by Sixer

July Notes

また会う、everyone. It has been a nice whille since I last sat down and looked at where my Japanese studies are. Registration for the JLPT opens up near the end of August and I have to decided whether I take level four again (80% chance of passing) or jump into level three ( 100% of tears). Last time I was relived to confirm that I really was more invested in having a set goal to look forward to than I was in passing said goal, and though this truth brings me mixed feelings it does fire me up to try something new and challenging instead of something, well, old and challenging. Why attack the opponent you’ve already lost to if you  can lose to a brand new opponent instead?

Funnily enough, I just beat Ni no Kuni yesterday. I was thrilled, (despite realizing that I now owe the world a review for it) but the happiest part of the whole thing, besides the beautiful animation and ending credit song, was that I now get to re-start on DQIX. I have startled myself by actually missing this game, and today I happily dived into it for the first time in months. Yes, this is a game I’ve already “beaten,” but there’s still so much more to do. Baddies to best, caves to conquer, jobs to juggle, and, dearest to my heart, recipes to be realized. Compared to Ni no Kuni it has less text, especially now that the plot is over, so I’m going to have to be extra diligent in looking up words in order to count it as studying.

The other cool thing that I did this summer? Discover some great Japanese songs. I’ve collected a small, small number in iTunes over the years, but even among these I have a hard time thinking of them as songs I like rather than songs that are Japanese. But somehow I stumbled across ToHo’s channel and so found Japanese versions of the gorgeous Les Miserables songs. Youtube then suggested I listen to 小さな恋の歌, which I offically love to peices. I even went so far as to translate the first two verses and the chorus. Song translation is one of my many good ideas that I have yet to fully intialize, so this was a major step forward. As if this wasn’t enough, I found some awesome music on Spotify too. Of course, I really, really dislike Spotify becasue it insists on playing the most explicit commercials possible, and, uh, no. I like feeling all self-righteous about getting things for free legally while supporting the artist, but I will totally quit you each and everytime you play that ad. All that to say, I don’t listen to Spotify much becasue, despite its increasingly delicious variety of songs, I can’t relax whille it’s on. However, like I said there are a lot of good songs on it. Some artist I enjoy are Miyako Hasegawa, All That Jazz, and Mint Julep (who is actually already a staple on my iPod).

Reading-wise I haven’t made any new progress. Of course I’ve been picking up Natsume and reading a few panels here and there, but I know the stories a little too well for me to sit down with it and read them for real, and I’m not sure how useful it is as a study aide. I’d like to get a different manga series, like maybe Youtsuba!, but honestly, I have so many other sources of Japanese fiction avaiable I feel kind of bad about purchasing one more.

As for listening, Summer was a dry month for me as far as anime went. I did watch a procedural cop show on Viki without any subs at all – and discovered the ubiquity of the police procedural trumps even culture – but the only anime I watched consistently was Chihayafuru, and yes, I was naughty and left the subs on. The new wave of shows has just started in Japan and I’m hopping to find at least two enjoyable enough to watch. Of course, if it’s too enjoyable I’ll end up watching it with subs anyway – maybe I should be hoping for something bland with good animation?

All-in-all I’m passivly-giddy about my Japanese progression. I’m not really studying it at them moment by even the loosest definition of the word, but I’m still constantly being exposed to it and it’s exciting to see myself become more and more comfortable with it in general. My main goals are, as always, to increase my vocabulary becasue I have a terrible memory and a bad habit of just nodding and moving on if I don’t understand something (this spils over into all areas of my life. It’s a habit I got into when I was quite a new reader and it has morphed into a kind of patient-apathy towards ignorance). My goals have shifted slightly in that I suddenly find myself wanting to know more about grammar, and of course as my vocab increases my need to study kanji increases too. I plan on using imabi for all three of these goals, and I have started as any good procrastinator would by making an Anki deck out of the first few posts and then forgetting about it completely. Yes, I expect great things for autumn.

by Sixer

Sketch: Going to the Doctor

Good Morning Everybody! I have the first sketch for you. I wanted to put one up that was sweet or funny, but what to do? All my sketches seem to have suddenly sprouted dark humor like some kind of fungus. Maybe I’ll post one of those for you next time. Until then I did find this oddity. Tell me what you think of it, particularly the ending. I hate ending things and I’m curious to see if this one feels complete to others.

Enjoy!

The Doctor came out with a long face – about eight inches long, which was .5 inches longer than he had went in with. But then, his mouth had been closed before and now it was partly open to speak.

“There seems to have been a loss of her Optic Presence.”

“You mean she can’t see, Doctor?” I knew that wasn’t her problem.

“No,” he bent his relatively short neck and turned his attention to his charts, “I mean she has lost her vision.”

“Isn’t vision just sight?” I tried to keep the acid out of my voice – it’s a daily struggle.

“Vision is to sight as feeling is to touch. You can have one without the other, but it is more important to feel than to touch.”

