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.)

Happy Valentine’s Day! Or Happy Pan-Universal Be Who You Are Day (thanks, Kristin Cashore!). I don’t have particularly strong feelings about Valentine’s Day one way or another, except that it is inevitably followed by the Second-Greatest Candy Sale Day of the Year (the Greatest Candy Sale Day of the Year being Nov. 1), about which I do have strong feelings. I compromised by wearing black and eyeliner to work, but also wearing pink tights and inexpertly painting my fingernails sparkly pink with black and silver details.

Speaking of work, I’m settling in pretty well, though it’s very different from my last job. But nice too. Clearly I still have a lot to learn about bookselling, though, and should remember not to say “awesomesauce” to little old ladies. I found the world’s best-organized comics store last week and bought Fionna & Cake #1.

FIONA: I was going to ask if you had this, but clearly… you do!
COMICSELLER: Yep!
FIONA: I don’t read nearly enough comics, but I have friends who work for Comic Book Resources, and they said I should read it.
COMICSELLER: Your friends are totally right!
FIONA & COMICSELLER: *mutual approval*

So there you have it. The comics store is right next to a sff/mystery bookstore that has nearly every single Diana Wynne Jones book, and pretty much everything else. *cries from happiness*

In other news, I’m getting used to my housemates and mustering the discipline to work on my paper and taking Korean. I’m eating far too much sourdough bread, which is probably why I haven’t noticeably lost any weight, despite the fact that I walk everywhere and desperately need new shoes. The other day, I got partway up one of the trails behind the house before I got nauseated and decided to turn around and come back down. But I got pretty far, especially for being as out of shape as I am. And the views are spectacular from pretty much anywhere on the trail I picked, as it zigzags up the western face of the hill. (I’m pretty sure that hill counts as a mountain in New England.) Next time I’ll get further. I could see downtown Oakland and San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County, and the bay shining silver, and a little haze creeping in.

I miss you all, and not everything is perfect, but I haven’t felt this good in a long time. Some days I can’t believe this place is real.

Some days I can.

My darlings, I have not dropped off the face of the planet—though it sort of feels like it—no, I am in California, and here I stay for the foreseeable future. Mind you, I can only deal with the future about two weeks in advance, so you see the problem with my life planning skills right here.

I have traveled by train and by car from one end of the country to the other, with lots of detouring in between and a brief stint where my friend M and I seriously considered becoming casino waitresses in Reno and then writing a trashy novel about it. mousapelli took me to a palace of wonders called Chocolate World and let me sleep on her couch and bond with Datte and watch all her con DVDs.

This has actually backfired, though, because now I’m in a KAT-TUN phase, and somebody needs to take all my music away from me, because I keep listening to 勇気の花 and then sobbing every time it gets to Hittori ja nai yo, nakama ga iru yo.

See, I'm crying again. No, stop. A road trip is more than what you leave behind. I have seen little harbor towns and shining cities and also elephants and a whole lot of sagebrush. I have participated in philosophical conversations about the human condition (lasting most of Kansas) and masqueraded as a German tourist (super useful for thwarting obnoxious panhandlers). I have visited the first coffee shop west of the Mississippi and driven past a mountain forest fire at night and seen the Milky Way.

Of many peoples—their cities he saw, and understood their minds;
Many perils his spirit suffered upon the sea.

Because a loose and selective translation of Homer is always relevant. Always.

More soon--I will try.

I've been trying to make my posts more thematically linked and less random, but I don't really feel like sorting through all the thoughts I've had since my last post, so you're going to get an old-fashioned rambly epistolary sort of thing like I used to write back when I had adventures and no job. Here you will find detailed descriptions of food, some talky bits about books, and the long-awaited return of that anchor of adventures, the staple of swashbuckling, the don of drinks--BUBBLE TEA!

( First proper snow of the season. On March 1. )


Life: it's happening.

Yesterday during the rainstorm I was in the library to pick up a book, as I often am, and was browsing the poetry section looking for Pushkin. See, I read yuki_onna ’s new book Deathless a few days ago, and while it’s pretty stark for her (which would be linguistically lush and layered for anyone else), I ate it up, and it’s making me remember a big book of Russian fairy tales I had as a child. (Yeah, there pretty much always WAS an Ivan.) And I wanted to check out some Pushkin, since he features so strongly in Deathless. I didn’t find anything about Koschei, but I did find this:


Sleep I cannot find, nor light:
Everywhere is dark and slumber,
Only weary tickings number
The slow hours of the night.
Parca, jabbering, woman-fashion,
Sleeping night, without compassion,
Life, who stirs like rustling mice,
Why encage me in thy vise?
Why the whispering insistence,—
Art thou but the pale persistence
Of a day departed twice?
What black failures dost thou reckon?
Dost thou prophesy or beckon?
I would know whence thou art sprung,
I would study thy dark tongue…


(“Verses Written During a Sleepless Night.” Deutsch and Yarmolinsky, comps. Modern Russian Poetry, 1921. I tell you, if my nights were sleepless then at least I wouldn't be having dreams about being a thoroughly useless human being.)

