Loud Coffee?

Posted on February 7, 2010
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I posted it on Facebook, but I’m wondering enough to ask it here. I’m in a Starbucks by a bookshop that Miss Jiwaku decided we should go to, because she knows how I am with bookshops, and because we needed coffee, and the cinemas nearby are showing crap.

(Incidentally, as with a number of places in Asia, the movie cinema industry is not quite a monopoly, butit’s heavily dominated by a few big companies, meaning your selection is often quite limited. Given a choice between the new Travolta film and the new Mel Gibson, we decided to give moviegoing a pass.)

So we’re sitting here, both happily online and sipping our coffees, and there’s a Korean couple not far away. They’re having a conversation so loud I can almost follow it, even with the music and the distance. That’s because they’re practically shouting at one another, though with smiles on their faces.

When I go to coffeeshops in other countries, I’m always struck by how most of them — not all, but most — are really quiet, comfortable places. Going there with company means a conversation can be held without shouting.

This is not how it is in Korea, or in any coffeeshop anywhere that Koreans happen to be. People reading my blog regularly might have noticed my recent rant about the topic, but now I’m going to ask the question a little more gently: why are conversations often held at such a high volume among Koreans?

Background: for some reason, a large proportion of (younger and middle-aged) Koreans who go to coffee shops seem to think that all conversations in such places should be conducted very loudly. One gets the sense that they go home needing a drink of lemon water to soothe the strain on their voices.

It doesn’t help that seating in cafes in Korea is almost invairably crammed, to maximize space but also, I suspect, because of the common attitude in Korea that places that look empty are unpopular and are “bad” while places that looked crammed full of people are popular and “good.”

In contrast, I remember the Second Cup I used to hang out in back on Rue St. Laurent, in Montreal. There were these big, open spaces between a lot of the different seating areas, and the music wasn’t cranked up. I remember reading there, a lot, without headphones. The space inside was, of course, much bigger than almost any coffee shop I’ve been in here in Asia, but it was also more comfortable than any I’ve visited in Asia.

Going to a coffeeshop in Korea is a headphones-non-optional outing, unless you’re with company. How and why did this happen? After all, the coffee shop boom happened among young women, and even today, it’s rare for men to go to such places with only men.

(I note this because Korean women, like women everywhere, tend to be just a little quieter than Korean men, even — or especially? — in big groups.)

I don’t know if it’s the aesthetics of behaviour for bars and pubs being mapped onto coffee shops, or whether it’s just part of thhe general desire to be “active” in their interactions that leads people to behave this way. I’d be really curious to see what others think about this.

Speaking of which, I’ve had a few interesting discussions about etiquette, manners, and so on with Miss Jiwaku and others. One of the interesting things that came up was a comparison of how Westerners developed the etiquette of politeness and gentility that we (at least some of us) hold so dear.

The answer is, etiquette manuals. But that’s the subject for another post… one into which I will be able to work in Robo Taekwon V, too!

Now I know you’re just dying to see it. Well, the loud couple has long gone, and Miss Jiwaku is awake again from the nap she took, so I think I’ll end this here…

You Know You’re in the Tropics When…

Posted on February 7, 2010
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… you see a lizard on the bathroom wall and it doesn’t particularly surprise or alarm you.

The driver who was sent to pick me up didn’t quite get the explanation he should have, so he drove to Depok, on the wrong side of town

So I’m now waiting for a taxi. Hmm… another day in Jakarta.

The Polo Shirt of Religious Art

Posted on February 6, 2010
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Today consisted of a an attempt to visit some older sites and monuments in Jakarta. We managed to visit what is claimed to be the biggest masjid in Southeast Asia, the Mesjid Istiqlal, as well as the “Catholic Cathedral” across the street from it, and a chunk of old Batavia, where the Dutch ran Indonesia for a long time. Batavia was polluted, loud, and full of people; if the air had been closer to breatheable, we might have enjoyed the microcircus we saw performing a little more.

