Off the Cliff

So have finished Miner's introduction to court poetry which is all well and good. A little irked at his sneering at the imagism of the Kyougoku poets.

(Court poetry of the Kamakura period was, politically, a hoot ie poetry *was* politics and if your school of poetry was in the ascendant you got to compile the Imperial anthology, leaving out all the poets whose prosody you disliked, meaning the Kyougoku school. And the Reizei but they weren't, so far as I can see, as innovative as the Ryougokus.)

Like, I'm sure if your classical Japanese is up to it, the clever wordplay of trad waka is charming and resonant, but if it's not, the images of the later poets will do nicely instead.

But what I mostly take away from both Miner and Waiting for the Wind is that nobody is a patch on Saigyou, he of the negawakuba epitaph to the Saiyūki Gaiden.

Negawakuba
Hana no shita ni shite
Shinan

If I have my wish, I will die under the cherry blossoms

(There's the concluding lines that Minekura left out:
Sono kisaragi no
Mochidzuki no koro

at the full moon of the second month)

I'd quote more but all the reasonably translated, c&p-able, sites are pdfs. But
http://www.wakapoetry.net/poets/late-heian-poets/saigyo/

has a bunch with both Japanese and English. Enough to be going on with.

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.)

nekonexus wrote me a Goujun story. Stunning images, delicately edged characterization, and resonances that tickle at the mind as, yes, fish in a pond brush over the skin.

"But in the Ocean, he speaks the language of the waves, he knows how to see through what obscures others' vision."

"Non-attachment is a difficult thing for a dragon." Mh, yeah. It would be.

And this, which I love:

"...he hears the koi speak. Swifter than thought, they tell each other tales of what passes Below. Their voices jumble over each other - each one distinct, each one a thread in a cacophonic melody of imperfect harmonies. Each swish of a fin, each ripple, each breath through their gills - it is all a part of the story."

No, I *will* not say 'we are a tale told by a carp' but, well, the idea is there too. "... or a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher."

Story is based on the seal script Confucian passage in this picture, whose text was so painstakingly unravelled by lovely friends in this entry.

NB Link takes you to the whole entry because there are other fics in there worth reading.

Oh. I have been jossed. From the Minekura interview here

Q: Please explain the organization of the military. (Shizuoka Prefecture, Fuzuki Kouki-san, many others)

A: Including activity content, in-depth explanation is tedious…… Generally speaking, the military is divided into the Western Army and the Eastern Army, and only the lowest-ranking 'platoons' go out to actual battle. Tenpou is 'Field Marshal of the Western Army,' and his true rank is just below that of Goujun.

No Goushou and Gouen in Heaven, then.

(Granted, I was jossed two years ago, but two years ago I was under the weather, out of the loop, and on fairly substantial pain killers.)

1. I've been cooking more and eating out less. It's very satisfying even when simple. Things like a poached egg on caraway rye bread spread with avocado; a few grinds of the pepper mill, a sprinkle of sea salt, and voila: Heaven. Or my stir fries, now I've learned how to handle the garlic (mash don't chop, fry with the ginger, then remove. Garlic dislikes me intensely.) Broccoli, mushrooms, celery, bok choy, and tofu. I have to freeze it almost immediately or else I'd eat a pot at a sitting.

But the downside of all this is dishes. Every day there are dishes. Somehow in the last fifteen years I've never had dishes in this quantity. I must practise daily Buddhist mindfulness and treat the dishes as an opportunity to wash dishes, much as I've sort of managed to treat flossing my teeth as an exercise in flossing teeth: the thing done for its own sake and not for the end goal. The end goal isn't worth it, really, so one dismisses that aspect and just does the thing itself.

I'd still love a dishwasher. In a renovated kitchen. With an attached powder room. In the rebuilt mudroom. Will be a while before the impermanence of downstairs toilets leads me to give up the dream of having one.

2. So I've been reading books on Buddhism for almost three months now. So far I respond best to the ones by easterners. The westerners talk as if they're selling something, and there's an awful lot of Self present for a religion that's all about the non-existence of the Self. There's no Self in the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, just a serene 'this is how it works.' Granted, the Dalai Lama is a bad place to start: he's teaching the graduate course, and a lot of the BA basics I got from westerners. Still.

Among the western examples is something called Just Add Buddha! subtitled 'Quick Buddhist Solutions for Hellish Bosses, Traffic Jams, Stubborn Spouses, and Other Annoyances of Everyday Life.' His solution for hellish bosses is to imagine yourself as your boss' mother, observing your little boy having a tantrum. 'You can't truly stay angry at toddlers. They're too puny and helpless. They lack a sense of their own failings.' Well maybe. But you can give them time outs until they cool off, and you can't do that with a screaming irrational adult.

