Phantom Tokyo- The Other Side |
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late My godmother, we think, is dying. We think so, my cousin and me, but the nurses are all cheerful 'She's doing much better.' Meaning that her heartbeat has stopped fluctuating and the congestion in her lungs has cleared. Meanwhile she never opens her eyes, makes noises that aren't words, and doesn't respond to familiar voices. Friday she was awake and able to talk to France. (France, not Frances. Named for the aunt who was born in 1914 who was named for la patrie, and hence pronounced Phrons.) Yesterday she wasn't responding to France and today she wasn't responding to me. 'Oh, she's alert. If you talk to her she answers,' the blond nurse assures me as if daring me to contradict her. (The bossy blond nurse, the one who said 'What's that woman doing here?' when she came in and saw me in the room. There are indeed people like that in the world, one just doesn't meet them very often. Fortunately.) It's always the same in hospitals. The people who work there are on crack. Even France, the doctor's daughter and the most relentlessly down to earth, factual, dry-eyed person I know, /almost/ gets upset at this persistent party line. I report the sum of my visit to France. I went through this with my mother, she went through it with her husband's uncle. A point comes when the mind starts shutting down and withdrawing from the world. 'So maybe it's the painkillers that's making her out of it,' she shrugs. 'She never took any before, it's possible even this mild stuff would do it,' I say. 'But I don't think so,' France says. 'Me neither,' say I.
The first few months of a fandom are always the best. I was reminded of this by the coincidence of rereading Shifting Currents and then by chance going out to eat at KFC. The fall of 2000 I ate at KFC a lot- no reason, it was cheap and close and convenient- and in those first months of intense Saiyuuki besottedness it became imbued with the stories I plotted there while automatically chewing my Classic Sandwiches or while bicycling home. (Can't remember what story I was in the middle of when I nearly got wiped out by a car going up Euclid. It *was* my fault, I know that.) The stories from that period were only partly mine. Some were work, and heartbreaking work, like Roadstop. But mostly all I was doing was writing the pictures in my head or the characters as I heard them speaking. I could turn them on any time. I didn't have to do the Method thing of thinking myself inside them-- I already knew how they worked, so it was merely a matter of transcribing it. The stories from the fall of 2000- Gojou, Gonou, North and South- they were the tv shows I was watching at the time. (Roadstop was just a problem of not being able to hear clearly enough through the static of the original Journey to the West.) So that though they may strike other people as strange or OOC- and I know Currents does strike some people that way- to me they have the total conviction of reportage. 'I know it happened like this because I saw it happening.' Whereas all the later stuff- not coincidentally, all the stuff after I became part of the fandom and started hearing from other fans- is no more than a strong Maybe. 'It might have happened this way but equally it could have happened any number of other ways.' And that's why I find them all fundamentally unsatisfying. I think the reason I wrote so much last year, after my first four months, was because I was trying to get *the* Saiyuuki story down on paper, and what I wrote kept on not being *the* story. Which is utterly different from what happened with Papuwa. For two and a half years every story I wrote was *the* story. You note at once what was different. Nobody who cared a hoot about Papuwa was reading my Papuwa stories. If you want authenticity, you must remove the audience. You must, in fact, remove even the possibility of the audience. But nowadays the audience is always potentially there. And thus the current dilemma. later And it wasn't just the choral piece that decided me that the end of part 1 was a highpoint not likely to be approached again. It was the fact that I knew Seneca dying surrounded by Seneca's grieving disciples was the only time I'd see men anyway near each other for the rest of the opera. I have nothing against heterosexuality, or not much, but right now representations of it just don't press my buttons. And guys together do. So an opera about two men repining for the same woman and two women repining for the two men and one woman having them both feels like a meal without seasonings. Bland. Boring. Where's the salt? I may have reached a point where, if there's not at the very least a slashy subtext in a work, it simply doesn't speak to me any more. Well, fine. This gives me a better stomach to read all the stuff I have to read ie Nitta Youka's collected minor works. 17 Guyz is not as bad as I feared. It has a nice concrete Tokyo setting (Shibuya, which I loathe, but then I'm not 17) and for half the arc actually deals with a story that isn't about the two guys' relationship, a rarity in BL. And also has a very suggestive personage in the form of Moriguchi senpai, whose interaction with the guys strikes me as both sinister and suggestive; and me, I wish there'd been more of it. Moriguchi consoles me, if only a little, for the discovery, when I went back and looked at EC2, that my Matsumoto and Tachibana aren't Minekura's M&T. Very back to the drawing board for that story sigh.
