Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
Last week Jack got some much-needed exercise while negotiating Bangkok traffic en route to a rendezvous with Hippolyte Lafleur, a.k.a. Izzy Scoop.
Selections from Arno Petty’s Intelligencer and Weekly Gleaner
This week we meet Mu, Jack Shackaway’s love interest and chief cultural critic.
Selections from Arno Petty’s Intelligencer and Weekly Gleaner
Compared to 2020, all previous years, even the Disco Era, were the golden age of human existence.
Dave Barry, Washington Post
Good riddance 2020. The year from Hell, right? So everyone says. But it’s really only a matter of how you look at it.
Whatever. Here’s something from a collection I call “Leary’s Laws,” call it a gloss on Dave Barry’s above comment.
… Read moreThings
Back in the day, I was the fastest pedestrian in Bangkok. If someone passed me on the pavement, I assumed they were either from Korea or else on the run from the police.
But these days I get schoolgirls in bobby sox and buckle shoes zipping past me while drowned in their smartphones. This suggests three hypotheses:
1. I’m slowing with age.
2. A younger generation of Thais are walking faster.
3. I’ve learned to live more in the … Read more
Soft drinks giant PepsiCo has consulted with a Russian space startup offering brands the chance to project their logos into the night skies via low-orbit satellites.
“Pepsi considers space billboards to project logo across night sky using satellites”
(The Independent)
No problem, eh? Just part of a global campaign to erode our private spaces and our private choices to vanishing point. More and more, without so much as a by-your-leave, commercial interests invade … Read more
Bangkok currently lies enshrouded in a great cloud of fine particulate matter. Hey, but listen to what an Andromedan named Melrose had to say about pollution back in the 1990s, back in the days of leaded gas and black-belching city buses. Chacun à son gout, eh? The following originally appeared in the Bangkok Post Sunday section, and was later collected in Bangkok Old Hand (Bangkok: Post Books, 1993).
As most of you already know, the … Read more
Are you a Bangkok Old Hand?
Try this selection from the quiz, first published in 1993:
In which of the following situations would it be appropriate to use the common Thai expression mai pen rai (“never mind; no problem”)?
… Read more(a) A guest spills a little water on your coffee table.
(b) A waiter accidently dumps your beer into your lap.
(c) You go downstairs one morning in the rainy season and find that those of your possessions that float are
A French edition of Bangkok Noir is due out from Editions GOPE in May or June 2012.
12 nouvelles de John Burdett, Christopher G. Moore, Colin Cotterill, Stephen Leather, Pico Iyer, Timothy Hallinan, Dean Barrett, Eric Stone, Tew Bunnag, Alex Kerr, Vasit Dejkunjorn, Collin Piprell.
Almost exactly a year ago I posted “Submarine garrets for starving writers” (4 November 2010), which foresaw the entire city of Bangkok serving as a recreational dive site. And that piece itself contained a link to an article (“One Born Every Minute“) I wrote 25 years ago wherein I interviewed a visiting extraterrestrial who foresaw the submersion of Bangkok within another three decades. The TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand), I suggested, would hail his proposals … Read more
Inebriation is a false Muse. As seductive as they may be, chemical substitutes for true creative intoxication don’t work.
Maybe there are exceptions that prove this rule. Malcolm Lowry, e.g., did much field research for his brilliant novel Under the Volcano, which included a main protagonist who was drinking himself to death. (Lowry, unfortunately, perhaps in his quest for verisimilitude, was himself to go all the way at an early age.) Emulating his own hard-boiled detective protagonists, writer … Read more