you reading now?
Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (and no, amazon.com, there's no comma in the title.) Because I *need* it, with the kind of week I'm having.

What will you read next?
Kate Elliott's Cold Fire is on its way to me from the library. The library write-up promises "a pseudo-Victorian Europe at the emergence of an industrial revolution, replete with dirigibles, gas lights, and great political and social upheaval." Every other review makes it sound distinctly less steampunk than this. We shall see.

Excellent excellent book. The Chinese authors I can find easily are either mainland or North American, which is fine as far as it goes; but the diaspora went to many other places and one hears very little from Chinese in the Straits or the West Indies or Africa. The Ghost Bride is set in the Chinese community in Malacca at the end of the 19th century: hot and steamy and, one character implies, preferable to Hong Kong, where Chinese are definitely second-class citizens compared to the British. (The author is not oblivious to the position of the Malays vis-a-vis the Chinese either, just to say.)

The book has many joys, sense of place being one of the first. All those Malaysians and Singaporeans over at goodreads saying, in essence, THIS. I only know the place from chance remarks in other people's blogs, and tGB fills in the details: heat, humidity, green, dust, rain. Oh, and the social workings, the domestic life. I've read just enough Chinese novels to realize how the protagonists' lifestyle is both the same and different from the way things worked on the mainland-- looser, less Confucian, more cosmopolitan.

All this is good. But the icing on the cake is the genre. It's historical fiction with a mystery or two on the side and a romance or two as well, and mh well what to call it? Fantasy sounds wrong: supernatural sounds wrong. It's the belief system of the society presented as working the way it was thought to work. No really, there is a Hell, there are Judges there, and they're just as corrupt as the ones here. (Minor plot thread, btw.) So, an historical mystery novel with fantasy elements, then? Basically, Liz Williams done organically, not borrowed from someone else. Excellent.

And I totally misplaced the one name I thought I knew. Comes from Houshin Engi *and* Journey to the West: and isn't him.

The ketchi GlobbyMail limits the number of articles you can read a month, is why I get most of my recipes (and news) from the Guardian. But there was a column about cooking leeks, which I c&p under the cut so as to have it handy, because I always found them a bit overwhelming except in leek and potato soup, where they disappear.
( How to prepare leeks )
( Wednesday meme )

In the Eat More Veg It's Cold dep't, I made this recipe for sesame beets today. Of course, putting toasted sesame seeds on anything makes it delicious. Unless the seeds are rancid, which they so often are. But I bought mine from the Korean super at the bottom of the street, guaranteed fresh, and have forcibly put the rest of the dish away because my system won't take eating half a dozen beets at a sitting. (I baked, not boiled, the beets, which added two hours to the prep time, but I wasn't going anywhere today...)

...on account of it was a drizzly grey mid-teens outside and the rotted Santa Claus parade had taken over the neighbourhood. I did wander down to look before it started because the bands line up on Christie St and practise while they wait. (Nice, once the silver flutes stopped playing The Twelve Days of Christmas.) Yes, the thing is tacky and commercial, but the kids like it. The rotted part comes anywhere north of the parade, with slavering drivers trying to get in to park (impossible after 8 am) or out to go home (impossible until 3 because the streets are unmoving: too narrow with traffic calmers to let cars pass each other even ordinarily, let alone when both sides are clogged with illegally parked vehicles.) And of course being Torontonians they lean on their horns, as if that will make gridlock vanish, and the actual residents of this area hem-hem long to heave a brick at them damned furrners.
( Read more... )

I think my readerly reactions are becoming overly-nice (in the Bingley sense of the word.) Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love is irritating me the way The Magus did oh so long ago-- twit of the first water falls for mysterious Bad News woman and willfully seeks his own salvation (in the Hamlet sense of the term.) Male characters behaving stupidly for cock-related reasons somehow irritate me more than female characters behaving stupidly for Jungian animus reasons: possibly because I understand the animus thing but not, obviously, the cock one; possibly because in real world terms the latter is far more likely to be fatal to the woman than the former is to the man. And it's bad enough when male writers act as if the reverse was true, or at least, that damage to men was far more terrible than damage to women. Oh the Fatal Woman preying on poor helpless men with no self-control will of their own: how very much you do not impress me. Your victims are Darwin Award candidates, pure and simple. But in this case it's a woman writer and I have no idea what she thinks she's doing.

But more happily: one advantage of *not* living in the present moment with its perennial present moment frets is the realization that, compared with other times, the present moment is actually quite wonderful. In this case autumn: which is not only the most comfortable season (the worst it does is rain, though granted days on end of autumn rain can grow tedious) but has the constant positive reinforcement of being beautiful every time you walk outside or even look out a window. Aesthetic satisfaction cannot be underrated. I wish there was a place where leaves were always yellow rather than green: it does the most amazing things to the quality of the light, even on grey days.

