(Incidentally, as with a number of places in Asia, the movie cinema industry is not quite a monopoly, butit’s heavily dominated by a few big companies, meaning your selection is often quite limited. Given a choice between the new Travolta film and the new Mel Gibson, we decided to give moviegoing a pass.)

So we’re sitting here, both happily online and sipping our coffees, and there’s a Korean couple not far away. They’re having a conversation so loud I can almost follow it, even with the music and the distance. That’s because they’re practically shouting at one another, though with smiles on their faces.

When I go to coffeeshops in other countries, I’m always struck by how most of them — not all, but most — are really quiet, comfortable places. Going there with company means a conversation can be held without shouting.

This is not how it is in Korea, or in any coffeeshop anywhere that Koreans happen to be. People reading my blog regularly might have noticed my recent rant about the topic, but now I’m going to ask the question a little more gently: why are conversations often held at such a high volume among Koreans?

Background: for some reason, a large proportion of (younger and middle-aged) Koreans who go to coffee shops seem to think that all conversations in such places should be conducted very loudly. One gets the sense that they go home needing a drink of lemon water to soothe the strain on their voices.

It doesn’t help that seating in cafes in Korea is almost invairably crammed, to maximize space but also, I suspect, because of the common attitude in Korea that places that look empty are unpopular and are “bad” while places that looked crammed full of people are popular and “good.”

In contrast, I remember the Second Cup I used to hang out in back on Rue St. Laurent, in Montreal. There were these big, open spaces between a lot of the different seating areas, and the music wasn’t cranked up. I remember reading there, a lot, without headphones. The space inside was, of course, much bigger than almost any coffee shop I’ve been in here in Asia, but it was also more comfortable than any I’ve visited in Asia.

Going to a coffeeshop in Korea is a headphones-non-optional outing, unless you’re with company. How and why did this happen? After all, the coffee shop boom happened among young women, and even today, it’s rare for men to go to such places with only men.

(I note this because Korean women, like women everywhere, tend to be just a little quieter than Korean men, even — or especially? — in big groups.)

I don’t know if it’s the aesthetics of behaviour for bars and pubs being mapped onto coffee shops, or whether it’s just part of thhe general desire to be “active” in their interactions that leads people to behave this way. I’d be really curious to see what others think about this.

Speaking of which, I’ve had a few interesting discussions about etiquette, manners, and so on with Miss Jiwaku and others. One of the interesting things that came up was a comparison of how Westerners developed the etiquette of politeness and gentility that we (at least some of us) hold so dear.

The answer is, etiquette manuals. But that’s the subject for another post… one into which I will be able to work in Robo Taekwon V, too!

Now I know you’re just dying to see it. Well, the loud couple has long gone, and Miss Jiwaku is awake again from the nap she took, so I think I’ll end this here…

The driver who was sent to pick me up didn’t quite get the explanation he should have, so he drove to Depok, on the wrong side of town

So I’m now waiting for a taxi. Hmm… another day in Jakarta.

The Masjid is what one expects of a masjid: big open spaces, not heavily ornamented but with a lovely, enormous dome above the main prayer hall. The most surprising thing was the number of people just hanging around, sleeping on the huge prayer rug, and goofing off with cell phones and little point-and-shoot cameras.

The shock of the afternoon came when, earlier and across the street from the masjid, we wandered into the local cathedral. It looks like a lot of cathedrals around the world from 1901, ie, somewhat ornate but not insanely so, and rather pretty with what looked like some local touches. There was a wedding ongoing, so I didn’t shoot too many pictures. (What I did shoot will land on Facebook, but not for a while, because the internet access I’m getting these days is, well… yeah, I’ll wait to upload till I get to Korea… and hopefully upload pics from my trip to Laos a couple of years ago while I’m at it.)

Anyway, the Church: yeah, it was when the singing started that my heart sank. I’ve been to masjids, to Buddhist temples, to Hindu temples, and at each place some degree of modernity had crept in. But the music in Catholic Churches — recognizable worldwide, by the way, from its earnest, inoffensively tonal strains, its simple (and incessantly repeating) sub-Broadway-melodies accompanied by mediocre piano music. It is inoffensive, but also unflattering, uninspiring, and completely interchangeable piece-to-piece.

