My new home town is situated in a river gorge, and both the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal pass right through it. So we were fortunate that the Draken Harald Hårfagre made it one of their stops in the their Canadian and US tour. The name translates as “Dragon Harald Fairhair.” The Draken Harald Hårfagre is the largest Viking ship built in the current age. Named in honor of King Harald Fairhair (sometimes also translated as “Prettyhair”, the dude clearly had some major locks), the first King of Norway and modeled after the Gokstad Ship. On Saturday and Sunday the ship itself was open for tours, and who with a modicum of interest in history is going to pass up the chance to stand aboard a real viking ship? It’s not like that happens every day. So we braved the crowds and headed down to the marina. Continue reading
Category Archives: Folklore
Things That are Nowish
Normally I like to get these blog posts out earlier in the day, but we had a nice, crisp late-summer morning here (what a concept!) and decided to go looking for a nature trail we’d heard about. We had a beautiful drive in the area around Mt. Shumaker, but a bridge under repair blocked us from reaching the nature trail. We’ll likely be back as summer turns to fall. The view from the mountain would be spectacular.
Okay, back to business, at least for a bit. A reader had already told me that the Audible.com edition of Yamada Monogatari: The Emperor in Shadow was available for pre-order and this morning I got the official link. I was fortunate in that the audio book reader is once again the incredible Brian Nishii:
“Brian Nishii is a bicultural, bilingual performer from Tokyo. As an actor and dancer, he has worked with theatre companies such as La Mama’s Great Jones Company, Robert Wilson, In Mixed Company, Fluid Motion, Crossing Jamaica Avenue, and The South Wing. Film and television credits include Robot Stories, Sex and the City, and Law & Order (CI). He also provides lead vocals and antics for the colorful band, HappyFunSmile. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and baby boy.”
While it is not quite yet the official release date where you’ll be able to find the book in your local B&N, Amazon.com does have paper copies for sale, so if you know you want it (And why wouldn’t you?) it’s there now. I also want to mention that I have paper copies of my own and since I’m unlikely to be anywhere you are, if you want a signed copy you can get it directly from me. My contact email is on the “About” page. While Supplies Last. Continue reading
Yamada Monogatari: The Emperor in Shadow Ebook Live
We interrupt whatever this normally is for a strictly commercial announcement: Yamada Monogatari: The Emperor in Shadow is now live on Kindle, Apple/iTunes, and Nook. It’s a little unusual for the ebook edition to be available before the print edition goes live, but this time those preferring their reading on the screen will get a headstart. Enjoy!
The Heavenly Fox
I don’t often link to review sites, but for this one I’ll make an exception. Not because it’s positive–though it is–but rather it’s that the reviewer mostly got what I was trying to do. And The Heavenly Fox remains special to me. There, I said it.
History Lesson
Library
Believe it or not, that mess on the left actually represents progress. There hasn’t been a lot of that, at least in the library. I can see about a third of the bare floor now. I also know that, judging the remaining books with the remaining shelf space, the numbers just don’t work, and I can’t add more shelves…well, maybe one.
That’s for later. Part of the point of at least attempting to get organized is that I have a book to finish, a book set in a specific historical period and at a very important historical crisis point. In short, my references—and one specifically—were packed up, and I needed them. Not to get into many details, but there was a particular point in the story where Imperial and clan politics interacted in a very specific way, and in order to understand how that all fit into the narrative, I needed a specific book. That is, I thought I did. Until I was able to unpack said book.
Funny thing about that—what one person considers important, another just skims past. In other words, the book I was depending on was no help at all. I shouldn’t have been too surprised. What I was looking for was a fairly obscure series of events that happened over nine hundred years ago. Unless you happen to have a large university reference library at your disposal, you’re probably not going to find what you’re looking for. I don’t happen to have that. Nor do I have the shelf space to stock every reference I might possibly need, even if they did exist in translation, and usually the ebook edition in any language simply doesn’t exist.
What I do have is Google. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but online it took me maybe twenty minutes, tops, to track down what I was looking for, thanks to a Japanese site pulling from primary sources, with English translation provided. The internet does make some things more difficult with its constant distractions. But it also makes a lot of things possible. The information I needed simply wouldn’t have been available to me without it. Fortunately, I am not without it, so no problem.
Also no excuses. Funny how that works.
Richard Parks 