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.