A plea to the Internets: Are there any good translations -- and by "good" I mean "readable as English poetry" -- of Ovid's Fasti? or is scholarly pedantic the best I can hope for?

Which latter has its own virtues to be sure, but does not make for poetry.

---L.

So that series Binchou-tan I mentioned yesterday? Right, well. For the record, I watched it only because janni asked me to write this.

( In which I commit a G-rated fanfic. )

---L.

Oh, Japanese popular culture. Don't stop doing that. The output artifacts may be too much sometimes and exhibit disturbing cultural norms, but that's part of the charm.

Saint Young Men - One's Buddha! The other's Jesus! Together, they fight crime share a cramped Tokyo apartment while on vacation from their respective paradises. No really, that's it: two bachelors living slacker lives -- who happen to be, well, Jesus and Buddha. Manga only, thank all the saints and bodhisattvas. And a best-seller in Japan. A handful of chapters are scanned.

Binchou-tan - The name is a pun: binchoutan is a kind of charcoal. Make a chibi mascot for a forestry company, put a piece of charcoal in her hair, call her Binchou and use an honorific that's a cutesy pronounciation of -chan, and you've got moe dripping off your anime spinoff faster than the viewer's insulin shots can take effect. Bonus points for the lush scenery porn, though. 12 fifteen-minute episodes, all fansubbed.

Three in Love - High school love comedy about a (semi)-stable threesome. Girl A is an academic star, cool and popular type -- the sort who not only gets adolation and gifties from younger girls but who revels in the attention from her "kittens". She is also competitive to the point of being unable stand losing and has a longtime crush on Boy C, a childhood friend, so when Girl B (the plunge ahead energetic type) asks Boy C out, Girl A insists that he also date her at the same time. Girl A comes to like her rival, and soon begins refering to B as her girlfriend as well -- even unto imagining the three of them married together -- to B's annoyance because, as she puts it, she is not a pervert. Ah, the joys of societal acceptance of bisexuality. Most of the drama comes from romantic complications from other boys. Licensed manga, a couple volumes out. Fair warning: this was the first serial by the mangaka (she was much better by the time she wrote Crossroad) and boy howdy does it show, in the storytelling (we pretty much have NO IDEA why Boy C is going along with this, at least so far) as well as the incredibly scratchy art.

First Girl - Like all Chiho Saito manga, this is hard to summarize without sounding stupid (YOU try it with Revolutionary Girl Utena) but here goes. 18-year-old Miu is sold as a bride by her mother, a professional lounge dancer, to a wealthy South American to pay off her debts -- only to get caught up in revolution, true love lost on a wedding night, a military coup, dancing tangos for a living, counter-revolution, angsty revolutionaries, a boat trip to New York, drug smugglers, dancing more tangos for a living (on Broadway!), and ... that takes us only halfway through, but rest assured there's still more cracktastic melodrama, all it perfumed with (what else?) Significant Roses. Oh, and there's a dog, too. All five volumes are scanned.


On the other hand, I await the day when someone deconstructs of the magical-girlfriend-falls-from-sky-into-shounen-hero's-arms story by taking the premises to their logically destructive ends, the way Neon Genesis Evangelion did for teen mecha pilots. Because until then, we'll have to put up with the likes of This Ugly Yet Beautiful World clogging the id-waves. Gah.

---L.

In a note to Juvenal's Satire VI, Peter Green comments in passing on Livy's account of the Sabine women's peacemaking: "The whole passage makes me wonder whether scholars do not seriously underestimate Livy's deadpan sense of humor." I should admit I didn't notice any deadpan humor myself, but I was in grad school when I read Livy.

If an editor names Auden and MacNiece as the "guiding spirits" of his anthology, this will indeed make me pay more attention. The anthology being Scanning the Century, which tries to be a documentary history of the 20th century through poetry. I see his point: after Auden and McNeice disappear from the scene, it gets less interesting -- possibly because he was collecting too closely.

