Off the Cliff

The other day I woke up remembering scenes from Spirited Away and text from Claudine in Paris. This is so much more pleasant than waking up remembering that Donald Trump is president. I must try to program my falling asleep brain to do it more often.

(It's been fifty years since I first read the Claudine books. Ah, the summer of 1967. Expo. Pre-university. Everybody kept on playing Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band. That's also when Markham Village first opened up, with Memory Lane where my comic-obsessed sister regularly hung out. All those buildings are closed and shuttered now, and chain-link fences cut off the entire street, both sides.)

The notion of sitting on the sofa, warm and dry, reading myself silly on a rainy cold Sunday is massively appealing. It just ignores my basic antsiness and adult attention deficit disorder. (Neither of those operate when I'm in front of a computer, mind. WHY SHOULD THIS BE, I WONDER?) So instead I sat in a laundromat reading, which has the bonus of getting me a clean terrycloth bathrobe as well. (I need a new bathrobe: this one is nearly ten years old and looking it. Also I have vain hopes of a lightweight terry robe. Vain because I'll be lucky to get terrycloth at all in this day of non-absorbent microfibre that pollutes water supplies.)

Dreamed again of The Apartment I Don't Live In That Has All The Books/ Things. A place I rented in the- 80s, this time, I think, because it felt different from the 70s dream apartments. As always, I moved my stuff there long ago and then forgot about it all. The Books/ Stuff were all on Ikea book cases that took up most of the space, only there was an extra hallway and a room at the end where someone was indeed currently living- rather a nice girl in her 20s. The landlord and his men came round- dark squat sullen muscle, wanting me to move- but as it happened my apartment was full of friends and relations, including my brother. So I was aware of its existence as well as being all 'OMG I forgot about this place how long have I had it, 20 years, 30? who's been paying the rent all that time??' To which my brother said in disgust, 'Me, of course.'

I have indeed rented apartments where I moved my stuff and then lived elsewhere but they were all in the forgotten 70s, which may explain why I have this dream in the first place. Oh, and for some reason I believe I sublet a friend's place as well for a few brief months. But that too feels like a dream, mostly because K's room looks like our childhood cottage and I always thought that's what I was seeing.
( April reading )

1. Kipling's autobiography is quite fascinating except when he starts being Kipling. Which is not what you're thinking, though there's some of that there too. More, the 'wakaru hito wa wakaru' aspect ('those who know will understand'): opaque sentences referring to some aspect of Indian army life or newspaper editing under the Raj or even his school's headmaster. *He* knows what he's talking about; those who were in the army or the newspaper or the school know what he's talking about; the rest of us don't, and sucks to be us. (Off the top of my head, I associate this opacity most with Stalky and Co, where I never know what on earth is going on, or why. Thi is why Kipling so often fantods me.)

Kipling in fact wasn't bad at rising above his innate prejudices. But in minor details he loses my sympathy. Do not whine to me about the heat of India that drives a man mad, and in the next breath say no really it's an absolute necessity to dress for dinner and you'd like a word or two with those modern slackers who sneer at the notion of wearing waistcoats and jackets in the sweltering months.
( Read more... )

Harry Dresden is teaching me to speed read. You only have to read the first sentence of a paragraph, then run an eye through the rest in case any important words jump out, then the next first sentence, and so on. I can't say the exercise is worth it. This is very Campbell soup fantasy-- all the usual ingredients tasting much the same no matter what the label says. Not sure why he's such a big hit; the Night Side is at least enjoyable fluff.

I was going to say But at least there are no vampires, only of course there are vampires. What there isn't is vampires as written by women writers. I picked up something by Nalini Singh, figuring that an Indo-New Zealander would have a different take on things. Nope. The same as Kittredge and McLeod: double whammy female something (in this case a vampire hunter turned angel-with-wings) with 'too many hawt boyfriends' problems and err 'default urban fantasy vocabulary' problems. "She sucked in a breath as she felt the temptation of Dmitri's scent wrap around her in a glide of fur and sex and wanton indulgence." Dmitri is a vampire, of course.

There's a problem when you begin with the best, as I did in the genre which I have to call 21st Century Urban Fantasy, to distinguish it from the folksy likes of Huff and de Lint. Aaronovitch and Griffin are about the urbs, not the genre tropes; but why is no one else?
( And speaking of starting with the best )

Ben Aaronovitch is talking about the previous incarnation of ideas that made it into Rivers of London, one of which was a Hogwarts hommage. "You can tell this is a basic TV idea because it's made out of clichés bolted together."
( I too can take someone else's ball and run with it )

What a lovely long weekend this long weekend was. Cool-cold sun for two days, which saw me gardening without pain and assembling my new vacuum and vacuuming without pain, and cooking chicken livers and mandarins, and reading Carpe Jugulum and embroidering my jacket with (cough) mixed success.

Also went to the matinee of Spirited Away Saturday, because I was not to be cheated of my two big screen viewings even if one was the dub.
( What a difference a matinee makes )

One Sunday in 1993 I bought a copy of GanGan Something, and was overjoyed because I thought I'd got a Papuwa episode. But no, it wasn't the GanGan that Papuwa ran in, so I left it in someone's bike basket out front of Hourindo in Ikebukuro. Ikebuk's Hourindo first moved across the street and then closed. But after nearly two decades the universe has paid back my (doubtless unwanted) present, by mysteriously depositing in my bike pannier a set of nightlight bulbs. Which I have no use for either.

The garbage pickup has moved back to Thursday mornings. This feels far more natural and way it s'posed to be than Tuesdays. Of course, natural is two pickups a week, but that we haven't had in decades.