The Masjid is what one expects of a masjid: big open spaces, not heavily ornamented but with a lovely, enormous dome above the main prayer hall. The most surprising thing was the number of people just hanging around, sleeping on the huge prayer rug, and goofing off with cell phones and little point-and-shoot cameras.

The shock of the afternoon came when, earlier and across the street from the masjid, we wandered into the local cathedral. It looks like a lot of cathedrals around the world from 1901, ie, somewhat ornate but not insanely so, and rather pretty with what looked like some local touches. There was a wedding ongoing, so I didn’t shoot too many pictures. (What I did shoot will land on Facebook, but not for a while, because the internet access I’m getting these days is, well… yeah, I’ll wait to upload till I get to Korea… and hopefully upload pics from my trip to Laos a couple of years ago while I’m at it.)

Anyway, the Church: yeah, it was when the singing started that my heart sank. I’ve been to masjids, to Buddhist temples, to Hindu temples, and at each place some degree of modernity had crept in. But the music in Catholic Churches — recognizable worldwide, by the way, from its earnest, inoffensively tonal strains, its simple (and incessantly repeating) sub-Broadway-melodies accompanied by mediocre piano music. It is inoffensive, but also unflattering, uninspiring, and completely interchangeable piece-to-piece.

It reminds me of the polo shirt, a style that itself is styleless: it bespeaks, in both women and men who don it, a milquetoast conservativism, that thoughtless preppiness, that mediocre concession to fashion. It makes men look all alike, and flatters not at all the female form; rather, it is — at least in Korea, where it remains immensely popular — the shirt of refuge for women who hate their bodies. It is less a fashion than an inoffensive option from a set of options set out before one of a certain mindset or social class and background — social class and background so often translating to mindset anyway.

Yes, indeed, Catholic Church music is the polo shirt of religious music. Which, when you have actually heard the works of Ockeghem, and Bach (Lutheran though he was), and other amazing European composers who produced sacred repertory, is especially depressing. Europe’s finest music was written on church coin, and now the best they can offer is folksong sing-along verse-chorus-verse. So predictable and unartistic it hurts. Hurts, I tell you…

It’s like having the Bible translated by Hallmark Card writers, just to achieve mass appeal. Sigh. Anyway…

Thailand: A Short History (2nd Edition) by David K. Wyatt

Posted on February 5, 2010
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History is not just a procession of Great Men, kings and generals and high priests. We all know this, we insist upon it. Yet it is difficult to tell the story of history without discussing these figures, not only because we know so much more about them than we do about the commoners for so much of history, but also because of the degree to which their decisions, agendas, and problems influenced, shaped, and determined the lives of those around them. When we want to know something of a particular historical period, history becomes a Shakespearean play, complete with clowns, mad kings, their desperate advisors and the princes eager to see them dead, ladies in waiting, and commoners in the graveyard with their acerbic comments about the whole proceedings.

But when you are looking for the broad-based, basic history of a society, with an eye to imagining its future, you need a good grounding in the broader sweep of their history, the past that informs not only their present but also will continue to inform their future, and often, when we are dealing with the huge timescales of a culture, of a people, much of the historical record has either crumbled to dust leaving only the monuments of kings, or is too specialized and peculiar for a nonspecialist to gain any traction with them.

And so it is with this in mind that I turned to David K. Wyatt’s Thailand: A Short History, an ambitious history of Thailand, and of the earlier history of the Tai people who would eventually create and populate it, which covers a vast period of a complex history in just a tad over three hundred pages. It is quite in-depth, though for the reasons I’ve cited above, the overall focus is on political and territorial history. (This seems to be something of a trend in books on Southeast Asian history, but that doesn’t surprise me, nor is it really a bad thing. With each book, I feel as if I have a better sense of the historical grounding of the past, its shape and echoes in the present.)

