Quiet days in Luang Prabang



Laos, a river bank, had been overrun and ransacked; it was one of America's expensive practical jokes, a motiveless place where nothing was made, everything imported; a kingdom with baffling pretensions to Frenchness.  What was surprising was that it existed at all, and the more I thought of it, the more it seemed like a lower form of life, like the cross-eyed planarian or squishy amoeba, the sort of creature that can't die even when it is cut to ribbons.

-----------------------------------

So wrote Paul Theroux, in his hymn to train travel, The Great Railway Bazaar,  about his 1973 visit to Vientiane, today the Lao capital. He wrote at the time when American soldiers were beginning their withdrawal from the Indochinese war.  Theroux wasn't impressed by what he saw.

I just returned yesterday from a week's stay in Luang Prabang -- the second largest city in Laos, and (until the Communists deposed the monarchy in 1975)  its ancient royal capital.  Today isn't 1973; forty-three years have since been flushed down the Mekong river. And Luang Prabang isn't Vientiane, nor is Vientiane itself still a playground for American G.I.s on leave. 

Luang Prabang is now -- and probably was in 1973 as well -- a quiet, friendly, languorous small town, about 190 miles up the Mekong river from Vientiane.  The town has -- as have towns everywhere -- begun to sprawl with increased population (about 50,000), but the heart of the town, the place people go to visit, is a small, walkable peninsula between the parallel Mekong and Nam Khan rivers, just before the latter flows into the former.  The two rivers, about three or four blocks apart, are lined with small restaurants, hotels, hostels, and "guest houses."

This "old town" section of Luang Prabang is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and thus preserved from "modernization" and degradation.

The city's infrastructure is built around a large number of impressive wats (temples or monasteries).  Each of the town's districts is named for its presiding wat.  The streets are full of saffron-garbed monks, many or most of them teenagers.  But economically, the city relies on tourism, and the old town is dedicated to serving their needs (and/or desires).  The monks give the town a spiritual quality; the businesses ensure that the visitor is comfortably housed, wined and dined.  The two approaches to life co-exist, with no conflict that appears obvious between prayers being chanted in the wats and Beerlao being consumed at sunset in the riverfront cafés. .

But although tourism is welcomed, and many of those tourists are young people roaming the world on the cheap, the city seems to inspire a respect in most visitors.  Cafés and bars close relatively early; I witnessed none of the loud partying you might find in other popular Southeast Asia vacation sites. This isn't one of the Thai islands.

I was there not to party, of course, but to hang out with family.  As noted in an earlier post, my great niece and her mother have been living for a time in Luang Prabang, and a number of relatives showed up this month to visit.  Also, it was my birthday, which we celebrated at L'Elephant -- a French restaurant located in a renovated and very atmospheric French villa. We enjoyed feeling like French colonists for an evening. 

I had seen the major tourist attractions during earlier visits in 2007 and 2014.  This year, I just enjoyed family, and absorbed with pleasure the quiet atmosphere of the city.  I strolled along the streets -- often a necessity, since most of my family was staying at the other end of town, a mile from my hotel -- and enjoyed eating and drinking at a variety of riverbank cafés.  My sister bought a dozen eggs at the street market, dyed them, and organized what may have been the city's only Easter egg hunt in a park adjacent to my hotel. 

In a few months, no family will remain in Luang Prabang -- Maury and her mother plan to move on in May to Chiang Mai in Thailand.  But I suspect I'll return for further visits to this small town on the Mekong.

On one pretext or another.

Novennial

Nine years ago, George W. Bush's presidency still had a couple more years to run -- but an eager, young senator named Barack Obama had already declared his candidacy.  Nancy Pelosi had just taken the gavel as the first female Speaker of the House.  The British pound would top $2.00 in April, and the Dow was hovering just under 14,000 -- it hit its maximum of 14,164.53 in October, before everything began going sour.

All important events, certainly.  But the single most important event of 2007 was, undisputedly, the grand opening on March 20, 2007, of the blog Confused Ideas from the Northwest Corner.

Looking back over the past 12 months, as we prepare for our tenth year, we see a lower than average number of posts being published, continuing what an economist would call a secular trend downward.  But the number of posts thus far in calendar year 2016 has been above average, which may or may not augur well for the future.

Turning away from quantity, we profess ourselves to be reasonably pleased with the quality of the product.  Movie and book reviews, always a popular topic, have been both numerous and -- as blogs go -- reasonably competent.  A new trend, which may be a bit worrisome, is a tendency toward personal reminiscence.  This trend is a clear marker of the publisher's advancing senility, and must be attacked vigorously in the coming year.

Generally, on these annual occasions, we can easily identify the most popular posts of the year past, for whatever insight that might give.  During the past year, however, few posts have stood out in popularity.  The number of hits recorded for each post has tended to be a function of  the time since its publication, not of any feature of the post that generated apparent reader excitement.

That said, the second most popular post of the year was a reproduction of a newspaper article that your author wrote in 1970 about his personal experiences with the joys of skydiving.  Other posts that tended to draw above average numbers of views dealt with a Los Angeles production of the musical Annie; memories of a chemistry set we owned as a kid, combined with thoughts about Oliver Sacks's own childhood chemistry experimentions; a review of the Andrew Smith novel Stick;  a discussion of a Colin Cotterill detective story that took place in Laos; a memory of listening to an NBC radio dramatization of a Ray Bradbury short story; and a child's hatred of having to get up and go outside the tent in the middle of a frigid night while camping -- in order to pee.

