High Water

Fantagraphics are releasing Heart of Thomas next year! You guys I am excited.

Valborg points out that Matt Thorn is totally a fanboy for that manga, so no-one should really be surprised. But yay!

That's all I had to say.

I really want a translation of the rest of Igarashi Yumiko's Paros no Ken.

Maybe one day I'll manage to bribe someone into giving me one, but until then, I'll be over here with raw scans and vague plot summaries. Has anyone read it? Is it actually as awesome as it sounds? Because it sounds awesome. Of all the untranslated but interesting-sounding things I've encountered during my exploration, this is right up near the top of the "want to know more" list. ....HUH. apparently it IS all scanlated and I just... somehow missed half of it? NEVER MIND.

P.S. For those of you following my Sailor Moon progress with baited breath (no, really, I get the feeling that crystal actually is), I've finished season one and am getting ready to watch R. well, the bits that I've been advised to watch, anyway.

After this weekend I'm going to get back to working on the main current project, which is to say, a talk that Valborg & I are going to be giving at B.L.Y.G. on queerness & 70s shojo, and also on getting up content on our shared blog, which is meant to be functioning as our public face linked in to any talks etc we might want to do, but which is tragically empty right now. (I'm completely identifiable in RL from the contents of this journal - seriously, there are not very many British immigrants to Sweden who are living in a lesbian partnership with someone called Valborg - but it's not meant to be a formal or focused space, so that's where the blog comes in.)

I'd have been charging at it this week but since Valborg has been loaded with a pile of birthday organising I figured she could use a period of grace. I think we have most of the info we need now to do a great talk and some fun posts anyway, so it's mostly structure, images, etc. now. (I've gleefully read ALL THE SHOJO HISTORY that exists in English, both good and dubious, and I won't get to use most of it in this case, so I'll probably turn a chunk of it into a post somewhere - blog or here or both.)

My function in this creative partnership is to be all serious and obsessively academic and Valborg's job is to thwap me lovingly over the head, remind me that it's meant to be fun, and add sparkles. I fear this will be a running joke. *g*



OTHER WILD SUMMER PLANS: Stockholm Pride is mostly free this year. I'd been planning to save birthday money and buy tickets, but I guess I don't have to now! In light of this information, anyone who thinks that hanging out with us in Stockholm in the first week of August and going to some incredibly gay talks, tours and misc. events sounds like their idea of a good time should plan accordingly. If I'm still not healthy by August we're hiring a fucking wheelchair, SO. We will be there. (There will definitely be things happening in English too, if this is relevant information.)



OTHER CURRENT EVENTS: I have an entrance test for Stockholm University's Swedish course in a couple of weeks, which is to see if my current level is good enough and which of their two courses (one which is prepatory for the other; the higher level one qualifies one to study at Swedish universities in Swedish). I'm getting a lift there and I also need to think about if there's anything I can ask them to provide for me to make the test easier, since really not well & doubt I'll be recovered by then.

If I'm accepted to the course I'll be studying in Autumn; if at all possible I'll be doing this with or without funding from CSN. The only completely unavoidable cost is a bus card, and I can probably get help with that from someone or other in the family.

After that I need to think about taking Högskoleprovet (a test which gives a grade you can use to apply for university), since if I can get a good score on that that'll put me in a bigger intake pool for normal university courses than a foreign grade would there are assigned numbers of places for students at universities: quite a lot of places for people with college scores, quite a lot for people who've taken the test, and not that many for people from overseas with a foreign college/university grade. Obviously that's not a relevant concern for the course I'm applying for now, since it's only for people from overseas.

I also have all these crazy dreams about being able to volunteer with Hallongrottan and similar if I study in Stockholm, but as Valborg points out, yes, I should do those things, but I should also remember not to break myself.

I'm pretty good at breaking myself, basically. But hey! I'm trying to learn better.



ETA OF JOY: I've just got my first birthday present, from Valborg: a year's subscription to the fabulous Swedish feminist magazine Bang! My face looks like this: :D

1. You've probably seen this around, but on the offchance, “Straight Male Gamer” told to ‘get over it’ by BioWare. How beautiful is this?


