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June 11th, 2021
04:52 pm - Anonymous commenting turned off
Anonymous comments have been turned off because of the volume of spam. Sorry! Please let me know (via email: emily@emilyhorner.com) if you need a Dreamwidth invite or if this otherwise poses an inconvenience to you.
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May 26th, 2012
08:54 am
Found my other test book for the Kanji Kentei and took the mock test in the back of that.
172/200, which is "safe pass"! (140 is a passing grade.)
I realize it may sound silly to be proud of myself for having the kanji knowledge of a Japanese 6th-grader, but I remember when I first got the test prep books and I was just astonished by how badly I did. Because knowing how to read kanji doesn't necessarily translate well to being able to write kanji, and being able to write kanji doesn't necessarily mean you'll know enough vocabulary to be able to pick out the right kanji to use in any given context. And even if it's only level 5, it's still over a thousand kanji, after all.
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May 24th, 2012
11:15 am
So, I've been studying for the Kanji Kentei exam (level 5, which is the level you're supposed to reach after finishing elementary school), which is an exam put out by a Japanese organization to test your ability to read and write kanji (and theoretically if you pass one of the higher levels it would look good on your resume, but I'm so far from passing one of the higher levels, and I don't intend to go to Japan and look for a job even if I do get that good.) I've just been studying because I wanted to have a more solid base of kanji knowledge, especially as I get into studying more older literature and nonfiction and things.
And I have reached the end of my test prep book. (Go me!)
And I have taken the mock test at the end of the book. (I think I did pretty well!)
So I looked for my answer book and.... it doesn't have the answers to the mock test inside. That's in a different booklet. Which I may or may not have, since I bought the test prep book maybe back in 2007. It is probably, along with most of my worldly goods, In A Box Somewhere.
I can't celebrate "Yeah, I think that's probably a passing grade"!
(I may take the real test at some point, but probably at a higher level; I'd have to go all the way out to New Jersey for it.)
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May 16th, 2012
03:05 pm - Frontiers of Language Change
Overheard in the library: "You two team-upped on me!"
I heard in one of Steven Pinker's books about the use of "verse" as a back-formation from "versus" (e.g. "I get to verse you next!") but I'm surprised at just how widespread it's become among the teens and tweens of my acquaintance.
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May 15th, 2012
05:18 pm
First Maurice Sendak, and now Jean Craighead George -- it's a sad time to be a children's literature person.
Since I heard about Maurice Sendak I have been trying to think of what I could say. He was a person with an aesthetic sense that didn't seem to have anything to do with what lessons children ought to learn, or how children ought to behave. A sense that was generally not concerned with Problems in the way they're usually deployed in children's books -- something the Where The Wild Things Are movie deeply misunderstood when it tried to make Max's anger about his mother's divorce and dating. And yet he always respected the seriousness of childhood, and it sadness and weirdness.
There are not many people who always seem to know where their own north star is, and I think he was one of them.
Jean Craighead George is one of those authors who meant a lot more to me at ten or eleven than they do now. I know Julie Of the Wolves wouldn't hold up as well for me now that I've become aware of some of the cultural issues involved. But as a sucker for animal books, I was glad that hers were rarely twee or sentimental, and always grounded in love and respect and knowledge of the natural world. I loved Who Really Killed Cock Robin, which worked equally well as a mystery and a book about ecology, but perhaps more than anything I remember the independence of the boy in My Side of the Mountain -- I think an infatuation with solitude and self-sufficiency was one of my big influences in writing Love Story, and My Side of the Mountain was a window into a time and place where that was, perhaps, a little more believable.
I still want a falcon.
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May 14th, 2012
01:42 pm
In Patricia Polacco's "The Art of Miss Chew," Miss Chew quotes the following as a Chinese proverb:
"Yesterday is a memory, tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift -- that's why it's called the present."
First person to figure out why this is extremely unlikely to be an actual Chinese proverb gets the prize.
My head-canon is that Miss Chew thinks that bit of sentimental glurge may actually cheer up her student if she dresses it up as a Chinese proverb, though she knows very well that it's not.
It may be a sad state of affairs when random picture books require fix-it head-canon.
