The kids never cease to surprise me. This Thursday, chief droog Bubbles (not his real name) decided that he liked the English learnin’ game. I ended up with three of them playing that while two did their own thing, and for the third week in a row I wasn’t exhausted at the end of class. Maybe I’m onto something with this whole freedom of choice approach.

That night Stu and I went down Soi 33 to see if a friend of his was at a pub there. Soi 33 is also known as Soi Dead Artist. First a bar called the Renoir Club opened, then a bunch of copycats followed - the Degas Club, the Goya Club, the Monet, the Gaugin, and Dali Pool (as well as establishments with classy names like Love Teen Massage). The street also hosts Demonia, a bondage club. The girls outside smile and say ‘Welcome’ just like the girls at the other places. As Stu said, shouldn’t they be snarling ‘Get inside, slave!’?

One place had a sign up advertising for a receptionist at 10,000 baht ($US284) a month. Some receptionists in black cocktail dresses were standing outside attracting customers. They probably work 7pm-2am for their 10,000 bt, which isn’t a great amount to live on, but it’s more than a police constable’s salary, and the uniforms are prettier. The girls in Soi Dead Artist are well groomed and tastefully begowned, but the street seems (somehow appropriately) dead and they all look bored. Stu’s friend isn’t at the pub, which is full of old white gents. Stu introduces me to one, an affable American named Alan.
“Hi. You’re pretty,” he says to me, and to Stu, “Is she your niece?”
“Sister,” I say. “Brother, sister.”
Stu and I have been taken for brother and sister before and I see an opportunity to start a rumour that we’re cohabiting in incestuous bliss, but Stu soon introduces me as his wife. As he points out later, he didn’t say I wasn’t his sister too.

We ended up at Livingstone’s, an African-themed bar/restaurant hotel complex. I hadn’t been there before, and I liked the outdoor seating under a thatched cloister around an aquamarine pool with a view across to a multilevel carpark - and, appropriately again, the Rembrandt Hotel.

#1 I must be settling in here good, because the other day I went out to check the prices of secondhand pianos (and some new ones, too). The only one I liked from among the affordable ones was a Yamaha I couldn’t really afford anyway, so today I tried a digital Kawai and was pleasantly surprised. Sounds like a piano, feels better than a lot of the cheaper acoustic pianos, can be made to go very quiet (a bonus when you live in a flat), has a cool button that turns randomly pressed notes into music, and it’s affordable. (Did I mention it has a button that turns random notes into music?) So in the elevator I mentioned to my boss that I’m thinking of buying a piano, and she says, “Oh, I have one. I can sell or rent it to you. I don’t have time to play it.” It’s a digital piano. She thinks it’s a Kawai. I’m going to go over to her place and try it out.

#2 I saw Casino Royale (the new one) last night. A couple of scenes made me think of The A-Team for the first time in years (and a couple of other scenes made me wonder if it might be time for a female Bond, a la the new Starbuck; if Bond can’t be Bond anymore, I’d prefer a Bonde)…anyway, I just heard the A-Team theme in Napoleon Dynamite. Now, I love coincidences. I like to take notice of them and investigate where they point, because sometimes they point to interesting places. But I’m having trouble working out where this A-Team thing is going, other than that “sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit” reminds me to hurry up and finish the post about David Hicks that I’ve been meaning to put up here. On the other hand, maybe it’s a warning to beware of vans?

Roughly 10 years ago I wrote a story. It was the first story I’d written - as in, started and finished and filled with the stuff that goes in between those two points - since high school. It was called The Art of Dying, and it happened when Gwynn, a character who’d been in my head for several years, suddenly appeared in a smoking den in the company of two women, Mona and Vali. These two, I soon realised, were lovers, and Gwynn in this particular incarnation or role was Mona’s old flame. The den was in a city on the edge of a very high cliff. The city was called Sheol, after the abode of the dead in Hebrew mythology. Since Sheol was/is supposed to be an underground place - basically, the dirt where the dead lie - the top of a cliff seems a strange place for its namesake, but there you go. Even in the highest heaven, the dead are still dead.

