Off the Cliff

I was right to drag my feet on assembling the Dirtdevil. There's a hose that fits into a ring that fits into the canister, and the hose came out of the ring and wouldn't go back in. The manual treats hose and ring as a single unit and gives no idea how the one goes into the other. So after fifteen minutes of pushing and squeezing and grunting I concluded that the part was defective, packed all the bits back into their plastic bags, and put off the tiresome question of how to return an amazon order. And then, because I can no more stop scratching an itch than I can stop looking for words-that-aren't-there in Squaredle, I pushed and squeezed and grunted some more until, with the arm strength of a young man, the hose got pushed far enough into the ring that I could turn it righty-tighty into unmovingness. So go me, and feh.

Last night's dream purported to be about the Marlows at home with visits by vague relatives and much to-doing over bath times and Lawrie not able to be the Shepherd Boy after all because she had such a hissy fit over her bathtime that she started to run a fever so (somebody- Esther?) had to/ got to play him after all.

Reading Austin Freeman's Thorndyke mysteries because the library has them and Gore Vidal is getting up my nose. I strongly suspect that his view of politics is plain and simply Wrong. The gossip about the Kennedys is interesting enough  (no news to me that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was no JFK either) but leaves me feeling slightly grubby. Of course, Thorndyke is no fast fun raad either, but still an improvement. What I want is more PMT, so instead I keep going over the last story in vol. 1 and its very odd happenings, like the menacing man the okami-san ushers out of the establishment on (if I'm reading this correctly) days that have eight in them but who *seems* to show up two days running? and who may not be the proprietor's favoured client/ boyfriend at all but the personification of the psychic detritus it's necessary to clear out at regular intervals.

Somewhere I picked up a battered paperback Nicolas Freeling Van der Valk mystery, and because I was in the mood for a portable mystery ie not on a screen, started reading it at restaurants. Meant to use it as bicycle reading but in the end finished it in one fell swoop of sofa-doku. When I say battered, I mean at some point someone had spilled sugary coffee on the back cover that got transferred to the front. Normally I'd put it in the recycle now, but it would seem that Van Der Valk mysteries are a rarity. Neither Kindle nor the library has buyable/ circulating copies, except for one. But you can get (some of) his other series. I'll give them a try, just to see. Kindle, because March is forecast to roar like a lion for at least the next two weeks, and libraries may not be get-at-able.

As for this precious single copy, I could try a damp cloth on the covers and stick it back in a wee free library if it works.

Continue on with Walpole's letters in the slightly sniffy Everyman edition. I have another collection in a more readable, because larger, paperback but of course it's not where it's supposed to be. I've had both for 50 years, so high time I read the boring bits. Just, Horry is much more fun talking scandal than about the American Revolution, let alone the Seven Years War.

Have reached vol. 1 in my backwards reading of PMT. This is where the vicabulary gets not merely obscure but vague to the point of meaningless. Vice Fearless Leader tells me the Chinese translations often don't make sense either, so obviously the translator had the same problems as I do. Shall still be sad when I'm finished it..

Another dream fragment, riding a railway or subway in Japan that suddenly didn't go where it was supposed to but up north. So we all got off at the station, which was in an old-fashioned department store with much wood and stone floors, and tried to get the elevator (wooden with old-fashioned cross-hatch expanding doors- have no idea what they're called) that would take us to the right platform to get to the right station but of course the elevator wouldn't come. And all this time I had the Patarilloish infant son of erm some kind of yakuza oyabun maybe that I was taking home to his father while he made age inappropriate snarky comments about my inadequacies, and I lost his stroller so had to carry him on my back in a sling, and finally with great relief got to where his father was but had to get one of the shopgirls? waitresses? secretaries? to point him out to me. 'That's him in the rose-coloured suit, so fashionable, as ever' but it didn't look like him at all.

Am dragging my feet on the Pratchett biography. Should just power through or else take it back unfinished and let someone else have it. With nothing else to read I've gone back to beavering my way through PMT 2, but early Ima Ichiko is unusual vocabulary. What's the colloquial meaning of grindng tea? Must have recourse to the web because wordtank and dictionaries alike fail me.

