Woof!

Since I seem to be perennially hopeless at finding (or keeping) a girlfriend, I am becoming seriously tempted to get a dog for companionship instead. The more I think on it, the more obvious the many advantages appear.

10 Reasons Why A Dog Is Better Than A Girlfriend

1) A dog gives you unconditional love.

2) A dog gives you absolute loyalty.

3) A dog is always pleased to see you when you come home.

4) A dog enjoys being told to "fetch".

5) You can pet other dogs whenever you like.

6) A dog doesn't mind being teased about "dog years".

7) You can keep a dog happy with one or two chocolate treats, instead of a whole box.

8) You can get a dog to jump in the lake quite easily.

9) When a dog has behaved badly, you can make it sleep outside.

10) When you stop buying dinner for a dog, it dies.


Quite a powerful argument, I think.

A Lungful of Dust

This past couple of weeks, everywhere I've looked in Beijing I've seen SAND. Piles and piles and piles of the bloody stuff.

It's the annual drive to carry out building improvements and sidewalk repairs before the really hot summer months come along. It is cunningly timed to coincide with the windiest of months here in the city. And, of course, nobody thinks to wet this sand, or cover it up. No, it is all left permanently exposed to the elements. Well, there was a strip of plastic matting laid down on the 400 yard strip of bare earth between my apartment building and the end of the street that was left exposed for some days last week while the sidewalk was being completely re-layed. That, however, was an innovation, not, to my knowledge, repeated anywhere else yet. And it was a fairly coarse-weave mesh, so the sand could quite easily seep through it.

Both local and national government here are fond of blaming the city's occasional full-on 'dust storms' on the far end of Inner Mongolia, the Gobi Desert. But the low-level sand infestations we suffer on a day-to-day basis certainly all arise locally, from the hundreds or thousands of building sites around the city, from the tens of thousands of sidewalk re-laying projects, from the millions of squares of parched earth around the base of all the trees here. Even the rare apocalyptic, sky-darkening storms (there were some humdingers 5 or 6 years ago, but nothing to speak of while I've been here) come from much closer to home, I think. We had a mild one (overnight, so unwitnessed) this time last year that left everything coated with a quarter-inch of fine red sand, but I heard that analysis of these deposits showed that the stuff came from the neighbouring province, perhaps only a few tens of miles distant, not from the far end of Mongolia. (In fact, pretty much the whole of north central China is now a dust-bowl, and the Gobi is threatening to colonize half the country.)

I suspect the whole "Mongolian sand storms" story is just a myth, another piece of disinformation eagerly propagated by the government to shift blame, to divert attention from the real sources of the problem.

PS Along with the dust at this time of the year comes the cotton-balls - airborne clumps of white fluff shed by one particular variety of tree (I'm not good on names of trees). For a few days at the end of last week it was everywhere, falling thick as snow, clogging nostrils and stinging eyes. Not nearly as bad as last year, though. The puffballs seemed much smaller than I remember in the past, and the inundation has passed in only three days, rather than the week or more it has lasted before. I am told it is only the 'female' trees of the species that produce this stuff. The first few years when I was here, trees were being ruthlessly pollarded, to the point - it would seem - of death, to try to ameliorate this problem, but it didn't seem to be working. In this last year, I think, a lot of the offending trees have simply been ripped up and replaced. Progress, of a sort. Ah, the Olympics....

PPS Along with the season of dust comes the notorious Beijing Spring Cold. I thought I had miraculously escaped it this year..... but NO. I started going down with it over the weekend, and am now feeling like SHIT. And I'm usually pretty resilient about illness - this is a bad one. I'm supposed to be running a marathon in a month's time, and my training plan is already way behind. Bugger, bugger, bugger.

Patriotism - who cares?

Some deeply buried trivia quiz impulse in my brain somehow reminded me (belatedly) that today was St George's Day. I don't suppose I was the only person who forgot (until it was nearly over). I have always been deeply sceptical of nationalism and patriotism ("the last refuge of the scoundrel" and all that). One of the few things I really like about the country into which I was accidentally born is that it doesn't really have a 'national day'.

Maybe it's because England is too old to have a 'creation myth'. Or maybe it's because we, as a people, are too self-confident (arrogant?) to feel the need of a communal orgy of self-definition. I love the fireworks and the jollity and the drinking that attend festivals like the 4th July in America and the 14th July in France, but I do always feel a bit uncomfortable and embarrassed about the "What a great nation we are!" braggardliness of it.

England just doesn't have such a holiday. St George's Day? Preposterous! It has no link to our real history, nor to anything relevant to our modern culture. Only a handful of right-wing loons give much of a damn about it.

No fireworks or parades for us Angles today - and I'm very glad of that.

This week's 'bon mot'

After publishing my dark poem last week about our consuming need for recognition, to win people's attention, to leave some enduring record of our presence here on earth.... I was reminded of this famous line by Woody Allen.

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my works. I want to achieve immortality by not dying."

An old story, yet always new

This is an old favourite. How's your German? (Don't worry - translation to follow in a few days)



Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,
Die hat einen Andern erwählt;
Der Andre liebt eine Andre,
Und hat sich mit dieser vermählt.

