Away to Carterhaugh as fast as go can she

[incandescens]

I'm rereading Pamela Dean's Tam Lin. Good stuff.

Hm. Brazil beat Belgium. So now England gets to play Brazil. Oh well, may the best team win. And may it be England.

One of my coworkers got a birthday present from her husband of a pair of tickets to go out and stay in Japan for the fortnight and watch the rest of the World Cup. Believe me, at work today, her good luck was admired by all in very envious tones. ;)

Amazon informs me that a kanji dictionary (Kodansha) is on the way. The day of actually having to start trying to learn the stuff looms closer and closer.

I wish work didn't have nannyware. Alas, I canot wish for my friends to have smaller vocabularies.

Interesting thought re Yaone and overcompensation, from Saiyuki, which I must take care to remember.

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre --
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
(_Little Gidding_, TS Eliot)

Comments

[summer-queen.livejournal.com]

If your kanji dictionary is anything like mine ... you can always use it much like a heavy candlestick in Clue, failing any usefulness as a dictionary. Did you pick up a romaji dictionary as well?

And mmmmmm! Tam Lin was a phenomenal read, as I recall.

[incandescens]

IIRC, not having the email here, I went for the Kanji Beginners Kodansha dictionary, so no, no romaji one. OTOH, it ought to be easier to get my hands on a romaji one than a kanji one, one would have thought . . .

And yes, the Tam Lin is a wonderful read. I was explaining the plot of the ballad to coworkers over lunch yesterday, and there were snickers at "after having been warned directly to stay away from there, Janet immediately girds up her skirt and goes to investigate . . ."

Oh.

http://home.eol.ca/~basara/saiyuuki/april_01_gaiden/ might interest you. ;)

[diony.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love Tam Lin. I ought to reread that sometime this fall, as I am venturing back to school.

My experience in learning kanji is that my kinetic memory is better than my visual memory, and thus learning to write the damn things helps about 1203948230 times more than just staring at them. Your mileage may vary, of course.

[incandescens]

No, I'm trying to learn-by-writing too. Sheets of paper with bad hiragana and katakana attempts are multiplying.

BTW, seen any of Gensomaden Saiyuki? Gorgeous, both anime and manga. (Though the second series of the anime isn't quite as good as the first: it's another of those cases when they wanted to make a second series, but the manga was deep in the middle of current plotline, so they invented a new story and major villain.)

[diony.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen any of Saiyuki, although I've read bits about it from the yaoi list I used to keep up with. These days I'm not having much time to keep up with anime, sadly...

[incandescens]

Sympathy, and good luck with all the work/etc . . . At least by the time you get to it, you'll be able to buy properly subtitled stuff rather than watch cheap knockoffs!