Floating around the murky regions of digitized Unicode values are anywhere between 60 and 100 yūrei-moji — literally, “ghost characters” — haunting the Japanese kanji lexicon.
One such example is 彁 (pronunciation unknown). Unlike 妛, which found its corporeal counterpart in the 国土行政区画総覧 (Kokudo Gyōsei Kukaku Sōran, National Conspectus of Administrative Districts), 彁 was documented as “completely unique among the graphic characters encoded in these standards, with absolutely no means of identification.”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2018/10/29/language/ghost-kanji-lurk-japanese-lexicon/
Thursday, 1 November 2018
Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Amanda Palmer - "I Want You, but I Don't Need You"
Great example of wonderful song writing. Funny, sad. It made me laugh and cry a little.
Thursday, 25 October 2018
tsundoku
(n.) buying books and not reading them; letting books pile up unread on shelves or floors or nightstands
Emilie Pine - "Notes To Self"
Essays about her personal life, her alcoholic father, her inate tempering of feminism, her struggle with voicing her opinion, her rough teenage years... Amazing personal writing.
Recalling the hurt and confusion in my sister's voice at that moment, I realise that we both needed the same thing: some promise of unconditional love, some security, unavailable to either of us. And I think that maybe, in the end, we got it from each other. Two years later, when I had screwed up again and feared my mum would kick me out, my sister promised she'd keep the screw-up a secret. She told me she'd still love me, no matter what. Tehn she came to me with her bank book and, with great seriousness, offered to sign over all her savings so that I'd be okay. I couldn't take it, so I hugged her, I reassured her, I smiled and joked until the worry left her eyes.
My parents separated when I was five and my sister was a baby. Though I am a long way from the difficulties of my childhood, I still dwell on the stories of those years, hoping that they might explain the troubling residues of so many feelings and thoughts and actions. My parents did not speak. My father suffered from depression. I was a lonesome child. Those facts, and all the accompanying stories, whirl around. I write them down. Perhaps they will be less overbearing that way, pinned in one place.
As I step away from the page, and I look at what I have written about myself and my family, this family, our family, I see that in the end it is always going to be both a complicated and a simple story. In this story, which I may never stop telling, I try to remember what i was like for me as a child, and what I did and what I could have done differently. I try to imageine what it was like for my parents, and what they did and what they could have done differently. I remember us happy, and I remember us sad. I remember us divided and I remember us together. I remember everything, and I remember only fragments of a whole that will always be beyond me.
Recalling the hurt and confusion in my sister's voice at that moment, I realise that we both needed the same thing: some promise of unconditional love, some security, unavailable to either of us. And I think that maybe, in the end, we got it from each other. Two years later, when I had screwed up again and feared my mum would kick me out, my sister promised she'd keep the screw-up a secret. She told me she'd still love me, no matter what. Tehn she came to me with her bank book and, with great seriousness, offered to sign over all her savings so that I'd be okay. I couldn't take it, so I hugged her, I reassured her, I smiled and joked until the worry left her eyes.
My parents separated when I was five and my sister was a baby. Though I am a long way from the difficulties of my childhood, I still dwell on the stories of those years, hoping that they might explain the troubling residues of so many feelings and thoughts and actions. My parents did not speak. My father suffered from depression. I was a lonesome child. Those facts, and all the accompanying stories, whirl around. I write them down. Perhaps they will be less overbearing that way, pinned in one place.
As I step away from the page, and I look at what I have written about myself and my family, this family, our family, I see that in the end it is always going to be both a complicated and a simple story. In this story, which I may never stop telling, I try to remember what i was like for me as a child, and what I did and what I could have done differently. I try to imageine what it was like for my parents, and what they did and what they could have done differently. I remember us happy, and I remember us sad. I remember us divided and I remember us together. I remember everything, and I remember only fragments of a whole that will always be beyond me.
GlerAkur - "Augun Opin"
Great soundscapes. Found via Iceland Airwaves spotify playlist. Much like Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Thursday, 27 September 2018
Khruangbin
Perhaps a bit tiresome after a while, but this instrumental guitar psychedelic music is kinda cool
Sunday, 16 September 2018
3:10 to Yuma
Remake of the original: trying to deliver an outlaw to the 3:10pm train to Yuma prison.