Das Mädchen heiratet aus Ärger
Den ersten besten Mann,
Der ihr in den Weg gelaufen;
Der Jüngling is übel dran.

Es ist eine alte Geschichte,
Doch bliebt sie immer neu;
Und wem sie just passieret,
Dem bricht das Herz entzwei.

Heinrich Heine (1797 -1856)

North Korean holidays - a shameless plug

A rare cross-post from brother blog, Barstool Blues.

And a rare foray into commercialism! It's all right - I promise I won't make a habit of it. But I know this outfit - Koryo Tours, a boutique tour company specialising in trips to North Korea, based here in Beijing (there are no direct flights into Pyongyang, I don't think, other than from here and one or two places in Russia), run by a couple of Brits, mates of mine, Nick Bonner and Simon Cockerell.

It's a fascinating country, a unique experience. And the Mass Games (on currently, and for the next month or so), an extravaganza of music & movement featuring tens of thousands of participants, is an absolutely awesome sight.

I went on one of their tours 18 months ago, and would like to go again sometime. Warmly recommended. Not cheap, but well worth it.

Another 'bad China' moment

I saw my first tandem bicycle in China while running around the nearby lakes. What an horrendous idea! As if regular bicycles aren't dangerous enough, without making them twice as big, twice as heavy, twice as unstable.

This one was, I imagine, rented out by one of the bike-hire places as an amusing novelty for the afternoon. It was being ridden by two young girls who were woefully short-sighted and had no idea where the brakes were. They very nearly killed me. Really. I had to throw myself sideways into a wall to avoid being mown down. I was furious. I gave them 10 seconds of abuse in Chinese, English, and a couple of other languages as well.

During the rest of my run, I fantasised grimly about having forced them to dismount and then having thrown the wretched über-bicycle into the lake. I would have done this, I told myself, not to vent my own rage, or to punish them for their irresponsibility, but for public protection - they were looking set to leave a trail of casualties in their wake, and somebody should have stopped them. But, with any luck, they will have been flattened by a truck themselves before they completed one circuit of the lakes.

Ah, it's good to have such a vivid imagination. It does save me from actually murdering people like this.

A Beijing street scene

As I was (belatedly) setting off on my run on Saturday afternoon, I passed an interesting bit of street theatre unfolding right outside my apartment building. I was tempted to abandon my exercise regime so that I could stay and enjoy it all, but..... I really can't afford to miss too many more days of running.

A pedicab (a sort of tricycle rickshaw arrangement: the cheapest form of local hire transport; though not that common in central Beijing, other than the slightly upmarket ones that cater to tourists) ferrying a frail old lady somewhere had - apparently - swerved across the road (having been on the wrong side of the road - a very common offence for Beijing cyclists, who seem convinced that their own convenience is far more important than any considerations of general safety), and was very nearly hit by a black Audi. I couldn't see any evidence of injury or damage to any of the parties, but it had evidently been a very close call and the pedicab guy was fuming about it.

Now, as far as I could infer, it was the pedicab that had been entirely in the wrong. However, none of the many bystanders gathering to watch the stormy confrontation was likely to take the Audi driver's side - and neither was I.

These black cars are the curse of Beijing. Luxury sedans, all in gleaming, glossy black, with completely blacked-out windows; usually Audis, or some other flash imported brand; reputedly the official vehicles of upper-level Party cadres. However, not even Beijing has that many senior cadres. There are thousands upon thousands of these fucking things. I imagine that a lot of people are merely posing as senior cadres. A lot of these sinister black cars, I think, are driven by, for example, a relatively lowly official who just happens to have become more-than-decently rich by virtue of holding a modest but influential position in a local planning department somewhere. Or his dodgy brother-in-law who owns a building supplies company which wins a lot of valuable government contracts. Yep, these are the guys who are bleeding the country dry; complete c*nts, the lot of them, and everybody knows it. You can always tell the type (on the rare occasions they leave the protective anonymity of their black-window cars): all sharp haircuts and sunglasses and genuine Lacoste polo shirts (rather than the cheap local fakes that everybody else settles for). They're all swagger and bluster and bullying ("Hey, don't mess with me; I know people, people who could make life very unpleasant for you."); they think they own the bloody country (well, they do), and that the little people are just there to stroke their egos by being in awe of them. They are universally hated, but universally feared.

Our pedicab guy, though, was undaunted. He was a typical "old Beijinger" - tatty old jumper and a cracked leather jacket that looked as though it might date back to The War Of Resistance Against Japanese Agression (as WWII is quaintly styled around here), huge paunch, chain-smoker, world-class swearer. Beijingers have a reputation for being irreverent, bloody-minded, truculent; they all love to slag the government and 'the system' off in conversation any chance they get, but that bravado soon evaporates when they're actually confronted with one of these 'connected' guys, these black sedan bastards. But our working class hero felt wronged, and was damn well going to get satisfaction. He had prised the Audi driver out of his car, and was haranguing him in the middle of the street.

