Sons of Loki

Useless skills you can learn in an afternoon #1: The Coin Walk.

Today’s been a day off – National Foundation Day – and as usual on days off, I have achieved absolutely nowt. Well, I did a tiny bit of Japanese work, I suppose. And learned to coin walk, if that counts for anything. And poached an egg for the first time (delicious!)

I’m a little worried for our upcoming spring break. Okay, Rob’s said we might go hitchhiking with his friend (which will be absurdly fun if we do) and Katie and Chris are coming over for a few weeks, but that leaves the best part of February 17th to April 5th completely void, and I have no idea what I’m going to do. I should just revise kanji in preparation for the Leeds test, which has been dated for May 7th. I could spend lots of money exploring Japan and getting into exciting adventures, just like the old days. I suspect, however, that I will spend it in a coffee-fuelled haze, occasionally writing a page or two for my great unfinished novel (coming in the year 201x) and staring at the walls and occasionally going out and regretting it.

But it’ll be nice to have some time off. It’s just I need a certain structure, a certain regularity to my life, and without it I lose all … whatever it is that I usually have.

I do wonder if I perhaps have something like adult ADD. That’s a big thing to self-diagnose, I know, and everyone would be well in order to tell me to buck my ideas up and get my head down and all that. It’s just … I find it hard to concentrate. I get distracted easily. A lot of things I’ve read about ADD ring bells for me. I ain’t saying that excuses bad grades, or that I don’t need to work hard. It just helps to realise that I possibly have something that means I work a little differently to most people, is all. And, knowing that, I can work around it. Because it’s not like I want to fail. It’s not like I don’t want to be fluent in Japanese.

But I forget what I was thinking about. Back to flashcards.

A few links I’ve picked up over the last week:

The Death of the Blog Post I’ve always liked bold graphic design, to the point where I sometimes get strange urges to run away from uni and become a graphic designer. Anyway, it’s interesting to see some of the new original magazine-inspired designs you can find on blog articles these days, and that article itself is a prime example. I’d stitch together such a thing for my own blog posts, but I lack the time and the knack and I really have nothing quite so interesting to say. It does make me want to re-jig this theme a little, though.

The remnants of Biosphere 2 When I was a kid I was fascinated by Biosphere 2, a great socio-biological experiment in the Arizona desert that aimed to create a sealed ecosystem. Now, like many things from the mid-90s, including East 17, it’s all a bit depressing and abandoned. Photographer Noah Sheldon documents the remains, which are ironically being taken over by the very nature the experiment sort to duplicate.

The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen’s idea of subnature—wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed “as a transgressive animated force against buildings”—and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai.

What happened to the hominids who may have been smarter than us? It’s a little over-enthusiastic in its extrapolations, but this article presents a fascinating Scratch that. The idea of a super-intelligent hominid has been thoroughly debunked.

Watched The Big Lebowski the other day, and was thoroughly amused. I’ve been meaning to watch it for years, but the final impetus was the sublime Shakespeare version recently released, which does more than a straight “olde english” parody and hits the Shakespearean style right on the head with delicious puns and wordplay and oh-so-perfect writing.

BLANCHE
Let us soak him in the commode, so as to turn his head.

WOO
Aye, and see what vapourises; then he will see what is foul.

[They insert his head into the commode]

BLANCHE
What dreadful noise of waters in thine ears! Thou hast cooled thine head; think now upon drier matters.

WOO
Speak now on ducats else again we’ll thee duckest; whither the money, Lebowski?

THE KNAVE
Faith, it awaits down there someplace; prithee let me glimpse again.

WOO
What, thou rash egg! Thus will we drown thine exclamations.

Yah, been a quiet couple of days. Well, actually no. Went out on Saturday night with the guys/girls for a cheap (1000 yen) night at Atom, a club somewhere in the backstreets of Shibuya (I’ll never find these places again). It was an alright place, especially for that sort of price.

