Phantom Tokyo- The Other Side |
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In the Tsurezuregusa--- (notes blank faces) Oh come. Tsu-re-zu-re- gusa. Nothing to be scared of. (Blank. Blank.) Oh alright. In the medieval collection of memoirs and pensees translated by Donald Keene, I believe, as Essays in Idleness, the author has a section whose title Keene translates as 'Self-praise.' Keene wouldn't have known this in the '70's, but that's really the 'Go Me!' section. Anyone can do it, and probably should periodically. It's good for the ego: 'One day when entering the university kissa I found Paul M desperately conning the text of The Wanderer, which he was supposed to have translated for an Anglo-Saxon tutorial in half an hour. Though it had been ten years since I last read it myself, I sat down immediately and walked him through it with five minutes to spare, and he subsequently faked his way through the tutorial discussion to great applause.' Like that. Today's Go me! is 'I was asked to provide a translation of a few lines in Arslan Senki vol 3 which are probably the basis of all the Darun x Arslan djs in existence (and trust me, that's about the only yaoi there *is* in Arslan fandom.) Though the Japanese original tends to the colorless and cliched because hell Tanaka is a *guy* after all, my eight and a half years of writing yaoi allowed me to render the passage with both verbal polish and emotional oomph, and that within the context of a perfectly literal translation.' Go me. (Odd, how few people actually link to Mooncalf. I'm at three degrees of separation from her, and have to try to remember just where the entry to her blog is. No, I don't link directly. I've got two blogs on my favourites list that act like Ootemachi or Hibiya Stations- you can get to *any* line from there. You just have to walk a lot, and I keep forgetting that fact.) But the noteworthy Mooncalf notes, worthily, that the umm less pleasing aspects of the 20-somethings may be ascribed to their parents raising them to have what we were serenely confident would be a sense of self-worth. None of this 'seen and not heard' nonsense, none of this benign neglect, none of this kid as generic small animal attitude. We treated kids as people whose needs and thoughts and wishes should be consulted and listened to. We- and I have to include myself in the indictment, because I've been doing it for 20-some years as well, only with other people's kids- thought it would make for confident mature and generous adults. What it made for, evidently, is a bunch of people convinced that the sun shines out of their asses. We should have beaten them instead. (Hopefully) Maybe it's not too late to start...? I will now, because I'm my mother, and if you think you won't turn into your mother when you're older, ha ha ha, argue the other side for balance and point out that all 20-somes act like that. We did. My parents' generation did. (Read them, the '40's writers. They *did*.) Their parents probably did. It's the nature of the beast. Should learn that speech from Jumpers, is it? Sort of: 'More children are fed than starving, more survive than die in infancy, more grow up happily than unhappily, and those who grow up unhappily do, at least, grow up.' (gloomily, going back to being me) They grow up to be miserable unhappy cranky adults, and boy do they tell you about it. Someone sent me a nice little present in a nice little envelope in the mail yesterday (and roses too, but those came later.) And while I can dream of laptops and CD players and weeks in Quebec City, I have a sinking feeling that what Someone's present will buy is three strong backs and a truck to clear the bricks and wire and doorframes and aluminum sheeting out of the garage, followed by a handyman to put a new lockable door on the garden side of the garage, followed by me putting signs up at Fiesta Farms supermarket, 'Parking space for rent- garage', to recoup the original costs of the garage door. I am now reminded exactly why being grown-up is what my generation never wanted to be when they grew up. It's bloody boring. I shall buy the entire set of Petshop of Horrors when I'm in New York to compensate.