Confrontations over petty traffic accidents are a common sight in Beijing (lots of cars, very poor standards of driving; hence, hundreds, perhaps thousands of minor shunts every day). There seems to be an ingrained belief (I doubt if it's actually a law, but it's the rule everyone seems to follow) that you should not move your car after an accident - any accident - until the police come. The police might take a very long time to come. Sometimes they might not come at all. The two drivers have to sort matters out for themselves. Probably one of them will be manifestly at fault, and will eventually agree some on-the-spot compensation (since we're rarely talking about more than a scratch or a dent or a broken tail-light, it'll be a matter of a few hundred kuai). Most of these transactions are pretty trivial, but there's an awful lot of pride invested in them - the crazy Chinese notion of maintaining 'face'. These heated exchanges in the middle of the road can drag on for hours. Literally hours. It is one of the major causes of the hopeless traffic congestion in this city.

The black sedan drivers, though, are scary motherf*ckers. People don't usually take them on; and if they do, they are soon intimidated into backing down. The pedicab man's storm of fury was an unusual, inspiring sight, a one-man 'peasants' revolt'. I had hoped the argument might still be raging when I got back from my run 90 minutes later - but alas, no. I imagine that the Audi driver, with his path completely blocked by the errant pedicab and an unsympathetic crowd forming around him, will have decided to buy his way out of trouble by reaching into his fake leather clutch-purse (they all have them; another of China's fashion oddities) and pulling out one or two 100 yuan notes. On the other hand, if he was seriously 'connected', he may just have summoned the police to come and kick the shit out of the pedicab guy. I do hope it was the former.

Whoops

I went shopping this morning. Impulse buy: new brand of fruit yoghurt drink - in a twin-pack, special price, with the free gift of a nice-looking little glass bowl.

Chinese packaging is.... strange. Shoddy. Bizarre.

I had incautiously assumed that the glass bowl was actually attached to the yoghurt cartons by tape or something. No - it was just loose, inside the extremely flimsy plastic bag surrounding the three items. As soon as I unpacked my shopping at home, said plastic bag revealed its remarkable flimsiness by spontaneously shredding into three pieces, allowing the nice glass bowl-et to fall to the floor.

I very nearly caught it in flight. I think I would have caught it first bounce - if there had been a first bounce. You know that thing about how glass doesn't shatter until the third impact? There's supposed to be some physical law at work, to do with the properties of crystalline structures: the first impact merely sets off potentially damaging resonances, the second 'fixes' them into permanent micro-fissures; only further impacts will cause these fissures to break. Chinese glass, I infer, is manufactured with the fissures already in place: the instant this bowl touched the floor for the first time it exploded into about 30 or 40 fragments.

Oh dear. Not an auspicious sign for the rest of my day. It might easily have made me angry. Or depressed. Instead, I just shrugged, and got on with unpacking the rest of the shopping. (The fruit yoghurt is actually rather good. Undoubtedly the brand will disappear without trace again in a month or two.) "Uh, it's China." Within seconds I had dismissed the incident from my mind.

I have become much more tolerant of these petty irritations over the last few years. I am even able to enjoy them with a sly humour most of the time.

I remember an incident while I was staying with my friend Coral down in The Other Place (Shanghai, that is) a year or so ago. Returning to her apartment to freshen up after a day out and about, I was shocked, momentarily mystified to find that my sponge bag had been completely emptied of its contents by her ayi ("auntie" = domestic help). Confused by the appearance of such a strange, male accessory in a single woman's bathroom, she had assumed that it was some sort of trash bag, and thrown away all the (expensive, foreign, new, barely used) toothpaste, shaving foam, razors, deodorant, etc. inside it, though not the bag itself??? This was a not insignificant financial blow to me (I'm a poor boy, and I don't like to write off 200 or 300 kuai's worth of nice foreign toiletries just like that), and it was darned inconvenient, potentially embarrassing that I would be spending my last night in swish, cosmopolitan Shanghai (and then going back to work again in Beijing the next day) unshaven. However, the incident was just so bizarre, so ludicrous that I responded to the discovery with a peal of laughter.

My laugh drew Coral's attention, obviously. When she discovered her ayi's aberration, she was livid. I had thought she was more mellow about the weirdnesses of China than me, but she does have a rather obsessive-compulsive streak. She said to me: "If you can just laugh off something like that, maybe you've been in China too long."

No, I don't think so. But I don't extend people the same latitude for fucking up in creative ways when I'm back in the UK or the US; here, on the other hand, it seems to be essential to maintaining one's inner calm.

Alternatives to teaching English

I've just had to give a lecturette on this topic, and last night I found this all-too-appropriate picture on the Internet to kick off my slideshow.

One day I shall probably write at more length on the subject of teaching and teachers. There's a lot to say, but I'm too exhausted now. And my feelings about it are too conflicted to admit of easy discussion. Many of my best friends are teachers, yet in general I am rather contemptuous of the profession. I love teaching, yet I hate having to do it for a living. (Actually, the same would probably be true of any profession that I found myself in. I think being a journalist would be torture for me.)

The friend who arranged this afternoon's seminar facetiously introduced me as "the richest teacher in Beijing". Ah, if only........

