Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

This was supposed to be a post with three links about traces of the past. However, comma, one link has succumbed to the ravages of time (or, more likely, a zealous delete key). Which is, itself, as useful an example as any. Sic transit is a glorious manatee, and all that.

"Ghosts of the Tsunami" -- it has not been easy to be a priest in the Tôhoku region since March 2011. Nor, indeed, anyone spiritually aware. (via lost)

Timelapsing again: the year in global weather, with commentary rather than soundtrack, sorry. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from "A Toccata of Galuppi's," Robert Browning.

Origami workshop went well. I need to practice not just folding while holding the model up in the air, but while holding it facing away from me, but a butterfly, a peacock, and a mouse were successfully learned by all at the table. Which is as good an excuse for linkage as any:

Video artist and wiz music editor Kutiman (creator of Thru You) has a new video created for PBS: Thru Tokyo. Do I get street cred for recognizing the guys from Hifana (from this) when they came on? (via)

Links to videos of train rides around the world. Not time-lapse -- full-length. As Making Light noted, very calming.

Apparently prehensile-tailed porcupines have muppet noses. Who knew?

---L.

Subject quote from "Œnone," Tennyson. Some texts read "slopes" instead of "floats."

Belated realization: the music from my childhood that I mentally label "traditional Japanese music" is almost all shinkyoku ("new music") compositions for shakuhachi flute and koto composed in the early 20th century with conscious Western influences. That last may be why recordings are available in the West, being partially adapted to the classical music listener's taste -- but that's armchair sociology. I've no idea why I imprinted on this style in particular, especially instead of traditional sankyoku ("trio") music for a three-instrument ensemble of shakuhachi, koto, and shamisan. My parents' musical tastes may be involved.

Some examples:

"The Sea in Spring" (warning: autoplay) is a classic by Michio Miyagi -- link is to a 1930 recording with the composer on koto.

Another by Miyagi. More are available here and here.

A recent concert featuring music of Miyagi, one of his students, and the student's school with a mostly koto focus, but includes two shakuhachi+koto pieces (starting at 23:00).

Many titles linked to from this page have clips, usually 30 seconds long, of available recordings by many composers.

---L.

Subject quote from "Dance Apocalyptic," Janelle Monae.

What I've recently finished since my last post - in this case, three weeks ago:

The Silver Branch by Rosemary Sutcliff -- finished the day of the last post. I cannot help but wonder that as part of the novel's effect Sutcliff was relying on her reader's reactions to Cullen with his titular silver branch -- ones that, half a century later in a different culture, I simply don't have. Or maybe it's just a flatter story.

Kokoro Connect volumes 2-3 by Sadanatsu Anda. Apparently I never mentioned reading volume 1 last year? Or at least, I can't find the post. Five high school students become subjects of psychological experiments by a mysterious inhuman entity called Heartseed (fûsenkazura). In the first volume, they are subject to randomly swapping bodies, in second, to acting at random times on their immediate impulse -- later volumes involve other tests. As one might hope, each character is well-defined and their reactions are appropriately various -- especially as this brings out how past traumas produce different scars in different people. I am, btw, quite taken with the style of the covers, which are drawn (by the character designer of K-On!) as candid photos of teenagers messing around -- volume 3 illustrates this particularly well, with one character noticing the "camera" and posing for it before another can react. Recommended. The only reason I did not continue the series is that hospital waiting rooms are not the best place for teen angst novels, however well handled.

Poems of Places ed. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow volumes 9-10, being the tour of France, volumes 14-15, of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Netherlands, and the second half of volume 16, Austria (I read the first half, Switzerland, last year). This is, um, a lot of poetry -- each of these volumes is a good-sized anthology of its own -- but mental travel fit the bill in said waiting in hospitals.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikô v6 by Hitoshi Ashinano. This is where Alpha finally uses the "everybody's ships" metaphor -- much later than I'd remembered, given how important it is to the series: as a near-immortal robot, she stands on the shore while human ships sail on. It isn't used often, but it will pack an emotional punch when it returns.

Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley. Sadly, this is an early Golden Age mystery completely devoid of clerihews. I am most disappointed. In all other genre respects, it served quite nicely, especially as an example of playing with genre tropes even as they are being codified.

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, First Series by Lafcadio Hearn, which I've been poking at off-and-on over several months as the mood hit me, and only finally finished.

What I'm reading now:

Poly-Olbion by Michael Drayton -- am up to song 17, more than halfway through, though we've only just reached London. Presumably tourism of parts north will get more hurried, though hopefully not in a "if it's Tuesday, this must be Amsterdam York" sort way. I'm finding the bits of embedded history lessons interesting enough that I want to read the pre-Norman volume of Holinshed. Which I may want to anyway.

Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China by Anne Birrell, being heavily annotated translations of folk songs collected, or in some cases written, by the imperial Music Bureau (yue-fu) between roughly 200 BCE–200 CE -- so the true old stuff, rather than the literary poems in the style of same I'm familiar with from Tang writers.

Poems of Places volume 17, being the first half of Germany. So far, the nationalism is notably stronger than in previous volumes -- I wonder whether the timing of unification, just before this was compiled, had any effect here. Also, less Goethe than I expected.

(Prose? What prose?)

What I'll read next:

On to Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers as soon as I pick up my reserve at the library, and probably Kokoro Connect volume 4. The second series of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan could also sneak in there somewhere. And more poetry, like as not. Just a guess.

---L.

"Sunrise in the Hills of Satsuma" by Mary McNeil Fenollosa. Of note: Satsuma is the old name for Kagoshima, and the author was the wife of the Ernest Fenollosa who got Pound oh so wrong about Chinese writing. Also of interest is this bit of orientialism, with a season in every stanza and ambiguous sexuality -- while most of her novels bore a male psuedonym, this was published under her own name.

