I want to talk about the four Melendy books by Elizabeth Enright: The Saturdays, The Four-Storey Mistake, Then There Were Five, and Spiderweb for Two. These concern the varied adventures of the four Melendy children, Mona, Rush, Miranda (Randy), and Oliver, growing up in New York and then the countryside in the 1940s. Elizabeth Enright does ( Read more... )

Well--I got my first random-check-result report from the translation company I work for, and generally got a good grade, but one comment made me laugh out loud. "This phrase is a remnant of your British English. In American English we wouldn't use this expression...". Nice. Clearly a misspent childhood reading British kids' books had a lasting ( Read more... )

a peaceful afternoon at home, pretty much.
I have some work (for money) I could be doing, nothing exciting or dramatically lucrative, but work is work. I'll do some later. It won't go away.
I have some work not for money I could be doing, two or three different things, translating and writing, which I would like to do too. Maybe I'll do some later. 
I ( Read more... )

Various comments on my first couple of weeks doing some English classes at the school for the deaf. Just self-introduction stuff so far really, with the junior high school kids. They are cheerful and pleasant to be with so far; junior high schoolers share general characteristics regardless of whether or not they can hear. A wide range of academic ( Read more... )

so I mentioned I've been reading, and occasionally writing, fanfiction. Having seen that people write real-people-fic about baseball players, mostly having them sleep with one another, I'm very sad that there aren't any fics in English about Japanese baseball. I am being horribly tempted to write a fic slashing Yuki Saito with Masahiro Tanaka. It ( Read more... )

There's a neighborhood in Osaka which is not like anywhere else in the city. For many years the city's flophouses have been concentrated there--cheap pay-by-the-day lodging houses, Single Room Occupancy kind of places, catering to day laborers mostly working construction. Because the city has done its best to shaft these people over the years, ( Read more... )

I've kind of thought this was true for many years, but yeah, this is just about certain, really: my truest function in life is to be a reader/watcher/listener. Not very useful, but what gives me the most joy and fulfillment, much more than creating/interacting in any context myself.
I'm swimming in the good stuff right now, more or less by chance ( Read more... )

Last week was hanami with the orchestra--sitting under a blossoming cherry tree in a local park, theoretically admiring the flowers, in practice eating and drinking and chattering. Even with a group of people I'm relatively at ease with, like the orchestra folks, it's hard for me to spend a long stretch of time in a large group--I never know what ( Read more... )

Gotta have 'em sometime.

1) My mom. Enough said.

2) I succumbed to the Dark Side and wrote fanfiction. Almost the first one I've ever written, definitely the first I've ever put on the internet for other people to read. (For a fanfic fest, so there were some built-in readers.) And people liked it. Not everybody, I'm sure, but several people wrote ( Read more... )

I was thinking about books which are focused on a thirteen-year-old, and (sometimes) meant for readers of about that age, but in which the adult characters are more compelling to me. The three examples I’d like to discuss are National Velvet (Enid Bagnold), Growing Up Weightless (John M. Ford), and King and Joker (Peter Dickinson).

National Velvet ( Read more... )