Perhaps the most time-efficient teacher? At least as far as my own benefit is concerned. I'd like to think that I deliver plenty of valuable content to my students too, but my main concern is to secure a decent hourly rate for myself. A couple of times since I've been here I've taken tough decisions to refuse to work for less than x per hour, and have suffered weeks or months of rising panic as I appear to have priced myself out of the market.... but then, but then, slowly, new offers of work at higher rates start coming in. So, I earn much the same as my other teacher friends, but I probably have to put in rather fewer hours to achieve it. As Liz Phair once put it in a song, "It's nice to be liked, but it's better by far to get paid."

And I am making progress in my mission to escape from English teaching altogether. In fact, I've never really had to teach much 'nuts & bolts' English (thank heavens); almost all the teaching I've done out here has been focused on exam preparation, study skills, academic writing - quite high-level stuff. And these days I try to restrict myself to business 'soft skills' training and MBA primer courses. And editing, voice work, etc.

Anything but bloody EFL teaching!!

A topical haiku

The weather's getting warmer, there's been no substantial rain for..... months(?)..... the whole city is one huge building site. It's one of the signs of Spring in this town, one of the signs that the dust problem is getting really out of hand, when the water tankers hit the streets, spraying the asphalt to try to reduce the amount of dust getting airborne.

When you haven't noticed this happening - especially wandering back from a bar in the wee small hours! - the unexpected appearance of shiny-wet roads can seem startlingly incongruous.

Streets suddenly wet -
Out of place amid the dust:
An ersatz rainfall.

More from John Banville's 'Athena'

I've quoted part of this book before. I rediscovered it while staying with friends in America last summer, having first read it shortly after breaking up with The Great Love Of My Life, 'The Evil One', some 9 or 10 years ago. I never expected to feel as moved, disturbed, obsessive again.... yet my affair with The Poet at the end of '05 was, if anything, even more intense. I have often been tempted to e-mail these snippets to her - probably will one day, but at the moment I fear she would find them too personal, too discomfiting. I'm not feeling this hung up on her any more; 10 or 12 months ago, yes; but now - I'm pretty much on an even keel again.... with perhaps just the very occasional little relapse into foolish wistfulness: 'what if' and 'maybe' and all of that bollocks. I try to slap myself out of it whenever it happens.

My love. If words can reach whatever world you may be suffering in, then listen. I have things to tell you. At this muffled end of another year I prowl the sombre streets of our quarter holding you in my head. I would not have thought it possible to fix a single object so steadily for so long in the mind's violent gaze. You. You. With dusk comes rain that seems no more than an agglutination of the darkening air, drifting aslant in the lamplight like something about to be remembered.

************************************************************************************

We had our season. That is what I tell myself. We had our season, and it ended. Were you waiting all along to go, poised to leap? It seems to me now that even while I held you clasped in my appalled embrace you were already looking back at me, like one lingering on the brink of departure, all that you were leaving already fading in your glance, becoming memory even as it stood before you.

************************************************************************************

That kiss. Well. The effect of it was to last for days, for weeks. I felt like something that had been shattered and yet was still of a piece, all run through with hairline cracks and fissures and rocking on my base, as if I were an effigy carved from ice and she had come running at me with a hammer and delivered me a ringing blow. I brooded ceaselessly on that brief contact in a state of gloomy joyfulness and misgiving, turning the memory of it this way and that, scrutinising it from every possible angle. At times I got myself into such a state of finicking speculation that I doubted it had happened at all. It was so long since I had kissed a woman I hardly knew how it should feel..... And of course I could not believe it had meant as much to her as it had to me; the tongue of flame that had licked my middle-aged flesh and made it sizzle would hardly register, surely, on her hot young hide. Probably she was being kissed all the time and thought nothing of it. Yes, I would tell myself sternly, it was nothing at all to her, she hardly noticed it, and I would give myself a vigorous shake, like a dog out of water, and go on about my business, only to fall again immediately, with redoubled frenzy, into tormented, mad-eyed, hopeless speculation. Ice, did I say I was like shattered ice? A mud pool, more like, hot and heaving, and the thought of her a bubble rising and steadily swelling and then breaking the surface and bursting with an awful plop while down in the depths another bleb of turbid speculation was already forming itself.

************************************************************************************

At first in the weeks after she had gone I used to torture myself with the thought that I had not observed her closely or carefully enough, that when I still had the opportunity I had not fixed her sufficiently firmly in the frame of memory; but now that I am calmer (am I calmer?) I cannot believe that anyone ever can have been subjected to such unwavering demented attention as I devoted to you. Every day when you arrived in the room (I was always the first one there, always) I turned on you a gaze so awed, so wide with ever-renewed astonishment, beseeching in its intensity, that I thought you must take fright and flee from me, from such need, such fear, such anguished happiness. Not that you so much as flinched, of course; my poor haggard glare was never fierce enough to dazzle you. All the same, I insist that I looked harder at you and deeper into your depths than anyone ever did before or will again. I saw you. That was the point of it all. I saw you. (Or I saw someone.)

Another poem, one of my darker ones

Another of the 'list poems' I was experimenting with a while back; I think, the most powerful of them, because of the underlying logic of the progression of images - the way it melds the stalker-ish obsession with lost love into such wider concerns as the artist's constant striving to create something lasting, the hopelessness we all feel in the face of mortality and oblivion, the ultimate vanity of self-assertion.