Weirdly enough -- and this really is weird -- the most popular post of the past year, in terms of actual number of views, was published exactly one year ago today.  It was entitled Octennial.  Go figure.

Onward and upward.  Our tenth year now begins.

New UW station finally opens

New UW station

I'm depressed that Seattle has talked about rail transit for so many decades, and has so little to show for it. I'm depressed at the part that the media have played in the debacle of this election. I'm depressed at the role played by the Sierra Club, an organization with whom I feel close ties.

And I'm generally depressed at our inability as a community to make decisions and work together to accomplish what we set out to do.
--------------------------------------------

So I wrote on November 8, 2007 -- feeling morose because the voters had just turned down funds for significant expansions to the fledgling light rail system. 

New Capitol Hill station

Since that time, voters have been far more accommodating.  If you run a search for "light rail" on my blog, you'll be surprised (at least I was) at how many posts I've devoted to the topic.  What can I say?  My fanaticism with rails all began when I received my first electric train! 

In any event, as I posted a couple of months ago, after eight years of tunneling and construction, the extension of the light rail system from downtown to Husky Stadium at the University of Washington is finally completed.  The new stations at the Stadium and on Capitol Hill open tomorrow, amidst much fanfare.  Tents have been thrown up around the UW station to provide music, games, food, favors -- and who knows what-all -- to the expected hordes. 

Free rides, tomorrow only!

And just in time, I say.  I fly to Southeast Asia on Sunday.  Guess how your humble correspondent will be getting to the airport?

Excelsior!

March seems to be the month when I run out of ideas for posts, and I resort to re-publishing old writings. 

The following piece of doggerel lunacy was never actually "published" (thank god), but was composed strictly for intra-family encouragement in 1996, several months before eight members of my family launched an assault on the summit of Mt. Rainier.  (Three of us made it all the way to the top; the others were left lying on the ground at various spots on the route up.)

If you're not a family member, this "poem" means nothing to you.  Go on to the next post!  If you are a family member, you're wondering why on earth I'd ever publish it.  Meh. 

My thanks to Lewis Carroll for various inspirations, including the rhyme and meter scheme, which I more or less lifted from his mock epic poem, The Hunting of the Snark. 

----------------------------

They attacked it with crampons, they attacked it with ropes,
     They pursued it with a laugh and a frown.
They charged towards its summit with feverish hopes,
     They vowed to reach it before they came down.

They'd planned it for fortnights, they'd been packed for days,
     They'd triumphed in their dreams and ne'er failed.
The peak loomed above, through the luminous haze --
     They'd climb whether it snowed or it hailed.

They came from Seattle, and from sunny Umatilla,
     From Sonoman vineyards, and the Town of the Stars.
They came to do battle, against a monstrous hill, (uh . . . )
     They arrived in rickshaws and horse carts and cars.

Their leader was ancient, their leader was old,
     His years had reached fifty-five,
His eyes were all rheumy, but his countenance bold,
     He vowed he'd bring 'em all down alive.

"I've conquered Mt. Adams (as have many Sirs and Madams),
     Kilimanjaro has fallen prey to my skills.
You joined me on Mt. Whitney, but why continue with this litany?
     I'm clearly familiar with scrambling up and down hills."

"We will hoist a friendly beer, on the summit of Mount Rainier!"
     (They welcomed with joy this glad advice.)
"You and I will give a cheer, as we toast atop Rainier,
     This forecast I've now offered to you twice."

"We'll be awash in suds and foam, on good old Rainier's dome,
     I know it's true, I'm not just casting dice.
The certainty of my prediction, is a function of my predilection,
     For recycling all my wisdom at least thrice."

But the days for idle boasting, and verbal riposting,
     Came to an end as such days always must.
The sun soon shone high, the month was July,
     They knew it now was "Rainier or bust!"

They climbed to Camp Muir, behind their old, demented Führer,
     Across endless snowfields, carrying forty pound packs.
Like dumb and burdened mules, half suspecting they were fools,
     Until at last they fell half-dead into their sacks.

But the tempus still must fugit, awake or asleep,
     Nor pain nor dread persuades it to go slow.
Midnight arrived so soon, they all felt they could weep,
     As they heard, "All right men, let's go!"

They tightened their crampons, clipped carabiners onto ropes,
     They set out with a sigh and a frown.
Eyes rose to the summit, each one still with flickering hopes,
     "By God, I'll stand there before I come on back down!"

Fewer scouts

Boy Scout membership has dropped by nearly forty percent in the past ten years, according to the BSA's Pacific Harbors Council.  As a result, the Council has closed four of the five scout camps in the south Puget Sound area.  Some of the camps are being logged to raise money.

A scout executive for the Council explained:

Kids have more options today, families are busier, and many are choosing organized team sports over scouting.

Scout executives discussed Camp Kilworth, one of the five camps, as an example:

  Home to eagles and owls, kingfishers and ospreys, Camp Kilworth’s forest is flecked with blooming trillium, and the 25-acre property provides a wildlife corridor between the Dumas Bay Park Wildlife Sanctuary and Dash Point State Park. It feels a world away from the bustle of Federal Way [a near-by city].

