Phantom Tokyo- The Other Side |
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rainy afternoon Brothers, sisters, I am here to give you the Word. Goof-off gets old paint stains out. Three drops of white paint on the kitchen floor, just in front of the stove, there since 1989 when I was painting the back room and didn't notice my brush was dripping as I came out. Turpentine didn't get them off. Steel wool didn't get them off. Goof-off (well, and steel wool) got them off. "The best cure for feeling futile," said Merlin, "is to clean something." This all the (female) world knows, but I still resist its wisdom desperately. The kitchen floor is big and relatively old and its worn and scratched vinyl with-the-dirt-in-the-scratches should be replaced but I don't have the money. You can't get it really clean just by mopping- you have to sit down and scrub. Given that I get up and down off the floor twenty times a day at work *and* do it with a 25 lb kid clinging to me, it's odd how much I hate sitting down to wash the kitchen tiles. Something about the futility of it, and the impossibility of ever being rid of dust and hair and greasy grunge, and the fact that it will just have to be done again in a week or two (or three, or a month, if you're me.) But it's a great thing to /have/ done, and to be able to put the acrylic coat on and see it gleam in the light. Small rewards for the everyday. 11:30 a.m. That time of year thou mayst in me behold... ...when my bloody $10 a pop disposable contact lenses keep trying to crawl off my eyes and fall like bits of saran wrap to the floor. "We're outta here!" I hate spring. Finished The Two Towers yesterday, finished Witch Week last night, and started (the translation of) God Child, all very commendable things to have done. Some books warp you out of your reality without your noting it. Two Towers didn't, but then it was always my least favorite of the three, and Witch Week did. Put it down and found, with a great sense of surprise, that I was me and here when I'd been half-assuming for an hour or so that I was someone else and there. Nice when that happens. I will now go into Fangirl mode and wonder if there's any Chrestomanci fanfic. Not that it matters if there is because the odds on it being bad are so enormous. Went cruising ff.net to see if I could find something to tell me what PSoH is about, and I can only conclude that people who find out about a series through its fanfic have a gene that I lack. What the fanfic screams loud and clear to /me/ is This is a forgettable series don't go near it! This is just like every other series! This is a series that inspires people to do BTN! I mean, fanfic is fanfic, ie amateur stories by people who don't write very well having ordinary fantasies about the characters in a series. As expressions of devotion they're touching, as expressions of personal feeling they have an unshakeable integrity, as any kind of literature they suck. The name of the game. You can go from the series to the fanfic and still find the distorted reflection of the characters you know there, but to go in the opposite direction boggles me. How?? I just don't see how it's doable. (The dj parallel doesn't work. Djs have artwork. Djs tell you something about the characters no matter how BTN the action is, even if it's only what the characters look like. From a fanfic you learn only the characters' names. And sometimes not even that, when people write from Chinese subtitled bootlegs and American made dubs.) And yes, Greer, I know my own stuff has turned people onto series, and even more recently than Papuwa. As one of the Saiyuki converts said, "I had to find out what kind of series would make someone write *that*." But my experience with Samurai Troopers and Aoki Soh suggests to me that if I find a dynamite story, it means only that I've found a dynamite storyteller, making silk purses out of pigs' ears. Not that ST is a pig's ear, but we all know anime defaults to the mean 98% of the time. And the ones that don't (ahem cough Utena cough cough O-nii-sama cough harumph) are impossible to write for. A lot of the time a good fanwriter or djka is just seeing things, IMHO- seeing stuff that's probably not in the original but wouldn't it be neat if it was. (I'll make an exception for people who write from the manga and not the anime. The manga is almost always more twisted than the anime, as we all know.) Is my take on this. 04:20 p.m. Ahh the Aestheticism-haters have been at it again, bless their angry little souls. Rhetoric and self-righteousness is a bad mixture to get drunk on, guys. Ato wa hidoi kara. God send them better sense, a little more humour, and something resembling a life, or they'll wake up in a decade or three at the logical end of their present course: small-souled fault-finding misery-making office managers, hated by their subordinates, despised by their superiors, loathed by their families and shunned by their cats. Not that I think change likely with that bunch. They all suffer too much from
The mortal sickness of a mind Sensible man, Housman. 06:47 p.m. I don't normally do these things but...