I've probably said too much by way of introduction again. I had promised myself I was going to try to stop this. Tulsa, reprove me.

See what you think of it.



I Write My Name

I write my name
I write my name in dew on windows
And in dust on table-tops

Once I wrote poems, stories, songs
But now I mostly write my name

I write my name
On the e-mails you delete without reading
And on the postcards I do not dare to send

I write my name in spray-paint
On the apartment building opposite yours

I write my name in semen on your breasts
I write my name in blood on your bathroom wall

I write 'I love you'
I write 'I hate you'
I write 'Die, bitch!'
I write 'Forgive me...'
I write my name

I write my name in letters of flame
A thousand feet high
Glowing across the desert

I write my name
In the sand on the beach
And sit and wait
For the tide

In defence of 'intellectual snobbery'

Am I an intellectual snob?

I am sometimes accused of it, and it makes me uncomfortable. I don't like criticism, especially justified criticism (although, of course, I hardly ever receive that).

I like to absolve myself of the charge on the basis that 'snobbery' is an ostentatious, pretentious assumption of superiority on a misconceived basis (i.e. the supposed superiority is either absent or resides in a quality that is of utterly trivial import).

Intellect is not a trivial thing. I have one. I think that gives me a certain licence to look down on others who don't - so long as I don't let myself get too smug or objectionable about it.

Let me be more specific: I think it is a trivial matter that my mental powers may far outstrip those of people who are not blessed with the genetic or environmental advantages that I have enjoyed; and I would not dream of deriding them for shortcomings in their intellectual development which are no fault of their own. People, however, who appear to have enjoyed the same benefits of education as me, and perhaps more so, and who purport to be men of intellect, men of high academic standing, but are in fact numbskulls - well, such people are thoroughly deserving of scorn and ridicule. It might even do them some good.

I was exposed to a prime example of this last week. One of my regular editing jobs, which throws me mostly scientific papers on IT and economics, this time gave me an extended article on early modern history. Oh, good: a nice change of pace, and more my own field (I studied history as a specialist topic in my last two years of high school, and ancient history at University).

Not so good, it turned out. This was the worst paper I have ever dealt with. And I make allowances for the author's possible difficulties with the language (this is a Japanese 'scholar', attempting to write in English); I'm quite experienced in dealing with the sort of problems that this throws up. No, this was atrocious in its structure, its argumentation, its use of evidence. This guy seems to think that he has a chance of getting published in overseas journals just because he is one of the few Japanese academics capable of reading contemporary historians in English (and in Dutch, it would appear). I think that is very unlikely.

I mean, really - the guy repeatedly made meaninglessly woolly generalisations like "the population doubled" and "the silver reserves were mined out" and "trade began to recover again" without any reference to the timeframe he was thinking of. History without dates?? Whatever next?! After the 15th or 20th instance of this, I was really getting tired of having to insert 'comments' in his text to draw the omission to his attention. This isn't just a 'language problem', it's sloppy writing, inept 'scholarship'. Heck, even when he did include dates, they were often inconsistent or inaccurate. He even located Marco Polo in the wrong century, for heaven's sake!

His bibliography was about 100 books long, but he only appeared to have actually read 3 or 4 of them, and those with a severely imperfect understanding of them, I would say. For example, he would refer again and again to a technical term coined by a famous British historian, but offered no definition or illustration of his own understanding of the phrase, and it did appear to be almost completely irrelevant to the vast majority of his slapdash content. Numerous unanswered questions, numerous unsupported assertions (I think fully one quarter of the 160-odd 'comments' I wrote for him were "Citation?") - just abysmal stuff. I might have given it a C+ (if only for the breadth of reading) - if it had been written by a 16-yr-old in high school, and I were in a particularly generous mood. As a piece of serious academic writing it was completely worthless. (Oh yes, did I mention that it included no original research whatsoever? NONE. It was purely a literature review. Unbelievable.)

My favourite factless assertion was his claim that Japan, by the end of the 16th Century, was "the largest gun-making country in the world". Now this may be true, although it seems intrinsically a little unlikely to me. After all, they had only discovered firearms technology some 50 years earlier, as a result of a Portuguese shipwreck. But our man really made no attempt to support the statement. Well, he did offer a solitary fact in support: one warlord was said to have put 3,000 artillery pieces into the field in a battle at the end of the century. He admitted that more mature estimates put that total at probably only 1,000. No reference made to whether the opposition had any artillery at all. No reference made to whether the other warlords in Japan were making widespread use of artillery. And these were presumably small to middling-sized field guns; no consideration given to larger siege guns, or to small arms. No attempt made to draw comparisons with the amount of guns being manufactured or used in the major European nations at the same period. (It's not an era I have ever studied in detail, but I immediately thought of the example of the Spanish Armada, a few years prior to this Japanese battle. Clearly, for Spain and England (and, I would guess, for most of the other great powers of Europe), their naval arsenals alone far exceeded the number of guns our author had cited in his lone example from Japan.)

There is a danger - god help me! - that this joker will persist in his deluded dreams of winning academic acclaim and will return his ludicrous manuscript to me for further edits. I don't think I could bear it.

"Brain the size of a planet, and they give me this to do."

Infinitely Strange

Yes, strange, strange, infinitely strange is the world in which we live.