It reminds me of the polo shirt, a style that itself is styleless: it bespeaks, in both women and men who don it, a milquetoast conservativism, that thoughtless preppiness, that mediocre concession to fashion. It makes men look all alike, and flatters not at all the female form; rather, it is — at least in Korea, where it remains immensely popular — the shirt of refuge for women who hate their bodies. It is less a fashion than an inoffensive option from a set of options set out before one of a certain mindset or social class and background — social class and background so often translating to mindset anyway.

Yes, indeed, Catholic Church music is the polo shirt of religious music. Which, when you have actually heard the works of Ockeghem, and Bach (Lutheran though he was), and other amazing European composers who produced sacred repertory, is especially depressing. Europe’s finest music was written on church coin, and now the best they can offer is folksong sing-along verse-chorus-verse. So predictable and unartistic it hurts. Hurts, I tell you…

It’s like having the Bible translated by Hallmark Card writers, just to achieve mass appeal. Sigh. Anyway…

But when you are looking for the broad-based, basic history of a society, with an eye to imagining its future, you need a good grounding in the broader sweep of their history, the past that informs not only their present but also will continue to inform their future, and often, when we are dealing with the huge timescales of a culture, of a people, much of the historical record has either crumbled to dust leaving only the monuments of kings, or is too specialized and peculiar for a nonspecialist to gain any traction with them.

And so it is with this in mind that I turned to David K. Wyatt’s Thailand: A Short History, an ambitious history of Thailand, and of the earlier history of the Tai people who would eventually create and populate it, which covers a vast period of a complex history in just a tad over three hundred pages. It is quite in-depth, though for the reasons I’ve cited above, the overall focus is on political and territorial history. (This seems to be something of a trend in books on Southeast Asian history, but that doesn’t surprise me, nor is it really a bad thing. With each book, I feel as if I have a better sense of the historical grounding of the past, its shape and echoes in the present.)

The earlier sections of the book deal mostly with kingdoms and proto-empires made up of Tai people, and their battles with Burmese, Cambodian, Lao, Vietnamese, and Chinese powers. At times, it was a bewildering procession of conquering followed by reconquering followed by retribution — that same sad story that has doinated so much of human history anywhere, powered by the machinery of slavery and royalty and tribal rivalry. Of course, these dynamics continue right into the twentieth century, with tensions between ideologically differing states during the Vietnam War era setting all kinds of military and political conflicts in motion that seem, to my eye at least, not so far disconnected from the clashes between various Southeast Asian kingdoms and empires of old.

The deep past is tumultuous, and though at times one tires of (or is dizzied by) the endless litany of who conquered whom when and why, Wyatt nonetheless does a good job of painting relatively vivid images of certain leaders at crucial points in the history of the Tai people. Still, once Wyatt reached the foundation of Ayutthaya, I found myself yearning for something different.

Something different was precisely what Wyatt delivered, of course, for from that point, Wyatt’s project becomes one of mapping the gestation and birth of the modern Thai nation-state. Even for someone like me, someone who basically tires of reading about kings and princes and their power struggles, these chapters were fascinating. One reason is Wyatt’s focus on why the way people did things — in Ayutthaya, as well as in rival states in the region — mattered so much to success. The way bureacracies worked, the way labour was controlled, the way minority ethnic groups were dealt with, are all important elements of the formula for success in Ayutthaya and its successor kingdom, Siam.

In dealing with the last century or so, Wyatt’s account finally grapples with the difficult problem of explaining the thinking of the military dictators to an audience of Anglophones whom one can rightly assume will be likely to resist any such explanations, even as logical as they might be gussied up into sounding. The peculiarities of what military leaders (and civilian ones too) have done with the notion of “democracy” in Thailand is a complex thing, raising questions about ideology and also about the project of democratization.