His solution for barking dogs is to imagine you are Kanzeon 'the bodhisattva who hears the cries of the world'. 'You are to the barking dog as Kanzeon is to you: a being of enormous compassion and inconceivable powers.' This is bad enough. But worse: when you find yourself in times of trouble, follow the lead of the Lotus Sutra and call on the Bodhisattva:

repeat these words...

Eyes of compassion, observing sentient beings, assemble an immeasurable ocean of blessings

...And if you're really in trouble, don't worry about the whole of the verse, just cry "Kanzeon!" and feel comforted.

And no I say no I can't no. Guanyin maybe, Chenrezig or Kwanum or Avalokiteshvara if it wasn't such a mouthful. But Kanzeon to me is firmly and unmovably an ijiwaru-ppoi hermaphrodite who wears too much lipstick, and that's that.

3) My local library renovated and half its books disappeared, or so it seems. Luckily everything I want is at the branch down the street from work, even if half of it doesn't circulate. (The Judith Merrill collection buys *everything* SFF so nobody else has to, but it's a reference library. A pain.) To round out my DWJ reading I went there and snagged an armful of volumes I'd never heard of, plus those missing Brusts. Plowed through the Brusts doggedly and then turned to dessert. Dessert was a disappointment.

A Sudden Wild Magic was... odd. Didn't sound like her at all. The three stories in Shopping for a Spell touched that same puzzling thing I noticed in Black Maria: extreme paralysis in the face of social intruders and appalling behaviour. Granted a certain kind of Canadian niceness dislikes telling people to get out, we're still capable of saying no on occasion. DWJ's people don't say no. They are wet and a weed and ultimately irritating.

The stories in Unexpected Magic were a slog to start but got steadily better. I very much liked Everard's Ride. And loved the moment in Little Dot where the cat is sleeping happily on the guy's lap, 'and then, suddenly, there was this huge human woman's voice screaming "Len Iggmy son of Trey, la moor Tay Una!"' ie Gli enigmi sono tre, la morte una!

That in fact is how I first met Turandot, in a now vanished dress shop on Bloor Street whose BGM came from the classical radio station that was, just then, playing an ad for the Canadian Uproar sorry pardon Opera's fall season. It turned out to be the Apocalypse Now version (heads on poles, dirty mist, generic peasants as the population of Peking) and confirmed me as a fan for life.

My webmail app tends to choke on Japanese emails. Can't swear to this, but I think amazon was trying to tell me about a repackaged Gaiden in two volumes. I was all ohh maybe new artwork maybe I should buy, what's the exchange rate these days. Then I read the reviews, one thing amazon is good for besides ISBNs. It's the bunko version. Thank you, no. 'The stunning artwork, the story itself, come off looking bitsy and fussy' says the reviewer. I can imagine.

Been out of the Japanese Saiyuki loop for a while so hadn't registered that there's also a couple of volumes of short stories that completist me will pass on no problemo. Even if some of her stories are included -- doubtless the ones already on her webpage-- I've read the novels, and no, just no.

The old 'pick ten charas and answer the questions' as modified by flo_nelja, and hopefully translated correctly.

Step 1 : pick a fandom.
Step 2 : make a list of your 10 favourite characters.
Step 3 : click on the cut and answer the questions!

( Questions and Saiyuki/ Gaiden )

Just realized that my way of expressing Hakkai and Tenpou's desu-masu Japanese is to make their English Latinate. UnLatinate the English and they no longer sound like themselves to my ear. Goujun however speaks da-tai (checks: yes, even to Konzen), and I always Latinate *him*. Must unLatinate Goujun forthwith, since 'forthwith' is a word he'd never use.

Ah, paleaswater's birthday hard on the heels of the Mid-autumn festival. Happy birthday, paleaswater!

The fic prompts at 31_days this month come from Issa's haiku. Today's is an obvious one for Gaiden.

Title: Half remembered names and faces
Day/Theme: October 3- There are no strangers under cherry blossoms
Series: Saiyuuki Gaiden
Character/Pairing: Goujun and acquaintance
Rating: G
( Read more... )

I hate reading tiny kanji so thanks heaven someone else did it for me.

And this:

"Ah, the one and only thing that changed from my original plan was Goujun’s ending. I had planned to have him commit suicide at the end, but I didn’t like having the man who witnessed Kenren’s last cry, take his own life."

