From the instructions for a flexible keyboard:

I suppose someone, somewhere, might want to teast their keyboard.

In other news, yesterday I found three pretty yet tasteful shirts, not pink (many clothes in T-land are pink), sans random bits of lace and ribbon (another common failing), with necklines that look fine left open (Thai shirts are often designed to be buttoned right up, notwithstanding the heat). MY CUP RUNNETH OVER.

I don’t know what it is about clothing designers here, but nearly everything is either girly or frumpy. If it’s formal enough for work — i.e. not a t-shirt — it’s usually either fucked up with frills and pin-tucked bodices or it’s made of stiff linen and cut like a cardboard box with bits of nasty lace around the sleeves. There’s a leap from infancy to mother-of-the-bride, leaving out most of adulthood — I know not why. So thank you to the label All About Clothes, whence came the shirts. Mind you, they had plenty of stuff with the lace and pin-tucks as well, ill-advisedly combined with batik patterns. But I am grateful for the offering of something wearable.

Adding John Inman to the list of people and things I can’t draw, orz.
Btw, Mizu Natsuki has a twin sister — rumouredly identical. Bancoran’s secret identity…?

Last week my friend Inger dropped in for a day on her way from Australia to England, where she’s giving a paper at a conference in Oxford. I had to go to work in the afternoon, so in the morning we set out early and took the water taxi to the old town. Inger’s background is architecture, and the canal provides a sample of Bangkok staples–old wooden houses, urban ruins, shacks where hanging laundry forms a front wall, and grungy office blocks. It also provides the excitement of a chance to fall in the canal, since the boat only stops briefly at the landing and sometimes you have to take a bit of a leap from the gunwale to the car tires that buffer the landing stop.

We survived the trip without a dunking and looked for transport to the palace district, which we found quickly in the form of a knot of tuk-tuk drivers. They tried to convince us to take a tour, which we declined; I said we just wanted to go to the palace. They said it was closed in the morning. The next day was an important religious holiday, so I thought maybe it might be closed for some special function–this is how stupid I have become. It was certainly in my mind that they were probably lying, and that this was some sort of scam, but I couldn’t for the life of me think why they would say the palace was closed when doing so would mean nothing but a lost fare. Bamboozled, I said all right, take us to Chinatown–yes, no worries, off we went, arrived without incident, and wandered the congested bazaar, heading in the general direction of the palace district, until I had to go.

Stu was incredulous when I told him what had happened. How had I ever taken it into my head to believe tuk-tuk drivers? The scam, as he reminded me, is to tell the tourist the palace is closed and to take them off to some gem shop instead. I had probably avoided the gem shop by speaking Thai and telling the driver which road to go to. In my defense I could only say feebly that I never take tuk-tuks and therefore my brain must have decided it didn’t need to remember what their drivers are like. There are a few standard scams in our area, but they are so much a part of the daily scenery that I hardly register them consciously anymore. The taxi drivers lurking outside the Ambassador trying to lure tourists into meterless tours of the city don’t call out to me anymore; they know I’m just cutting through the hotel on my way to work. The Indian fortune teller doesn’t hassle me; he knows I live here too. I had utterly forgotten that when I go to the old city I look like a tourist and can expect to be treated as one. I realised how complacent I’ve become. It was a timely reminder, since Thailand is not always safe for foreigners and one’s guard should be up–worse things can happen to you than missing out on a tourist attraction.

I was worried that Inger would miss out on the palace entirely, but she found it and returned to Sukhumvit safely. We talked about footnoting. She keeps in mind Stephen King’s advice to kill your darlings, and has found that footnoting is a gentle method of execution: first move the tangential thought into the footnotes, then delete without reading after a suitable time has elapsed. The Web provides a footnoting service for memory–how much bookmarked information does one ever return to and read thoroughly? There’s a magical sort of comfort in having it marked for reference, and in my case at least no sense of urgency to actually get around to reading the stuff.

We also talked about the personal voice in academic writing. Inger tends to use a personal voice, which is frowned on these days; it’s considered arrogant. However, we agreed that we think the opposite is true. It seems more humble and honest to present one’s subjective opinion as just that–an opinion arising from one’s being a particular individual with biased interests and ways of thinking–rather than claim a perfect objectivity and mask the traces of bias with the sort of writing that is like air freshener sprayed in a room where the odours of people were lingering.

I like robust subjective writing. I like Gaston Bachelard and Roland Barthes and Harold Bloom. They don’t preface their work with a squirming “this is only my opinion, but…” since there’s no need to. They do you the courtesy of assuming you will understand that these are the views of an individual–argued with conviction and perhaps unbudgeable, but there’s a big difference between convinced opinion and ex cathedra proclamation. In fact, with greatness one seems to earn the right to subjectivity–like getting pole position in a motor race. It’s the folk lower down the academic pecking order who earn frowns for speaking with a bit of personal bravura. The Catch-22 is that without that spark of the subjective, which gives the reader the sense of engagement with another person, your work is unlikely to win many converts–so that you really do have to put up a flight and flash your colours, and hope that in time people will get used to you and start engaging their subjectivity with yours.

