item-izing 2

1 · bokurano the manga- one of the most upsetting stories ever, it ranks alongside the dying-of-cancer-people documentaries that are on the TV here often -- a nice way to get rid of eye dusts -- I read somewhere that the author "doesn't like children", and this makes sense -- but not really because he allows great redemptive episodes for most of the doomed pilots, if you allow that there is redemption following certain death plus unquantifiable murder which is a condition of victory which leads to the certain death


2 · We walked the river a bit. Nice to have river (a walkable one) (not the river surface, but its cemented side bits) within city. Not unusual. I found a super nintendo game "nba jam" for 105 en -- played it long ago with "friends", I never knew about the turbo button then -- it is OK, meant to be played with 4 of you and "snacks", there is weird ball motion at times on rebounds, and a glitch I found, ball prone in corner makes everyone apathetic, clock could count down -- I looked up "basketball" on wikipedia, quite interesting

- - perhaps because I don't feel much in control of my basketball men, I begin to feel there is a fate-network in the game, some sort of system taking pity on the losing side -- sometimes I do something while anticipating a reward from this fate-pity network, a pass becomes a prayer

- - there are little people and big people in the basketball teams, the little ones are like the little transformers that worried you they were so out of scale, or the big ones were out of scale, in any case something was seriously wrong

- - and strange things happen at the rebound point


3 · I read these short books recently: Night Train Martin Amis, No Longer Human Dazai Osamu, Shrike Quentin S Crisp

-- the Amis: he has not been in people's good books recently, and perhaps there is an automatic response to his work saying "BAD", but I found Night Train interesting, oddly rough not only at edges, really it had a damaged interior, perhaps a deliberate ruining of what is usually a sleek surface, in that sort of crime fiction (it is a police procedural type book, American set, and interestingly, +probably controversially at the time, has female "protagonist", recovered alcoholic, bad-livered) - want to read more (only previous is Time's Arrow)

-- No Longer Human and Shrike go together nicely as companion texts -- Quentin S Crisp should be famous by now as the great england person reconfiguring the I Novel with nihil horror and england wet playground melancholy and following through on the implications of all that (probably only he knows fully what they are right now) -- inside Shrike is a translation of a poem written in french in No Longer Human:

. . . et puis on recommence encore le lendemain
avec seulement la meme regle que la vielle
et qui est d'eviter les grandes joies barbares
de meme que les grandes douleurs
comme un crapaud contorne une pierre sur son chemin . . .

but the translation must be from the japanese (which would be a translation from the french) (Quentin S Crisp knows japanese very fully):

And so, the next day, the same things repeated endlessly,
And simply to follow in the trodden path of yesterday is satisfactory.
In other words, if he thereby avoids any great and savage joy
Likewise, he manages to escape any great and savage sorrow,
Like a toad creeping round
A rock that blocks his way . . .

Both are super-class books, I plan to write more on Shrike after a 2nd reading (it was going to be a companion book for a trip to mountains, but the trip was not attained in the end -- however the tone is very like a companion, perhaps books where very little happens (quiet books) are more likely to be companions to you in the lone life) (because it is itself quiet?)

From No Longer Human:

What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful.

4 · A 500en hardback of Ulysses, it turns out to be a controversial "Gabler Edition" -- I was bit worried at first when I learned about this Gabler/Kidd controversy, like I'd made a mistake, but I am happy now -- surely it's an academic ego battle over who gets to be boss of the book -- & unlikely there's such a thing as a perfect edition -- :more information: about all of this -- the chapters are handily numbered, the book itself stays open without any slowly clamping closed action, currently am among the wandering rocks

Question --

. . . Rattle his bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody knows.

-- that's from a smiths song, is it an old irish song originally, or is it something first appeared in Ulysses then turned into lullaby-like line in a smiths song?

5 · The anime full moon o sagashite is nice -- a 10yr old orphan girl wants to be a pop singer, but has to wait til she's 16 to enter the audition, but she has throat cancer, and will be dead soon, but some death spirit things come and give her the power to transform now and then into a 16yr old -- it has a nice opening, similar in places (or one place only maybe) to the urusei yatsura opening -- so I provide them both here for comparative studies:




& how lovely the weather suddenly is