I happened on this last night, while cruising around the Internet. (I was, I confess, frittering away an idle hour in trying to test my two blogs' search engine visibility. I thought for a moment that I was now a Googlewhack for "panda abductions" - but then I discovered that 'the rules' for this bizarre hobby are that your combined search terms should not be in quotations: that's harsh.)

I assumed at first that this had to be a joke: a rare gourmet coffee which acquires its unique characteristics as a result of being passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet. This animal likes to feast on coffee berries, apparently, and then shits out the supposedly intact beans in convenient-to-collect logs (below). Coffee connoisseurs speculate that the creature's digestive enzymes, although not harming the sheath of the beans, somehow nevertheless enhance the complex flavour and aroma of the final product. This rare and expensive coffee is mainly produced in Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi (where 'Luwak' is the local name for the animal), although versions of it are also made elsewhere in South-East Asia, notably the Phillipines and Vietnam (where it is unappealingly referred to as 'weasel coffee').

A finely-judged April's Fools' Day jest, surely? Slightly gross, definitely outlandish, but frighteningly plausible.

Well, if it's a joke, there are an awful lot of people out there who have been taken in by it, or who are colluding in propagating it. A large number of coffee companies and connoisseurs' fan-sites include references to it. Even dear old Wikipedia has an item about it - not that Wikipedia is foolproof, but I do think they would have sniffed out a hoax by now.

That animated picture, though, I'm still not sure about. I don't know the provenance of it - genuine advertising campaign by one of the coffee sellers, or some wag's piss-take of this most unusual of brews?

Does anyone have more information on this?


Note: The advertising picture at the top of this post actually has a rather groovy - rather gross - animation, but it seems to have stopped displaying on the blog (at least when viewed via Firefox). If you click on the picture to view it in a separate window, you should be able to see the animation.

A favourite exam question

When I invited readers to 'discuss' one of my provocative asides in the post on my proposed 'three phases' of expat life, my über-commenter, Tulsa, made a remark which implied she was unfamiliar with the common use of this instruction in academic exams - and later explained that her 'selective memory' allowed her to forget tests within an hour of doing them. A strange skill, indeed.

I have always had a pretty good memory for exams. Heck, as a teacher, I have set a lot of exams - which can be a lot of fun. I've also marked a lot, which is not fun.

When I applied to Oxford (and Cambridge, as a back-up), they still had their own entrance test (this was phased out some years ago, although they still use interviews to whittle down the candidate pool - a highly contentious procedure) to supplement the results of the upper high school 'Advanced Level' subject exams. Although it was possible to attempt your application in the middle of your final year of high school study (something I would much have preferred to do, to get it out of the way), it was deemed to be such an arduous process that - back then (I think there might have been quite a shift in policy since) - almost all schools ran a "7th term" application process; i.e., you would wait until after you had completed your A-Levels in the summer term of your second year of the "6th Form" (the upper high school), and then come back for the start of an additional year, spending the winter term entirely on preparation for the Oxbridge Entrance exams. For me, it was pretty much a waste of time: I was well enough prepared anyway. It was, however, quite a pleasant change of pace from the high pressure of A-Levels: a very light timetable, a very relaxed lifestyle - this is when my poker, pool, and bar football skills started getting really good!

In addition to specialist papers on subjects related to your intended course of study (I was applying to read Classics, so had to do papers in translation and literary appreciation for Latin and Greek, and, I think, in general history also), there was a 'General Paper' of varied discussion topics, to see how well you could structure an argument off the top of your head. This was easily the most fun part of the whole process.

I remember on one of the papers (not the one I sat for the application itself; by then, we had spent nearly three months reviewing examples of past papers), they actually had this essay question:

'How would you differentiate between the erotic, the pornographic, and the obscene?'

A good question! Feeling in flippant mood, I answered:

'Only by careful scrutiny.'

I wonder if I could have got away with that in the Entrance Exam proper? I would like to think so!

A brush with death

In recounting my example of a 'bad China day' last week, I omitted to mention the key factor that briefly put me in such a bad mood - and probably thus pre-disposed me to suffering further 'disasters' throughout the course of the afternoon. (Is it, I wonder, that our state of mind can somehow provoke people into dicking us around, or is it simply that we interpret events more negatively and over-react to small irritations? Or is it - as I am inclined to feel when my paranoid streak takes hold - that 'bad luck' attracts more of the same??)

As I set out on my walk to the barber's, I was nearly knocked down by an electric bicycle that came hurtling out of a side-alley on to the main road - without looking, without signalling, without slowing down even slightly. It missed me by inches. I think I just managed to check my stride, and swayed, flinched out of its path at the last moment. I am now very highly attuned to these perils of the Beijing streets: I am constantly keyed up, on the alert for danger (when I go back to the UK or America, it takes me some time to get used to the fact that cars actually stop for you when you cross the road: for a few days, my brain reels in surprise every time it happens), relying more on my peripheral vision than looking straight ahead.