It would *not* be interesting if Korea won the cup. It would be loud. Very very very loud. They won at 4 bloody am or something like that this morning, and they haven't stopped honking down on Bloor for eighteen hours since. So not Korea, OK? Not Italy not Brazil I don't have to worry about Portugal any more maybe Mexico to make the Spanish speakers happy. Or some utterly unexpected African country. Or Japan. Especially Japan. Piss those noisy Koreans off. That'd learn 'em. (nasty smile) Body, we need to have a talk. You're happy, remember? You're happy because the temperature is back at 22 in the day and cool enough at night to need duvets. You're happy because I let you have a World Cup cookie at Second Cup every day- and they're *big* cookies, twice the size of the usual sugar cookie, with nice crackly hard sugar icing- even if I don't let you have Tim Horton's icepressos because that's got more calories and fat than a Big Mac. You're happy because the next volume of Arslan looks pretty interesting. You're happy because we're getting more Hi Izuru. You're happy because we're getting more Wild Adapter. You're happy because we have enough money to go to NY next month and see everybody and buy lots of overpriced manga at BookOff or Kinokuniya. You're happy because we may even be getting a sound system! or a laptop! or at any rate, bathroom taps that don't leak! You're happy because you don't have to work in the morning at all and can sleep in till 11. You're happy, OK? So would you cut it out with the muscle knot in the right shoulder that's trying to turn my neck into binder twine and kill the sight in my right eye? I'd appreciate it. Thank you. J. Quotation found in an old notebook, about the haiku of someone called Takahashi Matsuo: from the second floor a crimson plate thrown vernal day, shoes left on the lawn, the number of cold day, inside the paper doors it's being cooked 'In the first poem an effect is separated from its cause. In the second objects are separated from their owners. In the third the things and activities of the world indoors are separated from the world outside where the perception of them is vague and imperfect. In all cases the poet displays a rare self-discipline in refusing to resolve the separation, as would be done conventionally, by intruding an explanation, a number, or a hungry poet.'
I noted this long before I ever wrote any fic and before I knew practically any Japanese, and of course before I'd been to Japan. Now I have, the second and third poems don't seem quite as surrealistic as they did before- rather more oh yes of course. (The first one is still surrealistic and I like it a lot just for that. That sense of 'this happened I saw it period.') And meanwhile, apropos of the latest off-topicness on Saiyuki-yaoi, I went back and worked a bit at the Matsumoto/Tachibana story. It may still be nothing to write home about, but it made me feel better than I have in a long time, in the sense of settling my stomach. Don't know why my stomach was unsettled, but it was, and now it's better. For anyone that cares... The man's name is Umayado. Helps to read the furigana. And I'm not going to swear that one of my Koreans is Korean, though I can't think what other place would have Japanese-descended people living there as well as the native inhabitants. I need a *map*, dammit, and not just family trees. Because in the 6th century there were parts of Honshuu that hadn't been conquered, never mind expeditions to the mainland, and for all I know my putative Korean comes from there.
I feel I've been somewhere else, and have been for a long time. As in, yesterday and all that went before kind of feel like they didn't happen. This is because I got pulled out of a dream (forget what, now, but obviously a somewhere else dream) 6 hours after going to bed, by Zeb on the phone saying So-and-so didn't show up for her shift can you come in, it being then 9:20. And I did, hot muggy day suddenly when last night I needed a shawl to go down to Bloor St in; and stayed until 6 in the oppressive daycare heat, with the newest baby shrieking at us while we all said Ahh shades of Isabelle, who did the same thing all through the fall of 2000. Then I came home to talk Saiyuki fics with people on the net. This translates to 'I have been back to 2000', and on not enough sleep either. Word is that we're about to drop out of summer just as quickly as we dropped in, and thank god say I. Hubris Well, it's down. They've razed our old building. Pile of rubble and and concrete and bricks filling the hole that was the infant section, and all that's still standing is part of the basement's western wall, with a single window that I realize must have been the one in the lunchroom. The rest is gone. I don't know what to say. Every other place I've ever been attached to is still there, unaltered from the outside at least. Bedford, Brunswick, 402 Wellesley- even the Kimi Ryokan and the gaijin house in TobuNerima. This one isn't. Earthquakes. Bombs. War. Development. Kuni ni yotte... They happen. The university has no building permit to build anything on the lot in back of us, where there was a classic old building called The St George Apartments. The St George was an open square built around a central courtyard with a broad fountain in it. Very European in feel, gracious and dignified. Was once a student residence, before that a low-rise apartment building where my grandmother used to live, the one who died when I was five. Very 50ish Toronto in feel, hearkening back to that mythological golden age when Yorkville was an artists' community and the big minds that made UofT famous like McLuhan and Frye were at their height. The university has no permit to build there but they razed it in December anyway, before anyone could put pressure on the city's Planning Dep't to have it saved. And they razed our old building so they can get into the lot to build the seventeen-storey building they have no permit to build. Sasuga the UofT. Sasuga 21st century Toronto. A Big Stink Skunks. Why are there skunks in flaming downtown TO