Books and anime

[tarigwaemir]

DeWolfe Apts. on the Feast of St. Thomas More

schwimmerin is all moved in. ^_^

Books seen yesterday at the Coop:

• A History of Orgies, by Burgo Partridge:
  Self-explanatory, n'est-ce pas? It would make a great gift for someone, someday.
  
• The Sword and the Mind, by Yagyu Muenori, trans. Hiroaki Sato:
  Written during the Tokugawa shogunate. It's an instruction book on various sword tactics used during combat. I flipped through it, and to my surprise, every page described a waza from kendo. Well, yes, kendo had to be derived from somewhere, but I've always gotten the impression that kendo was much more stylized now. It cost $6.99...maybe I should buy it after I get my first paycheck.
  
• The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings, by Karl Marx:
  For only $3! I find it appropriate that a declaration of the proletariat revolution is nearly free for the taking (at least when compared to other books).
  
• Babygami, by Andrea Cornell Sarvady and Fern Drillings:
  The subtitle says, "Baby Wrapping for Beginners". Looking at the cover reminded me of a Christmas homily I once heard at children's Mass when I was very young. The priest was describing the manger scene and explained that swaddling cloths were used to wrap the newborn infant very tightly so that he wouldn't move about and injure himself. I remember thinking that it sounded as uncomfortable as a straitjacket at the time.

Color, by Victoria Finlay: I can't begin to describe how absolutely charming this book is. I had a similar reaction to Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman. Whenever I run across these sorts of nonfiction books, it makes me want to write myself, more so than a brilliant novel. It appeals to my eclectic academic sensibilities, I suppose.

From the footnotes to the introduction:

In the seventh century, St. John of Damascus said: "I worship the creator of matter who became matter for my sake, and who willed to take his abode in matter; who worked out my salvation through matter."

Chesterton would enjoy this quote, I believe. Church dogma isn't all antimaterialistic Platonism.

From the chapter "Black and Brown", on ink:

Once, for example, Su was criticized for painting a picture of leafy bamboo using red ink. Not realistic, his critics said gleefully. "Then what color should I have used?" he asked. "Black, of course," came the answer.

Also on ink:

Sometimes recipes for ink read like the random elements of a love poem: cloves, honey, locusts, the virgin pressing of olives, powdered pearl, scented musk, rhinoceros horn, jade, jasper, as well as, of course--most poignant and most common--that exquisite smoke of pine trees in autumn.

On printing ink:

The Printing Ink Manual, published in 1961, gives a wonderful image of a seventeenth-century printer and his employees taking a day off to replenish their ink supplies. They would go beyond the city walls to an open space, and there they would set up great pots for heating the oil. When it was boiling, the mucilage separated off, and the apprentices would sop it up by throwing bread into the vats: it must have smelled like a huge greasy fry-up.

On shades of brown:

Brown has been such an abused color in terms of names: "drab" is now a definition of dullness but was once the technical term for a hue basking boringly on that middle line between olive and puce. "Puce"--meaning flea colored--was once a fairly nice thing to say about Marie Antoinette's favorite color. Or how about "caca du dauphin," a favorite in National Trust houses in the 1930s, and loosely translatable as "princely crap"? But even the color "isabella," which sounds so pretty, has its origins in decay and bad smells. Rudyard Kipling loved this color term, and used it twice in his books. It refers to a curious decision by Queen Isabella (the queen who allegedly pawned her jewels to enable Columbus to make his voyage in 1492) to give moral support to the defenders of a siege near her hometown of Castile. Most ladies of her time would just have prayed supportively for the besieged soldiers. Not so Isabella, who apparently made the unusual (and as far as I know never repeated) pledge not to change her bodice until that particular town was liberated. She overestimated the skill of the opposite army. Perhaps if she--or her long-suffering husband Ferdinand--had known the town would be six months or more in the freeing, she would never have made the promise.

On lead white, from the chapter "White":

Pliny included lead white in his Natural History. [...] In his time the best quality of lead white came from Rhodes, and he described how it was made. Workers would put shavings of thin lead over a bowl filled with vinegar. The action of the acid on the thin metal would cause a chemical reaction and leave a white deposit of lead carbonate. The lead-workers of Rhodes then powdered it, flattened it into little cakes and left it to dry in the summer sun.

On zinc white:

From its days in the alchemists' laboratories before the element was isolated, zinc oxide had been given many wonderful names, including "tutty" (from the Persian word "dud" for smoke), "zinc flowers," "philosopher's wool" and blutenweiss or "blood white." Each name gives a different clue to the story of zinc oxide. The smoke refers to its genesis in the coal-fired ovens of brass furnaces and the flowers and wool describe the way in which it forms fluffily in the upper chamber of the oven. The blood white reference is the oddest of them all, a reminder of how this white paint starts off as red, having been colored in the ground by manganese.

