April 30
I'm not sure you understood the anime, but thanks anyway

You are Uranus and Neptune 

Which Homosexual Anime Relationship are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Not sure why it was there twice, but I'm deleting both images anyway. Too long to DL.

N- my dragons can get quite 'out' enough in the ordinary way of things to handle any aperture a human-form body can provide. What they can't do is penetrate a female body in dragon form deep enough to fertilize an egg. That's what the mating dance is for. That this reminds me of the extremely long (and unfunny) joke with the (quite funny) alternate punchline that makes reference to short-dick white boys is doubtless unfortunate. (And I swear for my next parlour trick I will will will invent a way that dragons can jerk off gracefully. Probably some small area of the sheathe is imbedded with nerve endings and all you do is manipulate it with a knuckle or a finger-end if your talons are coped, and you have instant rigid emergence. Though I believe the seemly way to get aroused is to stroke your own horns.)

Since fannish venting is bad for me I will not vent at the fan I wish to, but ohh I am thinking thoughts not lawful to be uttered. A pushing-40 if not over it Entitled Fangirl is migurushii, pure and simple.

But on that subject, N-- when I turned 40 my best friend sent me a card with an illo from Whoever it was that did Master Snickett's Cloak (or whatever it is): One day it was the middle ages. I didn't get the point until I spoke to her and found her all gloomy and depressed about how we were Getting Old. At 40? In my family you're still having kids at 40. So take heart. The best is yet to be. The 30's are ever so much nicer than the 20's anyway.

I would have been on the fifth level, but the sodomites are on the seventh. I think that's what did it.

And actually April was a pretty long month. We covered three seasons in it, and spring looked like fall occasionally, so make that four, and I finished three and a half stories which isn't bad, and the half-story is as long as the last story I finished, so go me, and I saw StC in Japanese and I really really like it if only the colours weren't so punk. And I take it back. People who write Haku/ Chihiro /are/ writing Mary Sues. They want a dragon of their own.

Wednesday, April 30, 2003 

Nice while it lasted and now it is over
Daycare Hugh has pulled something major in his shoulder and can't work. Naila has to work for Hugh. I have to work for Naila. End of vacation to the tune of 9:30-10:30, 1-3 and 4-5:30 shifts. Sucky hours, especially the 9:30 ones; but at least now I'm only 12 minutes away from home and can accomplish something in the interim.

So I was doing all this today on not enough sleep for the second day in a row (expect me to be awake before 11 am and you will have me go to sleep at 3 and wake at 7, then 7:30, then 8:00, then...) when I heard someone singing in what sounded like Japanese out in the toddler washroom area. Nobody there but their student, a Pakistani woman in her 40's or so getting a nanny certificate. But she's definitely singing about an akachan. I look over the half-door. 'Anou, ne... sore, Nihongo?' She gives me a big smile. 'You must be the woman they told me about who lived in Japan. I was there for six years' at exactly the same time I was. Husband was a mechanic for JAL, they had expat accommodations in Midori-ga-oka. 'Midori-ga-oka? That's out of... Meguro? Gotanda?' Meguro, next from Jiyuugaoka ie money-land. They had an eight-room house. Ai caramba. She said her kids loved the place- Japan, that is. To the extent it's not Pakistan, well they might. Must talk to her some more. She's only here another two weeks.

M- the fashion over here for 20th century woodblock artists in general, and landscape artists to boot, isn't as great as for the 19th century landscape biggies like Hiroshige and Hokusai, is probably why you haven't heard of Hasui. But it takes only one major artbook to bring an artist to prominence, as it did for Yoshitoshi, and possibly this new complete edition of Hasui will do it for him. I've been out of artbook circles as well, so I don't know much of what else has been available of his. The Boston Museum did a calendar of his prints back in the 80's, but that's all I ever saw. The prices on some of his hanga suggest he's beginning to get a market. 

The National Museum several times had Hasui prints on display, and I was lucky enough to find the art gallery devoted to him near where he lived, on a day when I was only intending to visit a famous plum viewing park. The postcards I got there are the ones I used to illustrate Katchan's Matsunuma musings. His later blocks were preserved (the earlier ones were destroyed in the great Kantou earthquake) and prints are still made from them that didn't cost that much when I bought them. They're not considered authentic, though I often wonder why. Hasui's role in all this ended with the picture he drew. Someone else carved the blocks, and rather more to the point, a third man printed them. It's the nameless printers *I* think who deserve the glory. The difference between a first and second printing is always noticeable, usually because the guy takes less trouble printing the second or third run and details get lost. 'Oh hell, make the whole sky black, why not?' Hence my black-skied Hiroshige lumber yards- which I like, but it's supposed to be graded shades of blue with snow.

Hmm. Chinese pawnshops sound wonderful. At least for stories.

L- squee squee kawaii kawaii oh what a cute baby PT was when she was a baby OK enough.

Tuesday, April 29, 2003 

Social
K- but if they aren't put together and painted, where do the pretty pictures come from? You assembled and painted four garage kits in a day?

G- those of us without the stamina or contacts for Long Before must perforce do Long After, but generally it's not Long enough After that the memory of fan squealing has faded. It lingers, and leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Fen are sheep, by and large. It's this today and that tomorrow and something else the day after, from which you may intuit a certain lack of depth either in them or in the things they squeal about or both. Well, it's manga/ anime made for the delectation of very young people. Depth is a rare gift, to be cherished when you find it.

However when you do find it it doesn't matter that fen squeal. The thing exists, good in itself, like Utena or Hi Izuru, a solid rock which the waves of fandom break on and pass around without affecting its value at all. On his track record, Miyazaki is simply *good*- take as given, end story, no need for debate. Like Shakespeare, some may be better than others, or more to one's taste; but the general statement that he's playing in a different league from everyone else holds. So it doesn't matter when you come to a Miyazaki anime. It has something innate in it that will speak to you at whatever depth you're able to hear. It makes some people squee about white dragons and other people squee about Shouwa woodblock artists. De gustibus.

Dragon anatomy... All I know about my dragons is that the male organs are mostly retracted into the body most of the time, shielded by an external sheath, and do not fully emerge even during arousal when the dragon is in manform. Equally the female organs during (womanform) arousal remain shut at some point within the body so that sperm can't get into the uterus or whatever it is dragons have instead. It takes six to eight hours of emotional and psychic foreplay, in the form of that dance, to fully extrude a male and open a female dragon, and at that point they have to take dragon form to consummate the union. However this consummation always leads to a fertilized egg, so a child is assured every time, even though its sex is not known until the egg hatches.

I would assume, as semi-lizards, that they *might* have more flexibility than humans, so they can indeed screw upside down. OTOH I don't think they have forked tongues (though some youkai do, so they might) and certainly don't have webbed hands. So...

Second the question: who are the Dell Interns? Interns from the Dell Corp that N for some reason has to teach, I keep thinking, but N teaches college kids...

Anti-social
Rot Google. Do an advanced search on 'His Dark Materials' without 'Pullman' and what do you get? "...includes interviews with Pullman...' in the very first entry. Grr.

I hate having to get up at 7 to be at Helen's at 8:30 because I have no bicycle because the bicycle suddenly and for no reason decided to jam a tire into the strut when I was bicycling to my doctor's yesterday; and I hate having to buy a new tire and a new wheel because both are foutu for reasons unspecified; and I hate not having my bike ready next day as promised because the derailers broke as he was getting the wheel off and both need replacing and he was waiting for my OK but I was at Helen's etc etc. Then I think suppose I was doing similar stuff with a car... and am satisfied with my lot.

Monday, April 28, 2003 

The Erotic Imagination
...occasionally misremembers things. This is what the Waterfall is supposed to look like. I seem to have made it much steeper. And the one thing 'muri' about it is the anatomy, especially the uke's right leg. I still think it's one of the hottest single illos I know, though. (Thought better of it and stuck it in Aesthe's passworded zone. TTG, tell me if you feel like looking at Feelthy Pictures and I'll give you my directory URL.)

Monday, April 28, 2003 

Other people telling you how good a thing is can be a vast disincentive to see it, even if they're intelligent people. Didn't see Mononoke because everyone raved so much, and still haven't. I wanted to see Sen to Chihiro because the stills in Animage were so resonant and mysterious (and referenced a couple of decadent artists I also knew- those screens in the wrecked banquet room where Sen confronts Kaonashi were lifted from some real ones); and of course the minute I saw the beginning with those great Hasui summer clouds in the blue Hasui summer sky and the buildings on top of the vertiginous Hasui hill, I was a goner. Hasui is the artist who draws the world the way it looked to me as a child, even if I saw it here and not there. Hasui draws places I know but have never been. Hasui draws the inside of my head, and so does Miyazaki. An anime that's about landscape and interiors and weather. Ahhh... But without that personal hook you've no reason to see StC, and if you did you wouldn't be able to like it because everyone else has liked it too much so now it's ruined for you. A pity, but it happens.

Haku's identity isn't a big plot-point secret. It's just a detail within the whole story. What I like about Japanese films, very often- like Japanese words, the emphasis falls somewhere other than where you expect it to. (Remembering the western guy who wanted to know how Chihiro could *tell* the thing she tells near the end. She does. The why doesn't matter. She just does. You figure out why if you want to.)

But me-- I like the railroad in the sea which *of course* references Ginga Tetsudou 999 but no more than it has to, and the evening countryside when they get off, and the baby-turned-hamster playing in the spinning wheel, and Kaonashi, and these Heian spirits with caps and fans all come to have a bath and cut loose, and just... all this Otherwhereness. 'Give me the beat boys and free my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock 'n roll and drift away.'

And I'm sending you more funny aspirin. I'm amazed the stuff still works on you after the quantities you've taken.

Sunday, April 27, 2003 

Lala la-lala la-lala lala
Have the Sen to Chihiro ending theme in my head. K, you ever see the sound track used, grab it for me. The sadness is the VHS or (with luck) my VCR bleaches out the glowing colours of the screen version. I do so want to see that in a theatre *in Japanese* but I know I won't. Oh dull and unlingual age. But the rest... ahhh. 

I see by the closing trailer that Chihiro is indeed canonically 10. But Greer is absolutely right. Japanese Chihiro is an adolescent. What would have been 13 in my day. (Oh BTW L- congrats to PT. Go her.) I now see the logic of Chihiro/ Haku stories- at least to the extent that I can now believe they're actually about Chihiro and not about author growing Chihiro up so she can be her and have a dragon of her own whoopee. (I have never wanted a dragon of my own, actually. Not unless it looks Minekuran and I can be a guy.) I don't agree though that Japanese Haku is younger than American Haku. Just that bit when he remembers who he is; but before that, nah, that sounded young immortal to me. Young face, old manners. Lovely delivery. (Difficult to understand, though.)

Amused me that Kamaji was actually scarier in Japanese than English, and Yubaba, at least at the start, not. I rather liked her, in fact. The sort of woman I'd get on with just fine. Rin was infinitely more bearable in Japanese, Chihiro's parents much more likable, and the sento staff a cut above the English version in manner. The Hasui clouds and landscapes are... Hasui still. (It's been a long time since I've had woodblock print lust, but looking at this and this has me all achy with wanting. There's a limited edition catalogue of his prints coming out in May, 2500 only, for about 400 of our dollars. Sigh. (I'd be happy if I could just adjust those colours on the VHS...)

There
Here. The complete Young Goukou 2.

Let the bright seraphim in bu-huhu-hurning row 
Their loud, uplifted angel tra-humpets blow

Bleeding to death + bindertwine headache = serious grumps. How can I do anything when all I want is to lie with hot rice-bags over my eyes and under my shoulder? (*I'll* believe anything that paralyzes the face relieves headaches. It's doing it.)

Really, guys, I wasn't serious about doing my taxes this afternoon. Don't tell me you believed me? Hahaha. A joke, it was just a joke, OK? Now can I have my sight back so I can go finish the Hisui story?

Saturday, April 26, 2003 

I am, god help me, a connoisseur. I can taste the difference between diet Coke, diet Pepsi, diet Dr. Pepper and, naturally, diet vanilla Coke. And god help me again, I want different diet drinks for different meals. Tuna fish sandwiches need the astringency of diet Pepsi, strawberries the sweetness of diet vanilla Coke. Meanwhile, am I listening to the question What's all that caffeine doing to your bone density? You know I'm not.

The Menstruation Sofa
No of course, 21st century modern me, I don't take to my bed every month, or if I do it's only briefly to attend to cramps with the cramp-attender-to that lives under the pillow. But today my period came unexpectedly and conveniently early. (It now wanders about between 24-28 days; jeez the uncertainty she says sardonically, remembering when it used to be a two week window.) And I realized I do have a certain off-the-hook attitude to this. 'Oh neat, I don't have to do anything today, I can curl up on the sofa and read and watch videos.' Of course I could have done that anyway, but it's not the same as legitimately not working because you legitimately have cramps. And of course, it's not an option I often get; not during the week, anyway.

Have worked out that LARP means live action role playing. Prejudices insist it really means group sex, and how could anyone?

I'll talk in the other blog some time about Nihon no Bi to Kokoro, The Beauty and Soul of Japan, this long ago program on Japanese antiquities that used to wander off to obscure temples in Fukui-ken and elsewhere to look at ancient statues of the Buddha. I didn't watch it when I was there, really, because it had to do with a Japan I never saw and almost, in Tokyo, didn't believe existed. I taped it to watch 'later', some far-distant future when I could understand the Japanese vocabulary. That future is now, though half the vocab is still way over my head. But those glimpses of the undistinguished Japanese countryside and those little temples which, if found by me on my own, never conveyed much of anything- they undo me, completely. I cry when the theme music comes on; and I wish I had more than three tapes of it because I love it all so much.

Friday, April 25, 2003 

An old friend had a cousin commit unintentional suicide by drinking too much water several years ago as well. 
(If the missionary first takes the dog and a cannibal over then leaves the cannibal and takes the dog back...) OK, I'll bite. How? (He didn't eat anything, just drank water. No, the water contained small amounts of some substance that he ingested in enough quantity to kill him. No, his kidneys were unable to handle the amount of fluid they were asked to deal with. No-)

M- I'm tempted to say Tell all about the pawnshops and the pharmacies, but I won't. I know you're busy. Pharmacies I know a little about anyway- do they still take your pulse?- but pawnshops are always fascinating.

Reverse Schadenfreude
If there is such a thing. Feeling unhappy about feeling wonderful, at a time when your friends are feeling lousy. But I have my Saiyuuki Reload 2 with the suggestive and resonant trailers for the next arc; I have Sen to Chihiro to watch; I have Garth Nix's Abhorsen, last of the trilogy, bought (extravagence!) in hard cover (and nearly not bought at all because the clerk at Book City couldn't find it in the kids' section. "The computer says we have two copies and I *know* I saw one hiding here behind the Redwall hardcovers the other day but..." Not in overstock and not in returns, can I give you a call when we find it? It was I who had the notion of looking among the adult Recent Arrivals and there it- or they- were.) I had someone come begging me for a story for an online journal if I had anything suitable, which is the way *I* prefer to submit stories. ^_^ And I have Goukou and Shantsu and their third about to embark on Threesome Position #1. How could I not be happy?

So I hope everyone else's everythings get settled; and N, I'd ignore your first critic. The first paragraph sets up expectations that are and are not met by the subsequent action; and that's what it's supposed to do. Disequilibrium we calls it where I come from. It stops people from smug skimming because they already *know* what's going to happen just by the way the story begins.

Thursday, April 24, 2003 

Chat chat chat
Because being a translator is a looonely occupation. So is being a writer. Hello wall (hello hello hello)...

There are the lamb-eating cultures of the world and the non-lamb-eating ones, as each of you will appreciate if you think about how long it's been since *you* last ate lamb. Mediterraneans are lamb eaters, so when I saw that the Good Meat supermarket was offering lamb gigots, I bought one. Natsukashii and all that. Of course it couldn't be as good as a French gigot but it would serve to remind me of happy days over there. Smelled like Sunday dinner cooking too. It's only... you know how long it's been since I last ate lamb? Ten years at the very least. Know what else? Your system gets unaccustomed to it. And the other thing? The smell of flesh roasting is kind of queasy-making now. Birds don't count. Birds are dinosaurs. But mammals... I think I may have eaten my last baa-lamb.

N- the essence of Goukou's response was a pathetic 'I don't *get* it.' This thing makes no sense and doesn't follow any rules and I can't see why anyone does it for fun because it's not fun it's just... Mutatis mutandis, it's the same mindset as says 'I keep drinking vanilla Coke because I can't decide if I like it or hate it.' Only that poor Goukou doesn't have the option to go on trying vanilla Coke until he can decide.

You don't need heroin. The writing high is every bit as addictive, and now you're in withdrawal. My wincing sympathy. Hope it passes soon.

Back to work. Work would be easier if it didn't involve having to translate someone saying 'Darun, this under Heaven ain't big enough for the both of us.' Ganbaru, ganbaru...

Cold Feet
So in a fit of now for something completely different, I started another Chinese BL pastiche, and at once ran into fanwriter's syndrome. I'm a fanwriter. I need a canon. More particularly, I need a solid physical world to set my story in. I can write Kou Josei because I've got all the physical details quite beautifully rendered thank-you in the manga. And if any of them are wrong, it's Fujita-sensei's fault, not mine, and I'm being true to the manga if not the history so they're *not* wrong nyah nyah nyah. ^_^ But now suddenly I'm not sure about things. Would a bookseller offer his clients tea and have his assistants bring them the books they requested, or would they browse as they do anywhere else? I'm reminded of fanwriters who set stories in Tokyo without knowing the really basic differences between everyday Japan and everyday America. (Someone had her character look out the dining room window and see someone standing across the street. No. Practically every house in Tokyo has a wall around it and you *can't* look out your downstairs windows and see across the street.) Maybe I should set this in A/U China. Its language already reads too much like A/U England as it is. 

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you or me
But Joe, I said, you're ten years dead. I never died, said he.
(Paraphrased by my bro as 'But Joe, already!)

I have a recurring dream trope that Home version 2- the ideal apartment, the place I lived in sunny early adulthood not sunny childhood- is somewhere over in the west side of the Annex, the older residential section I grew up in. (Cultural note: up here 'older residential' means 'more exclusive and more expensive than the burbs.') I usually think it's somewhere in the area of Madison Ave, which couldn't be more unlike NY's version- so many large old trees the street is in light shade most of its length, lined with three storey Edwardian behemoths- well, maybe Taishou behemoths. They're not quite big enough to accommodate a full set of servants. Usually the dream geography is imprecise- the perfect apartment is vaguely over there where Madison is, on that other (non-existent) street, the one that /isn't/ Madison, if you follow.

But last night I dreamed it as definitely Madison Ave, though not the perfect apartment. The perfect daycare, actually rather a cheerful shambles, with kids falling asleep everywhere in amongst dilapidated walls and bits of things lying around, because we were moving at some point. It was summer, it was hot, the sun out in the streets was the hazy unpleasant thing it is in TO summers; and I'd been on a long bus journey to Washington, I believe, with a British bus driver in a cap in spite of the heat who let me off on my tree-shaded street and then had his bus break down. I spent most of the dream putting kids to sleep in what was probably a dream translation of Campus Coop as I first met it 23 years ago now; and woke with that vague and happy sense of Otherwhere and Otherwhen, some other summer long ago and far away and so much better than it is today.

Wednesday, April 23, 2003 

That said...
Here. Because it seems I have never met a sex scene I didn't like, or that I could pass by without describing in detail, and consequently Shantsu and Mr.Third's preliminary encounter is going to take me rather longer than I had thought to finish. Kakkou warui, ore.

(And parenthetically, how can you make boom boxes admit there's a CD in them when they don't want to? I bought Fiddler on the Roof today because I'm nostalgic for Fiddler on the Roof but my box denies that the CD's there. It's happy to admit Medieval Babes is, which is annoying because MB have apparently not learned the musical equivalent of 'if it's not broken...'-- If people have been singing this song the same way for five hundred years there is *no* need to fiddle with it just so you can sing it atonal modern. No, it does *not* sound more interesting in twelve tones, it sounds *flat.* And yes Mr. Willan I *am* looking at you. Grump.)

Why I will never ever be a pro writer
Because I can't type.

Because I can't produce fic to a deadline, or even an expectation. (Articles I can do. Articles are rational things. Fic- nope. Forget it.)

Poor N being so miserable there, I thought 'Well hey I'll finish up that RPG manual description of Goukou's threesomes, so straightforward and so much easier than the weepy one.' Hah. Yeah. Sure. I worked on it five and a half hours today and is it done? No. Why not? Well because- this bit that should have been covered in a paragraph starts to expand and turns into two pages of sex and wise counsel from Shantsu, during which I learned a bunch of things I hadn't known, which is useful, yes, but see I'm supposed to get this story *finished*; and then Shantsu's polite overtures to the third candidate start bogging down in the fact that both are being /polite/ and neither is saying what he really thinks because they're both too well-bred for that but in fact what they're thinking is rather important only it has to be conveyed through minimal external and internal dialogue; and at that point I started feeling OK enough of this for the day, I need to go do something else and tonight have a look-see how this scene plays when I'm falling asleep. 

That's what one does with right-brain stories. What you must do with right-brain stories, because they aren't really under your control. The only left-brain stuff I've ever done is stylistic exercises, like the Seimei and Kou Josei ones, where I know the plot already and the psychology doesn't matter and I need only to focus on the language. But stylistic exercises are few and far between. Mostly the plot is uncertain and the psychology matters exceedingly, and those won't come through dint of effort. (Especially the psychology.) (Unless maybe you type 100 words a minute and can type a passage, see it's wrong, type another, see it's wrong, type a third and decide that one's right.) So there we are, alas. My stories grow plant-like, in their own sweet time, vaster than empires and more slow, and one just has to wait for them to emerge into the sunlight.

Wednesday, April 23, 2003 

Hormones, hormones. Looking through my Chinese poetry collections for something suitable to steal from, for no good reason suddenly remember Judy Collins' My Father and melt into small puddles. 

And I live in Paris now, my children dance and dream
Hearing the ways of a miner's life in words they've never seen
I sail my memories of home like boats across the Seine
And watch the Paris sun set in my father's eyes again.

('Why can't human beings just melt and disappear?' a character asks at the beginning of Wild Adapter 2. (Yes, TTG, translation in the works.) The answer is, obviously, that they do, if they're female.)

I'm reminded of Cavafy's poem Ithaca, about Odysseus returning home to his barren island, only somehow in reverse.

When you set out for Ithaca, pray that the way be long,
full of adventures, full of discovery...

But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts many years
and you dock an old man on the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave you the splendid journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She hasn't anything else to give you.

Instead of a place to get to, mundane and ordinary, that leads to the marvels of getting there, I think I prefer a marvellous place I will never get to whose existence lightens the mundane ordinariness of the rest of the world.

I see the country far away
Where I shall never stand;
The heart goes where no footstep may
Into the promised land.

(You can always tell a Housman poem, always. The seductive metre, the masterly rhyme, and the unbudging sadness seguing into self-pity. It's irresistible.)

Because, you know, actually being there must naturally and necessarily be less satisfying than wanting to be there. *Naturally.* Japanese? Me Japanese? Masaka.

(He was a very unhappy man, Housman, just like Catullus, and he put his unhappiness into his poetry. It helps for us that the source of it was his deep and unrequited love for another man, which gives it the right shounen-ai frisson. Catullus made himself far more desperately miserable over a woman, but produced great poetry from it nonetheless. Of course Catullus also ripped her apart in his poems, and many other people besides, so one never actually feels sorry for him. The man had fangs and was quite capable of looking after himself. What's known only to classicists- and people who've seen Stoppard's play as well now, I guess- is that Housman had fangs too, but he used them only on fellow classicists who disagreed with him about Greek particles. His comments on their comments were droll, scholarly, elegant and devastating. Never vicious, never personal, but ohhh-- nasty. One needs to remember that when feeling guilty about reading those enticingly soppy poems of his.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.)

Tuesday, April 22, 2003 

(later)
L- (blandly) Context, I think we were saying the other day. Context makes a difference. Under the circs I'd be proud of that D as well.

N- No wonder your head hurts. I'd have trouble following that one too. Yes but- quite apart from us personally, I don't think I *can* read a friend's story the same as an absolute stranger's. I'll say that fanfic/ genre is easier and umm more distanced from the person than mainstream-style fic, which has their personality marks all over it, but still. Knowing the person gives a subtext to the thing that one often doesn't even notice. 

Otherwise I ganbaru. I weep my way through three hours writing a morning regularly, but you must remember that I type almost as slowly as I read. The hands of Jeanne type slowly but they type exceeding fine, if you like.

Did waste part of the day reading lj friends of friends of friends. Someone somewhere was, Greer-like, listing ff.net LotR summaries, cheerfully and without undue malice I'll say, though one rolls one's eyes at the things thirteen year olds come up with. And I remembered some other f-of-an-f mentioning the book on Christianity she'd been reading, and how it had clarified the version she'd been raised in by defining (and refuting) it as the sin/redemption model:

The book even speaks of the fact that the old sin/redemption model is, fundamentally, one of distrust, fear, contempt of those who are not the same, and self-absorption... Why are so many people so fixated on perfect things when no thing is perfect? Yeah, Fox ties that back to the sin/redemption model. That only perfect things are allowed in the sin/redemption Heaven, so everything else is just trash, along with the people who shape them. 

I agree with that, of course, at the same time that I roll my eyes over uhh what was it? Frodo gets changed into a cat and is captured by Saruman? I push for shamelessness amongst fans, though the effect of shamelessness hurts my head- but one must push still, because it's not the brazen who need to hear it's OK to be bad cliched and off the wall, but the shameful who hold back for fear of being all those things. One would hope for a balance- one would almost hope for senpais who guide their kouhai fan sisters, but that's for *after* the Second Coming- but as the world is presently constructed, one must countenance everything, however excessive, or risk the existence of a Fanfic police laying down the law.

(earlier)
L- I once got a 24 in Geography which pleased me, in my confused 14 year old fashion, because it demonstrated the sincerity of my feelings, and I thought (spiritus naturaliter Japonicus though I knew *nothing* of the place at the time) that the sincerity of my feelings deserved expression and acknowledgment. My best friend had transferred to another school, I was miserable, hence I failed Geography. Failing first year university seems a little more extreme and I don't know if the same ethos was at work with you ('Take that, uncaring world') but if it makes you happy, I'm glad you did.

My greatest kvell-accomplishment FTR was probably staying in Japan for the first three months, but officially it's learning to ride a bike at 29.

I know how you feel. I wish to bury myself in dragons exclusively, but I'm being good. Write my piece for the day and then go do the translation that kills creativity, sigh. There's a twist to my ABC config which I haven't mentioned so as not to spoil the whole story for future readers, but I think I can safely go with your first suggestion. Thank you. Unless indeed the story decides to write itself completely different when I get into the passage, but that's the usual occupational hazard.

Why I love Incandescens
Her sole comment after a rant of mine about the Utena anime and the Utena OVA:

Sèvres china, meet Brighton Pier funny dog doing a handstand.

