The Pillow Book

Sunday longer than Monday

2010-07-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

So is this blog worth reviving? Do I have an inner blogger I can channel? Do I have an inner Sei Shonagan I can call upon? Speak up now inner people, or forever hold your peace!

PS: So a 'pillow book' is essentially a random record of random musings and observations. They're mostly idle lists -- like a list on things I like about autumn. The earliest compiler of a 'pillow book' was Japanese court author(ess) Sei Shonagan in the 900s'. This was during the very bizarrely elegant Heian period in Japan when folks were high aesthetes. They used to converse in haikus, for instance (called wakas in that era). So you'd send out a very witty haiku via a running messenger even if you wanted to do something as mundane as ask someone out for a cup of tea. (Sort of like if we were to converse in sms poetry!) And oh, the women in this period blackened their teeth to look beautiful and sophisticated...
Shonagan's biggest rival and contemporary was another very talented writer Lady Murasaki Shikibu (still a literary giant in Jap lit). She wrote the epically popular (during that time) soap operatic series 'Tales of Genji'. Like any other women of any other era, the Japanese ladies lapped up the the amorous adventures of the rakish bad-boy knight Genji with his many lady friends.

Footnote for the day

2009-03-03T01:44:00.000-08:00

B FOR BURLESQUE

Meaning A: Anything that ridicules or caricatures its subjec
Meaning B: A ribald variety show with comic acts, dancing, and striptease
The English 'burlesque' has been borrowed, without alterations, from the French word for comical. The French in turn derived this word from the Italian 'burlesco' with minimal changes. The Italian word is originally based on 'burla' or 'joke, put-on', a word they picked up from the Spanish. The Spanish inherited the word from Latin 'burrae' which means 'nonsense', which came from 'burra' or 'wool'.

That's as far as I am willing to travel, etymologically...

Invoking Anne Sexton

2009-01-18T22:55:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from Black Art:
A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands weren't enough;
as if mourners and gossips and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl...