To get there, we took the train from a station across the river. The skytrain now — at last — crosses the Chao Phraya. From the second and currently last station on that extension of the line, it’s a 15 min walk up a main road to what at first glance seems to be a busy little market beside the terminus of a disused train track, but is in fact a station.

I had gone there the day before just to look around, having seen very little of west Bangkok. I went wandering down the railway tracks, browsing the market stalls, bought a couple of pieces of kitchen crockery, and then found a white-flowered bush of a species I didn’t even vaguely recognise.  The flowers smelled like, well, English hedgerow came to mind. Blossoms of the May, and all that. All around was tropical vegetation, and maybe this bush was native to the Southeast Asian tropics too, but the smell took me right out of Bangkok and deposited me in a woodland I know (indeed, the only English woodland I know personally) on the outskirts of London, with oak and holly and bluebell lawns and foxes and distant grey Brutalist housing estates on a grey horizon peeping through the poplar trunks on the forest fringe.

Suddenly missing Old Blighty (though whenever I go there, all I ever do is complain about the cold and the food), I stood there sniffing the flowers like they were full of cocaine, not minding the odd looks I was getting. I had to resist the temptation to pick a few flowers to take home.

Anyway, I knew where the railway track was, and my friend correctly identified the area on which the market stood as the platform of a station (I had missed seeing the clock and the ticket booth they day before — observant, aren’t I?). The train to Mahachai came, and for an hour’s ride (sans cushions, mind you), cost 10 baht — about 30 cents.

Mahachai was a fun place to wander around. Apparently we completely missed the main part of the town, but we found a fish market anyway. What I found most interesting were the pastes — shrimp pastes, I guess — moulded into huge smooth egg-shapes. It all smelled wonderful, of course. On the other side of the market was a river. Fishing boats were working on the water and ferries were going back and forth between Mahachai and a town on the other bank. Half the passengers on the ferries were on motorbikes, which they didn’t wheel but rode directly onto and off the boat, up and down the pier ramps.

No knowing where to go, we had been following a group of tourists from Bangkok. On the other side, they all got into a fleet of rickshaws (real rickshaws, not tuk-tuks) and went…somewhere. So we wandered around, and presently came to a wat with a large glass case in its front courtyard. The case contained an enormous stuffed turtle, festooned with pearls and flowers and attended by a mongoose (I think) and a small mummified cetacean, possibly a river porpoise (below the mongoose(?)’s chin in the photo).

A sign on the shrine proclaimed the turtle to be Mafeuang the Turtle Goddess. The case had wheels, so maybe Mafeuang sometimes gets trundled through the streets — or the wheels might just be for ease of transport for cleaning and upkeep, I guess.

A little further on we came to an ornate Chinese cemetery. The graves were like beds, some king-sized, with voluted and painted surrounds. On a house near the cemetery was this banner featuring Taoist Jesus, advertising a pre-burial body-washing service for unclaimed corpses:

There was a dearth of restaurants in the town, so we ate back at Mahachai, then explored a blingy Chinese temple.  Chinese settlements in Thailand tend to be along coasts and rivers, since trade used to go by water.

On the way back, at the skytrain station, I noticed this sign:

And thus the day closed on a note of ponderable mystery.

Unfortunately, when the economic slump hit the publishing industry, some talented editors lost their positions, Juliet amongst them. Her departure from Bantam was definitely a blow to the science fiction / fantasy field and its writers. She now runs her own editing firm, Paper Tyger, in which I and, I’m sure, all her other writers wish her great success.

Jeff VanderMeer recently interviewed Juliet about her career, the work of an editor, and the current state of publishing. There are some more tributes from writers on Jeff’s blog.

But I have to admit, the experience shook me up, and I still don’t really know why it happened. Was it just one of the SFX of a nasty virus? A consequence of stress (largely self-imposed) and chronic insomnia, with the virus as the last straw? While I was in Australia I found out about a few things that run in my family, on both sides. Knowing what I know now, I think I’m lucky to be as hale in mind as I am.

A lot went on in my head. Went on intensely and mostly yuckily. I fell down a well. I thought about dying. Not with any real practical intent, but I found myself wishing that I didn’t have any loved ones so that I could do away with myself without upsetting anybody.

This was maybe the third time I’ve been down the well, although it was the first time the trip started with anxiety. Anyway, it was familiar enough that it was a bit like Groundhog Day. I recognised the bottom of the well, which actually isn’t a terribly bad place. It’s just a terminus. There’s a loss of personality. “Kirsten” fizzles out. The name is a luggage tag without a suitcase. Awareness remains, some habits stick around, but whatever is operating the organism feels like it’s accessing a backup copy of the personality over a lousy connection. Then “I” get very dopey, as if my skull were full of mud.

Then “I” fizzle back in. Same-same but different, as they say in Thailand. The differences might not be visible from the outside, but I can feel them. Some things carry on just as before, but other patterns of behaviour no longer feel natural, and I either have to act them out for continuity’s sake or drop them. It’s like a Windows upgrade. Some bugs will be fixed, but there’ll be new ones, and at least one silly new toolbar that only gets on the way.

I rarely dream that I’m someone else, but lately I’ve had a few dreams where I’m Dr Who and I’m fighting the Master. I figure it must be my brain trying to process the sense of being a contingent, flickering personality. I can’t work out what the Master represents. My dreaming brain likes to pun, so maybe he’s the “master” tape, something solid and permanent, which for some reason I feel threatened by.

Anyway, yes, sane. Coming off the boat, luggage in hand. Someone’s luggage, at any rate. Standing on dry land, my legs can still feel the motion of the water.