These electric bicycles are particularly challenging. They have become a big vogue only in the last couple of years. (I had heard that they were banned in Shanghai [Shanghai occasionally does sensible things like this - as much, I sometimes think, to flaunt its superior modernity as for the utility of the measure itself], but there were quite a few of them there too, the last time I visited.) They are almost completely noiseless. And they are, in size and appearance, almost indistinguishable from regular pedal-powered bicycles. If you notice one out of the corner of your eye as you are preparing to cross the road, it is dangerously easy to conclude that it is a safe distance away - "Heck, it can't be coming that quickly - the guy is freewheeling, for god's sake. And I can't even hear it yet: he must be far away." But these silent death-bringers are three times as fast as a regular bicycle. Regular bicycles are plenty dangerous enough, but these electric jobs you have to be very, very wary of. I have learned to double- and triple-check approaching bicycles, to gauge their speed carefully before stepping out in front of them. If the rider's not pedalling, that's the warning sign.

That doesn't help when they're coming out of side entrances, of course. If you STOPPED, and peered cautiously round the corner every time you crossed one of these alleys, you'd never get anywhere. So.... you take a calculated risk: you just walk straight across them, trying to keep your wits about you, prepared to jump aside if a hazard suddenly descends upon you.

Did I mention that the bloody things don't have brakes? Well, they probably do, but.... riders of regular bicycles never like to use them (Is it a thrift thing, are brake-pads expensive to replace?), and the same mentality prevails on these new monstrosities. People on electric bicycles regulate their speed by checking the throttle, relying on engine-braking to lose just a little speed when preparing to make a turn. I wonder how on earth they stop? Come to think of it, I don't believe I ever have seen one stop!

Ah, this reminds me of one of my little pieces of poetic silliness - inspired by a similar close encounter last year (though with a conventional bicycle on that occasion) while I was out on one of my morning jogs around the lakes. It started off as just an observation on the hazards presented by bicycles in this town; but, of course, it soon became linked in my mind with something - someone - else. Everything's a metaphor with me.

Traffic Accident

Beijing bicycles
Have no bells, no brakes
Or a rider incapable
Of comprehending their use

YOU ran a Beijing bicycle
Over my heart

Nanny, what ARE you up to?

The shenanigans of China's Net Nanny are becoming more unfathomable than ever.

It would appear that my tormentors down at the Net Censorship Department are in the grip of a raging multiple-personality disorder. Either that, or we are once again the beneficiaries of a piece of serendipitous clumsiness by their sainted Cleaning Lady.

Blogspot was unblocked again this weekend. Mind-boggling!! I wonder if it isn't all some elaborate experiment to test how quickly the blogging community can adapt and figure out 'workarounds' for their interfering ways.

I think I should start up a betting pool on when it will be blocked AGAIN. I'd bet on sometime around the end of this month.

Thought for the week

"To err is human; to umm, divine."

Another delightful bit of silliness from Peter Cook.

Pictures in the fire

God, I love real fires. I think I really do prefer them to TV (OK, in China, that's not hard - the local TV really isn't up to very much). I spent many a happy hour gazing into them as a child, and I still do whenever I get the chance.

My passing reference the other day to watching a fire for entertainment in my electricity-less apartment reminded me of this piece I wrote last summer. It was conceived as one of my 'freaky fables' series; although I suppose it's not a fable as such, really just an observation.

Communion of the Hearth

The Boy stares into the Fire,
Thrilled by the dancing flames
And dreaming stories in its bright embers.

The Fire is no less fascinated by the Boy,
The wild light of imagination in his eyes,
The fierce glow of excitement in his cheeks.

The Fire feeds the Boy’s hungry mind,
As the Boy's unfailing gaze fuels the Fire's pride.
They burn, burn, burn together.

******************************

They share a sadness too:
One knows it must soon be bedtime;
The other knows it must soon die.

The Three Phases

I have a theory that there are three phases to the experience of living overseas.

First, Novelty - a perpetual state of confusion and dislocation, yet coupled with a keen excitement at the constant challenge, the constant discovery.

Second, Familiarity - the 'comfort zone', the happy satisfaction of having found your feet, got to know your way around, overcome the initial difficulties.

Third, Ennui - you miss the bewilderment, the exploration of the early days; life has become too predictable, too much a matter of habit. Time to move on.

Yes, in fact it is exactly like the phases of a love affair. Discuss.

What saves so many of us from Phase 3 here in China, and especially in Beijing, is that things are changing at such a frantic pace. Favourite neighbourhoods disappear, sometimes seemingly overnight; huge new buildings sprout up almost as quickly; there is an astounding churn-rate of shops, bars, restaurants; and of people, too - most expats are only here for a year or two, fairly few for more than four or five. It's scarcely even possible to settle into the Phase 2 comfort zone for long before the ground has moved from under your feet.

It is both a curse and a blessing. This is a very demanding environment in which to live; but also an intensely stimulating one. That's why I'm still here after 5 years, and not making plans to move on any time soon.

Cool Hand Luke

I was raving to Tulsa the other day (in person, for once, rather than just over the cyber-waves) about 'Cool Hand Luke' - one of my all-time favourite films. Not that it is the best film I've ever seen in cinematic terms, but it is a story that strikes a deep chord within me. And it does feature a young-ish Paul Newman at his most infectiously charming.