miles from any ravine? (Because you're not miles from the railway tracks and the railway lands. Three blocks, no more, and when the wind's in the right direction you can hear that ol' train whistle blowin' and it sounds like it's ready to die...) But me, I figure the skunks have moved into the neighborhood and live under someone's porch nearby, because with all the cats around here you get skunk stink regularly. And now we're in window fan season it's damned near unbearable. Big stink 2: Bought a window fan for the infants section on Friday, must remember to bring an extension cord so we can use it. The only openable window is above the change table. Oi bloody vey. We *had* a window fan but Alex commandeered it after the move and won't- well, not won't give it back, but says You want the fire alarm going off every time I cook go right ahead and take it back. No, I don't want the fire alarm going off like they did a week ago Friday and all the kids wailing in fright as we try to get them together and out of the building before they can putatively burn to death. So I bought a new window fan. Never argue with the cook, they told me when I did my training. He's the most important person in the daycare. Horticultural update: the irises are in bloom. And there are a lot of them around, like in the front garden next door. (Tonari no ani, fumanning gently: I wanted grass but oh no Lois wanted flowers. And what do we get? Flowers.) Like in my own front garden. (I tell landscaping companies who solicit my business that my sister-in-law handles all my gardening.) Which is nice- she gets to garden and I get a garden and sometimes she even plants what I want, like nicotina. But I never noticed irises (or cherry blossoms or plum blossoms and certainly not hydrangeas, which I still don't much care for- associated with the chronic grungy feel of rainy season) until I went to Japan. What would I notice if I went to France, I wonder? Box hedges? OK, so what's the problem with the fact that most of fandom is functionally illiterate anyway? That they grew up watching TV, that they travel in cars, that they eat convenience food and prepackaged stuff, and in consequence expect everything to be fast-fast-fast and removed from actual physical experience? That though they went to college they're unacquainted with a literature that looks slowly and carefully at the people it's talking about and the places they're in? That the whole concept of slow and careful translates to them as 'bad' because it doesn't supply immediate gratification now this very second no work and no waiting? Nothing really. There are people like that, and you should feel sorry for them because they're incapable of reading a plain declarative sentence and understanding what it means. But ally it to an invincible sense that there's no other way to do things than the way they do them, and you're in trouble. If you write ironically, they don't get it. For them, English is used as a computer manual uses it. The surface meaning is the whole meaning. If you're doing a pastiche of Burton, they don't get it. They think Richard Burton was this old dead actor. They think you're being pretentious, as one of them criticized Tanith Lee for being when she did *her* pastiche of Burton. If you write anything outside their late-20th century American experience they don't get it, and they either resent you for undemocratically knowing something they don't know, or simply decide that you can't write. They don't have the concept that a writer is trying for a certain effect, or employing the tropes of a certain genre, or doing something that they can't even conceive of-- and so they condemn it as bad writing, with the invincible smugness of the invincibly ignorant and the arrogance that tells them they not only /can/ pass judgment on what's good and what's bad, but /must/. They set the tone of the fandom. That's what's wrong with it. They don't promote an atmosphere of acceptance, toleration of personal quirks, and personal generosity. They're middle America sono mono- The Way We Do It or else. Anything foreign to them is weird. And this in fandom, of all the weird places to be in. But no surprise. Feminists did it first- brought the whole arsenal of attitudes embodied in the patriarchal authority into their new space and began applying them wholesale to other feminists. St. Paul couldn't have done a better job. And so with fans. The values of the larger society are imported into the counter-culture without question. Non-authority? Tolerance? Non-judgmental acceptance? When pigs fly. And who wants to write to be read by idiots like that? Who wants *anything* to do with idiots like that in the first place? Turkeys I can find anywhere. I'm in fandom to get a respite from the turkeys. And there they are, even here, gobbling and strutting self-importantly and fancying themselves ever so very much. Tell you, the only good turkey is a dead turkey. Kill it, strip its covering off, reveal its pimple-skinned nakedness, stuff with onions and sage where its yellow belly used to be, and bake in a 400 degree oven for 4-5 hours or until the juices run clear. I go to sharpen my axe. Go me Just finished Arslan vol 1. And now feel very ill indeed. Reaction. Someone remind me again, what was it Dante did with the wrathful? (Resisting urge to say 'I don't know, dear. Didn't he leave them by the sink?') Put them in one of the lower circles of Hell, I believe, gnawing at each other's heads. Clever man. How did he know? Clearly time to leave fandom- or at least, take a protracted break from it- when bloody everyone ends up annoying you. I annoy way too easily already. I have hyper-annoy-itis. Which Saiyuuki character are you? I am Sanzou, and I'm out of hormones. And yes, Melissa, there's a reason why yaoi fandom should be declared a testosterone-free zone, but I won't say it because some of my readers are jeunes filles bien elevees like I was once, and I prefer to be tender of their sensibilities. (Not you, of course. Or you. ^_^) But ohhh am I thinking 'prancing little ponce' nado nado, and *hard*.