Scout authorities face a dilemma, because the property was deeded to the Council in 1934 with the proviso that it revert to its former owner if no longer used for scouting purposes.  The scouts can't simply sell it to raise money.

It's sad that, at least within the region governed by the Pacific Harbors Council (which doesn't include Seattle), scouting is losing popularity.  It's especially disconcerting that fewer boys want to be scouts here in the Northwest Corner, where our self-image has traditionally been heavily influenced by a love of outdoor activities.

Organized team sports are great, for those with the appropriate interest and talent.  But team sports teach kids to think and act as a group.  Scouting combines teamwork with encouragement of individualism.  Camp itself may be a place for group games, but Scouting more generally teaches each individual to excel at those activities that especially interest him.

Boy Scouts currently offers over a hundred merit badges -- everything from American Business to Journalism to Plumbing to Public Speaking.  A kid who is terrible at Kayaking and Scuba Diving, may be a star at Sculpture or Nuclear Science.  There's something for everybody.

And in offering something for everybody, Scouting encourages boys to dig into whatever activity interests them, even if no one else in their troop shares the same interest. 

In a post a few years back, I told of my browsing through a 1955 World Book Encyclopedia, and being impressed at how many entries discussed hobbies for young people, hobbies that were popular at the time but that few kids today would even consider.  The obsession of virtually all young people with social media imposes, to greater or lesser degree, depending on the person, a certain flattening out of individual peculiarities. 

If talking about leatherwork on-line invites only scorn from your friends, you find yourself increasingly less interested in leatherwork.  But when scouting offers a merit badge in Leatherwork, your interest is validated.  You have an incentive to work at it, at least long enough to earn your badge.  And, chances are, some of those short-term interests will stick, will become long-term hobbies.

But, as great as it is for a kids to have hobbies, I think something more important is at stake.  And that is encouraging young people to think for themselves, to pursue interests on their own, to be comfortable spending some part of their time in their own company without constant approval from the crowd.

Baseball and soccer are great, but we'll never run out of social reinforcements for participation in team sports.  Scouting encourages other virtues.

Keep those camps open, however possible.  And let's find ways to draw kids back to both scouting and to an increased development of individuality.

Virtual travel

Is all the world a stage?  And if so, are not only we men and women players, but all other creatures under the sun as well?

A couple of days ago, the New York Times carried a story* about technological advances that permit us to monitor wild beasts in the wild.   Wildlife experts can now use GPS and radio equipped collars to follow and manipulate herds of bighorn sheep; encourage bears and elephants, in their respective areas of habitat, to stay away from human contact; monitor movement and activities of wolves and cougars; and track even birds and fish.

The story was interesting, but I might not have read it but for the sub-headline the Times attached to it: "If technology helps us save the wilderness, will the wilderness still be wild?"  Unfortunately, however, the writer does not really address that question aside from noting:

Like most people, I would miss the un-manipulated wild if it entirely disappeared, and I like a point that Mr. Hebblewhite makes about technological breakthroughs tempting us to overestimate our own cleverness. Even with the latest digital tools, he notes, ecosystems, and specifically the challenge of restoring broken ones, remain profoundly more complex than any phenomenon or system that humans have ever mastered.

In other words, he seems to say, don't worry about it because we can't entirely control everything.  Not yet.

I hate to leave that topic before I even begin to address it, but I need to digress.  This morning's Sunday Times discussed a cool new app that Google is offering, called "Destinations."  Want to go somewhere, but don't know where?  The app, when installed on your phone, will toss a bunch of photos at you of places that the sort of people like you who use this app find appealing.  Paris look good?  Tap its photo, and the app will show you the best flights to get you there, background information about the city ("that metal thing is called the Eiffel Tower"), its climate, etc.  You're not the sort to visit just one city?   No problem.  Destinations will work out an itinerary for you -- hopping around Europe, perhaps..  You can then use the app to book your trip.

I sound supercilious, I realize.  Google admits that Destinations is for the casual traveler, not for folks like us, for whom travel is like breathing and who love to spend hours working out our trips.  But clearly, Destinations  is merely a prototype; soon, the sophisticated traveler will have the tools to work out his visit to Lower Slobbovia in full detail, right down to reviewing the menus offered at each ghastly café along his route.

Both these articles -- as disparate in subject matter as they are -- feed into the same sense of discomfort I feel about where life is heading in our globalized world.  Wildlife management is vital, I grant you.  Quick access to travel information is useful.  But both lead me -- throwback that I am -- to worry about TMI.  Too Much Information.  And about the loss of mystery, spontaneity, and surprise that come from too much advance information -- whether it's knowledge about where I'll sleep tonight while traveling, or about whether I'll encounter a lion around the next bend in the river.

I look ahead a couple or three generations.  Every wild animal, every hotel room, every bend in the river, every odd-shaped rock, will have been noticed, recorded, monitored and made available on-line, courtesy of ever speedier microprocessors and humongous warehouses full of servers.  The environment will be known so well that it can be reproduced -- digitally -- in detail.

The Times delivered the final blow in an email this morning.  Reminding me that they had sent me a free "Google Cardboard" virtual reality viewer several months ago, they breathlessly announced the latest entertainment treat:  "Use your Google Cardboard to watch our latest NYT VR film," the email was captioned.