I knew it. I told her I didn’t want to take her to a quack, but she insisted a PH.D in Literature was just the kind of doctor she needed. We had read his thesis on the way over. Its title was “The Universality of Fictional Philosophies and the Singularity of Society: How Generalizations Help form Cultural Individuality.” That alone was enough for me to want to get off at the next exit and try homeopathy first. But: “I’ve been self medicating on ice cream and english muffins for weeks.” she said. And so into the office we went, and I let them take her away into an room that seemed to double as a second hand bookshop. And now I was being quite literally talked down to by a man who could only tell me she had lost her motivation. I knew that, that’s why I bought her in!

“How,” I replied cautiously, “can we help her regain her Optic Presence?” And I was careful to capitalize as he had.

“Usually the Presence fades when it is overtired. Tell me, has she recently experienced something that she has been looking forward to for a while? A parade, perhaps, or a book signing?”

“There was a performance by the choir a few weeks ago, and she was responsible for the headdresses. But everything went well, even if she didn’t finish until the morning of.”

“Ah. And did she enjoy this event immensely?”

I wanted to ask him what he had been talking about with her for so long that he hadn’t gotten around to asking her these questions. How was I supposed to know what degree of enjoyment she attained?

“I wouldn’t say immensely – it was a nice event. Everything went smoothly and they liked the flowers.”

“Ah.” His face finally came up out of his notes. It’s length horribly abbreviated by a surprisingly wide, yet thin, smile. It looked like a a fresh paper cut on the tip of an index finger.

“The best thing you can do for her is help her see.” The doctor made the word “see” seem vast, inflated beyond the bounds of normalcy. “See and do. When the hands are busy the mind sleeps. When the eyes are busy it dreams. And what are dreams but – ” He paused expectantly, as if waiting for his off-screen audience to shout out “visions!” I staunchly held my silence, taking a step back to make sure I didn’t catch whatever madness he had. As if deciding that one of us must have said it allowed and he was just too preoccupied to hear it, the doctor looked back down at his notes and tore off a small purple square. “Here, I’m prescribing her some books. Don’t let her into them until she as had three full days of looking and doing, and make sure she’s doodling at least twice a day. If her Optic Presence doesn’t come back to her in a fortnight then I’m nothing than a bookworm.”

I resisted the urge to agree with him and just smiled and accepted the paper. It said “Library: YA, SCFI, FTSY”

I tried not to roll my eyes.

I gathered her up and rushed us to the metro and onto our returning train. If there were no delays, I decided, we could start the “Doctor’s” orders right away by making those pies I promised for the prayer meeting. She seemed awfully bubbly already, I had to admit, and finally I gave in and asked “How was it?”

“Oh!” Since she was normally in raptures this “oh” was a little flat. Still, there was certainly an exclamation point behind it  “Oh!, he had the most wonderful office. Just books, books, books. And you know, I realized that I’d been trying to do, do, do so much lately I forgot to just be, be, be. He had one in particular I’d like to read, because the font was the same color as the marigolds outside our house.”

“We can got to the library Thursday,” I offered, casually.

“Oh thank you! I don’t know what I’ll do with myself until then.”

“Bake pies,” I offered, and then threw away caution as if it were the wrapper on a good idea, keeping it safe until I was ready to use it, and added “Clean your room, organize your bookshelves, take apart the seams of that pillow and try again. And sweep.”

She wrinkled her nose and stared out the window with suddenly greedy eyes. “I don’t know about the sweeping.” She said. “But pies sound wonderful. I wonder – if we added turmeric to banana cream would the pie come out properly yellow instead of that awful beige-brown?”

She was lost in her own thoughts now and I gladly left her to them. The trip had done it’s job and offered her a change of pace. In a few days she would be as full of spark as ever and then I’d never get any rest. A small smile escaped with the thought and I settled down farther in my seat. Might as well get a little extra shut-eye now.

by Sixer

Rabbit Trails (兎の道): in which the author digresses

I love a good aside, a footnote, an afterthought. A scrawled comment written in the margins. Something too good to be left out, slipped between two commas (or crammed into parentheses when commas can’t contain them). This is my favorite way to learn too: randomly.

I learned a word from a Jdrama a few weeks ago (yes. There are legal places to watch Jdramas now). It stuck out because the scene was so funny. A grade student asked a high schooler to help him with his kanji homework. He asked her how to read this:

兎に角

The high schooler’s (internal) reaction was, “they teach kanji of this level to middle schoolers?” which was funny enough all by itself. Out loud she said “It’s read うさぎ に つの (rabbit (to) horn).” What followed was a beautiful, if shockingly rude, put down where the kid told her how it was really read (tonikaku→　とにかく) and then went and used it in his very next sentence. You know, as if she might not even know what it means.