The earlier sections of the book deal mostly with kingdoms and proto-empires made up of Tai people, and their battles with Burmese, Cambodian, Lao, Vietnamese, and Chinese powers. At times, it was a bewildering procession of conquering followed by reconquering followed by retribution — that same sad story that has doinated so much of human history anywhere, powered by the machinery of slavery and royalty and tribal rivalry. Of course, these dynamics continue right into the twentieth century, with tensions between ideologically differing states during the Vietnam War era setting all kinds of military and political conflicts in motion that seem, to my eye at least, not so far disconnected from the clashes between various Southeast Asian kingdoms and empires of old.

The deep past is tumultuous, and though at times one tires of (or is dizzied by) the endless litany of who conquered whom when and why, Wyatt nonetheless does a good job of painting relatively vivid images of certain leaders at crucial points in the history of the Tai people. Still, once Wyatt reached the foundation of Ayutthaya, I found myself yearning for something different.

Something different was precisely what Wyatt delivered, of course, for from that point, Wyatt’s project becomes one of mapping the gestation and birth of the modern Thai nation-state. Even for someone like me, someone who basically tires of reading about kings and princes and their power struggles, these chapters were fascinating. One reason is Wyatt’s focus on why the way people did things — in Ayutthaya, as well as in rival states in the region — mattered so much to success. The way bureacracies worked, the way labour was controlled, the way minority ethnic groups were dealt with, are all important elements of the formula for success in Ayutthaya and its successor kingdom, Siam.

In dealing with the last century or so, Wyatt’s account finally grapples with the difficult problem of explaining the thinking of the military dictators to an audience of Anglophones whom one can rightly assume will be likely to resist any such explanations, even as logical as they might be gussied up into sounding. The peculiarities of what military leaders (and civilian ones too) have done with the notion of “democracy” in Thailand is a complex thing, raising questions about ideology and also about the project of democratization.

(An argument I seem to keep having with older Korean men — by older, I mean in their 50s and 60s — about whether democratization can happen rapidly, and whether “development” and modernization need follow a specific trajectory, comes to mind. For some reason, the older Korean men seem to assume, inexplicably, except maybe for my Westerness — for they have not read this blog! –  that I am critical of the state of democracy in places like Korea and Indonesia simply because I think everywhere should be like Canada right now. The problem is more complex than that, of course, and one cannot impose a trajectory on all states, nor can one say that societies ought to be forced to democratize in some way imposed from outside. That said, I do side with C. Douglas Lummis in his response to cultural relativistic arguments that democracy is a Western construct, that all societies can become more democratic versions of themselves. Democracy may not look the same in each of its incarnations, and heaven knows that the idea of suddenly handing votes to any random person over a certain age has its problems, in every society the needs, beliefs, and demands of the public — tempered, of course, by ethics, the notion of human rights, and the limits of practicability — can more deeply inform the decision making of those who have the final say in how things shall be.)

Wyatt does not, here, seem often to take sides in the form of democratization advocated by various Thai leaders as much as to explain why they acted as they did, and how they seemed to think. He does so in a way that invites understanding, however, without stooping to apologia. This is a good thing.

Likewise, Anglophones from North America, at least, if not the West in general, are likely to be hostile, as I am, to the notion of absolute monarchy, but Wyatt’s account, to succeed, must articulate the importance and role of the monarchy in the formation of Thailand, both when it was absolute and since the end of monarchic absolutism in Thailand.

On both counts, Wyatt does a very good job of putting together explanations and discussions which, while they may not swing the reader over to the conservative Thai point of view (for most of the military dictatorships have been,  for the Thai version of the political spectrum, “conservative”), at least make the cultural and philosiophical logic roughly comprehensible.

The parallels — and divergences — with other East/Southeast Asian development histories with which I’m to any degree familiar, specifically South Korea and Burmese history, are quite tantalizing. Thailand’s recurrent case of military rule makes me wonder what South Korea would look like today if a coup were to reinstate dictatorship… or, rather, if such had happened in 1993 or so, what would Korea look like today? Yet at the same time, Thailand’s story in Wyatt’s book emerges as a series of carefully maneuvered plays which, while they may not have all worked out perfectly, can often be described as lucky near-misses with outright disaster, in contrast to the history of Burma which seems to involve the eager and energetic invitation by leaders of one disaster after another.