2. I know some of you are academically inclined when it comes to anime & manga fandom, and so I thought I'd ask around a bit - do you know any good articles or book chapters on shojo, particularly classic shojo, and even more specifically with a focus on queerness? Do you know of any good articles or book chapters on the historical traditions into which that particular brand of 70s shojo that I'm so interested in fits into? Do you know of any about its influence on later manga?

I have some material on all these things, various manga history books and academic papers, but one always misses things. And you guys are a smart and well-read bunch. ♥


3. Yesterday I imagined that I had picked up my wallet and put it in my pocket before we went to the shops. I had, in fact, put it on the microwave.

I seem to be putting a lot of things on the microwave lately, for no apparent reason. My only defence is that I'm still pretty heavily medicated...

Dear Dreamwidth,

In the past week I have read all the manga I could get my hands on and a not insubstantial amount of queer and feminist theory.

The two have collided in my mind and there has been some kind of terrible explosion.

Send help.

Love,
Liz

(Manga, by the way, is the best way I've found to survive dark evenings when I just want to go to sleep at seven pm. The rest of the books I read are by that stage way beyond me, but can I read To Terra and go "oooh, the hair" for a few hours? Can I ever. By the way, I'm making a list of stuff I'm going to try and get hold of in the near future; do you have any interesting manga that's published in English or Swedish? whether it's in print or not, because by the wonders of public libraries many things are possible. So far it's all Hagio Moto! Takemiya Keiko! Yoshinaga Fumi! etc...)

Latest contribution to Awesome 70s Shojo Week from starlady: A, A' (Hagio Moto)

I'm sticking with Ikeda Riyoko a little longer, although I promise that I have some other people to talk about as well; I might as well just get this out of my system first, right? Today we're on a manga I don't actually like all that much, which might be a bit out of the spirit of the thing, but I think it's maybe worth talking about anyway.


Claudine is one of Ikeda Riyoko's shorter stories. It's only around a hundred pages long, and I have to say that it does feel like a summary of quite a long & complex story rather than a story which actually should have been that short. Anyway: the short version of this post is that this is another of those reach-exceeding-grasp manga, of which this group also produced quite a lot. I think it's the widest miss of Ikeda's that I've read. Which isn't to say that it's devoid of interest.

This story contains a lot of elements that you'll have seen before if you've read much of Ikeda Riyoko's work; the pseudo-historical setting, the floppy shirts, the gender issues, the father who wants his daughter to be a son (but not too much of a son). Oh and the angst! And suicide! And manipulative relationships! I think we are basically only missing drugs and mystery wasting diseases?

Wikipedia is currently describing it as a classic yuri story, but if that's how it's widely thought of then I'm afraid people are wrong again, because although the female-bodied main character is addressed as Claudine and with female pronouns for most of the story it's still a story that focuses on a character who is struggling with being trans.

( Claudine )

P.S. Shouldn't there be a place on DW more for anime/manga discussion than for posting fic/art/etc? Or a place for talking about all the random old shojo stuff that is really interesting but not the kind of thing people write mountains of fic about?

Or does such a thing exist?

Because TBH at this point in my dubious internet career I'm way more interested in discussion and essays (however rough or formal or essentially ridiculous in premise) than anything else.

This week has been a bit oncoming-train somehow. I have a test tomorrow (which isn't something I Must Do Brilliantly On but which has registered in my brain as A TEST OH NO SKY WILL FALL anyway) and a doctor's appointment on Friday. I'm feeling a little less than balanced. But if I keep moving it's OK!

Accordingly, I went to Stockholm today, mostly to buy tea - we're horrible people so the only place apparently in Sweden that sells tea we find acceptable is near Ostermalmstorg, yes you can hate us now - and to pick up books from the comics library in Kulturhuset. I also went to the SF bookshop, because I just can't help myself, and used my last bit of birthday money to buy Yoshinaga Fumi's All My Darling Daughters.

I have a soft spot for Yoshinaga Fumi (who you are most likely to know from Antique Bakery, I suppose), but that she'd actually written a book about women was news to me, because, well, you know, I don't pay that much attention. But having realised that she had, of course I bought it.

( Thoughts )


I might come back and pull apart the stories and what I thought about their ideas in more detail some other time. But then again, my attention span...