In which Gwynn entertains an epiphany and fetus wears a fascinator. Probably the last one before I head home for a few weeks.

Eh. The New Weird antho has its own Myspace page. Apparently the antho is 90 years old and male. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have got into bed with it! Anyway, there’s a free fiction download of Jay Lake’s Lizard of Ooze, which sounds like a charming euphemism a rather Bangkokian beast.

This is my first ever trip to Myspace (truly!). I see they send you to a warning every time you click on an external link. Yes, guys, I’m leaving Myspace territory. That’s why I’m clicking the sod-fucking link. I want to go Elsewhere! Maybe Myspace would like to tell me not to take candy from strangers and always wear underpants. Though, actually, the other day was so hot that I went without, and nothing bad happened, in fact it was rather pleasant.

The other day I got it into my head to buy some hobby clay and make a model of Forage. The clay I bought was dark grey and it left black stains on my hands that were a bitch to remove, so I’ll be getting plain old white clay if I buy that brand again. I didn’t attempt much in the way of detail, just tried to get his general shape. I’m not sure about the colour I painted him. I think it needs to be either darker or lighter.

I’m going to have another go and try to get the anatomy a bit more accurate and maybe give the surface a smoother finish. My Ultimate Audacious Plan is to make a model that I’d be happy to have cast in bronze. Bronze casting is a big art industry here and there are quite a few foundries that will cast pieces from models you give them. Anyway, got to get it looking a bit sharper first.

Juts for fun, I bought a packet of modelling material for making artificial flowers, because I couldn’t resist the dense marshmallowy way it felt when I poked it. I guess I bought it for my inner three year-old, who, by playing with it, found out that it’s almost impossible to make anything but flat or turdlike forms out of the stuff, but enjoyed squeezing and squishing it anyway. It dries out somewhat soft, like rubber, and very light. I’m going to roll what’s left into a ball; then my inner three year-old will have a sensuously squishy, equally sensuously resilient toy to clutch and throw around the room when cycles of angst and weltschmerz peak.

Jools pub on Sukhumvit 4 (Soi Nana) is one of the many little corners of the UK in Bangkok - possibly a Welsh corner, given the red dragon flag proudly displayed downstairs. The place is chock-a-block full of rock and roll related memorabilia, from an old Mott The Hoople poster to a signed photo of Joan Jett to another signed photo of the pub’s owner with Ronnie Biggs.

Upstairs, next to a computer with a wavering, pulsating screen (and, on the day I took this photo, a gentleman sitting in front of it who looked as if he might, once upon a thinner, hipper, more paisley time, have frequented the environs of Ladbroke Grove), is one of the larger Rama V altars we’ve seen:

Rama V, or King Chulalongkorn, was the son of King Mongkut, who is best known to westerners as the king of The King and I. King Chulalongkorn is venerated as the monarch who guided Thailand towards modernity and avoided colonisation. His cult is popular and shrines to him, with offerings of beverages and food, are everywhere. The one at Jools is, we think, almost certainly the only Rama V altar with Motorhead souvenir drumsticks mounted above. The postcards in front of the plate show the present King and Queen. I like the negro child sculpture on the left, which gives the whole tableau a nuance, nostalgic for me, of the Chapel Street antique bazaar back in Melbourne.

I nearly always have the chicken soup, which is, just as the menu says, more like a stew, and comes with a thick slice of homemade wholemeal toast. If I ever really want to let myself go I’ll take to eating the blueberry pie, also homemade, which comes as an island in a lake of custard so large that the nether shore is scarcely visible from the consumer’s side of the plate.

If you’re in Bangkok and want to find Jools, get off at Nana BTS station and go up Soi 4 about 50m. It’s on the left, opposite a sign pointing to a bar called Annie’s Do-Do.

Yesterday I went back to the redoubtable Dr Wiliaporn for repairs to a couple of old composite fillings. Last time I saw her she looked quite dark-skinned, but this time she looked as white as me. Either she bleaches, or my vision was clouded with terror the first time.

“Give me lots of anaesthetic,” I begged shamelessly. “Lots and lots. I don’t mind paying extra.” She gave me a needle, we talked for a bit, I didn’t feel numb enough, so I asked for more. She must have hit a nerve, since for a second a perfect cliche of liquid fire ran through my right cheek - then all went beautifully numb, and I was able to relax, except when water started running down my throat. She attached a latex dam to stop it. This was my first time with a dental dam. I hadn’t known what they were for, except to use as protection during oral sex. Anyway, when the moment came to look in the mirror at the hole she had drilled (this seems to be a part of the procedure one can’t get away from), I got to see myself with my mouth wired open by what looked like an embroidery hoop with a green rubber funnel going down, down, down to my tooth, exposed through a rip in the funnel, and further down to the deep, dark, newly excavated hole, further down still to a pit where a tiny, fiery balrog stamped around, and down, down, to the darkly-splendid world, wherein continually lieth a faithless depth and Hades wrapped in clouds… I realised I was gazing into the Abyss. I hurriedly put Dr W’s magic mirror down before Nietzsche could pop out of my tooth. Ridiculous appearances aside, the dam was actually very helpful. There was no charge for the extra anesthetic, and I got two fillings for $60 the pair.