1. Why do I keep trying to make stock from turkey bones? It stinks up the house, it leaves greasy utensils and such all over the counter, and the result never tastes as good as the soup my mother made when I was a kid. Possibly I'd mind this less if I had a dishwasher, but the degree of hot water and scrubbing needed to degrease the kitchen after this kind of project is wearying: and the dishes still feel oily.

2. Have deciphered the twist in the second Hyakki-yakki story. A problem with timeline (tree in back garden falls before Tsukasa comes to visit) and identifying the wrong chin as uttering a certain line.
( Three more things )

1. For the Benefit of Mr Kite.

Pablo Fanque was a real person, which I kind of knew, while doubting that his name was really Fanque. (In fact it was William Darby.) He was also "the first black circus proprietor in Britain." The things no one ever told you in 1967.

I discovered this anent wiki's speculation that 'A splendid time is guaranteed for all' is an hommage to the title of Stevie Smith's first poetry book, A Good Time was Had By All; which "itself became a catch phrase, still occasionally used to this day... Variations appear in pop culture, including Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite by the Beatles."
( Read more... )

1. From the FFL, an animated flyover/ flythrough of Elizabethan London. I wish it had been slower so I could see the details.

2. Possibly my evening habit of reading by insufficient light out of one eye, but I didn't notice until yesterday afternoon that A Novel on Yellow Paper is actually printed on yellow paper.

3. Definition of shamanism, out of Kendall though not hers:

William Lebra provides a useful working definition of shamans. Shamans wield recognized supernatural powers for socially approved ends, and have the capacity to enter culturally acknowledged trance states at will.

Shall apply this at need to Kate Griffin, who I think has already taken liberties with it.

4. Illness is kind to the pocketbook so, with money left over this week, I decided to buy some Happy Steer stewing beef (not called that, but the label does eulogize the family farm the meat came from) and try a slow-cook recipe for beef stew out of the Guardian. (Actually a slow-cook gratin, but I'm adding veg to it, so stew/ boeuf bourgignon it is.) Doubtless slow-cook (*and* that bottle of wine they call for) would make even unhappy steer edible, but these days I'm antsy enough about beef to want to be sure my animal had a happy life before going to his useful death.

I used a de-alcoholized wine (was raining y'day and I didn't feel like tramping up or down to the wine store.) It works, but the real thing would have been better. I could have drunk some for the back pains cooking gives me.

S-i-l mentioned the proper/ Julia Child method of cooking mushrooms before adding: very hot frypan, very little oil. End results seems OK. But now I remember why I've never made stew in my life: my mother used to put kidneys in hers. Poking among the veg I kept expecting to encounter that awful offal taste. Luckily it's only a firm mushroom every time.

5. I'm really tempted by that quince recipe in the Guardian article, but quince doesn't grow in NAmerica "due to its susceptibility to fireblight disease caused by the bacterium Erwinia amylovora." Suggestion is that Whole Paycheque may carry them. Hmm....

Thank heaven for wikipedia. It may have spoiled some of the action of Novel on Yellow Paper but at least it's stopped me from returning it to the library after reaching page two. OTOH this is not going to be the happy romp the language suggests it might be. The narrator is vapid and bigoted and tiresome, not charmingly harum-scarum.

On a minor note, Peculiar Occurrences underlines again a significant blind spot in fictional 19th centuries. Servants. Anyone middle class and above had servants. When you went to spend an aristocratic weekend somewhere you brought your maid and valet. Really and truly guys, millionaires did not dress themselves *or* do up their wives' corsets.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

That's Auden, The Fall of the Roman Empire. Just realized how much it echoes earlier lines of his:

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests

City-child me rather likes the idea of an altogether elsewhere- somewhere that's the essence of uncity- as a mental location, if not somewhere I'd ever want to be.
( Cut for Wednesday meme )

Autumn really is a lovely time of year. The air smells beautiful; the leaves are yellow in the sun; the days are warm and the nights are cool and one gets as close to perfection as this earth is capable of.
( Cut for Wednesday meme )

1. Tried to discover if I had an old story in my alhambra directory, which requires using Filezilla because that directory is index.html locked. Filezilla connected happily as ever but wouldn't show me individual files in the various folders. Googled about, was told to give instructions to my firewall, did. It worked. Yay for me. Came home and tried accessing again. No files. Firewall remains instructed. Tried again. And again. Googled more, no joy. Tried again. Files appeared. Argh.

2. Have a desk lamp with a curly lightbulb in it. Every so often desk lamp turns off. Well, bulb goes dark, let's say. Asked the ojisan at Weiner's Home Hardware, he said that's weird, must be fault in the lamp. Bought a new lamp. This, please note, was last December. My inexplicable reluctance to deal with such things means I only replaced the lamp last night, but replace it I did. Yay me. Lamp just turned itself off again. And now I wonder if it's the curly bulb, which is definitely warm when I thought these guys didn't heat.
( Wednesday meme )

I need to start noting where I find these recs for the sort of novel I usually don't read. Must be one of the bookblogs, and I need to know which: because *someone* has an unerring instinct for the kind of book that gives me a reading hangover. Thus The Golem and the Jinni last week and thus We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves this.