Supposedly different from the original regarding its ending, but impressive.
Supposedly different from the original regarding its ending, but impressive.
The Homesman
Sad western about a woman (Hillary Swank) who decides to take it upon her to deliver three mentally disturbed women to a village several weeks traveling away. She is accompanied by Tommy Lee Jones, and the two have a sad sad connection. Did not see her suicide coming. Sad but deep.
Saturday, 8 September 2018
James Joyce - "Ulysses"
that podcast... amazing.
buck: originally not the gracious male deer, but a buck goat...
"sat down in a pet"... they are being like a pet, you need to "pet" them, to show them affection
"kip": very Dublin slang, originally Danish, "kipper" - low pub where hookers used to hang out.
"what kind of a kip is this"
"when I makes tea, I makes tea! When I makes water, I makes water! but not in the same pot!"
buck: originally not the gracious male deer, but a buck goat...
"sat down in a pet"... they are being like a pet, you need to "pet" them, to show them affection
"kip": very Dublin slang, originally Danish, "kipper" - low pub where hookers used to hang out.
"what kind of a kip is this"
"when I makes tea, I makes tea! When I makes water, I makes water! but not in the same pot!"
The Rover
Amazing Australian dystopic story of a man whose car get stolen after The Collapse. Packs quite a punch near the end. Sad, dreadful, amazing. Him of the Twilight Films, it seems, but an amazing performance as Rey, the not-completely-full-witted brother who is left for dead
I Don't Feel At Home in this World Anymore
Sad nice story about a girl (unknown, but just as good as Elijah Wood) who accepts all the bad things life throws at her... until no more. Elijah Wood plays a silly almost Coen-brother-esque tough-guy-who-isn't. All ends well.
Still, a good movie.
Still, a good movie.
Thursday, 6 September 2018
Elektrokiss - "The Teacher (Slap Me Like A Bitch) (Timofey Remix)"
Amusing song. Something for a gray list?
Barclay James Harvest - "She Said"
She said, "Why don't you come and stay with me
Far away from people we know?
We could live our lives together
Happiness wherever we go"
And I will always love her
And I will always care
And I will always love her
Wasn't long before she grew tired of me
And the life she thought would redeem
All the love she'd thrown away as a child
All the things she thought she had seen
And I will always love her
And I will always care
And I will always love her
Far away from people we know?
We could live our lives together
Happiness wherever we go"
And I will always love her
And I will always care
And I will always love her
Wasn't long before she grew tired of me
And the life she thought would redeem
All the love she'd thrown away as a child
All the things she thought she had seen
And I will always love her
And I will always care
And I will always love her
BlacKkKlansman
Amazing film by Spike Lee about a black agent going undercover in the KKK. The end packs quite the punch, splicing it with Charlotteville footage.
Friday, 31 August 2018
Monday, 27 August 2018
Mariana Enriquez - "Things we lost in the fire"
Collection of short stories. First of hers to be translated into English?
Dark. Borders on magic realism, but not explicitly so. The underbelly of Buenos Aires. Not always captivating, but I kept reading. Difficult stuff when you're in a bad spot, mentally.
Dark. Borders on magic realism, but not explicitly so. The underbelly of Buenos Aires. Not always captivating, but I kept reading. Difficult stuff when you're in a bad spot, mentally.
Monday, 13 August 2018
Denis Johnson - "Already Dead"
Amazing writing. Not go to through quickly. Savour it.
"She was victorious," he said, "in trying to destroy me with lingerie."
One day he was driving on the coast, on those cliffs north of Jenner. Have you seen that place? Five or six hundred feet straight down, no shoulder-you'd have time to shit your pants and change into clean ones before you hit. He was driving along behind this black Corvette. Corvette downshifts, Corvette accelerates, Corvette sails half a thousand feet down to the Pacific Ocean. Right over the edge. Turned out the guy had just bought the car that morning, brand-new Corvette. Some jilted kid. The brake lights," he said, "never winked."