It all comes together in my mind.  Virtual reality!  Of course.  Once all the earth and the creatures therein have been catalogued, shuffled, and organized, Google will bring out its Destinations 14.0 app.  Same photo of Paris.  Tap it.  Bing!  The offspring of Google Cardboard will fire up.  You can wander the streets of Paris, enjoy the ambience (if not the food ... yet ) of a small Left Bank café, wander the halls of the Louvre, climb the Tour de Eiffel -- all without leaving your living room.  (Or, if your interests are more outdoorsy, go on safari to darkest Africa.)

Las Vegas has long given tourists the opportunity to visit its own Nevada version of Paris.  Every bit as nice as visiting Paris, France, the ads suggest.  (But without the menacing discomfort of the horrid French waiters and taxi drivers, is the unstated subtext.  And all those French-speaking people.)

Destinations 14.0 will do Las Vegas one better.  No need to fly to out to the desert.  You can enjoy Paris, in perfect detail, while lounging in your recliner in the comfort of your own living room.  Vacations have never been so easy.
------------------------------------
*Daniel Duane, "The Unnatural Kingdom" NYT (3-11-16)

Daydreaming on a cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils.

Every few days, a box pops up on my iPhone screen, reminding me that I haven't yet backed up the contents of my phone in the "cloud" -- access to which Apple so kindly provides.  I haven't, and I probably won't, because doing so would just make even more data about me available to the world.

(As if I don't already spill it all, voluntarily, on Facebook!)

But as I was wandering about this morning, o'er the Wordsworthian UW campus, my mind began drifting over the concept of the "cloud," and its many implications.

One of the great unknowns of modern biological science is the meaning of "consciousness."  Is there some part of the brain devoted to our being "conscious"?  Almost certainly not.  Most neurologists would probably guess that consciousness arises out of the complexity of the brain -- at some point, the tangle of perceptions mediated by the brain, resulting in the actions of the body, becomes so complex that the subjective sensation of "consciousness" occurs.

No one can be certain that anyone besides him or herself experiences consciousness -- everyone but myself may be an automaton.  But that's a topic for another day.  Assuming that bodies much like ourselves have similar subjective sensations, we can safely assume that all humans are conscious.  As well as many animals.  But as we go down the list of cerebral complexity, we certainly feel safe in concluding that at some point, we reach animals that are not conscious. 

I doubt that a mosquito experiences subjective consciousness.  Or a clam.  Certainly not a paramecium.  Birds?  Maybe.  Ravens seem to have complex behavior patterns that suggest consciousness, but a raven is too canny to ever let you know one way or the other.

Now -- let's hypothesize that a brain is an organic computer.  I realize that most neurologists would question this hypothesis, but the brain at least resembles a very complex computer in the way that it receives information and "decides" how to act on it.  We even refer to the increasing complexity of computers as "Artificial Intelligence."  As we enable our computers to become more and more brain-like -- even human brain-like -- can we  be sure that they will remain simply machines?  Merely complex mosquitoes?

And if we concede that at some point a computer might begin to experience, subjectively, consciousness, we then must admit that we will have created something at least analogous to a human being.

Now a computer's contents -- such as the contents of my iPhone -- can be copied in the "cloud" (really, just in storage on some unknown entity's servers, but I like the "cloud" metaphor, because it's how we visualize such storage).  And from the cloud, the contents of my computer can be copied onto another computer. 

If we have not just an iPhone, but complex computers with consciousness, by uploading to the cloud we will be creating not just a clone, but a clone with a memory and a history of life experiences identical to those of the original -- up to the time that the original's contents were uploaded.  If the original computer was "guilty" of harmful acts against humanity, all its clones would be equally guilty.

This post is an example of thinking out loud on paper, or at least replicating my random thoughts while wandering on paper.  Or digitally.  Innumerable arguments, scientific and philosophical, can be made against just about every point I've made so far.  But bear with me for my concluding  final observations.

If a sufficiently complicated computer has the same consciousness as a human brain, then -- in theory, at least -- a human brain also could be uploaded to the cloud.  The difficulty would be one of technology, not concept.

And now, my final leap.  What if our human brains are merely carbon-based computers that some master race -- or "deity" -- has created for his/their own ends?  And what if the contents of our computer/brains, unbeknownst to us, are being uploaded to some celestial "cloud" on a virtually continuous basis, second by second?

The purpose of backing up a computer is to save a computer's contents as a precaution against anything happening to the original.  If I'd been conscientious and had backed up my iPhone, and had then lost the iPhone or had seen it run over by a truck, what would I do?  I wouldn't lament that my Great American Novel was lost, right?  I'd buy a new iPhone and quickly download into it the contents stored in the cloud.

Similarly, assuming my fantastic hypothesis were to be correct -- that our brains are being backed up in a heavenly cloud -- then it would be no big deal if our bodies were run through a wood chipper.  Every memory, every thought, every talent, every experience, would be preserved in the cloud.  Ready for downloading into a new body at our creator's leisure.

"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
--1 Corinthians 15:55

Q.E.D.

Our neighbors

Gene, age 59, lives in the toney Park Slope area of Brooklyn.  A chemist, he earned his Ph.D. at Wisconsin, and did post-doctoral work at Columbia.  He worked for many years for a major pharmaceutical company, where his work resulted in over forty patents.

Park Slope has leafy streets lined with fashionable row houses.  Gene doesn't live in one of them.  He lives in an SUV parked along the curb, where he sleeps on a mildewed futon.

