Phantom Tokyo- The Other Side |
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So I did five and some pages, and it took me practically all day, one way and another. Still not back into the routine of it yet. (Addendum: just remember why I don't remember what I did today. Like yesterday, I slept for half the afternoon. Siesta syndrome. Too warm. Faculties shut down.) Heat is bad for the brain. Hell, even warmth is bad for the brain. I need cold to make my thoughts jell. OTOH I read through the last half of Last Waltz 1 early this morning and then wrote a review of it just like that, no agonizing or theorizing or pain, before going to bed. The equivalent of standing in the kitchen with a manga or a dj thinking 'I have to leave in a few minutes', and somehow getting half the thing read as I stand there mostly thinking about something else. (Mice stick in hot weather.) Shall spend this Pride Day doing what I did on Pride Day 15 years ago- washing my kitchen floor in the heat. Oh, and translating and reading Last Waltz 2 and some more of Sore Kara, no doubt, which I must remind myself I *couldn't* do 15 years ago. Truly, the old political days seem so long ago now. Why go burn myself bright pink amid the Shinjuku rush-hour mobs on Church St when I could be comfy at home? It's not like I feel any sense of attachment or belonging to the mobs on Church St at the best of times. There needs to be a new category of gayness for these postmodern times- 'private.' As in, that's a factor of my private life and my private life stays private most of the time. Same reason I don't go to anime/ manga conventions even though I watch anime and read manga. I might well be interested in getting to know certain people out on Church St and certain people at Shoujocon, but neither venue is a good place to do it in, and both bring out the worst of the people involved. Mooncalf, while she seems to have ditched the worst 20's baggage, does IMO need to get over the notion that disliking children is a mark of sophistication. It more usually tends to be a mark of arrested adolescence, because children (naturally and understandably) think they're the centre of the world, and child-hating adults generally want to claim that honour for themselves. 'How dare that kid make noise when I'm eating my dinner here?!' The usual comeback is 'That kid's the one will be paying your social security when you're 65. You want to eat then, you could at least be polite to him now.' But I suppose this doesn't work as well for Americans, who expect social security not to be there when they reach 65. It still annoys me when people proclaim smugly that they can't stand kids as if this were either shockingly revolutionary of them, or a virtue. It's hardly revolutionary: about on a par with saying boldly 'There is no God!' and waiting to be stoned for your beliefs. And it's hardly a virtue. More of a lack. Truly superior people can meet anyone on their own level, including ten year olds. (I'm not superior, BTW. I can't talk to anyone over the age of three at most.) Addendum to last. Did two pages, wondered why I felt woozy, lay down and slept for two hours. Eight months of diet cola has undone my immunity to the combi of caffeine, sugar and codeine that I use to treat bad headaches. Don't, TBH, feel much better. It's the nadir of blogging when you use it instead of mail, so OK I'm at the nadir. TTG- I can't answer your last two because I can't access my server and it's a holiday weekend so I can't rectify the prob. But welcome back and thanks for reminding me about the light thingy.
A. No.
A. Bell and Howell.
A. Plague, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Hot out there. Hot for the next three days at least. Realize I must resort to pre-emptive airconditioning. Do so.
A. Bernouilli's principle.
A. Ambience.
A. Alexander Pope. Want only to sit in the coolness and read myself silly on Arslan 5 and 6. This is not the same as translating myself silly, unfortunately, but the latter is what I need to do in order to feel better. I go to do it. (Heat, that's what makes the difference. Last long weekend we had, mid-May, it was snowing. Perfectly happy to do updates and translate then.
