Off the Cliff

Tuesday night I dreamed about H and her family leaving, all of us in tears and H a good ten years younger than she is, and their golden retriever running away and having to be corralled (except in RL they have two youngish... beagles, I think) and then riding with them part of their way, but we were in train tunnels that passed through bookstores, the larger than life shelves right by the windows, and the titles of Japanese books were flashing by and I thought 'Oh I wanted to read that one- and that-'

Woke to a cool placid Autumn Preview morning and daegaer talking about the Gaiden and suddenly it was a dozen or more years ago in the calm happy days of fandom. Realize now that one thing that makes fandom calm is having one's attention focussed on fictional people and situations, not RL ones. Also the using another language thing. Time was I needed to have my dictionaries all handy here by the computer. Not any more.

(The H dream followed one about petronia and her elegant Chinese friends, probably inspired by the cover of Full Fathom Five.)

I don't get around to no-sword's blog often enough, because the reminder of how much Japanese I don't know, will never know, and/or have forgotten, is depressing. But sometimes one discovers delights, like the poems of a failed hermit-poet of the late Tang.

I don't stay at the summit that long myself
The air's too thin, it's not good for you
So there I sleep, far below the clouds
With a pillow for my pillow and a nice soft blanket

See also, and again, why I shall never be a Buddhist. Lack of pillows and nice soft blankets, also having to get up at 3 am, also not eating after noon.

Over at First Known When Lost, a commenter posts a Japanese song about fish.

Yona, Ninebe irasshai! ie, ikitakunai.
Yona, Ninebe irasshai! ie, ikitakunaaaaai!
Ohkina sakana Yona wo nonda
Yona wa osorete, tasukete, tasuketeeeee!
Yona Ninebe irasshai! hai, ikimasu.

The site owner is politely befuddled: 'I lived in Tokyo and studied Japanese for a year, long ago, but I don't know half the words here.' I lived and studied for five years and was equally adrift until the light suddenly dawned. Yona and Ninebe are proper names and this is all about Jonah and the whale.
( Cut for translation )

A tip from daegaer in a locked post sends me to this quote by Martin Luther:

Men have broad and large chests, and small narrow hips, and more understanding than women, who have but small and narrow breasts, and broad hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children.

See icon. That is all.

And where in all the country-that-eventually-became-Germany were all these narrow-chested small-breasted women and narrow-hipped small-bummed men to be found? Because jeez Louise, that ain't the Germans I know.
( Return of Wednesday reading meme )

Gender-switched Hobbit, with much fun as the comments segue off to Lord of the Powertools: "Do not read the instruction booklet aloud! For it is written in the Black Andecker Speech..."

Got this from lnhammer who cites his subject lines, as ever- 'from "As Hermes once took to his feathers light," John Keats.' I, one-eyed and blurry, saw that as 'As Holmes once took to his feathers light' and wish it had been.

ETA: LJ seems to be doing its occasional trick of not showing lj users' names after the tag, at least not on my outdated browser. That's lnhammer.

And here dreamer_easy provides a nice parallel to the Japanese ability to suss out other people's rank so as to be able to talk to them.

As I may have said before. It's not just the ambiguous subject-less, object-less, conversational demotic Japanese-- with, all too often, an unindicated speaker, either someone whose face you can't see or just nobody shown at all. It's that visual decoding that other people (thesis has been proposed: kanji/ hanzi reading people) seem so good at and that defeats me. Kanji/ hanzi readers may note without thinking the difference between two people, exact same features and exact same shape of face, one of whom has bangs that curl up at the right side and the other of whom has bangs that curl down at the left, but I do not. (And if kanji/ hanzi readers are good at this because of early education, then by me the Israelis should be utter shoo-ins because cripes I can't even *see* those vowel-indicating dots in Hebrew.)
( Cut for mildest spoilers )
( October stats )

Or through this week, and the worst is now (fingers crossed) over.

I'm always surprised, come the end of August, at how early it gets dark. 'Just the other day it was still light at nine' etc. So I shall note here that at the beginning of August the sun is hitting third floors and roofs at 8, l'heure blue begins at 8:30, and it is dark at nine.