The New York Times carried his story today in a lengthy feature article.  The thrust of the article was to show how his neighborhood gradually shifted from being appalled by his presence to acceptance, and ultimately became willing to help him out -- both financially and, to some extent, otherwise.  Gene has finally qualified for disability payments -- based on arthritis in his ankle -- which are keeping him afloat.  He no longer has to collect cans and bottles for their deposits, or hunt for nearby soup kitchens.

He still lives in his vehicle.  His daily search for appropriate restrooms and showers presumably continues.  But he's planning to move back to Wisconsin, where costs are lower.

In Seattle, we have been confronting the problems of homelessness.  An area beneath I-5, as it passes through the city, has been taken over by a diverse collection of unfortunates -- from criminals and drug abusers to people, with their families, who have been recently and unexpectedly laid off from legitimate employment.  Unless we avert our eyes, we can see straggly tents, damp sleeping bags, piles of debris, as we pass by.  Closer inspection, according to authorities, also reveals human waste, garbage, and syringes.

The area, appropriately, is called "The Jungle. One observer remarked that, within the enclave, you don't even feel you're still in the United States.   The London-based Guardian recently provided Seattle some unwanted international attention in its study of the problem.  And The Jungle is only one facet of the homelessness problem in Seattle.  Widespread squatting in vacant buildings is another.

No one has proposed a total solution to the problem.  No such solution exists, I suspect.  Tent cities, which Seattle sponsors, offer some temporary relief.  Cheap long-term housing is needed, but where?  Seattle, like San Francisco, is a small geographic area, hemmed in by bodies of water.  Zoning changes permitting increased population density are probably necessary, but everyone's immediate reaction is "Not In My Backyard."  It's a selfish reaction, but it's understandable.  It's my reaction.  Increased density -- whether allowing taller buildings or smaller lots -- changes the character of neighborhoods, and of the city itself. 

Increased density probably would decrease property values.  But those of us lucky enough to have bought property when it was less expensive have profited greatly by the inability of others who arrived later to do the same.  The calculus of fairness is complicated.

Unable to figure out a solution -- to either the root causes of homelessness or to its immediate symptoms -- many of us donate money to food banks and other services for the homeless.  Many of Gene's neighbors -- impressed by Gene's educational and employment history and by the complicated history of his descent to his present plight -- have done the same.  But the problem isn't just lack of money.  The homeless also need personalized help just to manage the chores of day to day life.

Mr. Wiener [a Park Slope neighbor] said getting money was simple — in all, about $5,000 was given by 10 people, and some of it remains unspent — but the nuts and bolts of helping someone with layers of problems took more attention than just writing a check: medical appointments, the motor vehicle agency, the disability application. “It wasn’t that hard to do — you just had to be willing do it,” Mr. Wiener said. “It turns out that people who mean well aren’t actually willing to do much.”

Who can blame them?  Gene may be a pleasant exception, but the homeless, in general, are often smelly, sometimes disoriented, often ungrateful, and just hard for many of us genteel folks to relate to. 

Right?

When the Good Samaritan, in the biblical parable, saw the robbed and assaulted victim lying beside the road, he could have just called 911 and even perhaps left the poor fellow some money. That would have been a lot more than the priest and the Levite did.  But the Samaritan did more and, the parable suggests, simple humanity seems to require more.

How much more, and whether -- in our more complex society -- we, as individuals, can delegate all our personal responsibility for others to the State, are the questions we need to consider.

Leap year day

Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn't any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I'm not at the bottom,
I'm not at the top;
So this is the stair
Where
I always
 Stop.


Halfway up the stairs
Isn't up,
And isn't down.
It isn't in the nursery,
It isn't in the town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head:
"It isn't really
Anywhere!
It's somewhere else
Instead!"

--A. A. Milne


Yesterday was February proper; tomorrow is March for sure. 
Today seems sort of -- I don't know --
somewhere else. 
Instead.

The Coroner's Lunch

When an old friend learned that I was returning next month to Laos, for another visit with family members in Luang Prabang, he was, of course, concerned that I might lack knowledgeable background in Lao life and politics.  Therefore, he wisely suggested that I prepare myself by perusal of one or more of the Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery novels, written by British author Colin Cotterill.

This was the same friend who had earlier tempted me into reading a Charlie Chan novel, set in Honolulu, and Dashiell Hammitt's The Maltese Falcon, set in San Francisco.  His reading proclivities, his studies of local cultures, had by now become reasonably apparent, but -- as evidenced by earlier essays appearing in this blog -- I had found his earlier suggestions both entertaining and conducive to written contemplation.

And so it came to pass that I've just finished reading the first of the "Dr. Siri series," The Coroner's Lunch.

I have visited Laos twice, if we don't count a third time when we sneaked ashore from a boat on the Mekong, not turning back until we drew within sight of an immigration check point.  Based on this vast experience, I would judge the Lao people to be friendly, humorous, and notably laid back, and their Communist government to be seemingly benign.  Also, the Lao appear amazingly forgiving of American visitors, considering that our military dropped over two million tons of ordnance on Laos during the Vietnam war, and that an estimated 20,000 Lao have been killed by contact with unexploded ordnance since the hostilities ceased.  Vast reaches of the country are still dangerously mined, once one's away from cleared roads and paths.

