The Garret

I approve of all the Beethoven that’s going around the internet airways like an epidemic. An epidemic of AWESOME AND STRING QUARTETS.

Tonight in Korean class 선생님 corrected a future tense conjugation I’d done, explaining “you’ve got the rule right, but actually we don’t use it here because we don’t like to say the sound twice.” Guys, this is a language that breaks its own rules because it sounds better that way. I finally gave up all pretense at scholarly interest and scrawled “OH KOREA” in the margin of my workbook.


Since it’s again apartment-hunting time, here is a poem:

“Landowners”

From my rented attic with no earth
To call my own except the air-motes,
I malign the leaden perspective
Of identical gray brick houses,
Orange roof-tiles, orange chimney pots,
And see that first house, as if between
Mirrors, engendering a spectral
Corridor of inane replicas,
Flimsily peopled.
                           But landowners
Own their cabbage roots, a space of stars,
Indigenous peace. Such substance makes
My eyeful of reflections a ghost’s
Eyeful, which, envious, would define
Death as striking root on one land-tract;
Life, its own vaporous wayfarings.

(Sylvia Plath, 1956. p. 53 in The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, New York: 2008.)

I’ve been meaning to write for weeks, but, you know, things happened: I read a picturebook about a highway-rat, complete with coat of claret velvet and lace at his little rat chin. I started reading I, Claudius because I picked it up off a dollar cart and got twenty percent off for identifying that week’s guess-the-quote (the Aeneid, Arma virumque cano etc). I finished watching Flower Boy Next Door and King of Dramas, and I was going to write last night, but then I thought, no, I’ll just check out the first episode of Answer Me, 1997, I probably won’t like it because I won’t get the ‘90s k-pop references but we’ll just see.

In retrospect, I should have known better. JUST TAKE MY HEART, I WASN’T USING IT ANYWAY.

Mind you, I said the same thing three days ago when I read Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. (It’s Big News now that John Green reviewed it in the New York Times, and that review and my reaction are an excellent example of vastly differing reader communities. We both loved it, but wow, it’s like we read entirely different books. You should read it too: there’s an awkward, magnificent, Romeo-&-Juliet-hating curly redhead, an eyeliner-wearing comic-reading half-Korean, epic explosions of adorableness and angst, all set to a soundtrack of terrible parenting and the Smiths.)

Actually these two stories are very similar in certain ways: they so perfectly embody the awkwardness, the intensity of being a teenager in a not-so-long-ago age (Eleanor & Park takes place in 1986; Answer Me, 1997 takes place in, obviously, 1997). Both stories are about growing up—that long liminal moment between dependence and independence. They’re about family, first love (true love?), and—of course—music.

They’re about a time in life that—if we’ve had the privilege of experiencing it (and so many young people haven’t, or experience it differently than I did and the characters in these stories do)—we’re expected to leave behind. But that shouldn’t mean we ignore it completely, and I think a lot of people read YA partly because, on some level, teenagerhood informs the rest of our lives, and the things we start working through then don’t just disappear because we hit twenty. This doesn’t mean adult readers of YA are immature or incapable of handling adulthood. It means, perhaps, that we’re still in touch with our younger selves in a way that demands some level of engagement. That questions about identity, family, love, one’s place in the world—that these are universal and ageless, in narrative just as much as in non-narrative philosophy; in living YA just as much as in anything written by dead white dudes.

That’s not the only reason for adults to read or write or edit YA, of course. But it is one that I think deserves a little more credit than it generally gets. It’s more usually phrased as the self-deprecatory “Well, I guess I’m still a teenager at heart”—but I think it demands (and deserves) more examination than that.

Yesterday I had Ravel’s Bolero stuck in my head and hummed it at work all afternoon.

The day before that, someone in my Korean class suggested watching dramas with Korean subs to practice reading. I decided to watch an episode of something I had already seen and thus did not need to actually watch again. While searching for something entirely different, I came across Big Bang re-enacting Coffee Prince. Well, that was an entertaining ten minutes, but a total failure for subtitle reading. Then I decided I just had to find something I had already seen and had absolutely no interest in re-watching.

Two episodes of Boys Before Flowers later... I’m not allowed to subtitle-watch anything with Lee Min-ho’s face in it. XD

In other news, now that I have a brand new stack of galleys, it’s time to post some reviews of old galleys!( Murder! And more murder!: Grave Mercy, Paper Valentine, and Quintana of Charyn )

What’re you reading these days?

Tonight here am I, amid my few bags of stuff and pitifully small stacks of books, in my new room in Berkeley. My housemates are Danish, German, New Zealander, and Afghan-American, and they have all been most welcoming. The southern wall of my room is all windows that look onto the little back garden. And in the garden there are stars. My new sheets are inviting, and I can see my Hark! A Vagrant calendar hanging beside the door.

Home sweet home.

"The Thought Fox" by Ted Hughes

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Well, and here we are on 12/12/12. We have just finished setting up the small tree that I tramped down the hillside out back to saw down with my own hands. It is unusually seasonal around here and no mistake. I think it will snow tonight.

Last week I took a very nice business-and-pleasure trip to San Francisco. It was totally unproductive on the job-getting front, it turns out, but I did see old friends and meet wonderful new people. I ate French toast in a sparkly, sparkly diner and had some really fantastic green curry and a really terrible cream puff. (Not all at the same time.) Half the UC Berkeley population randomly smiled at me in a not-particularly-creepy way. There was chai.

I had just enough time to visit The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. AMAZING. I cannot recommend it enough. The Snowy Day was a landmark picturebook, and the original art pieces are stunning—so rich and vivid. The exhibit had art from many of Keats’s other books as well, and also a little room dedicated to his friendship with a Japanese puppet theatre troupe. Their letters show a mutual artistic appreciation and frank, honest affection that I found very touching.

Then it was time to wait for the Amtrak bus home, and I stood on a footbridge looking across at a conference center with a carousel on top. Oh, SF. ♥

Here am I this All Hallows Eve, sitting in the darkened living room with rain overhead and scones in the oven, the dog snoozing on the rug. Before me is the prospect of much packing, for tomorrow I am bound for parts unknown—i.e., Atlanta—first to a dear friend’s wedding and thence to visiting other dear friends. I am bringing to read Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (concerning the re-discovery of Lucretius) and Fire and Hemlock, the enigmatic seasonally appropriate masterpiece of Diana Wynne Jones.

Once packing is finished there will commence the traditional reading of The Perilous Gard, and then bed.

Happy Halloween.

Dear Diary,

This week I played with power tools and toxic chemicals and set things on fire. It was a good week.

(No, I have not turned into a full-fledged psycho. My dad helped me make some new shelves for my bookcases. And by "helped" I mean "did most of the work while I cackled and learned how to use an orbital sander.")

As if that weren't enough, I’ve entered a translation contest for a 700-word sample of a German novel. This should be hilarious, because my German is not so much rusty as barely existent. We’ll see how it goes? XD It was nice to be sitting on a porch listening to KAT-TUN (what else) and abusing a dictionary again. Of course I had to have chai as well.

Of course.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go check on this pie.

NEWSFLASH

PERFECT COMING-OF-AGE ROCK MUSIC DRAMA IS PERFECT

;ALKSDJFL;ASDKJFALS;DJFAL;KDJS;DFKJ

Sitting in my inappropriately pink chair with some edits to do for mousapelli and a cup of tea. It’s foggy outside, I don’t have to be at work until 2, and I am so happy.

♥