Winter is a State of Mind

I love winter. Not necessarily the everyday experience of living through winter, which usually gets old around mid-February, but the general idea of the season. Frigid cold and darkness. I love the way snow and ice transform the world into something alien and pure and colorless and elemental. And then there’s the pleasure of being inside when it’s cold outside. Cocoa, tea, warm fireplaces, blankets, candles.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing because I live in the tropics now, and the weather here is more or less the same every day. I miss winter. I have whatever it’s called when you’re homesick for seasons.

Luckily, last winter – no, crap, it was two winters ago now – in Munich was extremely snowy, and I stored up enough experiences of trudging around in the snow to last me for years. To add to the whole thing, that was the year when my friends Mithra and Frank got me a pipe for Christmas, so I spent a lot of time wandering around the Englischer Garten and the Nymphenburger Schlosspark trying to light the pipe. The combination of snow and futilely lighting match after match was somehow unforgettable – I would pretend that I was trying to light a fire that would keep me alive, like some really bad Bavarian remake of a Jack London story. So I have particularly vivid memories of several walks I took that winter.

But when memories alone aren’t enough to put me in the right wintry frame of mind, there are always photographs, right? Wrong; I have taken perhaps ten rolls of photographs in my entire adult life, and I don’t even know where they are now. I love pictures but I hate taking them. Something about putting that stupid machine up to my face makes me so upset and angry that I hardly ever keep it up there long enough to take a good picture. I am a shy person. I always feel like everyone’s looking at me. Normally this is bad enough, but when I hold up a camera in public, it multiplies that feeling enormously.

I feel like Frodo when he puts on the One Ring. I feel like everyone’s attention is drawn to me, and that there’s some kind of horrible giant eye staring into my soul. I feel, in short, unbearably self-conscious. And to make things worse, when holding a camera up in public I feel like I’m sending out an invisible beam that will make people want to not step into my picture, and the anxiety of disturbing other people’s walking like that is enough to make me want to throw the camera down and stomp on it. I hate the fact that whenever any jackass holds up a camera, suddenly it’s rude to walk in front of them, and I don’t want to be on either end of that stupid, horrid interaction. So I’ve known for years that photography isn’t my thing, and I’ve just had to rely on memory and other people’s pictures to satisfy my nostalgia.

This is why I got so excited about Google Earth a few months back – finally I could mentally relive my past adventures, based on a reliable photographic source, without having had to take pictures of everything. But Google Earth doesn’t usually have wintry pictures, except for Salzburg, which for some reason is snowy in the satellite images while everywhere around it is green.

So I needed some way to periodically revisit places I’d been during winter, in order to help assuage my homesickness for the season. I only recently found a pretty good solution: webcams. Today I’m especially homesick for Germany, after a nice meal with Darby and David at a German restaurant here in KL, where I had some pretty good Schnitzel Wiener Art and a Weihenstephaner, and so for the last hour or so, via webcams, I’ve been watching night fall on the snowy Bavarian towns of Munich, Augsburg, Garmisch, Dachau, Freising, Rosenheim and Landsberg. I think it did the trick. You know, I really can’t remember what life was like before the Internet. What would I have had to do to see this sort of thing, 30 years ago? Go to the library and find a book with pictures of Germany in it? I guess I would have just made do with fading memories.

Quote of the Day...

...or week, or year, or decade... heck, I would consider this a good epitaph:

Me gustan los relojes de arena, los mapas, la tipografía del siglo XVIII, las etimologías, el sabor del café y la prosa de Stevenson.

or

“My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typeface, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.”

-Jorge Luis Borges, Borges y Yo (1960)


I’ve never been an enormous Stevenson fan, aside of course from a childhood liking of Treasure Island, Jekyll and Hyde and Kidnapped, but after a recent conversation with a serious student of Scottish literature, I am going to give his work a closer look, and while I don’t think I would say his prose per se is anything special, I definitely like Stevenson’s unique combination of the childish, the abstractly cerebral and the grotesque. As for the hourglasses, maps, etymology and coffee, I think it would be harder to find a four-word summary of the sorts of things I like. Well, not hourglasses in particular, but it gets the idea across of something slightly outdated yet effective, precise and elegant. Just one of the innumerable reasons why I have infinite admiration for Borges and his work.

