Yanno, what the world needs is a story about Monkey King meeting Br'er Rabbit. Or possibly Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear. I mean, the story goes that Sanzang and his disciples continued traveling west, sleeping in the air and eating in the wind, and by this time spring comes to an end and turns to summer. As they travel, they come to a river of green water, and see what it looks like:
The spreading live-oaks,
The cypress knees.
The spreading live-oaks hung with moss beards
Like old men gathered upon a front porch.
The cypress knees rise up from the water
As if the trees are bathing on the banks.
The mockingbirds trill a thousand calls,
The terrapins swim silent under the stream.
Beneath the magnolias cicadas chirr,
Above the briar-patch bees are circling.
In the lazy heat not a leaf is stirring:
The Song of the South is heard in stillness.
-- and sitting on a chair in the middle of the road is a small homunculus, pitch black all over. Sanzang tells Monkey to ask the man, politely mind, if there's any place nearby they can beg for a meal -- and we're off. See? Though someone else will have to write it, as that's not what this post is about.
Though speaking of mash-ups, it is startling to come across in a collection of Chinese poetry a translation into sub-Kipling jingle. It's very Kipling material, admittedly, about soldiers' life and prisoners of war and identities crossing the border, but still -- the disjoint jars. This being a one of Arthur Waley's bits -- one has to wonder what he was thinking. Yet that's not what this post is about.
I
wanted this post to be about Sadako and the Thousand Folk Processes, but I do not have my supporting materials ready. I don't even have a thousand cranes, though I do have three dinosaurs in cherry blossom patterns to show off:
But as I said, that's not what this post is about.
Folk processes, though, reminds me that while it's probably way too late to still be talking about Yuletide 2008, I never did get around to recommending "
Three Stories," a
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou fic set around the time of the penultimate chapter. Given how its purpose is to recapitulate (with different characters) several themes of the series, I'm not sure how it'll read if you haven't read
YKK, but if you have, it should *ting* like a well-tuned glass bell. But that's not what this post is about.
Which brings me to, um. Er. What was this post about again?
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Poll #1334983]
---L.
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