Wordsworth on the uses of fantasy:

A gracious spirit o'er this earth presides,
And o'er the heart of man; invisibly
It comes, to works of unreproved delight,
And tendency benign, directing those
Who care not, know not, think not, what they do.
The tales that charm away the wakeful night
In Araby, romances; legends penned
For solace by dim light of monkish lamps;
Fictions, for ladies of their love, devised
By youthful squires; adventures endless, spun
By the dismantled warrior in old age,
Out of the bowels of those very schemes
In which his youth did first extravagate;
These spread like day, and something in the shape
Of these will live till man shall be no more.
...
To endure this state of meagre vassalage,
Unwilling to forego, confess, submit,
Uneasy and unsettled, yoke-fellows
To custom, mettlesome, and not yet tamed
And humbled down--oh! then we feel, we feel,
We know where we have friends. Ye dreamers, then,
Forgers of daring tales! we bless you then,
Impostors, drivellers, dotards, as the ape
Philosophy will call you: then we feel
With what, and how great might ye are in league,
Who make our wish, our power, our thought a deed,
An empire, a possession,--ye whom time
And seasons serve; all Faculties to whom
Earth crouches, the elements are potter's clay,
Space like a heaven filled up with northern lights,
Here, nowhere, there, and everywhere at once.

—from The Prelude (1850), book five

---L.

More and more, I find myself resenting it when things wear out.

---L.

Continuing my Chinese reading kick, this one a YA fantasy: Silver Phoenix by Cindy Pon.

The story itself is solid: to evade an arranged marriage (being imposed not by her own family, but upon her defenseless mother) Ai Ling sets out for the capital to find her father. Cue road trip through a secondary world that's a thinly veiled early Sung Dynasty, complete with folkloric monsters, during which Ai Ling slowly discovers there's more to what's going on (and what she is) than she initially, or even thirdly, believes. That said, while the story's solid, it took a while to engage me -- took a couple days to read the first half, but then I read the second half in an evening. The climax is strong, and best of all, Pon nailed, bolted, and riveted the ending. 10.0 for the dismount.

Part of the problem is, I think, that the setting and sensory descriptions are initially not very strong -- the Imperial Palace was the first place I felt like I was there, which contrasted particularly to the somewhat bland Island of the Immortals, which the Imperial Palace should be aspiring to be when it grows up. On the one hand, I liked that Pon didn't exoticize the setting -- Ai Ling is used to her town and surroundings, and so details there do not get called out. On the other hand, I missed the vividness that comes with orientalizing. It's possibly unfair that the last China-based fantasies I've read were Journey to the West, which has enough vividness and energy to power a small city in a developing country, and Twelve Kingdoms, which is out to explore its world in the way of western high fantasies. Unfair, but I was unable to avoid comparing it to them.

Possibly it's just me, but I'm bemused at how much nudity there is in this YA novel -- two significant action scenes, Ai Ling is naked and quite aware of it.

But best of all, China-based fantasy! in mainstream YA! Worth supporting for that alone, but possibly by way of library or paperback.

Other takes: reviews by oyceter & rachelmanija.

---L.

It's not like you can always count on Röyksopp for live-action Space Invaders goodness, but it's nice to know they're there in a pinch.

Sometimes.

These links, otoh, aren't all so low-flying:

• Phoenix as she once was. (via)
  
  
• In re: children and how to raise them, we have teaching a child how to argue improves family harmony, and an open letter to KRXQ Sacramento from an accepting father of a non-conforming ten year old boy. (via & via)
  
  
• The Footbinding Dilemma, or "there's a reason you see so many females in movies as kick butt, kung fu hotties."
  
  
• Why ants survive in microwave ovens. Maybe -- read the followup as well. (via)
  
  
• Report on current thinking about how life could have come into existence by natural processes. (via)
  
  
• Study on same-sex sexual behaviors in animals finds they've pretty much all gots gays, every single species. (via)

And I leave you with this lovely bit of Macauley taking down a bad poet:

His writing bears the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture. There are colors in the Turkey carpet out of which a picture might be made. There are words in Mr. Montgomery's writing which, when disposed in certain orders and combinations, have made, and will again make, good poetry.

Criticism worthy of Housman, that.

---L.

Normally, I wait until I have enough links to make a full-sized salad, but these first two are too cool to sit on:

First, thanks to the Japan Space Agency, we have high-definition videos of low-altitude lunar flyovers. Fan-freaking-tastic.

Then the Wall Street Journal does an expose on DNA origami. That's folding at the molecular level, people. (via)

And just for fun, via truepenny a medley of 80s pop hits set as ragtime tunes. "Material Girl" works particualarly well in that style -- some of the other songs come out as closer jazz, to my ear.

---L.

The June issue of Ideomancer is up, with excellent poems by Sonya Taafe and Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, along with one of my own. The formal title is "At Death's Door" but I privately call it "Childe Roland to the Dark Sestina Came," even though it has more of Arizona than Browning in it.

---L.