His partner asked, "What year Corvette?"
"A year that don't concern us," the first man said impatiently. "A year you probably never heard of."
The chemistry between them was suddenly familiar to Van Ness. Their connection gave off a sour smoke, like bad wiring. He sensed they'd served time in prison together, or belowdecks.
Let me tell you about this girl. Her eyes are brown and wet. Her mouth twists from the effort of hiding her bad teeth when she smiles. But when she's drunk she laughs widely and her gold bridgework flashes. Bartenders like to lean forward to light her cigarettes and in the match-glow examine her as closely as a lover would. It's all exactly there. The punished child in the stolen makeup. Eyes that are never going to look at anyone again. And then she leans back, receding into that wonderful posture, her left hand in her lap. Sometimes she wilts, and sits hunched over a drunk drumming her fingers on the bar, and then she looks like a whore. She's capable of sneering. Awoman this vulnerable and perverse is usually taking time out from being tortured to death slowly by a mon who looks exactly like her father. Things come to me in images. I see the image of a man strangling an orchid. Oh, flowers!
"Good night, I'm going to sleep in my clothes," she said, "and I hope I dream I'm not drunk," and didn't even kiss me.
When she'd gone into the trailer, one of the rounded, aluminum ones, a Silver Stream, I laid my head, which was suddenly full of sorrows, against the steering wheel. The night wind stirred through the treetops on the ridges. The distant commotion got the sheep bleating - a word that just doesn't invoke the aged, human grief, in their voices. Across the drive the owner of this property - the Sheep Queen, a Mediterranean-looking woman in her fifties, a nice enough person but perfectly crazy - sat eating dinner in the kitchen of her ranch-style home, feeding bites from her plate to a big dog that loomed over her, standing up, as it were, with its forepaws on the table.
It's sad to love a woman who won't love back - it tears at a man - to love a woman who gives herself to others and uses his good intentions and sets his meaning aside. But I have a feeling that this stupid torment is the nearest thing going, for me, to what life is all about. I don't just sense it dimly. The feeling is overpowering that this is the closest I can get to the truth behind the cloud.
Kim Addonizio - "Bukowski in a sundress"
Amazing words (from her of "Red Dress") that made me sad and happy, laughing and crying. She writes with a verocity and rawness that I want to dive into and never surface.
All that year my friend wanted to kill herself. She would call me late at night, drunk and sobbing, talking about her gun. Finally I convinced her to throw it into the river. Eventually she got much better, but I still worried about her. I thought of her as the little bullet-size ballerina on my jewelry box, spinning and slowing, then spinning again. That she gave me the box was a complete fabrication. She did not give me the box. What she gave me was a picture book called Six-Dinner Sid, about a cat that goes from door to door getting fed by everyone on the block, and another one about a farting dog at a garage sale, and once, to celebrate the publication of my first novel, she gave me a plastic baby bottle with a blue ribbon on it. The truth is that she's much better now. The truth is also that I still worry.
Still, you may lay down sentence after lovely sentence and follow them for months only to find yourself, in the middle of your journey, in a dark wood. Structure can still elude you. I don't necessarily mean the structure of a sonnet or Freytag's Pyramid of the story, though they are useful to know. I mean figuring out the structure to hold what you have to say, the best structure for the material at hand. The way in, through, and finally out the other end. You must, in other words, learn how to shit flowers. A peom or story or memoir, however gorgeously written, has to be able to stand up, and it will not stand up unless you structure it, unless you give it a skeleton. If there is no patter, there is no art. Think hard about what holds your piece together, how the pieces connect, why and how each contributes. Remember that you are creating a world. Do not let it descent into anarchy. To hold anything together in life - especially oneself - is nearly impossible, but in art it is essential.
My mother dropped her spoon in her lap, mashed-potato-side down, and I picked it up and wiped it on a napkin and started to hand it back to her, but she had closed her eyes. She was shifting her shoulders a little, raising the right one and then the left, in barely perceptible movements. She lifted her hands just above the table, so they hovered over her meal like two little spaceships above a tiny city-maybe one they were planning to destory, or maybe one they had come to in peace, to teach us how to cope with the pain and loss of life on earth.