A. 'Shoo-fly pie and apple pan dowdy makes my eyes light up, my tummy say howdy; shoo-fly pie and apple pan dowdy- I never get enough of that wonderful stuff.' no I said no I won't No Depression hits. Not the feeling down one or the 'bald unknown' one (the last is scary and quite indescribable, because it really does register as a fundamental gone-wrongness in the universe.) The paralyzed nerve one. Can't do. Whatever has to be done. Can't/ won't do. No reason. Just won't. Try to prise the emotion apart to see what's inside it and can't- all squeezed shut and dried up that way like an ancient walnut. Mind won't co-operate, just goes on saying no no no I won't, squeezing tighter. Shit. Hence the title up there, cribbed from one of my life-saver books called Maybe He's Dead (quote: and other hilarious results of New York magazine competitions.) I see with vague disbelief that it's 20 years old, which is why all the political references are dated. But still- proof that New Yorkers really are wittier than us. The title line is from a 'first day of school done in the style of various writers' competition. The book's title comes from a 'What I should have said/ What I said' competition.' (1. "Salaam!" 2. "Shalom!"/ 1. "Some tuna, some shrimp, a little yellowtail, and maybe some of that pink stuff." 2. "Two uchimatas and an uke goshi, kudasai." (No, I'm not making that up. That's what it says. In 1981.) 1. "The house, the Mercedes, and $500,000." 2. "Please don't leave me." 1. "He was the only one killed, and the car, a Facel Vega, was totally destroyed. The legend surrounding his death has been largely romanticized; and he was not the driver." 2. "I always get Sartre and Camus confused.") Redistributed names, which I with my dyslexic fingers cherish-- Hoover'd A.M.- Note left by a cleaning woman. Rabbi Tredux- The leader of France's Jewish community. The goo dearth- The oil shortage. The carp enters- Announcement of a formal fish fry. (Puns. Sorry. My family can't resist them. It's a gene that my father had and my mother didn't, and we all have it, so it's dominant.) Famous Line, Flawed Tag:
1. "It is the ancient mariner and he stoppeth one of three."
1. "She was a day tripper."
1. "No man is an island..."
1. "Void where prohibited." Anyway, I now feel better. Will go. With one more- Answer/ question: A: The SALT talks. Q: What happens when you dine with a ventriloquist? Mooncalf praises the convenience of suburbia. Mooncalf is indeed a child of suburbia. City children know that if you can't get to a place except by car, be it store or restaurant or library, that place is inconveniently located. No Torontonian is allowed to be more than three blocks from a convenience store at the very least, except in the astronomically expensive and hence inconvenient sections of town, where you may have to go five blocks. And Canadian city children talk to their neighbours. Even in Trawna, that constipated centre of Scot/WASP Presbyterian standoffishness. Torontonians are *only* friendly at the neighbourhood level, but in our neighbourhoods we're very friendly. I've bad-mouthed the Italians a lot, but we owe to them the fact not only that the downtown residential core remained structurally sound- Italians do *not* let their houses fall down and the roofs rot, not while they have their Sundays free, for sure- but that downtown Torontonians sit on their front porches and talk to the world as it goes by. Things with no name The waxy buildup on mousepads that manifests as small gunky spots on the face of your favourite bishie, or in my case Hakuryuu, who's white so it shows. It was all over the other guys when I looked, but of course it didn't show on them. What is it, even? Rubber track-ball leavings? They're talking about getting air conditioners at the daycare. Air conditioners. I get all choked up and teary at the thought. Air conditioners. No more Black Hole of Calcutta. No more going into work as though facing a beating. Air conditioners. True, work being a coop, there's talk and then there's talk followed by action. An awful lot of the former and appreciably less of the latter. But talk at work may be likened to the prequel to a sneeze. (I'd use a more vulgar comparison, but my readers are ladies.) There's vague itching in the nose talk, and face-screwed-up-for-it talk; and we, I'd say, are at the eyes-shut 1-second-to-moment-of-orgasmic-explosion stage. Of course, work being a coop, there's buying what's necessary and then there's getting it installed. An awful lot of the former and... Zeb at work is Portugese and Shelly is WASP and/or Celt of some description. Zeb wants the blinds up always, unblocked western sun and unopening windows notwithsanding. Shelly (and all the replacement people) wants the blinds down. Zeb takes herself and three of the guys off for walks instead, in the unshaded bright streets of downtown TO, which satisfies her need for light. (Oh I miss our yard with its many many trees...) I see a parallel here to when Vicky makes some Sri Lankan dish at home and brings it in to share. 'It's not hot' she assures me, as the skin on my tongue blisters and hangs in shrivelled strips of dried-out flesh. 'Umm, good. Is there more?' Zeb says. Bugs Not those bugs, though there's a lot of them lately who somehow make it in through the window fan. What bugs me is that almost every time I type the word 'mean', it comes out mena, who was overseer of the king's granaries in the reign of I forget which Old Kingdom pharaoh. When kings weren't even called pharaoh. And the rest of the time it comes out eman. And every time I type a word ending in s I hit the space bar before the s and spellcheck never get sit. What's my reason for thinking HP slashfen are losers? "No more than a woman's- I think them so because I think them so." The ones I've met online have impressed me as such, is all.