Al B. Traum, Chinese Detective

I am a Chinese Detective. I just had another one of those lightning-bolt, burning-bush moments where everyday household objects are suddenly transfigured into something strange and luminous and portentous. Similar to my recent discovery that chess is everywhere. I’ll try to contain my excitement and keep the story brief and to the point because of its obvious limited interest to anyone who isn’t me, but I can’t promise anything.

Exhibit A:
A copy of “Fun with Chinese Characters: The Straits Times Collection 3” which was bought by me at a used book store in Munich, Germany for the sum of three euros and eighty euro cents. I have been carrying this around with me for a couple of years. It explains what some Chinese characters mean via cartoons and aphorisms, but frankly I have never liked the book because it seemed a little beyond my level of Chinese appreciation. For example, the sign for “chair” is explained as “tree” plus “man with exclamations of approval underneath”, which apparently means “unusual”, which all together means “unusual thing made out of wood”, which is what Chinese people thought of chairs since they were used to sitting on the floor. Yikes. I suppose the easier characters were all used up in the first two volumes, but that’s a little too complex a mnemonic scheme for me to absorb at this point in my life. It’s simply going to be hard for me to see little drawings meaning “tree plus man-approval which is to say unusual” and think “chair”.

Exhibit B:
A coarse paper scroll with what I was told were the Chinese characters for the four seasons on it, purchased last month by me in Hoi An, Vietnam for the princely sum of two American dollars, which price was deemed at the time by my wife to be far more than the item is worth, but which price was nevertheless paid promptly and without regret by me to the elderly calligrapher due entirely to my well-known soft-heartedness in re haggling. In further defiance of my wife’s wishes, I have since installed the artwork in my office, unframed and unmatted, by means of a small loop of Scotch tape. It sometimes comes loose and falls to the ground, but I am overall pleased with the state of this unique artistic exhibit and its adhesive mounting.

Exhibit C:
An almost repulsively cheerful, glitter-lined paper Chinese pig, with several cheerful dangling piglets in Chinese coolie outfits, clearly some sort of Chinese New Year decoration but otherwise a mystery to us, purchased by me in a spasmodic fit of never-before-seen Chinese New Year enthusiasm, at the Giant grocery store in One Utama mall last week for the sum of around ten Malaysian ringgit. Said swine is clearly so incredibly happy that it has quickly become a welcome addition to our apartment, in spite of my complete ignorance of what it is supposed to represent in Chinese culture, or what the characters on its ornate pig-saddle might mean.

What do these three ordinary household objects have in common, you might well ask? Read on, my friends, read on.

The Awesomeness Is Initiated:
While sitting contemplatively in the smallest room of our apartment this evening in a mood of pre-excretory anticipation, flipping as is my wont at such times through the pages of Exhibit A, I came across Page 108, which tells the story of the character for “Spring”. Apparently one remembers it by realizing that it is composed of mutated versions of the symbols for “vegetation” and “sun”. Fat chance of that, I thought to myself, but remarkably the character must have lodged itself in my short-term memory like a wad of paper towels in a sewage pipe, for soon afterwards...

The Awesomeness Is Further Unfurled:
I was sitting in my office hours later when, idly turning my head to scratch at one of my many iridescent fungal neck infections, my gaze fell upon Exhibit B, the mysterious Four Seasons scroll, its Scotch-taped length of ancient wisdom fluttering a bit in the breeze from the electric fan. It suddenly seemed to have more to say to me than usual. In fact, I suddenly realized that I could read the first character. Well, not read it in the sense that I would know how to pronounce it, but in the sense that I knew what it was supposed to mean. The two-dollar Vietnamese hieroglyphs were speaking to me! Spring! Note: the above picture is backwards and I don't have time to go back and flip it now. Sorry. Just look at this page in a mirror to get the full effect.

The Awesomeness Is Made Ham:
A few hours later, staggering sleepily through the darkened dining room into the kitchen to get a drink of tepid, disease-filled Malaysian tap water, I almost walked headfirst into the dangling coolie piglets but, with catlike reflexes, whipped my head out of danger at the last millisecond. But what was this? I stood transfixed, like a king cobra who has just been played a particularly mesmerizing ditty on the charmer’s flute. The ornamental bacon was speaking to me. I peered more closely at the gaudy oriental swine. This means something, I thought, like Richard Dreyfus confronted with a giant pile of mashed potatoes. The dangling pork had a mysterious message to impart. The tiny gilded crown hovering over the pig’s prosperous pink bulk was screaming out to me.


