What the Spam Said

[desperance]

I am of that school that used to have an attention-span but lost it, a while back, somewhere in my twenties; these days I flit, I fleet, I fly. I thank any manner of gods for the interweb, because it keeps me here at the keyboard, it keeps me in place to work. I multitask wherever I am, but only if I'm here is one of those tasks the working.

But anyway, what I meant to say, I check my e-mail constantly, and just now I did that and there was just a spam. And the contents were nothing, one of those pharmaceutical misspellings, but the subject line was "Your health, oat grinder" - and because I am who I am and I do what I do, it was instantly a scene, a classic: the remote and silent peasant mashing up his grain before he boiled his daily porridge, the well-spoken and inherently threatening stranger who comes down the hill to greet him and thereby precipitates all manner of change, revelation, story...

Comments

[mantichore.livejournal.com]

I wrote "Yi King", because I dimly recall that's the way it was spelled, more or less, in P.K. Dick's "Man in the High Castle". In French, it's I-Ching. Translitterating Chinese is a bit beyond my capabilities, though I've juggled with English translitterations, older French ones and newer French ones when I translated into French Barry Hughart's excellent Master Li & Number Ten Ox novels. You see, we've had two different ways of translitterating Chinese, an older one, and a modern one — and I decided these books set in a rather chronologically mixed-up "ancient China that never was" would read better if the names were translitterated using the older way of doing it. It was something of an interesting puzzle, at times, and a lot of fun in a masochistic way.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

In English too, an older and a modern version, Wade-Giles (what you could call the Peking version: Victorian, and pretty, and hopelessly inconsistent) and pinyin (the Beijing version: post-WWII Communist creation, much more consistent and accurate, but somehow much less fun). And in my own fantasy writing about Taiwan - my "ancient China that never was" - I made the same choice, to go for Wade-Giles. As they still do throughout Taiwan, bless them, because they couldn't use anything that came from the Communists...