It was published in Aurealis magazine, at least partly because Trudi Canavan, who was reading the slush, liked it. I’ve written a few more stories since then. In each case, the process has been one of writing, rewriting, sending out, seeing the thing published, then filing it away. All except for that first story, which now and then tempts me to go back and tinker with it. As a result, I’ve now got six versions of it. The events in the story never change, only the words, the characters’ reasons for their actions, their thoughts and dialogue. It’s easy to understand why you might want to alter these things. Tastes and interests change over time, and ideas that seemed fresh and important ten years back seem a bit stale and oh-so-1996 now. Still, I ask myself why I keep rewriting this particular story and not others. Gwynn’s in it, and I like spending time with him, but that isn’t the only reason. To be honest, I think it’s because the story stumps me. I don’t actually know why the characters do what they do, except for one, the outsider, a young journalist who follows the main three around. Very little of the story gets told from his perspective, but he’s still somehow my eyes and ears in their world. When I write their thoughts, I might as well be writing his conjectures.

I’m now redoing it again for translation, collating all the versions and making yet another one, with a sprinkling of new variations. I have to give up on the idea that there’s ever going to be a final one, or that it’s even asymptotically progressing towards something ‘final’. Maybe I’ll be tinkering with it till I drop and settle down for the long dirt nap myself, ridiculously obsessed with this strange object that flew by one night and landed in my lap.

In my humble view, too many comics and graphic novels are let down by ho-hum writing. The art looks great but the characters are talking McDialogue. Not so Eldritch Kid, the occult western brainchild of Christian Read and Christopher Burns. I love westerns. I love them even more when the characters are intelligent and the writing is infused with the muse. EK is a trip but its dusty boot-heels are on the ground. The artwork is stylish, robust and clear, and the art and writing are very happily married. The Read-Burns team now has an Eldritch Kid production diary online, which I’m going to be keeping an eye on. Clap your hands if you believe in cowboys, and check out Christian’s personal homage. As a fellow Aussie, I know what he means here:

“Cowboy movies reminded me of where I lived. Frontiers. Look one way, schools and shops. Turn the other, scoria and heat as far as I could ever see. Its funny, so much early Australian art, done by pale Victorian Englishmen involves pallid, overdressed figures staring into illimitable horizons, overwhelmed by scale. John Ford and Sam Fuller movies have that same feeling of overwhelming scope of land. Cowboys were there from the start for me and living big inside of my brain.”

Growing up, I was taught by adult example that food was either a peril to be avoided or, at best, treated as a necessary evil and consumed as one would consume spakfiller. At most meals you ate what was on your plate because you were told to, or because you were too hungry to give it to the dog. Consequently I never took much interest in the culinary arts, viewing cookbooks as a Puritan might view the grimoires of black magic. For the last fifteen years or so, my concept of food heaven has rotated around the celestial pole of the perfect tomato sandwich - and I must say, a good bread roll with good tomatoes is still hard to beat, in my book. However, something has been slowly happening over the last year. Living in Thailand, where good food is everywhere, then travelling in Europe and sampling cuisines (when my parents took me in 1981 we mostly ate dehydrated ravioli cooked on a portable stove to save money), has appeared to have planted seeds of curiosity about comestibles in my heretofore uncaring mind. France certainly watered those seeds. In St Malo, the fig-raisin rum hot chocolate got me thinking about the alchemies of taste; exposure to scallops cooked in various sauces (until now, I’d only ever eaten them deep fried from the fish and chip shop or overcooked in cheap Chinese takeaway), and my modest adventure in Paul and Joelle’s kitchen, worked a spell of seduction. Back in Bangkok, I found myself trawling supermarket aisles as I’d never done, looking at food with new eyes. And lo, I bought frozen scallops; and according to the way set down by Paul, I thawed them in milk; then I lightly salted them and seared them a minute on each side; and I prepared a sauce out of onions, garlic and wine. At the end, on a whim, I added chopped macadamias. And behold, it wasn’t half bad. I cooked all by myself, mama!

Truly, this is the first time I’ve cooked in any way that might be considered proper cooking. I’ve operated a toaster oven with some success, I’ve boiled/steamed spaghetti and rice and added things to them, I’ve cracked eggs in a pan and made omelette-like objects, but this was the first time that I had bought something with the express intention of cooking it, and the first time I’d treated the act of cooking with interest and respect, as opposed to viewing it as an annoying stage between hunger and satiety, to be traversed speedily and without looking to left or right. It feels…good?
Boldened by success, I made a dessert out of fresh figs, gin and chocolate. It really needed to be drizzled over ice cream or at least cut with baking soda and Vim, but I proudly ate it anyway, though it gave me a headache (I blame the figs).