Spring! The New Year! It all made sense.

In one night I went from having two items of incomprehensible decorative Middle-Kingdom gobbledygook in my apartment, to realizing that I was surrounded by lovely and legible signs of spring.

Another case closed for the world’s most prominent illiterate Chinese detective.

This sort of discovery is one of the reasons why I love languages and writing so much, and is an example of why I know that I will continue to be refreshingly and utterly astonished at and delighted by humanity’s ability to encode meaning in works of art for as long as I live. I know that even if I live to be 200 I will probably still not come close to deciphering all the hidden messages in my own apartment, not to mention the world outside. I am looking forward to my next case.

History Comes Alive

When we were on vacation in Vietnam last week, I realized something which I’ve had floating in the back of my head for a while. I shouldn’t have gone to Europe to find out about European history. I should have gone to Asia. Europe these days is just a normal modern place with some old buildings. Asia on the other hand has it all, and can be modern on one block and completely stone-age on the next. Here are some of the olde timey things I have seen here which I previously only knew from history books.

Nannies
People here have servants. Mainly to raise their kids for them. The nannies here are a small and silent race of young women with short haircuts and sweatsuits, most, as I understand it, from the Philippines. Strangely, most of the mothers don’t work and are usually standing right frigging there and could easily do exactly what the servants are doing. I didn’t understand the need for nannies in Olde Europe when the women didn’t work, and I don’t understand the need for nannies here in the condos in KL where the women don’t work, but at least I’ve seen the system in action.

Drivers
Similarly, people here have human beings who sit dozing in their cars all day for them and, when required, turn the steering wheel and work the pedals to make the car go somewhere. I think this is imbecilic. People here apparently think it’s a great idea. So did people back in the days when being a driver probably involved a lot more horse grooming, etc. and was actually a full-time job. So when I read a novel where someone has a family coachman, I have some reference points now.

Indentured servitude/ slavery
I don’t know how much they’re paying the Indonesian, Vietnamese, etc. construction workers here, or how long their contracts are. Maybe they’re all perfectly happy. But any industry where you import impoverished people from other countries to do the work, and where they live in all-male barracks for years at a time, seems to me to be on about the same moral level as running a cotton plantation with African slaves. I would much rather live in an apartment building that had been constructed by people who could visit their families whenever they wanted.

Families sleeping in one room
In Vietnam, the beds seem to often be in the main room of the house, and in full view of the street. I can’t count how many times I saw entire families curled up for a snooze as I walked down the street. I used to wonder how the medieval Europeans had time for makin’ sweet love with this setup, and I still wonder how the Vietnamese do it, but either way it seems to work for them.

Rats in the street
I mean, in broad daylight. Bold and sassy. I don’t think I ever saw that in Europe, but I know it used to be an issue.

Gutters as bathrooms
I had a Choose Your Own Adventure book set in medieval France where the characters have to watch out for the waste being flung from upstairs windows into the street. The woman yelled out “Gardyloo”! as she was dumping the pisspot. I’m not sure what that word means but I will certainly never forget it. Vietnam was a lot like that, except that most people keep everything at ground level and simply squat over the gutter, which is less dangerous but more visually stimulating for passersby. I haven’t been to India but I assume similar shenanigans are constantly underway there, which goes for a lot of these points.

Sentries/ watchmen
Bernardo: “Who’s there?” Francisco: “Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.”
Where I come from, there’s no need or desire for every neighborhood, building or place of business to have a full-time staff of armed guards somnolently prowling the perimeter. Here, there apparently is.


Racial specialization
Just as the olde-timey Jews had the moneylending biz locked down, and just as the dwarves pretty much have a monopoly on mining in the Misty Mountains, and as exiled Huegenots made the best lace doilies, so too was it until very recently an impossible feat in Asia for anyone who isn’t Chinese to sit behind a counter and sell things to other people. Why and how the Chinese were so fantastically, unbeatably advanced in shopkeeping technology puzzles me, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Specialized districts and markets
Old London used to have a street of fishmongers, a street of glove-makers, a street of furriers, etc., and the workshops were all right there out the street. Hanoi’s old quarter is the best example of this old philosophy I’ve seen. Our hotel was on tombstone carving street, as seen at the top of this post.