Since I saw this episode I’ve been noticing this phrase everywhere. It’s very common, since takes the place of “anyway, in other words, generally speaking . . . ” and a handful of other vague, but  apparently polite enough, transitionals. I finally got around to looking up the kanji today, and sure enough, they mean rabbit and horn respectively, even though their reading is different (for the phrase they use their Japanese readings). I was delighted, and then delighted again when I saw how many variations there were on the phrase. Take out the にand you have 兎角, “various things”. Or it can can mean rabbit horns, which is exactly like hens’ teeth, and comes from a Buddhist proverb: 兎角亀毛, horns on a rabbit and fur on a turtle.

Knowing this we come back to 兎に角with a different perspective. It’s not some grammatical problem we have to memorize, its plain idiom (which, yes, we still have to memorize).{{1}} [[1]] It’s neither here nor there, but there is nothing funnier than wathcing other nations use their own idioms. Imagine the tense faces of serious men saying “the beans have been spilled sir, Agent X let the cat out of the bag.”  [[1]] Horns to a Rabbit. “Forgetting what was just said as irrelevant to what I’m about to say . . . . 兎に角終わりましょう.”

Strange

and

Beautiful.

by Sixer

Garret Sketches: a Prelude

I’m sitting at the top of my world. My tray of tea things – really just a cookie sheet and some dirty dishes – grows cold beside me as the gray sky brightens towards noon. I call it my garret room, as if a word alone can turn the overwhelming clutter into something poetically dismal.

“Whiskey, whiskey, whiskey,” sings my computer, and I have another sip of cold Earl Grey.

I’m going to write a story about cosmos. I’ll title it “Past a Field of Cosmos,” and I’ll laugh at the misunderstandings that arise. Cosmos are my favorite flowers. When I can come up with a universe delicate and bold enough for them to live in – when I can paint with words that breathe like Monet’s Water Lilies from a distance, and show all the wonderful detail of a Robert Doisneau print under scrutiny – I’m going to write about them. I’ll write and show people how the world can exist inside a single flower.

Until then I sit here and make little pen sketches – 650 words or less. They die before they live. Already forgotten by the time I go back to proof read. If I had a little more of the starving artist about me I think they could really be something. Pathetic, you know, in the Victorian sense. But I find that I have a much higher value on food than on sentiment. I like it, sure, but you can’t live on weepy-eyed pessimism – you need something with strength and vibrancy at least now and then.

So I practice vibrancy in the sketches. Imagining the click-click of my keys as the scratching of a feather pen and the sharp return of the space bar as the report of a type-writer. One day I will be able to work words out of iron and harness a star to shine amongst my thoughts, but until then I send these sketches out to the world like little paper lantern-wishes. May they each shine brightly in the dark, little as they are.

by Sixer

The Sight: a Sketch of Distinction


In front of my house is a step. The step goes down once, hesitates for a moment, and then joins the sidewalk proper. People walk up and down the sidewalk all day with their dogs and never look to the right or the left, but if they did happen to glance past the sidewalk’s edge they’d see a little strip of green, a little white picket fence and then, beyond that, the lake. The lake is amazing, having both reeds and a little peninsula to give it distinction from a mere water reservoir. The green banks slopping down to its edge, and the half circle of trees which form a backdrop for it, all add to its pastoral dignity. It is also populated by ducks and Baltimore Geese. Where these go when the lake freezes over I do not know, but the moment it thaws you can be sure they will be back again, paddling around in it. Now that the days are getting warmer I notice the ducks are not as active in the afternoon, but they’re still there in the mornings. The geese seem to have finally left for good, but then who can tell with geese.

The sight of geese and ducks no longer seems special enough to take pictures of, although they lend my house that quiet air of untouched country-side which, in the suburbs, is more precious than a thousand feather beds. But Wednesday the ducks were replaced by a more esteemed visitor. I almost missed it, walking down the sidewalk and not looking either left or right, but something always pulls my eye to the lake and there it was. Glorious, but unfortunately, not showing me its best side – and besides, my grouchy little camera was sulking that day and refusing its batteries. So  I sighed and moved on, wanting to share my excitement with someone but unable to.

But Friday morning, when I came out of my door, there it was again. A magnificent sight in such a humble little neighborhood as mine. I grabbed my camera, with it’s newly charged batteries, and snapped a quick picture. It came out like this:

IMG_0001

Undaunted, I adjusted a setting and snapped again. It came out fuzzier than the last time. I switched to manual and focused in~out.

Bluuuuuuuuuuuuuur.

Certain settings would let me see the unbelievable thing on the LCD screen in lurid detail, but try as I might whenever I pressed down to take the shot, the focus would shift and the whole photo would be gone – lost in a beautiful indistinctness. After ten minutes the camera grudgingly gave the photo below, and though at first I thought it was just as bad as all the others,  now I don’t know but I rather like it. After all, it captures the surreality of the moment, the hazy aura of imperial pomp. The more I think of it the more it makes sense on an artistic level. Of course something this majestic  would be undefinable, and an exact representation of the moment could only be conveyed by admitting that that very representation was unattainable. And so I present to you a sight so rare even cameras tremble, The Emperor of Fowl:

As Unattainable as Perfection