Walking to massage on Tuesday with phone and gloves in my coat pocket, somehow I dropped one of the gloves on the way and only discovered the fact when I got home. Yesterday I had to use the thin remaining glove from my former pair and it really wasn't up to the cold wind. Nor was I up to limping down to the dollar store for another pair, as I'd intended- knees are having cold weather conniptions- so went to Fiesta to stock up against the polar vortex. Then made myself go up the street to see if someone had rescued my glove. Didn't have to go far: it was on next door's lawn. Or snowfield, whatever. And when I got in and moved my rain cape from the deacon's bench in the front hall, there was my thick black glove from the previous pair. So I am content for the moment.

(I have no idea why it's called a deacon's bench. That was what my parents called it. Has a hinged lid with storage space underneath, except that the bottom was basically thick cardboard and came apart after I'd had it at my place for several years.)

Am back to PMT 2 and impenetrable Ima plots so have given that up for the moment and am reading Our Mutual Friend on the tablet. Amazon insisted I had to pay $10 for the kindle version, so was about to cancel the misnamed Unlimited, but then today suddenly there was a free version. Unlimited thereby has just paid for itself so I'll keep it for now. The library has it too but the library's ebooks, for whatever reason, are harder to read than amazon's. And no way can I finish a Dickens in three weeks.

Made it to the store while the snow was still flurrying, hard enough to make the streets wet but not enough to require boots. Have enough pepsi to get me through-- well, maybe the week. I really have to find a substitute for that. But then the snow continued and now there's maybe an inch out there, and because it's wet snow it limns all the tree branches quite beautifully.

Have a couple of slim volumes for bag reading, started one today: Isherwood's Prater Violet from my parents' library. Why I thought it would be Ronald Firbanky I can't say, but it's not. It's Christopher writing film scripts in Nazi Germany, or against the background of Nazi Germany, and I'm not up for that at all. Into a Wee Free it goes once I get a chance. We're promised a snow dump on Wednesday afternoon, so it may not be any time soon.

And meanwhile I go back to my reread of Phantom Moon B(T)ower.* I started vol. 6, the one I got this year with Hyakki Yakki, and found it much more readable than I remember PMB/T from the past. Finished it, unearthed vol.5 from the shelves, realized I'd never read that one because it was too difficult at the time, and yes, there was much wordtanking involved but then I got into it and finished that one too. So now I'm on vol.4 which I may have read once, but-- the thing is, Ima-sensei does about one of these stories *a year*- two at most- so yeah, vol.4 came out in 2013. She actually has a little atogaki at the end of vol.6, where she's wondering just how long she's been drawing this series- 'three years? four?' and is shocked to realize it's been twenty years!!

*The character 楼 is translated as tower in all my dictionaries. However this place is  not a tower at all, but a building where geisha come to entertain the guests (as opposed to a geisha house proper); the story is set in the 1920s but the Phantom Moon Whatever is older than that. Language was a lot different in early Shouwa, let alone Taishou or Meiji, and classical allusions were more likely to be Chinese. A Chinese friend said that the original meaning of 楼 was more like 'a young lady's quarters, a bower' so I add that. reading.

Quite a lot of leaves fell in Wednesday's all day rain, including the maple across the street that glows so lovely under the streetlamps at night, and the aspen beside it is half denuded, reminding me of what November will look like. My own two trees have shed enough to cover mine and NND's front steps and walks. I swept some this afternoon, but I need a leaf bag and rake to do the job properly.

The view up the street is still autumn brocade-- old gold, maroon, lemon yellow, bright red, deep green, and various others. Walking in the other direction earlier and passing under a stretch of all gold maples, I flashbacked to a length of gold velvet I'd had in my early teens. I've no idea where I got it from but the why I remember clearly. It reminded me of the production of Richard II that was my first experience of live action (or, come to that, film action) Shakespeare. Presumably there were other bright colours involved in it, but the sumptuous gold and velvet was what stuck.

My childhood reading of that English classic, The Gentle Falcon, had acquainted me with the historical background sof the play, so that I could explain it to my fellow students. We saw Richard because that was what was on, not because we were studying it. The choice that season was between Richard and King Lear, and presumably the nuns thought the former to be less traumatising. Good call: everyone who does Lear loves to pull out all the stops with the storm and my startle reaction to sudden loud noises would have been sorely tried. 