But if you need reasons-- Because it's a line of least resistance fandom. An entry-level fandom. A lowest common denominator fandom. A garbage can fandom. A no need to regard canon fandom. A no need to know canon fandom. A fanon driven fandom. (And HP fandom is therefore different from native Japanese fandoms how...?) HP fandom is virtually identical. But I never said that Japanese fans aren't baa-lamb sheep either. They are. And if you want to go trotting with the flock, HP is the fandom for you. Don't even have to know Japanese. (Oh, and it attracts slash writers. A fandom that does that is a bad fandom by definition, like a politician who has ultra-right wing supporters. There's something wrong with it or those people wouldn't be there.) (Because I don't *feel* like being reasonable, since you ask. Reasonable has never gotten me anywhere. Now I'm going to rant and be opinionated and tear people apart when I'm hormonal because, to quote our American cousins, I have a right to be Suze if I feel like it. And have people love me for it. And bleat 'Jeanne has some very inteh-heh-hehligent things to say about HP fandom.' The rewards in this business go to the scurrilous and irrational, and I intend to be scurrilous and irrational in spades. I look forward to having my ass kissed by everyone in That Corner of Blogdumb. Snap to it, geboku-tachi.) Before I go on to more important things, I would just like to Bear Witness to the fact that I think Harry Potter slash fen are losers. I'll make an exception for Ebony, who's just having one of those periods of dementia that strike highly intelligent people. (...and good that they do so because it's infinitely more dangerous and humiliating if you catch it when you're older...) A side-effect of having a bathroom sink again is that I don't have to shower at night. Normally I do. Normally I can't go to bed sticky and unwashed. I *itch*. But these nights, when I translate, I stay up later and later and fall into bed around 4, and showering then is too much trouble. Without the sink there was no choice, but now I have my pre-76 option. Pre-76 I didn't even bathe every day. Every other, every third. I washed my feet and washed my underarms and my body then registered me as 'clean'. But '76 was when my mother had the first tumor removed, and I spent the fall looking after her and running the house and going to classes, and I needed something to reward me in the evening for having made it through another day. That something turned out to be baths, with lots of Vitabath in them (green and the much-lamented lemon. Miss that. It was good for headaches too.) So me being me I turned into a bath addict, and hence have been a daily evening bather for the last 25 years. That's because I like *baths*. You can't have a bath in the morning. (And because I worked with babies. Much as one loves them, a whole day spent with babies absolutely mandates an evening cleansing of both you and them.) But when I turned into a showerer from considerations of economy and time and this-western-bathtub-is-too-shallow, I began to see advantages to morning showers. Not to be crude, but the fastidious may occasionally wish to sluice away the aftereffects of the previous night's bedtime activities, to say nothing of the morning evacuation. The trouble is you can't get your underwear on after a shower. Which is why one supposes the French invented bidets. It's just that the bidets which all my cousins have but naturally in their bathrooms look bone-dry, and occasionally rusty from disuse. There for the show, as it were. While I but naturally have no *room* in my bathroom for a bidet, unless I were to remove a yard of space from my back study. A problem. "One more whine... one more whine..." It's too hot to translate Arslan. I go to translate Arslan.