All of my visits have been since 2003.  The Coroner's Lunch, written in 2004, describes Laos as it may (or may not) have existed in 1976, one year after the Communists had deposed the monarchy and had formed the present Lao People's Democratic Republic.  It was a time when relations with the Vietnamese government, which regarded the Lao with some condescension as their little Communist brothers, were somewhat strained.  And at a time when the Communist Lao government was embroiled in a continuing struggle with Hmong insurgents -- insurgents only recently abandoned to their own devices by their American patrons.

Most of the competent and educated Lao had fled across the Mekong into Thailand as the Communists were taking over.  Dr. Siri was one of the few medical doctors to remain.  Despite his being 72 years old, and having no qualifications or experience as a pathologist, the government appointed him as the nation's only "coroner." 

But wily Dr. Siri was a fast learner, and the government got more than it bargained for -- a wily detective, as well as a pathologist.

The plot is entertaining and interesting, involving relations between the new Lao Communist regime, their allies in Vietnam, and their Hmong domestic enemies, and the story is infused with the paranoia that results from living in a totalitarian state -- even an incompetent totalitarian state.  The plot is equally entangled with all the personal desires and ambitions and betrayals that the human heart -- capitalist or communist -- is heir to. 

It also seems that Dr. Siri is -- to his own surprise -- something of an animist shaman.  Which explains all those strange and scary dreams he's been having and his ability to understand languages he's never studied, not to mention the dog next door that barks ...

But I've given away too much, already.

The book also taught me more about the nuts and bolts -- the sights and smells -- of forensic pathology than I probably learned as a personal injury attorney.  Perhaps more than I wanted to know.

Dr. Siri is a good man, a clever man, an unassuming man, and a humorous man.  And yes, humor still exists, in and among odd places and people, even under Communism -- and even among Communists themselves.  At least, under Lao Communism and its party members.  Dr. Siri loves the Lao people, whatever their politics, and they love him.  But he is a man who has seen a lot in his life, and he is neither naïve nor overly concerned about legal niceties when it's time for the bad guys to get their come uppance.

So now, having a clearer idea of the Lao character, my visit to Laos should be all the more worthwhile.  Even if it took a Brit expatriate to explain it to me. 

I should add that Colin Cotterill has spent much of his life in Thailand and Laos -- not only as a writer, but as a teacher and as a volunteer performing humanitarian work -- especially combatting child abuse and child prostitution -- for various NGOs.  He is also a cartoonist.

Back to Beethoven

Six years ago this month, I returned to the piano lessons I'd abandoned in my youth.  (Actually, I had also taken lessons for a couple of years in the early 2000s.)  I had a favorite number that I'd been practicing on my own for a while.  I was having fun, and I decided to obtain some professional assistance with it. 

It was a wise decision, and the following December I played the piece, reasonably successfully, in a student recital.  The piece was the second movement to Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata.

At the end of the school year last June, I decided to take a break (although I didn't advise my teacher of this decision until September).  Weekly lessons require virtually daily practice, and I was feeling burned out.  I remember practicing daily for 1½ hours in junior high, but now, in my dotage, that seemed like a lot of work, always looming on my daily calendar.

But this week, I pulled out that first Beethoven number, and tried playing it.  My god, the first time through, it was as though I'd never seen it before, let along played it in recital.  But after playing it about four times, it's coming back quickly.  It's fun playing without the pressure of an upcoming lesson.  But -- as I recall clearly -- the incentive to keep working created by those weekly lessons was one of the reasons I returned to piano lessons in the first place.

Anyway, I hope to keep chipping away at old Ludwig and see how it goes.  I suspect I'm going to have it worked up fairly well before too long.  (But not with the same polish as if I had an imminent recital, and a teacher pushing me along.)

If that prediction comes true, I'll go ahead and begin work on the final movement as well.  I like both movements a lot.  Probably not the first movement.  It's the most difficult of the three, and although I played it well enough to satisfy my teacher that I wasn't going to get much better at it, and it was time to move on, I never enjoyed it that much.

After (if?) I'm satisfied with my efforts on the second and third movements, will I return to regular lessons again?  Maybe.  Stay tuned.

No word is an îland

Altho yu may laf, Teddy Roosevelt wanted to achiev a form of English speling that was eazier to lern, and he askt all government buros to follo the new paradim.  

The above sentence looks as though it had been written by a six-year-old, but that was sort of the point.  Andrew Carnegie founded the American Spelling Board in 1906 with a mandate to reform and simplify the English language.  The Board, packed with famous Americans, immediately prepared an initial list of 300 proposed word changes.  In August 1906, President Roosevelt ordered that all government documents would follow the new orthography.

Some of the changes have stuck -- or were already being slowly adopted even before the Board did its work.  Esthetic and fetus, instead of aesthetic and foetus.  Gram instead of gramme, and plow instead of plough.  The dropping of the "u" in words like colour and flavour.  Some of the suggested changes have gradually become a substandard or commercial form of spelling -- donut, cigaret, catalog.  Manoeuver was to be written manuver.  Modern American English has compromised with "maneuver."  

But most of the changes were too radical for public acceptance.  At the end of 1906, Congress resolved that standard dictionary spellings should be used in government documents.  Roosevelt threw up his hands and conceded the fight.  Our American experiment with government-mandated spelling ended within months of its commencement.

This battle was brought to mind by a feature article in today's New York Times discussing France's efforts to curtail to some extent the use of the circumflex -- that little hat that you often find over French vowels.  The idea wasn't to eliminate it entirely -- only in those cases involving the vowels "i" and "u."  Nevertheless, the public is in an uproar.