Otherwise I trundle about on aching muscles, not joints. Am being disappointed on the food front. Went down to the greengrocers to see if there were still strawberries to be had and there were: Ontario for $7 a carton or organic for half that. So I got two organic cartons that have the bonus of being in papier maché boxes, not unrecyclable green plastic crates. Turns out they have no taste at all. Then tried out the new fried chicken place that replaced KFC, Mary Brown's. Supposedly a Canadian Maritime chain, supposedly better chicken than Popeye's. And yes, the chicken was plump and tender but you have to ask for the non-spicy version or else they slather the bun in hot sauce. I'm not only not a fan of hot as a sensation, I hate the taste of hot sauce,  period. It kills the flavour of anything you put it on, much as catsup does. And catsup at least has sweet noted in it; hot sauce is sour.

So, having eaten the chicken without the coating or the bun, I came home intending to stir fry some broccoli and tofu in ginger. I don't use enough non-olive oil to buy bottles of peanut or canola or grapeseed or anything you can heat to high temps, and anyway oil is also getting expensive. But I was pleased to find small bottles of stir fry oil at Loblaws, that I could use up before it went rancid. What I hadn't noticed was that it was garlic-infused oil which I think is intended to supplement, not replace, a more regular oil. And though you don't need much for the small portions I was cooking, still however I feel about garlic (not a great fan), garlic definitely still dislikes me. Stomach has been rumbling all evening.

On the up side, my Ima Ichikos arrived in extremely prompt fashion. Worth the additional $25 I paid for delivery, though why the Japanese PO still won't deliver things by airmail or SAL is a mystery to me. Or maybe they do but Buyee insists on using a delivery service for everything overseas.

Still unseasonably cold, still winter jacket weather at 9C with no sun. A few diffident plum or cherry blossoms appear on streets that get whatever sun there is, but the horticultural landscape is behind the (new) seasonal. Temperatures might get into the teens this weekend, but if it rains, it still won't feel warm.

Yesterday I had an eye appointment and bicycled down in the rain and scarily gusty wind, which as ever came from whatever direction I was trying to go in and nearly knocked me sideways as I passed Robarts, not usually a wind tunnel area. Meanwhile hordes of high school students passed me on foot, bound possibly for the general strike/ demonstration at the Legislature a long block away. Our cocaine dealing Premier has been teacher-baiting. Gone alas are the days when the province's teachers could bring down a government. Now they're fair game.

Rehearsing for retirement, I stayed away from work on my two days off. This might have worked better if I hadn't ached abominably both days, with hip flexors and low back spasming into inexplicable rigidity, and if I hadn't been power-reading The Bone People. I was enchanted at first by a Booker Prize winner that was quirky and language-loving and utterly unlike the 'misunderstood white man by a lake' school of writing. (Though really that's an American trope, and the Booker IME just tends towards Misunderstood Men.) But read without the corrective presence of other human beings, it gave me the fantods, and now I have a bad taste in my mouth over it, which I'm trying to erase with the second last Hyakki Yakki. 25 had some interesting discoveries on reread, but 26 so far is both frustrating and obscure. So is Phantom Moon 5, but I might be better off with that new territory rather than the indifferent vol 26.

However, my s-i-l, genki as ever, heard me saying that I wanted to buy a power saw to cut up the ancient pine branches that have been sitting for at least a year on my porch, and cut down the rest of the scraggly pine bushes, and maybe lower the hedge as well; and so I came home today to a porch swept and bare of branches, which were sawed up and tied in bundles for the garbage. Two of the pines were gone, but she thought the corner one should stay. Best of all, the various trash that had accumulated on the table until I could think of a way of disposing of it (tiles, concrete pieces, wooden frames that didn't work for concrete repairs) was all bundled into garbage bags waiting for the next pickup. Oh happy day!

Of course I still want a power saw because even my genki s-i-l said she had to take two tylenols after all that sawing.

Some day I'll fire up the desktop and not only post at length but answer other people's replies. It just feels like too much trouble, even if the html is easier than on a tablet. My mouse jumps and double clicks and won't highlight properly and it's all so vexing that even tapping with a stylus feels preferable.