Nevertheless, no kindly swoon befell (Richard Wilbur, that one is. Heard him reading at Stratford ohhh back in '83 was it? which was what started me reading modern poetry again. Remember him as a summertime poet for that reason.) Sort of about the fuzz, just to remind me it could be worse. Silence on Bloor St. I take it that means Korea lost? I'm pleased for me, of course, and sad for my Korean acquaintance, like the nice guy in the PO outlet at Hanin Drugs who is never anything but pleasant and friendly but who seemed a little... subdued, today. Resorting now to my usual mental gymnastics of blogging about why I'm not blogging about people I want to dump a gallon of gasoline on with a safety match chaser... Bearing witness. There's nothing in this culture that can really stand up to that unbudgably self-righteous and dangerously seductive puritan/ methodist valorization of saying the truth aloud simply and solely to have the truth said. (Though such is my background that calling it Methodist rather than, say, Presbyterian at once invokes the Brit sanction on it- it's lower middle-class and hence (horrors) vulgar.) But south of the border it reigns supreme. There's no necessity to be egregiously unpleasant about someone? But there is. The necessity of bearing witness to the world that this person is an asshole. A dork. A pool of vomit-- acidic and full of bile and making you want to be sick yourself. The necessity of testifying to your belief that this person is an arrested three-year-old who thinks the world should stop turning if the world's rotation inconveniences her. Let the truth be spoken though the heavens should fall. 'This is the truth and I must speak the truth so that the truth may be known. I hate the cheap and stinking guts of her.' 'Who can we turn to?' Not social savoir-faire, that frivolous insincere Frenchman, so lightweight next to the iron sincerity of our (WASP) convictions. Not enryo. Enryo works only among those who practise it and doesn't translate into western cultures. (Besides, the country that gave us enryo also gave us the idea that *feeling* something strongly excuses if not actually licenses acting upon the feeling.) The calm adult puzzlement of the Chinese, perhaps (well, the Beijingers, is it? ^_^)? That simple failure to react emotionally, that blank if civil non-comprehension, that 'I don't understand what the fuss is about', that invokes automatically 5000 years of civilization looking at the naked blue-painted savages and wondering why they have these strange customs. Warera ni haji wo kakaseru no wa, ano hito-tachi shika nai deshou? Kanawanai kara ne. No translation for haji I can think of, short of 'make one realize what an utter prat one looks.' Which will do. We don't say egregiously unpleasant things about other people because the Chinese may be listening. Works for me. Occurs to me to wonder how old Genevieve is. I can usually tell from a person's language and references and just the way she phrases things what decade she belongs to at least. Education runs in ten-year fads and anyone who got their grade-schooling before 1970 talks vastly differently from anyone who got it after, and after that age-appropriate colloquialisms kick in, so it's fairly easy to tell an early-20 from a mid-30's, for instance. But she's British, which screws the whole thing up. Back at Nichibei Kaiwa one term there was a New York lawyer and a Minneapolis MBA and a nineteen year old kid called Ron, I believe, from a lower middle-class family in southern England. Went to the local grammar, left after the lower set of exams which I can never remember are they A levels or Us- A's I assume- because no way was he going to uni, got employment at a haberdasher's quote unquote. His dad, divorced for years from Mum and teaching here, asked did Ron want to join him in Tokyo, and Ron said yes- Mum had just had a new baby with her second husband and Ron felt in the way. He throve, giving conversation classes for his permitted 20 hours a week and making enough to go to Nichibei to learn Japanese. He was the one who got all my casual and reflex Eng.lit and historical references, not the guys with degrees. They'd studied law, you see, or business administration. He was the one didn't get confused by my English (well, nor did the New Zealander either.) That's how it works when you're just an average English bloke who goes to the local grammar. So Genevieve may be 20, for all I know, even though if she was North American I'd be saying late 30's- early 40's. I might ask her some time. After I've known her a few years. I mean- she's British.
I know I shouldn't write after 2 in the morning, but oh well. Did 16 pages of Rika translation. Vomitous, yes, but... But. When you translate your nose gets shoved up against the meaning of the Japanese and things that you let slide past you as you read now look you straight in the eye and say OK here we are now consider the ramifications of Us. And especially in a mystery puzzle like Rika, where anything at all, any throw-away line, may hold the answer to questions we've been asking ourselves since 1998. So- you know why Tetsu's mother killed herself? We've got two answers, and either of them might be applicable to why Tetsu killed himself. You know why Anji was crazy over Tetsu? The same reason everyone is crazy over Tetsu. He sends them into heat. Tetsu arrives at the school and thinks he's gone to heaven, because from his first day as a first-year middle-schooler he's cock of the walk, pun intended. So- umm-- just what did Tetsu want to be saved from, one wonders, when he was top-dog head of the Salon in his third year of high school and obsessively writing 'Hiro save me' in his notebook? Not what we thought. Himself, is my guess. The Rika atmosphere reflects oddly back on Koji's story. Both perverse, both claustrophobic and... lowering, like an oppressive afternoon. It feels like an oxymoron to say I *like* either of them (any way but intellectually, and intellectually is a cop-out, a distancing onself from the gut reaction.) It's an interesting sensation to find something that makes you feel that bad and does it that well, if you understand me. Koji's story is... not even dark (that much-abused by fangirls term.) Read in the context of the manga it's pitch-black. Comfortless. Deadly. Perfectly low-key, unlike Rika's horrors, but making the iron statement that there's no way out. Rika still has the possibility of salvation somewhere down the line (less, after this ep, but nonetheless there.) Rika himself has his moments of grace, or something that looks like grace- his visit to Hotaru in the hospital, for instance. But Kamisama and Nii- their story is finished, at least their story together. Nothing will change it. No-one was saved. Koji's story is the iron box that Kami-sama is inside of that *doesn't have a door.* And I don't know if it would be better or worse if Kami-sama realized he was in an iron box with no door, but as it is, he doesn't, and that fact oppresses me too. Koji does something I can't do. She writes a story with no redemption in it. I've never done that. Literally and viscerally can't. I need an out, if only a look into the monster's head so I can see that he's not a monster in his own eyes. I don't get it here. Ukoku is just- unknowable. Indifferent. The scientist who does things because he can do them and doesn't know or doesn't care what the effects are. And all I can do is hope Minekura cops out the way I'd cop out if it was my story and- well, saves Nii from himself. Yeah. I'm a wimp. Guilty as charged.
