flemmings | Entries tagged with rl

The unreliability of Japanese language bookstores in New York, and of Google itself, is beyond anything. Last November I spent a morning frantically trying to find Kinokuniya near Rockefeller Square when it was long moved to Bryant Park. Yesterday

shinymonkey spent a morning frantically trying to find BookOff on E 41st St when it had moved to 45th two weeks after I was there last November: with no notice of 'about to move' then or 'have moved' now, and with Google maps then and now showing both stores as being where they were not.

The exercise resulted in a migraine and she had to leave without visiting Kinokuniya, and so was unable to get me more Campus word cards on which to write kanji and vocab. Unable to believe that the Koreans don't have some version of this very basic educational artifact, I went down again to the Korean stationary store and pulled out my last Campus word card pack. 'Do you have anything like this?' The owner pointed to a low shelf. Well well. What I had taken to be Blue Bear erasers or something, turned out to be Blue Bear word cards, with the ring detached and hidden underneath the cards. Being knock-offs, the paper is thinner than the sturdy comforting Campus version, but still. I have word cards again.

( Considering how my light is spent )

My three hour work day turned into seven. I shall wish everyone happy new year and happy new decade (my decade starts with the year that ends in 0, thank you) and go to bed two hours before either begins.

Tomorrow I may meditate on the year(s) past. Or not. G'night.

Was looking at unfilled Yuletide requests yesterday. Before the whole archive became inaccessible, right? And not one but two people have requested Mara, Daughter of the Nile, the book I lived in in my early teens. One requester is utter anonymous, and the other, the one with the very detailed ideas, is someone next to whose name I have a vague Bartleby mark, for reasons lost in the mists of time. But still. Mara, Daughter of the Nile. Good lord that takes me back.
( Silent snow, invisible snow )

In the 'two countries divided by a common language' dep't, I learn from myriad entries on FFLs (and my own) that Americans 'call out' when they're not going to make it to work. Canadians 'call in'. Because it's the weekend I did neither, of course. Instead I stayed at home almost all of yesterday, as I'm supposed to, and felt vile, as I do when I stay home-- weak, ear-achey, and inclined to burst into tears over things like my 1998 line-a-day daybook.

So today I took half an ativan because it's supposed to help virus-caused balance problems, though it may help by making you not *care* that you've got virus-caused balance problems, or care much about anything, in fact; got on my trusty iron horse and pedalled happily in mild sunshine (above freezing) over to Bloor and Brunswick. And bought books, which is exactly what I need, of course. But everything at BMV looked so fascinating, I was hard put to get away with a mere $40. Knowing that the attractiveness might be just the ativan speaking, I read a few pages of each OMG wonderful! find, and so passed up on Donald Richie's novel about the life of Atsumori's killer, Mr Darcy's Decision, the fictionalized account of the real-life Chinese Imperial princess who spied for the Japanese in WW2, and a book of essays by Natsume Soseki which read as floaty-ungraspable as Japanese theorizing always does read to me in English. I should try it in Japanese and see if it reads better there, but my guess is not. I've heard that the Japanese, like the French, prefer to wander about a point rather than actually come to it, an approach that makes me scream whenever the French do it.
( The haul at the end of the day )

Illness is the most tiresome thing imaginable. It rots the brain. As this morning, when I realized my glasses were cloudy and sprayed them with cleaner, both sides, and wiped them, and wondered why they were even cloudier, not to say opaque. This will happen when you spray Liquid Bandage™ on your lenses.
( More intriguing kanji )

Full disclosure: RBC Dominion Securities has never hid any of *my* wealth in a Lichtenstinian account. This is because I have no wealth. Nice to know, I suppose, that if I did, someone there might pull a tax fiddle for me, though probably not my own adviser

I go to my doctor's appointment and come back with a backpack full of books from the used bookstore up by her place.

'You could have gone out to dinner on that $22,' Superego says. 'Now you can stay in and eat mush.'

'I merely emulate Erasmus,' I reply. '"When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes."'

'Yeah, but Erasmus read his books.'

Erm. This is true. Still, I might read these?
( Cut for swag and snow )

Sinuses have me down.

Good stuff: Happy story from the FFL.

Bad stuff:
( youtube link so under the cut it goes )
Though I gather much gladness was had by the geeks present when the hearing test turned out to be a passage from Evangelion.

( Read more... )

qwerty asks me five questions. I answer.
( At length, as ever )

( Cut and numbered )

My computer told me today it couldn't find my profile and rerouted me to generic user XP. I hope this doesn't happen again.)