The fun came when I tried to give directions to the taxi driver afterwards, since by then my tongue and the right side of my face were paralysed, introducing an extra level of handicap to my already quite sufficiently lousy Thai. Anyway, I eventually got home, fell asleep very early, and had a lot of dreams, including the first flying dream I’ve had for ages. I flew up out of the room I was in, through the clouds, and into space. I wanted to go to the centre of the galaxy, but I felt disoriented and didn’t know which way to go. I came back down, went up up again, still couldn’t see which way to go, came down again and went on with the complicated dream I was having, the details of which I can’t remember. I did remember a few things when I woke up in the night; then I went back to sleep, and dreamed I was writing down my first dream. By the time I woke in the morning I’d forgotten everything except the flying.

I took a yoga class a couple of weeks ago, and another on the weekend. For about a week after the first class I remembered my dreams better than I usually do. The second class didn’t seem to have as much of an effect, but maybe it’s kicking in late. Or was it the lidocaine? I hope it was the yoga, since it’d be quite a bummer to have to have a tooth filled every time I want to go flying in my sleep.

Flopsy the Easter Penis:

Sketches:

And because it’s Easter, and hence a time for eggs, and because birds come out of eggs, here’s an Easter egg of sorts in the form of penis birds, by ceramic artist Dean Adams. I had a sort of random mental fit where I imagined gorgeously plumed, plump, winged penises sitting in trees in a tropical forest, so I googled “penis birds”, and of course they’ve already been done. Personally, I think penis birds would look great with lavish lustre glazes, rococo painting and gilding. Do let me know if you find any like that.

 Here’s an extract from a new story, WIP featuring Gwynn and a new character, Mrs Elysée Curzon. Gwynn is still a dandy, though not so much of a bastard, at least not yet. The story isn’t finished by a long way, but I have a basic idea of where it’s going. For a long time I’ve had an image of him wandering through a pseudo-Asian mountain landscape, without having any story ideas to go with the image. So now I’ve got one, so, yeah, happy. Crit is always welcome.

—

The karst peaks, covered in cloud forest, separated by ravines, seemed endless: the world was re-endowed with the mysterious infinitude it had once possessed in the eye of the small person dwelling in a hamlet or on a seashore, before the roundness and the limits of the globe were known. Once could imagine that it was a great accumulation of time that darkened the shadows in the deep-reaching valleys and made every bough bend a little, as if in reverent genuflection to Age itself, and advance a step to feeling that time would never do more than layer season upon season, full moon upon new: that time would merely arrive, and sit, and grow weathered and beautiful, like the rows of statues whose seated forms were worn so that their smiles could hardly be seen, holding moss and water in their laps.

There was a single path ascending into this world, climbing through the sound of waterfalls, damp with the ever-present fog that trickled down pine and fern and held a veil across the way ahead, which, thinning sometimes, rendered glimpses of monotonous beauty in the contours of rock and vegetation. Close to the eye, there was always some delicate bed of moss or a new orchid to admire. There were the stone figures, varying likenesses of one benevolent spirit, and less frequently, small shrines, usually set on prominent rocks or within groves of trees. Often these were no more than a stone with an inscription and a holder for incense; sometimes there was a figurine.

These humble gateposts to the world of divinities didn’t offend Gwynn’s sense of art, which was sensitive to vulgar religiosity. He could hardly find anything vulgar in the childlike seated figures and the crude stone haunts, even if he could have done without the pathos.  

The human plane of existence provided quite enough of that.

Gwynn and Mrs Curzon had not seen a human dwelling in two days. Villages along the way were far between, few, and underpopulated. This was as Mrs Curzon had expected.

They had been travelling through the mountains for more than a fortnight, riding ponies they had purchased at a coal-mining town in the foothills, where Gwynn had also bought a blue quilted cotton tunic embroidered lavishly with flowers, birds, and folkloric beasts, which he wore to please his vanity (and thus maintain that equilibrium and health of spirit which, in his case, flowed from the heights of pleased vanity as from nowhere else). Dressed otherwise in corduroy and leather, his black hair held back with combs, he was armed with his sword and a single pistol. His old rifle was slung beside his saddle, but he did not expect to need it. The old reasons to have one’s person hung about with weapons were of receding validity in the increasingly ordered world. Railways and the telegraph had brought the extension of central control over remote territories. Where once it had been nearly impossible to travel outside the capitals without encountering the militias of competing warlords, governments or quasi-governments, bands of robbers, warlike nomads, or armed gangs that might be designated in any of these ways, depending on the place and the political winds, or even the time of year, it was now perfectly feasible to ride an express train over five or six national borders without encountering any human obstacle greater than a policeman or a customs official.