(You may substitute your own national kitsch souvenir for the funny dog, but the Brits do indeed do black and white bulldogs and bassetts in cloth caps playing poker. Can't recall who does the little kids peeing into a chamber pot. Belgians maybe.)

Tuesday, April 22, 2003 

Respect for the Aged
So there we go. *My* parents were almost 40 years older than me. And I (she realizes in shock) am your mother's age. Oy vey. (Man, I wonder what menopause babies do? Having a mother fifty years older than you...)

Did go see Sonya Rose today, in fact. She's a five day old baby. Shrug. And indeed her name was Delia 'for a few hours' until Helen's Mom got the Johnny Cash song about same into her head. Helen OTOH is confused. "What happened to baby Jane? Did you leave her at the hospital?" (That's my girl, all two and a half years of her, with the four year old's vocab and reasoning skills.) But Sonya too has inherited the suck the fingers comfort-reflex by which Helen short-circuits her own flip-outs. Some people's karma is to be envied.

Monday, April 21, 2003 

(chatty evening, yes)
Merde alors
Where do obsessions begin?
Was trawling through someone's friends' entries when a name hit me right between the eyes.
Khosh. Ambassador Khosh. Babylon 5.
That's where.
Argh.

(social) N, ganbare. An author's rejection slips are her badges of honour. They save her from being Truman Capote. However the idea of employment for life has made me cold for the last hour. Shades of the prison world close upon the growing boy. Brrr.

L, I am beyond flattered that my dragons resonate with you. I hope they may continue to do so. And yes, mother of two, you got the algorithm right. To pick the other two kids who go inside, choose the ones who are toilet training and will benefit from a visit to the loo. I would make one of the positions oral but that's a different form. Have a look at S&H 2f4.1 (Kyuushuu no shuu for the Japanesed among you) to see the configuration of this one. N may have the answer. Time for a little self-sacrifice here. 

The idea of Goujun lifting tail for Gouen is charming but ultimately unworkable. The taboo against penetrating older relatives exists quite solidly even if all you ever see is my dragons breaking it. ('But that's different!' My dragons are yappari Japanese, which means they do case-by-case in actual practice.) That's why you have thirds.

The dragon stories come two kinds, just apropos of what you were saying about Paper Mage. There's the ones like Young Goukou or the monkey story which aren't really stories. I don't know what to call them. Scene setting. Background info. What would be pages of factual information if this was a gaming manual, but in a (marginally) more entertaining form. Shantsu instructs Goukou and we listen in so as to learn about dragon training. Then there's the others, which are indeed stories. Any time I find myself writing in an explanatory phrase there I take it out. *You* figure out why it makes a difference that Shantsu stands up when his father enters the room but does not kneel. My pov character already knows. And the whole question of why the flush toilets of Heaven revolt the dragons, a point I can't even touch on because the dragons already know why Heavenly plumbing is nauseating, and Goujun would never ever have a conversation with his marshal on the topic. (Unless Curious Tenpou was moved to wonder *why* the dragons insist on earth closets and stuck his neck out to ask.) I go back and forth between these two kinds of narrative, working out details in the scene-setting/ exploratory ones so as to have a solid settei to background the others. If there's ones I'd keep to myself, it's these; just because they're practice sketches, rough and often inconsistent.

Consider This
You want to know why you can't understand the Japanese? This is why.

I was at the mall this evening, heading down the hallway with a wave of people coming towards me. Right in the forefront was a little guy, three or possibly, from the way he moved, a well-grown late two. One of the gotta-move generation running ahead of whoever he was with. Kid is black-white. I glance up. Behind him are three early 30's guys, white, talking to each other, none of them registering the kid. Behind them a 40's might-be-Arab guy. Sort of alongside him are two white guys again, late 20's. Bunch of fifteen year olds behind them. I start getting worried. Pushing through this last bunch is a thin black woman. Ah good, there she is. I continue walking; look back after a bit to doublecheck. Woman is 25 feet ahead, looking around her. Uh-oh. I turn and start walking back, looking in the stores. Spot the guy in a woman's dress shop making friendly with a kid in a stroller. I catch the woman's eye when she's ten feet away and point to the store. She rolls her eyes at me wits-endedly and goes in. I go on my way.

I would safely bet money that nobody else noticed any of this. They lacked the context (childcare) to see the salient features that were so obvious I couldn't avoid them. One, that there was a kid in the first place, two, that none of the adults near him seemed to belong to him, and three, that this fact could possibly be dangerous. So with the Japanese, I figure. They've got the context but it's not one that we normally use. We see the details but can't fit them together into a pattern. They see the pattern and can't break it down into details for us so as to explain.

Settei as she goes, Mr. Sulu
K- the problem being that the taboo against mounting people in the superior generation kicks in here, or does for me. This in spite of the fact that during training almost all rules can be legitimately ignored except for the iron one that fathers don't have any sexual relationship with their sons. So for younger but higher status A to mount older but lower status C (who is unrelated to him) as part of his training should be legitimate. It just feels wrong. It seems a very delicate balancing act of status against age, but age weighs more ultimately. (Which will mess up Goukou's later social and diplomatic life something awful. He outranks all other kings, fine; but all other kings belong to the generation above him. Normally this wouldn't happen, but special circs here, it did. So Goukou will never be seme to any of the river and lake kings because they're older than him.)

This argues that the third in a situation should ideally be a junior, but of course that gets screwed up when Goukou helps Goushou train Gouen. The third in that case is older than both of them, and related to both of them, and may not take the passive position ever. We do have special utility thirds available, but in this particular case I rather need C to be C *because* he's older. Argh. The problems of creation. (And of course, to be realistic, generation-taboos among dragons would be followed about as closely as parent-child taboos among humans ie it's never acknowledged but they get broken all the time.)

Monday, April 21, 2003 

Brainteasers
I always hated logic puzzles. My mother loved them, of course, so there were books lying around from *her* childhood with classic puzzles like 'The missionary is travelling with two cannibals and a dog and they come to a crocodile infested river. The boat will hold only two men at once. If the missionary is alone with a cannibal the cannibal will eat him. If the dog is alone with a cannibal the cannibal will eat him. If the dog goes in the boat with two men the boat will tip and send the dog into the water. How does the missionary get to the other side.' (Odd to think that at one time there were fabulous beasts in the popular imagination called missionaries and cannibals. Missionaries had broad hats and wore dresses, cannibals had bones in their hair and wore skirts. I wasn't sure if these people actually existed somewhere or if they were totally imaginary like elves and pixies- preTolkien elves, I mean, the ones with gossamer wings in the British Christmas annuals.)

No doubt there's a simple logarithm somewhere that solves these kinds of things. I was never much on math but the existence of logarithms pleased me mightily. It seemed a revenge on the sadists who'd thought these puzzles up. 'Henh. I just need to wave my magic string of letters and presto! your paltry problem crumbles to dust.'

I've had to deal with similar things in real life. There are two adults and one student out in the yard with twelve children, and one child needs to go in to pee. Who do you send with her given that the student must never be alone with the child, there must always be two adults when there are ten children together, and they have to stay at separate ends of the yard to keep an eye on the various pieces of equpment. I still hate it.

However I've come across an application that rather amuses me. My dragons are about to go through the threesome forms. On this occasion the upper status dragon (A) is junior to the middle status dragon (B), and will take the middle position. There is an ideal character (C) for the third position, but he's a) older kin to B and b) lower status to A but not in a formal relationship with him. Briefly- under these circumstances how can you enact the simplest of 3P positions, given that neither B nor C may be either seme or uke to the other and A should not be seme to B. 

Get out those logarithms.

Monday, April 21, 2003 

Cancel that. Either my voicemail is really bad or they changed their minds again, because baby is now called Sonya Rose. What a good thing I didn't send the birthday card off, addressed all wrong. Picture on request. 

(I do have a picture in fact, sent me late last night by her Dad and so huge I thought it was a whole tankoubon's translation from some unknown source. Only thing that ever took that long to DL were viruses. And being so huge all I could see on my screen was one and a half eyes. "God she's got huge eyes for a newborn, and god she looks like Helen." That's because it *was* Helen, modestly proud sitting next to the baby, who looks-- like a newborn. I'll wait till her eyes are open before I go visit.)

Sunday, April 20, 2003 

Dead Person on a Stick Day- (social)
Yo, L. How nice to have you back. Have your spousal unit sent in for repairs; he keeps giving the BAD COMMAND message inappropriately.

K sent me Sen to Chihiro ages back and Canada Post ate it. She's sent it again, and I wait with fingers crossed to see what the thing looks like in Japanese. (Nora may have to bring me one home as an omiyage.) I agree, SA was indeed about an American girl's experiences, and because her VA was so fantastic it worked very well. But the childing down of the character, if that's what it was, made some of the Haku interactions feel strange. She's clearly supposed to have some kind of romantic feeling for him, but it just doesn't work with this trad ten-eleven year old. (Later edit, after rereading you: the other thing that felt, not wrong, but just unexplained was the way this kid buckles down without immense demur to life a) all alone b) in a strange land c) after several utter impossibilities have happened. Kids can rise to challenges, I know; but it really makes more sense if Chihiro is indeed out of childhood and into young adolescence, and utterly pragmatic into the bargain.) Again, I'm all for making Haku a young immortal, but that requires having a young-sounding voice delivering lines with an adult intonation, which is a pretty stiff order for a child VA. (And of course any Japanese kid VA has been listening to other people do this stuff since forever. American kids don't get the range in their cartoons. Having never heard a coloratura role, they can't sing one.) 

N, my sympathy. The perils of reading the (IMHO deliberately) indifferent pro stuff that gets published is that you lose your appetite. The occasional TV dinner or Big Mac is OK, but as a constant diet it will put you off food. Avaryan Rising is a big Mac. There's some nutrition there but so many additives and padders that it leaves you feeling bloated but still hungry. No, I never got through it. Couldn't. (perpetual chorus these days) The woman needs an editor. Ditto fanfic, but of course. Thanks for the props for my own stories. (What's props short for?) I find that stories by someone you know can be exempt from the 'weary stale flat and unprofitable' distaste that occasionally attaches to all fiction. 'This at least has the virtue of reflecting something about my friend Name.'

My cure for reading blahs is to do Something Completely Different. This usually means nonfiction or something Asian in translation. I'd recommend Sei Shonagon's pillowbook if you've never read her. Fun read. Miss Smylla's Sense of Snow, which disoriented me only partly because I was in Japan at the time. Had an honest-to-God moment of weird dj sexuality, and did it m/f. Or else I do bread and butter reading- classics I may not be interested in but that let me say when I'm done 'OK, now I've read Anna Karenina.' I don't recommend Tolstoy, though. Just- not my writer. I do recommend the classic Chinese novel The Story of the Stone, that has a Penguin Classics translation. Westerners writing China is all very well, but one feels safer with the Chinese writing China. Stone is just as long ago and far away in feel, but it's the real thing. Even if, as I'm perpetually assured, Chinese doesn't translate into English. I know. Neither does Japanese. Other favourite- Dasai (or Dazai) Osamu's No Longer Human. You read that and think A *Japanese* wrote that? Yup.

Of all the things to worry about, being turned away at the border is the one that wouldn't occur to me. 'Welcome American tourist.' Sweet, they let Iranians in at a time when everyone *knew* that any Iranian male was going straight to the illegal job market. Ah well, why not, houses have to be built. Me, I worried strenuously about getting lost in Narita, and with reason. In those days the train didn't run to the airport and you had to take a bus, and I took the wrong bus which just brought me back to the airport again, and when I did get to the station, bought the wrong ticket and wound up standing on an every-station local instead of sitting in comfort on the Skyliner. Haven't heard about SARS getting to Japan yet; for that matter, haven't heard about any cases in NY either, or I'd worry about M's last trip to China (which was long enough ago that she'd have developed symptoms twice over by now.) No, that's just M being The Occasional Blogger, I'd bet. New Yorkers have lives, you know.

Sunday, April 20, 2003 

Dead Person on a Stick Day-- (pedant version)
No, that was Friday, wasn't it? Says something about Christianity that it puts immense emphasis on the fact that Christ died- it's the religion of the crucifix, after all- and damned little on the fact that he rose from the dead. And maybe it's just good advertising, get 'em where it hurts variety: you're gonna get SARS and die, right, but look so did our guy so he knows how it feels. It just ignores the other and rather more optimistic side of the deal: but look, it didn't last, and hey, you can rise too! Neat, huh? Of course there's fine print. I mean you can't come back here but you'll be alive Up There, and that's better than some gloomy Hades, right?

In fact I remember enough art history to know that as long as other people believed in Hades what the Christians pushed was Christ Triumphant. If it was a crucified Christ in the first place, which was rare, he'd be fully clothed and imbued with power- alive, calm-faced, the victor of over death. It was, what else, the Counter-Reformation and its bad fangirl adolescent sadism ('ohh he's suffering ohh the poor baby ohh how could it get worse ohh it just *did* ohh ohh ohhhh yes! yes!') that gave you suffering Christs (and suffering everybodies, and overripe sensuality, and decaying corpses, and other Anne Rice-ish tropes. Caravaggio was of the period. Say no more.) Somehow they never got rid of them, alas. Needs a good Puritan movement, Catholicism, in its artwork if not its mores which are puritan enough already grump the urami of the cradle Catholic never dies.

Meanwhile, G- it never occurred to me to wonder where the mills of god line comes from, so I looked. (And the spine of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations ripped when I took it out. Oxford publications- Oxford *hardback* publications- are not supposed to come apart. That's handsewn and cloth bound and the back cover is now loose. I don't care if it's nearly fifty years old. My god has betrayed me. I will have to google everything from now on, because of course Oxford completely redid the dictionary some decades ago, assiduously fixing what wasn't broken, and now it's divided by theme or some such and all the minor English poets are gone.) The original is German, by god, Friedrich von Logau, a poet from the 17th century- Gottesmuhlen mahlen langsam, mahlen aber trefflich klein. Translated by Longfellow who, go him, kept the original metre, but who is always misquoted and I can see why:
Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all.

(There's a reason why people like me who remember rhymed verse by reflex and without wanting to have to stay away from people like Longfellow, the Soldiers' March from Aida of poetry. Try to get that out of your head, just try.)

Saturday, April 19, 2003 

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum
FYI, N, I am writing the weepy Goukou and Shantsu story. It's so weepy I'm dehydrating myself into chronic headaches, just to round out this week of chronic headache appropriately, and must take myself off to the Dufferin Mall periodically to look for presents for Delia Rose that her sister can play with until Delia grows old enough to appreciate them. No, I haven't a clue why this is making me cry like a drain. I'm not averse to pressing my own buttons occasionally, but to press buttons I don't know I have is both puzzling and a little irritating. Identification with my main character, perhaps, who can't stop crying and dosn't know why either.

Saturday, April 19, 2003 

K- but it's the kids' fantasy novels that stay with you, I figure. Doubtless there are people who get really fixated on adult books, but they're not the kind who'd get really fixated on manga as we do. Kids' books and manga have in common that they deal in archetypes, up front, and usually do it well. Also the best kids' books- the ones I can still reread with pleasure- were Brit-written a long time ago when things like plot and character mattered. No young adult fic in those days. Hence Lewis and Nesbit and Kipling for me. This doesn't stop me from finding satisfying passages in The Brothers Karamazov (Dmitry is it? has a nice bit addressed to God, defining himself as what I did not know in 1982 to be The Uke Triumphant) but there's a lot of other stuff in Karamazov too and I'm not as young as I was. So no rereads in the near future.

But I don't understand. They will focus on sculpting, but what will they do with the sculptures if not make them into kits? Show them at art parks?

Agreed. April slipped by like greased lightning and left no mark behind. But once you've done your death you never ever have to do it again. Certainly not next year, same time same station. "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once: we owe God a death; and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next." (grimly) Unless the Buddhists are right, which they may well be.

Oh, scratched an itch y'day. Went out in grey rain to the Palmerston Koreans to get milk, Ojisan was taking the day off as he does sometimes now- though mind points out all Koreans I know are akumade Christians and y'day was Good Friday so he might have been singing hymns in church- got the Korean-Canadian girl instead. I mean they all are, but she's the one would be a sansei if she was Japanese and hence speaks the same (meta)language I do. (This after a little confusion with the Korean waitress at the Japanese restaurant over the difference between diet Coke and decaffeinated diet Coke that resolved into 'I want the silver one.') So I asked her does Korean have dialects, cause half the time it sounds like Japanese that makes no sense, and half the time it sounds like... Korean, by virtue of not sounding like anything else. No, she said, no dialects as such, but it does have accents. I wondered if accents would make that much difference, and then recalled the bus driver in Yorkshire and the SAfricans (white) on Bloor St met with Esther's mother, who by dint of repeating their question three times turned out to be saying Where is the nearest subway station? Makes sense that the Japanese-controlled sections of Korea, after 40 years, might have picked up a distinct Japanese intonation. So now I know.

Socratic Dialogue
Phaedo: If we're all going to die of SARS, why do I have to do my taxes?
Socrates: In a city of 2,500,000, 250 people have SARS. What's your odds?
Phaedo: But it hasn't gone 'untraceable source' yet. When it becomes airborne we'll drop like flies. So why do I have to do my taxes?
Socrates: Because 90% of people who get SARS do *not* die. They live to be hounded by the agents of Canada Customs and Revenue.

Somehow this strikes me as unfair.

Friday, April 18, 2003 

Removes albatross from around neck, drops into sea
Finished Wild Adapter 1. Had to google the name of the second detective, blue dragon swords, the blue dragon sword incident, panpii, yarikomu, and bokoru. Probably should have googled Akutagawa's oeuvre, but didn't. Will inevitably turn out that 'Dwarf' is the name of a Taoist sage or something. And come to that, wasn't there a famous Chinese statesman of very low stature back in the warring kingdoms era?

Phonecall while I was writing the below. Baby Jane appears, only a week late, but is not Baby Jane. Somewhere in the last ten days her name turned into Delia Rose. If, like the Chinese, the object of the exercise is to see that she has a name no-one else does, then I guess they've succeeded. Makes a change from the orthographical idiocies most people pull to ensure uniqueness, certainly, but I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Delia is a name with no solid connotations at all for me, which is odd. Short from Cordelia, I imagine, and saying vaguely English Renaissance and minor pastoral poetry.

N- I have two Shantsu/ Goukou stories; also a chronic bindertwine headache, the Spring Sulks, and that particular form of writer's block that comes from realizing that other people will read these. Nothing can happen in either story until all of them go away. (I *could* write Gouen and the pears. I have two Gouen and the pears incidents. I need a third. What's with the pears? You'll have to read the first Shantsu/ Goukou story to find out. The depths of my miserable bitchery when I wake with a muscle knot headache for the third day in a row are stunning, even to me.)

So Murcans have to file by April 15? We get to Mayday Eve. Mayday morning you can get get up at 5 and go out to High Park and watch the Morris dancers dance the sun in. I imagine this has changed in the 20 years since I last did this, if only because 20 years ago morris dancing was the purview of very hearty sexist men and their batty earth mother wannabe girlfriends. I suppose the girlfriends have all gone off to wicca in the meantime. (I'm inclined to be sad about wicca. A perfectly respectable belief system when it was in the old country, it's now the religious option of choice for west coast teeny dingbats, like the human disaster area that calls itself Aradia Morgan when it's not calling itself something else.)

Thursday, April 17, 2003 

Educational as well as amusing, moi
Panpii- short for ippan piipuru- ordinary people- hence any Joe Blow off the street. Your word for tonight. Thank you Minekura sensei and The Headscratcher's Glossary. Times, wading through the honyaku ML pays off.

The boredom of boredom when you blog so as to have something interesting to read. (Not entirely true. I have Lirael on the go currently. As ever, it feels strange to read books in English.) I also finished Fuuin last night, and My Mountain Daoist Lover 1, so it's not that I have been doing nothing. I even finished ch 1 of WA today and am five whole pages into ch.2 and have had to google two things already, is one reason why it goes so slowly. The other being the intutive nature of Japanese, where you have to know already what they're saying to know what they're saying. The gaming term I asked you about, K, suddenly revealed its meaning to me- as well as the meaning of the rest of the sentence- in a sudden satori. There are times I hate this language.

They're asking people please not to shake hands or kiss crucifixes at the various Easter services. Yes. Please don't. We're expecting a new burst of cases following the weekend, given that the last body blow to SARS containment was delivered by- what else- a Roman Catholic prayer group meeting of some 400 people, some of whom broke quarantine in their eagerness to meet their God now.

So Tuesday was 27 degrees and today was about 4. It does make the week long. And the wind that we expected yesterday or even Tuesday evening blew all today, garbage and recyclables day, so there's now a stray plastic garbage bin on our front lawn rolled down from who knows where, and vast amounts of waste paper blown out of people's grey boxes, and almost as many pop and beer cans blown out of the blue ones. But what really irritates me are the bags of dog shit that blew out of the rolling garbage cans after the truck came through and emptied them of legitimate garbage. This is a habit of dog owners (there's a reason I despise dog owners) who will happily clean up after their pet, sure; then drop the bag in somebody's emptied garbage bin and leave it for *them* to deal with. The garbage collectors won't take it next time- it has to be in a proper garbage bag- so you have to handle the nasty thing and put it in your own garbage for a week. The dog owners know that and don't care. So I had three little bags of dog turds blow onto my lawn today, and I am not pleased.

The lovableness of ff.net
You guys don't know Molesworth, which is a pity, because then I could just reference Molesworth luving gurls and you'd know what I meant. But as it is I shall have to quote:

    AND SO...i am determined to LUV GURLS.
    'oh goody,' sa fotherington-tomas who see wot my bold hand hav written, 'I knew you would come round to my point of view, molesworth. Wot sort of gurls do you like?'
    'All of them,' i repli. 'i shall spare myself nothing.'
    "Even gurls who giggle?'
    'Yes.'
    'Even gurls who recite weedy rhymes i.e.higldy piggledy i solicity umpa-la-ra-jig?'
    'Yes, yes.'
    'Gurls with skipping ropes who sa "Salt vinegar mustard peper" ect?'
    'Yes, but you are trying me hard, fotherington-tomas, very hard indeed.'

One does not expect to see Sen to Chihiro... fic done well. One is amazed to see it done at all. And of course, all fantasies are legitimate or none are. But you are trying me hard, greer, very hard indeed. 

Thursday, April 17, 2003 

(Parenthetically K- L is in CA over the EW. Cryptic enough for you?)

I don't work. Why am I so happy tomorrow is a holiday? So that I can not-work with a clear conscience?

G- One could go find Henry Ford's grave and spit on it. I'd do it anyway just for what his invention did to your major cities, the newer ones. Cities are meant for people, meaning it's the buildings on the street which matter and the streets themselves should be an optimal width to let traffic pass without separating one side of the street unduly from the other. Streets in CA towns are highways. There's no human scale there. Further, what the car did was allow Americans to live in a series of small towns. Small towns promote small town mentality, as K can tell you. It's not an accident, by me, that civic and civilization come from the same root, says the akumademo city child. (Link your towns by train, of course, and you're talking civilization.)

(Ya know, if I can't bear a muscle knot headache now what am I going to do when I'm dying of cancer with insufficient pain control? Scream a lot, I suppose. Mood, as they say in lj- gloomy.) (I should go hang around the daycare which I haven't been doing, mostly because, as Maya's Mom said, I've moved in with them for the last week. Y'day being Passover and because she hates matzoh, she made unleavened muffins instead. Then we ate them all in the course of the afternoon while she wrestled with architectural software and I Mayaed. Warui.)

Wednesday, April 16, 2003 

Stray Thought
When you work in the chocolate factory they give you free chocolate. When you work in the prophylactics division do they give you free condoms? 

Salad Days
The word I use for someone I don't like is a form of vegetable. I can't recall what the word is. I only know it if I'm not actually trying to remember it, and then it just slips out. Otherwise my mind refuses to supply it, giving me the French word for sauerkraut, as below. Kale? my mind suggests helpfully. Endive? Kohlrabi? Tu peux bien t'imaginer that this drives me up a wall. People who take lots of aspirin don't get Alzheimers, they say (rejoice, K- the reward for a lifetime's pain is you'll still be you at 80) but sometimes I wonder.

The word, for the record, is wurzel. It's a form of turnip.

Tuesday, April 15, 2003 

De gustibus
How odd that N should be in a lousy mood in spite of the warm weather, and I in a lousy mood because of the warm weather, and both of us, I fancy, in lousy moods because there's a big fat looks-full-to-me moon sitting outside the window. Snow Friday, you say? Anhhhhh.... It was 27 today- low 80's to you. Is supposed to start out 15 (59) tomorrow am after whatever it is blows through and drop through the day to 3 (38). I will feel more like myself tomorrow.

But right now I'm sitting here absolutely refusing to translate WA. That's just me and spring. I won't I won't I won't. Why should I? Lay myself out for the fangirls- the stupid whining bleating spoiled-brat brigade. Screw them. Let them learn Japanese, the arrogant unilingual choucroutes. Do something for a fangirl- as it might be, scan in the BBG calendar- and you get leering posts about cock on the ML. Thank you, no. And on and on. Equally I will not answer email and I will not write dragons and I will not will not in a boat I will not will not with a goat I will not do it here or there I will not do it anywhere.

Yes, life might be simpler if one had friends to call up and go see when one gets into these moods. If it's any comfort, N, you can be totally alone in the city you were born in.

Uchi no Vejita wa uke desu
And so's every Japanese-drawn yaoi Vejita I know. I have a hard time envisioning any Hirata Hiroaki character as anal, FWIW. And 'by-the-book' seme just doesn't ring true to me unless it's a humourous point.

Meanwhile it is spring. Two days ago I was, as ever, in full winter rig and freezing ('It was supposed to be *16* today but it feels like 8.') Today's supposed to be 24. The window is open, meaning I'm in another dimension now, the one where Outside comes In. (Opened it last night to, alas, cool off the room, and had to turn on fan because Mike the Taxidriver was out in his backyard talking to himself or the cats or both. As my bro says, Mike goes on periodic toots, and I think he was on a toot last night. He always talks to the cats but only when tooting does he talk to them loudly and at length.) Started another Goukou story, but it feels quite different now I'm writing with the window open. Truly, the changeover from winter to spring does involve a complete shift in realities. It smells like seven years ago, which I wish it wouldn't, but to be expected when you've had April snow. 

Tuesday, April 15, 2003 

The inhabitance. Yes of course.

In Death Powder's djs Wolfwood is an Aoki Soh uke to Vash, meaning he rapes him, as Aoki's ukes are wont to do to their semes. Wolfwood seme proves that a pure character is the sine qua non of ukedom, and it doesn't matter how tall Mr. Pure is. Come to that, Konzen the universal uke is taller than every other kami in the Gaiden, and Goujun the always uke'd to Kenren is taller than anybody. Even I have cut Goujun down to size because he's just so asking to be uke to someone. It's the one with the vulnerabilities? Nope, it's the one with the tight sphincter. Has anyone ever come across a constipated seme, now I think of it?