KojiR's Nii and Kamisama story. I don't advise the casual reader to read it- you really have to know these characters for the exercise to have meaning and otherwise it's unpleasant. (They're unpleasant characters. Simple.) But finally, she says without false modesty, someone besides me who thinks about what their characters are actually experiencing during sex and who then describes it accurately. Everyone else does distanced sex- distanced through bland vocabulary, distanced through intellectualization, distanced. I'll give them benefit of the doubt and say maybe it's not distanced for them. Maybe the set phrases are still new to them and still work. Maybe the very idea of writing sex is so novel that just naming the activity provides sufficient frisson. But play this game long enough and you require a different pov. And in my experience that generally means concrete and immediate descriptions of what it feels like and how that segues into what the guy is thinking. And very few people do this, what seems to me basic and unarguable kind of sexual writing. (There's a place for metaphoric sex, if you're writing a character who'd think in metaphors, or writing a style that's deliberately metaphoric. But I rarely see fanwriters even thinking about what style they use in the first place. They write whatever style comes to hand. End story. It's also nice to see someone who's given a thought to what style to use.) That's still not KojiRose's greatest achievement, by me. Her greatest achievement is to render Nii's verbal Japanese idosyncrasies in English. 'Goodness, goodness. You watch yourself.' Yup, that's what he'd say. I can hear him say it. Making a Japanese voice actor speak English is like climbing Everest. You're at the top. Go her.
Host, hosts, all day, interrupted by a few hours of Helen in the late afternoon, spur of the moment, because her parents thought they might actually want to go out for his birthday, and when they asked Helen that afternoon what she wanted to do- 'Park? Car?'- she said brightly 'Dyan.' And was sniffly and upset (I heard her being both on my voicemail) at learning that Dyan wasn't scheduled to come. I'm now going to talk about babies. You can all leave. I don't mind. We have a new babbler at work, Matthew, who blinks at the world from mild blue eyes and smiles a polite little smile and looks sort of like an unworldly curate, pale skinned and vague. The world, naturally, dotes on him- and dotes all the more because he's Sammy Stein's cousin. You have to have known Sammy Stein. He was one of those classic babies who makes history. I got on with him just fine, because we shared a common trait: we both hated loud noise. But Sam would shriek when the decibels started rising while I, being an adult, had to restrain myself to snotty remarks. The classic babies, for some reason, are usually female. The ones that people either roll their eyes over or go foolishly fond-faced at the memory of. Esther, who got herself stuck in a milk crate in the wading pool, and had to be extracted by pouring olive oil around her, and who now comes round in the summertime and helps out with the babies. Tammy- yes, her parents were working-class, and her dad had a mullet, but she was the neatest kid I ever knew- whom Stephen used to call Tamster, and said when she was 15 months or so, 'I always figured Tammy could make it on the street if she had to.' Wiry little Theresa, who swung from the bars of her crib; muffin-like Alexa, who could sense the minute you bent over to put her in her crib and who at once woke from a sound sleep to protest the outrage; Chloe, who started daycare at 4 months unweaned, because she absolutely refused to take a bottle, and who consequently spent most afternoons wailing with hunger. The fall of 2000, almost every day I wasn't working, I'd drop by at 3 or so and wrap her up in a blanket and take her out in the yard where she might occasionally, with luck, fall asleep until her mother could get there at 5:30. An unforeseen consequence of this was that Chloe bonded with me, which had never happened in all my years of daycare. And stayed partial to me, which is also unusual. Once they move to Toddlers they usually forget we exist. But last February when I came back from my week in Japan, Chloe ran around the mid-kid playroom shrieking 'Idan! Idan! Idan!' in absolute ecstasies. Male-wise there was red-haired Francis, whom even his mother considered weird. He had a huge head, solid and heavy, covered in bright red curls; and he was a pretty chunky kid down to his waist. But below the waist it was like he was someone else- shrivelled little chicken legs and tiny little feet the same size as his friend ALexander, six months younger. He didn't walk till he was two, and one day came in in a cast. 'What happened?' 'He broke his leg.' 'How?' 