Asakiyume mita

wakanomori announced last night that we had to watch a particular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Darmok." It had come up in a discussion of Japanese poetry translation--relevant, because part of what makes translation of Japanese poetry difficult is its reliance on shared cultural references and metaphors to convey meaning, and the episode is about the Enterprise's encounter with the Children of Tama, an alien people that the Federation has never been able to communicate successfully with. The universal translator is no good, because the Children of Tama communicate entirely in cultural references and metaphors, and these are unknown to the Federation.¹

The aliens beam Captain Picard and their own captain, Dathon, down to the planet El-Adrel, where Dathon assiduously repeats pertinent cultural phrases ("Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra," "Temba, his arms open," "Shaka, when the walls fell"), trying to make Picard understand.

The way in which understanding finally dawns, and what happens after that, is very effective and moving and involves Picard reading from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Picard remarks at one point, "In my experience, communication is a matter of patience, imagination. I would like to believe that these are qualities that we have in sufficient measure." Those words of hope and confidence filled me with pathos, thinking of where the world is today.

Anyway. It's a good episode. I recommend it.


¹ As the tall one observed, "They talk entirely in memes." Unsurprising, then, that the episode has generated memes of its own--like this one, featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

Today Matt, of Where the Hell [now toned down to Heck] Is Matt fame (videos here and here), came to dance in South Amherst.

I was one of the first people to arrive, but gradually more and more people came, until we had a small crowd. There was a woman whose name was Forest--not Forest Something, or Something Forest, just Forest. She's a dancer. There was a young meteorologist, and an acquaintance of mine who does shape-note singing, and a pastor who is going to let me go up into her belfry to take pictures of her bell and who has a little daughter. There was a woman with her two grandchildren. So many people, happy to dance!

He came with just a smartphone to film with! And asked for a stepladder and a chair, and people found those things--and then for someone willing to film, and guess who was willing: wakanomori!

Here he is consulting with Matt (forgive the crummy photo; I didn't bring my camera (crazy), so this is taken with my cell phone)



Here are two pictures of the crowd that wakanomori took from his vantage point on the ladder (you can click through to see bigger) (Also, the pastor's church is over on the right as you look at the picture):





Here's the front row, where the kids were (my cell phone picture again):



After it was over, one guy called out, "You've been all over the world--what's one thing you've learned?" Matt thought about it a minute and said, "That people want to be helpful."

It's true--you could see it in action right there. A sunshiny thought.

Matt collects way more video footage than he uses in his final video, and what he got today may not make it in--but it'll be up on his website, eventually. When it is, I'll link.

Last of all, a posed shot together :-)



[Edit, from 2018. I'm going through carefully putting photos that were only available on Livejournal into my Dreamwidth photo storage, so that when I cease to pay for an LJ account, the photos will continue to be visible. As I do, I'm revisiting the past from the future. In this case, I know now, which I didn't then, that this Matt video would be lackluster compared to the early ones; that you can't go to places based on popular demand and have as interesting and diverse a video, and that the enthusiasm of the earlier years can't be maintained for ever and ever. Matt deserves to--and ought to--move on to a new project. Hopefully now he is/has.]

best pasta
My favorite shape of pasta is long fusilli.

One supermarket I go to has it (the one with the Lenten ideas, actually), but the near supermarket doesn't. I bought lots of packages last time I was at the one supermarket, and last night we had some. I love-love-love the feel in my mouth.

Do you have a favorite shape of pasta?

Knife throwee or lion's mouth?

A cafe in a nearby town has old board games for patrons to play. We didn't play any, but one that I noticed was called something like "Which would you rather?" where I guess you must have to choose between various alternatives. The one featured on the box was, "Which would you rather be, the person in the circus that the knife thrower throws knives at, or the one who puts their head in the lion's mouth?" wakanomori and I chose opposite, but we both had good reasons. How about you?

Owl in Love

I'm reading this fun YA book that was first published in 1993. It's told by 14-year-old Owl, who is a girl by day and an owl by night. Her narrative voice is fabulous, like when she describes her human parents, who are hedge witches.

My parents are very, very honest. The would never sell a charm, no, not even the merest good-luck piece, if they did not believe it gave good value for money. On the other hand, they are both blessed with an optimistic and uncritical nature, so they are able to offer quite a large line of goods with a clear conscience.

