a part of me genuinely wants to do a skim through all of mxtx's novels to find every reference to plants, animals, insects, fungi, etc that I can, to see what kind of vision of the natural world she presents in her stories. the other part of me is like....but that is SO much text to skim through.

and would anyone else even be interested in this beyond @Betty and me, lol

@soph_sol 90% of MXTX plants are metaphorical. Like, consider "lotus"

@Betty oh for SURE. If a plant doesn't have metaphorical resonance or plot relevance then does it even need to be mentioned.

@soph_sol haha, I just looked up "willow" in my dictionary of Chinese symbolism

@Betty @soph_sol as a sidenote: you have a dictionary of Chinese symbolism? that sounds incredibly handy

@Betty @Satsuma oh it's that guy! I thought I recognized the name. I evicted a collection of Chinese folk stories that he edited from my folk tale collection because the introductory material made me not trust his ethos of translation

@soph_sol @Satsuma yeah, idk, it's from the eighties, too! So, like, big asterisk.

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@Betty @soph_sol unfortunate! it would definitely be nice to have a single text to refer to at times, instead of the endless disagreements of the internet

@Satsuma @soph_sol I think it's worth checking, but maybe not relying wholly upon

@Betty @Satsuma @soph_sol I also have this book and treat it the same way. Hm, maybe I should go through my book and paper library and see what else I have by this guy, while I’m thinking of him.

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