The Japanese Woodblock Print Database lets you keyword search ukiyo-e prints. This MetaFilter announcement includes some sample keywords. This is the sort of thing you can spend HOURS randomwalking through, so I'll leave you with my discovery favorite so far: an owl flying under cherry blossoms and a full moon (click to embiggen details).

The little-known local history of Jesus's life and death in a small town in northern Japan, where the local legend is that it was actually his younger brother, Isukiri, who died on Golgotha. (via)

---L.

I've mentioned before that one of the pleasures of working through the Kokinshu is getting to see stories cut in small slices. Sometimes, though, it's worth digging a little deeper. I knew something of Sugawara no Michizane from his being in One Hundred People, One Poem Each, but there's more to his tale than I'd realized.

In the mid-9th century, the Fujiwara clan solidified their control of Japanese politics, displacing previously dominant clans such as Tachibana and Ki. Fujiwara no Yoshifusa (see #52) married his daughter to Emperpor Montoku and had himself named regent for his grandson, Emperor Seiwa -- the first person outside the imperial family to hold the position. A string of weak (both physically and mentally) emperors allowed the Fujiwaras to continue their consolidation, so when the strong and determined Uda came to the throne in 887, he had to maneuver hard to take what power he did. One of his allies was Michizane.

Michizane was born in 845 to an academic family and made himself a name as the leading Chinese scholar of his generation. He rose through the official ranks as well, but it was under Uda's patronage he rapidly reached the highest offices -- largely because he wasn't a Fujiwara and, indeed, supported Uda (on Confucianist grounds) in the power struggle with Fujiwara no Mototsune, Yoshifusa's adopted son and heir, after Uda's accession. Once Uda's oldest son was old enough to rule without a regent, Uda abdicated in 897 in Daigo's favor, apparently to try running things behind the scenes without the constraints of imperial ritual. This left the reins of the government in the hands of Michizane as Minister of the Right and Fujiwara no Tokihira, Mototsune's son and current clan head, as Minister of the Left.

This was not an entirely stable situation, to say the least. In late 900, Tokihira and a few allies engineered a political scandal around Michizane, the details of which are obscure -- in no small part because Daigo later ordered the records burnt. The end result was Michizane's demotion in 901 on trumped-up charges to a distant provincial office, where he penned some of the best Chinese poetry written in Japan before dying in 903.

So far, so good. I should at this point mention that the Kokinshu was compiled around 905, so the rest of this story is not reflected in it. The editors included two poems each by Michizane (#272 + #420) and Tokihira (#230 + #1049) plus one by one of Tokihira's cabal-mates, Fujiwara no Sugane (#212).

Starting around 907, a series of disasters struck the capital -- storms, drought, plagues, deaths of important people, imperial palaces struck by lightning, and so on. By 909, Tokihira and his cabal were dead, most at early ages. Divinations eventually concluded that the cause was Michizane's vengeful spirit. Michizane's name was cleared,* his rank was restored with posthumous promotion, he was reburied in the capital with due funeral honors for his rank, and so on. These placations worked so well, he was later also deified as the kami Tenjin, initially a storm god but eventually a patron of scholars -- especially prayed to by students taking exams, with shrines devoted to him around the country.

And he's not the only deified poet. But he is the most important one.

History is so INTERESTING sometimes.


* This is when the records were burned, by way of erasing all mentions of being exiled.

---L.

Photos from during and just after the 11 March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and of the same locations taken during the last two months -- for most, click to time travel. There is some overlap between the two sets, but at least half of each are not in the other.

Set 1 from In Focus.

Set 2 from The Big Picture.

Also of note: photos from Japan's 80,000 nuclear refugees of Fukushima Prefecture, most of them living in temporary shelters just outside the 20-km radiation exclusion zone. Which, yes, still exists.

ETA: A one year anniversary set from In Focus and another (warning: contains random samba dancer in the snow) from The Big Picture.

---L.

Okay, fine, one more best-of-2011 post: the year in volcano photography.

ETA: Oh. My.

Yu Muroga was doing his job making deliveries when the 11 March 2011 earthquake hit in Japan. Unaware, like many people in the area, of how far inland the Tsunami would travel, he continued to drive and do his job. The HD camera mounted on his dashboard captured not only the earthquake, but also the moment he and several other drivers were suddenly engulfed in the Tsunami. He escaped from the vehicle seconds before it was crushed by other debris and sunk underwater. His car and the camera have only recently been recovered by the police. The camera was heavily damaged but a video expert was able to retrieve this footage.

With television commentary in Japanese.

---L.

Being linked about:*

Eight minutes of one day across Japan, mostly street scenes from various cities including Kyoto, Kamakura, and Okinawa. No music -- just daily life. Worth watching in HD if you have the connection for it. (via) (Hint: The Suggestions bar on the right includes scenes through the day from many of the places, with footage not used in the national video. I especially like Onomichi in Hiroshima.)

Meanwhile, here's another time-lapse city-scape: storm clouds over Buenos Aires set to music by Arvo Pärt.

Desolation Island, personified.

Oreo Cameos. (via)

"Plot Device." (via)


* Sometimes by other people, even.

---L.

Cyber-Shinto videos. I'm going to outsource the description to Pink Tentacle, as I cannot improve on it:

AUJIK, a mysterious Shinto group that believes all things in nature -- including the products of human technology -- possess a soul, have created a series of videos showing organic/synthetic artifacts intended to bridge the gap between the natural and artificial worlds.

They consist of lush scenery edited to include bizarre computer-animated objects set to soundtracks of various flavors of trance music, sometimes with narration.

In short, beautiful and trippy. Very trippy.

---L.