'On the whole I am glad I will never be twenty and have to go through all that again (I quote without book.) Sounds to me like W1 went and expressed the nagging fear of everyone else and annoyed everyone else by reminding them they have this nagging fear. Nothing that ten more years won't cure. Living in Amerika doesn't help. Up here my fandom is considered by most of my acquaintance as recherche and exotic. 'You read comic books in Japanese about gay guys? You write stories? That's kind of neat.' And if anyone looks sideways- 'That's kind of weird'- I do my little dance. I start en pointe with 'empowerment of the passive consumer', glisser along to 'liberation of female desire from self-imposed constraints', launch off my feet with 'idealized human beings and the emotional androgyne,' throw in a triple tour en l'air of 'unconstructed by the patriarchy and free of the Judaeo-Christian tradition', and, if I'm feeling ijiwaru, finish in a triumphantly modest arabesque over 'the true language of jouissance.' That usually shuts them up.
No, not soccer. Don't be silly. Dr. Pepper, and lots of it. Reaching the end of Hi Izuru 4, slowly, a few pages at a time so it lasts. What to do when it's over? It's not the kind of series you can write fic for, because all the interesting stuff is done for you. In shounen-ai, as in slash, the relationship *is* the story. So if you wrote a relationship story, you'd just be echoing the canon to no point. And a sex story- I was going to say, as always in shounen ai, but I don't know if that's universally true- is simply surplus to requirements. Vulgar and obvious, in fact. I don't know if Umayado will eventually get Emishi in the manga, and it doesn't really matter. It'll be fascinating to read the story of how Umayado doesn't get Emishi, whom he could have if he'd just lift a finger to try and get him, only in the area of human relations it seems Umayado doesn't understand *how* to go about lifting a finger. Equally, it'll be fascinating to read the story of how Umayado does get Emishi, and how much of Emishi he gets, because Emishi's goodness doesn't understand the- not evil, but different order of morality embodied in Umayado. (To date, Umayado doesn't fully understand it either, which makes for a nice tension.) Will Umayado corrupt Emishi? Likelier than Emishi saving Umayado, in Yamagishi's world. And a cold-eyed calculating Emishi would be interesting to watch. However we also have our Koreans, and I have a nice story about the Koreans playing in my head, drawn in Yamagishi's style, that I watch while falling asleep. But I don't know if I'd write it. It would only be for someone else to read, and who would? I don't need to- I see it already, in a more satisfactory form than limping English can express. And nobody else knows the series to care. A problem. I suppose worse coming to worst I could do a marathon read of Freeman Hero. Bound to be something useful in there- or, well, possibly something useful in there. Shibata does fall from the trees often enough- Papuwa, Keieru, Ch5, and Jibaku-kun get balanced by Dreamnet Papa and Suzume-chan and her new series on the other side, and you note which lot ran in mainstream shoujo/ shounen magazines. Freeman Hero was Jump, that graveyard of potentially good series. Say no more. (It's OK. I act like I'm 21 too. And am not about to count on my fingers from 1950.) Dreamed of women and universities and opera and babies last night- oh, and modern architecture as well. A pleasant mishmash with a bunch of rather neat 20-30 pro-type mothers attending an avant garde opera set to start at 7:30 that actually began at 11 (after the musicians spent an hour or more jamming with daycare Hugh, and because it was avant-garde who knows but that wasn't a scheduled part of the opera?) Me for some reason waiting for them before curtain time- greyish rainy evening and the trains late- with one or another of their fretful kids, most of whom I mercifully soothed into sleep. Still remember the feel of the year-old girl heavily asleep against my neck, arms down my back. "Here she is," I say to her mother as she scurries into the lobby. "Oh good. Put her down gently. You *know* we'll never get her back if she wakes up now," her mom says ruefully, aware of what a tyrant her daughter is in the naproom. I often- used to be always- dream of babies, but their mothers rarely make an appearance. A nice change. The theatre I now realize was the one up in Fukushima for god's sake where I saw... god, what did I see? A bunraku performance, was it? Twelve years ago, you expect me to remember? There's nothing like seeing your two least favorite people in the world at each other's throats to make you feel life isn't so bad after all.