It is, of course, the classic 'doomed Messiah' motif - an almost identical plot, in fact, to 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest': the charismatic newcomer gains acceptance among the downtrodden members of an oppressed, captive community, and becomes a catalyst for change, inspiring and energizing them to rediscover their sense of self-worth. Somehow, though, I've always much preferred 'Luke' - partly, I think, because he is a more engaging, more likeable character than MacMurphy; and partly because the mental illness on parade in 'Cuckoo's Nest' - and deployed largely for humorous effect - always makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable.

Both films end tragically (I hope this is not a SPOILER - I'm assuming that just about everyone has seen both of these films), but there's one intriguing difference. The uniquely moving part about MacMurphy's demise in 'Cuckoo's Nest' is that he has the opportunity to make good his escape at the end, but chooses to stay and confront his nemesis, the loathsome Nurse Ratched. What affects me most about 'Cool Hand Luke' is that Luke's seemingly indestructible spirit is finally broken by the system: subsequently, his buddies all fondly suppose that his period of half-witted subservience was just an act to lull the prison staff into reducing their watchfulness, to help him contrive another opportunity to escape; but, as he confides to his best friend, Dragline, near the end of the film, "No, they really did break me there for a while. I was gone."

I first saw this when I was only about 10 or 12 years old (BBC 1's 'Monday Film' series during my '70s childhood was probably the great formative influence of my life) and it has haunted me ever since. In fact, I think I've probably only ever seen it once or twice subsequently, and not for many years now. (Only once have I ever seen it in a DVD shop here in China; but the one-and-only copy was snapped up by my buddy, Big Frank - who shortly afterwards took it back to England with him, and then lost it! It tops the list of great films I have never been able to acquire here, but am constantly on the lookout for.)

Possibly the best prison film ever made (yes, there are other candidates - but 'The Shawshank Redemption' is not one of them!). Certainly the best "Don't let the bastards grind you down" film ever - and that has always been my watchword. (The early boxing match scene - where Luke simply refuses to accept that he is beaten, even when he can scarcely stand up any more - has been a powerful inspiration to me throughout my life; I suspect it is largely responsible for the streak of stubborn determination in me - which so often surprises, and occasionally alienates people.)

It has had other, less 'wholesome' influences on me too. It is probably responsible for my abiding fascination with the game of poker. And while at University, I was once tempted to try to emulate the famous egg-eating bet (50 hard-boiled eggs to be consumed in 1 hour!) with Cadbury's Creme Eggs; luckily, wiser counsels prevailed!

Fabulous, fabulous film. If, by some chance, you haven't ever seen it (Tulsa?), place it at the top of your 'to do' list.

Two lads up a pole

Or rather, two lads up two (adjacent) poles.

I have been without power for six-and-a-half hours today, until these guys had finished with their business. The one on the left spent a very long time (as here) reading the instruction manual, which I found rather disturbing.

This does mean that I have had a frustratingly unproductive day - no Internet, no computer (I was going to write up the notes for an academic writing course I'm starting next week, and make some Powerpoint slides for a presentation I'm supposed to be giving next Friday), no washing-machine (Friday is laundry day!!), not even any hot water (the crappy "on-demand" water-heater in my kitchen may be gas-fired but the ignition system is evidently on mains electric), so I couldn't get stuck into the week's backlog of washing-up. I have been at a loose end since getting back from my morning run (water in the [electric] heater in bathroom was already pretty tepid, so I didn't even get a decent shower). I've just been idling the day away, watching my fridge leak all over the kitchen floor, and eating gloopy ice-cream.

No entertainment either ("No TV and no beer make Homer go mad."); well, it's the music I miss most - hard even to get enthusiastic about "tidying up" and mopping the floor without that. God, how did we amuse ourselves in the pre-electric era? I was tempted to light a fire in the middle of the floor so that I could watch the pretty sparks.

Haiku time comes around again

Far Eastern fleshpots:
Opportunities dwindle
For fidelity.



I do not speak of myself here. I merely observe the general scene.

'Mutant Palm' revived

I was fretting last week that I may have jinxed one of my favourite blogs by mentioning it here.

The thoroughly weird, thoroughly brilliant 'Mutant Palm' had been in hiatus for 10 days, and I was beginning to fear it might have disappeared forever. But now....... davescomeback!

Yes, 'Dave' returned from his two-week holiday (parents visiting) yesterday with two long, thoughtful (scarily earnest!) articles (here and here) on the Chongqing Nail House saga.

(By the way, I found quite an interesting article on the 'Nail House' story on openDemocracy the other day. It's written by Li Datong, supposedly one of China's most progressive and free-thinking journalists [he was famously sacked a year or so ago from his job as editor of a magazine called Bingdian, for treading on the government's toes once too often], although here he is contriving a somewhat pro-government spin on the story.)

He follows that up with a comparison between China and Sicily (and, by implication, between the Cosa Nostra and the CCP?), and with some alarming news of an environmental-disaster-in-the-making in the coastal city of Xiamen.

All rather heavy stuff. But the depth of research, the quality of writing is always impressive. And I'm sure he'll be returning to more oddball pastures soon - if you want skateboarding pandas or alien abductions (or skateboarding aliens and panda abductions), this is usually the place to find them.

Welcome back, Dave.