Dogs as useful tools, not members of the family
I think that our forefathers probably kept a much wider emotional distance from their dogs, and you can definitely see that in Asia, where they are used as watchdogs but more or less left to fend for their own food and water.

Nightfall is terror time
Whatever you do don’t get caught in the Monkey Forest outside of Ubud, Bali, when the sun goes down. The monkeys are hungry and pitch black doesn’t begin to describe it. Lights out. In a lot of places when it gets dark if you’re not at home around the fireplace or whatever, you’re in trouble. It’s bedtime. This is a feeling I don’t think I ever experienced before, except for maybe when camping, but that’s different.

Hospitality to strangers
In America I don’t think we ever had anyone over to our house, and if we did maybe they got offered a pop-tart if they were lucky. Last week in Vietnam we were given tea, bananas, pomelos, and all sorts of friendliness by people who didn’t know us at all and could clearly barely afford the bananas, and it was very nice.

I could go on forever but I’ll stop there. Sorry for the sparsity of links and pictures on this one... I will try to add more later.

The end result of all this is, I’m pretty sure if I were to read a book like “Daily Life in the Age of Charlemagne” now, I would have a much better idea about what it was talking about than I would have a few years ago. And I would also mentally picture Dark Ages Europe as being filled with Asians.

Visions of Fat Plastic Horses

We were in Vietnam and Thailand for the last few weeks, but that’s not the reason why I haven’t written any updates. The reason this site has been utterly barren of new content is the simple fact that if I had written anything it would have been all about chess, and I don’t want to put you through that.

Sadly I still need to exorcise this somehow, so here’s the short version: I am a very bad chess player but, as I described in an earlier post, I like the game and am interested in its history and regional variations. So what happens when we go on vacation to Vietnam? Everyone is playing Chinese chess. Well, at least many of the scruffier and more desperate-looking men were. They were at it all day long. Out on the sidewalk. In the parks. Where I come from, ancient strategic board games are not a common sidewalk pastime for taxi drivers and garbagemen, and the whole thing fascinated me.

For less than five bucks I got a shiny plastic Chinese chess set and cheap wooden board, and I happily learned the different characters for “horse”, “elephant”, “general”, etc. As our trip through Vietnam continued, I began to realize that the game was everywhere. There were crude chess boards carved in the pavement or scratched into the tops of tables. That modern art painting in the cafe in Hoi An was not, I realized, a random set of geometric lines. Everything seemed to be falling into place and everything I came across seemed to have a hidden chess-related message, like that movie where Nic Cage found that the one dollar bill is a treasure map to the secret pyramid under the Supreme Court or whatever. Best of all, I had a really good bonding experience with an elderly Vietnamese villager who invited us in for tea and proudly showed us his sets of chess pieces. He seemed very excited that I knew about the game and invited me to come over to his house and play him any time. It was great.

Anyway, that was Vietnam. Then we continued to Thailand, and a little research shows me that they play a primitive mutant version of chess, one from before the queen piece got all of her fancy moves. On our first night there I saw two tuk-tuk drivers battling it out with a special Thai set with squashed little pawns and red and white plastic pieces. I had no choice but to stalk the streets of Bangkok like a lunatic looking for a set for myself, of course, but since we were in the tourist area I had no luck. I have dreamed about that cheap Thai chess set every night since. There is something strangely compelling about that chubby red plastic horse, and the fact that the Thai version seems to be very close to the way the game must have been like around a thousand years ago. I’m bummed that I didn’t find a set, but at least now I’ll have something to look forward to whenever I get back to Thailand. All these adorable schoolkids must have gotten their sets somewhere.

Now that I own or am scheming to someday obtain all these exotic chess sets, with whom, you ask, am I going to play? Beats me. I stink at chess. I’ve been trying to get better by playing the computer, but it’s slow going. Maybe I’ll eventually work my way up to playing actual other humans. But for now the sets are more like souvenirs than anything else. I had a great time in Vietnam and I probably have a lot to say about what we saw and did there, but I had to get some of that chess obsession stuff off my chest first.