HOME SWEET HOME

Last week we met Mu and learned the key to her libido. This week we meet all of her household, including a distinctive rhythm section and Mu’s sister, Bia.

Selections from Arno Petty’s Intelligencer and Weekly Gleaner

  • ALL FOR ONE, AND ONE FOR ALL. Western men have been known to misconstrue what is happening when they marry a Thai lady. Suddenly, as often as not, they discover that there are two cousins from upcountry who need a place
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KICKING DOGS ~ PROLOGUE

The Prologue to Kicking Dogs, a novel, appeared first in the Bangkok Post Sunday supplement in the early 1990s, and again over the years in at least two regional publications.
It was once shortlisted by The Paris Review for an annual humor competition, and they asked to see more stories from me. With my usual self-promotional genius, I never got around to submitting other stuff.
Next life.

Current edition (ebook & print on demand).
Cover by Colin Cotterill

Kicking DogsRead more

HEAR YE, HEAR YE

Drawing by John Tenniel

Announcing the upcoming serialization of Kicking Dogs on this very site.

The name is Jack Shackaway, and I’m a kind of freelance journalist. You meet some interesting people when you’re a hack writer living in Bangkok.
For example, the other day I was enjoying a few drinks with a pair of dubious characters name of Tommy Two-Toes and Wrong-Way Willie Wong. Actually, it was more than a few drinks, and these gentlemen were more than just Read more

Babies, bathwater, and back to the sacred

The Western Enlightenment, in all its euphoria at Reason’s liberation from old-crock orthodoxies, has thrown some babies out with the bathwater — e.g. perspectives and values that might better serve modern people. Such as? Such as common goals and values that promote individual development and satisfaction within shared senses of community. Such as universal principles by which to judge different cultural, religious and ideological institutions and actions. Rationalistic secular reductionism has been left with merely scientistic measures that seem, at … Read more

New science fiction: MOM now available for sale

 

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Digital editions now available for sale on the CDP website.

Print and digital versions available here and everywhere from 5 April 2017.

MOM

A GOD IS BORN!

TOO BAD ABOUT THE PERSONALITY DISORDER

So reads the graffito.

MOM is the mall operations manager — the greatest intelligence in history, a machine awakened to self-awareness at a time when the last few human survivors have withdrawn to the last two remaining refuges on Earth. Quarantined from the global nanobot superorganism … Read more

Wine appreciation night: Gold buttons & financial plans

winesJack Shackaway here.

The financial sky is falling. (So what’s new, eh? See here and here.). China’s economy is stumbling, the world’s share markets are tanking, and here in Bangkok anonymous malcontents have been bombing public places. Never mind. Starving writers are shielded from stock market crashes, at least, a regular feature of this life you don’t even notice if you have a pot to piss in but that’s about all.

Still, life can be good, and wine tastings … Read more

Get rich quick: Plan B

pike jumpingJack Shackaway here.

I’m free. A freelance writer. A free spirit. You name it. Currently a bachelor.

So why don’t I feel better? Where’s the lift of adventure, the sense of new horizons?

In my experience, the advantages of living alone are generally clearer when you’re living with somebody. (And vice versa.) Meanwhile I recognise another unfortunate fact of nature: Money serves in much the same way a shiny new Johnson Weedless Silver Spoon does when you’re fixin’ to catch … Read more

What I should write (learning to listen to my public)

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Jack Shackaway here. Of Kicking Dogs fame.

It’s true, as Collin says (here and here). Nearly everybody’s a writer these days.  And — given all the media interest in current publishing-industry convulsions — the few who aren’t writers are experts on publishing and books.

I used to tell people I was a novelist. I don’t anymore. That’s as interesting to your average citizen as saying “Every night I go to sleep.” Who isn’t writing a novel?

But if … Read more

Mickey’s Muse: Henry Ford for writers

The bots are coming, the bots are coming 

robot writer la times bbcThe times, they are a’changing, and faster than some of us might like. Us writers, for example. As Klaus F. Zimmerman has suggested:

“If anyone needed a wake-up call about how much the world, as we know it, is changing, consider this: China betting its future on robots is certainly about the starkest signal imaginable.” (“The big trade-off in the world of labour,”  The Straits Times, 1 May 2015)

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Existential & neural plasticity

helmet pink use

In the last two posts, we’ve seen how tobacco smokers and anthropogenic climate-change deniers demonstrate a similar psychology.

 

Jack Shackaway now looks at a third such group — those, including himself, who take motorcycle taxis in Bangkok. Jack offers this as a follow-up to both my “How I quit smoking” and my “Immortality for Joe Atheist” posts.

He claims the following sketch has been sitting on his computer since back in a time (or a … Read more