"The strangest whim has seized me- after all Achy, allergic, obscurely despondent and not sure why. Why the last. Achy comes from hefting babies for six hours yesterday, which I discover is something you have to do on a daily basis, like weight-training, for it not to hurt. (Mutters: hefting *Liandra.* I could heft Chloe or Matthew no prob.) Allergic because it's still rainy season, even if drier, and on grey blowy days you sneeze. Despondent because I didn't get up early enough to get my bike in to have the wheel fixed today, so will have to leave overnight; because my hard drive needs defragging, the dust mites are biting, a bunch of things I'd rather not translate need translating, I still need to lose another seven pounds at least and my body won't let them go, and my feet are cramping in consequence when I walk. And I'm getting to the end of my last volume of Hi Izuru, which I realize is to me now what writing fic used to be- close the door on unsatisfactory reality and go be in this lovely other place for a while. When it's done I won't have anywhere to go to but a bunch of BL manga: Cheezits to Yamagishi's poulet d'estragon, Julienned steamed carrots and parsleyed potatoes, with creme brulee and coffee to follow. There are so many manga where reading them is just-- tedious. To find something I want to read is a godsend, and rare as rubies. Don't know who it is. I hear all this said in a vaguely British voice but I don't know who it was said it, that bit about "Well you know everything sounds better if you say it in French, I mean, 'The Eiffel Tower- it's everything because it's nothing', what kind of idiot crap is that? But say 'La tour Eiffel- c'est tout parce que c'est rien' and everyone goes oohhh and ahh and *how profound*." So yes- everything sounds much better in French. And I don't know who you are, but I like you a lot. Meanwhile- the latest BBG came in from Fearless Leader, along with a couple of Saiyuuki djs and a half-dozen Papuwa cels. Latest BBG picks up Rika the Breeder. Flashback to Tetsu and Hiro's youth. Rubs your face in it. Rubs your face in it again. Rubs your face in it some more. Tetsu... was a nasty bit of goods and got what he deserved. I still don't want to translate the thing or scan it, but I'm going to have to do both. (I think in fact I want to don rubber gloves, pick that ep up with a pair of tongs, put it in an iron bucket, pour gasoline over it and set it alight. Can't.) Kakugo. (Took the test again with my alternative answers. This time got Nataku first and Chin Isou second. Followed in satisfying order by Doku, Gojou and Hakkai. So nyah.) Waaay back in the 70's, Toronto July, some music festival. Toronto July, sweltering, muggy, air unmoving and unbreathable. And my friend Peter said, 'But why are *we* in Vietnam??' Equally: why are *we* in Japan's rainy season? Grey, cool, muggy. Unmoving sky a foot over one's head. Rain rain rain falling sporadically heavily and nonstop. Common wisdom courtesy of HouseGuest 1: You might as well be doing overtime in the rainy season because if you had enough free time to think about it you'd kill yourself. Which is odd but true. Rainy season isn't suffering. (That's summer.) There's nothing extreme about it. It's just the grey unmoving nothing, like depression. The world looks ugly. You feel sweaty and grubby always. It feels like it'll never go away. And it wears at you and wears at you until you think one day 'I just can't take this any more.' Essence of all things tacky and undistinguished and-- mediocre, like polyester clothing and overstuffed sofas in nubbly plaid colours. 'Lives of quiet desperation.' Summer and catastrophe come as a relief, in their ways, after that kind of grinding nothingness. Useless Information Tsutsumotase, which looks like it's written bijinkyoku- bureau of beautiful people, translated as 'a badger game' in the wordtank. What's a badger game, you ask, as did I. The WT explains. It's the racket where a woman solicits a guy and in the middle of the action another guy bursts into the bedroom and she goes 'Oh god my husband!' and the first guy winds up paying the second guy not to take him to court or whatever. So now you know. Other piece of useless info, House Guests Have Their Uses 2: diet Dr. Pepper tastes like cherry Coke only better. It's now my aspartame vehicle of choice. HGHTU 3: alcoholic cider is vile. HGHTU 4 (well, this was my doing actually): when you break the white glass globe around the overhead light and manage somehow *not* to drive slivers of glass into your guest, you then realize that the light from a naked overhead bulb, while ugly as sin, is really great for reading small-print manga by. (Oh, and I took the Which Saiyuuki Character Would Sleep With You? test. 1 was Chin Isou, 2 was Nataku, and it got if possible even *more* embarrassing after that, so I've mercifully forgotten the rest.) 