Put bird mesh over my swimming pool garden and so far the squash flowers not only remain intact, one plant went so far as to produce vegetables. Vegetable. To be precise, a zucchini. And vaguely I remember sowing some zuke seeds as well as the kabocha ones but... what happened to all my squash plants?
( Cut for Wednesday memeage )

Reading Sky Above, Great Wind, a translation of the poetry of Ryōkan. Nice enough, but sort of wished the translator had given the texts of at least the Japanese poetry. (Ryōkan also wrote kanshi, all-kanji poetry modelled on classical Chinese verse. Even in translation you can usually tell kanshi poems, because they read exactly like translations of real Chinese poems.)
( Alas, Ryōkan had to have his fun. His calligraphy is unreadable as well )

The Japan Foundation was having their usual free films back at the old Bloor Cinema which has been taken over and renovated by an outfit that screens documentaries solely. Is why last year's films were at some inconvenient locale. The Japan Foundation's film nights have been cut to two, alas, but they still show three films. However, not up for a double bill, on Sunday I skipped the one about airlines and went to the one about the little village that puts on an amateur kabuki show every year (or every two years, if you're the real little village.) The film's called Someday in English, on account of them assuming American audiences would no more go see 'A Record of the Disturbances at Big Deer Village' than they'd buy a book called 'The Rivers of London.'

It was lots of fun, though I find the renovated Bloor now has much narrower seats, and I *think* has lost some side space downstairs. But venue apart, I was assailed by a particular gaijin moment in the film.
( Read more... )
Last night's film was Villon's Wife, and I lasted fifteen minutes. I was in the balcony, which has the old wide seats, and unlike the floor on Sunday night it was almost full, with lots of friends meeting each other, and groups of Japanese chatting together, and a happy theatre ambience all round. The film is set just post-war, in the vanished Tokyo one rarely sees, and Matsu Takako is gorgeous (she was in Someday-- her picture's in that first link) and listening to the levels of Japanese the actors use is most instructive. But there's only so much I can take of "a long-suffering woman's relationship with her brilliant but self-destructive writer husband in postwar Tokyo." Dazai Osamu wrote some amazing stuff but oh em gee was he a 'ditch him, dear, he ain't worth it' dweeb.

I bought a Wordtank IDF-4600 from a British seller for a tenth what the American was asking, including shipping. And a good thing too, because I'd be chizzed in spades at paying close to $400 for something as useless as the much vaunted IDF-4600. The rep Canon has for being gaijin-friendly, or at least Anglophone-friendly, is officially in tatters.
( Cut for electronic dictionary tsuris )

All day LJ has been pretty much inaccessible, all the while the 'Is it down?' pages told me LJ was up. I have it now, but I had it at 10 am and did not at 10:15. So all the dire warnings about 'cherish it while it lasts' may be right, as doomsayers often are.

Otherwise life is not as pleasant as it was when I was on holiday last week. Karin keeps me going, but one Wordtank is having conniptions over President's Choice batteries and the other is sadly aged. Ye Japan-domiciled, do you use Wordtanks and if so which model?

Reading Japanese is the soporific to end all soporifics. Witness me in bed and asleep at midnight yesterday after a 7 pm Pepsi that should have kept me awake for twelve hours. But Pepsi was followed by a good two hours of Karin, and between the tiny fonts and the unknown hanzi, I was yawning by 10. Is still a glorious farrago of Immortals and dragon kings and pearl spirits and Great Western Mothers. I shall have a happy month rereading the thing.

OTOH my faithful Wordtank grows a little cranky, now it's past its eighteenth birthday, and I know not where I can get another. Well I do know-- online, sight unseen, for hideous prices plus hideous duty and GST and PST. Why does no one on this continent sell gaijin-friendly Wordtanks? Why is it all Casio electronic dictionaries aimed at the native Japanese?

