the wombatcave

Have concluded that Naomi Novik's "Temeraire" series has succeeded in eating me as a new fandom, at least to the extent of getting me to read (or at least browse) assorted reference materials that I probably wouldn't've read otherwise, ranging from world butterfly compendia to early Qing histories/biographies.

A particularly odd book that I found in the local library system is A Manchu Monarch : an Interpretation of Chia Ch'ing by A.E. Grantham; this particular copy was a 1976 reprint with no original publication details inside. It's "odd" in that its subject breadth isn't too different from a standard popular history and it doesn't wander into historical novel by inventing dialogue, but it keeps having stylistic freakouts into florid narrative overkill; e.g., "as the newly liberated spirit passed away from the sick-bed in the early hours of a spring morning, grateful itself, it may have merged more readily into all the blossoming loveliness outlined against the blue of a cloudless sky."( Read more... )

Mediterranean/Near East "royal purple": 6, 6-dibromoindigo
Japanese murasaki/shikon purple: shikonin.

More general list of trad. Asian dye chromophores here, including Japanese color terminology.

I was about to make another labored attempt to flail through my reactions to RaceFail (or rather, MammothFail this time), but in the meantime finally remembered to find some of Hetalia: Axis Powers, which I'd been meaning to do.

...I have no idea how to express my reaction, other than relief that in one of the fan communities, a prospective student teacher was talked out of trying to use the material as part of a history curriculum (iirc at a high-school level). I can envision it being meta-studied at a college level as an example of satire or propaganda, but as history? Vast multiverses of no.

Though Italy's persistent characterization as a pasta-eating surrender monkey is weirdly entertaining.

[Added reflink here should people wish to read it, but please, please don't go harass the community or the original poster, since their discussion has now ended amicably. Also, more notes about Hetalia as a separate post.]

When I was an urchin, Ursula K. LeGuin's "Earthsea" books were a trilogy whose world was firmly categorized with the likes of Tolkien's Middle-Earth, CS Lewis' Narnia, and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain. In 1990, LeGuin unexpectedly resumed the series with Tehanu, which I rather liked as (imho) an elegiac postscript of both sorrow and hope, but which was widely execrated at the time by male readers on Usenet who thought that it "emasculated" the main hero from the original trilogy. Eventually, there was a fifth novel, The Other Wind, and a collection of short stories, Tales from Earthsea, but neither of those later books really clicked into my brain cell.

A few years ago, the SciFi Channel produced an execrable miniseries that was hashed together as a loose approximation of the first two books. It was produced by the same people who murdered MZB's The Mists of Avalon into a similarly distorted miniseries, and a lot of the same character types and plot twists seemed very familiar wrt that previous adaptation. By contrast, anything else would be an improvement, which I suppose is how I have to describe the anime movie Gedo Senki, whose bootleg DVD at our usual rental place was titled in English Tales from Earthsea but which is really a combination of the third and fourth books rather than anything much to do with the aforementioned anthology, and which therefore I'll continue to refer to by the Japanese name. ( Read more... )

Yesterday when I was already heading to Borders, BBC World aired an author interview which made me keep sitting in the parking lot after I got there. Once the interview was over, I went in and promptly bought this book.

I wonder if I still have Peter Brook's marathon adaptation of the Mahabharata on tape somewhere?

Addendum: Sita sings the blues.

Buried in the middle of this long list of garlic trivia, there's the statement, "Because of its stimulating qualities, garlic was never part of Buddhist tradition in China or Japan, whose practitioners felt it would upset one's spiritual balance. Garlic was never adopted into traditional Japanese cuisine and was shunned by Zen masters. On the other hand, legend tells of a Japanese Buddhist priest who hid in the mountains and secretly cured himself of tuberculosis by ingesting large amounts of garlic."

This made me think, "Well hey-- so what do you use to repel Japanese vampires?" ( Read more... )

Courtesy of Wikipedia, with some abridgement:

The first wave of immigration of the gentile class arrived in the province in the early 4th century AD when the Western Jin Dynasty collapsed and the north was torn apart by invasions by nomadic peoples from the north, as well as civil war. These immigrants were primarily from eight families in central China: Lin (林), Huang (黄), Chen (陈), Zheng (郑), Zhan (詹), Qiu (邱), He (何), and Hu (胡). The first four remain as the major surnames of modern Fujian.

I'm pretty sure those transliterations are from the Mandarin pronunciations rather than the local dialect. Which is just as well for security purposes, though even within the specialized context of Lan-nang, my mother's family isn't quite sure how they ended up with most of the current aspects of their surname. (Some of them theorize an earlier transliteration accident based on bad handwriting.) I feel oddly balanced between "Hey! I really do belong somewhere on both sides!" and "Bah, in context, my specific family names seem so boring if everyone has them back home."( Read more... )

This past summer, the wombat-consort and I went to Nova Scotia for my aunt's memorial service, in the small town where she was born. Most of her family still lives nearby; it was one of the first places resettled by the displaced Acadians after the British allowed them to return from exile. They live near the shore, which is a poor place for agriculture-- in Vieille Acadie, their ancestors constructed complex systems of stone dikes and levees in the salt marshes, regularly opening them for the tide to wash through with fresh silt, but the British destroyed those as part of the war of attrition-- so most of them are independent commercial fishermen, with boats worth more than their houses.

Most of the Acadians, of course, never came back. Some of them were sent back to France, more than a century after their colony had been founded. Others eventually coalesced into large communities on the other side of the Bay of Fundy (most of the Francophones in New Brunswick are of Acadian origin rather than Quebecois) and far to the south in the Mississippi Delta, but in their initial expulsion, they were randomly scattered through the Atlantic provinces. I have no idea of the genealogical demographics of those directly affected by Katrina, but I still can't help being reminded of history now, in a strange blend of "Evangeline" and the Middle Passage.

(As a gratuitous anime reference, for those who remember Yumi's cryptic remark about the ship Maria Luz near the end of Rurouni Kenshin's Kyoto Arc, it involved a legal case against Peru, which had adjusted to the end of the African slave trade the same way as several other parts of the world, by filling the same labor roles with Chinese coolies who were nominally indentured but essentially enslaved. Many of them had been simply kidnapped from their homes. In Cuba, one worker on a sugar plantation left the words, "It is certain that for us, there will be neither coffin nor grave, and that our bones will be burnt with those of horses and oxen to be afterwards used to refine sugar, and that neither our sons nor our sons' sons will ever know what we have endured." [Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor] Not that I have a real point, I suppose, except for the traditional observation that People Suck.)

I'm thinking about recanting an earlier determination to reconcile the "traditional" Eastern/Western elemental cosmologies, mostly due to the appalling number of similar-but-different systems among various Amerindian groups. But maybe if the New World is left out of it, the exercise is still barely possible. Maybe.

As a quick'n'dirty summary, the common Western system based on Gardnerian Wicca is oriented (oriens, rising) toward the east, the direction of sunrise. The traditional symbols ended up carrying over from Tarot to modern card suits, although sometimes Air and Fire swap gear with each other. ( Read more... )

By constrast, Chinese astronomy was based on equatorial observation toward the south. I have no idea why, since they were familiar with the North Star and had special names for the nearby constellations, but there it is. And while the Chinese zodiac has twelve signs, there's no direct correspondence with the twelvefold Western zodiac because of different timeframes and nonfixed elements: counterintuitively, while the Western "solar" signs change on a monthly basis, the Asian "lunar" signs change yearly; while the Western signs are inherently attached to certain elements, all twelve Asian signs rotate through a five-element system to create a sixty-year macrocycle. ( Read more... )