'Goh and Whatsisface' in Channel 5 is Goh and Zahaa, and I will mention for those of you who have the requisite hormones that the Goh and Zahaa episode in vol 3 where Goh leaves Zahaa's planet should be avoided when you're requsitely hormonal. I cried myself to sleep last night over it. Should we doubt that shounen-ai lives, even in these late degenerate days, there's your answer. It lives. "Grey, I have come to accept you. With all your anger and all your sorrow, still I love this planet. So when I die, return my body to this land that I may go on looking at its light forever. So that I may hold that warrior to my breast when he comes home to us at last." Noticed that people are blogging less lately? No new blog memes, a marked indifference to Old Scrotch's latest digs, like that. Summer? No longer confined indoors? The soccer thing? Whatever. Enjoy the peace while it lasts. Speaking of which-- Don't care who wins the cup, me, so long as it isn't Italy. Please please please not Italy. Or Brazil either, if You can manage it. Traffic stops for three days in this city when Italy wins and Nessun' dorma becomes mandatory for all, even those who are dying to sleep and can't because of the car horns honking 24/7. Sensible people move to Bathurst and Lawrence when Italy wins because at least it's quiet up there among the synagogues and the shuls. Not Italy, OK? Though it'd be interesting to see what would happen in my end of town if Korea won. Yes yes, wouldn't you know it.
Tremble on the days I have to stay home and work. This is how I divert myself
...Rather than words comes the thought of high windows No reason why I should associate that with the coffee-house called Francois in Shinjuku station near the east exit, where I used to have pizza toast and iced coffee more often than I can remember. Francois is underground, and I must be remembering some winter afternoon out the west exit, all vast blue sky above the bus bays (and am certainly remembering some midweek afternoon, with classes late or cancelled, going to an Ansel Adams exhibit at Odakyuu Deapaato.) But for whatever reason, it's Francois' slightly smoky interior I see when I read that. Gloom Descriptions of one-on-one personal combat ('Narsus leaped backwards and dodged the stroke. Holding his blade sideways he brought it across in a white arc to cleave the man's forehead...') make me disinclined to translate. Translating when I don't want to translate gives me muscle-knot headaches. Muscle-knot headaches make me feel ill-used by the universe. Feeling ill-used starts internal tantrums rumbling on the lines of oh say 'I want to read Petshop of Horrors why don't I have any PSoH where's my copy of PSoH why doesn't Kikiwai have any PSoH why isn't there a Mandarake in Toronto situated at the corner of Bloor and Bathurst across from Honest Ed's that sells PSoH at $3 (Canuck) a hit WHY CAN'T I HAVE WHAT I WANT WHEN I WANT IT?????' This is tiresome. It also leads me to muse on my generation ie the Boomers and wonder why we never thought that what we might like to be when we grew up was, well-- grown-up. I always assumed it was something that would happen inevitably, like getting your adult teeth, and I remember how outraged I was in my 20's at the realization that no, it isn't automatic, you have to do it yourself. Because, as I now know too, there are things that make you grow up (my parents' generation all started full-time work after high school, for instance, college being a luxury of the rich) but when you have everything handed to you on a platter like we did, you don't meet them until you're well on into chronological adulthood. And yes, I know too that childishness we have always with us- Malraux's famous line about There *is* no such thing as an adult- just that other generations had taboos about expressing it and we evidently have none. (Grimaces gloomily as her left sinus begins its inevitable twinging, and remembers that her aunt had migraines for two weeks of every month until menopause, which never stopped her raising a family and doing charitable work because, well, 'that's just the way it was.') We will continue to be infantile till we drop, no doubt. The only- and very back-handed- comfort in all this is that because my generation remained adolescent right through its breeding years, their kids have had to grow up very very young. Society's gain, I suppose. Back to Narsus in the alleyway...