It had to be, I suppose. If we're talking the movie, who else is there? ElrondxAragorn is who there is, actually, except for the little complication of Arwen. Sigh. They left one of those digging things on the street- you know, whatever they're called- steamshovels? Whatever Gertie is in the kids' book. Suppose they figured it was easier to leave it parked for two days than to drive it back to wherever at 10 mph. Never saw one close to before. And you know, they're *big* suckers. A little scary- 'the jaws that bite, the claws that catch.' Probably what a dinosaur feels like if you saw one intact and alive. sometime later Not the best way to begin a morning, with the power disappearing in the middle of mixing up my breakfast shake with the egg beater ("Damn these cheap appliances- I only *bought* that two months ago and now it's dead!") and staying off for a good twenty minutes or the time it took me to read a Puff article. Downtown Toronto under siege- expect disruptions. Under siege by the tory gov't is what I say and we all know to be true, and has been since '95. Meanwhile- pass me the allergy pills. The temperature climbs to 17 and 18 and all the trees are budding ah-CHOO! Went down to Chinatown Centre y'day after work, seized by a need to find Petshop of Horrors. (Didn't, btw.) The sky was a soft blue with little wisps of cirrus cloud overhead and a transparent white shoal of placid stratus over where the sun was lowering, and the sun shining through it on the bare branches was the clear calm light of November, the colour of white wine, that makes everything look exactly like itself and very beautiful. And I wish, of course, that it *was* November and we were heading into the cold clarity of winter and not out of it into the hot confusion of summer. I don't want to be Buddhist. Everything dies in winter and everything comes back to life in the spring, and my feeling is increasingly 'oh shit, not again, could someone let me off this damned Wheel for chrissake?' Let's just get to December and stay there, can't we, with Catullus' night is forever and must be slept out? Warukunai deshou? (The Buddhists of course agree with me that in fact there's no reason to be happy at another spring coming back and another life starting; but of course in their version you don't get seasons at all cause it's all just Illusion. Sigh.) so early early in the spring Note to me: going to bed at 4 or 5 am means being woken by the construction company currently repaving the street BLAM BLAM BLAM at 8 am. They were about ten doors up this morning. You know where they'll be in five hours. So are you going to bed? Typical urban annoyance 2: halfway through an email the lights and the computer went off. (Not the lights on the other side of the block, oh no, clearly visible out my backroom window. Just the lights on this side.) Two minutes later they went on again. In those two minutes I got to cold-sweat about Did I save the last three pages of the translation I was taking a break from to read email? Two minutes is a very long time when facing the prospect of having to translate three pages of Pillaging Army Sacks Ecbatana all over again. But yes, I did save it. Never again do I merely minimize a Word screen from now on. I save and exit, just to be safe. But of course our temporary blackout- average twice a month- meant the VCR's channel select had to be reprogrammed again. Which did, then watched some Trigun because it was there, and then did some vast wasteland channel-hopping, which is why I'm still up now finishing the last of my day's allottment of pages. And resisting the urge to peek in on Matsumoto and Tachibana and see if they've gotten any farther with the story since I left them this morning, or possibly even started the Kubitoh part of it in my absence. I do wish stories worked that way, your charas working diligently while you're away... And when you write at night they do. Anything written between 2 and 4 will be forgotten by next day, so when I go to reread it it's all totally unfamiliar. Uhh- so no, I'm not going to bed just yet. late. Jonathan's dad, who was not in fact the monk in Boris ("Ted Whatsis- we look a lot alike") gave me comps to Handel's Julius Caesar. This was definitely a Good Thing, because I was all ready to buy my own tickets, and ahem what a waste that would have been. "I'm not a fan of da capo singing," J's d said. I thought I was. 