reading

Too much boring work to do (better than no work at all, but still), so of course I am escaping reality and posting here instead. (Also owe some comments on other people's posts! Soon, I hope!)

I went to the thrice-yearly used book fair* in Kyoto, which is always fun and frustrating in equal measure; it’s the usual used bookstore problem writ large, i.e. I know there is something I want there, but there are so many books arranged in such random order, there’s no real way to come across it other than dumb luck. Still, I found one book for me (oral history in Japanese) and one for my mom (Hamerton’s Paris, architectural essays published in 1892, in amazingly good condition and not at all expensive), as well as some cute postcards from past book fair posters, see below. In the past I’ve also come across things like a set of Chujo Yuriko’s complete works at about 2 dollars a volume (there are a lot of volumes, but still), some art I still have up on my wall, at least one of the books I use as a source for senzenwomen, and my favorite piece of ephemera ever, have I mentioned it here before? a school directory for a Kyoto public junior high school from 1955, containing not just students’ names and addresses but also parents’ names, ages, and occupations, like a sociological map of the neighborhood at the time.
*(Of the three yearly used book fairs, the May one is the only one held inside; I usually skip the August one, because even in the shady precincts of the Shimogamo Shrine, Kyoto in August is too damn hot and humid to wander around outside for any length of time, and one doesn’t want to sweat on the books. October at Chionji (or is it Chion-in, I always forget) is much nicer.)

I’ve been watching a bunch of people doing reaction videos to songs/concerts on Bilibili, and found myself thinking, I could do this! Not showing my face, God forbid, just my voice and my terrible Chinese. I have things I want to say! It would be such good speaking practice! (she said innocently). Probably nobody would watch them, but so what? Except, I couldn’t do it, because I don’t have the relevant software/hardware and have never made a video in my life. Is that something you can just, like, download and learn? (Also I’d have to actually sign up to B站, but presumably that can be done…)

Considering some of the more varied uses of the character 美 in Chinese. 美甲, painted/polished/manicured nails; 美瞳, cosmetic contacts; 美声, bel canto (used, I think, as a metonym (?) for Western-opera singing in general, to distinguish it from Chinese opera). Also the phonetic ones: 美乃滋, Taiwan-Chinese for mayonnaise (the mainland uses 蛋黄酱, egg yolk sauce); 美式 is American-style and a 冰美式 is an iced Americano.
Other random Chinese stuff: 大肠发卷, a really delightful word which is literally “large intestine hairband,” ie a scrunchie; and the frequent online use of the English “ing”to mean, appropriately, “currently doing ~~” (I’ve seen “排练ing” and “考虑ing” among others).

Jiang Dunhao song of the post, 好的晚安, because the 转音 (melisma? do you call it melisma in a pop song?) get to me; also a bonus Zhou Shen version of the same song, up an octave of course (or rather JDH is taking it down an octave, Zhou Shen covered it first).

For the last orchestra concert, we had a different tuba player (the one before was a slight, fresh-faced young man who looked as if he might get sucked into his own tuba, a la Alice in Orchestralia); this one was a tall thin guy about thirty, with glasses and a short ponytail (still unusual in mainstream Japan). He looks like someone, I kept thinking, but I couldn’t pin it down until I saw him in his concert suit: Liu Sang!

Rereading the diaries of Nella Last, a mid-20th-c. housewife from Northern England, vibrant as always.

5/13/41: Men are so odd. I often feel I give up trying to understand them at all. Perhaps they feel like that about us!!
6/8/41: Today at Morecambe Bay two carfuls of happy people sat within earshot and I caught scraps of conversation…the rest of the talk seemed to be of ‘whether our Margaret should stand so much of Bill’s nonsense—girls were daft nowadays to bother about things like that.’ I was so curious about Margaret’s particular daftness!
4/23/42: Mrs Waite started off about ‘crawling snakes’ and ‘tricks her mother would have done’ and suddenly I got angry and said ‘If I wanted to leave I’d leave. Nothing would stop me. But if you want to make me grow tired of Hospital Supply, you will start bickering and nagging. What I do when I’m not at Hospital Supply is my own concern and to talk of “liking to be where men are” in that nasty insinuating way you did when I said I would rather work in the men’s Canteen than change over was quite uncalled for. I do like men best—I’m more used to them and anyway I’ve never heard a man say as many stupid childish things to another man as you did to Molly Diss. You are a very peevish cantankerous old thing and I will not be spoken to like that.’ There was dead silence and then Mrs. Waite said mildly ‘I cannot see us doing without a bit of fire for a week or two’ and Mrs. Higham got up and went out. Later she said ‘I went off to have a mild attack of hysterics…’
12/18/45: And there’s a thing people tend to forget. One of the strongest cornerstones in American society as a whole is bitter resentment, either to their own country or another, which compelled them to seek a fuller life overseas.
3/7/47: Shan We [Siamese cat] seemed to lose his head—he took a header [from the window] into the deep snow and disappeared, except for the tip of his brown tail. I leaned forward and heaved and we both fell backward into the hall, bringing a pile of snow. The cross-eyed look of reproach he gave me and the anxious look he gave his tail, as if surprised to find it still on, nearly sent me into hysterics of laughter—helped by the same ‘Why should this happen to me?’ look on my husband’s face as he shovelled snow.
2/3/50: Then the elephant keeper ‘had a go’ [on the eponymous radio program] and in a perfectly serious voice, answering Wilfred’s ‘Why do elephants marching along a street hold on to each other’s tails?’ said ‘It keeps them decent’! not pausing to realise he meant decent in the Northern Irish idiom meaning ‘tidy.’ … I was in the lounge and my eyes fell on a little carved coconut wood elephant. I felt chuckles begin in my throat and a vision of five or six elephants swinging down the Strand, with their ponderous yet ‘mincing’ tread, so smug and confident in their ‘decent’ appearance as trunks gripped tails! My husband put his head round the door and said ‘What are you laughing about?’ and I said ‘Decent elephants’ and he laughed too.
2/27/50: Luckily I didn’t mention going to Ireland, for my husband said quickly ‘Ah, Nell can have a good rest [while he would be away]. I’ll soon be back and she will have to write lots of letters to me…’. I sniffed as I said to Mrs Howson ‘So, if you see a cheap line in chastity girdles, let me know.’ He wondered why we both set off laughing. He said ‘You’ve just got new corsets. What do you want another girdle for?’
6/26/52: I’d have awarded top place for oddity, though, to a gentle old world type of man who could have been a country parson or doctor. In Lyons he had a glass of lemonade with ice cream dropped in, and a double portion of ice cream, with four wafers, and by his look enjoyed his odd lunch.

Photos: Miké-chan in the park; two from the regional jazz festival over Golden Week, one mostly sky and one a performance in a shrine (look close to see the sax and trumpet); iris, maple, and strawberries, the latter from my veranda; two from a recent Gaudí exhibition, because I can’t resist dragons, or mosaic (especially as a tiny model); and four postcards of past used-book-fair posters. Maybe the Heian lady is that girl whose name I can never remember who was so thrilled when her aunt gave her the latest chapters of the Tale of Genji?

Be safe and well.