Monday, April 14, 2003 

Oh I give up
"Which one is the parrot sketch?" One you didn't see, obviously. You can't forget the parrot sketch if you did. The one where Chapman tries to sell Cleese a dead parrot whom he maintains is just asleep, and Cleese goes through all the English nomenclature for 'dead' in his insistence that the parrot is precisely that: 

"He's passed on. This parrot is no more. He has ceased to be. He's expired and gone to meet his maker. He's a stiff. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed him to the perch he'd be pushing up the daisies. He's curled up his tootsies. He's off the twig. He's kicked the bucket, he's shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible! He's had his lot! This is an ex-parrot!!" 

Meanwhile I see lj is foutu, as lj tends to be. Annoying. It's my evening read.

And L, I know the syndrome. For me it's fics and manga, but both make the world go away very satisfactorily. OTOH I'd have thought two kids would drag you back in short order, as the babies do me. Nothing like something short and human needing stuff done for it to ground you at once.

Sunday, April 13, 2003 

Interesting moment of dislocation there. Because while I know Nora's father is an artist and I know Sabina's father is an artist I had never consciously thought 'Both Nora and Sabina's fathers are artists.' Also, S talks about her father's painting a fair amount and N doesn't. So I started reading Nora's blog and thought No wait this is *Sabina's* blog and then realized No it isn't- both Nora and Sabina's fathers are artists.

The things undone remain undone though I've virtuously done other things instead. I've also read Lord D'Arcy Investigates, that A/U series from the 70's. Stands up not bad. Nostalgic too.

Hormones. Have a weepy little story I want to write, post-whatever happens to Goujun that takes him Down There, where Goukou pays a condolence visit to the king of the Western River who's Goujun's maternal grandfather- river dragons actually take account of the female side, since they live in a female empire- and meets Shantsu again. Only Shantsu would more properly come to the oceans to attend the funeral, and that doesn't work at all.

(later)
If you only read completed manga you can afford to demand coherence, or deliberate lack of same. If you come in when a manga's young, you may get burned. AS was quite sensible through vol 8 or so; Basara through vol 15. Both cases I think the mangaka had a coherent plotline to be going on with, but the series was too big or the plotline only went so far (is my guess respectively) and she didn't implement it or wasn't allowed to. So the thing dragged on, or staggered on, whichever. Myself I can't sit around waiting for a manga series to be over before I'll read it (especially since some of the best series stop abruptly half way through- Rika, anyone?) That removes half the joy of reading a manga series, the roller-coaster ride of what next?

The Wonderful World of Manga
...the mangaka doesn't have a coherent plot in her head, she's just letting it take its episodic drunkard's walk down the time line

Yep, that's how it's done. Part of it is the way manga works. God forbid you *have* a coherent plot in your head cause if the series is big you won't be allowed to use it. What? *End* our best-selling YYH? No way Sensé. Keep on churning them episodes out. (Big writer keep on churning, Fan stomachs keep on turning, Roiling, roiling, roiling on the river) Again, you pitch your series to the pros when it's new in your head, and maybe you have a general idea where it's going and how it'll end but OTOH if it's picked up that'll all be several years down the road. That's a ways away. You can afford to be fuzzy on the later developments.

Would everyone please stop telling me they've done their taxes? I feel like TTG with her thesis proposal deadline, a quivering rabbit transfixed by the eyes of a very hungry hawk. Anhh kowai... (sniffle) I want some Man in a Can ('solid! competent! soothing!') to hold my hand for this.

"Keep in touch with media releases for a big surprise"- in bed. Well, *I* laughed. 

Saturday, April 12, 2003 

"We have left undone those things which we ought to have done and we have done those things which we ought not to have done and there is no health in us." 
What he said. (*They* said. The Book of Common Prayer was written by a committee, the first of two times that a committee ever produced something written in decent English.) 

You know, if *I* was Maya's Mama and Papa celebrating having survived yesterday and the presentation of one's thesis proposal (him), a critique of one's work by the architect who's designing the new twin towers (her) and a job interview (her again) by going out for the first time in two months, I don't think I would go see The Pianist. But they did.

Friday, April 11, 2003 

(And *I* am the Spanish Inquisition sketch, which was mine.)

A Day in Mayaland
...is like a freeze-dried vacation. Eight hours of nonstop infant takes you Elsewhere for what feels like a week, and makes the rest of the world look distanced and not entirely real when you come back to it. 

But while she had her abbreviated nap, I read HnG2. I do not see what the fangirl squealing is about. (Not you, G. The fangirls.) I do not see slash potential all over the map and screaming to be written. Maybe it happens in later vols. Maybe everyone gets old enough to make it seem reasonable. As the characters stand right now to take a yaoi approach is to miss the whole point of the thing, and miss it in an exceptionally irritating manner. Of course, I want more HnG and I want it in French, because this thing is too Shounen Jump to plow through in Japanese. Reads fine in French, though. And vol 3 was released two weeks ago. You get your French manga when and as you get your French manga. Patientez-vous alors.

I love the Europeans though. Got a sad little email from some German girl sadly thanking me for my WA and EC translations and saying her version of ganbatte: please go on. 'Excuse my english it is not my first language.' I read your English loud and clear, liebchen: when will you do the first two chapters of WA? Tonight, god willing. 

Thursday, April 10, 2003 

Context, L, context, as we keep saying on the various translators' MLs. Was the speaker of the original line 15, 10 or 5? I'm detecting a certain level of snottishness in the commentary but I'm not sure it's there.

G, I only go by the webpages, which suggest calendula is marigold in oil. OTOH there seem to be a zillion varieties of marigold, some of which I suppose could be tall and feathery. Sounds to *me* like she's using cosmos, of course.

Deplorable Dragon Domestic Practices
You realize that after reading Stuff yesterday I decided that nobody would get to see this one ever. Those monkey in the zoo tropes- that close and mortifying resemblance to our own behaviours and expressions. But then, even if you're a monkey you needn't be a prat. You can honestly admit you are a monkey. You acknowledge that you do indeed write overheated romantic sadism just like the author of Stuff, and yours is every bit as infantile and silly and overly long. You don't just hide it in Alhambra and pretend it isn't there because no one else can read it. Ahh kuyashii.

So OK. "My name is Jeanne and I am a monkey." (bros3)

Mind you, you needn't be a monkey by reading it. Just to mention. And *I* have not used the word nubbin and hope I never will.

Thursday, April 10, 2003 

M- musing on the Beijing Opera otaku and her blitzkrieg, there needs to be a word for this. It's not canon weeniedom per se, since it references reality and not faithfulness to the fictional source; but equally it's a syndrome beyond reality bug. An obsession with factual accuracy, where factual accuracy is the main criterion on which a work is to be judged, and its absence naturally damns the work as a whole. Western SF suffers from it in a very bad way, making a shibboleth of scientific accuracy. For the same reason that the English called them French letters and the French called it le vice anglais, I associate this nit-picking detail-obsession with the male mindset. Wrongly, of course. Slashers get wound into knots over HA (historical accuracy), SA (sexual accuracy) and ScA (scientific accuracy) just as much as any mainstream SF fan. Neil Gaiman referred to the Fanfic Police, and there are indeed FP out there amongst Our Little Psychos. But it's all a subset to me of The Fannish Inquisition, and thus I shall denominate it.

Meanwhile, 'winona' is in fact rather a nice term for the area. One needs an inoffensive way of saying, when one gets back on the bike after a winter off, that the general area between the legs hurts considerably after contact with the saddle and this may be it. 'God my winona aches.' That there's room here for a line about being a winona rider is something we'll try to ignore.

Noted in passing:
Vengeance is MINE, sayeth The Lord. 
Yeah, well, I'm gonna borrow it, 'kay??? 

And on a totally dfferent topic, winterbloom it is.

Sorry, what would be xiangencao? Vetivert? Witch hazel and lavendar both got mentioned as topical agents, but neither sounds Asian with those names. 'Witch hazel' in fact is so domestically NAmerican to my ears it hurts. Like having my dragons use Johnson's Baby Powder.

Chatty, yes
Jesus christ in a handbasket, as Ms. Tang is given to saying in her more private moments. *Eighty* spam messages in one day? To celebrate the ninth of April or something?

I'm tempted to repeat the same thing, G, about your HS classmates all having their private lives online and googleable. Tell the world, I'm at the U of C getting my phud. I hope this public persona only applies to those in academia.

I too might have trouble looking away from a size J vacuuming topless, but then again maybe I wouldn't. Breasts are breasts are nice but they're not la femme lui-meme. Anyway, there are enough stunningly substantial East Europeans around here that one gets used to the clothed sight at least. Dealing with a large-breasted woman is like dealing with someone old. The breasts, the wrinkles, they're just these things that happened to the rather ordinary person who's behind the eyes. After a bit you stop seeing them.

L- Tiger balm I know. I can't be near the stuff because it's the smell of migraine for me now. And it burns. Camphor isn't something I'd use on cuts and grazes. Calendula is, but once again, calendula is marigolds mashed up and I don't know if China has marigolds. Now vetivert is also used for cuts, and it's known in India, *and* it smells gorgeous, but I don't know if it's called vetiver there. (Cassia I also know, after having a misunderstanding with M over cassia and cassis, which are not at all the same. Cassis is used to make kir royale, cassia is used to treat constipation. ^_^)

Wednesday, April 9, 2003 

(Uhh- L? Was Stuff *supposed* to be funny?)

I have finished The Endless Evening at Goukou's, aka Deplorable Dragon Domestic Practices, except that I need a natural topical analgesic and none comes immediately to mind. Back in the old days people seemed to use alcohol, internally, and nothing external. Now clove oil I know works wonders at deadening aching gums and holes-in-the-jaw, but it also removes the plastic from vinyl floor tiles. Could one use it on skin, I have to wonder? I know it burns mucous membranes- don't get it anywhere near your lips, which is difficult if you're trying to get it on your gums. Seems to me there should be a common or garden painkiller- dock leaves?- that isn't occurring to me.

(Update after googling- not clove oil. Nope. But all the topical analgesics I find are western. Do marigolds grow in China?)

I don't know if Sabina is a BNFW or just a BNF, but she's certainly one or the other or both. And the fact is you can't be a BNFW unless you write in a huge fandom, which means GW almost as a default. Otherwise WK, FY, maybe YYH, and nowadays HP of course. Nor is it that BNFWs can do no wrong. There are always Young Turks around to declare boldly that the BNFW isn't all that wonderful and why does everyone say she is? (No-one has told the YTs that you simply can't say that if you write in the same fandom as the BNFW, however true it may be, because invariably it sounds like Why doesn't everyone come kiss *my* ass? But if they can't figure that for themselves- and on the evidence, they can't- then they deserve to look like ijjits.)

Do I miss Tokyo? Yes and no. It was interesting to have done, and I like going back, but life in Japan is tough. Very short on positive reinforcement and, I find, slightly crazy-making. Some cultures have a goodness of fit with each other and some don't, and the ethos of Japan is very much at odds with the things I value. I could live in Montreal, which doesn't believe in working hard; possibly in Germany, which believes in working hard during working hours but then expects you to go out and enjoy yourself at a symphony or in a restaurant. I couldn't live in Italy, that expects you to work, take a few hours off for lunch with friends and family, work some more, have a leisurely dinner, work some more, go to bed. The friends and family part is good; the working till 10 is not. And I hate Japan, that expects you to work because well work is all there is; and when you've finished working, to go out drinking with your coworkers, come home on the last train, get five hours sleep, and do it all over the next day. There is no private time in Japan, because being alone is terrible; there are no small dinner parties in Japan, because you always have to go out, and you have to go out with 20 other people or it isn't lively enough; hence there is practically no conversation in Japan, which is what drives the French-descended bonkers. As Matt Thorne put it, 'When my Korean friends get drunk they argue about politics or God; when my Japanese friends get drunk they try to put chopsticks up their noses.' Exactly. If the Japanese are not all extroverts they certainly act as if they were extroverts- they talk non-stop about nothing, everyone agrees, and that's their idea of a satisfying conversation.

Wednesday, April 9, 2003 

N- hmm, yes. Hot, very hot. But the point for me is, the story is clearly leading up to Takahatsu (I take it he's not the Chinese mafia guy of canon but an OC?) being royally rogered over Ogata's desk. You even describe it for our delectation, in prospect, of course. That Ogata is about to handjob Taka at the end is just a minor detail, an hors d'oeuvre (yes there really are three vowels in a row there, Jeanne; French orthography does that) before the main course. But to describe the feel of hot dry hand rubbing over sensitive aroused flesh (and probably causing a little chapping as well, sources inform me), or even better, soft suede glove rubbing over engorged flesh-- that's the thing that's hard to make arousing. My guess is that it's because we can't relate to it personally. There's not much, female-wise, that feels good being rubbed directly, and nothing that feels good being pulled. Besides the fact that pulling is a silly movement at the best of times.

You are clearly a New Yorker. No-one notices where you look in the subway here. They're too busy thinking their own thoughts or reading their own papers. *Talk* to someone on a train? Hah. That's the sign of an American tourist. ^_^ 

I will say to their credit that Torontonians generally have the same attitude as Tokyoites though not to the same degree under extreme circumstances. We just assume that you aren't there even if you're just a few inches away from me (in Tokyo, even if you're jammed up against me next to the doors.) The guy talking to himself over there or the woman growling obscenities here aren't really there, you know? So you ignore them. (Helps to know that the chances of them being armed are very very remote.) I grant you, Asians in general have an enviable ability to look blank without looking demented. The white face, at least, doesn't. It has to be expressing something always, which makes staring into space difficult for us to do neutrally. And if you're looking out the window when underground, if you're really looking at yourself you don't see other people but it's prattish to look at your own reflection in the first place- gaze in miror at yore strange unnatural beauty; if you do it above ground, you're looking out the window, and anyone glaring at you is nuts. Which I suppose is the point of your entry. In Boston they are. No wonder public transit is in trouble.

Wednesday, April 9, 2003 

See, I can't believe that all real guys are /obsessed/ by thoughts of Pud, or they'd all be with guys. Or is it (horrible thought occurs to her) that it's their own pud they're obsessed with? And the ones who're obsessed with pud qua pud are indeed with other guys?

That's bizarre. Does it translate? 'I have a thing about my breasts. All women do. I like it that my man is absolutely floored by the beauty of my breasts and can't get enough of them but I am always worried that some other woman has bigger breasts than me and that my man is looking at women with bigger breasts than me and wants them instead of me...' Well OK. As an occasional underlying feeling doubtless it happens, yeah. Now: 'I have a thing about breasts. I go after women because of their breasts. I'm always cruising the bars for triple-D cups and I have a stack of Big Jugs magazines next to the Color Roter. My girlfriend has enormous breasts and all the dykes go green when we walk down the street together' snort giggle yeah sure. (cheerfully) Men are weird.

I'd like to think that with different socializing and different social attitudes they might have a more umm holistic view of the matter. The Greeks liked small neat penises in proportion to the rest of the body and thought size was for satyrs and Cyclops and other man-beasts. OTOH going by their poetry, what exercised them was butt. Always something. Well, the poor bunnies are hard-wired to umm get hard, basically, which must make life difficult. I used to go into heat at the end of March- some atavistic remnant, don't ask me why; and it was both distracting and a little desolating because most years I was alone. Certainly it was hard to concentrate with one's attention always reverting to the same subject like a dog wanting to hump table legs. Haven't done that in years, now I think about it. Yaoi must have cured the syndrome by making it low-grade, chronic and permanent.

Tuesday, April 8, 2003 

HikaGo in French from Incandescens. Reading a tankoubon in half an hour feels all wrong, you know? My god, this stuff really is like popcorn, zip and it's gone. Actually it was almost as slow as Japanese to start with but then the atrophied French centres in my brain kicked in, and zip. Though I have a feeling Houshin Engi will be slower. Rather more high level dialogue and rather more of it. But really, this looks to be the way to get my shounen manga, once I track down some online Montreal bookstores and see what it costs in Can$.

Sabina asks do I have a blog and I say yes. Sabina asks can she have the url and I say no. The reason being, and you may all go off in a fearful offender at this if you like, that I don't want to be read by BNFWs. If I natter about my fics here, I'm nattering to SNFWs like myself. I don't know why it makes a difference, but it does. Well, I can think of one difference. BNFWs have a lot of people reading their bljgs and I don't want to be talking to them, even at one remove through quoted passages.

Yo, K. Welcome back. 

I agree, one guy kneeling worshipfully before another ought to resonate as much as one guy bending for another, and I can't think why it doesn't. Possibly because it's not traditional simian submissive behaviour? ^_^ Possibly because I'm an ass-woman? (What a revolting phrase.) Possibly because the fine details of buggery are, basically, (nearly wrote fundamentally there, but you guys wouldn't have cared, would you? No, thought not) non-existent while the fine details of schlurping are fine indeed; and I, she says pathetically, never had much experience of them or it *or* took anatomical notes when I did. But mostly it's because dick qua dick doesn't interest me, which proves only that I'm not a man. I think of it as an instrument for a purpose (nearly wrote an end there, and that one you couldn't have ignored.) Whereas the usual attitude to schlurping, to go by the male lit on the subject, is halfway to fetishism and often close enough to see the lights in the windows. The organ itself is what turns them on. They worship it. (Depressingly: it, not him.) That weird male ability to detach bits of the human body and valorize them. Doesn't matter what's attached to The Wondrous Pud, it's Pud itself that monopolizes their attention and receives their worship. La phalle, c'est l'homme lui-même.

All of which recalls the old t-shirt slogan- My father was a man and my mother was a woman. No wonder I'm fucked up.

Monday, April 7, 2003 

N- But it *was* an hour earlier. That's where the canker guhnaws. I can do no better than quote Incandescens on uhh that particular subject of your displeasure:

CS Lewis was right -- it's not the thing itself so much as the fact that one felt entitled to whatever it was that was lost. My hour. How dare the world take it away? 

She has nothing to say about ComSci students, winter storm warnings and Your Little Psycho, and neither do I. I don't read fandom blogs any more, and on the rare occasions when I do I invariably regret it. Septic tanks rather notoriously produce revolting sights and nauseating smells. The solution is to stay away from septic tanks. Achy and asthmatic, achy because asthmatic, I have blown the world off today in order to write Dysfunctional Dragon Families, and feel much better for doing so. 

(I lie. About the winter storms at least. Es schneit, she says glumly from her grade ten German. Es schneit umm wieder, is it? Il neige encore. Mata yuki ga futteru yo. This is getting boring, guys.)

M, as ever, you put your finger on something that had bothered me but that I couldn't articulate. No, people are not movie cameras that record everything. The details they see are selected- they're the details they /would/ see. And the tendency among young writers is indeed not to personalize what's seen to the character, but to make the character a 360 degree observer that sees all, including the colour of his own eyes. Hence the flatness in so much description. And thus my liking for Method writing- if I am the character then I see only what's important to the character. (And then have to go back as author and somehow sneak in explanations of stuff my chara already knows instinctively but the reader doesn't. Yes well. No-one ever said it was easy.)

Monday, April 7, 2003 

Shameful Disclosures
Oral sex between men does not interest me. It does not inspire me. It does not resonate with me. Fact is, it bores me only slightly less than handjobs, which bore me to tears. Given my main hobby- no, casual wanderer by, not what you think- this is almost a guaranteed disaster.

Almost. I don't write realistic. I write yaoi, where guys can get it up five times in an hour and don't you dare tell me they can't. I write yaoi which is buggery rulez OK. So my guys could well take the (very common in other eras) attitude that sodomy is all there is to m/m sex no problem and no lube either.

It's just- one likes variety. And the only variation to screwing is sucking. What to do? Komatta naa...

(Oh- rimming doesn't count as oral sex. A lot of oral sex doesn't count as oral sex. Cock-sucking counts as oral sex and it bores me.)

Sunday, April 6, 2003 

Bring back the lash
...for people who don't even touch their icy sidewalks. Fell on a swath of glare ice over snow, there since Friday, in front of house whose front path alone had been cleared. "I can get to my car OK. What's the problem?"

Tired and bummed-out and feeling unco-operative after three days of meds, refuse to do replacement shifts at daycare for co-ordinators. Spend eight hours there for $72? No I don't think so. I don't care if I get an hour's lunch and breaks. I can't *do* anything on my hour's lunch and breaks, so it's just a waste of my time. You earn your $20-plus an hour salary for a change, guys. I'm making less than half what you do and I'm tired of it.

Sunday, April 6, 2003 

To the Japan-domiciled
Our annual Idiocy of Spring has happened this weekend, and the time difference is now 13 hours. (I only think it idiotic in the spring, when you lose time. At least sunrise goes back to being at a decent hour for a little longer. I like the gift of an extra hour in fall. And hey, if it means light at 9:30 pm in June, I'll live with it. After the perpetual night of Tokyo, it's most welcome.)

My favourite treatment for bindertwine is a large pair of warm strong clever and patient male hands. These alas are hard to find and usually cost when you do. The hot bath, the hot packs, the HWB, the drugs, and the float will do too, but I'll try your exercises. I too shove into corners, crunch crunch crunch on the muscle knots, but it doesn't really help that much. Lying on golf balls is also recommended, and sometimes works. This is all chronic daycare occupational hazard, of course, and explains why daycare workers greet each other with what outsiders take to be simian-descended behaviour, by rubbing the other's shoulderblades. (One of our dads does this. He used to do paid shifts at the old centre and knows us all, and will sometimes grab my shoulders and give them the three minute jellying-special when he comes to pick his kid up. Kid is being co-parented, and if you want cultural bump in action, try explaining to your Azerbaijanic student why kid has two fathers and one mother, and even more difficult, how. 'Jeez, what's the technically correct term for 'turkey baster'?') 

So all deserts bleach then? I'd gotten used to those Beautiful America saturated shots of the mountains then, all blue blue sky and red red cliffs.

Saturday, April 5, 2003 

These fragments I have shored against my ruin
Can't think how K operates with migraine in her system always. Migraine in the system gives me vague carsickness of the soul. Not throwing up- psychically, I mean- but very not happy. The world looks like a Didion novel. Decades before I ever laid eyes on any part of California Joan Didion convinced me it was hell, just by the emptiness and nausea her books invoked in me. 'Too much light and no colour at all- looks how the world looks with a migraine.' Nor did I consciously think 'California' about Didion's world. Could as easily be TO in July. But when I saw LA, I knew. This is Didion land, and it's hell. Horror vacui. A crowd flowed over Wilshire Boulevard, so many/ I had not thought death had undone so many.

(Helen's mother is particularly scathing about Berkeley, so it's not just southern CA. But meanwhile baby Jane is where she ought to be, is making no moves to go elsewhere, and Gogo arrived on the last plane to get in Thursday night before they closed the airport. So all is well on that front.)

Spent chunks of the day with the ice chopper, the only one on the block evidently, keeping our sidewalk clear and rescuing various people trying to get down their icy front steps. It was warmer this morning and the ice chopped just fine, good igloo making weather had I been so inclined. It also lifts in nice chunks off the sidewalks, but bindertwine headaches do not conduce to excessive ice chopping. Came in and sat with hot rice bags (thanks again, L) and wrote desultory bits of Goukou being Goukou, arbitrarily changing the forms around gasp, and Goushou being Goushou, playing the unconscious power games sibs will play with each other. So not a wholly empty day.

Saturday, April 5, 2003 

(You and me both, L. Ice storms almost invariably involve pressure changes which almost invariably send people into premature labour. What I wanted to check was whether Gogo arrived from Minnesota late last night, as per schedule, in the middle of late last night's ice storm, but codeine-fried I forgot.)

The Great Ice Storm of '03
Appears to be happening out my window. 33 hours (sporadically) and still coming. Stores long since sold out of salt and gravel. Wires getting coated. Do not count on me being online tomorrow.

So have some dragons to be going on with. (Fire's Heart) Mata ne.

Friday, April 4, 2003 

Bad Moon Rising
Went to bed at 4 am Thursday morning, so had the binder twine muscle knot thing when I woke at 11. Jean says it's a result of sleeping too deeply to roll about, which is what I do when I go to bed late. Bicycled to work and, obviously, walked the thing home in the sleet and snow and freezing rain that had begun in the meantime. Actually a good thing I'd brought the bike, because I could put the road salt I bought going home on the carrier. Put it down on freezing ice and ativanned the binder twine. 

Y'day being my seventh anniversary I wrote that up in the other blog and then felt expectedly lousy at the memory. Do *not* care to be reminded what the world looked like in 1996, but there I was reminding myself. Coming back from Japan was the most traumatic thing that happened to me since my mother's death. Other things were empirically worse, like my father dying, and Richard, and some things *felt* almost as bad, like last spring, and some thngs *should* have been as bad but were actually rather a lark, like getting hit by that car in France. Coming back was the one that was hard to take and felt hard to take every bloody minute of it.

Being ativanned I fell asleep at 9. Wake at one, take out lenses, fill up hwb, go back to sleep, and wake with more bindertwine at 7. Filled up hwb again, heated up rice bags (I want a microwave for my room at this point), floated a little in weepy my-head-hurts mode till I started hearing dragons talk and fell asleep again to them doing it. Ripped from sleep at 10 by alarm clock, dressed, bundled, and out to shovel layers of ice and snow from the steps and walk. It came away like slices of cake, which is the only good thing about it. Then walked to work in sharp and sided sleet, head still hurting and vaguely nauseated by codeine and stuff in system.

So not a wonderful 42 hours, all things considered, unless I can remember what it was the dragons were saying before I fell back to sleep this morning. It was the thing that Gouen was wailing about, I do know that. (Did like somebody's dream in somebody's lj about people being turned into dragons as punishment for various peccadilloes though. Seems likely somehow.)

Thursday, April 3, 2003 

Late night thoughts
(More girl talk, basically. Any guys here, and sensitive females as well, may want to tune out.) I realize, writing my dragons, that there's a problem with the physical side of male sexuality. To be blunt about it, it gets silly fast. Maybe it's inherently silly. You have to get this flap of flesh stiff. You better hope it happens automatically because the means available- should I say 'at hand'?- to /make/ it happen are completely undignified. There's no way a guy can wank gracefully, and I bet guys know it. 

I've always been pained by the buffoonish streak in male sexual writing from about as far back as you care to go. One wants grace and dignity and instead one gets five-year-old jokes and brainless guffaws as if they were not just natural but unavoidable. (Nicknames for penises. The whole cock as weapon mindset. All of sexual vocabulary to begin with.) Well, maybe it is. You can pull the phallocentric Lawrencian cliches till the cows come home and maybe some dizzy adolescents will buy it, but having a bit of you sticking out at right angles is just dumb. The whole thing is so ridiculous, maybe all you can do is talk about your pecker or your willy and snigger. If you're accustomed to the decorousness of female arousal, the crudeness of the male version, even at its best, is embarrassing. Men have no sensitivity towards things sexual because they can't afford to have sensitivities, or else they'd be too embarrassed by their clownish bodies to function.

And alas, male physiology being male physiology even in mythic creatures, I cannot figure out a pleasing way for a non-turned on male dragon to turn himself on so he can complete his proper devoirs, and do it with the innate grace a woman can.

I'm glad K has been found, but where the hell is she?

