More Life

Many thanks for help and advice in my previous post. Of course as soon as I told myself I would start on query letters, a ton of day-job work fell on my head (not that I can complain, but still), but I am trying to move a little forward every day.

Orchestra news. For a while I was kind of dreading it, because of the senior bassoonist, an older lady who nagged me unmercifully about all the things I was doing wrong. She was quite right! And also she wasn’t doing it to be unkind, she was genuinely well-intentioned and concerned with helping me improve, but I found it very stressful and unwelcoming. So one week she texted me and said “can we talk before rehearsal tomorrow” and I thought, oh dear, she’s going to suggest I leave the orchestra because I’m just not good enough. So I went, full of trepidation, and the first thing out of her mouth was “Actually I’m leaving the orchestra.” (I was good, I didn’t say “what do you mean you’re leaving?!”) So she has moved on for reasons of her own, and we parted friends, and now I have some last-minute Dvorak Sixth (or Doboroku as it’s called among Japanese musicians) parts to learn. I can’t play the damn thing, but it’s a wonderful piece, an old friend from way back, and the second bassoon part is full of delicious low notes and it’s extremely exhilarating (and exhausting, but never mind that). Wish me luck, sigh.

If you are (by whatever definition) multilingual, how does your brain sort out what languages you think in when? I’ve never sat down and analyzed it, but I think I’m pretty predictable, English is my baseline, drifting into and out of Japanese depending on context and convenience. (When visiting my mom this summer, I had to have various practical conversations with people like electricians, bank tellers, and so on, and I kept rehearsing them in my head in Japanese and then reminding myself that no, they would actually take place in English.) Chinese creeps in here and there around the edges; more than once in moments of minor frustration I’ve caught myself saying “Aiyaaa mō!” which is Chinese and Japanese garbled together (but expresses my feelings very well). (The farmboys have also been helpful in providing innocuous but satisfying Chinese phrases for these moments, from 我真服了 to 完蛋了 and 玩儿呢!)

Music: Fourth movement of the Schubert Great symphony, which starts with a breath-holding “something is about to happen!” feeling and quickly moves into straight-up excitement. (For those who liked the Beethoven jazz a couple posts ago, I feel like Schubert gets into his own version here, even if not quite as syncopated, complete with walking bass.)
Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 轻轻 sung live, a folk-song-ish original lovely to listen to (and look at).

The overlap between Chinese and Japanese can occasionally be comical. A-Pei was very amused by the names of a couple of Japanese baseball players I passed on to her, 太贵 and 好贵, in Japanese the quite ordinary male first names Daiki (or Taiki) and Yoshiki (or Yoshitaka), in Chinese respectively “too expensive” and “quite expensive.” We haven’t found Chinese names that sound equally bizarre in Japanese yet, but I’m sure there are some.

Stack of new books! Behind cut: Brenchley, Cook, Edwards, Harrod-Eagles, Matuku, Samatar, Wells, Whiteley/Langmead.