On Farrow & Ball house paints:

The company is proud of its wonderful and eccentric paint names. "String" was originally called "Straw Left out in the Rain" and was designed by the 1930s paint genius John Fowler, who used both words and colors with enthusiasm. "Clunch" is named from the East Anglian slang for a hard chalk building block while "Blackened" is actually another off-white--in which soot is used to make a pigment with a silver tinge.

As for "Dead Salmon," the name has nothing to do with death at all. It was inspired by an invoice for decorating a house in 1850: "It just means a dead flat finish," Helme said. When people used lead paint it was sometimes too shiny, so they would "flatten" or "deaden" it with turpentine to make it look more matte.

More to come. I'm beginning the chapter on "Red" now.

The attempt to write something each day for an hour has turned into "thinking about what to write for about ten minutes then getting sidetracked by watching Legend of Galactic Heroes". I watched both OVAs, as per kitsune_jade's advice, and now the first four episodes make much more sense. I like Reinhard but still think he's an insensitive idiot. Kircheis is the real brains behind the enterprise, in my opinion. Reinhard just sits there and comes up with brilliant strategies while Kircheis smooths the way and mollifies all the irritated egos that follow in Reinhard's wake. Also, I have millions of questions about the military technology in LoGH because that's the only explanation I can come up with for some of the truly clunky strategies I've seen so far. Further speculation to come as I continue to procrastinate on my thesis proposal. (I really have no idea when I'm going to write it because I come home late every day and I have to go to lab on Saturday and Sunday too. Maybe I should just grit my teeth and tell myself to finish it tomorrow no matter how late I stay up, but then how will schwimmerin ever sleep? ;_;)

Yours &c.

Post-script: Taken from aishuu: Favorite anime/manga in...

Sport: Hikaru no Go, if you include "board games" as sports. Otherwise...Slam Dunk? ^_^
Historical: Ravages of Time, of course.
Yaoi: For anime, Ai no Kusabi. For manga, Shanghai, July 1999. (For shounen ai, Rin!, of course.)
Yuri: Huh, now that I think of it, I've never read or watched yuri. O_O
Not-yaoi-but-they-should-so-be-doing-each-other: Uh, Gundam Wing? ^_^
Romance: For anime, Kare Kano. For manga, Hanazakari no Kimitachi e and Koukou Debut.
Magical/Fantasy: Twelve Kingdoms.
Epic (it goes on and on and on!): Glass Mask! (It's at how many volumes now? But I've only read up to volume 20.)
Surprise (didn't think you'd like it but you did): 20th Century Boys...Slam Dunk...
Action (non-scifi): Bleach counts, right? Followed closely by Rurouni Kenshin and Shaman King. (I love Jump.)
Mecha/SF: If you asked me last year, it would have been Gundam Wing, but now it's Legend of Galactic Heroes, hands down. (Apologies to my first anime fandom. ;_;)
Horror: Vampire Princess Miyu. Plus, if we changed that to supernatural series, it would be Mushishi. If we changed it to psychological horror, it would be Monster.
OMG the crack: Kodomo no Omocha, anime version. Although Ouran Koukou Host Club would be a pretty good fit there as well.
All-time favorite: Hikaru no Go, followed closely by Mushishi.

Post-post-script: Ugh, sorry about the HTML mess-up. Accidentally clicking on rich text editor completely messes up your code and ruins all LJ cuts.

...

Okay, stupidity of rich-text editor has forced me to repost. Argh.

Comments

[sangoire.livejournal.com]

I picked up Color from my library from your earlier recommendation! I haven't read very far into it yet, but it's a fascinating read so far. Thanks for the pointer :)

[troisroyaumes]

Yay! I'm glad it got you to start reading the book. (That reminds me, I've been meaning to hunt down the Megan Whalen Turner series you recommended a while back on your LJ as well. ^_^)

[schwimmerin.livejournal.com]

Heehee, you avoided the awkwardness by writing that when I was asleep. Good work! :D

[troisroyaumes]

And now am avoiding awkwardness by replying from work! XD

[ladydaera.livejournal.com]

omg, to read something unrelated to diabetes! not that i mind, it's just that i've edited 60 pages of reports (MS word, font 11) and written a page-long blog on four new drugs today and i still have a manuscript to edit and two literature reviews to do. which probably aren't going to get done today. eek. but yeah, the point is, thanks for the ink descriptions, very fascinating procrastination.

[ladydaera.livejournal.com]

oh, right, and attended my sister's fifth grade graduation. adorable

[troisroyaumes]

Awww, sounds cute!

If you liked the quotes, do read the book (well, when/if you have free time). I'm considering buying it; I love it so much. ^_^