My non-fan stuff? Ca n'existe pas. I wrote one non-fan story three and a half years ago and never have again, unless you count Goujun's brothers. Who look like Minekura's Goujun, except in colour. I assume the skin is a pale version of their predominant colour, to avoid the effect of garish Hindu deities- thus a light blue for Goukou and a dark grey for Gouen, though there's no reason why Gouen shouldn't be jet black to match Goujun's pure white. It's just that pure black with red eyes is more... Hindu than I feel I can handle. Goushou is a stubborn problem- how to have red skin that doesn't look like a sunburn, essentially, but that doesn't go to some pink shade either. Of course, the family features are imposing enough that they probably could get away with Pepsi blue and Coka-cola red and jet black skin, and the strangeness would be no stranger than Goujun's disquieting albino. (And yes, they do dress with elegant pragmatism. I have a minor fetish for garments with long tight wrists that cover part of the hand as well, and theirs do.)

And speaking of living tattoos, M, that illo...

Wednesday, April 2, 2003 

(Hey, it's the beginning of the month, a fact I'd not quite registered completely, as in, my garage renter surprised me by turning up to pay rent- 'huh? oh yeah, it's that time of the month.' What put me off was the fact that I'm *not* in a pissy mood this time. Which may have to do with the fact that March has 31 days, so *this* month I'm *not* PMSish on the first, as I would have been had it had 28 days.)

Girl talk- skip if not a girl
Having reached- passed, actually- the average age for menopause to start, I'm sort of waiting for uhh menopause to start. A little flexibility in my usual clockwork cycle is the only sign so far. The common wisdom that you'll be the same age as your mother is no help- how would I know when my *mother* started menopause? You think she'd tell me? And wrong, because my sister, four years younger than me, has been on replacement therapy for at least a year now. You know what I think does it. (That's not a rhetorical question, BTW; it's a statement.) You know what I think does it. Two or three times a day turning into a guy screwing another guy is what does it. A natural hormone boosting program.

Meanwhile, took the Weird Causes of Death test and found I'm doomed to be crushed by a falling piano. Not barbecued by a dragon or dead of West Nile. The latter reassures me after reading the article on last year's outbreak and the refusal of the gov't to spray for larva, which is the only thing that works to date.

So I don't like to be given too many visual details about anything---the setting, the characters, none of it. I feel like that's the author's attempt to superimpose her own loud mental movie over my soft-spoken storyteller, and my mind reads that as rude.
I suggest you not read my stories then. ^_^ I see my stories in widescreen and sensaround. I live my stories. I write to convey to others the sensations I have being my characters, or the things I see watching my characters. Descriptionless, which works for you, comes across as tapwater to me. Unsatisfying. Often makes me doubt that the writer knows what her characters are doing since she obviously isn't seeing them do it. If you're not giving me pictures to see you'd better have a rivetting story to tell or intriguing language for me to listen to. And come on: how many writers, amateur or pro, have either of those two? Immediacy is easier to do than plot, which requires invention, or language, which requires being an omnivorous reader as well as having an innate sense for sound.

(There was a slash writer who prided herself on being able to write sex scenes- for other people's stories because oooh gee they were too embarrassed to write them themselves- without ever visualizing the scene in question. She thought this a virtue. I thought it made for BTN situations and sex manual vocabulary, and I say without fear of contradiction that I was right. Of course, her readers wanted Joy of Gay Sex vocab because that kept the whole thing distanced and safe, but that's by the bye.) 

The only trouble I have is when a young writer doesn't know when description is unnecessary- that the thing she's trying to convey, which is all bright and new to her and hence important that she describe it exactly so that we may see it clearly too, is familiar to the point of cliche to the rest of us. You needn't describe the icy eyes, the cold curl of the proud lips, the contemptuous hauteur, the aristocratic disdain of the aristocratic flick of the delicate aristocratic fingers. We *know* you're doing third-gen Lord Byron vampire clone. The problem is that you don't.

Wailing. Yes indeed. Came up in the description of some manga action where tough guy goes up a flight of stairs to meet his mocking enemy and quote gets wailed on, conveying image of villain sobbing bitterly on his shoulder. Huh? said I. Tough guy goes up stairs and gets his butt beat. Yeah, came the answer, he gets wailed on. More properly, whaled, what I think of as 19th century American usage- You're going to get a good whaling, young whippersnapper- now making a slang comeback amongst people who apparently don't know it's slang. Now me, I do know that getting your butt beat is both slang and a metaphor, because tough guy in fact gets knocked down, not spanked. But of course I still use it, and confuse the second language speakers just as much.

Hence Goushou will get wailed on their definition, by his oldest brother, and Goukou will get wailed on my definition, by his youngest brother. The joys of writing a story as a character and not as an author is that you and your chara discover why people do things a long long time after they do them, so it comes as a revelation to both of you. In this case- something I might have figured out consciously for myself but didn't- Father's untimely and hideously shocking death was only three months ago, and now the children have recovered from the shock enough for the fallout to happen. It's happening. Is why I have a story. 

'They're rioting in Africa' I knew from Beatrice Lillie, who I think did it before the Kingston Trio. If you say it's Minuet in G I believe you. Was pretty sure it wasn't Merry Widow, whatever. (And discovers that the guy who wrote it also co-wrote Fiddler on the Roof.)

Briefly before Helening, I must quote TTG:
First off, why are we fighting with Iraq when it’s BELGIUM that has all the GOOD chocolate?????

Not to mention the real French fries. 

(Well *I'm* glad K has been found. Cappies worry too.)

Tuesday, April 1, 2003 

As has been said on a certain webpage, my Goushou (in the never-ending bath story which stopped being in the bath eight pages ago) is going to get wailed on. Had that particular typo not cropped up I'd have had some nice vanilla scene instead. But now, like, I haveta.

The sidebar on K's blog's changed, suggesting an update. More server woes?

Didn't finish the story in question- style too painful- and I know what you mean. But there's another problem when a stereotype is as entrenched as the ones you mention-- stereotypes often have a nodding relationship with reality. Big black bucks are in the same category of cliche as short slender Orientals. One tries to avoid the most obvious tropes, but there remains the fact that most black guys (at least the ones I know) are considerably larger-framed than most white guys, while most Chinese guys are indeed shorter and finer-boned than either, and that both these register as virtues with us the female writers. Now I understand there are very tall northern Chinese as there are indeed a lot of (young) hulking Koreans, though I only know the first fact in an abstract way (I know few northern Chinese) and the latter fact because I live in Koreaville. What I *know* about the Chinese, which is what's in Chinatown, can look me, now barely scraping 5'9, in the eye, and the men's clothing size L made in China is a NAmerican M if that. 

This leaves the writer in a quandary if she wants to write PSoH's Count D as the willowy sort he looks. Can't give her character the characteristics most usual to his group because it's stereotyped. Can't make him atypical because it's clearly writing against stereotype. Leave physical description out entirely and thus reduce the sensuality of the work? It's a problem.

I can give you a parallel case, from a bias that's not as reflexive to the culture as racism, but which still makes difficulties for the writer. Writing a gay character and giving him/ her an encounter with the opposite sex. It happens all the time to real gay people but goes down badly with the gay community in general when it's inside a story. You can have been straight before you saw the gay light, but once having done that there must be no backsliding. Otherwise you're selling out to the het mainstream and implying that gayness is somehow not an innate natural instinct sanctioned by Goddess but something you can *gasp* disregard at will. Which is heresy and treason both.

As with stereotypes about women and blondes and Jews and anyone else you care to name, one wishes the general society would just bloody forget the stereotype ever existed. Then if you write a big sexual guy, you're just writing a guy who happens to be big and muscular with a swelling torso and an easy panther-like grace, and maybe he's black or maybe he's Chinese or maybe, like the last swelling torso I wrote, he's youkai. I don't want to have to write my stories with reference to what someone might be thinking in the backwoods of Oregon or the trailer parks of Arkansas. I want to write my reality- or indeed, my fantasy- without reference to the larger culture. Beautiful dreamer, as my mother would have said. Yes, I know.

(If I were going to write a black character, how would I write him, then? I think, as if he were one of those raceless characters from anime. The way I get to write m/m without having to deal with 'gayness.' The only way to be free of references to the mainstream culture is to remove yourself from it entirely. This of course means you can't write here and now at all, but then I don't.)
 
Monday, March 31, 2003 
(later)
Greer on TV shows: what she said. Engages without being engaging. Precisely. (And *I* understand about the cherries, and rejoice that they are well.)

Ray Bradbury is not a great writer, and I strongly suspect possibly not even a good one, but he's a marvellous writer to have encountered at fourteen. Alas, N, you are no longer fourteen, and I don't know if the resonances of his (inflated over-written) imagery will speak to you as they did to me. Same goes for Michael Moorcock by the way. The one innocence I regret losing is my reader's one. Things are same old same old now, not wow amazing! Though I may call myself lucky to have started all over again in my 40's with manga and done the O brave new world thing there, decades after it had stopped happening in English.

If people in the US are not dying of lung collapse, good. People here are. Four deaths is hardly a pandemic, but it's worrisome enough to put me into a fatalistic mindset and to remind my coworkers that, as Shakespeare said, we owe God a death. And L, speaking of pandemics- this thing called West Nile virus. Spread by mosquitoes. Perhaps hasn't reached the west coast yet, but I'd suggest insect repellant.

I believe parents are being encouraged to do volunteer shifts so we don't have to hire, but somehow in the renewal of our licence our grandfather clause that said a parent equals a staff member got thrown out and replaced with the standard co-op rule that a parent equals only half a staff member, so you need two of them to make up one replacement worker. This in spite of the fact that by provincial standards almost all our replacements and some of the actual staff are unqualified. Are raising three kids quite successfully and have worked here for 15 years, but never got the piece of paper. Suits, she says, and spits.

Meanwhile, in an access of end of the monthlies, I finished 4 and 5 down there, more or less. They're part of the A/U Gaiden thingy and thus not terribly dear to my heart, which is why I was able to finish them no doubt. 4 got posted to the ML and 5 needs to sit and breathe a bit, if only because it doesn't happen until after an awful lot of other things have happened, and I am not the one writing the awful lot of other things. But mostly because even stories not close to my heart benefit from sitting around and being looked at much later and tweaked. And *not* being thrown half-baked at one's admiring public in order to garner egoboo.

(earlier)
Es schneit, she says happily from her grade 10 German class.

Actually es schneit pretty damned heavily. Doesn't seem to be accumulating though. Uhh no cancel that. I shall walk to work today in my happy salt-stained Romikas. It is end of March in TO (advertising campaign: "It's been snowing in Toronto for the last 750,000 years. Get used to it") and the universe continues to unfold as it should.

Sunday, March 30, 2003 

Yes, yes, Helen's Dad mentioned about N Ontario getting three feet of snow yesterday, and I *did* read the blog about it being 30F and snowing in DC today, but here the sun was shining happily all day and round about 4 I went out to pay my property taxes at the banking machine in golden Novemberish sun. And yes I was wearing my fleecy and my winter coat and my hothead and my winter gloves and my heavy pants-- in short, I was dressed as for the deep midwinter and the icy winds do blow. And I forking FROZE. Mama it's *cold* out there.

Various
It's being creamy March today, finally for a change. I like the March days that look like November but we haven't had many of them this time. The first two weeks were winter. Then we had sudden spring. When I put the garbage out on March 19 I was confused by the sudden amount of space available- flat lawn and broad sidewalk- because when I put the garbage out on March 12 there were icy two foot high snowbanks bordering the sidewalk and front walk on which I precariously placed the garbage bags, and when I put the garbage and recyclables out on March 5 I had to hack spaces in the three foot high banks to fit them in, because otherwise they'd have made the sidewalk impassable. 

It's been spring since, the wet humid thing that follows snowy winters. But now the snow's gone and when it's cool the streets are clear and dry. The buds are still minimal and the silver light is November's and I have my last surge of dry-season energy until fall comes back again. Meaning I hacked out paragraphs of the Nii story last night and began the last of Wild Adapter 1 this morning.

Oh, Bradbury's The Illustrated Man! My god, I'd forgotten that one entirely. Seems to me, N, you could write something exactly the same as a music-vid based story. Though I suppose vid-based stories are considered to be about the artist who does the vid, though just how sort of beats me, in the ones I've seen at least. What your description of the commercial reminds me of is the state of being a writer, or a fanwriter at least. (OK. Writer. I'm losing my amateur status slowly but surely.) Carrying all these strange creatures about your person- Chinese dragons, yes, naturally, what's odd about that?- and having them come out and talk to you when you're alone.

AFAIK Romikas are only boots. Lightweight nylon-somethings, another plus. I had leather boots and they weighed a ton. If they made lightweight nylon walking shoes I'd be very very happy, but I don't think they do.

Oh, and an era ended Friday. The last parent shift. After 30-some years we no longer have parents working on the floor as part of the ratio, meaning that The Suits have won. They never thought parents were qualified to look after kids and we had to yell at them just to keep our mandate, which was that they are indeed. If The Suits had their way doubtless parents wouldn't be allowed to look after their own kids. And half of me thinks Not a bad idea necessarily, and the other half thinks Creeping institutionalization. 

What our daycare did actually was give people back the extended family and community most of them don't have these days. You come in with a kid who's refusing to eat, convinced he's going to starve to death, and someone else with two kids of their own says Oh yeah they do that. Don't worry. No kid ever starved himself to death. You find out that nobody's kid sleeps through the night at three months, never mind what the books say. (One in fifty. One in a hundred. Mostly you hear "We tried ferberizing her and she screamed for three hours for two nights running and I couldn't take it.") Our specialty has always been unfraughting the fraught. New parents aren't getting their advice from experts with no kids of their own. They're getting it from other parents, including the staff, because unlike most daycares the majority of the staff have kids. Makes scheduling holidays a bitch, but helps the ambience wonderfully. And a third of the staff is male, unlike any other daycare in existence. Also helps the ambience wonderfully.

And now we have eight hour days and have to hire extra casual help and the fees have gone up. The parents wanted the shifts gone, because yes, this isn't the 60's and employers won't give you three hours off to go and play with your kid; and the university wanted them gone because the university hates everything we stand for and made it a condition of giving us our space. (I'm not being paranoid. Our liaison at the uni has been the same person for going on 25 years now, and recent parents who've met with her over negotiations have asked later What's *wrong* with her? She hates us. We forced a settlement with her outfit in 1980 and she resents it.) 

But it's going to change everything.

Sunday, March 30, 2003 

Helen's baby sister will be called Jane, which pleases me. Jane has always struck me as a very classy name, unlike Mary and Anne, which have no associations, or Sara and Jessica which my generation overused so badly they had to be retired. There are not enough Janes in the world, and all the ones I know are cool.

Grandmother arrives Thursday. We all hope baby does not choose to be born before then, especially since a little reflection prompted me to suggest that if she is they might prefer me to move in for a day or two and take Helen to her appointments rather than follow Game Plan 1, which was to park her at Chloe's. This was fine before Chloe's mom got the job which takes her out of the house at 6 am, leaving Dad to get two obstreperous little girls dressed, breakfasted and to daycare by himself. Make that three obstreperous little girls- going to two different daycares, for overweight- and it ceases to be feasible, let alone advisable. Even I would hesitate before taking it on. 

Saturday, March 29, 2003 

Dilemma
We had a very wintry winter and I loved it, which is odd. Usually the snowy ones make me long for spring, or at least a thaw that lets me get back on the bicycle. But I got a new pair of boots last year (and didn't have to wear them much last year because 01-02 was mild.) I was annoyed at the time. I'd wanted pull-on boots and these were laceups, always a hideous nuisance, but they were the only Romikas available, and Romikas it transpires are the only boots that I can walk in. I say this having shelled out hundreds for two other pairs, one of which I couldn't even get into, so badly did my feet degenerate between the September buying and the December wearing. It's not that my feet don't hurt in slip-on Romikas. But they hurt less.

And in the laceups they don't hurt at all. I could walk miles and did. I could walk over ice and did. The occasional bunion rub. But no cramping, no dull ache in the tendons, such as I get even in Berks. Laceups is what does it.

Which means I need a pair of hightop laceup somethings and I can't think what. Doc Martens are way too laceup for someone who has to take her shoes on and off several times a day. The neat little boots they make for women won't accommodate the other structural problems of my very problematic feet. I wonder if hightop running shoes would do? I hate running shoes for their sheer clunkiness, but hey, if I can walk...

Saturday, March 29, 2003 

Under attack
I watch TV when I'm depressed. No, make that past tense. Now I play free cell. Before when I had cable and could get the weather channel or the Chinese channels I'd sit and watch them because they at least had some inherent interest, especially the Chinese channels. Now sometimes I watch the French station for the same reason- foreign language, can I hear what they're saying? But I can't do it for long. Too many other things to do.

I hate the voices on TV. I hate their loudness and their rough edges and the inanity of what they're saying and their bloody intrusiveness. I hate the BGM and the commercials. It's noise, and I can't keep it out. Every TV show is Jerry Springer to me and it all gives me a horror vacui. (Terror of nothingness- the vertigo and panic you get at contemplating the nothingness of nothing.) The only time I ever had the TV on for any length of time was in Japan, and I did it for ear-training and because a foreign language doesn't intrude like English does. But there's nothing you can do when watching TV, which is why I only watch it when I'm depressed. Everything else I spend my time doing at home- which is reading and writing- requires me to concentrate on the language, and I can't do that if some loud voice is speaking right across the room from me. That's why I don't watch much anime. There's nothing I can do but watch anime.

Yes I'm sensitive to noise, especially ugly noise- sitcom actors, laugh tracks, loud bass lines. Yes I prefer silence, or rather, the silence of a city which is a pleasant distanced white noise. The trains rumbling three blocks up. Cars passing. That undefinable hum from nowhere at all. It's all background and it soothes. Anything closer intrudes. I can read manga happily in a packed Second Cup but not with a CBC animal documentary happening. It stops me from hearing the voices in my head, and whose voices do I most want to hear- my dragons talking or Jerry Seinfeldt and his pals?

Yes I am the last of a dying generation. I am dying of everyone else's noise.

Friday, March 28, 2003 

Bloggery
M- Pitas only updates when something goes wrong so that part doesn't worry me. The vanishing logos though...

And I choose to differ with your writer. Someone who likes to eat is a gourmand. Someone who likes to eat well is a gourmet. And an epicure is someone who likes to live well, with refined tastes in food and literature and how one passes one's time. Even if you confine it to food, an epicure is not interested in just eating, but in eating properly. (Classic Epicureanism was all about moderation FWIW.) The Chinese are epicures because they pay attention to balancing tastes and seasonings and (noncalorific) heat. They have a philosophy of food. Which, yes, puts them one up on just about everyone in the world, the French of course excepted. Indeed, to the extent that the Chinese system as I understand it is more thoroughgoing, I think they trump the French. The French were very successful at turning the sow's ear of peasant cooking into the silk purse of haute cuisine, but it's still a sow's ear au fond. There's no overarching system to the thing, just 'put a butter sauce on it.'

N's blog about Aesthe bashers: ahh- what she said. Even two year olds are pushing it a bit in the forgivable department. To quote a long-time coworker: "I expect a kid to have developed a sense of humour by the time she's two." The bashers haven't, even twenty years later. The rigid judgmentalism and hysterical self-righteousness of the very young. Five year olds, actually.

Also: there are people- Thai, Portugese, Sri Lankan, southern Indian and obviously southern black- who think hot is a taste. This is incorrect. Hot is a sensation that interferes with taste, being as how it cauterizes the taste buds in the tongue so that nothing registers.

And I very much like your-version-of-my-dragons game. Would like it even better if it was a BL one where you got points for completing all 64 forms with appropriate partners. (This involves thinking up 64 forms capable of use in various variations. If I'm ever trapped on a plane for 12 hours sometime I shall do that very thing. Woken by an out of season thunderstorm this morning, I did in fact come up with the four- I believe- disciplinary forms of which Split Peach is the third highest.)

In fact there's a RPG in French, which may get translated into English- or rather, translated officially, because Incandescens has done great chunks of it- in which you get to be a dragon in a version of our world where various dragons and their extended families of children and grandchildren run mafia like outfits with a view to extracting psychic energy from the earth. And propagating as well. It's a grand House of Atreus-type settei of generational betrayal and what-all, and contains among its characters Wyverns that have ten heads. Ask a Wyvern a question and you'll get vague and contradictory answers from all the heads, or if one head gives you a definite answer another head will immediately dispute the first head's facts, and all the other heads will get into the argument so that in the end you never know what to believe. Wyverns are not supposed to be playable characters, but people insist on being wyverns anyway, to the dismay of the Game Masters. One quite sees why. *I*'d like to play a wyvern, even though they stink of carrion because all they can eat is dead flesh.

Friday, March 28, 2003 

K- go-kurou-sama. Your mail is bouncing BTW so I'll say it here. Thanks for trying, and mangaka *will* have these little physical crises at the worst times. She probably finally registered that she has to kill four of her characters and do awful things to the fifth. Might bring on a crisis in anyone. Hell OTOH is being at the mercy of other people's music. Or anyone's music. Great fan of silence, me.

L- au contraire. Providing links so others can read only gets people's blood pressure up to no purpose. I've been avoiding the one in N's blog as if it were strychnine-laced LSD. Guaranteed bad trip if I want it. And the people named in both blogs are happy to both link /and/ name /and/ scream abuse like a Tourette's sufferer, with serene disregard for any consequences. The measure of their dementia is that they're surprised when there are consequences, and the objects of their venom spit venom back. The usual bully mentality- I beat on you because you won't retaliate and if you do retaliate I have been betrayed by the universe.

Thursday, March 27, 2003 

(Of course, Mt.Sinai's Second Cup still has St. Paddy's day cookies of the old wonderful sinful variety. Sasuga Mt. Sinai, the best hospital in TO. I forgive it for the strange absence of ham sandwiches in the French cafe franchise they also have there. No seriously- last time I stood wondering for almost five minutes where the ham sandwiches were, because La Baguette always has ham sandwiches, only not in Jewish hospitals.)

M, it means only that you are not a reflex writer, which you already knew. When I have nothing else to do, I write, or at least think about stories that I might write. You don't. It's N who puzzles me. How can anyone miss cable TV? A reminder that there are 85 channels out there and nothing I want to watch on any of them.

Was meaning to say that I do like Freakjoy's painter story. It has that sense of mysteriousness and transcendance thats almost impossible to do in words, or to do well, and that usually gets done in works that have been Translated from the Something .

(earlier)
Had Molly not been yowling around my front porch I would not have let her in next door, and gone to check that she had catfood, and seen the newspaper on the kitchen table about the quarantine in effect over SARS, and so would have been seriously taken aback when I arrived at Mt.Sinai Hspital by the line-ups at the doors and the people with clipboards asking had I recently been in Hong Kong and did I currently have a fever and leaving my name and phone number so they could call me should Mt.Sinai too have an outbreak like Scarborough Grace and getting a facemask to wear up to otolaryngology. As it was the experience was merely interesting, and the lump in my neck not even a sebaceous cyst but some minor hysteria on the part of one of the many little conduits in that part of the world. 'You could have it out but it's only the size of a grain of rice and it means an incision and why bother?' Since I waited three months plus 90 minutes to see the specialist alone, and since I've waited for surgery at Mt.Sinai before (and had it cancelled) why bother indeed? The earliest opening they have would probably be around my 60th birthday.

Thursday, March 27, 2003 

I always wanted to be a lexicographer but I didn't have the Latin
I could link this but I'll quote instead:

The first name for Duct Tape was DUCK. During World War II the U.S. Military needed a waterproof tape to keep the moisture out of ammunition cases. So, they enlisted the Johnson and Johnson Permacel Division to manufacture the tape. Because it was waterproof, everyone referred to it as "duck" tape (like water off a duck's back). (J note: Those were the days, my friend.) Military personnel discovered that the tape was good for lots more than keeping out water. They used it for Jeep repair, fixing stuff on their guns, strapping equipment to their clothing... the list is endless.
After the War, the housing industry was booming and someone discovered that the tape was great for joining the heating and air conditioning duct work. So the color was changed from army green to the silvery color we are familiar with today and people started to refer to it as "duct tape". Therefore, either name is appropriate. 

I like knowing things like that.

Meanwhile in my little corner of the universe, the bad news is that Second Cup's Easter cookies this year are revolting. Hard and dry and not flavourful at all. The good news is that Second Cup's Easter cookies this year are revolting, because I was resigning myself to going without lattes until Easter lest I be tempted to eat them. 

Wednesday, March 26, 2003 

(She adds, pathetically, that her greatest hope is to have a job someday, or rather work some day, that pays her $30,000 a year. That's in our bucks; 20,000 of yours. A professional salary is beyond my dreams. Besides, with our tax system, if I made 50,000 a year I'd see a little over 32 of it. So why bother?)

Trompe l'oeil
Have this (Young Goukou), those of you who haven't read it yet. If I just cut it off arbitrarily it almost feels like I've finished something. A relief if nothing else. (I suppose there's no real alternative to Arial, she says sadly. Kind of the default typeface.)

Wednesday, March 26, 2003 

Sad Steps
(Poem by Phillip Larkin. Best night scene description I know of. 'Four o'clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie/ Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.') 'Wind-picked'- yeah.

The translation steams ahead, aided immeasurably by the fact that we are now, thirty pages from the end of the book, actually dealing with Arslan. There is nothing like writing about your hero to give interest to your novel, yes. Helps too when plot things are happening, not set battle pieces. OTOH I now remember the downside of this. It leaches interest from everything else. I don't mean that the story itself is so fascinating that neither email or my own stuff can hold a candle to it. I mean that the act of translating- or of translating this- has a flattening effect on the psyche, like a lowgrade depression. One doesn't want to do much of anything afterwards. 

In the best and rarest of all possible worlds translating inspires. Equally, the best writing energizes me for translation. I work a bit on whatever story it is and feel that blissful sense of- well, the universe unfolding as it should, really. In touch with the basics and everything where it ought to be. But it's not always that way. Often- though rarely as badly as the current stall- it's the fiddly churn-out routine, that has no satisfaction associated with it but the fact that there is at least another paragraph done, and maybe eventually we'll make our way out of this forest to some open ground.

I feel harried, I think is what I feel. Am tempted to blame spring, as ever. All these things to do and never enough time to do them. Usually the sign of having too much time and not too little.

You do get over the grass is greener thing, but only when you accept finally that you aren't ever going to have the things you want and must make do with the things you have. I'm not advocating this attitude, by the way. The world is a greyer place when you know the possibilities are limited. What makes it even greyer is the other realization that even if you had what you want it wouldn't be enough. Three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things that say not, "It is enough" with the human heart at the top of the list. All this is called realism and maturity in many places; called equally 'sad', and often in the same places. To think that two and two make four/ and neither five nor three... It happens to most people eventually, but with any luck it won't happen to you for another quarter century.

(The Larkin poem is here but (airily) you're probably not old enough to understand it.)

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

(Asked my friend Randi once how she felt about all this, and she said 'Oh, Louis Armstrong, you know.' 'Hunh?' 'I hear babies cry, I watch them grow, they'll learn much more than I'll ever know. And I say to myself, what a wonderful world.' There's a scene in an Ozu film that says the same thing, but Armstrong is more accessible to a westerner and rather more cheering.) 