'Standing in the driveway.' But he talked at 14 months, sentences, and what the Dutch call 'stopwords', the things people always say. His first words were 'I see a bus', and he'd look at me frowningly and say 'You amaze me.' One day a bus passed the yard and everyone yelled 'Francis, Francis, look, a bus!' Francis looked up at it and said 'Evidently.' His friend Alexander at 16 months walked away from his parents up at the Camp Borden army base, climbed onto a bus, sat down near an adult, and in that way managed to get himself to the next base over with no-one on the bus suspecting a thing. 'We took him to church and left him with the baby-sitters. They keep all the kids at the back of the church behind this screen. Alexander climbed over the screen, and they put him back. Alexander climbed over the screen, and they put him back. Alexander climbed over the screen, and they put him back. Alexander climbed over the screen, and all the other kids climbed over the screen with him.' That's our boy, whom I once turned around to find halfway up the shelving unit in the five seconds my back had been turned. There was Robert, who I'll swear made a dirty joke when he was less than two; and his friend Adam, who I'll swear became attached to a toy hammer in an access of castration-anxiety that was related to the aforementioned dirty joke. There was Janine, the below-mentioned Neenie, who would assert her goodness after knocking someone over and grabbing their toy. There was Aisha, who was French in fact, and who proved that it doesn't matter what language the big people speak to a kid in, they'll speak what their friends are speaking. There was Aliya and Rosie and Laila and Duncan and little woodland creature Emily and Saber and Sumayyah and Jessica-and-Derek and Quentin and Gabriel Malbogat, whose medicine prescription was made out to Gabriel Malbegot, and his sister Sarah whom their parents called Sarah Heartburn. There were babies, and they were all really neat. I'm being good. I am. 'I a *good* Neenie!!' to quote someone I once knew who must now be college aged. Half-Egyptian, and her father a Copt, so she looked like one of Akhnaton's daughter in the wall friezes. Lord those genes breed true in despite of Scottish mothers. I finished Night Cap last night instead of Deimos, and will now write a review of it. Somehow. While managing not to say 'I liked him a lot better at 26 *without* Iwaki thank you, c'mon sensei be innovative and give him to the other blond hunh hunh hunh??' The Nitta coverage is less a statement of my opinions and more promo puff for Ycon, and must read like it. Which little ethical dilemma of mine (honne vs tatemae) does oddly echo the situation of Nitta's hosts, who devote their lives to tatemae, or something even less grounded than tatemae (tatemae is real, after all: the acceptable face of things, but still an actual face) like pretence and lies, and need a way to keep their feelings separate from their trade. Because when they have feelings about their work, like Iwaki, and Shinkawa in his bitterer moments, they come out as hostility for the customers the minute the customers start to act like the charade is real, even though the hosts do everything to make their pretence regsiter as reality. To which Takaaki (so far) opposes a dry-eyed professionalism and the basic principle that it's your professional responsibility as a host to see that people don't get hurt, even by their own desires and stupidity. The parallels between hosts and psychiatrists are something it's too hot to consider, but I'm sure they're there. Jane asks people to send her the best fanfic passages they know. They send her various quotes from various slash fanfics from various slash fandoms. XF, Highlander, DS, Smallville. *All* of them make me slightly sick to my stomach. I don't quite know why. Just the deadly slash style which is always the same no matter who writes it, which registers to me as a crossover between claustrophobia and migraine. (It feels like claustrophobia feels, is what I mean, and it makes the world look the way it does during a migraine, rather an unpleasant place you don't want to be in and can't leave, accompanied by a vague pervasive soul-sickness/ nausea.) And the fact that these aren't guys. These are no more guys than lavender-eyed bishounen with flowing wine-coloured hair are guys. But I get the feeling the writer thinks they're guys, and thinks they're the guys she sees on her TV screen. That's what scares me. Yaoi is grand opera. It's silly and overdone, but silly and overdone inside its own accepted conventions. Slash is Angry Young Men Brit theatre of the 50's, thinking its being hyper-realistic in its grittiness, but just as unreal and mannered as opera when you compare it with actual reality. (yes I know talking about the weather is the nadir of blogging, even below bitching about your mother, but still. This demands to be said.) Not only do I not expect to