'Da capo' meaning pretty much 'from the top', which is where Baroque opera likes to start its repetitions from, again and again and, well, again. If it's something dynamite, you don't mind hearing it sung three times over, and I always thought Handel was pretty dynamite. Umm. Saru mo ki kara etc etc. Trouble is that Baroque everything works great as background music, to be listened to while doing something else, but an opera is supposed to be given your undivided attention. And with this very nice but one pattern stuff my attention began straying in very short order to considerations like You *could* do a Wild Adapter/ Petshop of Horrors crossover if you could figure out a way to get one character from NY's Chinatown to Yokohama's Chinatown, or possibly vice versa... And then the classic concerns of baroque opera (and theatre as well), those stiff and noble figures stiffly and nobly falling in love or contemplating dignified revenge or whatever. One began to wish for some of the overheated passion and musicality of Aida, just to add a little life to the proceedings. Hey, sex and politics are supposed to be exciting, guys. I like stylism as much as the next person, but there are limits to how much interest the expression of stylized emotion has. And finally... the thing was three and a half hours long. They cut Boris down to a civilized 2 hrs 40 minutes, possibly for good historical reasons (the act removed may have been inserted later for all I know to the contrary) but more likely, I think, because they didn't believe a western audience would sit through 3 hours plus of Mussorgsky. Handel however is One Of Ours, so let's keep him all in. Well, the length is really neither here nor there. My limit for Handel's operas turns out to be the same as my limit for Noh plays- 90 minutes and I have to leave. A nice enough 90 minutes, but let's end the experience while the memories are still friendly. But I'll note that Caesar was sung by a woman, which is one thing to do with those castrato roles; and Pompey's son, who I thought was sung by a woman, was sung by a countertenor, which is the other. Japanese-American countertenor, in black leather, and very nice for the period that I was thinking he was a she. Still very nice, actually, but not the same androgynous frisson. after midnight. Read through West End 6 and 7 in a day or two. Don't ask me why that series makes me feel so happy, but it does. Possibly because the hints given in vol 1 actually pan out later in the story, suggesting- good god- that the mangaka knew what they were doing for once? Or because I associate it with a couple of years back- mostly summer of '99 I believe- when fandom wasn't being nearly as tiresome as it has been this century? (Everyone else in my life was being tiresome, but not the fans.) Or simply because Kiri is a Harlem-type and I like him, cheerful amoral basically decent hired knife that he is. But also because in vol 7 there's a scene where he gets reunited with Tonami and it has, by god, the selfsame iconography as Stork and Tit when Tit's come bringing Stork's briefcase in Stigma. I always knew that man was a romantic hero just waiting to happen. 'Dark, depressing, headed for tragedy'- West End? Give me a break. Yes, I know it's not over and I know we've been promised that puzzlingly invulnerable Kiri will die through Tonami- but me I bet it's a Harvey and Atsuka type tragic consummation. *If* the series gets finished at all. (And there was me this aft in the Museum cafeteria with tears all over my face through the Atsuka scenes, and hoping ostrich-like that my reading glasses were hiding that fact.)
Later- 5 pm Got my Feb GFantasy- last Gaiden cliff-hanging ep, when shall we three meet again?- and the March Animage with an unexpected EC shitajiki freebie in it. What I like about Japanese magazines- they give you presents. It's like having a birthday every month. True, it's like having a birthday with relatives who have no idea what you want or need and more often than not miss the mark- *another* Inu Yasha poster? jeez, it was postcards last month...- but who sometimes get it right in spades ('The Sanzou trading card! I got the Sanzou trading card!') And next month has a Kubo-chan/Tokitoh poster, happy happy me. Floreat Minekura's connection with Animage, may it not go the way of Shibata's. I /like/ getting my Wild Adapter art book illo by illo in each issue. Oh, and something has to be done with Kou of Chinatown. You can't have the long hair, the long robe, and that bemused expression and not do something with Kou of Chinatown. Only you have to do it in a manga cause I can't think of any text story that would work. Morning Bought a while ago a book on French verbs (to go with the Italian dictionary I felt I *had* to have to read Italian djs with.) Saturday night, my regular date with Helen, after she went to bed in her 'get lost who needs you' Helenish fashion (she's 17 months btw- honi soit qui mal y pense), sat down with it and my little French-English dictionary to bone up on these obscure verbs listed in the back. Half of them weren't there. They aren't even in my Larousse. They're borrowed from various African dialects- wolophiser, pindouler, yailler- or English- weekender, reprogrammer- or have been constructed out of who knows what- abloquer, satonner, spathifier. Boy, do living languages change or what? Even with an Academie Francaise to keep you pure...