Letter L
My keyboard isn't responding well to my attempt to press the L key. I keep on having to go back and type it harder.

Balance
Did you know it's harder to balance on one foot if you have your eyes closed? It is.

... I think that'll do for now.... I'll be back; I have to go pick up a pizza.

The night before I left for Sirens, wakanomori had the pleasant job of introducing a Japanese storyteller who was performing at the local university. She does traditional rakugo storytelling, plus original stories, in English. I asked Wakanomori what they were like, and he told me one of the traditional ones she'd told. It was so entertaining I thought I'd share it here. I listened to a couple of Japanese versions of the story, so what you're getting is Motoko-Wakanomori transmission, influenced by those two linked storytellers.

The Cat's Bowl

( wherein a farmer has the best of a canny merchant )

Image from this website

You can find all sorts of things on the roadside, including CDs. Wakanomori once found a CD from a library several towns away lying in the street--he biked it back to where it belonged. A few days ago he found two CDs, one blue and one green, with nothing written on them.

One turned out to have 51 tracks on it--not whole songs, but fragments of songs, transitioning smooth as silk one to the next. It seems to be a DJ CD, for playing at a club or party or something. Some of the fragments I really like, and so I'm gradually buying the whole songs. Serendipitous way to broaden my musical horizons! I catch a few snatches of lyrics, do a search on them, find out the track name and the artist, and then I'm all set.

... This doesn't work so well for ones in Spanish, though. So I was hoping to ask you all! (rachelmanija--maybe your friends would have an idea?)

Mystery Spanish-Language Songs
ETA: A Spanish-speaking friend on Tumblr, aloneinthemath, identified them all for me!
So the names and singers are added in below
Anyone have any clue as to what mysterious Track 24 might be?

Mystery Track 24 turned out to be "Si no te quiere" (by Ozuna ft D. Ozi).

Mystery Track 25 turned out to be "Dulce carita" (by Dalmata ft Zion y Lennox)

Mystery Track 26 turned out to be "Lejos de aquí" by Farruko (some of these videos are -_- ... try just listening without watching, you know?)

Tumblr itself identified Track 27 when I tried to upload it--they warned me against uploading stuff that I hadn't created and linked me to this video of "Compromiso" by Tito "El Bambino."

Mystery Track Track 28 is "Suele suceder," by Piso 21 ft Nicky James

And Mystery Track 29, which made me shiver, turns out to be "Esta Noche," by J Quiles

There are more, but this is enough for the time being.

Would you like to know some of the English-language songs I've bought, thanks to the roadside DJ? (Links below go to Youtube videos, except for the special remix of the Anjali World song)

"Shoulda Been There," by Sevyn Streeter

"Locked Away," by R. City (which makes my heart crack, thinking of the women I work with on Fridays)

If I got locked away and we lost it all today, tell me honestly: would you still love me the same?

On the Roadside DJ CD, this song is answered by a remix of Anjali World, "Nobody," in which she sings,

Nobody, nobody can come between me and you ... I want you to be mine forever

Nice call and response, roadside DJ!

There are a bunch of reggae/soca songs, too. I liked Mr. Vegas, "Love the Girls Them" and *really* loved Shurwayne Winchester, "Girl Born to Wine"--that one makes me so happy.

Roadside treasure, for sure, that CD.

Behind this grand old mill building is the Mill River, which teenybuffalo took me to several years ago.



Little Springtime, the healing angel, and I went down to the very spot she had shown me (and, actually, the healing angel was along on that trip too), but really what we wanted to get to was a sandy island a bit upstream. The problem was that there was a waterfall between us and upriver at this point.

The healing angel hopped quite nimbly across the river and signaled to us, after a time, that we would find a place to scramble down on our side if we walked back along the highway a bit.

We walked back up the highway, and sure enough, did find a place to scramble down to the water.

Here is the healing angel, already on the island we want to get to.


( a few more photos )

Yesterday at the blog The Blue and Green House, they talked about the year without a summer--1816, the year following the massive eruption of Mt. Tambora. In my neck of the woods, snow fell as late as June and as early as August--across Europe there were famine conditions from failed crops. Wikipedia says that there was so much aerosolized material in the atmosphere that sunspots were visible to the naked eye.