Is smug, again. (Eight and a half years. 'One's life takes long strides between Olympics.')

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

Does anyone know a 3K source that's hostile to Zhuge Liang? I mean, it's too much to hope it's been translated if there is. But it would make me very happy to know it exists, and that someone thought the sun did *not* shine out of the smug little git's bottom.

Now I see what paleaswater meant about most advisors standing aloof from the kings they advised and dying safe in their beds; not that anyone would want to be close to that utterly wet and a weed Liu Bei in the fist place. (And I wish I could recall where paleaswater said it.) The next chapter promises to show him weeping over Zhou Yu, but that notwithstanding, Zhuge Liang has ice water in his veins. 血もなければ、腸もない-- neither blood nor bowels. How brilliant of Minekura to have cast Tenpou in his role.

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday's prompt begun on Friday and finished this morning. It's now official that I can't finish even a ficlet at night. I need to sleep on it to know how it ends. (And dream of harem intrigue in Chinese palaces; the palace was open-air, just as a side benefit.) This is why (one reason why) I'll never make a prompt on the day it's due.

And of course it's Gaiden. The alternative was something depressing with Gou Jian or Ya Yu or both.
( dying is what, to live, each has to do )

Evidently Goujun's favourite food is boiled greens. With salt and bonito flakes to taste. Also he takes pains with his grooming, especially his skin, because it gives him so much trouble.

Now if I could only read those kanji under favourite colour and favourite kind of woman.

Anyone wanting the latest Gaiden ep will find it at saiyuki_manga, but you have to join the community to see it. Needless to say, you do not want to see the latest Gaiden ep. I'm content to postpone the trauma for a month myself.
( But still there's the bath )

ETA As veronicacode points out, what I was looking at was the ish that came out in July. This month's issue does indeed have a Gaiden episode. I go to order it from Kinokuniya.

No Gaiden ep this month either. Knew we'd gain nothing from WARD going bimonthly instead of 4x a year. OTOH 100 Demons Next (16? 17?) comes out in October. I am content.

And since it's the 17th in LRD if not here, many happy returns to i_am_zan. Much birthday cake be yours in the hours you can eat it.

No Gaiden ep in this month's issue. Some nice bookmarks, but not $25 worth.

From abyss_goat, this story, currently making the forum rounds. "The 70-year-old Chinese man who hand-carved over 6,000 stairs up a mountain for his 80-year-old wife has passed away in the cave which has been the couple's home for the last 50 years." Sniff snerf.

(That page is immensely slow-loading. The photos can be more easily seen here.)

Something that occurred to me Saturday anent Kenren's 咲いて 咲いて 咲いて!! ('bloom bloom bloom' if you must have it literally). A problem I've encountered myself. 咲く is a common phrase in Japanese. You use it all the time. Bloom isn't a common phrase in English. Even when we talk about flowers on trees- which we rarely do, compared to the Japanese- common NAmerican English reduces it to a flat 'the whatevers are out.'
( Flowery things that grow on trees )

I have a Hasui landscape happening out the study window. Pale blue evening sky, tall grey-green trees in the day's last sunlight. Lovely; serene; consoling. Only...

Of all these noted in stride and detained in memory
I now know better that they were going to die,

and *have* known it since the first Gaiden tank came out, because Minekura said exactly that in her afterword. There are tens of thousands of people dead in China, and hundreds of thousands in Myanmar, and that fact has clouded my life for the last few days; and still the foretold death of an imaginary character (who was pretty 'ii kagen' when he was alive) makes the evening seem a little empty.

Goujun. Over here. Filed for future use.
( On finding fics )

Having a not so wonderful week in small but sharp-edged ways. At least today passed without major disasters, screw-ups, or heart-scald, and tomorrow is Friday. I only have to work four hours with the screamers, even if I have to work to 6; there's a parcel for me at the PO; and then I have five days to do what I've wanted to do all this week, which is contemplate the ways of dragons.

But one good thing: Kinokuniya finally answered my email- after I'd emailed them again- apologizing for the mix-up with the WARD order and saying they'd order me the right one. 'And since it was our mistake you needn't send the spring edition back.' (Whether they bill me again is another question which I didn't feel like tormenting the poor clerk with; he has to write to me in English, which is clearly punishment enough for him.)

The spring WARD has no Gaiden ep but it does have that alternative cover Minekura drew for Gaiden 3. Anyone here want it? First dibs gets it.

Gaiden birthday ficlet for i_am_zan
( Many happy returns of the day )