Was talking about Novik and Temeraire last weekend with

nojojojo and

paleaswater. Shall continue to do it here. ( Bolstered by some floaty lying awake at 2 am Tuesday morning thoughts, listening to Newark being as silent as Newark ever gets )

The Night Revels of Minister Han Xizai was painted in the 10th century by Gu Hongzhong (another representation with linked closeups is here.) 'Painted in five panels' doesn't mean 'reproduced in five panels.' Good, that's cleared up.

Wandering about NY on Monday, trying to locate Kinokuniya while passing Saks 5th Avenue here or observing the mouth-watering sales on denki seihin there, I realized that many people come to NY to shop for, well, other things than I come to shop for, certainly. But these days, with cheap bk1 shipping and increasing numbers of- feh- translated manga not only at Kino but at Bookoff itself, I don't really come to buy manga anymore. (Though I'm sorry to have missed Kino while I had US money during loonie-daka-- Saiyuki Reload and Onmyouji and Ravages of Time would have been mine without waiting for shipping. OTOH I'd probably have bought a new Wordtank for heart-stopping prices, just for the ability to see what it looks like and does, and there goes my VISA. Sai Weng's horse and all.)

( No, what I really go to NY for is... )

I survived Amtrak (half hour late due to freight trains.) I survived NJ Rail (30 minutes late due to downed wires + 20 minutes waiting at a bridge by Secaucus for all the backed up trains to pass us into NY.) I survived NJ taxi drivers who couldn't find a building right round the corner even though he told me it was right round the corner when I said I can't walk the two blocks to Mulberry St. I survived the desk clerk who didn't believe I was the person whose name was written on the envelope with the keys in it. I even survived me who managed to lose my wallet inside the bedroom of the apartment and *then* managed to lose (ie not find) half the money that was in the wallet.

It only took 15 hours but I am in New York. Or rather New Jersey. Tell me again why people travel?

And happy birthday, Fearless Leader.

( Cut to save FLs )

( Cut for space )

( Cut and numbered for convenience )

On Wednesday I wrote "Amelia Peabody and I are not long for each other's acquaintance." On Thursday I went to Eliot's Books and bought four more volumes in the series.

I blame Pratchett for this. I read him last year after the op; and now recuperative periods, even if they aren't *actually* recuperative, require an easy series of English language books to distract me from the lack of small people. (Easy series of Japanese books require coffee shops and the ingestion of bakery items which I cannot afford in any sense of the word. Alas.)

Thus, Amelia Peabody. ( However-- )

( Cut and numbered for your convenience )

Hari Raya is already over in S'pore, but Happy Eid to

i_am_zan and anyone else who celebrates. Next up-- mid-autumn festival. I told me I couldn't have mooncakes unless I broke the weeping-point 200 lb mark. I have done that, quite unwittingly. Thus-- mooncake. Singular. When I'm quite sure lotus paste won't upset my fragile innards again.

Otherwise have succumbed and am reading my first Amelia Peabody. Also Komahoshi, which at the end of vol 10 suddenly reverted to the desperate edgy happenings of the first volumes after about five tanks of Happy Skool Daze rabu-rabu.
( Vol 10 also has a family tree, and needs it )

It is, as someone else said, 'Talk like a Jewish Pirate Day.' Err... lessee. 'Aaarhh me hearties, L'Shanah Tovah t'ye all! Aarrh, and a happy birthday to

nojojojo as well!'

Yes, well, moving right along here.

My FFL is a source of inspiration. There's an Eid fic community for fanfic about Muslim characters. In my current light-headed state (involuntary fasting puts you in a strange place, truly) I think, maybe I could write a drabble about Zhang He, maybe?
( Equally... )

I was going to write the Sep 16 prompt at

31_days-- had it started and was hacking away because writing is no longer an easy act for me. Intended to have it done at least for

i_am_zan's birthday yesterday. ( Best laid plans and all )

September is pulling a classical classy act this year. It's the essence of all those Septembers half-noted in passing and later vaguely recalled as, say, a warm afternoon in the porch-bedroom on Madison hacking my way through the Prometheus Bound. For reference's sake I shall note September's non-calendar calendar:
( Under the cut )

J'ai un peu moins, peur de vieillir

Song by Pauline Julien, never released on CD that I can tell, alas. Deux Vieilles/ Two Old Women. 'When I hear them burst out laughing, I'm a little less afraid of growing old.'

And there's also Hazel McCallion, while we're at it.