Shall probably have recourse to werewolves and vampires to remove the taste from my brain.

Otherwise my legs have been twitching and cramping persistently enough to send me to the doctor, who suggests a magnesium deficiency. Naruhodo. Used to take calcium and magnesium, and then someone said calcium supplements cause heart attacks, and have had none since earlier this year. Accompanied by upswing in leg cramps and twitches in bed. Blood work will reveal all, but that looks a good bet.

My confidence in the editors of Holmes pastiche is not strengthened when I find Holmes and Watson taking 'a transom' to reach their destination, not once but several times. The author shouldn't have written that, but the editors-- to say nothing of the named betas-- should certainly have caught it.

Which goes double for Holmes' account of a peer of the Welsh marches murdered in 1687 by his wife and daughters. "...the local population didn't regard Rupert Grimsley's murder as particularly evil; the villagers impeded the Metropolitan police in the pursuit of their duties to such effect that the three murderesses got completely away." The Metropolitan police, founded in 1829 and responsible for the city of London, would not have been active on the borders of Wales in the 17th century; and Barbara Hambly, who wrote that story, ought to have known as much.

Can't remember if it's the harvest moon or the hunter's that happens in September (presumably it could be both if September is a two-moon month.) In any case there's a bloody big nearly-full moon out there- full as of 7 am tomorrow, which is near as dammit. Close to the horizon, near sunset, its size was surrealistic.
( Now I think of my life as vintage wines from fine old kegs )
( Wednesday meme )

Monday was autumn. Not aggressively so- high of 20, and I think a cloudy-sunny day, as seen from the fog of the sleep-deprived. Tuesday was summer: warm when I woke up, eventually something between 31 and 34 depending whose webpage you read, with a humidex over 40 (105F). Came home mid-day and found my walls wet-- actual droplets of water-- which threw me until I figured it was the result of still-chilly interior and suddenly-steamy ex-, when the heat had appeared as suddenly as cold fronts tend to. I've never experienced that before; nor the smell that came from the silk haoru that has hung in the front hallway for fifteen years and that suddenly revealed itself in need of dry cleaning. (Hung it out in the blistering sun yesterday afternoon, which seems to have helped a little.) Today was warm and breezy; tomorrow will be cooler and wet; Friday will be cold. Between the weather weirdness and truncated sleep this morning and allergies, I feel like I've slipped into some alternate reality. Maybe I'll be myself again on the weekend.
( Cut for Wednesday meme )

There are advantages to being an Ancient of Days. As in: I'm rearranging the Kitchen Art Gallery (the sidewalk-dollar-store pictures and cards that soften some of the rectangularity of that unfortunate window between the kitchen and mudroom, and also block sight of the ugly mudroom itself); I go to line things up from the mudroom side of the window, where kitchen grunge can't get at them; I catch sight of The Year's Best Fantasy doorstopper I unearthed from-- oh what? the mudroom bookcase? And I say to myself, which year is that, could it be--? It could. 1989, number 2, and contains the text of M John Harrison's The Great God Pan.

(Parenthetically I see why they changed the name to The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror in short order, because half the stories at a guess are already that.)
( Read more... )

Did I say Sugawara no Akitada was reminiscent of Judge Dee? So he is, and clearly deliberately so, for here in The Hell Screen is Akitada caught overnight in a rainstorm at a Buddhist monastery full of terrifying pictures of the afterlife, and wondering sniffily what use Buddhism is when Confucianism is so much wiser and more humane a system, and here is an anonymous Lady Macbeth-type lustful female urging her paramour on to murder and here, as required, is a naked mutilated female corpse, and and and.

Thus: perfect summer reading.

But I have to say, if you're modelling a hero on Judge Dee-- which is great and I'm all for it-- it helps to have some of Dee's magisterial always-rightness as well. Alas, that seems to be the point on which Ms Parker balked, because Akitada wibbles over everything. I suppose she wanted a nice decent chap, very aware of ningen kankei (unlike the by-the-book Confucian cold fish Dee) who can be browbeaten by his appalling mother, and is. At which he becomes less Dee than poor old Nakamura Mondo from Hissatsu Shigotonin, without the assassin side of things.

Parasol Protectorate was my first encounter with vampires as bees-- female-led by a queen, at the very least, even if they lack drones and swarms. Now here it is again in Patricia Briggs. Have I just not been reading the right vampire writers? Who first turned the isolated aristocrat Count Dracula into a they, and a they who are part of a social system as well?