One regret I have is that the book, having been published in 2003, has nothing to say about the more recent coup in Thailand in 2006. Also, be warned, as with the book about Burma that I recently discussed, this text has very little to say about the particulrities of Thai culture, and much less to say about the role of religion in Thai society. (Then again, monks are such a major force in Burma that is is an understandable difference.) As I said about that book on Burma, if you’re looking for something of the flavor of Thai culture, Thai urban life, and the Thai imagination, you will need to look elsewhere — probably some modern Thai fiction will serve better for that sort of a glimpse of the country. But for a fairly interesting look at the history of the region, and of how the nation of Thailand came to be, I recommend Wyatt’s book wholeheartedly.

One disclaimer to the above: I’m obviously not an expert on Thailand, and so I can’t evaluate the book on its actual quality, only the quality apparent to a nonexpert. But such as it is, my opinion is that it’s a great book.

Rilke

Posted on February 4, 2010
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Oops! Wow, I can’t believe I forgot to include the two books of Rilke in translation that I read on my list of books read from 2009. This is a serious omission, since 2009 was the year that I finally really discovered Rilke.

If you’re interested in what I have to say about those books, I’ve added my thoughts to the post, and you can click through to see what I had to say. But for here, I’ll just say that I came to Rilke because of a conversation I had recalling a few lines from one of the letters in his famous Letters to a Young Poet. I’d tried reading some small collection of Rilke’s verse ages ago, and the mistake was that what I read was a scattering of uncollected verse. Whatever it was I read, it didn’t strike me as all that spectacular, and I shuffled Rilke into the pile of poets in whom I had no interest.

Then, I picked up a copy of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and I was blown away. Maybe it depends on the translation — this one by A. Poulin Jr., though, is spectacular.

While traveling in the United States, I also picked up an unfortunately abridged translation of Rilke’s Book of Hours, and unfortunate as the abridgement is, I once again found myself in the presence of a poetical force to be reckoned with. Having tried to write a book of hours myself once, I can testify to the difficulty of this open-ended form, and I was impressed with what Rilke did with it.

Rilke is, make no mistake, a constant and convinced theist. It is odd that his texts, so infused with his religious convictions, should strike me as they do, but with Rilke, you take the man’s work as it is, rather than as you would have it be, for there are moments and passages of such insight, genius, and beauty that you find the idea of quarreling with the man’s work something bordering on ingratitude.

I’m thinking of writing something with a character loosely based on Rilke, some poet-in-exile wandering a fantastical world, writing love-letters and trying to fit in among the clockwork artisans and dog-headed shamans o. I probably won’t write it the way it sits in my head, bordering on plotlessness unless the love of his life collapsing in a series of letters, amid his wanderings in strange, harsh, and beautiful lands, counts as a plot. But we’ll see: for now, I have a copy of a book of his letters to Andreas-Salome, which awaits on my desk back in Korea. I’ll finish that off — I started it in 2009, but did not finish it — and also dig into a short collection of his fiction that I got in New York, and then I’ll see whether I’m moved to write a pseudo-Rilkean fantasy novel later.

Can’t Get No by Rick Veitch

Posted on February 4, 2010
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Warning: if you’re one of those people who hates spoilers, and you haven’t read this comic, then I don’t know what to tell you. Seek out a spoiler-free review, I guess, or read it. I don’t give away the whole store, but I do discuss the plot somewhat, as I need to do to say anything coherent about this book.

This is one of those comics where I could just say, “I’m not sure I understood what this was about,” because I want to avoid the fact that I sort of understood, but had problems with the book, and yet think there’s something interesting to talk about except it makes me uncomfortable to have to grapple with the stuff I didn’t like about it. If I were like Neil Gaiman, I might just say of it something like what Gaiman actually said — the pull quote is on the front cover: “… supremely magnificently strange, and like nothing else I’ve read.”

