Watch of the Week: MoonSwatch

 

WINSPMBT

 

Negoro-ji in Autumn

Abstract Painting

 

10 years

I can’t remember now what I was thinking when I started this blog 10 years ago today. I mean, I do remember the specific exact reason why I started, posting that first post about inviting Dashan to our wedding. But I don’t think there was any more thought to it than recording the exchange.

However the blog quickly took on the characteristic that has sustained it for this last decade. What I like to think of as my ‘external memory palace’ – a place where I can keep a record of all the minutiae and internet detritus that comes across my screen on a daily basis, or other quirky footnotes from something I have read (usually in the LRB) that I want to preserve. For a long time I was frustrated that I would be able to half recall something I had seen some years before, but it was lost to time, never to be recovered.

In that sense, the blog has served fairly well as a resource to call back to when that half remembered thought emerges. Two inflection points in the blog that have made it is what it is. The first was in January 2014. Up to that point, I had been posting every weekday, but leaving out weekends and holidays. I was keeping close track of my metrics (I have tried to keep the views on the blog as low as possible, making sure it was hidden from search engines and not sharing the url. But I still noticed there was one view of the blog everyday. Now I do not know if that was an artifact of my own views, a random view from a bot (most probably) or a real person. But the thought there was one person checking the blog everyday inspired me to make a post every day. That is something that I have some small pride to have maintained for over seven years now, with 2 exceptions – the days my two daughters were born when I had other things on my mind.

The second major structural change to the blog arose because of the number of entries (now over 3,000). This brought its own problems that even though I knew I had made an entry, I could not find it again. This reached an impasse when I was trying to find the music video for Janelle Monáe - Q.U.E.E.N. (25 May 2013). That led to one of the major overhauls of the blog in around 2016, where I laboriously went back through the thousands of posts and manually added a tag to each one.

Otherwise the daily update has proceeded without much difficulty. The vast majority of entries are done every day on the day – usually in the morning. There are times when there will be a spate of things that I come across that I want to add, so there may be 4 or 5 days planned out in advance. Other days I will be absolutely lost and have no idea what to post – so I will wait and generally later in the day something will come up that I want to add.

Looking back over the years, there are definitely trends of interests that have risen and fallen. I haven’t done a crossword in years! Same with flash fiction. I was also much more prepared to go to lengths to embed weird music players in the past that I don’t do now. Chess has been picking up in popularity more recently, as has a new series of entries about the 100 Mountains of Japan. There are also a number of constants such as Art and Poetry that have remained the mainstays over the years.

My favourite posts are the ones where I get to bring together a number of different sources on a single topic – where I have also gone back and added to over the years as I discovery more information about it. The translation of Du Fu is one of these. The same with the one on Brecht and Benjamin playing chess together.

As to how often the blog actually serves it purpose and lets me search back for something half remembered – the answer is not that often! Although on the occasions when I have had something bugging me and gone back through the blog and found what I was thinking about – it has been very satisfying to be able to find it. But it is not infallible, there have been times I was surprised the thing I was looking for was never recorded – which at least gave me a new entry for the next day.

Personally, when this blog started I was on the cusp of getting married, still living in the small apartment in Ultimo. Now, 10 years later, we have moved twice – to each time to bigger houses to accommodate a growing family. There have been births and deaths in the family, the pandemic, innumerable work dramas and stresses. But the constancy and existence of this record is and remains a great source of comfort that I have been able to work on a project for a sustained period of time.

As to what things will look like 10 years hence, hopefully that will be the subject of the next entry.

Spring Snow

Jude the Obscure: Infinite Sorrow and Incomplete Desires

https://the-artifice.com/jude-the-obscure-study/




Thomas Hardy published his last novel Jude the Obscure in 1895. Originally, the novel appeared serialized in Harper’s New Monthly as The Simpletons and Enduring Hearts. The novel met with public outrage due to its dark themes, so Hardy never wrote another novel. Prior to the publication of Jude the Obscure, Hardy wrote several other novels including The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. His novels depicted characters struggling against their passions and social conventions: a “conflict between flesh and spirit” (King). Although many people argued that Hardy depicted a harsh and cruel portrayal of society, Hardy presented a more realistic, albeit brutally, and honest depiction of Victorian society.

Mark Herman's Pacific War: The Struggle Against Japan 1941-1945 (1985)

 

RAIN LIGHT

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

— W.S. Merwin, from his Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).

Fire and Ice (1983)

 

Godrick the Grafted

 

Caetano Veloso

Wreck of the Endurance

Jingyanggang Wu Song da hu 景陽崗 武松打虎 [Wu Song Fights the Tiger on Jingyang Ridge]

 

Aquaman by James Harren

 

TacOpsCav Edition Version 4.0.3FG

 https://archive.org/details/TacOpsCav_Edition_Version_4.0.3FG_September_2002

A Medieval English Description of Java

https://indomedieval.medium.com/a-medieval-english-description-of-java-328747c95b2c




It might surprise you to learn, however, that there is a description of the island of Java in Middle English. It is not an original account, and the writer of it did not travel to Java personally. The name of Java may have been distorted slightly by an earlier scribal error, and the description occurs in a text that contains a lot of fabrication and fantasy. It is nonetheless evidence of the hemispheric reach of knowledge about Java in the Middle Ages.