Tuesday, March 25, 2003 

(contemplates het lifestyles) 'I married a man who was scarier than my father, and after that daddy was a piece of cake.' I don't say I haven't done similar. Toulouse petrified me at 25, but after I'd had to function in Paris, Toulouse was a piece of cake. You note however that I don't actually *live* in those cities now. What happened to the 'and be on my side forever and ever' part? 

Yesterday Incandescens got on a train at Waterloo Station and got off three hours later at the Gare du Nord in Paris. Just like that. Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, say that health and wealth have missed me, say I'm growing old, but add- You can now take a train from London to Paris. Isn't that awesome? (happily) It's like something Moorcock would have dreamed up in the 70's, only it's true.

Tempted by the spring weather, Helen and I went out to the Museum where we looked at the Dior dresses. Otherwise very sad- they're closing the shops, the Chinese galleries- my favourite- have been emptied, everything is at 6's and 7's, because they're going to build an extension on the side. Extension is much needed and is unbelievably ugly. Ugly ugly. Hideously ugly. I can't describe it. It looks like this. The thing like a collapsing parachute or falling blocks coming out the back? That's what the new addition will look like. Scuse me, Mr. bin Laden, could you send a few terrorists to attack a godless public building in Canada?

I am stuck deciding which form Goukou uses with Goushou. There are worse ways to be stuck, I suppose, than deciding how two characters will have sex. Half awake I (naturally) want to go with the over-the-top borderline unpleasant one. This allows Goushou to get prettily and appropriately teary in the right places. I have my yaoi reflexes down pat: torture the uke. Awake I think But the psychology doesn't support it. Ever notice how awake is no fun at all? Had I the courage of my yaoi convictions I'd do it anyway.

K- I have never heard of toilets breaking, anywhere, any country. Cheap imported stuff. Tell you, Japan is on the skids.

FTR and to salvage something of my reputation, finished a chapter of vol 7 yesterday and started another.

Monday, March 24, 2003 

The Wall
Just so y'all can see what my day is really like, instead of the breath-taking glimpses into creative frenzy and mad social whirl I normally give you, behold me, at 7 pm, not translating. I have been not translating in various ways for eight hours, and have run out of ways to do it. I could spend the next five hours playing free cell or writing perhaps a paragraph of this3, and probably will.

(If any of the stories were even remotely finishable it would give me inspiration. But they aren't. They write in real time. They're like walking through deep sand. One step and one step and one step and never any farther forewards, and knowing you'll be doing one step and one step and one step for nearly as long as the future lasts because we're in the desert and the desert goes on a long way. They are, in fact, exactly the same as translating. There is no end to it.)

But on a happier note, intending to watch five minutes of TV with my dinner last night I came into halfway through Shall We Dance on our eddykational station and watched to the end, for the Tokyo landscapes and the Japanese faces and the lovely voices of the leads.

Monday, March 24, 2003 

Late breaking news
Have devirginized Goukou. 
(beat)
My accomplishment for the day.
(beat)
I hate being a miniaturist.
(What's with the Pitas logo btw?)

Sunday, March 23, 2003 

(Meant to say- peonies. Peonies. Oi vey. A classic 'East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet' moment. All Chinese love peonies which by me are big fat evil-smelling flowers that can't stand up by themselves and are covered in bugs. If ever a garden flower (not a weed) struck me as unclean, it's the peony. You could have cosmos, which is a cheerful and invasive flower, or nicotinea which is intoxicating, or petunias even- overdone, I know, but the smell is entrancing. But peonies-- even worse than geraniums, that other ratty smelly flower.) (Or you could have gardenias or daphne bushes (ohh...) or anything like that...)

The mills of God are not the only things that grind exceeding fine
Unlike this2, this3 can *only* be written in the morning. It's a waking-up story that comes to me like the last bit of dream as you surface. It's all there, down to the dialogue- especially the dialogue- as I lie warm in bed. But the minute my eyes are open, the minute I'm vertical, the minute I'm left-brain again, it's gone. I may hope that the vision I have of it is only the false suggestiveness of half-waking, because the other day I swear I heard one of my dragons utter the perfect translation for one of the words I can never translate, and once awake couldn't remember either the Japanese word or its English translation.

So I grind it out, tiny bit by tiny bit, little remembered flashes and awake 'things that will work' even if they're not perfect. It's the first time I've ever had a story remain so stubbornly in one hemisphere that doesn't even try to talk to the other. (Not true. I've had more than one left brain story that got written with no inspiration at all. But the other way round...) I may hope it doesn't happen again soon. A good workmanlike story with a logical development and daylight psychology is what I need now to counter all this dreamy ineffable moonlight froth.

(Head stories are different. Head stories you're usually awake for, no matter where the content originates. Head stories can at least be taken out and looked at in the light- will translate into left brain rationality, however wincingly, and can then have the worst elements removed so they don't embarrass. This story vanishes in daylight like a ghost. And it's *still* only Goukou having a bath.)

(later)
She takes counsel of herself
The woman is a pea-brained morally imbecilic ninny, but you knew that already. Is there need for surprise? No. Is there need for censure? It will accomplish nothing. Is there need to Bear Witness? It's been done. The Dao is the Dao. What is, is, and what is is cause for rejoicing. Let me rejoice in the sight of this pea-brained ninny being so perfectly a pea-brained ninny. The universe continues to unfold as it should, and I have more pressing things to think about, like the sudden unexpected streak of Confucian conservatism that has surfaced so opportunely but unwontedly in my erstwhile hysterical sentimental fire dragon. *Could* Goushou be this politically and psychologically savvy? Well, why not. He may be PMSish much of the time, but he's sensitive to nuances and not stupid. He may know something about Goukou that Goukou (and I) don't.

(earlier)
(Yet sometimes quite emotive, L.) Just in case I feel too stodgy as a sonnet

I am the sonnet, never quickly thrilled;
Not prone to overstated gushing praise
Nor yet to seething rants and anger, filled
With overstretched opinions to rephrase;
But on the other hand, not fond of fools,
And thus, not fond of people, on the whole;
And holding to the sound and useful rules, 
Not those that seek unjustified control.
I'm balanced, measured, sensible (at least,
I think I am, and usually I'm right);
And when more ostentatious types have ceased,
I'm still around, and doing, still, alright.
In short, I'm calm and rational and stable -
Or, well, I am, as much as I am able.

or heroic couplets

I am heroic couplets; most precise
And fond of order. Planned and structured. Nice.
I know, of course, just what I want; I know,
As well, what I will do to make it so.
This doesn't mean that I attempt to shun
Excitement, entertainment, pleasure, fun;
But they must keep their place, like all the rest;
They might be good, but ordered life is best.

adding one alternative answer makes me a tanka. More like it.

I am the tanka.
The attention of others
Is unnerving, and
Since I try not to draw it,
I'm left alone. Which is good.

Us Cappies have a limited range of options. But interesting, isn't it, that we're all something different? And interesting too how very much those poems match myself, at least.

Saturday, March 22, 2003 

Oh, this. What Poetry Form Are You? I am a sonnet. If I were not a sonnet I would be heroic couplets. I mean naturally. Of course.

N, I too was in New York's Chinatown. The skank is indeed just that Lower Manhattan ambience. Our Chinatown- let us say, the Chinatown you were in, because we have four or five of them, I can never remember which- I'm told feels like Hong Kong. Not sure about that, but maybe. It's certainly where half of it comes from, members of the Commonwealth and ties of Empah don't you know. We all used to belong to the Brits.

The mills of God grind slowly...
I've seen people lose their jobs and/or denied jobs because of their behavior in internet 'public'... 

L, you have restored my faith in the justice of the universe. Thank you. 

Nothing quite like abusing some faceless someone roundly on the internet, graduating, and then discovering your flamee is the person you're interviewing with. (And yes, it has really happened before. As I understand it in at least one case, the interview was polite and brief.)

(Ahh, yes- welcome to our little group, Major Fan Writer. We hope you will submit a *lot*.) 

Friday, March 21, 2003 

Toronto the Clean
There's gum on the sidewalks. Not much gum, but enough to annoy. We have hookers. They're in the hooker district. We have gay hookers. They're in the gay hooker district. We do not have bums; we have homeless. They sell papers on street corners. There are no homeless in my section of Bloor St, just the guy with the beautiful voice who walks around Markham St. talking nonstop to himself. The homeless start on the other side of Bathurst and are rather upscale as homeless go, because it's an upscale neighbourhood. Downtown the homeless are lower scale. There are garbage receptacles at every corner and sometimes in between, which we find a disincentive to litter. Peter Ustinov called Toronto "New York run by the Swiss." Non-Torontonians thought that was a compliment. Torontonians knew better.

I was red, very red, when you saw me. That was unintentional, caused by leaving the dye on ten minutes too long. I am actually grey, very grey. 

The person in question is a much-revered Big Name Fan Writer and a moderate, yes, as these things go. She writes like a BNFW- nothing wrong, nothing terribly right. She has long had aspirations to original fic. You may unseam her to the chaps if she deserves it and I shall watch with interest. She probably hasn't a clue that you are you, by the way.

Friday, March 21, 2003 

(later)
(You see, this is what it is. N and I theoretically speak the same language, but she has the greatest difficulty understanding what I say.) Chester is full of white blonds. Or was fifteen years ago. Nothing but white blonds, though I did see one single Pakistani woman in the course of my four hour walkabout. That was what freaked my Torontonian sensibilities. A world where everyone is white and blond is all wrong. Where are all the /people/? You know, the ones with the straight black hair and epicanthic eyelids. Or at least the ones with the wavy dark hair and the brownish skin. Don't these guys know that white blonds are a minority?

Kobe is OK I suppose, but there's nicer ends of the country. One should see Kyoto, except that in the decent season everyone else is seeing Kyoto too. The area called San'in (mountain shadow), down at the bottom of the main island in Yamaguchi-ken IIRC, is supposed to be lovely and always looks it in the travel posters. 

(earlier)
L- fair enough. I'm betraying my own cultural narrowness here, because the notion of being the only Asian or black in town-- or Tamil or Iranian or you-name-it-- hurts a Torontonian's head. I counter you-in-Taiwan with me-in-England. I went to visit my friend in northern England in the late 80's and spent the afternoon wandering alone around Chester. After a while I began to feel unplaceably but distinctly uneasy. Eventually realized the cause: everyone I saw was white, and not only white but for the most part blond. I felt like I was in an alien world. I came back to the cathedral and found a tour bus of Japanese just disembarking. Wave of relief. Oh thank god. *People.* Which was the first indication I had that somehow between my youth and my adulthood I'd picked up the notion that 'people' were by definition Asian, and everything else was just a variation. Turned out to be a useful mindset to go to Japan with. The place /looked/ normal at least, whatever it felt like.

Thursday, March 20, 2003 

It's a useful parallel, the visible minority one. The commonplace in my day was that Japan was about the only place in the world where a white person could get even an approximation of what it was like to be black. People don't want to serve you, rent to you or hire you, and no-one thinks there's anything wrong with that. It's still not quite the essence of the thing. Neither K nor I- nor N nor L, even- are visible minorities in Japan. (L is not even visible of course except to the fashion attuned. You can always tell Asian-American tourists from Japanese natives by how they dress.) What we are is Not Japanese. Being a member of a visible minority doesn't make you less a part of the greater society. Second-class citizen, quite possibly, but you're still part of your group and your group is still an identifiable and intrinsic part of the whole. If any one visible minority vanished from the USA tomorrow, America would no longer be America. If all gaijin vanished from Japan, Japan would be largely unchanged. What we are is Not Them, in a binary configuration. You can be Them or you can be Not Them. We are Not. So is the occasional Japanese too, FWIW.

It isn't the homogeneous structure of Japan that does it, per se. Korea is pretty homogeneous too, and has no trouble talking to foreigners intelligently. It's the mindset that historically hasn't had to deal with the foreign, has no cultural type of how to deal with the foreign, never much wanted to deal with the foreign, and simply doesn't know *how* to deal with the foreign except in certain set ways. It's a bit like the Brits, in fact, only the Brits are culturally close enough to us that their ways of excluding you don't register. Until they do, and then it's like being stabbed by your grandmother.

That said, your experience in the elevator was a lot like mine in Japan, finding the person who spoke my language. Like water in the desert. Only they weren't other gaijin- I knew a lot of those, and they were all mad to one degree or another. The Japanese were a piece of cake by comparison. It was fellow-Canadians and they occasional Australian. They were the only people who ever knew what I was talking about. 

Thursday, March 20, 2003 

Oooh, K-chan, will you *hurt* me? (And Echo answers, you know it, lady.) I know it's eye of the beholder but it's my eye that beholds. I say it's pedestrian and I say the hell with it. To be bored by your own fics is bitter indeed.

Now as I understood it, the two things you could always stay at home with without reproach were cramps- some offices give you seirikyuuka- and fevers. Mary used to be very bitter because she's like me, never ever has a temperature, and so could never take time off. Had to come in with puking migraines and no-one batted an eye, though God knows I wouldn't want anyone round me who was throwing up given how infectious the activity is even if you're well. Meanwhile people stayed off with 38 degree fevers.

Yes, not the least advantage of the process which is living in Japan, the one that deconstructs the person you were and reconstructs it to suit its own requirements, is the way you are politely or not so politely informed that your divine autonomy has been suspended for the duration. You will not decide what kind of person you are. We will. It's much much worse for people who actually work for the Japanese and not merely with them. One reason so many gaijin teach, in fact, is that it puts you in a position of authority with respect to them, so they'll be thinking of you as sensei and not imposing their ideas on you quite as much. (People who teach don't know that's why they teach, of course; but they probably couldn't do any other kind of work there. I couldn't, for sure.) Stubborn western souls go on trying to be the sole definer of their selves, and slip into insanity or all-gaijin communities as the case may be. (Or found their own companies. There's that.) Consider the taking-apart process to be the equivalent of psychic rolfing. Hurts like hell, but gives you more flexibility than you had.

And L, it's not necessarily a universal in being a foreigner. Or it happens to more or less greater degrees and you feel it to a more or less greater extent. Europe's much better at handling the foreigner than Japan, just as New York is better at it than Selma. There are more of them and you have a way of dealing with them. Further, you can be an outsider in Europe and not know it because the ways it's conveyed there are either less developed than Japan's, or more familiar and hence congenial to us than Japan's. That said, I have to add that I never did figure out how Japan conveys its disapproval and exclusion. There's nothing I at least could put a finger on. It just seemed to be in the air, something sensed, so I never knew if it was real or if I was paranoid. This drives any but the dullest souls batty in no time flat. 'Is it there or am I just seeing it?' It's there, I'm convinced, because I've confirmed it empirically on occasion ('Is there really something wrong with eating sandwiches on a train?' 'Yes of course. You don't eat in public.') It's not conveyed in ways one can define clearly, and so is crazy-making. This is doubtless why the people who are happiest in Japan are loud overconfident bumptious young males. They thrive because they never see anything but the surface of the country.

Wednesday, March 19, 2003 

Oddly, I do not feel like writing. Not even this. Oddly.

But I gave up on the statistics of what places get the greatest average rainfall. (Daycare Rick says it's a one-upmanship thing guys do when they're together, just to show how much they know about Whatever- *all* his batting stats for *all* his games.) I think it's going to have to be linked verse instead. Spent a peaceful hour or two with google and rain poems from Li Bo, mostly, looking for likely candidates. The unChinese will think Goukou and his bath attendant are versifying together. The Chinese will think they're playing Famous Quotations together. No-one but you will know why they're doing it, supposing I post this very prolix, very uninspired, and quite mittomonai piece in the first place. I go from reluctant mittomonai to pedestrian mittomonai. This is progress?

Expected to have tomorrow off but Maya, trusty Maya, has yet-another of her mysterious low-grade fevers. Must do me a chart of Celsius to Fahrenheit conversions because I can never remember what normal is Celsius. (OK, it's 37.) 40 is a high fever, and you give Tempra. 38 is a low fever and you don't unless the kid's uncomfortable. Maya is 38. We see what happens.

Wednesday, March 19, 2003 

Social blogs, social blogs, riding through the glen (continued)
(Social blogs, social blogs, written just for fen
 Some like to bitch, some like to snog
 Social blog, social blog, social blog.)

Three hours sleep, full moon no sei. What do you expect?

N, you're quite right about the anthology in question. Some of the submissions are dreadful. They're dreadful because they're fanfic by any other name. Fanfic, by and large, is what all beginning writers write. Stuff that turns me on, without the technique to make it go down easy. ('Did I really just swallow one of Proust's wet dreams? Yeah. Looks like I did. Ohh Marcel, you bitch.') Also, ir's news to the writers that what a pro writer needs is distance from her writing and her characters so she can see them as they look to others, not with the golden animus glow they have in her own head. The creatures of the Id need a lot of dressing up before they're safe to take out in society. There's a fine line between overdressed and underdressed, and one I don't intend to try walking myself.

Which is why one likes to hug stories to oneself. Hugging a whole novel might be work, but then I'm not a novelist. 'It's mine, and you can't have it/ I just don't want to share it/ Cause if I share it with you/ I'll have much less.' 

(Kakugo. Helen time. How can I handle Helen on three hours sleep? This is going to be interesting, Boise girls.)

(later)
That was a piece of cake. Nothing like a chatty two year old to keep you going.

L, your notions of breakfast are remorselessly correct and nothing I myself would touch in the morning, though I'm partial to cold boiled tofu and edamame any other time. I had eel, barbecued, and I can only say-- the fat! The horror! Otherwise, give me dry rice and grilled fish if I must have such things in the morning, so long as I get my misoshiro as well. But my dragons are carnivores, and last seen eating breakfast were having venison and pasties. Which is a bit unlikely in the sea, yes. Bird or fish, but not land animals, no. Even if venison feels right for them.

By coincidence, my what? 34 year old copy of The Mask of Apollo fell off the ironing board yesterday and split open. Mine's at least as good as done And I must get another one. The words you don't know are all probably technical Greek terms relating to the theatre.

Hm, well. If Goukou doesn't get a nice red Happy Deflowering card with a fat cheque in it from his father, what does he get to celebrate the occasion? Oh, of course. The headband all dragons wear, in the colour of his Older. Fine then. Remains only to think of statistics related to rain.

Tuesday, March 18, 2003 

A writer's lot is not a happy one
I have five stories on the go in various phases of go. Some have yet to see text form. All are stalled. 

#1 is stalled as Goukou approaches his deflowering. I seem unwilling to deflower Goukou because the scene is simply too boring. Goukou's phlegmatic approach to the world added to the uninvolved omniscient narration the story uses lowers the emotional temperature to zero. None of this will mean anything to Goukou except that he's now a certified man, bar mitzvah style or possibly rite-of-passage in those societies that postpone circumcision to puberty yecch. Can't think how to return interest to what ought to be an interesting occasion. Bizarre surrounding customs? But this is ersatz China-Japan. Goukou gets the congratulations of his father and uncles, a few symbolic presents, some money in a red envelope. (What presents are suitable to male deflowering? I think of ceremonial kaleidoscopes or a graded set of jade dildoes. What gets served at the breakfast next day? Bananas, melons, poached eggs in pairs? Round wobbly jellies? Oh alright, enough already.)

#2, conversely, is stalled by Goukou getting turned on in the bath. This is fine. One does get turned on in the bath. One mustn't do anything about it for various cultural reasons, and so one's bath attendant is trained to start talking football scores at you in order to distract attention and postpone the event till a little later. I'm going mad trying to think what the dragon equivalent of football scores are. Something utterly mundane (to me at least) that has enough inherent fascination that it can override a basic physical response. Linked verse? Fluctuations in air pressure? (Dragons should be very interested in those, you'd think.) Maybe I need to ask some guys what the irresistible appeal of football is.

#3 is stalled by conviction that I won't get it right. I don't even know where it should be set. I am *not* an original writer, period.

#4 is stalled by cold feet. Nii is in it, and if anything gives a Saiyuki writer advanced performance anxiety, it's Nii.

#5 is stalled by superstitious fear that if I write it it will be affected by the stall curse that has hit, #1, 2, 3 and 4. I suppose that's the one I should write.

Or I could go read more Mountain Taoist Lover, Minami Megumu being silly in an unhot way. Which somehow in my fevered brain last night turned into a Mary Renault novel, but only because I was browsing the Greek Anthology yesterday too.

   O black winter of savage death 
that froze the spring of your unnumbered charms. 
    The tomb tore you from brilliant day
    in this, your bitter sixteenth year. 
    Your husband and your father - blind with grief -
think of you you, Anastasia, who were our sun.

A young child of Diodorus' house
fell from some steps and broke its neck.
Yet, when the master came running,
it stretched out its arms for his sad aid.
Earth, do not crush the bones
of a slave's child; be kind to Korax,
who died at two years old.

The only record of our great affection
my dear Sabinus, is this little stone.
I'll miss you always. When you come to Lethe
don't drink, I pray, forgetfulness of me.

I'm Callicratia
who bore
29 children,
saw none die,
lived 105
years & never once
used walking sticks.

May the soil cover
        your interred corpse
lightly, pathetic Nearchos,
        so that the dogs
have less trouble dragging you out.

Tuesday, March 18, 2003 

Yes, it is so nice when it stops hurting, which it has now though god knows I was stiff enough when I woke up this morning. Is even nicer when rocks in stomach that suggest you not eat if you know what's good for you go away, leaving you five pounds lighter. Fast fast results (that's a pun BTW); yes, you *can* drop ten pounds in two days. Am now at the stage of wondering if eating is safe, and if so what. Stomach contemplates melba toast, says don't do it. Stomach contemplates meringues, says Don' wanna. Soya powder and milk it is. Helen tomorrow. Thank god I can bicycle anywhere I need to go now, because transitting would be too exhausting.

If I had broad-band I'd probably DL anime and watch too. Some. Not much. DLing anime sounds like an infernal bitch, but Wolf's Rain sounds interesting.

L- I see your mother didn't pass on the whatif gene to you (or your kids, cause it does skip generations.) First thing I think if a kid is out on roller blades is what if she falls? She better have long pants and sleeves on, maybe gloves? don't they make anything to pad breakable areas? and a helmet too? But all this is minor compared to What if she gets hit by a car? with the result that there's no dog rollerblading in the street, and none on the sidewalk because it disrupts people walking, and hence no dog rollerblading at all until you get good enough at it to control the dog. It's a very good thing I never had kids. They'd have had the same anxiety-burdened childhood I did.

Monday, March 17, 2003 

To celebrate this hideous day when the temperature is over 50 and Bush is doing His Thing, my body has come down with a grade A attack of malaise. Stomach hurts as if filled with rocks, head aches, back of neck aches, shoulder aches, can't breathe. Lay awake all last night feeling blank not-wellness and slept most of today, sinking back down when the surface threatened. Am up. Can't find a way to get comfortable. May go curl up on sofa and consider the melancholy of life. Since I feel this lousy it wouldn't make me lousier to read Godchild.

Sunday, March 16, 2003 

What I need
Love google. Checking to see that I had my Old English correct when I was moved to quote the poem Deor at somebody, first hit got me this:

De-or,
De-e-eor,
Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg,
De,
Me say de, me say de, me say de-e-e-or,
Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg.

I work all day in the island grasses,
(Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg)
I turn your children into drinking glasses...
(Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg...)

So it's an English major joke, or a medieval studies major. So sue me. Deor gives little thumbnail vignettes from Anglo-Saxon history, bad things happening to good or at least famous people, and says at the end of each one, Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg- Those things passed by and this may too. Useful tag, as many people note.

And so I return to my own,

Ebisu
Ebisu
Pretty pretty pretty pretty Ebisu
My Ebi, my Ebisu-u-u
Well I love you girl and I need you
Ebisu.

(Must we go into the whole soft-shoe routine? The Indian restaurant hit list: Paperback Raita. My papadum tole me. My chana dahl down in old Hong Kong/ Waits for my return. Nan but the brave. And on...) 

Sunday, March 16, 2003 

"I'd like to buy this stuff legal and support the artists," she says, "but if people won't sell it to me in a language I can read I'll have to rely on fansubs and scanlations." 

Why does this offend me?

Because the speaker feels entitled to have the works she wants to read made available to her in the language she reads in, for one. Where I come from if you're a fan of something that comes in a foreign language, whether it be b-d or schlock kung-fu films, you learn the foreign language. You go to it. You don't expect it to come to you. Expecting it to come to you is arrogant and, worse, provincial. We don't mind being arrogant (they are in New York) but god forbid we should be provincial (they aren't in New York, we think, doubtless incorrectly.) Also English-onliness to an eastern Canadian is the hallmark of an American or an Albertan, and we pull reflex moral rank on Americans and Albertans always. (My American readers may want to close their eyes while I say that linguistic chauvinism- the world must speak my language- is exactly what the rest of the world considers to be typically 'American.' Unfairly, because the French do it too, them and their universal dubs. And we won't mention the fact that the Hungarians sing all opera in Hungarian, ignoring the way the libretto fits the music. This is doubly dumb because you can't make out what an opera singer is singing most of the time anyway, so it's waste labour, and when you can in your own language it's ludicrous. 'Don GioVAnni, I've come to DINner. You inVIted me, and here I am.' But I digress.) 

She is not content to look at the pretty pictures if she doesn't know the language. Text translations are not good enough. She insists on the package- the pictures and the words together on the same page. If they aren't available she feels herself exempt from the need to pay the mangaka for the privilege of looking at the mangaka's pictures. A bootleg novel translation I won't balk at. But with manga the text is not the only or even the main thing, and this still strikes me as arrogant.

Now. Suppose she lived in Kuala Lampur and had the same attitude, why would I not be as offended? Well, if she was holding out for manga translated into Malaysian, you'd pat the poor pathetic girl on the head and send her off, because you know it's not going to happen. Malay doesn't rate high as markets and languages go, and a Canadian knows what it's like to be dismissable as a market. If she's insisting on an English translation, she's already outside the linguistic chauvinism package. She's learned her second language already in order to talk to the world, and is only balking at learning a third (or fourth, the way most Malaysians I've met go.) So is it the willingness to learn a second language and operate outside the culture's language that decides me to leniency or not? I doubt it. The she of the first paragraph lives in Texas, and if she doesn't speak at least some Spanish I'd be immensely surprised. Equally a hypothetical French fan insisting on having her manga in French will get no sympathy from me just because she reads English as well. First world and third, then? But Japan is first world, and I don't expect the Japanese, poor bunnies, to read works in English, mostly because they're made to do it in school and therefore can't all the rest of their lives.

Remains only the conclusion that my moral outrage is inconsistent. I shall go wash floors instead, which is a better use of my time. 

Saturday, March 15, 2003 

(later)
Thing is, we don't have any snugglebug high-contact guys who want their contact from other kids. (Adults, yes. Worth your life to sit on the floor because three people will come and sit on your lap at once.) Apart from Owen, two yesterday, once characterized by me as 'All body-mind and very little of the other kind.' Likes to express affection for kids by grabbing them around the neck from behind and clinging to them as they try to walk away. (It's usually Liandra he tackles, who bats her eyes in her spacey Liandraish fashion- 'I thought I felt something on my back but I must have been mistaken'- as Owen pulls her off balance.) Ferny, maybe, Fernando? who's always sidling over to squeaky Ben and trying to share toys. But Ferny does it to make Ben squeak, not out of a need for contact. Bridgett needs some of the babies, those worms in a can always happy for bodies to cling and pull up on. Or someone Helen's age. The social two and a halfs like to shove their chairs over to sit beside their best friends and create mayhem. Chloe and Helen were an item before Chloe went upstairs, and had to be sat at separate tables; then Faith and Helen were an item before Helen left. I suppose now it's Faith and Elan, the gigglers.

