Monthly Archives: January 2012

01/31/12

Outlaws of the Marsh

“There are hairs in this dumpling that look a lot like pubic hairs.”

“Ximen was frolicking with Golden Lotus upstairs. At the sound of Wu Song’s voice he farted with terror and pissed in his pants.”

The Goriest, Raunchiest Chinese Classic of All Time

I’ve been reading Sidney Shapiro’s translation (1980) of the 14th century Chinese classic Outlaws of the Marsh, aka The Water Margin (authorship usually attributed to Shi Nai’an, Luo Guangzhong — author of Romance of the Three Kingdoms — or both). It’s highly readable. In fact, I’m finding it addictive.

It’s full of badass characters and it goes along at a clip. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny in places. It’s almost all action and plot, with very little introspection or showy writing (though there was a flowery metaphor concerning how the blood flowed out of someone’s head wound). The narration tells you when it’s leaving a character behind or skipping over something. If you’ve read Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds, it has some of that feeling of “an Ancient China that never was” but it feels more like a tall tale than a myth — more Robin Hood than King Arthur. Apart from a legend told at the beginning that frames the story, there hasn’t been any magic in it yet, though chapter titles hint that there might be some further on.

The translation uses modern-sounding terms like “grog shop”, with occasional slight archaisms like “clove him in twain” — perhaps with humorous purpose, or perhaps the original dips into slight archaisms of its own? With the vernacular language and the highly organised and bureaucratised medieval Chinese milieu, which can seem like a modern enough world on its own, it feels contemporary as well as ancient.

I remember reading, as a fan of “Monkey”, a translation of Journey to the West, and being frustrated by its slow pace. If I remember right, the translator had cut out a lot of incidents in order to do justice to the details and style of the text within a volume that could be picked up in one hand. I was a kid, and I was expecting the book to be like the TV show. Outlaws of the Marsh, so far, is not unlike a TV show — episodic and busy. The start has a bit of a patchwork feel, as it skips from character to character, though the framing legend helps to ward off the sense of a shaggy dog story. Then it settles down and concentrates on one guy (whose personality reminds me of Monkey) — or at least, it has been concentrating on him for a couple of chapters now. It looks like it’s going to move on to other characters, but hopefully without jumping around as much as it did at the beginning.

Anyway, I’m pretty hooked on the fun of it all. The Kindle edition that I bought is entirely no-frills. It doesn’t even have page numbers, and there are a few typos and ebook conversion errors, but not enough to be terribly intrusive. But it was only $3.49, and it’s 768 pages. Bargain, mate!

01/30/12

He came with the rain

So, my resolution about not letting Dim Sim in during working hours fell in a heap after one day. It’s raining this morning, and there he was, all wet.

He hadn’t eaten the dry food we left out for him last night, so I guess he wasn’t really hungry. He let me dry his paws. After a little gentle shoving, he did better at not being underfoot on the stairs, too.

The streets in the direction I think he comes from are kind of chaotic — narrow, busy, lots of motorbikes, people and dogs. Our lane is quiet. Our house is cool and safe and quiet. I can see why a cat would like it.

He’s chilling out here. I’m ignoring a lot of his meows, as if he wants to hang out here he’s got to learn that being noisy won’t get him very far. I think he’s showing signs of getting the picture.

I guess whoever took his collar off didn’t want the hassle of talking, or was worried about what their cat might have done — knocked over a pricless vase, killed someone’s expensive fish, etc. I’m tempted to get another collar and write a more comprehensive note.

We’re going away in March/April, and I’d really like to know the details of his situation before then.

I know that my worrying about him like this may seem incomprehensible to any local person I do manage to talk to, as the attitude towards cats here is rather laissez faire. People seem more interested in their dogs. But he’s so domesticated that I can’t help feeling a duty towards him, and I’d also like to let his owner/carer know what he’s up to.

01/29/12

Back without the collar

We put the collar with the noted taped to it on Dim Sim yesterday. This morning he’s back without the collar. He was very placid when we put it on him. He didn’t try to remove it at all, so I would say that a human did. Even if no one calls, I think I can assume that someone either owns or is looking out for him.

He was indoors for a while yesterday, and by the end of the day I had itchy eyes. I don’t know if it’s because of him or because I had the door open so he could go in and out. It’s possible that I’m slightly allergic to cats, but I’ve never had a cat in a house without carpet, so I’ve never been able to tell whether I react to cats, carpet dust, or both.

Anyway, I’ve put a cardboard box out on the balcony for him. He seems to like it. He was looking kind of rattled this morning — as he has on other occasions — so I’m going to believe the guy who told me he might be coming up here because a dog chased him. He’s very vocal and attention-seeking, unlike the cat back home who just used to come in and sleep, so all other reasons aside, I’ve decided he can’t come indoors during “working hours”.

