Dank, grey, chill not cold. At least I got my Asia-going cards mailed. Since four weeks isn't nearly long enough in these latter days, they must be New Year's cards, and will with luck arrive around the Epiphany. And why does the arrival of the Three Wise Guys get called by the term for a sudden enlightenment, one wonders.

Last finished?Wanted ( Read more... )

Last night's frustration dream was having an erotic scenario sabotaged because the dream protagonist, of uncertain sex, was unable to find batteries for their vibrator ( Read more... )

Dear God but Piranesi is oogey-making reading. Like a bad dream or the faintest recollection of something else I read somewhere else but can't trace. For no good reason I think that something else is certain scenes in Hamabe no Kafuka, which doesn't read at all the same in English as in Japanese. In Japanese it's all quite straightforward, almost ( Read more... )

Waddell reminds me so much of (what I have heard about) donnish conversation in Oxbridge colleges- in-jokes, allusions, 'who needs no introduction' etc.The port goes round so much the faster ( Read more... )

1. The gecko people who gifted me with my highball glass are also the parents of one of our babies. The gecko was discovered near Christie Pits by a dog, not a human. Dog freaked out at something in the backyard that humans couldn't see until close investigation because, basically, chameleon-type gecko. I always wondered how that happened ( Read more... )

And I did, late last night, at which a load lifted from my spirit.

Book is The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar. The blurb calls it 'a great mystical poem', 'an allegorical rendering of sufism- the secretive and paradoxical form of Islamic mysticism.' Cool! Reader, I bought it ( Read more... )

Tuesday night I dreamed about H and her family leaving, all of us in tears and H a good ten years younger than she is, and their golden retriever running away and having to be corralled (except in RL they have two youngish... beagles, I think) and then riding with them part of their way, but we were in train tunnels that passed through bookstores, ( Read more... )

When translations go bad

And here is the original Catullus 3 for those who haven't got it memorized. (Full disclosure- I only know the 'qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum' bit, because of the Hamlet echoes.)

My down the street neighbours put out a bunch of children's toys outgrown by their single and cherished child, with whom I have a speaking acquaintance from the time *she* put out some of her own toys. One was a Thomas the Tank Engine riding toy. (I suspect some basement cleaning here-- riding toys look to be six or eight years in her past.) I was ( Read more... )

Bought the first volume of Wild Sheep Chase when I was in New York last fall, as I said then, 'just to see what Murakami reads like in Japanese. As suspected, he reads like tapwater, but less sociopathic tapwater than in English where the lack of affect reads very unsettling indeed.' I must have been thinking of another Murakami work, because for ( Read more... )