Have spent day writing Goukou takes a bath, though he's barely into the bathroom, and Goukou has breakfast, though he's barely started his venison pasty, and meanwhile, so as not to feel totally futile, deleted feelthy pictures from some passworded Aesthe reviews so they can stop being passworded. I will very soon break down and go get the html book and find out just what the codes for tables are and do, because Sue's old coding insists on giving me tables when I don't want them and no amount of fiddling will make the thing behave like the current articles do.

Oh yes. The Ides. 'I told him Julie don't go, I *begged* him don't go, I said it's the Idsa Mahch beware already. But would he listen to me? No-o-o-o' as the Jewish Mrs. Caesar said in a long ago Wayne and Schuster skit. Flavius Maximus, private Roman eye. 'I slouch into the bar. "Give me a martinus." "You mean a martini." "When I want two, I'll ask for them."

(earlier)
OK, so we have it straight that I'm writing Goukou having his shoelaces undone only so that I know what happens when Goukou has his shoelaces undone, and what happens when he has his back scrubbed, and possibly what happens when he has his teeth brushed as well (and here I'm getting flashbacks to Patarillo's wake-up machine that pulls him sleeping from bed and dresses, washes and scrubs him in a frenzy of jointed mechanical arms.) It's not meant to be a story, much less a readable one. This makes life much simpler. Like drawing pictures of the rooms in which everything happens, which I don't do because I can't draw, but if I did. I have to sort out all the human furniture that surrounds him (dragon furniture? attendant furniture in any case) just so I know it's there, even if Goukou himself registers very little of it. Who bathes him, who dresses him, who serves him his coffee. Animated vending machines who serve without the need to be thanked or even acknowledged. Do I thank the daycare coffee machine for providing coffee? Certainly not.

What a difference a democracy makes indeed. It's one of those things you never think about, any more than you think about how dark a city is when it has no electricity. You're coming downstairs in the 16th century in the middle of the night, it's bloody pitch black and you bloody can't see a thing unless you have a candle. And outside isn't a lot better. It might as well be counryside.

Friday, March 14, 2003 

Fiorinal never did diddly for my headaches, but it did make me not care that I had them. Which is progress of a sort. White Day- well, I'm not surprised. It's not just the group thing women do. We also remember occasions better than them, and in general make more of them. Though I wonder what the reaction would have been chez vous had you guys neglected to give your giri choko.

Two new kids at work yesterday, one being left for the first time, both pretty good about it. The girl, Bridgett, makes everybody stop and go 'Meaghan!!' because she's just short of the spitting image of Shmegeggy when she was a toddler- fat face, pale blue eyes, every which way hair. She was just about to leave when Meaghan and her mother came down from Big Kids so I called them over- 'There's someone you've got to meet. Where have you seen this face before?' Bridgett walked over to the door, smiled beatifically and went over to grab hold of Meaghan- ahh, my long-lost sister. The only drawback is that we all now call Bridgett 'Meaghan' by reflex. The other is that she's a body-contacter. Likes body contact, doesn't care with who. Goes and sits next to the other kids on their beds when they're just getting up from nap, which some people consider a violation of their personal space, like Squeaky Benny who-- squeaks, and Asha, who screams.

Thursday, March 13, 2003 

I remember Fearless Leader declaring, after visiting Versailles I believe, that she was going to stop writing RG Veda stories about those heavenly monarchs Ashura-oh and Taishakuten because she'd suddenly realized that royalty conducts its daily life on a scale and in a fashion that an ordinary person, citizen of a democracy, simply can't conceive. I'm reminded of this because the current story is fighting me tooth and nail in a way that nothing has for ohh eight years approximately, since the first and last time I tried writing a sex scene with Klaus. It's a sequence of write sentence, rewrite sentence, rewrite sentence, delete sentence, try another sentence, rewrite sentence, rewrite sentence, delete sentence misery, where every single detail has to be hammered out with a chisel and nothing comes naturally and spontaneously. And all that's happening is Goukou getting undressed to have a bath and go to bed with his brother. Dragon kings don't get undressed and have baths and go to bed the way we do, especially when their brothers are there as well. The problem is that there's a whole bunch of other people present doing this and that- someone takes his clothes off and someone else puts them away and someone else gets his bathrobe out and hands it to the servant who hands it to the person who puts it on him while someone else sends another underservant to go fetch his brother's servants to do all those things for *him*, while yet another set of servants gets the bath ready and prepares to wash him, and yet more servants, or maybe the same ones as did all the undressing, get the bed ready for a night of sex. Figuring out who does what is bad enough, but the crimp that they put in the emotional action is worse. And it shouldn't be crimping it at all. Louis XIV regularly had not only his baths but his evacuations in the presence of half a dozen people. None of the shouguns ever had sex with their wives without a duenna sitting close enough by to hear if the lady in question made any untoward post-coital political suggestions to the ruler of Japan. Goukou should simply not register any of these people as being there, any more than I register the furniture or the cat, if I had a cat, even though they're in the process of taking his underwear off. That attitude is immensely difficult for a westerner to come at. I can imagine being a man much more easily than I can imagine being a king- or indeed anyone who has no privacy and doesn't miss it.

Yes I'm being ijiwaru, and I apologize in advance, but I shall go on being ijiwaru because it's so much fun. Phonics lesson. When you have a verb with a short vowel, as it might be 'begin', and you want to add an -ing ending, you have to double the final consonant to keep the short vowel short. Begin, beginning; spam, spamming. If you write it with a single consonant it means the vowel is long in the original verb and the verb probably ends in e. Thus it's flimflam, flimflamming, but flame, flaming. Twining is the continuative form of twine, and fraternal twining, she says with dignity, is what *I* write.

Wednesday, March 12, 2003 

I am so glad people are happy to entrust me with their children. It gives me something to do while I indulge in Writer's Funk and don't write any of the three stories I have in my head. Of course, I resent it like hell that I'm not allowed to sit in front of my computer and not-write in peace, but must spend my mornings with Helen and my mid-days at the daycare and my evenings with Yonatan. But such is the price of earning a living.

Tuesday, March 11, 2003 

The world may do as it likes with me, just as long as it doesn't want me to get up before ten, or preferably 10:30. When the world wants me to get up at 7:30, or *be* at work at 10:30 (unless I can bicycle there in ten minutes and right now, believe me, I can't) I begin to feel ill-used. This is why it's called a sleep disorder. Knowing I have to be up at a certain time disorders my sleep. I don't. Or not enough. Left to my own devices I can function perfectly on five or six hours, and occasionally on three, so it's not the shortness per se that's the problem. It's not having enough time to wake up in. I need an hour or so to do it properly or else the night's sleep goes for nothing. I'm not a zombie if I'm ripped from sleep and have to get up right away. I can hit the ground running. But I hit it feeling like I've had no sleep at all, and a few hours later the ground hits me.

Monday, March 10, 2003 

And then a friend emails me after a long time and says yes she had an implant too same tooth as me and her body went hysterical about it, said No no no take it out don't do this it's wrong, something doctors and dentists don't believe can happen, but of course it can. They kept telling her No it's fine the x-rays say everything's great, but eventually gave in and took it out and found, quote, there was only a thin, transparent film left between the hole where the metal was screwed in and the sinus cavity. Do. Not. Mess. With. Sinuses. They are the Bermuda Triangle of the body. And the bicuspids lead right to them. This is why even my bridge has been making me miserable all day.

I *think* the Japanese do sexless too. Logically they ought to- that compartmentalization thing. But of course the Japanese feel sexless to me even when they're being sexual, like eleven year olds trying to act adult and just not having a clue as to what it's all about. (Had a couple of Japanese lesbians make up to me at a party once and it did indeed feel like some nice little prepubescent kid going moony over a pop singer. Sweetie, I don't cradle rob; but of course I couldn't explain that.) That's just my eye, of course; gaijin men seem to think them very sexual. Whereas some Chinese women feel almost French to me- it's a part of them, and it comes through in the mix.

Monday, March 10, 2003 

In headache and in worry Vaguely life leaks away
Teeth, Wystan, teeth. You forgot the teeth. Dr. Mah, you fiend, what did you do to my poor poor teeth?

Not to mention the sinuses and the asthma. Yes, I know. Doesn't matter if it's 15F out there, it's March, and allergies are starting, which is why the tooth-that-isn't is screaming blue murder. It's situated under the sinus. And I think Suppose you'd gone for an implant? An implant there would have been reportable to Amnesty International. So I count blessings.

L- I know what you mean, sort of. It's hard to associate most of the ordinary everyday people you see with people who would actually take their clothes off and have sex. *Here* it is. Now over in France it's a piece of cake, which is what I was talking about. Everybody is assumed sexual, just as a given. It's not compartmentalized. Equally, if I look at our parents at the daycare, the Anglo middle-class Canadians make me believe in parthenogenesis, but I can see perfectly easily how we came by Maya and Yonatan and Asha and Emily. I think it's a matter of culture. You wear it more easily in certain ones than in others.

Sunday, March 9, 2003 

Had a bindertwine shoulder, the one that goes rigid with knots, and took ativan for it- took two ativan for it, which is me being recklessly prodigal, and slept, naturally- and woke with a bindertwine shoulder headache and a fast trip to the pit. When ativan doesn't work, what can we do but sit with our heads in our hands and moan? Well, and have a long hot shower, fill up a hot water bottle, heat up both L's rice-bag beanies, get under the duvet, the duvet, and the Korean blanket (which is made in China just FYI), slide hotpacks under all the knots, put on earphones, crack open a pack of K's batteries and um. It works, I tell you, it works for everything. Also gets me a couple of scenes for a new story. Sometimes you just have to add heat as well.

Might have been flu but was probably pressure, 'cause when I finally got out it seemed there'd been freezing rain and a temperature nosedive last night and we got skating rink sidewalks. My bro (I assume) put sand down on my walk and steps, which was nice of him, though I wonder did he not see the bag of biodegradable will not harm lawns melter by my front door? I put that down as I left. It's green and looks like broken windshield glass, but it works.

Incandescens is back from her con. One misses Incandescens when she's away, as if something is vaguely wrong and out of place in the house. The stove disappeared or something. I'm not sure why this surprises me, but it does. Clearly I'm becoming a creature of habit.

Saturday, March 8, 2003 

Did I say Daddy the Father? I did. I meant God the Daddy, obviously. And the uke is God the Ickle Bitty Boy. And the western and more specifically American terror of being less than 100% autonomous all the time makes the trope an antsy one for us. Well, for most men and for affluent women. It's why people do BDSM, which in my opinion is a very silly sexual practice, but silly precisely because it's so rule and contract laden. 'Yes I want you to take all the responsibility but it's gotta be in writing that I know I'm doing it and you know I'm doing it and it doesn't really mean anything about either of us because god forbid I should *actually* be less than a fully responsible and independent adult ever.' (I'm being unkind. It may just be to avoid reality bug and the realization, which Dubya is currently rubbing our faces in, that we're all without power.) Or it may be that if you've acquired your adult independence at a certain cost you fear to allow yourself the pleasure of reverting to dependent childhood.

To answer your question, L, people slash the Bible. Never read any, but it gets mentioned in articles. Doubtless ff.net had stories before they yanked the adult ones. Satan has a thing for God, of course, and Judas a thing for Jesus. (Jesus had a thing for John who wrote the Gospel of, and that, as they say, is canon.) But if I wed my slash instincts to my cradle Catholic ones, I'd say God comes off as uke, at least with Satan. You want abusive seme God you need to check out Genesis and the sacrifice of Isaac (a squicky love triangle) or all of Job. And the psalms get pretty masoppoi in short order. The God of Israel chastises Israel a lot and Israel (or the guy who wrote the pslams) loves Him for it. Leaving God out of it, David and Jonathan are a canon item, Saul Jonathan's father probably had a thing for David (another triangle) and me I always figured Joseph was getting it on first with Potiphar and then with Pharaoh.

Kippered. Yes indeed. Not a fan of kippering myself. Toronto is not just a Brit city, it is or was in many ways a Scots one. Kippers we can do you, especially the herring (feh) even if now you also get lox'n bagels and gravlax. I always knew kidney smelled. All the meat pies were steak and kidney until the Yanks started making their own.

Your hanzi come out a little odd in my browser because I don't feel like spending 34 minutes DLing the hanzi support. I think it inserts random squares before the hanzi- but were there two hanzi or three in your translation of mittomonai? My J/J tells me that the word itself comes from mitaku mo nai- I don't want to see it- and meant both shabby and unbecoming. Something that embarrasses you to see, hence you don't want to see it.

Friday, March 7, 2003 

There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things that say not, "It is enough"

I have never had enough

- pierogies with butter and sour cream            
- smoked salmon on caraway rye with lemon juice            
- sushi in Japan            
- Second Cup sugar cookies            
- cold cooked tiger shrimp 

Meanwhile M tells me that the basis of Chinese BL, its overarching theme if you will, is the be-all and end-all-ness of the seme. He is There for his uke. He holds the world in place. His love is the bedrock foundation of the universe. "To be held in endlessly anxious hands that will never let you go." His devotion is total, his loyalty never falters, he endures all the uke's temper and whims and caprices with a tolerant and understanding smile. He is Mr. Knightley, he is Wonderful Nii-san, he suffereth long and is kind, vaunteth not himself and is not puffed up, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. He is someone who is fierce and will love you until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on your side for ever and ever. He's Daddy the Father, in a word, and the Chinese fen seem to see nothing at all mittomonai about being in love with a hot version of their fathers. M says if something is a fantasy, why the hell not be shameless? And I say Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh what a feeling. Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief. Lord, I am shameless. Help thou my lingering and crawling embarrassment. 

To which end we have this (bros) and this (bros2), and if you have any thoughts about them I don't want to hear them. TTG, you'll find yourself refilling a lot of ice buckets; I'd suggest you avoid both, myself.

Thursday, March 6, 2003 

I got up early every day this week, and you wonder why I have no short-term memory? Two mornings at the dentist's. Two morning at Helen's. A lot of snow- mid-week, I suppose. Afternoons at the daycare. Evenings brainfried accomplishing with immense slowness, and not much. My throat is sore. My teeth are sore. My neck is binder twine. I took two ativan and more codeine all day than is advised and will go seek that dark safe world of rest. Have a feeling it's going to be a sleep twelve hours night, and I have to be in at work at 11:30.

Lentyn ys come wyth luve to towne
'Happy dead person on a stick season,' she said, and my mind does one of those [stall] things that happens when computers get a byte of info they don't know how to process. Uhh. Yes. Uhh. It is, of course, if you look at it like that. Of course.

Wednesday, March 5, 2003 

(later)
G- that sucks big time. My wincing empathy for you and the car. Hope the idiot's insurance co gets stung for absolutely everything and his rates go up to equal your gross annual income.

Small request
Could I have my life back please?

Tuesday, March 4, 2003 

Server down again. People who sent me mail, people I owe mail, we shall meet again eventually in a better world.

Monday, March 3, 2003 

Diem perdidi
Day spent at dentist's and at work. Evening spent html-ing a single article and inserting illos. Thus Monday.

Sunday, March 2, 2003 

Now I wish I could stop worrying about my pipes freezing again. The house is overheated because I'm afraid to turn the thermostat down. Have removed great swaths of the insulation that was wrapped around the heat duct that runs through the (uninsulated) basement back room where the pipe froze before and hope that warms the place some. But I still think the Arm-And-A-Leg Company that replaced my pipes screwed up somehow when they did it. Someone still needs to come up with Man-In-A-Can for women who live alone. To tell them about pipes and sewer feeds and to replace washers on sinks and such.

(later)
The mercury dropped in the mouth of the dying day
Slushed off to Helen's, and in the subway saw the weather pixel board telling me the high would be -13 (celsius, which still factors to something like 9F) with a wind chill factor of -21, which has no F equivalent, it's just forking freezing. This as the temp approached an obvious 34 or 35F. 'On crack,' I muttered. Transpires this is what waits for us *tomorrow* as our winter of wild weather continues. As a precaution I shovelled a pathway through the rotting ice and slush of five doors down, which is currently empty, so as to avoid breaking my neck on it tomorrow am.

Brunch was lovely, thank you- fresh fresh bagels and smoked salmon and scones that Helen made (she says) and muffins that Helen made (she says) and apparently did have a hand in, advanced two year old that she is, and a fruit salad that shouldn't happen in Toronto in the winter, and Belgian chocolate and apricot danishes and all the stuff I'm not supposed to eat and did. Helen's Mom agrees- "My colleague's wife quit her job when she had her third kid, and now she's basically a taxi driver." What do people do who don't drive, I wonder.

And in a few years' time Helen and family may be moving into my neighbourhood because they want to go to the school near me and don't want to have to drive her there morning and afternoon. Helen probably could commute once she gets to be eight or so- it's an easy subway ride- but it seems they see other advantages to my end of town. This amuses me because in fact they live in what's considered a very desirable location, not quite rich posh WASP Rosedale but the more professional area adjacent to it. Since there are only about three short streets of adjacent area, they're considered incredibly lucky to have found a place there. But the adjacency to Rosedale is apparently the problem. Too rich, too white, too WASP. Better to head over to the Annex Far West with its Italians Portugese Koreans Chinese blacks and all combinations of the above, to be near a school that offers French immersion. This thinking makes sense to anyone but a native Torontonian like me. Native Torontonians are simply bemused, but fortunately there are very few of us around.

(earlier)
And what's wrong with long paragraphs, she asks with dignity? ^_^ Short line people are either jotting memos to themselves or aren't natural writers.

Snow. March snow, which is heavy and wet, which I should go shovel soon, and get dressed and go to the brunch at Helen's. Helen is moving daycares and her parents have invited the staff to a farewell brunch. Staff all have kids in the middle of that tribal schoolage lifestyle schoolaged kids have that make me glad I never had kids because I wouldn't have a clue how to arrange hockey practices and skating practices and gym classes and stickball practices or whatever it's called. My childhood was singularly unsullied by sports and the mindset is foreign to me. But the result is that neither kids nor parents have lives of their own that I can see, much less time to attend a Sunday brunch. We shall see who shows up.

And I personally want only to write dragon smut. Morning is the best time to write smut. Gets you off to a good start and sets the tone for the day.

Saturday, March 1, 2003 

A feeling of accomplishment, finally, which is nice given how badly I started the day. Hormonal spins, I believe. Find it amusing that exactly a month ago much the same thing happened. Started in a snit, talked to my cheerful garage renter Vince (I'm sure he's a mass-murderer or something; no-one normal can be that cheery and overflowing with bonhomie, but it's nice for a change), read a TTG story, felt better, got some work done. Amusing also that the person who started the snit a month ago has been keeping everyone in a tizzy ever since, has got everyone's back up, and has got us all clenching our jaws and grinding our teeth, which is why my temporary bridge is now loose. Then Grace got a call from her one day, talked to her for five minutes, and hung up looking stunned. "She was friendly. She said Thank you." Hugh frowned. "I don't remember a blue moon being forecast for tonight." It's been all cheerfulness and politeness and sunshine since. Drugs, could it be?

Saturday, March 1, 2003 

Puzzlement
Turns out Sabina writes just as bland as any other Big Name Fanwriter. Somehow I thought she wouldn't. Her nonfic style is energetic and distinctly her own voice. So what's with this Any Two Guys dialogue and Any Series narration and In My Sleep action? A reflex? The result of reading too much of everyone else's stuff? But she *knows* there's a thing called style, and knows you can change styles, and god knows has read enough real literature to have models in plenty to choose from. So why does she choose to write the default BNFW style? Because that's how she thinks GW and WK ought to be written- generic, flavourless, technically irreproachable, unmemorable? Fodder here for the argument that the slashers and their think-alike cousins in yaoi write competent mediocre because they like competent mediocre, not because they can't do better. Which I suppose is their right. I write overheated baroque because I like overheated baroque, not because I can't do Hemingway. Better kitsch than suburban middle-class good taste, I say. And others say the opposite.

Friday, February 28, 2003 

Somehow I thought something nice was going to happen today. I dreamed last night, though I can't remember what, and something Goujun-related was floating through my head when I woke up. But all that happened was I wound up working seven hours instead of two and a half, and my garage renter tells me he saw two raccoons there the other day. Roof is under snow and ice, floor is concrete, how the hell did they get in? And where raccoons start, skunks follow, and all of them cost money to be rid of. Also it's the last day of February and winter is almost over. Taxes are due, insurance is due, dental bills are due, spring is coming. I hate this time of year and I hate what follows more. Fooey.

Thursday, February 27, 2003 

(later)
You *got* the horse to trot? In my experience of those vastly over-rated quadripeds there's no difficulty in *getting* them to trot. They do it without asking, rattling your teeth and bones happily for free. I too neither screamed nor fell off, though I wanted to do the first and was terrified I'd do the latter. A nice gentle walk, that was all I wanted from my horses. They told me galloping was easier. I didn't take lessons long enough to find out.

I have a story from TTG and seven more pages of ch.7 and I'm not allowed to read the first until I finish the second. Back we go to more brotherly slanging matches and muteki!Andragoras may he rot.

How did it get to be Thursday in a week where I was convinced Tuesday night that it was Wednesday and the garbage should go out? The deterioration of short-term memory continues.

Wednesday I can at least recall, because I did about fifteen pages of translation without pain and then went and did a shift and then went home with Helen and her cousin Baby Lucy, as she must be called, even if she's almost the same height, in deference to Helen's year's seniority. I'd had no expectations of the evening, since Lucy is 18 months and doesn't know me. In fact Lucy decided I just came with the furniture of Helen's house and that was cool. Bedtime I figured would be dicey cause they sleep in different rooms and I didn't think L's usual bedtime routine (Read her a book, put her in her crib with the singing doggy- that fortunately plays Hush Little Baby- say good-night and leave her) was going to work with a stranger. Nor did it. Lucy wouldn't be put down. So off we trooped to Helen's room with some intention of Helen sleeping in her own bed and me sitting with Lucy on the rocking chair. Out comes the two and a half year old's full arsenal. 'I need to pee. I need to pee Dan! I need to PEEEE' You peed before you went to bed, Helen. Anguished sniffles from the dark. 'I need to poo Dan, I need to poo.' You pooed earlier. 'I need to poo, Dan, I need to POO, I NEED TO POOOOO-OOOHHHH' heading for a meltdown. (Still in night diapers so you can't send her to do it alone.) We take care of that- she didn't- while Lucy watches in interest. Back to bed. Lucy's bright little eyes are wide open and wondering what's going on. 'I need a new diaper Dan I need a new diaper I NEED-" Helen, do you want to sleep in baby Lucy's bed? "YEAH!!" Helen has the divine privilege of sleeping in a crib again, and drifts away in minutes. I lie next to Lucy on her Mom's bed and pull the cord on her singing dog for twenty minutes until Lucy too falls asleep. Go me. 

(Of course, Helen wakes up when I transfer her to her own bed, but doesn't stay too long at the surface. But Lucy turns out to be one of those Does Not Transfer guys, that if they fall asleep in the stroller on a walk, stay in the stroller for the next hour while someone gets to eat their lunch outside to wait for them. Periodically Hugh just dismantles the whole stroller section and puts them in their crib still half-upright and strapped into their seat. Lucy stayed on her Mom's bed bolstered by pillows with me at the end doing meditation exercises until Mom came back.)

Tuesday, February 25, 2003 

It's not just seeing different things in the same cultural artifact. It's being severely limited in the cultural artifacts I can see, when the culture is foreign. Why Zheng He? Because he's the only eunuch I know by name. Otherwise we English readers have only vague and sinister figures, nameless and unidentified, who got a stranglehold on the Ming dynasty and squeezed the life out of it. The books /say/. But I know no specific evil eunuch who corrupted emperors or empires or whatever it is that eunuchs were supposed to do, to pin the image on; so for all I know the eunuchs' evil reputation is as groundless as the Greek eunuchs' evil reputation. St. Basil worked himself into foaming frenzies about what horrible things eunuchs were, which proves to me only what a twisted hysteric Basil was. Hence I'm already half inclined to ascribe the Chinese eunuchs' evil reputation to the same kind of male het hysteria. First we created them, then we blame them for being corrupt creatures and evil so we don't have to take responsibility for having created them.

Equally with dragons. I'm glad to hear they're considered fierce and capricious, because fierce and capricious is exactly what I want. But the ones translated into English are Wu Ch'eng-en's stuffy mandarins and some rather nice ones in a folk tale who make it rain for the people when they're dying of drought and get mountains put on them by the Jade Emperor for doing so. Dragons defiantly say it was the right thing to do and they'd do it again. Can't get much more moral than that. And yes, western dragons are very unsatisfactory, simply because they're creatures and not people; though Leguin did a not bad job of suggesting they might be something else in the Earthsea trilogy. 

The eroticism of the exotic remains erotic for me, like any eroticism, precisely as long as it isn't nailed down and made obvious. See it in glimpses, experience it as something briefly intuited, there and gone, and it stays erotic. Vampires were erotic as long as no-one knew they were; Anne Rice killed that. M/m UST of the Star Trek variety was erotic so long as the writers and actors didn't realize what they were doing. Slash killed that. There was a subliminal and pervasive eroticism in the early Cain books. Angel Sanctuary killed that. Make it overt and yes, it's flashy and obvious and gone. Domestic eroticism would be gone too, I think, the minute you wrote a work that defined the eroticism of the domestic. Fortunately it's hard to pin down something so watercolour and pervasive. But to take K's example-- I find guys with babies very hot, or rather, I *used* to. But in 20 years I've seen too many guys looking after too many babies, and now it no longer has that ring of the strange and tender and undefinably erotic. It's just the norm.

Tuesday, February 25, 2003 

Perhaps it's the subjugation of selfish urges to the prescribed structure that's such a turn on to me. 
That, yes, is where the eroticism of Confucianism ought to come from, if it does come. It is indeed an eroticism that must be read into the situation, but the best eroticism is. Reading the spaces, of course. The devotion of Zheng He to his unhavable emperor is also a nice thought. But here's where I go Japanese again, insisting on the need for some ningen kankei- human connection- in the scenario. Our admiral receives his orders from the remote Son of Heaven whom he barely looks at. Who is it he's devoted to? An abstraction, a voice heard through a screen. A little bodiless for true passion, I feel.

Now confer, as the Romans said, have a look at one of my guys, Ooka Echizen. Country magistrate down in the Kii peninsula south of Nagoya. Guys over in the neighbouring Tokugawa fief divert water from his area, his guys bring a suit against the Tokugawa guys, it comes up to him for judgment. No-one in his right mind finds against Tokugawa serfs. Ooka Tadasuke finds against the Tokugawa serfs. They go tell the lord of the region, Tokugawa Yoshimune, look what this guy has dared to do to your people. And quite rightly, says Tokugawa Yoshimune, having looked into the circumstances, and the judgment stands.