Satiated. Vols 4 and 5 of Jibaku-kun and vol.3 of Hi Izuru..., all in an evening. Lovely escape, and so different from my usual parsimonious doling out of manga-time. If we rank Shibata's oeuvre on just how Out everything is, then I'd say Jibaku is running neck and neck with Papuwa for the no.2 position, and possibly has the edge. Devotion and tears all over the place, modelled in general on Goh and Whatsisface in Channel 5. Which I personally find more congenial than Papuwa's gag approach, even if gag done with Magic has very non-gaggish resonances. Nothing touches Channel 5 for no.1, of course. (Ahh, Rai on top of Yaiba in bed with their flies undone... Jan's 'wasuresasete kure'... Great Moments In Manga.) Meanwhile the Koreans in Hi Izuru... are talking to each other, and from a brief suggestive flashback I think I know their relationship. Maybe. Emishi is getting dialogue too close to a sappy uke's for my comfort- 'Is it too late? Is it too late for me now?' even though I know it's stock shounen-ai. BTW don't read webpages about Hi Izuru... if you're going to read the manga. Matt Thorne and Co spoil the thing all over the place and don't seem even to register that they've done it. Big People schedules being what they are, Helen and I had our first date together in a month last night. She'd been to a fun fair in her neighbourhood in the afternoon where she'd seen (quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore) a python and two tarantulas, and had to tell me about them. This would faze the average 18-month-old, but she conveyed her meaning adequately by waving her arms wildly and growling. Thank you, Helen, I get the message. Listening to the Saiyuuki 4 Songs Albums, which is sort of an image album except there already is an Image Album or three for the series. The music is about what one expects of modern anime ie loud, undistinguished and forgettable. Melody? Tune? Hah. 'I am seiyuu, hear me roar.' Loud seems to be what's generally wanted by the wakamono these days. One of them was talking on a ML about the 'subtle creepiness' of Sanzou's umm bellow. Sigh. No room for ballads these days, or even the high heroics of Harlock's BGM. Sigh again.
*Where* is my copy of The Imagist Poem? I've had that book since I was 15 or so and never misplaced it once. True, I didn't read it until a couple of decades after I got it. It was a Xmas present from my mother, who used to randomly give me poetry books for reasons of her own that she never told me. Because she thought I'd like them, possibly, or possibly because she thought I ought to read them. I really don't know. She didn't give my *brothers* poetry, for sure. But she gave me that, and Swinburne, and a collection of Chinese verse in translation called The White Pony that's still one of the best anthologies I have. (And I think she gave me my Sappho as well.) I never saw my mother read anything but mysteries and biographies, but we had an exhaustive library of American and British lit of the 30's and 40's that was hers. An interesting woman, my mother. A pity I never knew her. But meanwhile The Imagist Poem is not on the poetry shelf where it ought to be. Where it's always been. I look at each book title by title in case it's just Johnson Spot Blindness, that we all have: looking straight at the thing we want and not seeing it. In case my mind is automatically dismissing its white spine because it always sees its white spine along with the other regulars- 4 Greek Poets, Auden's Longer Poems, Dorothy Parker's Sunset Gun. It's not there. And neither is Modern English Verse, the anthology I took to Europe when I was *twelve* for heaven's sake, if you want things that have always been there. Only it's not, and I can't remember the last time I saw it. I don't like it when things disappear like that, in a house where I live by myself. Watching my scattered collection of Jibaku-kun just for the dislocation of the thing, and because after a week of little sleep I'm too fried to do any of the virtuous things I'd intended to do this weekend. (Besides it's warm now, finally, and warmth drains my will and energy. Some people hibernate. I aestivate. Should go to sleep until September, and I wish I could.) I remember vaguely having a feeling that Baku was a touch deeper than the average shounen hero, or at least delivered his deeper lines with more aplomb so that he gave that impression at least, only now I'm not sure that isn't simple hindsight. But I compare Midorikawa's Shintaro in the cicada ep with Ishida's Baku in a couple of places, and yeah-- Ishida adds *something* to those warm brown lower notes that Midorikawa's tenor doesn't manage. Domingo as against Pavarotti, let's say. ^_^ The eps are scattered- and incomplete, dammit- because these are the when-I-remember tapes from my sister's taper. Meaning there are other things on them, mostly forgettable, including a mecha series called (?) Dai Guard or something. Good artwork and probably an intelligent plot but still... mecha. Only I'd give a lot for cels from the closing theme because it's all so very Japanese cityscape- the view from the pedestrian overpass, the night office buildings, the one park with the cherry trees and benches by the pond where people read on spring afternoons. |