So, for the cost of basically all the comps I got from Jonathan's dad put together, went to The Marriage of Poppaea last night. Now that's more like it. Partly because the WinterGraden is done in red plush and gilt and has boxes at the side and looks like a *real* theatre- and by 'real' what this Trawntonian means is the Royal Alex (being a real Trawntonian she can't remember what Alex stands for but thinks it probably refers to Edward VII's wife Alexandra) where I was taken to see the ballet for my birthdays when I was a kidling. The OKeefe never quite cut it in the atmosphere department, early 60's artefact that it is. But a little red plush eases the soul greatly. Also it had baroque costuming and staging- just as plush red velvet as the theatre about us, if not more so- and something closer to baroque dancing than whatever was on display in Julius Caesar, and it had passion (ah yes, lots of passion- Handel was German, we mustn't forget, and Monteverdi was Italian, and yes Virginia it makes a difference) with Poppaea leading Nerone about by the nose in what seems strikingly modern fashion. And it had some actual chorus work, if four people constitutes a chorus, that ended the first half beautifully with Seneca's death. Two counter tenors, both quite good- Ottone in fact wonderful. My mind has this vague sensation of having been in some fantastic elsewhere dreaming about something or other that happens after good books and plays. But my limit for opera is still my limit for Noh plays, ninety minutes, so $85 seats or no $85 seats we left at intermission. Adult ADD, I believe it's called.
'Trouble not the heart of a stranger, for thou wast a stranger in the land of Egypt' Two young Korean girls came to my door, telling me in careful English that they were selling chocolate almonds to raise funds. For their church or their language school, I assume. I didn't ask. Being a Korean teenager in a foreign country going door to door selling chocolates to roundeyes, while not the worst fate in the world, can't be a whole lot of fun (they could, after all, be more happily employed drinking bubble tea somewhere IMHO)-- so I bought two boxes and they smiled shyly and bowed and took themselves off. Thus the day's touch of sweetness. They interrupted me as I was framing an answer to someone who wanted to read my passworded fics in Tro's archive but couldn't because Tro has disappeared into RL and isn't answering requests for passwords. My correspondent was unhappy about having to sit around able to read only bits and pieces of my work. 'Drives me nuts.' Could I please send him her or it a location where my smut isn't passworded, or go prod Tro a bit to give them a password? Sasuga the western fan. If the universe isn't organized for the greatest convenience of said fan, the universe is failing in its contractual obligations. Times, monkhood starts looking good. (Needs to be said: western sakura look like popcorn balls strung to the tree branch. Just ever so very slightly- ridiculous, you know?) 11:07 a.m. Do not like April. My godmother broke her hip, had a heart attack during the operation, is very weak, on morphine and not recognizing anyone. Family has given instructions not to try reviving her if she has a subsequent heart attack. Do not like life much either, at this point. 12:47 a.m. Getting up at 1:30 doesn't mean I'm now going to be awake till 5 am, does it? Like- I was exhausted all day. I could barely work at work. I'm still sick, universe- I need my sleep! Don't tell me I suddenly got better at 10 this evening just because I started to reread The Moonstone? I did? OK guys, you heard that? Wilkie Collins- good for what ails you. Course, I could just translate some more Arslan- we're back to Dweeb uhh Gweeb being the ladykiller. That should send me off to lalaland in no time. 01:54 p.m. 'See the little bunnies sleeping' in to nearly noon/ Shall we try and wake them up/ With a happy tune?/ So still!/ Are they ill? You betcha. Why else would I be rolling out of bed at 1:20 pm, 11 and a half hours after getting into it? And I don't even know what I've got beyond the general rubric 'stomach trouble' and 'malaise.' Fooey. (The first paragraph is an ancient incantation that stops toddler riots. Sometimes. Note for future reference, ye breeders.) 10:20 a.m. Elegant confusion we got here, right back to its Heian sources. 