It is somewhat startling to realize that my reading comprehension is better in German than in Spanish. I've always thought of Spanish as my second, or at least sesquiunitary, language -- having at one point been halfway to fluent. Clearly, it's time to start watching telenovelas again. Any recommendations among the current crop on Telemundo and Univision?

In return, I offer link baba ghanoush:

• Unsettling Okinawan proverbs.
  
  
• Six tips for introverted travelers. (via)
  
  
• Art created by creasing paper. As in, this guy is good.
  
  
• Speaking of art, and following up on line 12 of this, the first in a multipart series about forger Han van Meegeren. (via)
  
  
• Palaeolithic pr0n.
  
  
• The higher cost of being poor.
  
  
• And finally, the ontological proof of the existence of God non-existence of jetpacks.

---L.

Quote of the day: "As with all Japanese popular culture, it appears to delve deeply into and grapple profoundly with the eternal existential-philosophical question, What the Fucking Fuck Was That?" —Bill Walsh on The Tragedy of Belladonna, as quoted by TvTropes.

Also seen on TvTropes: "Wodehouse was ... a master of farce, constructing farce, and pushing farce to the point where it curves around some nebulous point out in the dada hinterlands of space, wraps around the universe, and actually makes sense." Where by "making sense" the writer meant the plots are tightly constructed. The trope of Chekhov's Armoury (in which not just one gun is set over the mantlepiece) seems to be created for his books.

But speaking of Japanese popular culture, recently watched:

5 Centimeters Per Second - The most recent anime feature by the writer/director of Voices of a Distant Star, and like it is about growing apart and missed connections. As is should be, given the title refers to the terminal velocity of falling cherry petals. Gorgeous animation, stunning visuals, and deeply atmospheric. However, comma, it not only doesn't nail the ending but fumbles it -- the final act needed about two beats more of story arc, and the gratuitous closing pop song completely trashed the mood. Just jumping straight from the moment the song started to the final scene would have improved things, actually. Worth watching for the first two acts, though.

Love*Com: The Movie - Live-action adaptation of a popular, award-winning rom-com manga. There's something about the timing in live Japanese comedy that feels off-kilter to me. It didn't help that, of the main cast, only the female lead appeared to be her nominal age. The script, at least, did a decent job of compressing the first half of the series into 90 minutes. Made me want all the more to see an official translation of the anime. (Hey, if they'll license Ouran ... )

Cross Game - As in, I'm keeping up with the fansubs, which are coming out in English the day of Japanese broadcast. It's as good as the manga, at least so far. Given the show's scheduled for 51 episodes, I suspect the manga will be ending about the same time, next spring, which is good as structurally, there's only two more games to play on-stage.

Aria the Natural - The second season of the anime adaptation of the manga. Actually, I'm savoring this one slowly, and haven't even gotten halfway through -- it's not one to rush as it's very much a journey rather than destination sort of series. This season, with a full 26 episodes, they had the space to more "naturally" develop things left out of the first season, which means yay Cait Sith and other magic realist incidents. But even without that, Akari's confused "Ehhh?!" to Aika's "sappy lines prohibited!" line never gets old. Ahhhh.


Has anyone seen anything good lately?

---L.

... you'll hear me say "whatever you want, whatever you want."

It's good to be knocked out of one's comfort zone every so often. Not regularly, though -- it needs to be aperiodic, to avoid anticipation -- and of course, no comfort is unlivable. Here's three recently encountered brain-strainy, if not breain-breaky manga:

Arata Kangatari, being a Shounen Sunday manga by Yuu Watase. Which I can only describe as "Yuu Watase writes a Shounen Sunday series" -- with all the story strengths and weaknesses that implies. Makes my head hurt, thinking about it. Best not to think about it and just read. Fortunately, since it's pretty good, that's not hard. Not as good as Cross Game, but what is?

Simoun Magical Biyuden, being Simoun reimagined as a magical girl school comedy (!) with the simouns themselves as magic wands (!!), and Aeru as the idiot shounen hero she almost is anyway (o_O). Fortunately, it's ignorable.

Katatsumuri Zensen, lit. "Snail Front-line", in which a girl's classmate turns into a snail -- again. As in, this time his mother won't let him back in the house till he turns back into a human. So he stays on the girl's houseplant, and goes to school with her in a small box. And then things get complicated, in the way of sweet shoujo romances ... that happen to include a WERE-SNAIL.

(It's really a stress reaction -- a literalization of wanting to retreat into one's shell -- but I don't care: it's still a crawling, talking were-snail.)

What conceptual delights of serial art have people being discovering lately?

---L.