hear any more grousing about the level of the Great Lakes this year, I expect to see an 'ALERT: Lake Ontario flooding!' story. Jeez Louise, guys. Enough already. If I'm not going to translate Nitta, not going to translate Rika, and not going to translate Arslan, on the juvenile grounds that I've had a piss-awful day because it had the nerve to be 29 degrees and muggy on the first day of summer more-or-less, would I at least go read Deimos no Hanayome or something like that that I've had sitting on the shelf since forever and always meant to read when I got the time? (adds: for-god's-sake.) OK, so now I'm poor again and the property taxes are due, but lemme tell you it was worth it. Stepped into that shower last night (well, this morning- 3 am) and had hot water *pound* on me. OK, 'pound' relatively speaking. Still the best shower I've had in my eight and something years of domicile here. Still the best home improvement since the AC system in the new furnace. Roofs, porches, garage doors, nahh. *This* was worth the bucks. Now to the next item of business. What's with the current writer's blockage? Three stories on the go, and none of them going anywhere. What's the problem? 1) The EC story is a Method writing one. I have to turn into the characters and walk around in their skin for a bit and see what the world looks like to them, and then I'll know what happens. Simple fact is that I haven't wanted to do this, or haven't wanted to take the time to do it. There's too much that I-as-me have to get accomplished and I can't afford the time for personality changes, however temporary. Complicated by the fact that both charas are very Not-me type people that I can't write on automatic pilot. I'd have to /be/ Matsumoto for a couple of days, and I'm too lazy. 2) The Saiyuuki story is the same only more so. It requires turning into everybody, because it's one of those Everyone Faces Their Worst Nightmare scenarios. The Sanzou part I could write because I'm always outside Sanzou. The others I need to get exactly the right mood and it never lasts long enough when I do. Also I've had doubts about this story from the beginning- just doubts whether the final product would be worth the effort of actually writing the thing. Does it say anything new and different? Is there any point in writing Saiyuuki at all? It's all been done and done again. This was the one got poisoned by fannish miasma this winter (once a story breathes poisoned air it rarely recovers) and it still gasps for breath. It reads to me like run of the mill fanfic- no strangeness, no innovation, no daring. There's nothing more apt to kill inspiration than realizing you're writing like A Major Fan Writer (TM)- respectable, irreproachable and absolutely unexciting. 3. The Hi Izuru... story is one I want to write, but it isn't in my usual style and it fights me all down the line. I want to write prose that recalls Yamagishi's visual style- a little archaic, a little formal and distanced, a world and story that aren't doing what we normally expect manga worlds and fanfics to do. I want to do something *different*. My brain will only provide Same Old. Stalemate. This all gets compounded by the Fuzz. Not that fuzz- the mental wooliness that starts in your 40's. Used to be my brain simply handed me the exact word I needed when I needed it. Now it doesn't, and I have to search for it, sometimes desperately. It's like losing your sight, which I'm also doing. You almost prefer not to write or read so as not to be reminded of how much you've deteriorated. OTOH I remind myself that last September my mind was quite happy to hand me a whole story practically ready-written, no need to change much more than a word here or there. My mind's had a lot more on its plate this year, and maybe it's just tired. But I also remember a Japanese friend saying The more you translate the less you're able to write, and I wonder sinkingly if that could be the problem here. My fictional output and ability went downhill steeply the minute I started translating an actual book. Addendum: wait, you mean all that honking on Bloor St yesterday (**all** yesterday) means not merely thatSKorea won but that Italy is out of the cup finals? 