'Ah, is that snow or is it the plum blossoms I see?' or the cherry blossoms as well in this case. All of the above. Snow on the roofs, snow on the new green of the leaves tempted out by the weekend sunshine. Fine for Japan where plums open in February and snow can be expected. But here you can expect snow in April, is why cherry blossoms should wait until May. Another reason why the fourth month is as weird as I think it is. Remember getting three feet dumped on us one year, the same April that my cousin died. (My father died in April too. Has one of the higher body counts of the year. Another reason not to like it. Chinami ni shigatsu sounds like 'death month' in Japanese. Ditto.) But yesterday out for a walk to get whatever it was from the store, among the grey clouds and the smell of woodsmoke and the sidewalks clean and swept, was November of the best kind, calm and settled and finished with the busyness of the year, ready for some indoor time with books and a fireplace. Not that I have a fireplace or could use it if I did, but the instinct is there. Left over from childhoood maybe when my grandparents visited for Sunday dinner (the noon meal, because my mother was French) and if it was winter we'd have a fire in the library, and the room and the quiet Sunday garden would smell of woodsmoke for the rest of the day. Yes we had a library, where oddly all the social-socializing happened because it was out of the way of the everyday parts of the house (and hence clean. My mother was not a tidier, and unless we marry tidiers we live in chaos.) And we had a garden, not a yard, because our house was built for his own use by the man who developed that area and he took three lots to build his house on. At one point, when it was first built, it must have had a *field* out back of it, but the Mendels took some to build the library and we took some more to add on the new room. ('About the size of the house I grew up in,' my father observed when it was finished- 'here's the hallway, that'd be the parlor, there's the kitchen...') What remained was still a respectable yard that I rather miss- big trees and a bunch of forsythia bushes at the bottom with lots of space behind them that felt like the middle of the woods when I was five. We had the 50's version of a playhouse, an old milkwagon bought when the dairies went over to trucks instead of horsedrawn. Must have been a good six or eight feet long, which is about how deep the bushes were at the end of the garden then. But for all I know John's grandkids find our combined yards out back as big as the garden at Bedford- just a question of what eye-level you look at it from. 02:17 p.m. Waiting for some chicken to cook, started reading Supersonic Angel Engine etc etc III. That schizophrenia of the Japanese with respect to genre- it hurts, ohh it hurts. Characters weeping at the death of other characters aren't supposed to have snot running from their noses- not unless it's supposed to be funny not tragic; but this is supposed to be funny *and* tragic. Dead characters who may be alive aren't supposed to register that fact by a line of spit drooling from their mouths that so beautifully echoes the drool coming at that very moment on the other side of town from their friends' mouths. Even our black humour has rules, but Motoni could care less about our rules. She doesn't even know they exist. She's too busy concocting 'please will someone tell me what's happening here who is this character we've never seen before why is he so important hey where'd he go to what the hell's going on' plots. Continuity is for wimps. Logic is for westerners. What matters is the immediate moment- this panel and this one and this one... I hope all this confusion is due to the fact that though I can read Japanese I can't read unwritten Japanese even if the Japanese themselves can. That all I need, as with Henry James' novels, is someone on that cultural wavelength to tell me what's really happening. 'See, when Kate says 'so there it is' what it means is 'you must get Milly to marry you so we can be rich when she dies so go ahead and seduce her and if you do that I'll sleep with you.' And he does and she does, but you don't see any of it happening. Clear now?' On the up side, Motoni makes Tanaka look a lot better. There are times when the price of a Japanese who tells you *everything* is above rubies. On another note, if Thursday or even Friday had been as cool as they were supposed to be, the plum tree wouldn't be blooming now, but they were and the bare branches of Thursday turned into snow by Friday afternoon. Even the cherry has little white tips showing. And I suppose I don't mind this disruption of TO's horticultural calendar. It's justthat I *like* that moment in May when everything and I do mean everything blooms at once. Lilacs, plum tree, cherry, magnolia, daffodils and tulips and forsythia, and the whole city goes a little crazy for a while. barely Sunday Not the first person to say this, obviously, but it's true: Blogito, ergo sum. Especially now when I spend all my free time putting other people's words into English (thinks of the translation that needs doing in the next 3-4 weeks and shudders) I have this real need to see my own words in print and hear my own voice, not Tanaka's or Nitta's or Yuki Kaori's. If I were ficcing the problem would solve itself but I'm not ficcing because it's too difficult and takes up too much time turning into someone else and then turning out of them and all for very unsatisfactory results but if I *were* ficcing I wouldn't be blogging. But I'm not so I am. Somehow this doesn't strike me as an ideal situation but will have to do till hope of better shall amend the present woe. 12:54 p.m. (I have this pathetically trusting belief that if I had a faster modem I wouldn't have to dial in three or four or five times to get connected on weekends. I have the modem that was cutting-edge five years ago, when people who had it- courtesy of their universities primarily- sneered at me for having the 9600 I got in '94. Technology sometimes strikes me as being like a lemming chase- faster and faster till we all fall over the edge of the cliff. And when we do, the closet Luddite in me will be oh so very happy even though the techno-addict me will be clawing the skin off her arms in withdrawal.) Will some day start cooking for myself again, at a great saving in money and calories, but last night went down to Tasty's on Bloor again. Bloor where I live is Koreaville, but Tasty's is Greek. (Across from it is one of the best Mexican places in the city, hole in the wall seats eight very friendly people.) Tasty's makes better souvlaki than anything not on the Danforth (the centre of Greekville in TO. Remember the name. Even the Greeks in Greece have heard of the Danforth.) Tasty's cook is southern-I-believe Indian, but do I care? By the Way's cook, who makes the dill hollandaise sauce to die for, is Sri Lankan. Nataraj, best Indian food in the neighbourhood, is run by Chinese. Yappari there are good things about Toronto after all. So I ate my souvlaki dinner and started The Return of the King and watched the Koreans on the patio decide that it was starting to be too cold out there and come inside by twos and threes. RotK is good. Back to the stuff I want to read, which is descriptions of Minas Tirith. City-child, me. And I do wonder again at all the blogging 20-somethings who were solemnly assuring each other when the movie came out that Tolkien wasn't a writer in any sense of the word, oh no not he, created a good world maybe but couldn't write for beans, not like that talented David Eddings who never bores you with description or landscape or weather but writes a nice fast-paced story that can be forgotten as soon as read. Read someone's article on teaching English to highschool students. "They can't stand description. A bad book has description. A good book has dialogue and lots of action." The generation raised on video games, obviously. 01:16 p.m. Afternoon temperature 27, said the weather TV. Evening temperature 8. Overnight temperature 3. April. I'm a 40D but people have been calling me Sir ever since I stopped having shoulder-length hair 25 years ago. I understand why they do this in France and Japan, where little old ladies and men never look at people above the waist anyway. But sitting down in a restaurant here? In a restaurant where I thought I was a regular? Wearing a mauve top? And nowhere near the gay ghetto? I suppose I'll have to start wearing earrings again. 09:12 a.m. I found the perfect item Monday- a plastic device that lets you cook poached eggs in the microwave. I love poached eggs and I've never been able to do them in water, ever, and the aluminum pans for them-- are aluminum, and hard to clean, and need butter or whatever to make them not-stick. This was the last egg-poacher in the store, so I was really lucky. Brought it home, glanced at directions- you need to add a spoonful of water- put in drawer. Then tidied kitchen and threw out a ton of miscellaneous stuff. It all went out in yesterday's garbage and so I now have no idea what power level to use to poach eggs or how long or anything. Am looking forward to many underdone eggs, overdone eggs, and possibly melted plastic before I get it right. Never clean. One of these days I'll learn that basic rule. When I came home from Japan six years ago memory says I cleaned the whole place top to bottom, but that was different. I rearranged all the books in the house by subject matter and assigned them a place- fiction in the back room, poetry in the front room, nonfic and artbooks and the chinese stuff in the study, new (relatively speaking) manga in the bedroom. Couldn't find anything for a month thereafter but it very effectively kick-started the house out of the stalled past where it had been (for five years, seen for three weeks every twelve months) and drove it into the present. I thought I'd also tossed the remnants of my 6-years-ago roomie and the more recent tenant, but there on the kitchen shelves were all sorts of weird stuff I'd never buy myself- bee pollen and olive oil with herbs soaking in it, looking like drowned fieldmice, and linseed oil and bouquet garni. Tossed all that glass and plastic as well, several boxes full, which is why the anxiety about whether the garbage trucks would make it through yesterday or not. 08:32 a.m. Il Duca was silent only for the space it takes to bring in a cement mixer. The guys two doors down are tired of grass in their front yard and have decided to put in concrete instead. It's this sort of thing that breeds intercultural friction of the Beirut sort. Trees reduce the temperature of the street. Grass reduces the temperature of the street. Cutting down trees and paving over grass raises the temperature of the street. Which do the Calabrians do? You got it. But gee, they miss their sunbaked broiling homeland where no tree has grown in centuries and all houses have overwrought iron railings. When they come here they cut down the trees, tear out the wooden porches, and erect a concrete porch with an iron railing in its place, overlooking a cement courtyard, the way it should be. Is it hot? Of course it's hot. That's why God made air conditioning, silly. 