Sorry-ology

  11/07/2024 A belated post but a necessary memo for myself. My second reading for the Read-for-kids event is an English poem by Thomas Nashe, Spring, the Sweet Spring. An unseasonal choice of a season-specific poem in a rainy time (July 2024). Given that the young audience is not entirely familiar with this foreign language, my approach is to make pleasant melody of sounds to appeal to their audio memory. This poem serves the function to me. I first came across this poem when I was seventeen when an English tutor "sang" the refrain to me. Since then the melody of birds' sounds in Spring has stuck in my mind even though it took me another 10 years to recall and identify the poet again. It has been one of my favorite melody of words. In preparation for the reading to allow the audience to visualize the sounds, I tried to identify the kinds of birds participating in the line "cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!". They are cuckoo, nightingale, lapwing, and owl. B...

 Tolstoy, Leo. What Men Live By? Ronald Wilks, trans. How Much Land Does A Man Need? Penguin Books, 2015, 23-53. 

  A Terrible Thing Happened By Margaret Holmes  Illustrated by Cary Pillo Y's friend in the kindergarten was injured in the forehead about more than 1 month ago. She recovered from the physical hurt but seems to have connected the horror of the injury to the ambulance that carried her to the hospital. She has been refusing to leave her mother fearing of the separation just like when she was taken to the hospital to get treatment.  The mother and I had a brief chat about this last week. I feel very sorry to see the mother drained of energy because of worries. I have been wanting to help. At first, I thought picture books featuring ambulances might help but was unsure if the child would simply be scared by the images of an ambulance. Then I started to think about the situation in relation to PTSD. After a search, there are books about how to help children suffering from psychological wounds.  A Terrible Thing Happened by Margaret Holmes is a book recommended to childre...

  Literature Italo Calvino, "The Dinosaurs"  P.D. James,  The Children of Men Tolstoy, Leo.  How Much Land Does a Man Need?  Ronald Wilks, trans. Penguin Classics, No. 57. Penguin, 2015.  Picture Books Klassen, Jon. The Skull: A Tyrolean Folktale . Candlewick Press, 2023.  Academic Articles Potten, Edward. "The Library and Commonplace Books of Mary Booth of Dunham Massey (1704-1772). The Library , 7th series, vol. 23, no. 4 (December, 2022).  Siegel, Kristi. "Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics : Qfwfg's Postmodern Autobiography". Italica , Spring, 1991, Vol. 68, No. 1. Perspectives on the Novecento (Spring, 1991), pp. 43-59. 

  Spring in Japan is the most dreadful season to me. I have been suffering from serious hay fever since I started living in the country. If the symptoms are combined with a cold, a situation that usually occurs, it simply turns into an unescapable hell in my case. Whenever I have a cold, I will develop a persistent cough that might last as long as 3 weeks. A cold induced by hay fever, as pollen is also full of germs, makes me sick of life, especially the spring break is usually the longest vacation I can have in a year when kids still go to school and kindergarten regularly and I can finally work on research. However, coughs just prevent everything from happening.  What is worse this year is that, there has been an unbelievable shortage of cough medicine across Tokyo since last year due to the spread of COVID and influenza. Last November, I visited three pharmacies to finally get some cough pills, but it was still a substitute medicine and was only half of the amount that was ...