I am freshly committed to finishing my novel, because I’ve realised that if I leave it a couple of years it will begin to look outdated, given that it touches on contemporary events. Almost without realising it, I’ve discovered that this third section is all about social media and social networking and the differences it will make to our lives. But I don’t want to go all technologically evangelistic, because despite the posturings of the Twitterati most of the web is about unintelligible #hashtags and braindead YouTube comments and bad spelling. I’m hoping that will work well as a thematic conflict of ideologies. Maybe. We shall see.

I decided to head back to Asakusabashi, for a stroll along the Sumida River. The trip out was weird; first time I’ve been out in daylight for a while, first time I’ve seen Tokyo in the morning for a long time.

I went to Asakusa, to Shitamachi (lit. ‘down-town’, meaning ‘old town’), way back in 2007 to find a department store that apparently specialised in fancy paper. While there I ended up down strange ancient alleys that seemed the antithesis of the Tokyo I knew, and wandering along the Sumida River, so desolate and empty compared to the Thames or the Seine or whatever municipal rivers you care to name.

It was a stroll that inspired a short story for my Writing Fiction class last year, and that little short story grew into a novel that’s 60k and counting. Head down the right passage off the Sumida embankment, you see, and you stumble across the secret artist commune that’s at the heart of my novel. Which sets most of my novel in old town, in Shitamachi. Which meant I wanted to head along and do a little research. (It’s not every day one’s in Tokyo, after all.)

After lunch at Maccy D’s, I walk.

I always feel some strange connection to rivers. I’d love to own a boat one day, go chugging along, watch the scenery go by…

The titantic bulk of the (Shuto?) Expressway.

I bother a few pigeons for cool shots.

Strange little buildings, as far from the towers of Shinjuku as can be imagined.

Could this be the secret entrance, I wonder? (Naught but a concrete wall and bags of rubbish could I peek behind it.)

The riverside walk stretches on for an awfully long way, but is desolate except for old people, the homeless, and a couple salarymen on a smoke break.

How many live here?

Fabulously wealthy Tokyo has a shanty town too. It's just that this shanty town is thousands of elaborate cardboard hovels stretched in every nook and cranny across the city.

I end up walking quite a ways along the river, all the way down to Tsukishima and its Hong Kong-esque apartment towers at the tip of Tokyo Bay. Here I stop for a sit-down at the top of a steep embankment and catch a quick nap in the less-than-blazing January sunshine.

Walking back inland towards Tokyo Station, I pop into a Starbucks populated mainly by businesspeople rather than the usual student crowd (and a woman in a kimono chatting to a Yank for reasons I couldn’t discern) and get a café latte while putting a few ideas down. Writing in cafes. It’s practically the entire point of being a writer.

Money is running tight, thanks to splurging on stupid kanji textbooks which I’m not even sure I need (given that I’ve got a perfectly good kanji dictionary), and what counts as a small amount here is a ridiculously huge expenditure back home, like Japan is some kind of magical shrinking land where all of £50 transforms into £5 after it passes through the mystical portal to Nippon.

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The exchange rate has jumped 10 yen, which isn’t much but does make some difference. Plus I just picked up my MUFJ bank book and card, and the JASSO scholarship will indeed be going in next week, and I got my electricity bill and I only spent 1,214 yen (£8) for the period 30/09 – 18/10, which implies that my monthly cost will be a mere 1800 yen or so; which is far less than the 15000 I budgeted for – although the water bill could be ridiculously high, I don’t know.

Also I got some MEN’S HAIR STRAIGHTENERS and now my hair looks a bit like Nick Cave’s from when he was in The Birthday Party and on lots of heroin, which is good.

And it’s November soon, which means it’s Nanowrimo time again! Last time my bizarre tale of alien invasion utilitarianism floundered at ~34,000 words, but it was a good experience nonetheless, and I’m certain that it gave me the impetus to go ahead with my currently-in-progress novel, right now at about ~54,000 words. The thing is, do I cheat and use the month to finish that off, winding up with a choppy-but-complete 100,000 word novel? Or do I follow the spirit of Nano and start afresh with something totally original and unashamedly pulpy? The prospect of actually having a 100,000-word finished novel to my name in 40 days time is almost too good to resist, rules be damned.