Presumably this sort of thing happens to other people too. So go on, tell me if this all sounds familiar. I like to know that my friends are all as sane as me!

Fantasy Magazine has accepted “Saving the Gleeful Horse”, the story I wrote for Vera Nazarian’s auction, and I’ve finished the intros for DEAD GIRLS and ELDRITCH KID.

I’m reading Walter Benjamin and wondering what he’d be writing if he were alive today. I suspect he’d be working for Lonely Planet, sending reams of rumination to baffled editors. Sometimes their red pens would skip a beat and in the middle of a hotel review or a potted history of Canada there’d be left a lonely line about the sadness of a coppery afternoon on the outskirts of a port city or the estrangement of mass instincts from life.

A little box on a shelf caught my eye. Dark blue, with dancing fairy silhouettes on the cover, I thought it was a whimsically-decorated matchbox until belatedly I read “perfume”. Feeling the weight of the bottle inside I opened it and to my surprise found that although all the alcohol had long evaporated away, there was a little residue of brown viscous oil left.

The box and the bottle:

I opened the lid and took a sniff and oh, my, it was gorgeous. Old-fashioned and incensey, with one slippered foot in the boudoir and one in the joss house. Ten bucks later the little treasure was in my purse.

My nose only knows what it likes, and I can’t pick out the smells in a perfume unless it’s something blindingly obvious like tuberose. This does remind me of aloeswood oil, but I’m probably wrong. Besides, it has an odd habit of smelling a bit different whenever I open the bottle. I looked for it online, hoping to get a description, but no luck. I don’t even know how old it is. The design of the box looks 1920s-30s to me, but it could be a retro design from a later decade, or just an old one that was never changed. And the manufacturer is, or was, Australian. Now that’s something to be nostalgic about.

Seen recently in the local newspaper, a 3-hour craft workshop: Make and Decorate Your Own Coffin.

With only three hours to complete the coffin, it would have to be a plywood job. Of course, for the decoratively inclined, plywood is a good option — pale and easy to draw on.

I daydreamed about how I would decorate mine. Maybe figures from the Commedia dell’Arte, to portray the idea that all the world’s a stage, and because it would be an excuse to indulge my fetish for masked characters; or porn, to amuse, mystify, scandalise or bore future archaeologists; or decoupage photos of some bodacious siren, so that people will think that was me; or a whole lot of sudoku squares, to give me something to do in the afterlife.

So, how would you decorate yours?

A friend of hers rang up the telephone company to cancel the mobile phone subscription of her recently deceased father. “My father died recently,” she said, “and I’d like to cancel his phone.”

“I’m sorry,” said the customer service representative at the other end, “but we’ll have to speak to him in person.”

“Did you hear what I said?” asked the friend. “He’s dead. This is his PIN number…”

“I’m afraid we have to speak to him in person…”

No, really.

Now, onto the main act of this post: Walrus plays the Swiss horn! (via The Oyster’s Garter)

And the sideshow attraction, also via The Oyster’s Garter — be amazed by Mandelbrot the Fractal Teddy!

Microbiologist Brian Lower, whose team made the discovery, also notes that the bacteria they studied, Shewanella oneidensis, “generate a small amount of electricity as they eat waste, giving them potential as biofuel cells”.

The bacteria aren’t ready to be put to work yet, however. “It’s a matter of outsmarting the microbes so they do what you want them to do rather than what they want to do,” said biologist Kenneth Nealson.

Hopefully, human beings can outsmart microbes. Which leads (sort of) to this: a lauded scientific thinker’s views on why climate change may not be such a bad thing. Freeman Dyson of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study has spoken out in favour of (scrubbed) coal and contends that carbon, and increased temperatures, might be helpful rather than harmful to life on the planet.  I’m not qualified to have any opinion on Dyson’s views in those connections, but I found myself thinking about this one item in the article:

“(Dyson) had added the caveat that if carbon dioxide levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred ‘carbon-eating trees,’ whereupon Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, had looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Mr. Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that ‘perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.’ ”

To which my mind went, “Well, you know, why not?” Perhaps I’m just an optimistic fantasiser, but human beings have proven time and again just what clever monkeys we are. If it’s at all physically possible, it seems, we will find a way to do it. Given what nature has already done with organic material, the engineerability of biological matter seems a field full of opportunity, as Dyson believes:

“Biotech, he writes in his book, ‘Infinite in All Directions’ (1988), ‘offers us the chance to imitate nature’s speed and flexibility,’ and he imagines the furniture and art that people will ‘grow’ for themselves, the pet dinosaurs they will ‘grow’ for their children (he has six children himself), along with an idiosyncratic menagerie of genetically engineered cousins of the carbon-eating tree: termites to consume derelict automobiles, a potato capable of flourishing on the dry red surfaces of Mars, a collision-avoiding car.”

Because it’s human nature to look out for number one and to care about the short term more than the long term, I admit I’m pessimistic about the chances of the global push to reduce carbon emissions (and let’s assume these emissions are a bad thing). I can’t see any reason to place hope in the operation of selflessness and long-term thinking in (the perhaps mis-named) Homo sapiens. As I see it, the only spot to park a bit of hope is in our orangutan-like cleverness with technology. Rather than expect us to become any wiser that we’ve shown ourselves capable of being since we climbed down from the trees, I’m hoping we’ll somehow MacGyver our way out of trouble. And grow those My Little Dinosaurs. And collision-avoiding potatoes.

I’ve just found out how to password protect a post. The older I get, the steeper the learning curves get… Having looked at mailing list options, I think password protection for future doujinshi posts would be a better idea than a mailing list. I’ll email the password to people who asked to be on the list.

Since it’s been a while, here was the last page: