(Still working on my review of Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days, so instead of rush-posting it before I’m happy with it, I’m posting this review.) I am writing this review without access to the Internet, so I may not have a chance to search for links before posting it. However, since I have a little free time, I am eager to write up this book while it is fresh in my mind. I’ll keep my review simple: this book is a fascinating, deft exploration of Thailand from the inside, by a young writer who I envy like mad. Lapcharoensap’s writing is …
Month: February 2010
Micro-update
Connectivity is severely reduced for a few days, maybe more. If you’ve emailed me, or are trying to contact me, please be patient. Yes, it sucks. Makes me koo-koo, reduces my productivity. Working on it. Working also on a book review for Kyoto Journal (of a book on North Korea) and on reviews of several other books I’ve read for this here blog. Next review will be on Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald, which was wonderful but which is proving thorny in terms of writing a fair, critical, and incisive review. Reading? Um… yeah, I’m working on it. And fiction-writing? …
Loud Coffee?
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 …
You Know You’re in the Tropics When…
… 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
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 …
Thailand: A Short History (2nd Edition) by David K. Wyatt
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, …
Rilke
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 …
Can’t Get No by Rick Veitch
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 …
An End to Passwords?
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 …
A Robot Dream
Last night I dreamed of robots; big, huge, slightly abstract impressionist robots made out of lattices of material; huge, primary-colored lattices of stuff. They were fighting. Laser blasts. Projectiles — more of this primary colored lattice-stuff. They were shouting at one another in weird, digitizal-static voices that sounded like a parody of the voices of human beings. I took cover, but while I was safe from the laser blasts and projectiles, those voices were inescapable. I listened, trying to figure out what they were saying, but it was no use. It soon became apparent that they were exchanging way more …