I finally finished THE STORY OF THE STONE this morning! It was great (aside from the bit at the end maligning the women, who‘re the book‘s main focus despite Bao-Yu‘s central character status), and the last five pages took me half a frickin‘ hour to read because of this adorable red menace. Argh. #deweyoct #readathon
I did the Sunday afternoon book & beer thing, with strange lighting effects and two schnauzers who I just barely managed to keep from sampling the beer. (It was a very nice witbier. I might‘ve drunk it too quickly.)
I‘m now in the home stretch with THE STORY OF THE STONE! Unless I get distracted, I should know all the sordid details of the Jia family‘s sad fate by the end of the week.
I requested the final volume of THE STORY OF THE STONE as soon as I finished Vol 4, and it didn‘t come in. When I checked the catalogue again, they‘d marked it as Trace.
I figured there was nothing I could do if someone stole it, but if it was lost in the library maybe *I* could find it. I went to the branch today, and it was right there on the shelf, exactly where it was supposed to be. 🤷♀️
I got a bunch of other stuff too, since I was there.
Today‘s plan: make a good start on THE DEBT OF TEARS with this little cutie and her sister.
I kinda lost my momentum with THE STORY OF THE STONE when I didn‘t touch it during Gay May. Now I‘ve reached the maximum number of renewals on Vol 3, so I NEED to push on through the last hundred and thirty pages today and tomorrow. Let‘s do this.
I set my opera doll‘s face to Xi-feng in honour of how very awful she‘s been in recent scenes.
pickOf the four of Shen Fu's records which have passed down to us, the first three recount his life with his adorable wife Yün, whose sweet nature was subject to anxiety & depression, sensitive to the harsh judgements of her in-laws, & prone to ill health, which we know from early on will sunder the loving couple. Shen's grief at her death is palpable & moving.
The couple live an aesthetic life, troubled by precarious employment, poverty and... 1/4⬇️
pickFast-paced, direct, breezy humor in Beijing. Dust storms, police crackdowns, pirated DVDs, migration, urban survival, economic inequality, desperation, entrepreneurialism, living by your wits. “Making it.” Wild final scene. Great trans. Eric Abrahamsen. 2014
43 “Ha, people were all too vain to withstand love.”
6 “ the sun was dropping steadily in the sandpaper sky […] looking more and more like a giant millstone weighing on Beijing‘s shoulders.”
"She prized shabby old books and tattered paintings. She would take the partial remnants of old books and separate them into sections by topic, and then have them rebound. These she called her 'Fragments of Literature'. When she found some calligraphy or a painting that had been ruined, she felt she had to search for a piece of old paper on which to remount it. If there were portions missing, she would ask me to restore them. These she named ⬇️
"I was born in the winter of the 27th year of the reign of the Emperor Chien Lung, on the second and twentieth day of the eleventh month."
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
Written around 1809 by a mid-level Ch'ing Dynasty civil servant, the surviving four records (nonetheless confusingly still titled "Six Records") recount Fu's marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Yün, his dalliances with courtesans and her efforts to secure him a concubine, in keeping with the social mores of the time.
In a culture of arranged marriages, the introduction says that Fu's description of his romantic love match with Yün was unusual ⬇️
