立冬

[muckefuck]

As far as I'm concerned, winter is already here; as proof I offer up my first winter cold. It started on Wednesday, and really settled in on Thursday. A steady routine of zinc has kept it within bounds, but it was still enough to bollox up my plans with mlr for Friday. "Lunch downtown, dinner on Devon" became "lunch by yourself, dinner by yourself, with an hour or so of visiting inbetween". It was a nice visit, but it wasn't at all what I'd had in mind.

But with Parsifal on the docket for tonight, we thought it best to keep plans simple. I slept really badly on Thursday and was worried about a repeat last night so monshu and I slept in separate rooms and I spent a total of nearly twelve hours between the sheets, at least ten of them actually sleeping. Now the trick will be to overcome all that lethargy. I do hope Davis is up to the task.

So what did I do with all that time lying about? Read when I could, doze when I couldn't. Last night when I was straining to keep my eyes open a little longer (I know it sounds ridiculous, but if I go to bed before 9, it almost invariably means insomnia later) I ended up watching some bad television. On the positive side, I'm two-thirds through Dalby's Tale of Murasaki. As I suspected, at first it just made me want to start reading Genji again, but the narrative has since come into its own.

Mostly, it's worth reading for the tinsel. It's peppered with details of Hei'an courtly life (sometimes rather preciously explained in footnotes) and summarises pretty much everything that's known about Murasaki's existence. All of this will help enrich my next rereading of Murasaki's masterwork. It's been particularly diverting to look up the various exotic plants mentioned in passing. Most recently something Dalby translates as "maidenflower" (Japanese 女郎花 ominaeshi) a.k.a. Patrinia scabiosifolia, an "unassuming clump-forming perennial" of the valerian family. I did a doubletake when I saw the Chinese name, 敗醬 biàjiàng "spoiled sauce". According to Lin Yutang, this is due to the smell of the edible stem. Sorta adds an interesting dimensions to the poetic exchange between Murasaki and Michinaga where he compares her to it, doesn't it?

Still, the Chinese name raises two questions for me: (1) Soy sauce goes bad?; (2) Who would want to eat something which smells like that? Then I saw that the alternative name he gives is 苦菜 kǔcài "bitter vegetable" (naturally applied to several other plants as well, notably Sonchus oleraceus or sowthistle) and thought, "Duh, tyrannio."

Comments

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

Though vegetable species are numberless, I vow to eat them.