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Glasses, and other piecemeal notes
May. 14th, 2004 12:43 amHeard on AMLA: Central Park Media is licensing manga for an imprint devoted to yaoi. As in with actual NC17. Prolly will pan out to be mostly available online. And the first thing I thought was--
"That's three or four of the Christmas presents I have to pick this year taken care of! Super!"
--which I feel says it all, but I don't know what "it all" is in this case.
Will likely not be able to buy manga this month; bought new glasses instead. So instead of the current - I always say Tezuka-like set but they're not really, I keep forgetting that I'm no longer wearing the Tezuka-like glasses (basically destroyed by use) but the ones I had before that, which are just as silver and skinny but rounder and with sort of odd Celtic knotwork on the nose and earpieces, and are .5 off in the right lens - I have (will have, rather) long slim rectangular-block frames of translucent smoky-grey lucite, that when examined under good lighting reveals itself to be, in fact, not grey but violet. The effect is extremely innocuous (everyone has long dark plastic frames these days) with a vague overtone of sci-fi movie programmer indiegirl. I'd be lying if I said the effect wasn't intentional. They make my face look very different, but not as different as it looks to me with my contacts in. I know that I personally barely perceive any change in the faces of my friends when they remove their glasses, especially if the frames were as unobstrusive as mine, but I haven't the slightest idea who the glasses-free person in the mirror is. I haven't seen her unfuzzed for a good decade, and in that time one might assume that she's undergone changes of physiognomy. The effect is... disconcerting.
It's really, really easy to become a completely different person. Not that you or I could drop three hundred bucks as offhandedly as that, but that's still much less of a money/effort expenditure than people seem to assume.
(Watch me, like, write a story about Yagyuu now.)
The book, the book - can you tell when I've been reading and the words bleed into my blog entries? I can sometimes tell with other people - Kalpa Imperial, by Angélica Gorodischer (translated from the Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin). Argentinian fantastic literature. It's billed as a novel, but is really a collection of short stories related by narrative device, theme and setting: all of them are told by a nameless storyteller (not always the same person), involve Emperors and Empresses and a cross-section of their subjects, and take place within the same Empire (in what we understand to be vastly divergent eras, though no chronological order is hinted at). Basically, it's what Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities would be if it contained lots of politics and a historical sense reminiscent of early Orson Scott Card. Which of course is exactly the sort of thing I like and expect to like, apart from which it's a very good book.
"That's three or four of the Christmas presents I have to pick this year taken care of! Super!"
--which I feel says it all, but I don't know what "it all" is in this case.
Will likely not be able to buy manga this month; bought new glasses instead. So instead of the current - I always say Tezuka-like set but they're not really, I keep forgetting that I'm no longer wearing the Tezuka-like glasses (basically destroyed by use) but the ones I had before that, which are just as silver and skinny but rounder and with sort of odd Celtic knotwork on the nose and earpieces, and are .5 off in the right lens - I have (will have, rather) long slim rectangular-block frames of translucent smoky-grey lucite, that when examined under good lighting reveals itself to be, in fact, not grey but violet. The effect is extremely innocuous (everyone has long dark plastic frames these days) with a vague overtone of sci-fi movie programmer indiegirl. I'd be lying if I said the effect wasn't intentional. They make my face look very different, but not as different as it looks to me with my contacts in. I know that I personally barely perceive any change in the faces of my friends when they remove their glasses, especially if the frames were as unobstrusive as mine, but I haven't the slightest idea who the glasses-free person in the mirror is. I haven't seen her unfuzzed for a good decade, and in that time one might assume that she's undergone changes of physiognomy. The effect is... disconcerting.
It's really, really easy to become a completely different person. Not that you or I could drop three hundred bucks as offhandedly as that, but that's still much less of a money/effort expenditure than people seem to assume.
(Watch me, like, write a story about Yagyuu now.)
The book, the book - can you tell when I've been reading and the words bleed into my blog entries? I can sometimes tell with other people - Kalpa Imperial, by Angélica Gorodischer (translated from the Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin). Argentinian fantastic literature. It's billed as a novel, but is really a collection of short stories related by narrative device, theme and setting: all of them are told by a nameless storyteller (not always the same person), involve Emperors and Empresses and a cross-section of their subjects, and take place within the same Empire (in what we understand to be vastly divergent eras, though no chronological order is hinted at). Basically, it's what Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities would be if it contained lots of politics and a historical sense reminiscent of early Orson Scott Card. Which of course is exactly the sort of thing I like and expect to like, apart from which it's a very good book.