Even in the wild mountains, outlaws were not the problem they once had been, according to every source of information they spoke to in the town—or, rather, that Mrs Curzon spoke to, her knowledge of the local language being far the greater. She had listened to the explanations, which were almost ubiquitously vague where people did not say simply that the army had come in numbers and massacred the large bands several years ago. This might be half true, was her view, but she believed people were too afraid to speak the outright truth. She saw the same forces behind the unhistorical peace and the lifeless villages. It was the labour shortage, she said. “Governments, in the pockets of industrialists, forcibly removing people and carting them off to work, for slave wages or none, hundreds of miles away, so that they have no chance of getting home. It couldn’t have happened before trains. These mountain clans have a history of disregarding any authority except their own chiefs. They’ve always been the bane of kings. Most administrations in the past found it expedient to turn a blind eye to brigands in these mountains, since—”

— “They not only preyed on the illustriously insolent peasants, but drew off into their own numbers the frustrated firebrands who wanted action?”

“Exactly.” She ignored the minor flourish of sarcasm in his words. By now she had him down as the type for whom kicking sacred cows was irresistible entertainment. She was at present, for the most part, treating his personality as a collection of such tics, while at the same time taking him seriously enough that she did not stop attempting to educate him. It was one of her own tics, she knew very well, that she couldn’t help taking even ridiculous people seriously and trying to educate them.

 “Then you had secret clan societies fighting outlaws, which saved the government the trouble of hunting them, and tended to prevent the firebrands from growing to difficult maturity. Look,” she said, pointing. He followed her finger through the tall cryptomeria growing up the mountain on their left.

“What?”

“Those trees grow quickly. Ten years ago there were a lot more villages along this road. But the people were relocated and the buildings were destroyed.”

The scowl with which she condemned this action he felt to be partially for him. He had allowed her to know that he had once worked for a dealer in slaves and weapons who had kept a civil war in finely balanced progress for his own commercial ends. He wondered if this mischievous revelation had not been a tactical error. He felt that the weight of her lectures on social politics had increased afterwards.

That he had killed the man did not impress her. He would have been disappointed if it had, since that would have introduced a blemish into his image of her stern compassion, a quality whose possessors often attracted him. He supposed this taste of his to be partly due to the attraction inherent in opposites, but he believed it was also aesthetic on a less personal plane. Such people worked upon his senses in the bracing, glittering manner of diamonds, charging swords, cold blue lakes and the like. Mrs Curzon’s true natural background was not quite this sort of mountain scenery, he thought. The force of her character wanted less haze and more sharp, triangular peaks…clear alpine air, and probably, he thought, sanitariums, full of people who would be encouraged to get well and then sent briskly back to their lives. She reminded him of Raule, but where the woman doctor’s idealism and belief in her own powers had been worn down almost to nothing by protracted war, Mrs Curzon’s vital forces had not encountered that kind of opposition—yet.

She claimed to have got her knowledge of the region’s language and recent history from a Major Bronton, who had been a founding member of an organisation she belonged to, which, she said, did not have a name or a purpose that could be revealed to outsiders. His imagination was left free to run the gamut of every possibility. Whatever it was, he guessed at a certain middle-class madness behind it: the sort of derring-do that bred in drawing rooms amongst the aspidistras and launched now and again, like a debutante with dynamite in her shoes, out into the world, to make a spectacle and often enough a nuisance of itself in places far from its origin. Regrettably, by his own reckoning, but there was nothing he could do about it, he was drawn irresistibly to that aesthetic, too. He supposed it was false nostalgia for the life he might have lived—the chandeliered life of the parents of his friends at the foreign school in the green and rainy country.

She carried a pewter jar containing the remains of Bronton. He had died, she said, after returning from his last expedition to the mountains. He had charged her with scattering his ashes on the ground at a certain temple—“If,” she said, “it’s still there.”

Gwynn took it for granted that the ashes story was bogus or, at most, a cover for whatever she actually was up to. He did not care enormously what that was. It amused him to think that he had come all this way for no other purpose than to spend some time alone in a place of renowned natural beauty, only to find the pull of civilised company as irresistible as he always found it.

Mrs Curzon’s conversation carried the drawing room into the wilderness; the landscapes became wallpapers; the mosses, carpets; the orchids, ordered from expensive dealers. Whether one saw the ersatz landscape or the real was a relatively simple matter of adjusting mental focus, so that his love of nature and his love of artifice could take turns feeding from those two distinct categories of nourishment.

Still busy with writing, so more sloppy art, orz.

Just a lovely feelgood story, folks.