Wow. It really does seem to work.  Yesterday was another candy-free Thursday for my Japanese munchkins, and the kids were calm enough that we actually managed to learn some English. Well, first we played indoor soccer for 15 minutes, after which the girls were tired. I let them play for another 10 minutes while I played keepings-off with the boys until they were tired too. Then they were all willing to do stuff with flash cards for 10 minutes, then practice actions with English words. After break the boys were still in play mode, as usual, while the girls seemed undecided, so I tried a new tactic, telling them that they could either play a game or study English. I was surprised when both of the girls (one was absent, and yes, this is only a class of five; I have no idea how real teachers manage classes of 30+, but I take my hat off to them for doing it) decided to study. So while the boys amused themselves the girls got half an hour of solid learning. I figured that was better than me spending all my time trying to get the boys’ attention, as I often do, in which case no one learns anything. However, the boys seem to be getting English from somewhere, and one of them is starting to play with the language, saying deliberately wrong and funny things. I figure if I can help them get used to the idea of just using English, even if they make mistakes, we’ll have achieved something. I’ve met too many Japanese people who know enough English to get by but are afraid to use it. And yes, I am teaching by example, re the mistakes, including a flustered moment when I said “Don’t eat the classroom” (heya o tabete wa ikemasen) when I meant to say “Don’t eat in the classroom.” (heya de tabete wa ikemasen) They still remind me of that from time to time…

Airport security check queues probably aren’t high on the list of places where you’re likely to make friends with strangers. However, the queue at Charles de Gaulle for the Gulf Air flight to Bahrain was so slow that I got quite deep into conversation with a French Canadian couple, Juli and Patrique. Juli, it turned out, has a passion for writing. She also had quite a few good lipsticks, which the female baggage checker confiscated, leaving her with one cheap one. Cheap lipstick is less likely to contain nitroglycerin, as everyone knows. This nice woman also took her mascara. Down at baggage check-in I’d been told that lipstick was ok to carry on board, though I had to put my moisturiser and perfume in my suitcase. Now, that violet perfume bottle is very nice, but it only has a push top, not a screw top, and I was worried it would leak. Rummaging for something to wrap it in, I chose Stu’s old long johns, which I’d been wearing at night for warmth, having no warm PJs of my own, and hoped for the best. Meanwhile, my radioactive material (remember those shot glasses?) was nestled away, wrapped in tissue paper, uninterrogated and unmolested. And my cheap-looking (and, verily, cheap) camel-patterned bag didn’t get checked, so I got my lipstick on board, along with lip balm and foundation - all harmless substances in themselves, but when you mix them together, they turn into Genghis Khan and his hordes. Or was it bikers? I forget. Oh, well.

However, my belt set off the metal detector, leading to the most thorough roaming of hands over my body that I’ve ever had outside of the bedroom and a couple of car seats. The woman who checked me was middle-aged, dumpy and plain, but friendly and cheerful, and respectful, greeting me with a ‘Bonjour, Madame’ before running her hands up and down my thighs. It somehow reminded me of being dried by my mother after a bath. She caressed my hips, sliding her hand under my belt and tugging on the buckle. I felt a surprising little twinge of interest. I could imagine her running a discreet bordello offering expert cunnilingus and mild discipline. I grinned at her. She grinned back. There was definitely a spark between us. All too quickly, however, she declared me clean and sent me on my way before I could ask for her phone number.

Juli, Patrique and I hung out in the departure lounge and agreed to rendezvous later on the plane. I had a window seat, but swapped seats with another passenger so that he and his companion could sit together, as they’d been separated with one sitting in front of the other. By the time we were ready to take off, the window seat beside my new one was still empty. I was looking forward to enjoying this luxury, but an Indian-American kid sitting with his family in the middle seats wanted to be by the window, so he got the spare seat. Fair enough, but when his mother asked me if I’d mind sitting in the middle so that she could be with him I found myself saying sorry, but I did mind. Middle sucks. Jesus Christ himself wouldn’t swap a side seat for a middle seat. Anyhow, Junior and I got along ok. After takeoff he pointed out the scenery. We were flying above clouds that looked like a vast snowfield covered in deep toboggan tracks, and in the middle of it was a single strange upright plume of cloud with a sort of trunk at the base, like a poplar tree or smoke rising from a chimney. I figured clouds would interest him for about ten minutes, then he’d want to close the window and watch a movie, which is exactly what happened. I took my deprivation of warm sunshine with a show of good grace and helped him with the headset (on Gulf planes you have to press one of the pins on the jack down). In return, he put the sponges on my earphones. His seat-back screen turned out to be dodgy, subject to static and freezes, so in a transparent attempt to get the window seat I offered to swap, since my screen was fine. Naturally, he prefered to stay where he was and wake me up when he had trouble. The first time he didn’t say “please”. I reminded him about this word and from then on it was “please ma’am”. I wanted to tell him that this mode of address to women will serve him well for the rest of his life. The family fell asleep, leaving him in my care. His mother woke up and tried to get him to look at her waving and smiling at him, but she was competing with Superman Returns so basically had no chance unless I played go-between, which I wasn’t going to. I’m an only child and I know how much you sometimes want to get away from adults and their constant need for attention. The sky darkened. Juli came by to visit. We went up to business class where she and Patrique were and snuck into two spare seats. I had never sat in business before. The seats were actually way too big for me, but they’d be nice to curl up in at night. We chatted away happily for half an hour before I got deported back to cattle class, where there were no two adjacent spare seats. We tried lurking in a corner, but this too was forbidden, so in time-honoured fashion we hung out behind the toilets, talking about writers, writing, quotations, and the intriguing snippets that come floating into one’s mental net. We parted at Bahrain with kisses and hopes of seeing each other again. Somehow I have a feeling we will.