Later in the day, out of the blue, wakanomori started telling me about one of the most powerful eruptions in recorded history, which he'd seen tweeted about. "Oh, maybe it was the eruption of Mt. Tambora," I said--fresh from my reading. He looked at me strangely and said, "Yeah, I think that's the one."

We both mused on why, in two separate venues, two separate people should have happened to talk about Mt. Tambora.

... And discovered that yesterday was the bicentennial of the eruption. Well then!

Meanwhile, on Twitter, people were tweeting humorous thoughts for new Hugo Award categories, and Nisi Shawl suggested, among other things, an award for Most Dramatic Pie.

So I decided to make a volcano pie--surely dramatic--to commemorate the bicentennial of Mt. Tambora's eruption. Behold the Pie:

Lots of red-lava chunks

I went out to get some coriander seeds from the garden, only the sky was doing this:



and this



It was very exciting.

Another thing that was exciting was yesterday, at the airport. I had to pick up wakanomori but there were some problems. Customs and immigration were in a bad mood because there was a huge backlog and pileup of people because of a bunch of planes being rerouted because of thunderstorms, and so they were detaining bunches of people, including him! He got off one text message to me that said, "In customs limbo. It may be a LONG time," but then they said they'd confiscate people's phones if people used them.

"Like school," remarked the healing angel when we were all back together again at midnight, three hours after people first disembarked from the plane Waka was on.

Admittedly, even without detention, it was taking forever for people to make it through. International arrivals was full of folks waiting for loved ones. Here are some impressionistic cell-phone photos.


waiting with flowers
>

standing on a chair for a better view


One family who waited nearly as long as we did asked the healing angel to take a picture of them when they were reunited:



We ended up walking through most of the airport terminals on our way out, and so we saw all the metal cots that the airport had set up for people who were stranded there--it looked like an evacuation center. We talked to one mother, traveling with two small children, who was given just one cot. There's no plane for her for two days, and no hotel rooms open near the airport, and she doesn't know anyone in the city. A friend is driving up tomorrow from New Jersey to rescue her, she said.

We were happy to be able to sleep in our own beds, even if we didn't make it home until 2 am.

wakanomori shared with me some of Lewis Carroll's crazy-complicated symbolic-logic syllogisms (these are all in the common domain--he saw them in Lapham's Quarterly, but you can find more at Project Gutenberg here). To wit:

1. Nobody, who really appreciates Beethoven, fails to keep silence while the Moonlight-Sonata is being played;
   
2. Guinea-pigs are hopelessly ignorant of music;
   
3. No one, who is hopelessly ignorant of music, ever keeps silence while the Moonlight-Sonata is being played.
   
4. Guinea-pigs never really appreciate Beethoven.

1. No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste;
   
2. No modern poetry is free from affectation;
   
3. All your poems are on the subject of soap-bubbles;
   
4. No affected poetry is popular among people of real taste;
   
5. No ancient poem is on the subject of soap-bubbles.
   
6. All your poems are uninteresting

(But but Mr. Carroll--how about frozen soap bubbles?)

1. There is no box of mine here that I dare open;
   
2. My writing-desk is made of rose-wood;
   
3. All my boxes are painted, except what are here;
   
4. There is no box of mine that I dare not open, unless it is full of live scorpions;
   
5. All my rose-wood boxes are unpainted.
   
6. My writing-desk is full of live scorpions.

--now that last one needs a story, I think.

Picture the grad student: she is a teaching assistant. She works late into the night. If you went into the teaching assistants' room, you might find her curled up and assume she'd fallen asleep over her grading, or over her reading, or in contemplation of her laptop. But then she'd raise her head in some confusion and embarrassment, because, you see, she'd been cradling the teakettle, which is so nice and warm. A stainless-steel hot-water bottle.

It's cold in the TAs' room: she's got her jacket on, and a scarf, and the old boots she just bought replacements for, but somehow has not yet stopped wearing--the boots with the big split on top that lets the snow come in direct contact with her sock (and then it's quick work to reach her foot).

"If anyone finds out I do this," she'll say, "they might not want to make tea from it anymore!" As if to embrace a teakettle is illicit--transgressive--deeply wrong. Please, reassure her--but not too effusively, or she will become suspicious.