Various people die, the clan elders get together, Yoshimune finds himself in Edo as eighth shougun. One of the first things he does is send for Ooka and promote him to North City magistrate. Ooka reformed the extremely severe penalties of the day which like the Chinese system punished the whole family for the crimes of one person. Had a talent for finding bright boys and putting them in charge of things, like the guy who introduced yams to Japan. Ooka's wife died young leaving no sons. He didn't remarry. Yoshimune predeceased him though he was seven years the younger. Ooka died the same year. Now me, I've always thought Yoshimune x Ooka perfectly rational for those reasons. They knew each other, you see. They had this ningen kankei, this connection.

And the figure of the magnificent male, Father knows best variety. Nice archetypal image. But in practice... my western insistence that people are people and not their roles, and my learned Japanese instinct that your authority comes because people give it to you, undoes my best intentions. My dragon nii-san should have the serene confidence to behave arbitrarily and magnificently with his erring younger brothers for their own good, and to tell the next one Some day you'll understand. But then serene confidence segues into fat-faced smugness, which is not erotic at all. Much more congenial to have nii-san feel a little ambivalence. Know he's right but half-wish his closest brother understood his position, and indicate as much to next brother- who by Japanese standards /ought/ to understand without being told. Implicitly ask for that human connection instead of enrobing himself in the authority permitted by the system. 'I am your older brother and always right' vs 'I am your older brother, and it's not a lot of fun when I have to do this as you should have figured out for yourself, but I do it anyway because I love you, which you should know too.'

Tuesday, February 25, 2003 

It has something to do with the way Chinese culture drains the erotic juice out of things that ought, from our pov, to be overwhelmingly sexual/ sensual...

I spent sometime thinking this over, but I'm still not quite sure what made you feel this way. Was it Kou Jousei? Or was it all the Victorian translations of Chinese classics?

Not at all. The Victorians and the Japanese did and do their best to make China seem exotic and strange and marvellous, each in their own way- the Victorians through a mixture of ignorance and repressed lasciviousness that turns any foreigner into a sexually potent being/ threat; the Japanese by applying to it any of the shoujo manga tropes they use to make any Elsewhere look romantic (LA, NY, Beijing...) And it's fine as far as it goes, so long as you never read what the Chinese themselves actually say or do. Ooohhh, eunuchs, what systematic depravity and refinements of cruelty and steamy sexuality of a corrupt court hubba hubba. Hey, Persian Boy, right? Catamites, right? Castrati and AnK furniture, right? Brilliant admiral led a fleet to India Persia and Africa amassed treasure for the emperor and may have discovered America uhh I beg your pardon? Eunuchs do *not* become efficient admirals and go sailing around the world. What kind of symbol of perverse sexuality is Zheng He, I ask you?

Obviously no one is quite like the French, but certainly a Chinese, or at least a Chinese who lived pre-Communist revolution, always had a body. As did the spirits and gods and even dragons. 

Yeah, I know that. But it's not having the body but how the body is interpreted in the culture that counts. In our literature dragons amass gold and breathe fire and live under mountains and do battle with heroes in which the hero dies. In your literature dragons address memorials to the Jade Emperor protesting against the depredations of that infernal Monkey. Our dragons are avatars of something dark and dangerous and outside the human ken. Yours are fussy bureaucrats or kind nature spirits. Even when untamed, like a flooding river, they have something solid and everyday about them still. Rivers. They flood. Happens. Whereas over here the great winged figure seen flying from the Misty Mountain to strike terror in the hearts of all suggests something alien to the everyday, hostile to it. 

Everything is included in China: it's all part of Under Heaven. Nothing is excluded and defined as Other, in the way that Christianity likes to exclude thngs and designate them as anathema- at which point they also become sexual/ attractive/ irresistible in their evil and Otherness. China is just too domestic and matter of fact all the time to be exotic, and therefore it also becomes unerotic. (And jeez- 'Hey honey, can I have a sip' has got to be the acme of non-sexy.)

Sunday, February 23, 2003 

(later)
Make my dragons Taoist? Oh, if only I could. And I'm sure dragons are, really. But Taoism is like its first cousin Zen- a slippery little critter that's never quite located where you think it is or think it ought to be. Roundeyes who deal with it invariably do two things- they get it wrong and they look ridiculous doing it. I *think*, by analogy with other things met in Japan, it's because we try to describe something that's fundamentally indescribable, and try to do it rationally and intellectually when what's needed is closer to poetry or maybe the mystical raptures of John of the Cross, and then just to make sure we'll never get out of the mess we're in we try to do it in English.

And of course if my dragons are Taoist they lose that little tension between them as members of a structured society and them as creatures of a larger and less-defined order that sometimes I half-understand. At the moment the conflict is expressing itself quite clearly as Chinese vs Japanese gestalt. My nii-san dragon, having done a bravura display of Chinese older brother, has suddenly dropped into Japanese mode and I am having immense difficulty stopping him from saying Wakatte kure to his next oldest brother. 'Please understand' is not what I expect to hear from magnificent Chinese ani-ues.

Your sister's dog is staying? Then PT gets her wish after all. Thought she would. ^_^

Odd
When you deliberately write something unpleasant, something that's a personal squick even if it's hot (/because/ it's a squick, and if you don't understand that one, might as well stop reading this now) there are a number of things you can be feeling, and I've felt all of them. Terror, horror, unholy excitement, nausea, exhilaration, or that odd truffle-ball that is all those things rolled together. Lowering oppression, even, and I've felt that too, so much so that I had to stop the story because it was making me feel dangerously bad. This is new, however. Reluctance and petulance and... tedium. Nothing stronger than that. So low-key that I only noticed it when I was through the section and felt a palpable lightening of the atmosphere. 'Oh good, that's out of the way, now I can do something more interesting.' Tedium, she says blankly. It's supposed to be hot and forbidden and it comes out as Bartleby. 'I would prefer not.' Tedium. I'm still trying to get my head around it. 

It has something to do with the way Chinese culture drains the erotic juice out of things that ought, from our pov, to be overwhelmingly sexual/ sensual, and which aren't, not in their lowkey perfectly mundane everyday China setting. Fathers. Dragons. Eunuchs. Concubinage. Opium, even. ('*We* never wanted it. It destroys the morale of the lower classes. It was those damned Brits forced it on us.' Which is, depressingly, true, not that my British-authored history books ever told me that.) It's as if the entire culture has a sunny cheerful middle-class mindset that takes no account of things outré and tanbiesque, or rather keeps them neatly put away in the drawer labelled outré and tanbiesque, to be brought out at need and for the most utilitarian of purposes. ('It's so hot. Let me tell you a nice ghost story so we'll all shiver and cool off.') 

I blame Confucianism for this, a pedestrian mindset if ever there was one. I cannot make my dragons totally Confucianist, or possibly even Confucianist at all. They become utter bores when I do. To have a sexual side to them I need to import those Japanese emotional ties and the yappari rather adolescent sexual attitude of the Japanese, that can sexualize everything because it's still in the middle of puberty. And then add something western to counterbalance the very unerotic adolescence of Japanese sexuality. (I don't care what Tanizaki says. It's a country without shadows, or cultural shadows, and you can't have eroticism as a westerner envisages it without shadows. Sexuality, yes. Eroticism, no.) (Actually Japan can be very erotic, but not when it's trying to be, if you follow. I can get quite squishy thinking about mist rising from the lines of mountains or the unwet rains of autumn or the mild cold of a winter night. Keigo does odd things to me, and mothers talking to their kids, and of course shoujo manga. But the minute Japan realizes this is about *sex*, back it goes to being a 14 year old boy, and trots out the lipstick and garterbelts.)

China has some of the same problems as that. It's got a drawer for sexuality as well, and pulls the artefact out when needed, but it doesn't wear it all the time. Now for comparison purposes consider the French. For them sexuality is like perfume. You wear it always no matter what else you're doing- and if you're French you're probably keeping the books, or chopping onions, or something utterly mundane and middle-class like that. But all the time the odour is there, underlying everything else, and so it all feels different. Family relationships in France-- we won't talk about family relationships in France. Maybe my dragons are French after all- or letsay French out of a tanbi manga.

Sunday, February 23, 2003 

Shameless, shameless, the moonlight sleeping on the quiet lake
(burble burble natter talking to myself)
It's only at night that this story makes me cringe. In daylight it's just fine, which is an odd reversal of the usual. May be that I know, only too well, that this story is a head story that, you know, well- (can't you keep it in your pants?)- ought to be kept in the head. Night is the domain of head stories and the time I see the thing in its true colours. Day, I console me that it's not as glaringly obvious a head story as it might be. In the sun it might have some redeeming social value.

This however leaves me nothing to do at night but read and blog. I read more Arslan, and thank god as we approach the end of vol 7 Tanaka *finally* *for once* inserts the sort of thing that I'm used to finding in my gothic tanbiesque manga and djs. Andragoras and his brother killed their father. Yes, good, of course. Overwhelming and magnificently nasty guys always have killed their fathers. (Alexis just finished killing *his* father in Godchild 3.) And for why? Because Father demanded A's brother hand over his wife to him after a soothsayer told him his son and heir was sterile. Hence A's brother's son isn't- he's Andragoras' half-brother. A's brother begged him on his deathbed to kill the child. A did his best. 'Well, what family doesn't have its ups and downs?' Na foin, na foin, couldn't you have done that earlier, guy? No of course not. Had to stay the Big Bad Secret to be delivered with a flourish just after we discover what's up with Arslan's birth. Heigh-ho. And Andragoras is just as boringly muteki as Alexis. These invincible fathers. Pfui.

Pull out my Story of the Stone and run through that a bit. Discover yet another father getting it on with his daughter-in-law. This is getting to be an epidemic. Maybe I should go back to my other dragon story, about Goujun's father, who isn't about to go demanding his son's wife because royal dragons don't marry. They contract temporary alliances with the (much more powerful) female rulers of the fixed lands to gain offspring. Much more civilized.

Saturday, February 22, 2003 

Not sure how I feel about having a large billboard above Bloor St near Palmerston with the mummy of Seti I on it. For one thing, his eyes have been Photoshopped in, large and liquid- and blue as it happens- to illustrate how moist these contact lens will keep your eyes. For another, if you must have an Egyptian mummy, in colour yet, you can't do better than (or even nearly as well as) Seti I, who doesn't look terribly dead even if he has been for something over 3000 years. But there are tell-tale signs, like the missing lower left ear, and on the whole I can't help feeling there are other things I'd rather be looking at as I walk along Bloor St near Palmerston.

If the story isn't the point about Happy Honey (a title which gives me cold shivers right there) what /is/ the point? Is the artwork so beautiful as to compensate for such story and dialogue idiocy? It occurs to me that my own text scripts could read as witless, or nearly, to someone without the manga in front of them, and I'd never know because of course I do have the manga and its oh-so-convincing pictures in front of me.

Things I have learned from making sugarless meringues
1. Free-run egg yolks break more easily than battery hen egg yolks. Like, if you look at them.
2. Egg beaters do not whip into meringue.
3. Add anything to the egg whites and they won't whip. Add any kind of liquid to the beaten egg whites and they will deflate some. Add a heavier-than-sugar powder to the beaten egg whites and they will deflate considerably. There's supposed to be a way to make chocolate meringues but I think it involves having deflated meringues.
4. If you do it carefully you can make a very nice chocolate mousse substitute by adding diet cocoa mix to your beaten egg whites and eating them raw. This runs the risk of salmonella, true, so one probably shouldn't. But it's good and not nearly as heavy as the real thing. Yes, there's diet mousse mix. But the thing about sugar-free chocolate in the quantities those use is that it really upsets the stomach.

Translated a chunk of Arslan and a chunk of WA and read some PSoH and wrote some non-dragon gen and some quite mittomonai dragon smut and now feel much better. If I could just make myself finish Godchild 3 (kewl unbeatable!Alexis makes me want to do murder) half the monkeys would be gone from my back.

Friday, February 21, 2003 

Evaporation
It happens. It's been happening all my life. Something I like doing, something that interests me, something that gives me pleasure, will suddenly dry up and turn into air. Loses its colour and fascination and becomes in an instant Oh why bother? Tedious. A chore. Something I don't want to do.

It's called depression, I suppose, and this kind of debilitating low-grade version has dogged me as long as I can remember, like a recurring fever or a chronic physical condition that flares up from time to time, requiring bed rest and an absence from life. The babies alone have held out against it, though when I was working full-time the force of the 'I don't want to do this' could drown out even their charm. Japanese resists it best of everything else, but still has its moments when I just don't want to do that either.

Today suddenly I've been hit with an epic attack of it. I was writing a story- two stories- and suddenly I don't want to be writing either of them. What brought on the attack I think was E's translation of Happy Honey Life. We writers can take the witlessness of same-old-same-old BL situations and dialogue and give it a pleasing shape, or at least hide the worst of its offence. E is a doctor and never learned the trick, so the carbon copy idiocy of this manga in particular and of BL tropes in general is glaringly painful and unavoidable in her faithful English rendition. Unfortunately, I went from that to my stories and suddenly saw the carbon copy idiocy *there.* I've often been discouraged from writing by reading others' stories; but never before by a translation. A first, I suppose.

And I don't want to read, though I've got manga in both English and French from Incandescens if I don't feel like reading Japanese; and I don't want to translate, not Arslan certainly but not even WA; and I don't want to watch videos, not even FotR which has been enlivening my dinner hours. I want to go to bed, at 10 at night, which is unheard of and something I only do when I'm jetlagged and can't keep my eyes open, or depressed and don't want to keep my eyes open. (The boredom of depression is what's worst about it. Nothing you want to do, nothing that will give you pleasure. I can see why one would turn to drugs. Like sleep, it allows you to stop being you for a bit.)

The 18th century called this melancholy, and popular wisdom said the only cure for it was hard work. Do something, anything, and the paralysis will at least lift a little. Well, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. But I shall now go and see what reading French manga does to my mood, if anything.

Friday, February 21, 2003 

One either understands puritanism with the gut or one doesn't. I do. Irish influences in childhood. *Of course* breastfeeding in public is disgusting because you *know* that breast is naked under the blanket instead of being properly contained in a brassiere where it can't easily get out and attack your virtue. And because you know it's naked and you might see it you can't stop thinking about how it's naked and you might see it, since obsession is a basic part of puritanism too. Equally, breast-feeding is disgusting in the way defecation is disgusting. Bodies are disgusting. Ergo anything that comes out of bodies is disgusting, tears excepted maybe. You deal with body secretions privately where no-one can see and be reminded what animals we are really.

In a way I half-understand the male discomfort. Breasts are sexual objects to them, be-all and end-all, and suddenly they have to deal with them as not-sexual objects. Physical response and cultural conditioning don't make this easy, and it only gets worse when they *know* they should know better but don't have the practice. Our mothers breastfeeed their kids at pickup time a lot, and you do get the occasional father, poor guy, who doesn't quite know where to put his eyes when he comes to get his kid. Can't look at her but can't not look at her oh dear. Imagine being in a male nudist colony for an idea of similar discomfort.

Though this all reminds me of our reading club ages ago doing The Story of O, and Carol the librarian bouncing in and announcing happily, 'I'm naked under my clothes!' I hadn't quite registered what an idiotic line that is at the level of common sense, though at the puritan level it was perfectly rational. (You are wearing clothes therefore your body doesn't exist but if you are still aware of your body even with clothes on then indeed you are naked under your clothes.) Of course, as Kim said afterwards, 'I'm not sure Carol is.' There are indeed women who give the impression that they don't have bodies under their clothes. It's a high refinement of puritanism, to have internalized the anti-physical so completely that you deny what your body does and is even when it's there in front of you. I used to wonder how they had sex and children. Maybe they were indeed absent from their bodies for the experience. Or maybe, as I discovered from another friend of mine, they could allow the whole carnal side to exist so long as words were never applied to it. As long as it was something the voiceless body did on its own, the languaged (hence thinking and judging) brain never had to deal with it. But they died a thousand deaths if you so much as spoke the words to them. For them words are real and have power and make a thing undeniable. Whereas for me, words were abstract. One could talk about a thing in detail, and easily, that would have been a-thousand-deaths to have had to do.

Mittomonai
I'm a failure. I give up. I can't even write mittomonai smut when I want to. I was, I really was, going to write a masoppoi story where Goukou tears his rain dragon youngest brother off a strip for the fictional equivalent of flooding my basement. I wound up writing a story of Goukou's conception and childhood that only narrowly missed having little Goujun watching even littler Gouen crawl across the floor in dragon sleepers a size too large and all wrinkly in the leg. Sheesh.

Thursday, February 20, 2003 

To answer your question, Americans are too prudish. Nakedness bothers the culture, or rather male nakedness does. When they show a baby, it has to be female so you see nothing of the genitals. I remember my teenaged shock at a French magazine with an article about possible innate sexual differences in the brain or something, that had a naked young toddler jumping on the cover, all of maybe 14 months, with his little chinchin bouncing in the air. You wouldn't see that over here. Penises are deemed offensive by definition.

Add to that the paranoia about kiddy porn, which means that anything that even remotely suggests a sexual scenario sends them into panic mode, and you can see why father and son wriggling under the covers (on top of an *inkstone*, which strikes me as terribly uncomfortable) would never be shown. Neither would dad and son at the sento, and god forbid it should be dad and little daughter. A three year old girl in a room full of naked men? Masaka.

But thanks for the info. This is obviously what Hatsu Akiko was on about in her Rainywillow Antique Store, where inanimate objects like kimono have picked up enough of their owners' spiritual essence from contact with them to become animate, or at least animate enough to miss their owners and occasionally to go looking for them. And I see it's something that I've always felt myself without knowing what it was. The reason why I prefer to get my china and my furnishings at yardsales and occasionally from the gomi is that something someone else has owned feels different- more interesting, if nothing else- than stuff bought new. It's not like it's a personal possession to which something of the other person's personality clings. It's a set of plates, about which one thinks as much as one normally does about a set of plates, which is not much. But somebody else used it, and it lived in their house, and so it feels different.

Wednesday, February 19, 2003 

Here we go down the slippery slope, slippery slope, slippery slope
Looking for blogs to amuse me instead of doing the fifteen things I could be doing. Knew this would happen. L- I keep mine in a file called Egoboo. FWIW people wax more enthusiastic over stories than translations. Be grateful if you get even a 'thanks' for a translation. The Entitled assume translating isn't work but something we do casually and without thought and not nearly enough of given that it's so simple. Writing, they think, is work, so they say nice things about it. Life is unfair.

Tuesday, February 18, 2003 

Messing about with dragons. Just... messing about with dragons.
Who are traditionally associated with water. Hence the rushing sound of water I heard this evening, which was not next-door taking a shower and never is, but a pipe in the basement that had frozen and broken and was trying to flood my house and being defeated, fortunately, by the highly illegal floor drain in the laundry room. Looked at it blankly and went into female mode ie called cheer freer at work and said What do I do now? Call a plumber, he said, and make sure they get the right shutoff valve from the street. Which proves even older brothers can fall out of trees. The correct answer, which I got from The-Arm-And-A-Leg guy after the other two were busy or not answering, is Turn off the internal shut-off valve. And I *still* went internal shut-off I know not of internal shut-off valves oh please come soon. Five minutes later the lightbulb went on and I said oh *that* internal shut-off, the one I had replaced at great cost last spring because the old one had rusted into unmovable Open-ness. And turned it off. Was pleased that I had it replaced because I could indeed turn it off, but on balance and $400 later am less than pleased that my new copper piping froze (the ancient corroded stuff never did) on a night which isn't that far below freezing and only because the thermostat was set at 59 because I was warm and snug in my Korean bankies and didn't need heat. 'Only connect.' However this minor crisis has put me in the mood to write a dragon story where a certain overly-enthusiastic water dragon gets his butt beat but good by his kind but firm older brother after he causes a flood somewhere.

Paint bucket, incidentally, responds, if grudgingly, to both L and K's suggestions. Thank you. It's still immensely fiddly work, recolouring Minekuran hair.

Wandered down to Bloor St to see if the Koreans had Korean blankets. They didn't, though one shop is getting *Japanese* blankets in in a few days. 'But not thick- very thin- wool. And small size.' I think I know what she means. Small, indeed. So went along to our local dollar store and there by god was a Korean blanket. One only, with a dreadful kitsch pattern of a pile of puppy dogs in a dazzling array of colours- lavender and red and brown and green and gold. But I took it. It's a Korean blanket. The other side is goldy abstract flowers with a barbaric red border that pleases me, even though the puppy dog side has a wider band of red. I'm wrapped in it now and toasty warm. K-chan, see if you can find the kind that's made into a coat, with sleeves, perfect for sitting in. Or would be perfect if it had a hood, because keeping the head and neck warm was one of those details the Japanese never grasped. Always makes me wince when I see someone in bed in the jidai-geki, covered all nicely up to mid-chest and then with their neck and the v of the chest bare to the unheated winter air because they're wearing a night kimono of course. No wonder everyone died of TB and pneumonia.

All the pretty little dragons
Stayed up to 3 wouldn't you know it playing with Photoshop and Goujun scans. Got a Goukou who half pleases me, but Goushou is a bitch, largely because Photoshop doesn't want to give me the red I need, and I don't understand the real function of paintbucket. It colours the black portions. I want it to colour the white ones, and do it delicately. We continue our dialogue.

Of course, all the drawings of Goujun make him look like he's sucking on a lemon. Giving a more genial expression to his brothers' faces is proving to be a matter of sheer blind luck.

Monday, February 17, 2003 

Fuwafuwa
So I am walking up Yonge St, she begins Runyonesquely, after two hours in the dentist's chair during which Dr. Mah turned a perfectly good tooth into a rough square block in order to anchor two false teeth to it sometime in future, which is all well and good but I wish people would *tell* me these things in advance so I could have said a proper good-bye to my old friend when I had the chance. No doubt there are people who can lose teeth they've had since they were seven and not feel the slightest twinge of nostalgia, whatever else may be twinging, but I'm not one of them. I'm surprised Dr. Mah should be so insensitive on that point when he's so very sensitive on all the others. Always tells you the injection will pinch a little- well yes, needles do, it needs no ghost come from the grave etc etc, but it's still nice of him.

If you want proof that women go by what they hear more than what they see, you may consider me and accents. Dr. Mah grew up out west somewhere- Calgary, Edmonton- and sounds like anyone who grew up out there as far as vowels and so on are concerned, though his voice is softer and more agreeable than the average run of Albertans one knows. (Preston Manning, Ralph Klein...) Ergo as far as my basic reflexes are concerned Dr. Mah is no more Asian than I am. Or as Asian. Whichever. Besides when a man habitually covers half his face with a gauze mask he could be virtually anything and how'd you know? (His predecessor, Dr. Hori, was somebody I could pass on the street without recognizing and have, because I never saw him without his.) But today in the middle of grinding and packing gums and doing these other unintimate intimate things, he paused to consider one of my crowns that wasn't doing what it was supposed to. Pulled down his mask and frowned (most unusually) at the x-ray with a face indicative of professional dissatisfaction. And I was moved to contemplate that the man is not only Asian, not only Chinese, but definitely biseinen. Definitely. And really, if one is having one's mouth pulled at by strange men, soft-voiced biseinen Chinese men from Alberta are the best ones to do it. Sight and hearing are both well satisfied, whatever may be happening to sensation and taste.

However it's not Dr. Mah who is fuwafuwa, or not much. So I am walking up Yonge St and I pass a dollar store and the dollar store has Korean blankets. They're Korean because they were made in Korea and for all I know the first one I had was too, but all *I* know is I bought it in Fukushima to get me through those cold Tohoku nights, and it did, and came to Tokyo with me still fluffy and soft but *heavy* and shared all my nights thereafter till I went home. They feel like fur. They feel almost as soft as my mother's otter coat which had soft fur four inches thick at least, but no semi-rodents died of electro-shock to the anus to make these. It was $40 and is a double, while my Fukushima one cost half as much again a dozen years ago and was a single. I want two more, one for the sofa and one for the study and one for sleeping on-not-under when the really chilly winds do blow. 

Considering dragons. The problem I realize- have realized for some time- is a basic fannish one that might have occurred to me earlier. I don't know what Goujun's brothers look like, and being a fanwriter I've *always* known what my characters look like. I'm flying blind, as it were. If I were any good at Photoshop I could muck about with scans of him and produce blue, red and black versions of same to guide me, but I'm useless with Photoshop. (People actually *draw* in that thing? With a mouse? In god's name, how?) But as it is, I'm imprinted on the original Saiyuki dragons and keep wanting to see people in Manchu costume with dragon heads that look a little like sea horses. Whereas I need to be seeing things that look like youkai only hotter, and it isn't happening.

(Correctly, Ottawan. Colloquially, 'someone from Ottawa.' ^_^)

Sunday, February 16, 2003 

Who from a safe height views the sea perils of others
Flurries, no more. Everyone else is getting the blizzard of '99 as well as the PQ icestorm of the same year. Schadenfreud rules OK. It is of course what a Trawntonian calls forking freezing out there AKA a mild afternoon in Calgary. Is why it isn't snowing heavily. Too cold.

I have the itch in the soul that comes of not writing a story. This is what happens when I try to avoid mittomonainess. I get into toad sulk mode where I don't want to do anything. Email, translation, reading. Hate it. Hate it. But the story isn't worth writing in the first place. 

Sunday, February 16, 2003 

Yawn
Or we could just kick all the egocentric testosterone-crazed origional Big Swinging Trolls off the ML. (blowing smoke from gun barrel) 'Things'll be a lot quieter in this town from now on.'

Saturday, February 15, 2003 

In the heavens a high wind

One of these years I will dig out my copy of Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain and verify who wrote the haiku that ends with that line. I like it for very many reasons, but today I'm using it with what IIRC is something close to the function it has in the novel, though I could never see how it did, as a disparaging comment about unbecoming behaviour in people old enough to know better. To wit:

I wish to be shameless. I am inhibited from being shameless. I do not wish to be inhibited from being shameless. I wish to shamelessly write yet more masoppoi dragon smut with wildly out of character Goujuns of my own invention. I'm not doing it, even as the bunnies gnaw at my shin and snitter Write us write us o you mite! I shall think less of myself if I do. Equally I shall be sad when the bunnies give up and go home. Two alternatives, both bad. Le sigh. In the heavens a high wind.

I have a superstitious belief that if I could find the book that has the story about the girl whose spirit stays at home while her body goes eloping my creative problems would be solved. There is no such book in my house, and memory stubbornly insists that it was Tales of a Ming Storyteller I read, *yes* in that large-format Penguin edition, and finished with a feeling of Is that all there is aren't there any more, and put away on the shelf. As one looks again and again in the same coat pocket or backpack for the missing keys or addressbook that ought to be there but clearly aren't but you have to keep checking just in case they've you know come back, so I keep looking in Tales to see if the story really isn't there after all. It isn't.