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May 4th, 2012
10:33 pm - Five Things Make A Post
1. Naoki Urasawa wrote Yawara? The judo manga that I read bits and pieces of in Mangajin way back in high school? Mind. Blown. (Also, I was just thinking, Hey, Yawara, that was pretty cool, right? I should track that down.)
2. While my brain may not categorize "WTF" as a Swear That I Should Not Say In The Library, it is, nevertheless, probably not wise to say it in the library just because the books are in the wrong place.
3. File under Things I Am Snobbish About, but I itch when I see media tie-in books recommended for really young kids. Parents' lives fill up soon enough with Saturday morning cartoons and happy meals and media put out by giant conglomerations. Sit down and read some Ezra Jack Keats!
4. I walked from the bus stop to the food co-op and home, which is a pretty substantial detour but a nice walk. There are beekeepers in Ditmas Park! They have hives!
5. My monitor is now sitting on my copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. This seems like the correct use for a thick, attractive hardcover book that I have no particular desire to reread anytime soon.
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08:08 am - LA Review of Books review!
The Los Angeles Review of Books has a write-up on the lesbian coming-of-age story by Laura Goode, the author of Sister Mischief, with a very nice little review of Love Story.
In other news, there is nothing to make you feel like a foolish, stubborn badass like going to Ikea, finding the pieces for a desk, getting them home on the subway, and assembling them without instructions. I will be paying for it today, though.
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May 3rd, 2012
10:01 pm - Kondou Marie. The magic of cleaning for a flourishing life!
This was a mega-best-seller in Japan, so I was curious about it on that basis, as well as because I always need help cleaning.
This book has a lot of cute anecdotes and a very friendly style, but you can boil it down to a couple of main principles:
-Throw out everything except things you LOVE, things that make you really happy, things that make your heart beat faster when you touch them. Throw out about 2/3 to 3/4 of what you own.
-Don't throw things out a little at a time, because that will make you feel like you're not making any progress. Set aside some time to clean ALL THE THINGS, because once you've experienced what it's like to have all the things clean you will be so moved that you won't backslide.
-Once you've thrown away most of your possessions, it's really easy to find good storage spaces for all your stuff and take good care of it and put it back when you're done.
( Read more... )
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April 30th, 2012
07:46 pm
Note to self: After a full weekend of moving things, there will come a time when you finally feel all the strength drain from your limbs.
It would be wise not to be carrying All The Things at this point.
Note to guy from the cable company:
If you ever find yourself having the following conversation:
-Are you married?
-No.
-Have a boyfriend?
-No.
-Do you want one?
-No.
-Why?
-Because I don't want one.
-Why?
It would be wise to end the conversation before it gets to that point.
Note to myself again:
Do not underestimate the value of a steely-eyed "Why do you ask?"
--
ANYWAY I am all moved in and the internet is on and the gas is on and the books will come out of boxes at some point.
I am very, very tired.
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April 26th, 2012
02:23 pm
So YALSA (the division of the American Library Association for services to Young Adults) now requires an e-mail and a login in order to get to the lists of award-winning books, including the Printz?
Why on earth should that not be a public page? Presumably the book awards are something that they want to PROMOTE. To the PUBLIC. They're not just something that librarians are interested in. Okay, well, maybe they are. But it happens frequently that I need to access the Newbery lists very quickly because there's some kid who needs to read a Newbery winner for school, and... if I were YALSA, I would want the Printz to have that kind of prominence! Not hide it behind a login page because they want my email address! (Do I want to get email from YALSA? No, I do not. Not from any particular ill will towards YALSA but I just get enough organizational emails.)
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April 25th, 2012
08:36 pm
I really liked Sarah Rees Brennan's tribute to Diana Wynne Jones.
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April 24th, 2012
09:27 pm - Polar bear cafe
I'm surprising myself by following, not just one anime, but two this season!
The first is Sakamichi no Apollon, which I'll probably squee about another ten times. The second is Polar Bear Cafe, which (like Sakamichi no Apollon) is available streaming on Crunchyroll for you folks within the viewing area.
It's a show about an extremely lazy panda who goes out looking for a job at his mother's insistence (he asks at the convenience store, "Which of these [job-searching books] has jobs where you can earn money without working?") and finds a cafe run by a polar bear. "Oh," you think right away. "So the show is about how he gets a job working at the polar bear cafe and he makes friends there and grows as a person. Err, panda." No. This is not actually what happens. But he does become a regular at the cafe, along with a penguin, a sloth, a llama, and other anthropomorphic characters. (The world of the show is mostly populated by humans; the presence of animals who run cafes and live in houses passes without explanation.)