But in posting these reviews of books I’ve read, I’m working on my skills at reviewing — since many of the books I’m reading are not new, it’s not like others haven’t discussed them for prospective readers, after all, so what I am trying to do is learn the art of the bookr review, as well as trying to engage critically with every book I read. (Not every text, to be sure: I can’t review every story I read this way, but I may as well do the full-length books.) So I am going to try to dig a little deeper.

To start, I have to agree that this book of Ray Veitch’s is a weird one, to be sure. Strange, yes. Its story, though, is one that teeters on the edge of the familiar: a man who works for a permanent marker company (the markers produced by which are being used in massive, popular vandalism in NYC) goes on a drinking binge when his company is sued for the production of truly permanent markers. The man wakes up with a full-body, permanent marker tattoo that renders him, basically, unhuman. The irony, of course, is that in this state, he embarks on an odyssey of sex, travel, and surprising human interaction in which he discovers his own lost humanity. The backdrop of this story is 9/11.

Those two threads didn’t quite come together for me: the man’s life has already fallen apart when we watch him watch the Twin Towers go down. Maybe it’s because I’m not American or living in America, but the image of the Twin Towers being destroyed doesn’t resonate for me the way I imagine it does for an American reader — one at any point along the American political spectrum. But reading the text exegetically, ity’s hard to escaspe the sneaking suspicion that narrative suggests that some tragedies, at least, happen to those who build their possibility — a somehow dangerous thing to suggest in a text that discusses 9/11 as a tragedy as well.

The reason I say this is that the marker-man’s tragedy is directly tied to his decisions, conscious and unconscious. When we witness his home life, we see that he (and his wife) have essentially started running on autopilot. When he leaves for work, without a kiss or a touch, she is already at her computer in the kitchen, and talking on the phone. The man’s commute to the office reveals the damage done by the markers his company produces: New York City is a hot mess of black marker graffitti, or, we might say, disfigured by the man’s employer’s blind pursuit of profit. But not only has the man shut off his sense of conscience — after all, the part he’s played is too small to feel bad about, it’s someone else who’s decided to use the markers in such a bad way… something that hints at criticism of how easy it is for individuals within a system, say, a nation-state, to dismiss the bad things that system does because, after all, they’re just cogs in the machine, and someone else is calling the shots. No, he hasn’t just shut off his conscience, he has outright embraced his dark side: he and his co-workers seem to revel in the controversy about their markers, to feel great since it’s propelled their stock prices through the roof… until, of course, the stock plummets due to a state and city lawsuit against the company, and the man’s life falls apart.

Does this not sound like a political allegory? Veitch invites such involved reading because of the text of the book. For this story unfolds without a single line of dialogue, all in pictures. Meanwhile, in the kinds of text boxes in which narrator’s asides are usually presented, Veitch’s words unfurl as a kind of epic poem of disaster, condemnation, and prophecy. Here’s a sample from a random page:

Small wonder we barnacle to rusted beliefs…
Convinced that if we supplicate long and loud enough…
Out bootless prayers shall be answered.
That some benign gaseous vertebrate will fulfill His every covenant…
Sweeping us up in despotic benevolence…
And installing us in a ten-room co-op in the Heavenly City…
… with a view to die for.

(You can sample the text more in this MP3 of a reading of the text made by Veitch himself, as linked from his website. It actually is quite a different text when disconnected from the images, so don’t worry, this won’t spoil the book for you.)

The text isn’t completely disconnected from the images on the page, of course: on this page, an unnamed but obviously Muslim-American man discovers the marker-tattooed man hiding, terrified, on the top of his winnebago and says a little prayer, then returning to his (head-scarf wearing) wife inside the vehicle and driving off with the man still there, a small act of kindness in allowing the man to hitch a ride.