My current life is eerily reminiscent of post-op back five years ago. Walk two hours every morning (slowly, this time because my knees and feet hurt), eat small lunch, browse internets, read Japanese all afternoon, eat small dinner, browse internets, read some English, go to bed exhausted at ten. (I miss the 'write dragon story' part of that. I also miss the 'drop ten pounds in ten days' bit.) This regime is supposed to lose me weight, strengthen muscles, and increase reading speed. Can't see that it's doing any of those.
( Chronicles of wasted time )

Went to Chinatown Centre after buying mooncakes on Spadina. ( Eheu )

Note to my fellow cyclists: Road rage gets you nowhere. Though seriously--

When a Star reporter visited Bryant's two-storey Victorian home on Foxbar Rd., at the intersection of St. Clair W. and Avenue Rd., a woman closed the curtains. She could then be seen in the window talking on the phone while two children played.

Brilliant investigative journalism, Toronto Star. 'We snooped around his house and looked through the windows and here's what we saw.' This is why my opinion of the jackals of the press is a few degrees lower than Prince Phillip's.

(And why do I never see 'comment here' notices on Star articles until after someone else has commented? Why was I not issued one of the Special Comment Invites?)

While it would be lovely if 2009 was the year that I lost 40 pounds or began to read Chinese without pain, it's not going to happen. However, I shall note three minor behaviour changes that have occurred quite spontaneously this year, and that may, in the long run, not be minor at all.
( Cut for boredom and possibly TMI )

All the wasps have fallen into the cup of 7-UP on the window ledge and drowned. Bob, little corpses, bob away. You make me very happy.
( Cut for spoilerish Ze speculation )

Maybe it's flu, maybe it's wanhope, maybe it's a weekend spent at a cottage on the Niagara peninsula-- a flat unbeautiful stretch of land always covered in heat haze, where people watch television because there's nothing else to do but drink. Yes, yes, they grow wine there. But you'd have to be either drunk all the time or a Buddhist recluse not to go mad at the excess of nothing on all sides, which (even worse) requires a car to get you to it. Auden's estate is ferociously copy-righted so there's no online version, and the poem itself is too long for me to type, but his Plains contains the line, "I cannot see a plain without a shudder,/ 'Oh God, please, please don't ever make me live there." Yes. Yes. *This*, as the wacky mono say.

And think of growing where all elsewheres are equal!
     So long as there's a hill-ridge somewhere the dreamer
Can place his land of marvels; in poor valleys
     Orphans can head downstream to seek a million;
Here nothing points; to choose between Art and Science
     An embryo genius would have to spin a stick.

Knowing what the cottage can do to me in its worst moods (ie hot sweltering mug, shimmery grey hazed sky, stink of polluted lake, and no, that's it, sorry all but I'm never going to LRD ever) I brought a backpack of books to read, including that simple-minded White Hart novel. But wanhope/ flu/ ferocious muscle spasms ruled out anything Japanese, as they did the undistinguished Martha Wells I'd also brought. (Why do so many fantasies read like tapwater? and tapwater written on a computer, to boot.) If I must suffer, let me suffer to some purpose, so I gnawed doggedly away at The Fall of the Kings. And finished it today, finally, dragging feet and ripping nails out all the way.
( What does tFotK have in common with morphine? )

I admit the hanging black clouds, tattered at the hemline, that scuttled across the just-post-sundown sky ahead of the storm were eerie and wonderful, like pantomime assassins hastening to do the dire deed. (ETA or Ringwraiths, or something even nastier in black cloaks.) The two hours of NOISE and DELUGE that followed were totally unnecessary, in my ever so very humble opinion.

And since I couldn't be online, and since I have a hard time concentrating on things like plot and dialogue when there's NOISE and DELUGE happening, I rousted out one of my ancient White Hart Japanese novels (the one where the silver-haired amethyst-eyed magic-wielding biseinen is called 'ill'-- lower casing it because ariel font makes it look like a Roman 3-- and read fifty pages of it. Read fast, I stopped being bothered that the author informs me every three lines that ill has (clear, cold, fathomless) amethyst eyes and that the quondem Dragon Prince (never got far enough in the series to find out does he turn into a dragon) has (sparkling, mischievous, teasing) onyx eyes, and concentrated instead on remembering the Japanese words for rowan, elm, yew, and mistletoe. My pleasures are recherche indeed.

I swing down to the bus station (after cursing the impossibility of finding any addresses for Greyhound agents in TO) and ask for a round-trip ticket to Kitchener on Saturday. "You're going and coming back the same day?" the guy asks. "Yup." "Well, if you buy the day itself, it's around $28. But if you buy in advance it's about $20 more." "Uhh- what? What's the usual fare?" "$48 plus tax." "Uh. Oh. I see." Henh-- thought you could avoid lining up with the throngs for hours on a holiday Saturday, did you? Showed you, we did.