I quite like it, even if my own recent attempts at Catullus (98, rendered clumsily by me as “Victus the Stinkbreath”) have thrown me into despair and convinced me that I should just learn all languages ever and read things in the original, because many accurate translations are terrible poetry, and many decent poems are not at all accurate translations.

...Russian only has one alphabet, right? How hard can it be?

Happy Poetry Month.

A: A puppy that tries to leap into your zipped hoodie, while you're wearing it, in a frantic joyful search for more cuddles. While you're already petting said puppy.

One of our office-types at work brought her new puppy down to the sales floor for a few minutes, where it happily snuffled around and was petted and cooed at and cuddled. So soft! So tiny and wet-nosed and perfect! It made me so, so happy.

Which was good, because sales for my co-written staff rec Young Miles (The Warrior's Apprentice, The Mountains of Mourning, and The Vor Game) continue to be sad, despite Vericon and several helpful suggestions aimed at customers of the target demographic. I have decided that I shall henceforth describe the Vorkosigan books as “Robert Heinlein and Georgette Heyer walk into a bar...”

Speaking of Vericon and Vorkosigans, I talked to Holly Black for about 15 minutes while she ate her pre-signing sandwich. I had on my Hat of Vaguely European Mystery and was lounging in the break room with a copy of Cryoburn and hopefully I did not terrify her too much with the awkward and the crazy. She was wonderful, at any rate, and said many smart and interesting things about books we both like very much.

Later in the day, this happened:

BOOKSTORE MUSIC: *is some slow, kind of rock-y wistful song about spring and feelings and sadness, with whistling*
ME: Huh, nice song.
ME: Wait, why is this song in Japanese?

XD

It was snowing as I walked to the library and Trader Joe’s the other day. There were some crocuses out, as there are this time of year long before the trees realize it’s spring. The snow wasn’t really sticking, but a few patches in the shade of walls and bushes were frosted over, the white snow stark and cold against the yellow and purple of the flowers. Poor, brave little things.

And now I must take another look at my taxes.

This is why I'm going to wind up being a copyeditor, which has got to be pretty much the only publishing job worse than being an editor.

I should probably mention that I really, really want to be an editor.

FML.

You know, pretty often Edna St. Vincent Millay makes me feel like I've been punched in the stomach.

( This door you might not open, and you did )

* * *

From the YA Realism Chronicles, or, Kdramas Are Totally Educational...

ME: Wow, this book seems really different than it did last time I read it! Talk about experience shaping reading!
K: I know! Word!
ME: But I’m seriously confused. Why is the kid calling his big sister unni and not noona?
K: ...Noonawhahuh? A year later and you're worried about vocabulary? Hon, sometimes you're kinda weird.
ME: I don’t get ittttttt.
K: ...
K: You know, sometimes after talking to you I feel like I need to Google something.

♥ Sometimes I love people.

Also, I really want a Skip Beat! icon. Or two.

“The nature of a train is to fly underground, beneath cities. It is a clay bird, its natural element is earth. But the Shinkansen loves the air, confuses the sparrows...” (Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest, p. 268)

( Japan, Part the Final )

***

In other news, where is this alleged "snow" that people keep talking about/closing the library early/prematurely canceling school for? Inquiring New England minds wish to know!

Have you read The Tough Guide to Fantasyland? You should read The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. It is hysterical and generally accurate about a number of fantasy cliches, and also by Dianna Wynne Jones, which should sell you on it even if you somehow passed up “hysterical” and “generally accurate.”

It also contains a few useful observations about travel, be it in Fantasyland or otherwise. For example, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland has this to say about WEATHER:

WEATHER is always wrong for what you are doing at the time. It varies from heat/drought if you must travel quickly, to heavy rain if you need just to travel. If you need to sleep rough, there is always a frost; invariably, if you have to cross MOUNTAINS, there will be a thunderstorm or a blizzard. Some of the reason for this is that, despite obvious drawbacks, the Management nearly always arranges for Tours to set out in late autumn or early winter... The rest is natural perversity.

It has this to say about BATHS:

BATH is something all Tourists crave for quite soon. After very few days of slogging along in all weathers and sleeping in your clothes, you will be ready to kill for a Bath. You will crave to wash your hair. The Management is reasonable on this issue. Before long, you will find either a deep POOL in a RIVER of icy water ... or an INN with a heated bathhouse.

And finally, on the subject of BIRDS:

There are remarkably few Birds in Fantasyland, either in WOODS or on moorland. The reason is probably that, when any bird is seen, if is promptly shot by a Tourist desperate for something else to eat besides STEW.

( No tour of Fantasyland is complete without one! )