No good fairy had waved a wand and turned Bahrain airport into Dubai while I was gone. Its cramped dimensions were crowded and smoky. I was able to find a wireless connection to piggyback on, which passed some time. The plane to Bangkok was delayed. The airport staff let us wait without telling us anything, and then after an hour or so handed out transit cards with an air of immense irritation at us for being there cluttering up the departure lounge. I asked one of them how long the delay would be. About an hour, he snapped. Too many airports give the impression of being very much like the hospital in Yes, Minister, which had staff but no patients, and in Sir Humphrey’s opinion was much better and more efficient that way. At airports it’s the passengers who are clearly the extraneous, unwanted matter. I try to remember that it’s a privilege to be one of the small percentage of human beings who can afford international air travel (and have clean water, medicine, education, etc.), and this thought actually does help my mood quite a bit.

The flight home was uneventful. At Bangkok I was sure my luggage was lost, but it turned out that my suitcase was black, not blue as I thought it was, and was missing the sticker with my name and address on it, though there seemed to be a faint sticky residue in the place I’d put it. Had it been black all along? On the other hand, for the last week I’d been experiencing a lot of unusual coincidences, which, when I went where they pointed, led to more coincidences. Have those coincidences led me through a crack into an alternative reality? (And will the hairdressers in Bangkok be better in this one?)
There are signs all over the place telling you to use the airport limousine for your own comfort and safety. This of course is bullshit, but they drive the regular taxi drivers away from the arrivals area, so I went up to departures and picked up a taxi there for half the price (still 100 baht too much, but he wouldn’t put his meter on, and I was too tired to argue, and it turned out the freeway toll was included; and I can understand the taxis pushing for a bit extra when they must have to drive back to town with an empty cab often enough - anyway, after France, I’m seeing 100 baht, which is about 2 Euro, in a whole new perspective, i.e. as the cost of half a hot chocolate, as opposed to the cost of four lunches).

I have to go to work in the afternoon. Work is very good about letting me take time off, so I try to minimise the days I’m away. The substitute teacher who took my five 7 yr olds had written a lovely, long, polite note on pink paper asking if their mothers could possibly be asked not to send their children to class with bags of candy as the sugar high makes them go nuts. I had vaguely mumbled about this before, but his note had done the trick. There was very little candy today, and while they were still a handful, they just were a handful of kids and not a handful of insane small demons with unnatural strength and a predilection for throwing shoes.

Stu has just come back from a work thing in San Francisco with a) bronchitis and b) a new razor. It has a UV light on it that shines when it’s charging. I tested my glasses under it, and oh my, yes, they glow like Kryptonite. As for the perfume, it did leak. I lost about 10% of the bottle, and Stu’s long johns were drenched in the smell of violets. Not only did the smell not come out in the wash, it mildly permeated everything else in the washing machine and now fills our bedroom where all the stuff is hanging up to dry - a lovely if rather expensive air freshener.

Now that I’ve got your attention…

Who could possibly do without this book of medieval Welsh erotic poetry, reviewed by Russ Kick, who has a blog devoted to rare erotica? There’s one rather expensive copy on Amazon. Or you could ask your local library, I guess.