He’s curled up in the box. Maybe he just wants a safe spot to sleep in. (Also, it looks like it’s going to rain. Maybe he knows and wants to arrange shelter in advance. Last time he was really hustling to get inside in the early morning it was about to pour, too.)

01/27/12

I might have a problem (cat again)

We finally carried Dim Sim out last night and dumped him on the balcony. An hour later he was still there meowing. He’d eaten the food I’d put out.

This morning? Still there. Keen to come in. I’ve let him back in my room.

Now I really don’t know whether he has a house or not. Maybe he’s recently homeless, or someone who was feeding him isn’t feeding him anymore. Maybe a family bought a kitten and don’t want him now that he’s big. Maybe he’ll just take whatever he can get!

He’s playing a bit with the only toy I could find for him — a plastic tiger tooth charm on a rope from the “tiger temple”. And meowing. As soon as the supermarket opens I’ll get some cat food.

While I’m more than happy for him to hang out here on a casual basis, I can’t even think about keeping him. We’re away too often, and most likely one day we’ll leave for good.

We might have to put a collar on him with a note attached saying “call us if this is your cat”!

ETA: He’s still here. He ate the cat food and drank some milk. Now he’s exploring the room, checking out the confined spaces and possibly rating them on a scale of 1 to 10. I’ve tried putting him outside again, and he’s not into that at all! He is now sitting on the bed on the towel I put there for him.

Despite his foreign looks, he’s definitely a Thai cat. I tried stroking him with my foot, and he nipped me — gently, not breaking skin — as if to tell me I was being rude! (Feet are the lowest/dirtiest part of the body — you’re not meant to point them at people.)

ETA2: I put a little food for him in the garage area and left him there while I went out to get a collar to hang a note on. He was absent when I got back, to my relief, as I was worried that I’d gone too far with the hospitality. I need to steel myself a bit in that regard.

N.B. When I went out to get the food this morning, next door’s cat was in the garage area, meowing at me. Do cats leave hobo signs on “easy” houses?

01/26/12

Cat hotel

Dim Sim has spent most of the afternoon indoors here. When he’s awake he meows a lot, seeming to be hungry, but turned his nose up at fresh raw salmon, so I don’t think he can be that hungry.

He has now discovered the bed in my room, and is sleeping in the valley between the pillows. ETA: He’s awake and meowing again. I don’t know what he wants. A particular brand of tinned tuna? Sex? Catnip?

He’s so big and so clean that I’m sure he has a real home somewhere. He isn’t neutered after all, but he hasn’t sprayed, just rubbed his head on everything a lot.

He’s back on the bed, washing himself. I’ve read that tom cats often have several “homes”, so it isn’t strange for him to be hanging around here. I’ll get some cat food, but only for occasional treats, as someone is obviously feeding him and he shouldn’t learn to count on this as a place to eat regularly.

Right now he looks like he’s studying the books behind the bed, but actually he’s fast alseep :-) Possibly absorbing literature by hypno-osmosis, or something.

ETA, hours later: He’s still here. We keep opening the door for him and he keeps taking a brief look outside and running straight back to the bed. I tried to gently push him out. He lay down on the floor.

If he has a home, why does he want to stay here where there’s no food? Maybe his owners have acquired a dog, or they’ve had a baby and now they’re putting him out at night?

Or he just knows a sucker when he sees one…?

01/20/12

Cat

I was sitting here typing when a cat leaped onto my balcony from the balcony next door.

A magnificent cat. Either a huge female or a neutered male, tabby, sleek, fit, so glossy that its grey markings were almost silver.

You don’t see cats like that in Bangkok every day. It looked like it had walked out of a cat showroom. I couldn’t see a collar on it, but I’m sure it was someone’s pet.

It sat down and washed itself a bit. It was breathing a little heavily. It hung out on our balcony for a bit, then leaped over to next door’s balcony (it’s a row of townhnouses with adjoining large balconies). I went out and checked on it.

It was sitting by next door’s door, meowing at me, as if it expected me as the nearest member of the servant species to go over there and open the door. It had that whole “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me” thing going on on its general deportment. And a truly piteable, kittenish meow.

I don’t think it’s next door’s cat. I’ve never seen it before. I wondered if it had got up onto the balconies and couldn’t get down.

It came back onto our balcony and meowed at me. Was it an “I’m hungry, feed me, thou wretch!” meow? A “Help, I’m stuck!” meow? I could have let it indoors, but then I’d have to had put it out in the street, and perhaps, I thought, this is an indoor cat that got out one of the balcony doors and shouldn’t just be dumped in the street.