This swerving and sliding between elevated language and pop-cultural reference is pretty much constant throughout the text, and personally, at least on my first reading, it wore a bit thin. Though one reviewer has suggested that the book may be “the ‘Howl’ of the 9/11 generation,” Veitch’s text doesn’t, to me, quite succeed as a poem on the level of Ginsberg’s. But Veitch’s work is, to be fair, perhaps not intended to be read as poetry (despite the MP3 above) in the way “Howl” is: after all, this is a graphic poem, and the images and text interact, adding up to more than the sum of the two.

So once I got over my resistance to the text — my insistence that this was not “great poetry” — I discovered that what Veitch was doing constituted a really fascinating approach to storytelling, somewhat akin to a film where the only voice you hear is a narrator’s — Chris Marker’s La Jetee comes to mind, though it’s a tenuous comparison. Anyway, I think there may well be more there than I picked up the first time through. My reaction to Can’t Get No was opposite of my reaction to what I think are poems that don’t work, and thus I call the book a successs: I wanted to brave the barrage of prophetic narration to see what happened in the end to the marker-tattooed man, to the Muslim couple, to the women who gave the man his marker-tattoo.

And it is here, at the level of the characters, that Veitch does the most amazing things. Without a single line of dialog from their mouths, each of the characters comes to life, but also seems to win sympathy. I found myself invested in each of them, and wanted to see what happened the next time each reappeared on the page, as each of them did several times. It is because of the wonderful handling of these characters that when finally I finished reading it, I realized that I’d read it all the way through in a single sitting, even though I’d had other things to do, even though I was still sick from food poisoning: despite all the possible reasons I had for not reading it, I’d kept turning those pages, rapt.

And that says something.

An End to Passwords?

Posted on February 4, 2010
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Yeah, the French government apparently wants to do away with Internet passwords. They’ve teamed up with a bunch of companies. The idea seems to be that you could use a digital certificate instead.

Which sounds curiously like a system thought up by people who are scared of and vaguely uncomfortable with the Internet. Hey, wait, that’s exactly how Korean Internet Banking works! (Except with outdated ActiveX controllers which I hope the French government isn’t foolilsh enough to get tied up with.)

Mind you, the 공인인증서 — the Korean equivalent of this kind of certificate that is basically a domestic online banking ID certificate — is handy on occasion: it’s nice at tax time, since many of your deductible expenditures have been automatically tracked for you, and you can (given a decent internet connection, a computer with a Korean version of Windows, and the patience of a saint) access all your documents and print them off from one place, no sweat. But even with these certificates, you need passwords. You need them because even when you’ve authenticated your identity, you need to be able to verify individual transactions, as noted by the commentator I’ve linked above.

It puts me in mind of recent (ie. during the past few years) debacles in which major shopping websites in Korea got hacked, with the personal data of millions being downloaded, all because the government that (ridiculously) required the use of a lot of personal information for any random activity online also failed to set and enforce standards for the security of the data it was requiring commercial operators to store and collect for them.

A single mode of authentication sounds to me like a major step down in security — centralization is going to make this a nightmare for the masses as soon as exploits and cracks are found, and they will eventually be found. And if it is going to be secure, people are going to have to keep using passwords, verifying their identities in other ways, and so on. A system might be possible, but I’m nervous about a government implementing it on a huge scale, in a system connected to millions of people’s finances, before it’s run the gauntlet of hostile hackers.

Meanwhile, the single bank card number and password security system for my Canadian account’s online banking site seems to have held out well, security wise. No complicated registration procedures, no wacky ActiveX controls… but then, Canadian banks assume their customers aren’t dumb enough to give their passwords and account information to their kids or strangers who call them on the phone.

By contrast, pretty much every Korean banking or finance interface I’ve used in the last year asks me questions to ascertain whether I’m being voice phished — which goes to show you that a security system is only as good as its users’s training and level of intuitive comfort and commonsense with regard to the system in general. We’ll see whether the French public is ready for this kind of a change, though current plans seem to be set for a very soon due date, if you ask me.

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