Essay finished, as far as it's going to be finished. A deadline three weeks away would suggest the possibility that it could be improved, but it's time to move on to the creative piece.

Completely irrelevant to that is the reading of The Pillow Book that has taken up my free time the last couple of days. I had never heard of it before this year; bought a copy overseas but it turns out to be a 2006 edition by an Australian translator, Meredith McKinney. And it's just lovely: very little in the way of story but such finely noted observations that it's like watching a Japanese scroll unfolded before you. It gave me a use for the silk-bound notebook I also got on that same overseas trip...have begun writing little subheadings similar to those she uses with observations listed beneath them...so she might have a section headed "refined and elegant things", and I have a page headed "matters of small private amusement," another headed "false notes" and so on. of course her book was partly a workbook, intended as a source and reference for her composition of poems. but it's a different style to the usual journal entry, in which I feel I have to draw some sort of conclusion: I like the idea of saying "this is a delightful/annoying/intriguing thing", describing the thing itself and then letting it rest, like an artist picking up small bits of colour and texture in their daily round and storing them for later reference.

creative piece notes: still undecided about which to do. still inclined to the more analytical mining of the past - things you forget, things you don't - which on reflection are in fact relevant to Sei Shonagon's style - but need to start all over again, to find something I want to say within that rather than the forced filling-400-word-segments stuff I've come up with so far.

have realised that the Book Show's First Person readings (the last 20 minutes of the show every day) fit into this subject perfectly. all that time I was "reading" for the subject and didn't know it! they actually read some Shonagon last week, which is what made me pick the book out of my unread-books pile.