11:39 a.m. Jenny the cat would look out the front door, see it was raining or snowing or whatever, and then go to the back door on the off-chance that it wasn't raining or snowing out there. I see parallels with my own attitude to work. I slog away at the translation page by wearisome page and never get any farther ahead. So I drop it and go do other stuff for the rest of the day on the off-chance that *not* slogging away at the translation will somehow get it finished. "That," said the Gollux, "is logic as *I* know and use it." I'm cheered to read that Alice Munro believed she might have talent but not the ability to express it. She believed this until her collected stories came out about seven years ago- which means, when you do the math, that she believed it until she was 73, through four decades of professional writing. It's just an innate attitude, you know? Everyone doubts their ability. Well, snotty 20-something male writers apart, perhaps. 01:01 p.m. Boris on my mind still, sort of. Thing is, I didn't read the plot summary in the program book till intermission. And of course it was sung in Russian with surtitles. So I got a sketchy idea of what was happening onstage as it was happening- the peasants want Boris to be tsar, Boris refuses to be tsar, the peasants *really* want Boris to be tsar and all these sinister guys are ordering the peasants around in a funny fashion. Boris becomes Tsar and angsts horribly about something preying on his mind. Then we're in a monastery and someone is writing his memoirs and I wondered if this was a flash-forward to some point in future and was this Boris who'd retired and become a monk... And at that point I realized I was watching the opera as if it was a manga, getting the gist of what was happening but with no idea of what /had/ happened, which is something you almost always have to pick up in manga from the context. And that I was further expecting a 19th century composer to think like a 20th century Japanese mangaka, which wasn't going to happen. Time is linear in 19th century everythings. But I must say- stripped of context and picture read, with all these unanswered questions (is the young monk *really* the Tsarevitch who survived the massacre? I suppose he could be...) the opera was a lot more immediate than when I knew what was actually going on (like, the peasants had been hired to yell that they wanted Boris so as to make him seem the people's choice. An ignorance of history can be useful at times.) And Boris' angsting read more more satisfactorily as shoujo manga than as actual or even stage emotion. I know shoujo manga and grand opera aren't really all that different from each other, but no-one expects me to be serious about shoujo manga. Besides, Boris and Whatsis-unpronounceable-name- Sluiovich?- have nice yaoi overtones together of the betrayer/ betrayed fashion. Yes ok- how reading manga ruined me for western culture, yet again. late 'Cause it makes her feel the way she used to feel... Jonathan's dad who sings in the Canadian Uproar chorus gave me comps to Boris Godunov for tonight. I biked down, foolhardy because it's *cold* these days and April has had, if not more snow, than at least more frequent snow than January did. (And the number of homeless downtown stuns me. Largely because there are warmer places to be homeless in in TO than the canyon streets of King and Adelaide.) Brought my copy of West End 7 to read till curtain time, and was sudenly struck by the anomaly. I used to go to the opera a lot in the 80's, but the last time I actually remember being at the O'Keefenoke/ Hummingbird Centre was 14 years ago. Don't think I've been in the place since for anything. Opera belongs with the me who used to go to Europe every other year or so and could speak passable French. Manga belongs to the me who goes to Japan and can get by in Japanese. Different people from different decades- but here I am reading manga at the opera. I discover that you can hear beautifully in the balcony, which you never could on the floor. That Jonathan's dad, who looks like a burly monk, got to play a burly monk. That the opera audiences are the same as they ever were, only 15 years older. Time was I knew people like these- literate and civilized, humanities grads who still follow the paths they followed in university, people who read books and not only computer screens. Where'd they all go to? I miss them, my generation. I know they must be around somewhere because even if there's been two generations since us, there are still more Boomers than there is anyone else. But now they're invisible. They don't come to the places where I am. (Vicky says in Sri Lanka they believe that middle of the night dreams come true but morning dreams don't. And of course the clearest dreams are the morning ones. So no Paris for us. But that grey confused and unpleasant one about babies vanishing might...) 09:48 a.m. Dreamt I was in Paris last night. Not the real Paris, a dream Paris like the dream Tokyo I occasionally visit. This was the first time for Paris, though. Grey, misty, post-rain evening Paris, travelling with daycare Vicky (Vigneswaran to you- calm capable young Sri Lankan woman), out to buy books in a crowded little bookstore, boxes and boxes of them. 