(An argument I seem to keep having with older Korean men — by older, I mean in their 50s and 60s — about whether democratization can happen rapidly, and whether “development” and modernization need follow a specific trajectory, comes to mind. For some reason, the older Korean men seem to assume, inexplicably, except maybe for my Westerness — for they have not read this blog! –  that I am critical of the state of democracy in places like Korea and Indonesia simply because I think everywhere should be like Canada right now. The problem is more complex than that, of course, and one cannot impose a trajectory on all states, nor can one say that societies ought to be forced to democratize in some way imposed from outside. That said, I do side with C. Douglas Lummis in his response to cultural relativistic arguments that democracy is a Western construct, that all societies can become more democratic versions of themselves. Democracy may not look the same in each of its incarnations, and heaven knows that the idea of suddenly handing votes to any random person over a certain age has its problems, in every society the needs, beliefs, and demands of the public — tempered, of course, by ethics, the notion of human rights, and the limits of practicability — can more deeply inform the decision making of those who have the final say in how things shall be.)

Wyatt does not, here, seem often to take sides in the form of democratization advocated by various Thai leaders as much as to explain why they acted as they did, and how they seemed to think. He does so in a way that invites understanding, however, without stooping to apologia. This is a good thing.

Likewise, Anglophones from North America, at least, if not the West in general, are likely to be hostile, as I am, to the notion of absolute monarchy, but Wyatt’s account, to succeed, must articulate the importance and role of the monarchy in the formation of Thailand, both when it was absolute and since the end of monarchic absolutism in Thailand.

On both counts, Wyatt does a very good job of putting together explanations and discussions which, while they may not swing the reader over to the conservative Thai point of view (for most of the military dictatorships have been,  for the Thai version of the political spectrum, “conservative”), at least make the cultural and philosiophical logic roughly comprehensible.

The parallels — and divergences — with other East/Southeast Asian development histories with which I’m to any degree familiar, specifically South Korea and Burmese history, are quite tantalizing. Thailand’s recurrent case of military rule makes me wonder what South Korea would look like today if a coup were to reinstate dictatorship… or, rather, if such had happened in 1993 or so, what would Korea look like today? Yet at the same time, Thailand’s story in Wyatt’s book emerges as a series of carefully maneuvered plays which, while they may not have all worked out perfectly, can often be described as lucky near-misses with outright disaster, in contrast to the history of Burma which seems to involve the eager and energetic invitation by leaders of one disaster after another.

One regret I have is that the book, having been published in 2003, has nothing to say about the more recent coup in Thailand in 2006. Also, be warned, as with the book about Burma that I recently discussed, this text has very little to say about the particulrities of Thai culture, and much less to say about the role of religion in Thai society. (Then again, monks are such a major force in Burma that is is an understandable difference.) As I said about that book on Burma, if you’re looking for something of the flavor of Thai culture, Thai urban life, and the Thai imagination, you will need to look elsewhere — probably some modern Thai fiction will serve better for that sort of a glimpse of the country. But for a fairly interesting look at the history of the region, and of how the nation of Thailand came to be, I recommend Wyatt’s book wholeheartedly.

One disclaimer to the above: I’m obviously not an expert on Thailand, and so I can’t evaluate the book on its actual quality, only the quality apparent to a nonexpert. But such as it is, my opinion is that it’s a great book.

If you’re interested in what I have to say about those books, I’ve added my thoughts to the post, and you can click through to see what I had to say. But for here, I’ll just say that I came to Rilke because of a conversation I had recalling a few lines from one of the letters in his famous Letters to a Young Poet. I’d tried reading some small collection of Rilke’s verse ages ago, and the mistake was that what I read was a scattering of uncollected verse. Whatever it was I read, it didn’t strike me as all that spectacular, and I shuffled Rilke into the pile of poets in whom I had no interest.

Then, I picked up a copy of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and I was blown away. Maybe it depends on the translation — this one by A. Poulin Jr., though, is spectacular.

While traveling in the United States, I also picked up an unfortunately abridged translation of Rilke’s Book of Hours, and unfortunate as the abridgement is, I once again found myself in the presence of a poetical force to be reckoned with. Having tried to write a book of hours myself once, I can testify to the difficulty of this open-ended form, and I was impressed with what Rilke did with it.

Rilke is, make no mistake, a constant and convinced theist. It is odd that his texts, so infused with his religious convictions, should strike me as they do, but with Rilke, you take the man’s work as it is, rather than as you would have it be, for there are moments and passages of such insight, genius, and beauty that you find the idea of quarreling with the man’s work something bordering on ingratitude.