I went downstairs to see if any humans were around. By then the cat had jumped onto the next balcony and was sitting on the balcony wall, meowing. The people in that house were in their downstairs area. They said it wasn’t their cat, and asked a guy across the road. Not his cat either.

The cat went over the next balcony, and was lost to view.

There are a couple of ways a cat could get down, if perhaps not very comfortably, so maybe it found its way to the ground — or back to its own house.

In any case, it reminded me that I rather miss having a cat around. We used to share a neighbour’s cat. He spent a lot of time in our house. I think he liked our squashy sofa.

If the cat is free to wander, I rather hope it decides it likes balcony excursions and comes back for another visit.

01/17/12

Pan has hands

Pan now has two little hands made out of hard wax that I had to keep warming in the toaster oven to make it workable. (Did I melt a hand I’d nearly finished? Yep!) I’m about 90% happy with them. Fingernails and all!

And I now have a lot of respect for people who make detailed small models. It’s a way to go crouched and crosseyed. I always wondered why sculptors like making big abstract lumps. Now I know!

01/14/12

The Country of Pointed Firs

I was going to come to The Country of Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett with no preconceptions, but after stumbling (not for the first time I think) onto Laura Miller’s Salon review of Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers, I read:

“…she will, when needed, chart the rise and fall of the reputation of someone like Sarah Orne Jewett (who wrote about late 19th-century life in the small towns of coastal Maine), a trajectory that went from being “patronized as the epitome of the little woman writer” in her own time to being touted as a “recovered” feminist pioneer in the 1970s and ’80s, and finally, in the ’90s, to being “excoriated and banished by feminist critics for her endorsement of bourgeois values and her political thought crimes.”

Oh dear.

I swear, if anything of my work survives to be studied after my death, and them as studies it co-opt my stuff for their own political agendas, ignoring the spirit of the work and/or the context of my times, I will haunt their houses with blood dripping from the ceiling, breaking crockery, and hideous apparitions in the night. For starters.

From the book’s first couple of pages: “…a lover of Dunnett Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilisation of which her affectionate dreams had told.”

Seems promising.

01/10/12

Thousand Cranes

[SPOILERS]

It took me until nearly 2/3 of the way through Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes to really start getting into it, perhaps because the callow narrator annoyed the hell out of me.

By the end, I wasn’t sure whether I’d read an ‘ordinary’ novel about human relationships — their messiness contrasted with the formalised beauty of the tea ceremony and its paraphernalia (and the reader perhaps encouraged not to judge too harshly but to see the tenderness in a soap opera-ish human tangle?) and the passing of problems from one generation to the next — or one about two haunted tea bowls.

Both, I assume — though I think that how much the ghost story is real and how much metaphorical is left up to the reader (not just the reader’s judgements, but the reader’s tastes and what they would like the book to be?)

In the story’s early stages the attention paid to the tea utensils seems like comfortable territory for a literary novel. They symbolise this and that. Then the attention starts lingering over them (one in particular) to the point of seeming either precious or self-parodying. Then they kind of take over, which made me reassess my reading of the story.

Kikuji and Fumiko, as personalities, both feel like rather ‘empty vessels’, in contrast to Chikako’s awful but alive and self-aware presence. (She also seems to have a meta-awareness of the story, describing herself as the ‘villain’.) At the end, it’s ambiguous as to whether Fumiko has committed suicide or not — but did she just vanish like a ghost after breaking ‘her’ bowl, and is Kikuji’s vanishing into the park also the vanishing of a ghost? He refers to Fumiko as the one ‘who had brought him to life’.

Chikako uses the word ‘witch’ to describe Mrs Ota. In a novel in which every word seems carefully chosen, surely Kawabata had a reason for using a supernatural word like that?

Her birthmark is the sort of thing that characters obsess over in literary novels. In a folk story, though, it might be the mark of a supernatural being, or a witch. But how wicked a witch was she? Was Chikako a villain in the human story, but on another level something more like an exorcist? (Am I speculating too wildly?) At the very end, to Kikuji she is ‘the woman he took for his enemy’. How telling is that ‘took for’?

Layers, textures, invitations to different readings, and effects (hard to pinpoint in words) created by the layers of readings.

Tsukumogami — ordinary objects which acquire souls after 100 years of service (one of my favourite folkloric ideas: see Wikipedia entry for delightful picture). I don’t think the bowls in Thousand Cranes are tsukumogami, just haunted, but their age is emphasised, making me wonder whether their story has been going on for longer than the period of events in the novel.

It’s a short book, and after not digging the first 2/3 I should probably read it again and see if I can get a better idea of what Kawabata’s doing and how he’s doing it.