I’ve been sick for a few days and haven’t felt like writing, so doujin-ahoy. Wass and Wan were around while I was doing this and asked me what the picture was about. I think I failed pretty well to explain, but succeeded in communicating through song and mime that it was a joke in loose connection with the Village People. I realised too late that this would have been a golden opportunity to dress Gwynn up as Kai. Oh, well, some other time.

It’s back! Bad art in a good cause, avec un peu de ho-yay. The images of Mr Humphries belong to the BBC, I guess.

Michelangelo was no beauty queen and left no documented self portrait except a cartoon, doodled in the margin of one of his poems, showing the artist painting the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.

“Moreover, the drawing reveals Michelangelo’s sense of humor since the figure he is drawing is not one of the massive heroic participants from the stories of Genesis that would ultimately populate the ceiling, but rather, one with cartoon-like features including huge eyes and hair standing straight up on ends.”

Indeed it awesomely does. I don’t know about you, but it gives me a kind of Sistine Chapel moment: the feeling of a finger reaching across half a thousand years - callused, paint-stained, chipped nails - and playfully poking my own finger. And maybe scribbling a doodled autograph.

Big Nose Kate kitty made it. Angel Eyes didn’t. When I went back to take him to the vet for his shots the owner said he’d died. Diarrhea and a runny nose. It’s hard not to feel angry. These people have a 4WD sitting in the ground floor of their rickety slum house. The credit payments are probably costing more than their wages. But still, they care about the car. It gleams, and they do somehow find the money to keep it and pay for petrol. But they don’t find the money to take a sick cat to the vet.

Five new young kittens were crawling around my feet when I went to look for Angel Eyes. Just ready to go out and get run over, drink from the swamp, drown, catch something from all the other unvaccinated animals in the street, etc. When I saw them, I had a feeling that surprised me. I didn’t care too much about them. Because the one that I’d tried to save had died, an inner switch moved with shameful speed to the “off” position. It was the classic cliche of not wanting to care so as to avoid future distress - not a failure of compassion, but a failure of courage. I was shocked at how fast it happened. Not a nice thing to learn about myself. But at least I could understand why the owners - seemingly - don’t care about their pets. They must be thoroughly used to seeing animals die - and probably people, too. Perhaps (for most of us?) the heart doesn’t have to bleed very much before the self-protective instinct arranges a firm tourniquet and the mind comes up with comforting thoughts like heaven and reincarnation, and, hey, why not, the Heaviside Layer full of Evanjellicle cats.

I hope that if I see another transportable animal with an obvious injury I will take it to the vet. But I have a bad feeling that I’m going to avoid that street for a while. Moral fibre rating of a jelly donut.

In which Gwynn is a strong female character, or in which there are no scenes of really explicit violence. I wanted there to be wide scope for readers to interpret the text, but sometimes I run into responses that make me wonder whether there really are infinite realities out there. (And therefore, which book would be the original…?)

Whokilledbambi.co.uk - a great repository of quirky and macabre art. The curators seem to bit of a fetish for dolls, skulls and guns (I love the porcelain pistols!!)but there’s still a wide selection of odd goodies, from Batman as St Sebastian to roadkill toys, kinetic totems and even a touching monster hug.

“You look like Britney Spears!” gushes the young man at the front desk of the Hotel Cara in Phnom Penh.
“It’s the hat, isn’t it?” I say hopefully. He nods. He’s lovely. All the staff here are. The hotel is excellent — small, comfortable, stylish, spotless, and inexpensive. Perfect pillows, too. It was recommended to me by Ross, an American businessman who I met in Bangkok. He works in Cambodia and lives in the hotel. Middle-aged, energetic, dressed in shorts and a black t-shirt, his eyes are fish-tank green, horizontal, and full of passion when he talks about Cambodia. With him is Pat, an Australian lady aged 84, who also resides in the hotel. Pat is what I would call old school — rather aristocratic, tough, adventurous, and razor sharp. If I want to be like her when I’m older I’ll have to shape up mentally, not just hang on to what I’ve got. Pat and Ross have decided that I must go and see Tuol Sleng prison, now a museum, and the mass graves of the killing field outside the city in order to appreciate the modern history of Cambodia.

I admit that I don’t know much about the war. Over lunch in a terrific restaurant, Ross gives me a precis. The first point that sticks in my mind is that the war in Cambodia was essentially a proxy war between Russia, backing Vietnam, and China, backing the Khmer Rouge. The second point is that most of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were educated people, intellectuals from landowner or civil servant backgrounds who picked up communist ideas at university in France, and then — this is the part that seems to make no sense — turned into mass murderers, descending particularly on members of their own class in a bid to turn Cambodia into a Maoist agrarian peasant state in the name of self-sufficiency.