'It's over 400 francs,' the woman at the caisse says, 'is that alright?' A little over $100 for all these? Marvellous. (Never mind what the exchange rate may be- I keep to the one of my youth, 4 FR = 1 dollar.) We come out amid misty fields and anonymous institutional buildings and possibly a greenhouse or two, and drag our bags up to the bus stop on the Boulevard far away to the north. I can't remember where the hotel is exactly in this crowded and complicated metropolis. Not surprisingly, because when we get off the bus to check the business card it says 'Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie, Montmartre.' The Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie is nowhere near Montmartre. We're in the courtyard of a little 18th century hotel somewhere, wooden tables set about for the cafe's customers, much more southern and meridional than Paris. But cozy and friendly, and the evening sun is out making its golden way into the courtyard to light up the green and shiny leaves of some little tree, or maybe the ivy. And we're drinking whatever it was the parents used to drink when I was in Paris as a kid- something syrupy in one carafe, water in another, mix together and let them roil. Cassis, maybe, or anisette. And it's nice and calm here at the table with Vicky in a corner of this cozy beloved city surrounded by friendly French people, and very odd to wake up to Now, with a powdering of snow on the roofs lke icing sugar and the sense of having been very far away in a place I'd forgotten existed. Vicky came to the daycare on a training program for new immigrants at this time of year five years ago, in my first year home when I wasn't entirely adjusted to the west myself. '97 still keeps in my mind the sense of strangeness that the world has when seen through jet-lagged eyes- seemingly familiar but *wrong*, which may be why Vicky, everyday as she is now, was the one to turn up in Paris. On her first day she took Theresa, our then Impossible Baby, off for a nap. "Uhh- she's very difficult to get to sleep," Grace warned her, in massive understatement. "It's OK," Vicky said, and disappeared into the naproom. We sat in the next room, listening for the usual and expected shrieks from the monitor. Silence. We looked at each other. "'Takes initiative'," said Hugh. noon OK, body. So you made me give you ativan and codeine again. I suppose you think you've done something very clever, turning the back of my neck and all my shoulders into granite that squeezes the poor little nerves and blood-veins till they shriek. And now you think we're going to lie in bed cozy all afternoon with a hotwater bottle listening to October Project and looking at the ceiling. No, little bunny rabbit, no. We're dressing warmly and going out in the sleet for our shift with Bobby and Andrew and Melissa. You want shrieking, shrieking is what you'll get. Zama mirou. See that I wake up tomorrow with functional vision, shoulders and balance, or tomorrow afternoon I'll take you in to hang around with Melissa's *Mom*, and then we'll all be sorry. (Note: Pseudonyms have been used here in accordance with the Young Offenders' Act, which prohibits stating the real names of offending minors in a public venue.) Later ZeroSum episode arrived. Wrapped it carefully in plastic, took it out in sloggy accumulating sleety snow (ah, April), and made several copies of its 70-odd pages. It's still just a rehash of the second episode, by me. (Kangaete mireba, in the second episode too Sanzou was being actually semi-human about innocent kids taken hostage. Maybe this isn't post-Kamisama monk at all but merely a flashback. A reload. Hmmm...) 10:24 a.m. The problem writing EC, I realize at 1 o'clock last night, is that English has no good translation for ijiwaru, or at least not the ijiwaru one finds in Minekura's characters. A bright-eyed, smiling, deeply sexual, almost good-natured not-being-nice. And certainly English has nothing that equates to the kind of ijiwaru possible in Japanese, like using respect language when you should be less than formal and exercising enryo with an intimate. Mind insists, as it always insists, that there *is* the perfect word for this subtle and lowkey not-niceness, I just can't think of it. But in that case neither can Roget. Roget's proffered synonyms suggest that when we English speakers are being unkind and malicious, we do it with unbearably clumsiness, and I know we don't. Not the Brits, certainly. What on earth /do/ you call that blandly polite and snotty putting people in their place? Not sarcasm, not sardonic, not ironic... And of course, nothing here captures the ijiwaru which is an expression of lust and arousal, though you see it everywhere in the djs. I could draw it in a minute if I could draw, but I can't write it. Equally Roget makes me think that when we feel ill-used we do it with unbearable childishness, all 'sulky' and 'petulant' and 'sullen', verbal red flags saying 'You hurt my feeeeelings!!!' But I know there's a word for the kind of subdued lowkey urami I'm thinking of that doesn't have those connotations. Heigh-ho. Keep reading The Two Towers and doubtless I'll find Sam being it at some point. Victorian servants were said to do it a lot, I believe. |
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