07:47 a.m. (Who needs an alarm clock when you've got Il Duca and open windows? Except that alarm clocks wake me at 9... My second lot of choices got me Passion is a big part of your life, which makes sense for a pirate. Even through many pirates have a reputation for not being the brightest souls on earth, you defy the sterotypes. You've got taste and education. Arr! That's me. The trouble with these tests is there's no place to check 'burgundy' under 'favorite colors.' Red is not my favorite color. Burgundy is. I grant you, 'Burgundy Anne Read' doesn't have quite the same ring... After pounding the pavement, literally, at 7 am, Il Duca is suddenly and suspiciously silent. Couldn't you have done that two hours later, guys? late Sensible adults don't have time for this. Sensible adults don't do this. No. Really. We don't. We wonder if the garbage is going to be picked up tomorrow morning, given that the street is blocked off at both ends and consists only of a concrete bedding at present, no asphalt, because Il Duca construction (FWIW the guys who switched our water main leads last fall) is repaving the thing. We wonder if the street will still go to Dupont after Il Duca finishes with it, or if it will have been switched over so that it goes to Christie instead. We certainly don't think of things like this:
Mad Mary Bonney Every pirate is a little bit crazy. You, though, are more than just a little bit. You can be a little bit unpredictable, but a pirate's life is far from full of certainties, so that fits in pretty well. Arr! Should I say I'm actually quite pleased? But only because I'm 2/3 through Arslan. Not because I'm Mad Mary Bonney. Obviously. 12:13 a.m. Finish the last four lines of chaper three, Jeanne. Finish them. Finish them. They're perfectly straightforward- 'On seeing Tahamine's form the Lusitanian king was silent for a moment, then bit by bit his whole body began to tremble...' (Tahamine smells like a new Porsche- no man can resist her strange fascination.) This is no time to far il gran rifuto. Four lines. Finish them. No. O-kotowari. It's not four lines, it's six. You said it was four but it's six zurui zurui I'm not going to finish them I'm going to play freecell until 1 am and then I'm going to have a bath and go to bed because it's going to be 29 again tomorrow and it's *six* lines not four and the world is just so *unfair* and I'm not going to do what you want I'm going to do what I want even if I don't want it much. Get in touch with my inner child? Isn't there any way to make her just go away?
Oddities, oddities. They happen with hot weather. Weather being hot I took up the throw rugs in the hallway and side bedroom and decided to wash a winter's dust out of them. And since one throw rug in my washing machine makes the thing wobble violently and occasionally walk off its washing machine stand, I took them to a laundromat near work. Provided a good excuse to read the section of Arslan I have to translate tonight. Was doing this when an Asian woman comes in and dumps stuff in machine, then glances at my book and starts a conversation in Japanese. This doesn't happen in Tokyo. Doesn't happen in Tokyo, any more than it happens in Toronto. Conversations in English maybe, always beginning Where are you from? But she was from Osaka, where people really are as different as every non-Osakan says they are, and had just been in NY to see a guy she'd known over there who suddenly turns out to have acquired a girlfriend three weeks ago gee sorry and honestly what's with western men, like, Japanese men are way too serious but western guys they say this and they say that but sheesh really (poking my shoulder) this guy's twenty-flaming-seven for chrissake, he's supposed to be grown-up already and hey, what do you do for a living by the way? Oh, yeah people asked me did I live in NY and I said 'in future' that's not right is it what do you say in English? 'I will' I told her. She will. And she'll fit right in when she does.
A day without blogging is like a day without sunshine. Supposed to be 29 tomorrow. Everyone is indecently pleased, the ninnies. No-one seems to have registered the correlation between high temperatures and air quality alerts. Have lived in this city for over 45 years, 12 of them with asthma, and I don't need to be told what happens in Toronto When It Sizzles. Sensible people move to the Maritimes. Or Inuvik, which starts to look really good to me about this time of year. |
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