Dinner at swanky French restaurant to celebrate mine and my sister's birthdays last January and my brother's today. Aches and stiffness meant I didn't manage even a card for him, and to make matters worse, both he and my sister gave me presents. The presents are alcoholic in esse and in posse (LCBO gift card) so the latter might well be repurposed as one giri no ongaeshi. People who live on tylenol aren't supposed to drink at all, and certainly alcohol hates me these days. Dinner was at invitation of my cousins, aunt's surviving daughter and husband, partly at least as thanks for weekly visits for the last six years. Which still dictate my reflexes: I automatically check the long range weather report for Saturdays and only belatedly recall that there's nowhere I have to go on Saturday.
( Wednesday )

This summer it seems we get one good day a month, and today was August's. And not even all of it, because last night was still warm and wet and I kept the windows closed and the window AC on, and the morning dawned muggy and grey. But the wind picked up and blew it all away by noon, and it's now clear and dry.

(Actually there was a very nice day not quite two weeks ago that was also blowy sun and cool after rain, when I went down to the AGO for cocktails and a viewing of the two Inuit artists, Kenojuak Ashevak and her nephew Tim Pitsiulak. But if I don't talk about things here I forget they happened.)

Last finished?
Choo, The Ghost Bride
Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia

Reading now?
Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo
Christie, Sad Cypress

Next?
Have a couple of holds for the ereader and, in theory, the next Phantom Moon Tower is on its way to me. I hope mental confusion hasn't led me to order vol.4 again, believing it to be the latest.

So yesterday we had one of those logistic problems of three babies who needed naps, all of whom take a good fifteen minutes to get to sleep and the first of which (Miss Picky, who has two people and two only who are permitted to touch her) refused to be laid in her crib once she *had* fallen asleep. I suggested we just load them in the triple stroller which, guarantees that those three will all sleep within minutes. But the only person who could take them for the walk was me. Twice round the block should do it, I thought, so off I set with my heavy load: two of these guys are chunkinators, even if the third is a bird-boned skellington.

Twice round the block didn't do it, but did immediately start my lower back screaming. Walking is good for the piriformis, yeah sure, and what about my touchy shoulders, huh? Birdbones was asleep, but Miss Picky was still suspiciously awake- and one may not stop moving or she screams and screams again- while Chunk 3 was singing loudky and off-key. On I plodded, stopping at the occasional bench to ease the cramps, and on again until even Rowboat was asleep and I could come back to sit on the front steps and just push the carriage back and forth.

'I won't be able to move tomorrow,' I thought, but fine, today I have massage. Except this morning when I got up, knees and back were happily lamblike and shoulders much less ouchy than usual. Maybe all I need after all is a half hour of strength traing and walking.

Meanwhile, the online bookstore I get my manga from says it can't send emails to my old address. I try resending them my email, they say they'll send me a verification link, the email doesn't arrive. I try my gmail account, but the verification email doesn't arrive. This is serious. There's a new Phantom Moon Tower out and a new Hundred Demons due, and the only alternative seems to be amazon.jp, than which I'd rather die.

But I also discover that ebooks from the library are the best way to read Agatha Christies, especially slightly unsatisfactory later ones like Elephants Can Remember, so now I shall read them all like that.

1. Come into my house after work. Ah how cool and dark! Oh how my house retains the coolness from last night's AC! ...and today's all-day AC, because I turned up the thermostat and left it on, a detail that disappeared in the heat outside. The heat alert is now lifted, and they say it's 24C out there, but it's a humid unmoving 24C. I shan't be happy until we get lows of 15 again, unseen since the middle of June.

2. Picked up a cookbook off the boulevard, One Pot Low-cal Wonders. Which is fine up to where nine recipes out of ten call for tinned tomatoes or tomato paste, two ingredients that kill the taste of everything else.

3. I need meat and veg reading to make the lighter fantasy and mystery feel substantial. Granted, Gladstone is pretty chewy all on his lonesome, and Retold Chinese Tales doesn't provide any sense of corrective balance. But Japanese works just as well as history or biography and rather better than both, especially when it's Ima Ichiko's impenetrable Phantom Moon manga. Very very chewy and still not quite making sense.