Thus my mondegreening of the original song that The Mamas and the Papas covered. I steamed through twenty-five pages of 1Q84 vol.2 on one eye this evening. Go me. We're at page-turning intensity and I must fight the urge to go to the English version, where doubtless the intensity will read somewhat flatter, given (cough) the translators' choice of words.
( Read more... )

1. White plastic dragon. Wants so bad.

2. The blue sunglasses from my cataract surgery. Evidently all I've ever wanted was to see the world through a blue filter. It calms me. It induces tranquility. And it makes the nasty bright light of late winter Go Away, says the Gollum in this corner. Alas, these glasses are thin and cheap and will not last forever; and for some reason no one makes blue-tinted wrap-arounds otherwise. But for the moment, am happy.
( More within )

Pleasant long weekend, of which I remember very little. Much wine was consumed next door and in restaurants, so I must stop drinking wine.

1Q84 may become my Japanese reading project for the year-- and that's just book 1. Every Sunday I go to Starbuck's and read about 25 pages, intending to read more next day, and never do. The Tengo sections go fast, the Aomame ones require the wordtank more than they should.
( Reading )

Must stop buying books. Won't stop buying books. Thus I wind up with Conan Doyle's Tales of Terror and Mystery which fantods me in spades. Not that the content is all that innovative: could see what was coming a mile away in the three I've read so far. But like MR James' ghost stories, they express perfectly a sense of time and place. Do this with not particularly nice places (or times) and the result is instant nightmare. Should wash it away with a few pages of 1Q84 which is being intensely flat-footed to date, even when the action involves murder. Actually, *especially* when the action involves murder. Am waiting for the surrealism I've been promised and only have a whisper of it so far.

My copy of 1Q84 pt 1 arrived today, speeding from Japan as if from New York. I hadn't realized it was a hardcover. Perhaps that will make for easier reading, or perhaps not. When Murakami is good, he is very very good, and when he is bad he's A Wild Sheep Chase, which goes nowhere and takes forever to do it. Cannot work up any enthusiasm for that book, and I've barely got to the sheep so far.

I'm being injected in the knee Wednesday, with instructions to stay off feet for the next 48 hours thereafter. I suppose I could read the Murakami and call it Japanese practice. But I'm much more likely to read The Kingdom of Gods, which I was saving for precisely this occasion.

On an unrelated note, why do people who write prefaces feel it necessary to summarize the plot? Don't they realize this is an unforgivable sin? Recent instance was The Life of Milarepa, that I bought with the $10 I won in the lottery Saturday night. And that isn't even a novel. I was expecting the preface to give me some background to the history of Tibetan Buddhism, and got it, but then I was in the middle of Whosis telling me the highpoints of Milarepa's life. Dude, sorry to be so shallow, but that's why I'm reading the book.

1) My mother and her twin sister, if they were alive, would be 99 today. This seems very odd. I don't feel nearly old enough to have a parent born a century ago. Never mind 'How terribly strange to be seventy.' Boomers find it strange enough to be 60.

My mother died decades ago but my aunt lived a few weeks after her 89th birthday, hale and healthy, until felled by a sudden massive heart attack. So Happy Birthday anyway, Mom and Aunt Helen.
( Read more... )

My dentist is a nisei or sansei, and has various Japanese objects in her office including a wind chime from some temple with the usual tanka on it. Was examining it the other day, dental ass't asked could I read it, I said yes, pretty much-- all about seeing the willow quietly growing green on the north bank just like-- 'but I don't know this character.' Looked it up when I got home. Kanji dictionaries and Wordtank were adamant it didn't exist. Yes, well, dictionaries and Wordtank were stumped by Angel Sanctuary vocabulary as well. Looked it up in the online hanzi pages, though mandarintools also denied its existence when I searched by radical and bound. nciku of course provided it when I drew it: 泫, weep; cry; shine, glisten; drip. Then looked it up in online Japanese dictionaries, and got-- a bunch of references from Chinese-Japanese dictionaries. Obscure, whoever you are, Mr. Medieval Poet.

Bought the first volume of Wild Sheep Chase when I was in New York last fall, as I said then, 'just to see what Murakami reads like in Japanese. As suspected, he reads like tapwater, but less sociopathic tapwater than in English where the lack of affect reads very unsettling indeed.' I must have been thinking of another Murakami work, because for interest's sake this afternoon I had a look at the English version in Book City. I may have to buy it. Because *that*, my friends, is what a translation should be. It doesn't even read like tapwater.

