The exquisite Kij Johnson is in Japan, conducting research for her next book. She's posting a travelogue on her lj -- so good it's almost like taking a little trip.

The commercial for this post is: for the armchair traveler who reads fantasy novels about feudal Japan.

Which is a larger and better audience than many people would think.

Also, unrelatedly but forgotten earlier, from the NYTimes, Henry James was a diet fiend:

By the turn of the century, another diet was all the rage. It was the work of Horace Fletcher, who was inspired by the deplored American habit of devouring food, barely taking time to chew it. Eat only when you are hungry, he said, eat only those foods you crave, and chew every morsel of food until no more taste can be extracted from it. As proof, Fletcher gleefully told how his weight had plummeted. In June 1898, he weighed 205 pounds. Four months later he weighed 163, losing seven inches from his waist.

He gained celebrity endorsements. Upton Sinclair chanced upon a magazine article about Fletcher. It was "one of the great discoveries of my life," he
wrote. John D. Rockefeller Sr. was Fletcherizing. "Don't gobble your food," he wrote. "Fletcherize or chew very slowly when you eat."

But some became disillusioned. Henry James began with great enthusiasm, giving Fletcher's book "The New Glutton" to his neighbors and claiming it changed his life. He wrote to Edith Wharton about "the divine Fletcher" and to his friend Mrs. Humphrey Ward: "Am I a convert, you ask? A fanatic." But after five years, he was having stomach troubles his doctor attributed to Fletcherism. James found himself "more and more sickishly loathing food."