It has a very highly refined sense of the absurd, plus a handful of truly terrible puns, and all in all I can't remember the last time I've laughed like that at an anime.
I could see myself actually getting back into anime fandom. Perhaps, maybe. If I actually get better at locating the things that are worth watching.
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April 20th, 2012
10:47 pm - Sakamichi no Apollon: Yeah. It's love.
I am afraid that the direction they're going with this has too many love triangles (hint: any) for my taste, but am I going to complain about pretty people swimming in pretty Kyushu? (hint: NO).
I have a weakness for stories where the dorky book-smart guy meets a rough-and-tumble street-smart guy and Learns About Living Life Spontaneously And Being True To Himself. But what really got me was the sequence right in the beginning --
Kaoru has just gotten ragged on by Sentaro for playing jazz without any swing, so he bought the record and he's trying to figure it out on the piano. But the record player is upstairs and the piano is downstairs and his aunt has gone out shopping and he has ONE HOUR to figure out how to play this song right. So he's running madly up and down the stairs, listening to a bit, trying a bit out, listening to a bit, trying a bit out, and, oh. That singleminded teenaged passion for getting right to the heart of a thing, for persevering and persevering to get it right.
I read a book on anime and feminism once where the author talked about watching Gundam as a kid, and as soon as the show ended she would write down as much of the script as she could remember -- it was the days before VCRs. It reminded me of that, the kind of thing where you can look back on it as an adult and say "Why on earth would you go that far in pursuit of something?" but really, you can't understand it unless you're there, in that moment, running up and down the stairs.
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April 15th, 2012
12:23 am
I have no idea where my earplugs are. I was napping with them just this afternoon! but in my post-nap fog I probably took them off in some weird place.
My neighbors are having a post-midnight party. Where are my earplugs?
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April 14th, 2012
10:34 pm
...You know, I could've gone my whole life without hearing the Utena dub. I didn't. But I could've.
I put my DVD in and went off to go do something else and all of a sudden WHAT THE HECK THAT'S NOT AKIO'S VOICE.
It brings me back to my late-90s anime-watching days when it was almost taken for granted that terrible voice acting was a necessary feature of dubbed anime, and Cowboy Bebop was kind of a revelation because the dub was actually good.
OH HEY SAKAMICHI NO APOLLON STARTED. That is a thing I have been waiting for.
ETA: I know that they did not actually go back and put more sex in Utena, but I sure missed a lot of stuff when I was a teenager, huh?
ETA: Sakamichi no Apollon takes place in Kyushu! They're talking Kyushu-ben! <3
...Yeah, if that can make me happy I really need to get on the Natsume bandwagon.
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01:05 pm - So much packing!
I'm up to eleven boxes.
I have almost finished my bookcases.
It is possible that I own too many books.
I haven't even signed a lease or established a concrete move-in date, so I don't want to get too much ahead of myself, but... given the Giant Boxathon of last year, I want to do as much as I can as early as I can.
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April 9th, 2012
04:25 pm
I have put down a deposit on a place! It is nice enough that if it were any nicer I would start to get suspicious.
It has a real kitchen with counter space and room for me to have more furniture than just a bed, a computer desk, and too many bookshelves!
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April 8th, 2012
10:36 pm - Making fun of people with money
Williams Sonoma now has a gardening/hipster domestic hobby store.
These chicken coops!
Copper trowels!
This is the prettiest, fanciest twine I have ever seen. TWINE.
I have spent sufficient money on yarn and kitchen stuff that I can be thoroughly understanding of the temptation to spend large amounts of money on one's hobbies, for the prettiness and the unshakeable belief that somehow a really pretty chicken coop will make you that much better at keeping chickens. There is probably some of this that makes perfect sense for someone who is serious about their jam-making or their beekeeping. But I am just mouthing at the computer screen, "You realize this is going OUTSIDE, right? This is going IN THE DIRT?"
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April 6th, 2012
10:16 pm - Unpopular fandom opinion
( Kino no Tabi is not actually WAY DEEP. )
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