Chaz Brenchley, Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost and Radhika Rages at the Crater School: Latest in the Crater School series. The Rowany novella is very slight and not very interesting, although I do enjoy her voice. Radhika is really fun, I think the best one so far; certainly it’s nice to see even one non-white character turn up, although I do feel like the setup suggests she would in fact run up against a lot worse than some well-intended microaggressions at school, but it is nice also to imagine a school where people are decent enough that that doesn’t happen. (Maybe next time around we could have, you know, non-Christian characters too, or some actual f/f?) Oh well, I love Radhika herself, complex and entertaining, and I love the ensemble cast. (I actually nominated this series for Yuletide, only nominations closed just a day or two before I read this installment…oh well.)
Ida Cook, The Bravest Voices: Courtesy of a post by cyphomandra. Autobiography in which two opera-obsessed English sisters, one a budding romance novelist, become friends with the great singers of their time and also save a large number of people from the Nazis, all improbable but all true. Ida’s voice is delightful (I’m sorry there wasn’t a chapter from her sister Louise, just to find out what her writing voice would have sounded like) and the opera parts are as fascinating as the rest, and inextricable. I think the best description is something like “Betsy and Julia Ray crossed with Naomi Mitchison in 1934 Vienna.”
Erin Edwards, Finding Hester: Also from somebody’s DW post but I can’t remember whose? Account of an online community’s successful attempt to track down Hester Leggatt, one of the people involved in the WWII Operation Mincemeat spy incident. It’s my period and I enjoyed it (and was envious and admiring of the research work), but felt that it was definitely written for people who have already read and/or seen Operation Mincemeat, given its wealth of details on background characters but very little about the incident and its principal players itself. Also I found the references to the Discord group a little tiresome; either take the traditional route and just keep the researcher(s) in the background of the text, or take steps to involve the reader more with the community (pocket introductions to the members, excerpted conversations, etc.). That said, the chapter which actually quotes Hester’s letters and diaries was a delight (reminding me a little of Olivia Cockett, another wartime civil servant with a mind of her own having an affair with a married man).
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Before I Sleep and Easeful Death: Latest two in a very long mystery series which is one of my comfort reads. Not a whole lot new and amazing, but as always the characters feel real, the language is good, and there are dumb puns. Not pleased with Atherton’s latest girlfriend, I think he should have stayed with Emily; on the other hand it’s delightful to see Slider’s daughter Kate coming into her own.
Steph Matuku, Migration: Also from cyphomandra. This felt like two or three distinct books jostling together, and I had trouble assimilating “interpersonal struggles at military high school” with “end and new beginning of the world, at great cost.” I think I would have gotten over that if I’d felt more invested in the characters. I liked Farah and most of her friends fine, but you never get to know them in the way of characters who live in your head later on, they’re sketched in such broad strokes and generalized characterizations, plus the minor characters sort of fade in and out of frame as if there was a limit to the page count each of them was allowed. That said, it is really interesting worldbuilding (which would probably be more meaningful to me if I knew NZ better), and you could make several more books out of the possibilities there. It occurred to me that the whole thing might work well as a ballet.
Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque: Beautifully written, sad, thoughtful memoir/essay about traveling with a Mennonite research tour in Central Asia and being half German-Swiss Mennonite and half Somali. Predictably, I enjoyed the meditations on language a lot, as well as the small details of the places she visits. “The Mennonite game”—figuring out, when one Mennonite meets another, what their degrees of separation are (usually very few) and how—is what I’d call a lovely piece of worldbuilding if it were fiction.
Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy: I think I was right to start from the end of the series, I didn’t enjoy these quite as much as the others I read, although I will probably go back to reread. My problem with Rogue Protocol in particular was that it’s either everyone in sight being unhappy and/or unnerved, or action scenes, or both, and “too many action scenes” is one of my perennial complaints about books I otherwise really like, see also Rivers of London. Exit Strategy suffers from the same action-scene thing, but I enjoyed it more because the characters are more fun; also I like the way Murderbot teaches itself new skills, sometimes deliberately and sometimes under stress, which build on each other as they come into use.
Aliya Whiteley and Oliver K. Langmead, City of All Seasons: Elegant writing and a satisfying ending, but not quite suited to my id; a little too fairy-tale-ish for me.

Photos: One butterfly and some (?) goya vines, plus many from a visit to an ex-brothel. Y and I went on a tour of this beautiful old building which is now a fancy restaurant; the neighborhood around it has been a red-light district for a century and is not friendly to passing strangers with no business there (not in the sense of dangerous as far as I know, but you’ll get glared at, and the tour guide warned us not to stare rudely or take photographs on the street). The building itself was restored a few years back and is now stunning inside; don’t miss the sleeping cat imitating the one at Nikko Toshogu, or the round flower inlays (with mother-of-pearl), which are on the ceiling, luckily it’s a tatami room so you can just lie down on the floor and gaze.

Be safe and well.