I still can't see the logic of that at all. Don't you *want* some idea in advance of how many people want to go to somewhere before you start filling your buses up with bodies?

'If it doesn't rain tomorrow', I said. Ha ha ha. Indoors as the house shakes with the thunder crashes (for which the Chinese have a word- 雳/靂) and the gutters overflow, I turn to my Chinese textbooks.

(Mandarin speakers, avert your eyes while I butcher your (native or LRD acquired) tongue.)

Yes I know us flat-tongued English speakers have a deplorable tendency to apply English phonics to all foreign languages. Thus the ook and seem roles in yay-oi, or the garahdges and chez lounges out in back of the house. And I know half of Mandarin's sounds don't exist in English in the first place, rotit. (Retroflex j's and ch's and sh's, she mutters.) But I gets my mnemonics where I finds them, and when I must deal with oft-recurring modals or tricksy prepositionses, I'll take whatever low means are available to remember them. Thus I present you with Uncle Scrooge's nephews: 会 (hui), 对 (dui) and 里 (li with a dipping tone.) Though you'd think Chinese could come up with a true lui or rui sound...

Well, not exactly. The dawn came up kind of flat pre-storm tropical, the red-tinged grey I associate with Tokyo. Of course I was awake to see the dawn, which peeves me, but one cannot fight those light = awake instincts. The storm came along a little later and was occasionally louder than it needed to be; but mostly it just rumbled constantly, in the way non-TO storms do, and monsooned rain as if from fire hoses. And I read the first chapter of Cloud Atlas which definitely suited that weather, and in the sunny warm blowy afternoon the second chapter, which was fun. I love epistolatory novels except when they forget they're epistles; and yes, Mr. Richardson, I *am* looking at you. Now I'm reading the third chapter, set in the 70s, and wondering sourly if the flat unconvincing female protagonist is a clever shout-out to those flat unconvincing 70s female protagonists written by men-- we could be channeling Pyncheon here-- or if Mitchell is just incapable of writing women, the way China Mieville is. You know where my money lies.

As for why I'm reading Cloud Atlas, ( that's another story. )

WARD arrived. Photocopies can be made for those who wish it. The story on Goujun ( is under the cut )
( And the story on me )

My sort-of impromptu sort-of holiday continues on a perfect June day through a delicious lunch of tilapia and lemon and rice, and dinner al fresco with my next door family. I'd thought I'd spend the time in my rocking chair reading myself silly-- the more so as I must wear my bunion splints several hours each day since I find it impossible to sleep in them. But instead I continue this year's erratic tendency and *clean.* Today's object of attack was the bunker floor, probably untouched for seven years, and the garden pathway, awash in the cherry pits of yesteryear.

In amongst all this I finished Empire of Ivory which really was good, and started Victory of Eagles which has me all a-wibble. If god loves me I have another ten days of this and then comes work and heat, pretty much together. 3 Kingdoms vol 3 isn't going to happen this month but that's OK. No-brainers is what I need in July.

Oh, the vampire Sforza duke *isn't* Ludovico. Funny, Ludovico /ought/ to be a vampire.

Been reading my old Saiyuki / Gaiden/ dragon stories. Almost as good as time travel. Still bothers me that they were all written six years ago and more.

On the plus paw, the latest WARD is in the mail and the new Ima Ichiko is in the mail. On the minus paw, how can it be only Tuesday?

The theory is I have Monday off, bar Dolorous Phonecalls. It will be interesting to have a holiday Monday that no one else has. If it happens. Note the fine line between 'pessimist' and 'realist.'

Discussion of fave female BFFs. Since I spent my early teen years wishing I was at Kingscote school with the Marlows while being at an all-girls Catholic high school in reality, female BFF to me was synonymous with adolescence. Now it's synonymous with LJ FLs. Am still trying to think, through the chronic mental fuzz, what fictional BFF I know currently, and conclude there aren't any, aside from Ya Yu and Yuan Luo swapping books, or Sybil and her coterie of well-born semi-aristos caring for sick dragons. Possibly there's something wrong with my reading habits.
( Cut for prolix )

Read an article a while ago that said that certain inexplicable discrepancies in some scientific something I can't follow-- echoes from deep space?-- suggest that the whole universe is nothing but a hologram. A very detailed hologram, it must be, but still just a hologram. We are an imaginary 3D image somewhere; end story.
( This simplifies life immensely )

Happy glorious 25th.

Is there actually a tune for 'all the little angels'?