I go with Pat and her driver, Parak, in Parak’s 4WD, to Tuol Sleng, a former high school turned into a prison camp operated by Khan Khek Iew, where 17,000 people were imprisoned and tortured before they were taken to the killing fields and executed. There were only ten known survivors. Groups the Khmer Rouge arrested and brought to places like Tuol Sleng included people with connections to the former government, the educated, Buddhist monks, homosexuals, Christians, Muslims, ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese, and former urban dwellers. Urban populations were rounded up and taken to labor camps in the country. Parak, who lost his whole family, explains that these people were continually split up and moved from camp to camp to prevent them organising.

The rules at Tuol Sleng:

Inmates were chained to these beds. The metal box is a toilet.

Body of a prisoner:

Waterboarding table:

Inside the prison are boards covered with photographs of inmates. Some are shown before and after torture. Many are former Khmer Rouge members suspected of betraying the party. Some of these are very young. The Khmer Rouge used child soldiers. Pat tells me that children recruited into the army were required to kill their own families. I ask Pat what methods were used to recruit them. She seems irritated by the question, as if the answer were obvious. “When you’re poor and hungry, I don’t think it’s hard to understand,” she says. “Particularly if a man with a gun is telling you what to do.” It might be that simple.

Tuol Sleng certainly gave me pause for thought, but I couldn’t say I was horrified. We’ve all grown up on a daily news diet of human enormities, and this was just more of the same, including a room with glass cabinets full of skulls and paintings of torture by one of the surviving inmates. What I did find affecting were the photographs by prison photographer Nhem En. They are compelling pictures of individuals. Looking from one board to the next, you’re literally faced with the fact that every murder, every act of torture, rape and humiliation, is committed by one individual against another. Every one of Stalin’s famous statistics has a personal history, and so does every human being who strays off the path of humanity.

After Tuol Sleng, Parak drove us to the old Chinese cemetery that became the “Killing field” where prisoners were executed, often with a bludgeon or by having their throats cut with a palm branch to save bullets. The mass graves are depressions in the ground, filled with long grass and purple flowers. A few grave stones from the original cemetery can still be seen. Curiously, I find it has the usual peace of a graveyard. I don’t feel anything here, despite the prisoners’ clothing still lying visibly in the ground:

There is a glass pagoda full of skulls. Parak won’t go there. I go and have a look, but I still feel unaffected, perhaps because the skulls are the opposite of individual. The question “Why” hangs in the sunny midday air. Parak says he has asked many people the same question, and nobody can give him an adequate answer. He thinks the former king and president Norodom Sihanouk could tell him. Ross and Pat think that evil is not far from the surface in human nature, and it is hard to argue with that, or with the contention that power fed to a human being is like raw bloody meat fed to a dog; that man is the top predator on earth and, if he unlocks his own cage, sets himself free from self-imposed taming and removes himself from the reach of law and censure, he will more often than not turn into something which, if it had four legs, would need shooting dead.

There’s also the matter of grudges and revenge. The communists were suppressed by the government in the early 1960s. Prior to the Khmer Rouge gaining power, Khar Khek Iew was tortured in prison by Norodom Sihanouk’s police for engaging in communist activities. Another key figure, Khieu Samphan, was publicly beaten, stripped and photographed. When looking for reasons — not excuses, just causes — I don’t think the virulent power of the desire to get one’s own back and avenge humiliations can be underestimated. Chain it to the mob mentality that arises in situations of political and economic conflict and you might have at least part of the recipe for mass violence.

“Communism doesn’t work because it has to be enforced by totalitarian means, and totalitarianism doesn’t go away,” says Ross when we meet up again in the afternoon. Most mature societies, he says, are looking for an optimum balance between socialism and capitalism. Gung-ho capitalists who would strip away all social services risk creating an angry underclass with nothing to lose. Those unable to see the moral necessity of social welfare should still be able to see its practical necessity.

I finish my trip to Phnom Penh with a quick look around the National Museum, an attractive building housing mainly statuary removed, for its own safety, from temples at Angkor and elsewhere. Unfortunately photography is not allowed. There’s something Egyptian about the streamlined, solid elegance of many of the figures and their full-lipped, serene faces. There is an astonishingly beautiful Lokeshvara, a form of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. I can’t help thinking that if there really was a deity of compassion it would look just like this. (And there is a charming one with a horse’s head, who reminds me of Forage. It turns out he is the prophesied 10th avatar of Vishnu.)

Leaving the airport I buy a block of Dagobah lavender and blueberry dark chocolate. It’s delicious. I eat some of it for dinner on the plane. My taxi driver in Bangkok is twitching, making funny noises, talking to himself and applying the brake with alarming jerks. I suspect yaba has something to do with it. Stuck in the usual traffic jam where the tollway reaches Sukhumvit he stretches and yawns mightily. “Tired?” I ask. He says he needs chocolate. I wonder if he will like lavender chocolate, but I needn’t worry, he does. It really is very good.