(I probably didn't mean sociopath either. One must be as careful with psychiatric terms these days as one had to be with religious terminology in the Middle Ages. Homoousios, not Homoiousios, transsubstantial, not consubstantial. Whatever the tech term is for a blunted emotional range, distance from reality, and lack of empathy, then.)

Ganked from daegaer

In Estonian nouns and pronouns do not have grammatical gender, but nouns and adjectives decline in fourteen cases

(swoons from rapture)

'illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative' ought to be a Tom Lehrer song. It scans if you pronounce the words as if they were Japanese.
( Cut for medieval legal Latin )

Mind, that webpage is misleading. The entry on Japanese grammar is very short and says "The good news is that Japanese has none of the following: gender, declensions or plurals. Nouns never conjugate and almost all verbs are regular." The bad news is that there can be two, three or four different verbs or verb forms for the same activity, depending on who you're talking to, and you have to grow up there to know which one to use.

ETA Which then segues into Complaints Choirs on Youtube.
( Cut for a litany of complaints )

Day 07 - Which Japanese words do you use in English? (hanami, shinkansen, etc.)

Futon, tofu, sushi, kotatsu, samurai...
( Yeah, well )

I never got a handle on the whys and wherefores of hanzi/ kanji simplification, but I assumed it had to do with general standardization and, possibly, the promotion of universal literacy. Now I find my 1971 author blandly declaring that the Chinese government effected both simplification and pinyin as preliminary steps in the *abolition* of hanzi, and a move to a phonic western-alphabet-based writing system. (Which 1971 guy thinks is long overdue.) Was he totally on crack, as my reflexes say he must be, or is there something to this?

And I have to say, I do not get the character-hatred. The idea of reading Chinese in pinyin, even with tone markings, gives me the horrors. This is because I've read all hiragana Japanese and it's horrible. Horrible for the foreign reader, certainly; a native speaker might provide meaning and context by ear, but god knows I can't. So pace almost everyone I've read, dispensing with characters will *not* make reading easier for foreigners at all at all at all.

Also watched an hour of an NHK special on tea caravans that travel through Tibet. May rethink this taking ikkyuu business because dear god my ear (and my vocabulary) is so baaaad.

It's not hot, not really, but it's the humid mug that drains just as effectively as heat does, and makes me scratchy and uncomfortable and out of sorts. I didn't say, 'Well since I'm scratchy and uncomfortable and out of sorts anyway it can't hurt to read Tantei Aoneko 5' because I started reading it for other reasons; but Motoni Modoru does not help. At all. The obscurities of Ima Ichiko are there for a purpose (generally) and can be unravelled (generally.) Her weird tales are meant to be weird tales; her mysteries are meant to be mysteries; there are solutions and explanations if you look closely enough for them, though I still remain uncertain who Yosaburou is getting his info from in several different stories.

But Motoni's obscurities are caused by something else. And increasingly I think the something else is that she's writing witless BL (only taking it very very seriously) and would be quite surprised that you think she's writing a mystery or a drama or even a psychologically complex love story. She puts in 'notes towards' all those things in the course of the story, but the story is really an erotic fantasy about guys screwing, and that's why all these people are screwing for unlikely reasons under unlikely circumstances. Which I could live with if there wasn't all this other bumpf getting in the way, to say nothing of extended conversations about 品 and 格 in which those extremely general terms are never defined.

Hence I am scratchy and itchy and may have to drop Japanese entirely in favour of some Aubrey Maturin sunlight and common sense.

Have been spending my time virtuously disentangling Japanese words for promontory 岬, cape 崎, mountain pass 峠, gorge 峡, the various kinds of valley (谷　峪 渓) and other topographic features of that rather mountainous buncha islands. In a classic case of Flow, following some googling as to the difference between the words Holland and Netherlands, I come across a web page that does the same for forest, grove, holt, hanger, and hill, how and hurst, and other topographical features of the rather wooded and hilly English landscape. ('Ware popup at bottom.)

Must go back to disentangling the varying Japanese words for ditches and caves- 溝, 堀,洞, 窟-- and that annoying one that I can't recall-- means a dip in a surface, is always used in BL to refer to the dip at the base of the throat (I think: unless it's the declivity above the collarbones) and isn't read the way I thought it was.