Years ago I read a book in which a woman was wearing a ‘harlequin’ dress. I assumed the dress had a multicoloured diamond pattern. Not so. While I was looking for something else, I chanced to find out that harlequin has been used as an alternative word for the colour chartruese since 1923. According to Answers.com, “The color has traditionally been known as harlequin because it was the color of the costume worn by jesters, and “harlequin” is a synonym for jester.” But why did it take till 1923 for chartreuse to acquire a medieval alias?

Another colour name I only discovered within the last year or so is eau-de-nil, meaning ‘water of the Nile’ - a pale, yellowish-greyish, impure green. I wish I’d known the word when I was writing The Etched City, because this is the colour of Gwynn’s eyes, and I took pains over finding words to describe them, settling on ‘waterish’ (thank you, E.R. Eddison) and ‘brine’, while ‘eau-de-nil’ was sitting there in the dictionary - but not the thesaurus - all undiscovered by me. Mind you, when you Google it, eau-de-nil seems to get used for anything from teal to aqua to khaki to eggshell blue, but I think the sound of it suggests the right sort of colour, and it has the perfect Art Nouveau/Edwardian connotations. Ah, well, next time…

I was going to visit the Musee D’Orsay and look at more paintings, but art fatigue was starting to set in, so I decided to leave it till next time. Instead, I spent my last couple of days in Paris just oozling around and hanging out with Paul and Joelle. On my way to their place I went into a shop I’d seen before, but which had been closed - Senteurs de Fée (’Fragrances from the Good Fairies’). It was full of fascinating elixirs and oils, and there were six or seven perfumes - all eau de parfum - in pretty bottles. I sampled them all and thought they were quite simply the loveliest and most wearable perfumes I’d smelled in Paris. Not incredibly fancy mixtures, perhaps, but very high quality, and balanced to perfection. One of them was a violet scent, Coeur de Violette. I adore the smell of violets, but every violet perfume I’ve tried in my life has done one of two things: either the scent goes bad on my skin, or it vanishes very quickly. Not only did this one smell great on me, it stayed for hours. I bought a bottle and asked for the recipe. It contains essential oil of violets, olibanum, myrrh, and oakmoss (I don’t have the proportions, sorry). It’s strong, but I don’t feel like it’s wearing me. It’s so nice to finally find something you’ve wanted for ages.

I brought some fig aperitif over to Paul and Joelle’s. We realised that it just had to be mixed up with dark chocolate, heated to make a sauce and poured over things like biscuits and blackberries. Here’s some disgusting person licking the pan (does she think it’s Mick Ronson’s guitar?):

Mmm, she thinks she’ll have some more:

Paul cooked beautiful scallops and gave me a chef’s tip. If you buy frozen scallops, thaw them in milk - it’ll take the nasty freezer smell away.

Their place is something of an Aladdin’s cave of curios, including - while we’re on the theme of smelling - a bizarre and curiously poignant collection of noses from old statues. As far as Paul nose, it’s the largest such collection in the world. He inherited most of the noses - including a wooden nose from an English gothic statue of a bishop and a scungy-looking melted nose from Pompeii - from his grandfather, who, it seems, was quite the archaeological adventurer. Naturally, some people have taken Paul to task over hanging on to all this nasal booty. A couple of the noses actually belong to statues that are in the Louvre (fucking everything is in the Louvre, I swear), and one woman was incensed that he hadn’t handed them over. He said he would when the Louvre hands back its sphinxes and what not to Egypt. Which seems fair enough to me.

Noses from the Swendsen collection:

Oh, and I found another bakery selling those chestnut cakes - barquette aux marrons. I bought one just to see if it tasted of blue cheese too. Well, it tasted entirely of mild-mannered, sweet chestnut cream. So I guess i was very lucky not to be sick after eating the other one. The lesson? Never buy from ‘the oldest bakery’ in any town - the cakes may be as old as the shop.

Paul has a wacom tablet which he let me have a go of. It was pretty cool, though not as easy to use as I thought it would be. I have to say, I prefer the feel of pencil/charcoal and paper. On the other hand, you can erase as much as you want, and there’s no mess. The first thing I drew was this little cat:

Then I scribbled some Venetians all of my very own:

On the last night we ate Indian and wandered home looking in shop windows. Joelle and I were delighted to find this motoring Barbapapa:

Paul was more taken with the car (his family had one like it); actually, as I recall from Barbapapa’s Ark, Barbapapa was an environmental crusader who didn’t drive a car even back in the 70s. Maybe it’s Barbabright disguised as a Barbabuick…