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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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| 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.
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| Mekong Riverview Hotel |
Getting there may or may not be "half the fun," but planning a trip almost always is. Most of my travel is thus planned long in advance, with various aspects of my trip meticulously considered, and bookings arranged early on. Not that I don't value spontaneity -- I just like to tackle early those details of the trip that are necessarily non-spontaneous.
Rarely do I decide to take a major trip a mere six weeks in advance. But when advised that my sister and my nephew were going to Laos next month, visiting with family members for a couple of weeks, what could I do? I said sure, me too, I wanna go, when will you be there?
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Maury celebrates fifth birthday with
Luang Prabang classmates in 2004.
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My six-year-old great niece and her mom have returned to Luang Prabang, after an extended stay in the Bay Area. Maury's mom is writing travel articles for Southeast Asia publications. Maury, my great niece, originally began first grade in Luang Prabang in the fall of 2004, but then switched to a Sonoma county school last fall. Now she's back in Luang Prabang, at an international school where most of her classes are taught in English, but some in Lao.
So yesterday I decided to go. No time to ponder schedules for weeks, as is my wont. Within an hour I had booked round trip flights from Seattle to Bangkok, via Seoul (surprisingly inexpensive), and round trip flights on a local airline (not quite so cheap) between Bangkok and Luang Prabang. I also booked six nights at the Riverview Hotel, overlooking the Mekong river -- the hotel where I stayed with delight on my prior visit to Luang Prabang in October 2014 -- and a single night between flights at the airport hotel in Bangkok.
My parents would have gone downtown and engaged in lengthy discussions with a travel agent, with a number of subsequent phone calls confirming various aspects of the trip. Through the magic of the internet, I can do the entire thing myself with minimal fuss. That sounds totally natural to most of my readers, but to me -- who began his travels in an earlier world -- it still instills awe.
All one needs now is enough available credit on your Visa card, and the world is your oyster. Hopefully, you will have reached a nation that has no extradition treaty with the United States before your Visa bill arrives.
Just a little light travel humor.
So I leave Seattle on March 20, spend six nights in Luang Prabang, and return home on March 29. A whirlwind trip, but travel causes time dilation, as Einstein well knew. My time in Laos will seem lengthy and full of event -- but once I get home, I'll marvel at how quickly the time flew.
Such is the sad way the world works -- and that our lives pass!
I just feel moved to expound on the subject of Groundhog Day, noting that today is indeed the Feast of the Purification, a/k/a Candlemas Day a/k/a Groundhog Day. But long-time bloggers, like old-timers in general, find themselves apt to tell the same story over and over.
In fact, a perusal of my archives reveals that I've already discussed the subject. Twice, in fact, in 2009 -- at the beginning and at the end of the six-week prescriptive period of additional winter. And in 2010, I added a macabre touch to the day, publishing a recipe for Groundhog Stew.
What can I add to our annual celebration of the rites of Marmota monax that I haven't mentioned before? A little poetry, perhaps? Recall that a groundhog is also known, depending on whence you hale, as a woodchuck:
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he couldif a woodchuck could chuck wood!
There you go, readers. You get rhyme, alliteration, homonyms, and scientific knowledge all in one fell quatrain.
Recall -- by the way -- that groundhogs not only go about their business under the name of woodchuck, but also use the varied monikers of whistler, thickwood badger, Canada marmot, monax, moonack, weenusk, and red monk.
Long before anyone began badgering (!) the benighted woodchuck each year at this time, his powers of prognostication were attributed to mere forces of nature. From pre-groundhog England we have the verse:
If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.
From Germany (in translation):
For as the sun shines on Candlemas Day,
So far will the snow swirl until May.
For as the snow blows on Candlemas Day,
So far will the sun shine before May.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Today was sunny and bright. Any Seattle groundhog who popped his head above ground definitely saw his shadow, foreshadowing six more weeks of winter. Alas!
But hark! There are no groundhogs in the State of Washington! They live and thrive east of the Mississippi and northwards into Canada. But not in these parts. We do have their distant marmot relatives: the hoary marmot, the yellow-bellied marmot, and the Olympic marmot. But no one would mistake these friendly, intelligent and generally magnificent mountain animals with the common groundhog. Our mountain marmots are far superior to that peculiar beast held aloft by the mayor of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, in the movie Groundhog Day.
Having no resident groundhogs, and clearly not being physically attached to England or Germany, we in Seattle are free from all Groundhog Day traditions, superstitions, old-wives tales, and/or empirical observations.
Sometimes a sunny day is just a sunny day, as Freud once observed. A sunny February 2nd in Seattle is (1) a miracle, and (2) simply a day to be enjoyed in shorts and t-shirts. We may or may not have six more weeks of winter. But "winter" in Seattle isn't what most of the nation -- especially those parts of the nation subject to the reign of the groundhog -- call "winter." To us, it's just a little more rainfall than usual.
Happy Groundhog Day!