Unlike America and Britain -- aside from our unfortunate effort in 1906 -- France has a permanent body, the Académie Française, that determines what is correct and what is not correct French usage.  The Académie can rely on its decisions being enforced in some contexts -- public advertising and signage, for example.  It remains to be seen how effective their latest efforts to simplify French spelling will prove.

French is derived from Latin, as is English to a lesser extent.  The circumflex is most commonly used to show that an "s" in a Latin word has become omitted in French pronunciation, and thus spelling.  For example, "insula" becomes "isle" in English but île in French, showing that the "s" has been dropped.  Interestingly enough, one of the American Spelling Board's 300 changes was to change isle and island to ile and iland. 

"Yuk" is my reaction, and was also the reaction of the American public in 1906.

While the average reader of English probably couldn't care less, for some of us, the clues revealing our language's ancestry are valued and even, at times, useful.  The French are far more tradition-minded than we Americans, and I imagine that the loss of the circumflex in île would be at least as painful as would be the loss, for us, of the silent "s" in island. 

Language isn't static, but it changes slowly, glacially, as people's lives change.  Over the past century or two, Americans have lost their enthusiasm for the "British u" in words like honour, harbour, and flavour.   They are now willing to countenance use of either "catalogue" or "catalog."  And while comic books and popular magazines may tolerate "alright," "altho," and "laff," none of us has become  "advanst enuf" to claim he "preferd" "iland" for "island."

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once stated that, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience."  So also for the life of a nation's language.

Paradoxical travel

The author of any story dealing with time travel has the problem of handling the inherent paradoxes. The most successful handling of this problem that I've seen was that of the third Harry Potter movie. But the potential time travel paradox in that movie occurred during a relatively short sequence within the movie.

Here, in The Speed of Darkness, we have the concluding volume of Catherine Fisher's Obsidian Mirror quartet -- a quartet that has been centered entirely on time travel. The paradoxes abound, and the characters openly acknowledge those paradoxes and attempt to come to grip with them within the boundaries of the plot.

I would have to go back and read all four books again to find out how successful the author was. Not all that successful, I suspect. The books were enjoyable and well-written and worth one reading. But only one such reading, I think.

Aside from my concerns with the time travel paradoxes presented by the plot -- which really is the central issue, explicit in the books themselves, and not something swept under the carpet -- this final volume is an exciting read, as we watch the fairly large cast of characters experience great adventures and continue their development as persons, their motivations becoming more evident to us, and, interestingly, to themselves as well. Even the greatest villain, the dastardly Janus, arouses a certain sense of pathos. Summer, the queen of the fairy Shee, remains remorseless, superficial and without feeling -- but still appealing to us in a perverse way.

And the changeling Gideon, to me the most sympathetic of the characters from the very first volume, finally has his wish fulfilled, although not the wish I would have wished for him.

A good read. But, of course, the first three books are an absolute prerequisite if this book is to make any sense at all.
-----------------------------------------

I've posted reviews of the earlier three volumes in the series on the Goodreads website.  I also posted a discussion of the opening novel, Obsidian Mirror, three years ago, on my Confused Ideas blog. The other two are The Slanted Worlds and The Door in the Moon.

Riding a tiger

All freshman at my university were required to take a three-term course in the History of Western Civilization.  These courses were quite common among colleges and universities a few decades ago, but unfortunately less so now.

During the course, we were required to read selections from Aristotle's Politics, and discuss our readings with our instructor in small discussion groups.  Time has eroded most of what I learned, of course, but I do recall that Aristotle divided governments into three categories:  monarchy, aristocracy and polity.  Each category had a "perversion":  respectively, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. 

Aristotle discusses in some detail the distinction between each category and its perversion, but in general, a "true" monarch, or aristocracy, or polity rules on behalf of the entire city-state, with the goal of maximizing the welfare of all citizens.  The perversions use the same form of government to maximize the happiness of, respectively, the ruler, the oligarchy, or the impoverished and poorly-educated masses, at the expense of the other members of the community.

This is all heady stuff when you're 18, and it made for lively discussion.  But Aristotle's concerns seemed pretty abstract.  They also seemed irrelevant, to some degree, in modern America, because -- we were confident -- we had developed a government by the entire people, with checks and balances to prevent any one group from oppressing the others.  (How we believed this so firmly, knowing at least something of the "Gilded Age," eludes me now.)

Aristotle came to mind over the weekend, watching the Republican debate.  If Aristotle wanted an example of what happens when "the masses" take control for their own purposes alone, he might have pointed to the squawking and braying of the various contenders for the GOP nomination.  All consideration of contemplative and deliberative debate was thrust aside.  The melée wasn't even a "debate," properly understood.  It was a shouting match, a hurling of coarse, personal insults at one another.

What makes the entire disgusting spectacle frightening is that what we saw on Saturday night was only partially a degeneration of Aristotle's "polity" into his dreaded "democracy."  Behind the scenes, the GOP's big business interests have encouraged this strident populism, trusting that it would ultimately play out in their own favor, hoping that the populist horror of socialism would cause the masses to give our oligarchy -- an elite not of birth but of money -- everything that it wants.  We see, therefore, oligarchy fomenting a perverted "democracy" for its own oligarchical ends.