4. The local coffee shop is closed next week, which is sad, because the other coffee shop is now a Mexican restaurant, and there's nowhere else to get my 'familiar faces' barista fix.

5. Birks have been resoled for half the cost of a new pair, but resoled they are. I should simply toss my second pair, supposedly identical to the first. But they're not. They strain my legs and back, and make me feel wobbly-unsteady (even though *they've* been resoled recently too.) Had to take muscle relaxants last night for the spasms after wearing them two days, and today had recourse to the velcro ones I wear with orthotics.

6. Stopped wearing gauze bandage on rapidly uninfecting toe. Must start again, because the urge to pick at toenails- what got me into this mess to start with- is irresistible.

In search of an elusive author whose works the library system doesn't have- or has only in unborrowable form- I succeeded in getting my hands on a thumpingly huge short story collection called The Weird. Heart fell when I saw that the ToC included M.R. James' Casting the Runes. James isn't weird: he's terrifying. But if that's an exception: if the other stories are indeed weird tales, it occurred to me I could try reading them as 100 Demons episodes. Which I do, generally to dismal failure. Hand's The Boy in the Tree, Gaiman's Feeders and Eaters, Tagore's The Hungry Stones, Chabon's The God of Dark Laughter, Utley's The Country Doctor (and stories I knew from before: Russ' The Little Dirty Girl, Kafka's In the Penal Colony, Akutagawa's The Hell Screen) are, well, SF or horror or what-have-you, but not the simply Odd that Ima does. With the possible exception of Mieville's Details, which is certainly looking like an Ima manga so far.

Alas, I can't remember what writer it is I want to read. Possibly Michael Cisco.

Alas also, the ToC is in chronological order, which makes finding anything very difficult.

1. Am reading Invisible Cities in a brown-edged Picador paperback. I found this passage, which I pass on to qwerty:

True, also, in Hypatia the day will come when my only desire will be to leave. I know I must not go down to the harbour then, but climb the citadel's highest pinnacle and wait for a ship to go by up there. But will it ever go by? There is no language without deceit.

Which is not quite air-borne triremes, and there are no mermaids or Wild Hunts in the subway (so far) but is a start.
( Cut for more reading and appalling accidents )

It has been A Week, and isn't over yet. But still. I came home late last night after class, opened front door, and a box fell out from between that and the screen door. 'Huh? Can't be my bk1 order; SAL takes 2-3 weeks and they only got the thing filled last week sometime.' No, not my bk1 order. Two chubby red dragons, one holding a treasure bag and the other a treasure ship is it? They are currently brightening up my front room study. Thank you rasetsunyo!
( Continung... )

The general rule is that one should eat more vegetables. Vegetables fill you up, they say. Yes well. Vegetables are also time-consuming to cook and tough on my irritable insides unless bolstered by a lot of starch, which then undercuts the point of eating vegetables.

Enter Green Giant Japanese Mix. Frozen veg don't have the same growly effects as cooked from raw. Japanese mix has that weird misshapen broccoli that isn't as iron laden as local broccoli (which I can have three florets of, starchless, before growls set in) and those large soft green beans that Ive only found in France before this; also water chestnuts and carrots, which are actually *good*. There seem to be no additives or sugar. I throw in a handful of frozen lima beans, cook in a little water, add a tbsp of margarine and a squeeze of lemon, and am happy.

( February's reading )

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.

Seriously?

According to Xiaomingxiong, Chinese dragons "consistently enjoy sexual relationships with older men".

Mh yes well, I should like a footnote to that 'consistently', myself. I mean, I'm assuming 小明雄 isn't speaking from personal experience.
( July stats )

I was reading the other day how the Russians screwed Ikea over. One city refused to connect the electricity at the local outlet for three years so Ikea decided as a matter of policy that all stores must have their own generator, only the guy who was leasing the generators for them was taking kickbacks so that the generators wound up costing the company something like 200 million. At this point I begin to think Kipling was right, and Russia is much more easily understood as the most westerly of the Asian countries rather than the most easterly of the European ones. Complex bureaucracy making things difficult just because? Bribes needed to get anything accomplished? Infinite patience rewarded by glacier-like progress? Sounds familiar to me, even if the bribes come in the form of New Year gifts in the version I know best.