Then i saw that my mother was trying to snap her fingers and couldn't quite. But for the couple of minutes until the song ended, looking as though she were in a kind of beautiful trance, she danced.
It was a little like bear baiting. Then again, [Charles Bukowksi] seemed like someone who practiced self-acceptance rather than the guilt and self-loathing that drive so many lesse alcoholics into AA. He never quit. He went on drinking and wrote book after book.
So even though I suspect that critic was being a dick about my work, I've decided I'm going to be proud of my new nickname. If I am truly honest with myself, I have to admit that I have always wanted someone to touch my soul with his cock. Since childhood, I have wondered where my soul was, and I'm glad to discover it's up there somewhere in my lady parts.
And who knows. Maybe one day, when Bukowksi's up for a posthumous literary award, some critic will say, "Oh, him? Kim Addonizio in pee-stained paints," and then I Hope whoever said it pukes on his shoes.
All that year my friend wanted to kill herself. She would call me late at night, drunk and sobbing, talking about her gun. Finally I convinced her to throw it into the river. Eventually she got much better, but I still worried about her. I thought of her as the little bullet-size ballerina on my jewelry box, spinning and slowing, then spinning again. That she gave me the box was a complete fabrication. She did not give me the box. What she gave me was a picture book called Six-Dinner Sid, about a cat that goes from door to door getting fed by everyone on the block, and another one about a farting dog at a garage sale, and once, to celebrate the publication of my first novel, she gave me a plastic baby bottle with a blue ribbon on it. The truth is that she's much better now. The truth is also that I still worry.
Still, you may lay down sentence after lovely sentence and follow them for months only to find yourself, in the middle of your journey, in a dark wood. Structure can still elude you. I don't necessarily mean the structure of a sonnet or Freytag's Pyramid of the story, though they are useful to know. I mean figuring out the structure to hold what you have to say, the best structure for the material at hand. The way in, through, and finally out the other end. You must, in other words, learn how to shit flowers. A peom or story or memoir, however gorgeously written, has to be able to stand up, and it will not stand up unless you structure it, unless you give it a skeleton. If there is no patter, there is no art. Think hard about what holds your piece together, how the pieces connect, why and how each contributes. Remember that you are creating a world. Do not let it descent into anarchy. To hold anything together in life - especially oneself - is nearly impossible, but in art it is essential.
My mother dropped her spoon in her lap, mashed-potato-side down, and I picked it up and wiped it on a napkin and started to hand it back to her, but she had closed her eyes. She was shifting her shoulders a little, raising the right one and then the left, in barely perceptible movements. She lifted her hands just above the table, so they hovered over her meal like two little spaceships above a tiny city-maybe one they were planning to destory, or maybe one they had come to in peace, to teach us how to cope with the pain and loss of life on earth.
Then i saw that my mother was trying to snap her fingers and couldn't quite. But for the couple of minutes until the song ended, looking as though she were in a kind of beautiful trance, she danced.
It was a little like bear baiting. Then again, [Charles Bukowksi] seemed like someone who practiced self-acceptance rather than the guilt and self-loathing that drive so many lesse alcoholics into AA. He never quit. He went on drinking and wrote book after book.
So even though I suspect that critic was being a dick about my work, I've decided I'm going to be proud of my new nickname. If I am truly honest with myself, I have to admit that I have always wanted someone to touch my soul with his cock. Since childhood, I have wondered where my soul was, and I'm glad to discover it's up there somewhere in my lady parts.
And who knows. Maybe one day, when Bukowksi's up for a posthumous literary award, some critic will say, "Oh, him? Kim Addonizio in pee-stained paints," and then I Hope whoever said it pukes on his shoes.
Ken Liu - "The paper menagerie and other stories"
Not all of them are great, but some breathtaking stories, such as the "The paper menagerie" itself of course, as well as "State Change" of a girl with an icecube as her soul.
"Everything passes, Hiroto," Dad said. "That feeling in your heart: it's called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transcience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephmeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon."
"Everything passes, Hiroto," Dad said. "That feeling in your heart: it's called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transcience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephmeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon."
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