It's happened before, and in recent times.  In Weimar Germany, business interests encouraged the populist Nazis, on behalf of the frightened petit bourgeois masses, to destroy not only socialists but the labor unions.  Once the Nazis had done away with the leftists, the "right sort" of upper class leaders believed, the "establishment" would quietly ease out the bumbling Nazis and restore government by oligarchy.

Things didn't go well for the Germans.  As the Chinese proverb puts it, "He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount."  I'm afraid that the business-oriented "establishment" of the GOP may discover that they have mounted a tiger they can no longer stop riding.

I hope only the GOP ends up being eaten, not the entire American people.

Travels of an expatriate

Street scene in Fez

We often travel to seek the strange and the mysterious, which sometimes means simply seeing how other people in other cultures live their lives.  American writer (and musician) Paul Bowles spent his life traveling and observing other peoples.  His fiction evokes the strange, the mysterious, and even the frightening and bizarre.

His best known novel, The Sheltering Sky, follows an American couple into the Sahara, where they find more than they sought, in writing that casts an almost hypnotic spell on the reader.  Bowles's best known short story, perhaps, The Delicate Prey, also set deep in the Sahara, is a horrifying tale of crime and punishment among residents of the desert, desert dwellers whose ideas of justice are untempered by mercy.

I was introduced to Bowles through his fiction, his stories of the Sahara and its effects on those who lived in, or visited the life of, the desert.  I had also heard stories of Bowles's private life -- stories of a man who spent most of his life as an expatriate in Tangier, who lived for years in an interesting marriage to a lesbian writer, and who was a friend and confidante of many American writers including members of the Beat generation.

I was unprepared for the writing to which he evidently devoted much of his time -- travel writing for mainstream publications.  His book, Travels, contains some 39 essays, most of them published in the late, lamented Holiday magazine during the 1950s and 60s  -- a magazine that was to travel writing what the New Yorker is to general literature.   His writing presents scenes and vignettes almost as strange as those in his fiction, but in a first-person narrative form  that is far more accessible to the uninitiated first-time Bowles reader.

Tangier was his preferred residence, and Morocco his preferred country, and some of the best essays describe experiences in Moroccan cities, in the mountain areas (the Rif, the Atlas), and in the bleak (but always surprising) expanses of the Sahara.  Bowles first moved to Tangier in the early 1930s as a youth.  Tangier -- for many years an "international city" under French and Spanish administration --  has no major "tourist sites," he acknowledges, but, in a 1958 article, he found much to love.

In Europe, it seems to me, the past is largely fictitious; to be aware of it one must have previous knowledge of it.  In Tangier, the past is a physical reality as perceptible as sunlight.

 He saw both the city and the country evolve from a primitive residence of Berbers and Arabs, governed by French and Spanish colonial powers, to a far more modern and independent nation. 

Bowles (who died in 1999) was no sympathizer with colonial rule.  He was even less, perhaps, a sympathizer with the "modernizing" (read "Europeanizing and Americanizing") ferver of Moroccan nationalist leaders.  Where Morocco's rulers saw progress, Bowles saw foundering attempts at globalization -- the gradual replacement of local crafts and foods with mass produced imported goods and services.

The last essays in this book were written in the early 1990s.  I'm not sure to what extent Bowles's fears for the future have come true, although "McDonaldization" continues unabated in many parts of the world.  In an article written in 1984, he wrote about the medieval medina in Fez:

Yet with the increasing poverty in the region, the city clearly cannot continue much longer in its present form.   ...  A house which formerly sheltered one family now contains ten or twelve families, living, it goes without saying, in unimaginable squalor.  The ancient dwellings are falling rapidly into disrepair.  And so at last, it is the people from outside the walls who have taken over the city, and their conquest, a natural and inevitable process, spells its doom.  That Fez should still be there today, unchanged in its outward form, is the surprising phenomenon.

I visited Fez, for my first and, so far, only visit, in 2012.  I have nothing earlier in my own experience with which to compare it.  All I can say is that the city, when I visited it, was magical -- magical and apparently non-ersatz, thriving, and packed with local manufacturing (e.g., leather tanning) and shops, and local residents.  (It also had its share of tourists, of course.)   I would love to find a place to stay overnight within the medina on a future visit.

So the death and decay of Morocco is all relative, I suppose.  The past was always better.  I'm not being entirely ironical, because by Bowles's standards the past no doubt was better, more true to local culture -- even though the Moroccan residents probably had less money, less food, and worse housing.

Bowles's travel articles aren't limited in topic to Morocco.  He writes about locales as disparate as Paris, Seville, Istanbul, Algeria, Central America, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Kenya, Madeira, and Thailand.  He writes a series of articles about a project he undertook under a grant, recording tribal music throughout the mountainous areas of Morocco -- at a time when the Moroccan government was hoping to stamp out "folk music" as an indication of non-modern backwardness.  Always, Bowles has an eye for the strange, an ear for the good story, an empathy for the people with whom he speaks, a sensitivity to their music and to their lives.

Reading the essays and articles in Travels is as close as most of us will get to obtaining a feel for many various cultures in the world, and especially for those cultures as they existed before and a decade or two after World War II.  And learning about the world's hidden places and cultures from a gifted writer with a clear sense of perception renders them no less intriguing or mysterious.  Intriguing and mysterious to us, as they were even to Bowles himself.