( All the little bookshelves, how do they rise up? )

You understand, those in my profession have a neutral attitude towards excrement. Shit is, end story. Nonetheless, there are things I'd rather be doing on my weekends than moving kitchen furniture and cleaning the mouse poo behind them. (Sighs.) Two bookshelves and a fridge down, one bookshelf and the cupboards to go. Maybe I should get a cat.

OTOH as long as I'm cleaning mouse poo I needn't assemble my Ikea bookshelves. Don't know when or why Ikea assemblage became as high-anxiety an activity as doing taxes, but it is. I want someone to hold my hand and feed me gin and tonics for both, and there's no one to do that. Maybe I should get married.

And I want *clear* *sharp* pictures of my dragon king writing his report, like Gawain, 'an hour before my death and so subscribed with a portion of my heart's blood.' I do not have them and will not have them until various Kinokuniyas lift, as the Japanese phrase has it, their heavy buttocks. Maybe I should move back to Japan.

(And where's my copy of the Once and Future King when I want it, huh? This is why I can never throw books away, only play musical bookshelves amid the crescendoing anxiety of Too Many Books, Too Little Time, and Too Many Books Still Left To Read Even If I Never Buy Another One.)

I has it. It starts with the first warm muggy stinky day in spring and doesn't go away till Thanksgiving (ours, not theirs.) It has started today. It'll be cooler on the weekend, but that's only a brief respite. June is coming, to be followed by July: hot muggy days in insufficient air conditioning, hot muggy nights that are both too warm and too clammy for sleep. And I grow old and stiff and nothing is as good as it was before, not that it was ever very good to start with, and nothing is ever going to be the way it could have been, and Zhuge Liang is not either a brilliant tactician, he's a hedge wizard who uses magic to make the wind to burn the ships that carried the men who marched in the army that Cao Cao led. Bah.

I don't follow sports news but I swear, *every single time* I look at The Star's wp and come across a headline attached to this ongoing saga, I read it as 'Batman' and do a double take.

In other news, The Armor of Light is better on a reread, with Sidney regarded as just yer average fantasy hero and not, you know, The Perfect Philip Sidney of history. There's still a bit too much of him and he's still not my kind of hero but at least I'm not going 'Yer kidding-- Philip Sidney??' every few paragraphs. Its Marlowe and Shakespeare are also much more believable than Ink and Steel's. Though I wonder why everyone wants to make these guys into fundamentally nice guys. I bet they were miserable rotters and back-stabbing self-absorbed pricks. 'What people /are/ is so different from what people can /do/'-- which was the whole point of Amadeus, after all. I can count the fundamentally nice great writers I've heard of on the fingers of one hand. Chekov and RLS, basically.

I have bought a dining room table and a vibrator and The Borribles and have nothing else to do. Actually I have a lot to do, but I like Austen's throw-away construction.
( Cut for natter and Karin )

I was very good after putting The Little Girls to bed last night.
( Cut for mundanity )

( People, people. Argh )

The sun would not shine
It was too cold to play
So I sat in the house
All that wet muggy monsoon-like cloudburst and prolonged thunder showery day

The familiar rainy-season suicidal longueurs were creeping upon me yesterday, so I took firm and decisive action. I went and played Musical Mattresses.
( Which is not as much fun as it sounds )

Oh, glad someone noticed. Power off for two hours from midnightish at the same station that let us freeze in the dark back in January, and not a word from Hydro even now.

Were I richer than I am I *would* get a Blackberry with net access, just because the only people with info about these things are online. Mind you, if power's off in the house then my router's off too, right? Maybe should save my money for battery-powered fans for when this happens in the summer.

(And Firefox still insists on updating without asking my permission.)

For five years I've wanted a glider rocking chair. They're soothing, they're relaxing, you can sleep in them if you want to. I thought about getting one before the first tum operation but the price was beyond beyond. They cost as much as most desktops and some cost as much as a good quality laptop. Add 15% GST and PST and, well, no. But I have money if I want it, or a line of credit at good rates, and am tired of being saving for my old age. I went to the end of the street and sussed out the gliders. ( Saga within )

I have been in some immensely stupidly designed places; I have been in buildings whose main purpose is clearly to keep people out (Robarts Library, I *am* looking at you) or confuse them utterly (any major airport in the world) or make them realize the insignificance of their ant-like existence when they can't even find the exit without going down two flights of stairs and asking directions (Shibuya Station shudder moan.)

I have never been in a store that combined all the above features until yesterday. (Not even Honest Ed's. Honest Ed's merely needs signage to be comprehensible. It doesn't have it for the obvious reason.) Blahblahs at St. Clair and sort-of Bathurst, you fail utterly.
( Note to mgmt: Impromptu intelligence tests |= good customer service )

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