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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 120 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 July 22 Thursday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Really hot days. The air has a chemical smell. Sometimes paint, sometimes exhaust fumes, sometimes an indefinable otherness. At a guess, photochemical smog levels are high, but that's just a guess. As always in Japan, there are no smog warnings on TV. Because of the crushing heat and the polluted air, summer here in the Tokyo-Yokohama area becomes something of a tournament of endurance, so to speak. Section 120 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 July 30 Friday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) At about the age of one hundred days, baby Cornucopia finally succeeded in turning right over. She didn't do much when she had - just lay splodged on the futon with one arm still trapped under her. Later, she amused me by trying the same stunt in the bath, but I successfully prevented her from twisting herself into a face-down-in-the-bathwater position. A couple of days later, she finally grasped the German-made rattle and rattled it. After that, rattling became something of a habit, though up until that point she had pretty much ignored the rattle. About the same time (close to the hundred days mark) she also went through a "jungle calls" phase, in which she gave short, happy wildcat-type yawps every five minutes or so, evidently delighting in the discovery of a new mode of vocalization. Having watched my daughter through her first hundred days, my main observation is that development is not primarily verbal. Verbal skills, such as they are, seem to be an afterthought, something tagged on, and running a long way back from the main pack, far behind anticipation of the future and strategic cunning. Anticipation of the future shows up in things as simple as closing her eyes when her face is being washed. I always wash the scalp and then, with a cloth, the face. Initially, her eyes would stay wide open right up until the moment that the cloth ran over them, which was a bit horrific to watch (although no damage seemed to result, so she must have closed her eyes at the last moment.) But now, since she knows the routine, she closes her eyes a moment or two before the cloth reaches them, a little wrinkle crossing her forehead as she does so. I've started to get better at the "let's get the bad-tempered baby to sleep" bit, the trick being the songs from "The Sound of Music," which I find I know extremely well. I think I studied them in elementary school, and I also saw the movie a number of times as a kid. They seem to (usually) do the trick. Section 120 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 August 3 Tuesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Have been reading some superhero fiction to my daughter Cornucopia. The book in question is a bit advanced for her age. Given that she's less than four months old, I'm focusing on the fact that books have pages, and that they turn ("Turn, turn, turn, turn!") and that things have colors, and that the colors have names. Anyway, the book certainly tickled my fantasy. It's called "Boo!" and it's by Colin McNaughton, who did both the words and the pictures. It features a very naughty pig called Preston, aka the Masked Advenger, who goes round town persecuting totally innocent citizens, such as his schoolteacher. (He also says "Boo" as he goes sneaking past the home of the Big Bad Wolf, but makes sure it's a quiet boo, far too quiet to be heard.) What I liked was that the superhero (if we can call him that - he certainly has a formidable boo) is a bad guy. And, what's more, even after being caught and chastised by his father, he goes on being naughty. The author, then, is not a slave to the old shiboleth which tells us that "character must mature." At a guess, this book would be better suited to someone four years of age rather than someone not yet four months old, but it's nice for the parent, on occasion, to have something more challenging than a set of pictures of baby animals who all love mama animal. Regarding the "character must mature" rule (and there are people who try to make it an enforceable rule for writing fiction), I think this rule is unrealistic. People may change but, in my opinion, as time goes by people tend to become more like what they are already, rather than changing into something new. I mean, over the last couple of years or so, I don't think I noticed much in the way of "evolution of character" in George Bush, Tony Blair or Saddam Hussein, to name just three people who might have been expected to change (or "grow," to use another word) if evolutionary change was the natural consequence of the pressure of events. They just became more of what they were already. Section 120 Entry 0004. Date: 2004 August 7 Saturday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Was walking home the other day thinking (for some reason) of my story "A Gorilla in Vietnam" (about a gorilla visiting today's Vietnam) which is going to appear in print (this year, I think) in the American magazine "Space and Time." And I put my hand in the letter box and there was a fat brown envelope inside, obviously a magazine of some kind, and I thought "Synchronicity!" Then noticed that the magazine was from England. It was actually the 2004 relaunch issue of "Premonitions" containing my story "Shotgun Al's Last Picnic," about a transgenerational spaceship on which a member of the younger generation really doesn't want to play the "let's nobly and dutifully spend our lives venturing out into the further reaches of hard vacuum" game. A science fiction story which gets pretty violent in places, weighing in at about 6,559 words. The URL for the outfit which puts out "Premonitions" is www.pigasuspress.co.uk. Section 120 Entry 0005. Date: 2004 August 12 Thursday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) And this week baby Cornucopia managed to roll right over, to get both her arms out from under her body, and to get up on her knees and elbows - to get into the crawling position, in other words! It's not crawling yet, but she evidently has the idea. Her proud parents photographed this spectacle for posterity. Section 120 Entry 0006. Date: 2004 July 17 Tuesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) The small banana was lying on its own in the wooden dish. It was lying like a boat sitting on its keel when I came along and put a bunch of bigger bananas into the wooden dish. The bigger bananas bumped the small banana, which promptly rolled over onto its side. And, unbidden, there came into my mind the image of my baby daughter rolling over onto her side. I happened recently to look at the list of stuff my blog is supposedly about, and the list includes "Japan journal - politics - Japan and North Korea - Japan and war - Japan and Iraq". But baby Cornucopia has displaced most of that stuff from my mind, so I've gone and written a new list. "Baby - lifewith baby - Japanese baby - baby in Japan - baby developments - living withbaby diary blog". In some ways, even with a baby in the house, my life carries on as normal. I still go to work, still do the shopping, and still continue to grind away at various writing projects, mostly at moments when I'm sitting at train stations. But a whole bunch of other stuff has gone, like watching CNN and idly browsing the Internet. Life has become a matter of work, baby, sleep, baby, work, baby ... a totally baby-dominated existence. Still, the world seems to get along okay even when I'm not there to keep an eye on it, and I've accepted that being focused on my baby (rather than on, say, the life cycles of American cicadas) is where my life should be at right now. A long time ago I read a science fiction novel about some people who end up in the hold of a ship which has been sunk in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean during World War Two. They stay alive by eating canned milk and stuff and by using bicycles to generate electricity to power lights so they can grow plants to convert carbon dioxide as oxygen. (I'm sure this is unworkable, even in theory, but it makes a good story.) Anyway, while they're in the hold (and they live the rest of their lives there, leaving a new generation to carry on after them) they gradually begin to remember more and more of the cultural stuff that they didn't think was in their memories, resurrecting their own culture from memory. On a small scale, I've been doing something of the sort with baby Cornucopia. She needs a lot of singing to, and the act of repeated singing has stirred up memories of songs that I used to hear (maybe I wouldn't actively listen to them, but I'd hear them) years and years ago, like various old Frank Sinatra numbers. (My mother, at one time, was something of a Frank Sinatra fan, and perhaps still is.) (To close out the story of the people in the hold of the cargo ship, what happens is that they eventually get discovered after an alien spaceship lands, and the latest generation of humans from the cargo hold gets to meet with a generation of aliens who have experienced an analogous situation, forced to improvise a method of surviving for generations on an interstellar flight after they found that their method of periodically unfreezing their frozen bodies to make necessary ship inspections was not going to work.) So that's my life right now: baby on my mind. And other things, of course. But mostly baby. |
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