'Finally the nightmare is over'? at least as far as St. Clair is concerned? Well, that at least is good news. True, if SKorea wins the cup, the vicinity of my neighbourhood will be hidoi, but if Italy won my actual neighbourhood would be hidoi/ hidosugiru, and so would most of the rest of Toronto. Koreans are still a tenth of the Italians here, if that. Of course, they're all young and genki and given to leaning on their horns; or old and genki, because at least one flag-waving car prowling the streets honking last night was driven by someone who bore a strong resemblance to the Showa emperor, with his white-haired wife beside him. Momma don't let your babies grow up to be translators... What's called The Lead Ass. The Lead Ass will defeat even the Grand Refusal if given enough time. The Lead Ass is what keeps you sitting in front of the computer, playing free cell, yes, checking email, yes, reading blogs even, yes, and when you've done all that you're still in front of the computer so shou ga arimahen you might as well translate. True, for this exercise to work it helps to have a large mound of earth blocking your front steps, and for the only place you might want to go to to have been razed and converted into a flat field of earth (insert screen clips from ep 16 of the Sanzou-tachi at the ruins of Hyakugan Maoh's castle + sad dramatic music.) Also to have three stories that are fighting you. Also to be doing the most respectable of the Otoko ga Otoko wo tanks, number one when we're still dealing with the doomed love of Shinkawa for Takaaki (doomed because they're both blond) before Nitta's Klaus-clone Iwaki comes to bore us to death and make the rather neat Takaaki start looking like a headless chicken. (He's a Klaus-clone not because he looks like Klaus, bar the dark hair, but because Nitta makes it only too obvious she thinks he's kewl and thinks we should too.) Scratch itch. I now have water pressure in the upstairs sink again. Actually I always did have water pressure there, but I also had a build-up of gunk in the 'aerator' of the faucet (whatever that is) which the guys said comes from having something wrong with the hot water. I know what was wrong with the hot water, and I know it got fixed a year ago, and I know the plumbers who charge $150 an hour just to come to your house said they cleaned the aerator, and I now know they didn't. This guy cleaned the aerator and changed the washers in the shower and charged nothing. But that's because I said 'oh hell replace all my pipes while you're at it.' They come back tomorrow to dig up my front walk, dig up the bro's front walk (those incompetents at Il Duca, sigh. I'll never be able to sell the house now- 'Oh and next door has control of your water supply'), dump earth on my irises (Lois' irises- 'Next door has control of your garden as well') and put in ten feet of new pipes through to the house. This costs $1800 plus GST. Then they put all new pipes the length of the basement, cap the old pipes, run everything into the water heater, and make good. This costs $400. Do not ask me why. Plumbers' ways are not our ways, and a wise man does not inquire too deeply into their mysteries. It's taken me fifteen minutes (been a long day) but I've worked it out that people who come off as assholes in their blogs really are assholes. No, bear with me. It works like this: Someone says something on a ML, say, to piss you off. You want to tear a strip off the stupid twit. But you don't do it on the ML because it's just stupid twittery and you don't go around starting flame wars with twits because that's being an asshole. So you tear a strip off her in your blog where you can vent freely and chances are good she'll never see it. It's just like having a phone conversation with a friend, and it gets the irritation out of your system and no-one the worse because it doesn't *count*, right? Now, it would make a much better impression for the people who do read your blog if you talked about the fun things of the day or even the down things of the day, if they were really downers, than if you just wrote an entry blowing off steam and then forgot it. Because after all this *is* a public venue and anyone *can* read it. You've got readers, and anyone who ignores that fact is being disingenuous. But the twit was a stupid twit who deserves to have a strip torn off her for her stupidity and ki ga sumanai until you've torn a strip off her somewhere and told the world what a twit she is. So that's what you talk about. But if you're the kind of person who *has* to blow steam off at stupid people who annoy you, and has to do it in front of an audience, and can't just say to yourself Jeez what a twit, then you're an asshole. QED. So it's either vent and reveal yourself as an asshole, or don't vent and seethe in unsatisfied fury. Just as you please. Or do what I do: blog about why you're not blogging about the stupid twit on the ML. Rainy season? This is flaming monSOON season, Hong Kong style. I expect to hear no more grousing about the level of the Great Lakes after this weekend, guys. (But it does look neat, in its Hiroshige woodblock print style. Slanting lines of rain against the thick and verdant green.) These fortnightly archives- they happen at shorter and shorter intervals as the year goes by. Early March lasted a month or so. Early June a few days. Sic transit.
Now let me get this straight- the Japanese portion of the World Cup is happening in /rainy season/ in **Niigata**? Yukiguni, China Sea side of island, famous for copious precipitation all year round? |