flemmings | Entries tagged with soseki

Age is upon me. Last night I did what my s-i-l so often complains happens to her: sank into a pleasant post-Christmas dinner alcoholic sleep at 11 and woke, irrevocably, at 1 am. Usually I then sink back into the flannel-covered arms of Morpheus, but not last night. Looked at the dark, did exercises in bed, changed bedrooms, looked at the dark some more, turned on light and read Lies Sleeping until I began yawning, turned off light and slept to 10. And then turned over and slept another two hours. So the day was a quarter gone by the time I got up.

I'd taken prophylactics against the usual fallout from excessive wine, but my system still didn't want to eat much. Crackers and Brie and a hard boiled egg were my brunch and tea. However, I'd bought a mini-turducken that had been thawing in the fridge the requisite 2-3 days so I had to cook that up. Mini turducken is stuffed with Italian sausage which is the second reason (price is the first) I shall never buy another. I am left with a fair quantity of Meat- and pretty dry meat at that- which might go well minced with celery and ginger and bok choy. Stuffing birds one into the other is simply not the best way to cook said birds.
( Oh, it's Wednesday again )

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/950504.html

Rebuked, my copy of The Midnight Court emerges from the poetry shelf where I so thoughtlessly placed it. Would that the other two might appear as well.

Age or the example of my sister leads me to a divesting mindset. It's true that I never know when I'll want a book again: I was pleased to discover that I didn't trun my copies of Ciardi's Dante all those years ago. But now I can't see me really wanting to read Anne of Green Gables ever again; Montgomery cloys whenever I try her. I should drop this in a wee free and let someone else gloat.

Or those 'may want to read this' purchases. Fifteen pages into Soseki's neglected work, The Miner, Jay Rubin's colloquial translation, which makes Soseki sound like Murakami Haruki, begins to pall, as Soseki starts sounding like Soseki again. Go on with it or give it up? I'd rather be reading Dante. Hell, I'd rather be reading Boccaccio. This is because I'm a naive reader, and the Italians wrote to instruct or amuse in an age of WYSIWYG. Dante's version of Hell I know to be more interesting than Soseki's, having better company in it.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/804526.html

Dry sidewalks allow me to errand into previously ice-bound wastes, so I now have wine (for next door) and salt stain remover (for my boots, since it seems ammonia is no longer sold anywhere. What shall we do for smelling salts, I ask me?) Also is official: I walk into the shoe repair store (only place that sells salt remover) in my foofy rose pink hat and mauve-lavender-rose pink scarf, and am addressed as Sir by the middle-aged white Torontonian male owner. Rose pink is no longer a gender marker in this culture, which I suppose is good; coats *are* gender markers, which is enh; but coats that are not cloth (cloth is useless in winter) and tailored female (buttons, nipped waist, patch pockets if any) are read male by default. No wonder the unisex comfy middle-aged confuse so many people.
( February reading )

Now I've finished the Soseki manga, all my current reading books are door-stoppers. So for a day at The Little Girls' I popped a copy of Anne of Ingleside into the backpack. (Picked up a half dozen of the Anne books off the sidewalk last May, figuring you never know when they'll come in handy, and anyway I'm sure I haven't read half of those six.)

Little Girls went out skating with their father for an hour, so I opened my book. Transpires:
a) I *have* read Anne of Ingleside, several times
and
b) the Suck Fairy has been at L.M. Montgomery in a big way. Yuck, blecch, let me out of here.

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... )

Jo Walton has a lovely explanation of why time goes elastic in Patrick O'Brian. For the uninitiated, there's not enough Napoleonic War for all the Aubrey action, so that several voyages of many months if not years all happen between 1813 and 1815. Her reasoning-- Stephen's almost mute assistant Padeen, who can speak well enough if it's Gaelic and who does canonically manage well with children and animals, is fae, and time works differently where he is. Does not explain why Jack's family back in England doesn't grow older, though.

Otherwise a grey rainy December Sunday, and I reading a translation of Soseki's short pieces, which has put me in a nostalgic mood. Rainy grey is what it did a lot of the first December in Tokyo, and Soseki was the first novelist I read in my intensive Japan period, back in the fall and winter of 1985. That doubtless explains why I always think of Meiji as cold and grey and invigorating; it's amazing how much the weather of Toronto influences my notions of an era.

The translation as ever is one of those 'but *I* could do better than that' ones, even if I couldn't. Still I see no reason to translate the word for the small drum that accompanies Noh performances as 'tambourine' even if that's what it looks like. Especially not when the player first has to tighten the cords on it. (I'm assuming the Japanese is shime-daiko; a shoulder drum would surely be called a drum?)

So why, with a plethora of enticing books to choose from, must I decide to devote my day off to another stab at Soseki's Sorekara? Especially when I disliked the (plump, smooth, valetudinarian, 'oh my poor high-pitched nerves and subtle sensibilities') protagonist so much when I first met him in translation a quarter of a century ago (sob)? I can hack my way through Sanshiro well enough, to judge by the first thirty pages I read of *that* before being distracted by the Oooh shiny! elsewhere. But Soseki's Meiji vocabulary here makes me cry. Have had recourse to the translation more than once, to find out what it was Meiji called postcards and so on, and half the time the weird Japanese sentence becomes an equally weird English sentence. Oh well. This, I am told, is how one passes ikkyuu. And if I keep on, I'm told I shall find myself in Kagurazaka again. (Note- buy flat map of Tokyo so I can see how various parts of the city relate.)

But I've done my couple of hours for today and succeeded in finishing precisely one chapter; now for English.

~~100~~ 50 Female Characters I Love Meme

Maybe I read the wrong stuff or don't watch the right things, or maybe I take that 'love' too seriously, because there aren't that many characters anywhere I actually *love*. Even here, a number are 'strongly like.' You observe there's nobody from Utena, an *anime* I love, nor from Amelia Peabody, whom I still find perfectly readable, but less so as the kids grow up and turn the whole thing into a romance series.

Might be enlightening to make a list of characters I really do love and see what that looks like. You see that Ya Yu tops my female list, but neither Gou Jian nor Fan Li would make it to a male one. Fascinating, absorbing, provocative, but I don't love them. I love Wen Zhong.
( In no particular order )

Off the Cliff

The rodents are running hurrah! hurrah!

Entries tagged with soseki

Ah well

Much reading is a weariness of the flesh

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La Nausée

Closer to Christmas

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Can we do it? Yes we--- err, no. We can't

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