There's been much shifting about of boxes next door, as s-i-l's work office moves into bro's home office, bro's home office moves down to basement, and what was in the basement since 1989 gets left for the garbage or the scavengers, whichever comes first. Thus I discover that the early issues of Horizon magazine, from the late '50s, did *not* go to the Art Gallery's library. They've been next door all along, and that vanished snapshot of a vanished time is now mine. Alas it's a faintly mouldy mine-- not enough to make me sneeze, but with a distinctive smell and a tendency for pages to want to stick together.

It remains a fascinating snapshot of the pre-British Invasion/ Vietnam War world that I saw and read as a child: the Beat poets and modern American architecture (all of it hideous to my eye) and execrations of the growing emptiness of growing suburbia; profiles of up-and-coming entertainers like the young Stephen Sondheim, the young Marlon Brando, the young Mike Nichols and Elaine May; homages to the grand old men Andrew Wyeth and Robert Frost, encomia of the new Italian directors Fellini and Antonioni, pictures by (the young) Ronald Searle; and articles on odd corners of history and art, popular stuff but still informative. It just looks--- different, 50 years later with an adult understanding of what's being said. I think Horizon shaped my idea of what kind of world adults ought to live in, a world of style and ideas; I believed that New York or Paris in the 50s was some kind of heaven. But it wasn't that way at all, even from the viewpoint of the time.

Speaking of different on re-view: Sunday I finally saw Sen to Chihiro in Japanese on a big screen. It was good, of course; but my memory says the Bloor's screen was bigger and the whole thing more engrossing, the colours richer and more mysterious, when seen that first time, even from the balcony. Like the first time, I was seized mid-film with a need to pee, but this time I held out, slightly to the detriment of my concentration. Also was troubled by an attack of those chest knocks that are either anxiety or fluid in the lungs, and I never know which. But a nuisance, whichever. Because though I woke Sunday morning feeling better than in weeks, with energy to spare, by the time I finished with the film and got me home I was yawning at 11 and slept ten and a half hours, and was a draggled wreck the next day.

Thus I am not going to Omohide poro-poro this evening (starts at 8:45), having been up early for a sick child this morning and landed with an 8:15 shift for tomorrow. I'm yawning at 7:30 and anticipate a very early night. (Out the window a grey November sky is backing the blooming plum blossoms and the buildings are all shades of tan in the filtered western light. That was what the 50s looked like to me.)

Reading Melissa Scott's A Choice of Destinies, which is A/U Alexander the Great, of all things. I see echoes of Nicholas and Phillip in Alexander and Hephaistion, or maybe more, Nicholas and Phillip are both Hephaistion to the latent Alexander in the other. Alexander is not my man at all at all, and the book reads straightforward history, but I'm reading it with enjoyment still, so it must be good. Though I'd like it less without the little flashforward scenes from the future that evolved from Alexander not trying to conquer India, but turning back to deal with a Greek rebellion-- and then Syracuse-- and then the tribes of mainland Italy...
( Read more... )

Ganked from nojojojojojojojo's entry (there was a character in Arslan, I think it was, that did that to my fingers too; had to keep going back and removing a's and consonants from the name that never never ends...)

Unlike her source, I tend to individuals over species. Species are a problem, as I'll discuss later.
( Read moar )

Spring melancholy. The 20-somethings squeeing over Peter and Harriet make me feel old. I too squeed once. Then I reread the books twenty years later and thought 'what an odious unlikable pair.' Nothing comes as it came before, and everything looks worse second time around...

( But is for others undiminished somewhere. )

Everything looks worse second time around except for Miyazaki maybe. I finally watched Howl in a decent copy, not pirated with crappy sound and surrreal subtitles. Followed it with a reread of the book. I like the Miyazaki better than before, naturally, but I'm surprised to find it edging the book out as well. Miyazaki's WTF interpolations- the war, the bird, that disconcertingly story-book disguised prince- who gave me the creeps BTW- are on balance no more WTF than Jones' own trademark and casual WTFs- like the dog man who's actually two people, that I still can't figure out precisely what happened to him where, and what was going on between Howl and the Witch and why, and all that stuff in the last quarter of the book that's just there, deal with it. There's a lot of thready loose-endedness in Jones, which is doubtless a change from the common run with every last blessed detail explicated into the dust, but it does annoy the tidy-minded, like me.

And of course Miyazaki has his landscapes, straight out of 1920's children's books with the colours intact. This is no fair because he's a master of landscapes and wins with them over just about anyone I can think of.

The transit strike is a go. And Squidlet summarizes the WHO report under the accurate cut-tag We're ALL GONNA DIE!! A pandemic of avian flu is inevitable. It hits not only the very young and the very old but the adults in their prime right in the middle. And it's definitely going to happen.
( I can't tell you what a relief this is )

On another note, I'm a touch bemused by these people writing Stigma fic. I wonder how many of them have actually read the thing in Japanese. Because the last thing I feel the need of is Stigma fic of any description. What's there is perfect. Anything further is just... surplus to requirement. And not perfect, of course. But what I want, rather badly, is to be able to translate it again, only better than before; and that I can't do.

( memeage )

So mvrdrk sent me a DVD of The Butterfly Lovers and I've been watching it in spurts. Spurting partly because Shanghai opera music (I'm assuming that's what this version is?) is terribly catchy and I get the most awful earworm from it; and partly because the DVD has no subtitle options. The case says it does- in Japanese as well if you want it- but no menu appears at the start. We just go straight into Chinese subtitles which I then squint at hoping to make some kind of sense of the things. And it works 'cause by the time the heroine got to lamenting at her lover's tomb I was able to make out most of what the lamentation was about. So I finished the opera tonight. Then I was presented with the subtitle menu. Argh.

(To combat Shanghai opera earworms, I have recourse to the Sen to Chihiro Image Album and the cheerfully lugubrious Aburaya. Sounds similar but I know what it's saying.)