And I was all 'Oh poor Ikea president', who sounds like a principled if stubborn man. Except, except. I need a new Ikea knife. My old one fell into a black hole shortly after slitting open the bk1 package with the Ima Ichiko illo'd weird tales. Ikea has them on their website. **Ikea will not sell them from the website.** No no no madame you must come to our inconveniently located stores and with luck buy a whole bunch of other stuff. I understand the logic of this, but it makes no sense to *me* to pay $6 on the TTC to buy a $9 knife. Go the Russians, say I.

Now I'm wondering if I could indeed bike past Royal York Rd to the Etobicoke store, and back. Would have thought nothing of it a dozen years ago, so maybe.

Obviously I'm not up on my BL, because the name Ishihara Satoru meant nothing to me when I excavated possibly-readable manga from the boxes. Not that I know anything about Afuresou na puuru, or care less. But I lucked out on the one I got: 其は怜々の雪に舞い /So wa reirei no yuki ni mai. (Reissued as 怜々蒐集譚, FWIW.)

Taishou Weird Tales, full of (late) Taishou weird tale writers and Taishou weird picture artists, and put-upon newsmen and editors who follow the writers and artists around, possibly hoping to grab copy from them. Ghosts, possession, odd combinations of Japanese and western clothing. (Kimono and button down underwear being one of the interesting ones.) Also Taishou Japanese, is why I'm not going to try translating that title. (Who's doing the dancing, for one thing?) It's the last message from a writer who'd disappeared in the snows of Mt Takao, hence poetic. The story reminds me of one of Ima Ichiko's where a guy also disappears in the mountains, leaving his wife behind to wonder what's happened to him, while the general ambience of the series naturally reminds me of Ima Ichiko's Phantom Moon Tower. Wish there was more of this, though the Taishou Japanese makes me cry.

Trailers and stats--

From i_am_zan, previews for The Treasure Hunter, aka what Uncle Ming does to pay the bills.

( Cut for November book-chat )

There's a package in the mailbox when I get home. Ahh, the latest WARD, hotfoot from NY! Ohh, last of the dragon kings! Now to see what Goujun was actually saying--- Only I won't. Because it's not WARD, it's my manga from Japan, sent SAL. Go Jpn PO, and Canuck land surface whatevers too. Six days door to door. Boo US postal service: can't get a parcel to TO from NY in five days.
( Read more... )

This is a good time of year to do that 'what makes you happy' meme. Many disked sets of Uncle Ming is a good start, but today it was followed by kickinpants' Christmas package. It contains a Hasui calendar, and I nearly wept when I looked at the plates.
( Reason being-- )

I wake up to sweet silliness:
What do we want? Status quo! When do we want it? Still!

And went content to the crocodile.
( Gate )

ETA: Knew I was forgetting something. Happy birthday, paleaswater. Congratulations and, uhh, congratulations. (Is technically the 4th now, but it's the thought that counts.)

Serendipity a few weeks back found me a copy of Mythago Wood. (I was looking for Quarrelling They Met the Dragon, and found that too, and started it, and... some day I'll do an entry about why I don't like sf intruding on my fantasy. If you've got a perfectly good fantasy culture, I prefer it left a perfectly good fantasy culture. My heart sinks when the author introduces space ships and underground computer centres where the Earthmen are controlling the planet and its inhabitants as part of some experiment or anthropological study or whatever. For one thing, Leguin apart, the Earthmen are invariably white, usually men, and nowhere near as interesting as the 'aliens' on the planet.)

But anyway I'm reading Mythago Wood. And finding it oppressive in undefined ways. I'm hoping he won't send it to hell in a handbasket with the romantic plot, but...

Also finished Mushishi 1 in English. It makes no more sense than in Japanese. Less, actually. Am almost finished my Beautiful Green Palace, a very fast Ima Ichiko, nice enough but...

However when this cough medicine reading is over, I have an anthology of pseudo-Chinese / silk road manga, with Ima Ichiko, Akino Matsuri, and the woman who does Konron no Tama. And the last story in vol 2 of Phantom Moon Tower. Roll on the weekend.