The English description of Java appears in the account of the fictitious travels of John Mandeville, a supposedly English knight supposedly from St Albans who supposedly travelled around Europe, Africa, and Asia in the fourteenth century (Figure 3). Mandeville was not real; the book that was written under that name is a mix of information drawn from earlier sources and complete falsehood and, while the true authorship is not entirely clear, the earliest versions were written in French (and not English). The account includes descriptions of islands and kingdoms that simply did not exist and which are not documented in any other sources in addition to accurate information gleaned from other earlier texts (incidentally not including the Marco Polo travels).

Now, so: a lot of the Mandeville text is simply fake. Pure invention. Most of the rest, however, comes from the entirely real account of the aforementioned Odoric of Pordenone, who travelled to China by way of India and Southeast Asia in the early fourteenth century, not all that long after Marco Polo. Odoric wrote his account in Latin in around 1330. The original text is difficult to reconstruct because the surviving manuscripts are all rather different from one another, but it was fairly popular and there are quite a few extant manuscripts in several languages, including French. (Annalia Marchisio’s 2016 edition is the best source for Odoric’s texts and its difficulties.) The description of Java in the Mandeville Travels, and thus in Harley MS 3954, is taken wholesale from Odoric; the extract below is in essence a Middle English translation of Odoric rather than ‘Mandeville’, whoever he may have been.

Odoric’s account of Java is interesting for several reasons. Odoric is (almost) alone among medieval European travellers in clearly distinguishing Java from other islands around it. Marco Polo called Java ‘Big Java’ and Sumatra ‘Smaller Java’. (Never mind that Sumatra is much bigger in area than Java.) Niccolò de’ Conti uses a Java-like name for two islands, one probably Java and the other unidentified — possibly Borneo. Odoric conveniently uses ‘Java’ (originally ⟨Iaua⟩) in reference to the island we now call Java.

‘And there is a great isle that is called Jana. And the king of that country has under him seven kings, for he is full mighty. In that isle grow all manner of spices more plenteous than elsewhere — ginger and all other spices. All things are there in plenty but wine.’

The King

 

Sessho-seki 殺生石,

In 1000 B.C. in China, the Emperor of the Yin Dynasty’s wife, the queen, was the embodiment of an evil fox. She tricked him into misruling his people, and as a result his government was overthrown. Then the fox moved to India, and became the first wife of the prince. She tempted him into beheading thousands of people. But one of his retainers unmasked her and she disappeared at once. In 753, the evil fox took the form of a young girl and sneaked onto a ship of Japanese envoys heading from Tang to Japan. The ship was the same one that high-ranking Priest Ganjin was on board.

After she landed in Japan, she waited quietly for 360 years. And then, she became an abandoned cute little baby and waited for someone to find her, help her, and raise her. And that happened soon. She grew up to become a woman with beauty, wit, and charm. When she was 18, she started to serve at the Imperial Court in ancient Kyoto and publicly identified herself as “Tamamo-no-Mae”. She approached Emperor Toba and gained his favor. He fell in love with her. After that, the Emperor suffered from sickness and his condition became worse and worse. No one could find out why the Emperor was suddenly sick. But a diviner, Abe Yasunari, eventually discovered her true nature and exposed her (the fox’s) plot to ruin the nation. They fought terribly hard and finally the fox showed her tails—she had nine—and escaped from Kyoto.

After some time, the rumor went around that the same nine-tailed fox was abducting young women and girls in the Nasu district. Upon hearing this, the Imperial Court sent an 80,000-strong army to Nasu. The fox put up a vicious fight, but the army finally cornered the fox in a dead-end alley. Then, one of the soldiers shot an arrow at the fox. The fox changed into the form of a giant rock and emitted strong poison. Any people and animals that went close to the rock were killed by its toxic gas. Soon no birds, no insects and no plants could live there.

Many priests tried to appease her anger but it had no effect on the poison. At last, Priest Genoh decided to fight with the rock. He purified his body and soul with a hot spring bath before the battle. Then he started to chant a special sutra and continued it fervently. In the end, Tamamo-no-Mae appeared out of a string of white smoke. And she gradually disappeared, and the rock broke into three parts. Two of them flew away and one of them stayed there. It still eliminates some toxic gas; even its power was weakened.

Gran Turismo

 

Pockets of Light · Lubomyr Melnyk

Watch of the Week: Grand Seiko 'White Birch' Spring Drive (SLGA009)

 

John Steinbeck - The Moon Is Down

Obey Ukraine

 

Sydney Ball