At the mall yesterday (it tickles me to call it the mall because it's in the heart of downtown and two subway stops away, but you know- it's an urban mall) to get K's bras I stopped by HMV and found hey happy FotR on video in stock for paltry sum. Take it to cashier, who asks Wouldn't you like the complete version for only another three bucks? Yes I would thank you kindly for mentioning it. Have been watching it in snatches today. Never did see it on a big screen and don't think I could take it in that format. Even seen on my too small TV screen through the annoying rectangular keyhole dictated by the widescreen original it's overwhelming. So very very Otherwhere in such very otherwhere colours. A view into another world, like Sen to Chihiro, but scarier. But also quite happy-making, to be able to see it both again (after a year) and at last (because it looks like the book I read when I was 16.)

Helen tomorrow. A nice change after three consecutive Sundays of Shaked (not stirred. No really, that's how they write her name, and I hope they either learn to spell it Shach'ed or something or go back to Israel before she starts school. Else the kid will have a desperately miserable life.) Nothing against S herself, who's a bright 13 month old. But she doesn't know me and I spent most of the day convincing her I was really a Nice Person even if I was keeping her away from her aba. Helen already knows I'm a Nice Person and will happily wave both her aba and her eim out the door if I'm there.

Saturday, February 15, 2003 

Sweet Hakuryuu sidestories
Here.

Friday, February 14, 2003 

(later)
Sadly- I *said*, don't make me a liar. Ah well. I give you best, K-chan. The man is an ijjit. Were he female, I would suspect hormones in either excess or deficiency, but as it is...
I go to translate sweet Hakuryuu sidestories to take the taste away.

(earlier)
The one thing about the gentleman in question is that he *is* a gentleman and will play by his and my generation's rules. (Kindly do not make a liar out of me, sir.) Naturally he steps onto the thin ice of near-offence occasionally. So do I when I'm taking people apart onlist. The game is one of seeing how close you can come to saying <content= U SUK> without overstepping the rule against flames. The goal being to enrage without giving any cause for complaint. So far he's batting six for six, I believe is how they score cricket. First person to yell at him gives him the over on a platter, so don't do it.

'A shounen manga hero is something to be...'
I was being unfair to Gokuu. He pulls himself from catalepsy because Kou is about to go make mincemeat of the little kid. 'A monkey don't know what he can do till he has to.' Of course he can still stand and still throw people into mountains, which is annoying. His strength is still as the strength of ten, and wouldn't it be nice if a chara somewhere and for once discovered that physical strength isn't the be-all and end-all? 

On the plus side, while Gokuu would presumably always have gone to protect little kids about to be ripped apart by bar-coded youkai princes, there are hints in this story of Gokuu growing up and doing the things he's depended on other people to do for him before, which is all very nice I suppose. True, he'll grow up into Gojou without the angst that gives him his (occasional) maturity, but shou ga nai. Gokuu isn't Minekura's avatar, actually. In that series, pretty obvously Kanzeon Bousatsu is. (Or is she the authorial self-insert?) Minekura's true avatar is Kubota Makoto from either EC or WA. All shounen-drawing female mangaka may want to be guys in their hearts, but Minekura is a horse of a different cruller. I think she imprinted on a real guy. Something Sabina said once, about M's characters making you suspect that Minekura has real male friends. She did and does, including assistants, if those names aren't pseudonyms.

I will note, for the sake of noting, that not reading blogs still doesn't save me from epic attacks of misanthropy. If we all die of botulism in the next weeks, my only thought is that it couldn't happen to a more unlikable lot of vile worms. Why must people be people, and isn't there something we can do about it? preferably less permanently than botulism does?

Thursday, February 13, 2003 

Ah. It's only Feb 13. I thought it was Valentine's Day today for some reason. Because Sophie Lou, Chloe's sister, asked me 'What are you doing for Valentine's Day' as she was leaving, perhaps. 'Nothing, Lou-lou. I am profoundly unloved.' 'You know that's not true,' her mother said. Let's say, I am profoundly unloved by people with the wherewithal to take me out to dinner, though they will very generously wipe their lunches all over my front.

I had my new garbage pail stolen, after having the old one stolen. Someone on my street can't resist little white garbage pails. So Monday I bought a humoungous big thing from Home Hardware, grumbling that my old one had been stolen to the young female salesclerk. (Why I like our local Home Hardware- it covers the waterfront people-wise. *And* the black gay guy who's been there since '85 at least *and* the pony-tailed guy with the Japanese tattoos on his arm *and* the long-haired Chinese guy who's also been there 15 years *and* the peach-cheeked kid on Saturdays who I think is the original founder's grandson and not even born when the black guy started working. Nice Jewish family business with an excellent idea of what sort of neighbourhood it's located in.)

Anyway, clerk says kindly Would you like to mark your address on it? and gives me heavy-duty magic marker to do so. Put garbage out in it last night, take it in this morning, realize I wrote my address as 534 Clinton. So now everyone will think I stole my garbage can from the nice guy down the street with the two kids who brings me my misaddressed mail as well.

Wednesday, February 12, 2003 

Murmel murmel murmel went the fangirl 
The March ZS came today after someone on the ML provided the link to Kagenami's spoiler scans, and a good thing too. Saved from mittomonai wailing about 'the woman tempted me and I did look' which otherwise I'd be doing loudly. I take responsibility for most of my own idiocies, but being offered spoilers and looking at them always feels like I've been had in some obscure fashion. 

They're good spoilers, the kind that simultaneously give you a shock of joy and the sickening certainty that you'll die if you can't see the whole thing and *soon*, which is the purest essence of the fannish experience. Fieri sentio et excrucior- I feel it is thus and I suffer in agony. And anyone who's reading this and hasn't seen the eps in question, there are spoilers below so go no farther. 

So the Gaiden ep has a fair amount of Goujun in it, which is nice, except that it reminds me that my Goujun isn't this guy at all. Now I want to write that Goujun, the one terribly surprised at having Tenpou's sword at his throat. Who may walk out a hostage and decide on balance he'd rather be with his captors than Back There and do the Gojou Tsurette-ke routine. This would rejoice the fangirls, and me too, but I don't see it. Too romantic for Minekura. Or he may, as Incandescens says, get killed by Litouten's soldiers as collatoral damage to taking out the Konzen-tachi. Which may happen, though we've got a few loose ends to tie up first, most especially the wild card of undiademmed Gokuu. We wait with pleasant anticipation to see what transpires.

And try to restrain annoyance with the main episode, where Kou does indeed wipe the floor with Gokuu, who has his arm broken and can't move and is seriously kerblonxed until little youkai goes Ganbatte nii-chan! at which Gokuu naturally but of course is able to get to his feet and throw Kou against a mountain side with his broken arm. Of course. His strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure, and if there's anyone I want to buy it in Saiyuuki it'd probably be Gokuu now, but it won't happen. Ever. Minekura will kill off Kou because she can, for cheap-weep effects, and the unbearably smug Sanzou-tachi will continue on to the west, and who will care a bit about them? Not me. Self-sufficient and unlikable dweebs, and bad cess to them all.

Monday, February 10, 2003 

I am mortified. Catullus 43. (meekly) Thank you, Lynda. Saeclum, not saeculum. What a difference a u makes.

Monday, February 10, 2003 

O dull and tasteless age
Some Germans, talking on a German ML about things I can only guess at because my German died a long time ago, and who would no more identify a common classical tag than I would attribute a quotation from Shakespeare, finally scratch the worst of my itch. O saeculum insapiens et infacetum, is how it goes. I don't know who said it, because their conversation is the only place it occurs on the net, which at least puts Whoever one up on George Barker. Obviously not Horace and possibly not Martial, but also not someone too obscure or I'd never have read it in the first place.

Funny I should remember it at all, because classical Latin poetry never stayed in my head. Too artificial. The Latin I remember best is jolly and medieval:

Meum est propositum in taberna mori
Ut sint vina proxima morientis ori
Tunc cantabunt laetior angelorum chori
'Deus sit propitius huic potatori.'

(Little did the the nuns know who taught me to memorize rhymed verse almost by instinct, to what uses I would put it.) (Note also that I typed that Desu by reflex.) 'I intend to die in a tavern so that the wine will be right next to my dying mouth, and the angels will sing all the more happily, God have mercy on this drunkard.'

Google is wonderful. You just have to approach it with the right question, like the Delphic oracle. But now I have the words- or some words- to a song by someone called Juan del Encina back in the 14th century, that Victoria de los Angeles (and no, no reason why you should know who she is either) sang on a record a friend of mine had way back when that I've never been able to locate since. Would that I had a sound card and speakers, because then I could hear it-- and figure out for myself if my first understanding of it (that it was a pastoral about a poor shepherd) was really off the wall, or if the lyrics given are the religious version instead.

(No, no, dear, the right question. Not Ay triste que vengo, but Ay triste que vengo vencido. That's the one gives you:

Ay triste que vengo vencido de amor,
magüera, pastor. 
Más sano me fuera no ir al mercado 
que no que viniera tan aquerenciado 
que vengo cuitado, vencido de amor, magüera pastor,

instead of

¡Ay triste que vengo
vencido de amor,
aun siendo el Señor!)

Sorry for the wankery. Just making notes for my own reference, so I can sing the fecking thing when I want to. 

Saturday, February 8, 2003 

Dragon smut
For those that like such things.
Here. (Adoption)

Friday, February 7, 2003 

Cruel to be kind
(Note that the following was written with a sinus headache. I then lay down for a bit, slept from 8 till midnight, got up, got undressed, and slept from 12:30 till 10. All things connect.)

Am I aware that I've made sentimental sadism the foundation of dragon sexual dynamics? Well yes. It's not the sort of thing you can be *un*aware of, unless you're fifteen or so. Now ask me if I think it likely. Not particularly. I just happen to be in the mood for some altruistic hurting. It's a variant on Joanna Russ' attitude that when you're in pain anyway, you might as well get some fun out of it. ('I knew I was being hurt and I knew I was being hurt for no reason, so the least I could do was make it erotic.') Mine is the more general line that since pain is always there, might as well make it a vehicle of caring as well. The other way of redeeming that nasty inevitability. (Why is pain always there? Why is the sky blue? Answer: it isn't, it only looks that way, but it's a very convincing illusion.)

If only translating took me as far away from myself and the world as writing smut does. I fail even to notice that I'm drinking flat lime Perrier and that I have cramps. That's away. Equally, nothing makes the daily frets look small and insignificant like trying to renegotiate one's household insurance premiums. There are people who handle insurance for a living, ce qui est une grande preuve de la melancolie de la vie.

Where was the Gaiden, btw?

Friday, February 7, 2003 

at a time of wankers/ to exercise a little charity
(bankers, you twit.)

No-one has George Barker's Anno Domini online, which is a pity, but sorts with what the articles say about him being a neglected poet. This, one likes to think, is what happens to men who are unkind to women. Barker made Elizabeth Smart miserable, with Elizabeth Smart's full co-operation, and now no-one has his poems where I can cut and paste. A nuisance. Shall have to excerpt with my three typing fingers instead. (Also he indents. I hate indenting in html.)

at a time of bankers
             to exercise a little charity; 
at a time of soldiers
            to cultivate small gardens;

is how it starts, and goes on for a thin booklet's length.

           Turn your hand not away
from the wilfully unemployed
            because they employ the state
as not from those whom the state
            only too wilfully employs

or else

Illusions have spoken the truth in obscure language
            about matters we cannot speak of at all.
I mean the death of the heart
            that does not know it is dead because
it continues to suffer
            and like a headless chicken stalks around
bleeding Chinese ideograms signifying Pity
            down the garden path.

Or

Let who will lay upon the stone
            of the run-over child a wreath
inscribed: Dei voluntas. I will not, for there is a mystery here
            not given to any, yet, to understand
The printed shadows of Hiroshima, do they
            point their evaporated hands at us
or you? How could it have been you?
            This is a thing so evil that
it could have come from nowhere save a mind
            capable of inventing the idea of evil.

And finally

                        ...May all Mycenean 
mountains remind us that over
            the darkest of caves and crimes
as over the violent lives of violent men
            the great white clouds of summer, like
compassion may sometimes, sooner
            or later, pass in a silent
propitiation.

Thursday, February 6, 2003 

But how can a dragon flirt? How can he make love? The most he can say is, 'I will see you in my office after call-over"

From which you may deduce that I lack a proper handle on the why of Goujun and Tenpou part 2. Part 1 was easy. I cheated. Goujun wasn't Goujun. In part 2 Goujun must be Goujun, the one we know from the Gaiden, and Tenpou must be at least one of the Tenpous on display in the Gaiden; but those two being as they are I'm encountering the direst warning signal a yaoi writer can hear. Both my protagonists are *talking.* Much too much too much. 

Now I'll concede a dragon who copulates according to the 64 Forms, meaning he uses some of his brain during the exercise until the exercise tells him You are permitted to stop thinking at this point, may well be disposed to converse in the early stages. And I assume an eccentric and scholarly Marshal who's in this situation out of curiosity as to what it involves exactly may also be disposed to converse, even if it's more on the practical What's this for? lines. (Followed by Don't touch me theres!) But how one gets from all this pleasant chat to presumably equally pleasant copulation is giving me trouble. Myself I have no problems with dragons who talk before, during and after. They've made it an artificial activity in many ways, why not add the discipline of talk to the thing?  But that's not where the western mind expects the story to go. Can one have sex if *not* swept away by passion/ gonadal response at some point? Can I convey that this chattiness is a (pedantic) dragonish habit and not a middle-aged female one? I'm afraid my readers will be as confused by the non-human-male sexual response of dragons as they are by my dragon family hierarchies, which are perfectly straightforward to *me.* First older brother, second older brother, third brother. 'What part of this sequence do you fail to understand?' So. Mmhhh. 

But it's cold again, and clear, which is good envisioning dragons weather. New Years was grey and raw and above freezing, under a brown and oppressive sky. Sunday was mild and sunny, pleasant but not that hard-edged keenness. But after the temperatures nosedived Tuesday afternoon and all the melt snapped to glare ice, back we were again in those blue skies and meringuey white clouds of February, the days and nights like jewels. So good luck to me tomorrow.

Wednesday, February 5, 2003 

What Songs the Mermaids Sang
I should like to know that one because it applies to so many of my little friends. As it is I only know the Hostile Baby Rocking Song. ('hostile' modifying 'song', not 'baby.')

So this is the day we give babies away
With a half a pound of tea
You know any ladies who want any babies
You send them along to me
And here is the way we give babies away
With a half a pound of tea
You open the lid and you take out the kid
With a written guarantee...

One has to stop singing this when they hit 15 months or so and understand what you're saying. Meanwhile it transpires that Helen's mother too accidentally rented her the video of Madeleine Sold Into White Slavery. Unlike Isabel, who dotes on it in morbid three year old fashion, Helen was quite upset by, as her mother says, this actually very evil situation.

As for unauthorized translations- my pragmatic response is that when there's a translation available, fans will buy the Japanese tank, so the purpose of what we do is to sell works for the author. (Though I was pleased by Emi's news that most mangaka find the phenomenon of fan translation charming and/ or amusing.) My unpragmatic bloody-minded response is that I am a pirate and will out cutlasses and board anything I want that heaves within my range. No, I wil not ask a mangaka may I do a fan-translation of her work because if she says no, that's it, no translation and no possibility of increasing her western readership or conveying to the unJapanesed just *why* this is an amazing work. And if she says no she's probably saying it from a misunderstanding of the situation, which is doubly galling. Don't ask, don't tell, is my motto. Someone wants to out cutlasses and board me, let them. No-one has but a group of Chinese fen who translated the AnK article into very weird Chinese, because Brit-Canuck stylistic jokes won't go into an Asian mindset.

God bless Postini. 59 spam messages and a virus painlessly removed from my cognizance. All those guys who bought the random generator software have yet to figure out that any spam filter will remove anything containing random collections of letters in the subject line. There's one born every minute.

Monday, February 3, 2003 

I wake up to the sound of music
I wake up these days in Elsewhere. I dream almost every night, and the half-images and the sense of dislocation- the return from the journey- stay with me as I come out into Here. This is a winter phenomenon, I think, that goes with windows locked tight and the air filter on and the outside street noises dampened by snow and other things (like cold, that keeps my hearty neighbours off their front porches.) I love it more than I can say. One of those seasonal gifts.

Thanks to it I now know what the ghost story I want to write is about, only to my dismay I realize I need to know mmensely more about Chinese popular literature than I do. I need a locus classicus about young lovers, something besides The Butterfly Lovers or The Everlasting Wrong which are the only ones I can think of off-hand. And I need to know if there's any similar romantic work about male lovers. Ahem- Mimi, give me a call when you get back.

Sunday, February 2, 2003 

January is always a long month. I don't know why and I wish I did, so I could make the other months be equally as long. January is the only month that's still a decent length, like in my 30's. February is too at times, and March occasionally. After that you're in fast forward.

It might be leftover Christmas season dislocation, ten days approx of Things Different. Christmas is always slow and boring, one has to say. Those doldrums could slop over into the new year. But every week of this month has been different from the others except in terms of weather. Every week has seen me doing different things, and the different things feel /different/ even though they're really quite mundane- wrote a pastiche, saw a film, went to the dentist, wrote a story, translated ZS, wrote another story, translated WA... But even that's unusual. I wrote three stories this month. Four, actually. Where did I get the time? Normally a story takes me two months if not more. Not blogging helped, and not reading blogs helps, but who'd have thought the hours and half hours would add up to such a total of accomplishment?

Reading has suffered. I bought The Golden Compass from the Koreans (I *live* in Korea-town, 'the Koreans' could be any one of five stores minimum, but it's actually the Milk Koreans at Palmerston) because I always wonder who buys the books the Koreans (all of them) stock; but it's not a compulsive page-turner. My HS best friend recc'd it perhaps eight years ago- while I was still in Japan, I believe- but the tachiyomi skim I did didn't impress. So- yeah. It sits in the backpack. Bunch of reproachful half-started manga- Godchild 3, PSoH 3 (I'll need it more later), My Mountain Taoist Lover and Diablo 2 (both by Minami Megumu who can get wordy to no purpose when she's not off the erotic wall ie hanging upside down from the chandelier by her heels.) I just don't want to face the fact that I'm going blind. I could read a tank in a morning seven years ago, and cannot now. My Japanese cannot have gotten worse, ergo...

Saturday, February 1, 2003 

The Wicked Cease From Troubling and the Weary Are At Rest
Was pleased that the threatening snit today passed off into Daoistic serene acceptance of the universe and a very good mood after my cheerful garage renter Vince came by to pay me for February and TTG sent me a story, always two nice things to happen on a day. Then I realized that Daoistic acceptance was getting a little boost from the two ativan for that nerve pinched down my leg. No wonder I'm happy. Tomorrow I shall not be. Tomorrow I shall be exhausted, trying to keep a small girl who doesn't know me occupied while her Dad writes his thesis proposal just down the hallway. Sigh. Maybe I'll reacquire an interest in Goujun's sexual life, but writing same all day has rather umm surfeited me for the continuation. Need a good ghost story to write, that's what.

A Fic with a View
Agh. The idiocies of idiotic people return to plague me. One can be quit of fandom's ninnies by not reading them, at which point they simply... cease to exist. ("You're nothing but a pack of bytes," said Alice.) RL ninnies, especially work-related ninnies, will not go away so easily. So one must leave them.

This I can do. My version of the good book to live in is the ongoing story to write. The minute I walk out of the building, even if it's on a break, back I am among dragons watching the action happen, looking to see what comes next, sometimes hearing passages replay with variations in my head. At night I dream dragons, very oddly, because I've never done that before. (And in last night's dream Goujun was the caretaker at a daycare borrowed largely from the sento in Sen to Chihiro, and suffering from indigestion according to the daycare secretary- glimpse of the white and red figure in overalls in his wire-mesh-glassed cubicle, popping Tums.)

This stative and- what's the word? locative sense of story, as of a place one lives, wars a little with the writerly sense of a story to tell. If I tell my story there's no place for me to live any more and I'll have to find another. One doesn't want to get to the end of a locative story, and observes its approach with dismay. But this might be close to what Sabina means about liking to write her stuff as opposed to reading her stuff, which she hates. It's the process which is soothing. (Can be. Rarely is, because writerly instincts rule OK and one needs to tell the story more often than one wants to live in the process of writing it.) The present case is the process at its best- a good story that does enough arbitrary twists on its own to satisfy me ('tell me something I don't know' is a demand I make of my own stories as well as other people's, and I must say, my stories do it at least as often as other people's, which is cheering) and a feeling that I'm also doing something new or newish (oh yes- 'do something I can't do' is also a demand I make of my stories, with much less frequent success.) A story that, pace Sabina, I'll want to read when it's done, and one that I'm not writing just for the analgesic process of writing itself. 

This kind of balance doesn't happen very often. Usually one or the other element gets out of whack ('yeah you wrote this story and it was nice while it lasted but so what?' or 'this story hates me it won't go where I want it to go, or anywhere else' or 'this story is a slog, there's no leaps here, I have to walk every bloody step of the way to get to the end and frankly I'm not even sure the journey's worth it in the first place.') So I shall be grateful for this interlude and grateful for my dragons, and not repine when both are done and I face the blank 'what next?'

Thursday, January 30, 2003 

Verweile doch! du bist so schön! 

Stay for a moment, you are so beautiful. I believe that was what Goethe's Faust could stay immortal as long as he didn't say. (I have a translation of Faust, you know. I bought it around 1979. Some day I might even read it instead of doing the 'And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway' routine.) It's an injunction to enjoy the moment's pleasure but not try to keep it, which is Zen wisdom, though I don't know if Zen appreciates the moment's *pleasure* exactly. And it seems odd to find it a part of a western pact with the devil, but oh well. The fact that I always hear it as Bugs Bunny doesn't help- Ennnh, verweile, Doc. Do bist so shane- but it will do for the present purpose, which is to heave a small sigh at the passing of January and the bright cold days and my happy doped world of the Dragon Kings. February still has its wintertime clarity and certainty, if one is lucky; but the altered and certain vision of 292s is gone forever, and I'm back to being Just A Fanwriter wrestling with a balky story.

(Oh and while we're at it, the smut story needs an ending. A sentence would do. This is like Paris, that remained unfinished two weeks because I couldn't think of a sentence to end it with. Something, anything, that isn't just my dragons having breakfast together under the indulgent and unforgivably self-satisfied eye of their older brother.)

Wednesday, January 29, 2003 

And said what a good boy am I

Did WA translation, scanned the idiot illos, go me. No time for dragon kings fic before bed, so I will do Dragon Kings blog.

My mind is relentlessly puritan, alas. Fine to write yaoi when I'm writing a yaoi story, but there I was wanting brother yaoi in my Gaiden story and my mind simply said You can't. Why not? Because there's no room for it in this story. It's an unnecessary intrusion. Now send Goujun back to Heaven where he can have his little yaoi interlude with Tenpou, and don't be tiresome.

The assumption being, if you hadn't noticed, that anything and everything is appropriate to a story- descriptions of food and weather and clothes and people's posture- but sex belongs in a subuniverse of its own. Descriptions of rain-washed rose gardens do not constitute intrusions, but descriptions of sexual activity are. Yet both are included for their own sake- truly, my rain-washed rose gardens, when I have them, add nothing to the plot or even the atmosphere. I just want a rain-washed rose garden for the pleasure of it. And I want brotherly sex for the pleasure of that.

So Goujun goes back to Heaven and I start writing him yielding to Tenpou's blandishments but, really, why should he have another yaoi interlude with Tenpou? Why would Tenpou practise blandishments in the first place? Merely some more egregious yaoi. So I scrap that scene too, because it's not working. At which point, why write the story at all, because there's basically no story to write. 

The problem was that Goujun was supposed to leave his brothers very much at odds with them and find his new and proper place with the kami, expressed in the person of, and represented by a little sexual congress with, Tenpou. Well, fine, except that Goujun's brothers insisted on being the essence of sweet reason and understanding. They wouldn't storm at him and threaten disinheritance and tell him begone like I wanted them to. And then I realized this is because our view of Goujun, and Goujun's view of Goujun, isn't his brothers' view of Goujun and isn't in fact the whole story at all. We see him as moral and upright and punctilious and admirable and a touch stick-up-arse, and Goujun sees himself as much the same, bar the stick-- dragon of the dragons, very serious and always aware of what's proper. His brothers see him as young. Craving activity and change, curious, a doer and not a thinker. 'Let the boy have his head,' they're more or less thinking when they agree to let him go back to that unstable and unchancy place Heaven.

This pleases me, for many reasons. It ties in with what I observed about the way Goujun's drawn in the scene where he meets Tenpou in the hallway. He looks young there, no other word for it. It pleases me because it references my younger brother without screwing up the settei ('He's the youngest, isn't he?' someone asked me, and I said No, my sister is, and Someone said 'Yes, she's the last, but he's the youngest, right?' Right.) And it pleases me because I can go and write my brotherly yaoi, and with any luck Goujun will get pissed off about *that* and go off in a low-grade snit to Heaven to discover who his real friends are. The only drawback is that the settei requires Tenpou to be seme to Kenren or risk shocking Goujun's youthfully rigid notions of How It's Done. But that one can do. 

Tuesday, January 28, 2003 

The black water thing, you know- when unreality or impossibility or whatever leaks into your life and you think maybe you've fallen through one of the cracks in the universe into some kind of Elsewhere. (You don't know? Lucky you.) With me it usually has the feeling that I'm in a Borges story. Which is better than being in a ghost story or a horror story or a suspense story, if only because the wrongness is less cliched and probably less dangerous as well. But disconcerting, very. 

As in the latest. There's a famous Chinese story- not a ghost story exactly, but a weird tale- about, IIRC, a girl who elopes with her lover and marries him in a distant province and they have a family and all, until eventually filial piety gets the better of them and they return home to ask her parents' forgiveness. (This is a dangerous undertaking, by the way. In another story I read, in the same collection, a wastral son leaves home and gambles his money away and is rescued by a prostitute whom he marries and becomes a coolie or something, I think, to support her. He's recognized in the street by his father's old steward who happily takes him home to be reconciled to his father. Father has his worthless son flogged by the servants and left for dead. Story does have a happy ending, but still. Kids, do not try the Prodigal Son routine if you're Chinese.) 

Anyway, girl comes home and parents are amazed, because as far as they're concerned girl has /been/ at home these last five years, an invalid who took to her bed. Girl's spirit was so grieved at grieving her parents that it stayed with them even when she went away. Or something like that.

These stories were in a translation called Tales of a Ming Storyteller that I bought at a yard sale a dozen years ago or so, read, and put on shelf. I got it down the other day to look up the ghost-girl and how she managed to be in two places at the same time. The story isn't there. Neither is the story of the prodigal son. What's there is a bunch of murder mysteries and seduced wives I've never read before. There's no other book in my library that I could have confused with Tales of a Ming Storyteller. There are no other Chinese story collections period. The book must simply have changed its contents some time while I was in Japan. Which is very Borgesian of it, but still an infernal nuisance.

Tuesday, January 28, 2003 

Like it says. For social blogging and whining about my writing.

Without more ado, then-

Me, I'd cater.

(You know this feels like the slippery slope. It feels like the alcoholic who's been dry six months saying OK just one social drink. If my translation and email and writing suffer from this, I'm going back to abstinence. Just thought I'd let you know.)