I’m thinking of writing something with a character loosely based on Rilke, some poet-in-exile wandering a fantastical world, writing love-letters and trying to fit in among the clockwork artisans and dog-headed shamans o. I probably won’t write it the way it sits in my head, bordering on plotlessness unless the love of his life collapsing in a series of letters, amid his wanderings in strange, harsh, and beautiful lands, counts as a plot. But we’ll see: for now, I have a copy of a book of his letters to Andreas-Salome, which awaits on my desk back in Korea. I’ll finish that off — I started it in 2009, but did not finish it — and also dig into a short collection of his fiction that I got in New York, and then I’ll see whether I’m moved to write a pseudo-Rilkean fantasy novel later.

But in posting these reviews of books I’ve read, I’m working on my skills at reviewing — since many of the books I’m reading are not new, it’s not like others haven’t discussed them for prospective readers, after all, so what I am trying to do is learn the art of the bookr review, as well as trying to engage critically with every book I read. (Not every text, to be sure: I can’t review every story I read this way, but I may as well do the full-length books.) So I am going to try to dig a little deeper.

To start, I have to agree that this book of Ray Veitch’s is a weird one, to be sure. Strange, yes. Its story, though, is one that teeters on the edge of the familiar: a man who works for a permanent marker company (the markers produced by which are being used in massive, popular vandalism in NYC) goes on a drinking binge when his company is sued for the production of truly permanent markers. The man wakes up with a full-body, permanent marker tattoo that renders him, basically, unhuman. The irony, of course, is that in this state, he embarks on an odyssey of sex, travel, and surprising human interaction in which he discovers his own lost humanity. The backdrop of this story is 9/11.

Those two threads didn’t quite come together for me: the man’s life has already fallen apart when we watch him watch the Twin Towers go down. Maybe it’s because I’m not American or living in America, but the image of the Twin Towers being destroyed doesn’t resonate for me the way I imagine it does for an American reader — one at any point along the American political spectrum. But reading the text exegetically, ity’s hard to escaspe the sneaking suspicion that narrative suggests that some tragedies, at least, happen to those who build their possibility — a somehow dangerous thing to suggest in a text that discusses 9/11 as a tragedy as well.

The reason I say this is that the marker-man’s tragedy is directly tied to his decisions, conscious and unconscious. When we witness his home life, we see that he (and his wife) have essentially started running on autopilot. When he leaves for work, without a kiss or a touch, she is already at her computer in the kitchen, and talking on the phone. The man’s commute to the office reveals the damage done by the markers his company produces: New York City is a hot mess of black marker graffitti, or, we might say, disfigured by the man’s employer’s blind pursuit of profit. But not only has the man shut off his sense of conscience — after all, the part he’s played is too small to feel bad about, it’s someone else who’s decided to use the markers in such a bad way… something that hints at criticism of how easy it is for individuals within a system, say, a nation-state, to dismiss the bad things that system does because, after all, they’re just cogs in the machine, and someone else is calling the shots. No, he hasn’t just shut off his conscience, he has outright embraced his dark side: he and his co-workers seem to revel in the controversy about their markers, to feel great since it’s propelled their stock prices through the roof… until, of course, the stock plummets due to a state and city lawsuit against the company, and the man’s life falls apart.

Does this not sound like a political allegory? Veitch invites such involved reading because of the text of the book. For this story unfolds without a single line of dialogue, all in pictures. Meanwhile, in the kinds of text boxes in which narrator’s asides are usually presented, Veitch’s words unfurl as a kind of epic poem of disaster, condemnation, and prophecy. Here’s a sample from a random page:

Small wonder we barnacle to rusted beliefs…
Convinced that if we supplicate long and loud enough…
Out bootless prayers shall be answered.
That some benign gaseous vertebrate will fulfill His every covenant…
Sweeping us up in despotic benevolence…
And installing us in a ten-room co-op in the Heavenly City…
… with a view to die for.

(You can sample the text more in this MP3 of a reading of the text made by Veitch himself, as linked from his website. It actually is quite a different text when disconnected from the images, so don’t worry, this won’t spoil the book for you.)

The text isn’t completely disconnected from the images on the page, of course: on this page, an unnamed but obviously Muslim-American man discovers the marker-tattooed man hiding, terrified, on the top of his winnebago and says a little prayer, then returning to his (head-scarf wearing) wife inside the vehicle and driving off with the man still there, a small act of kindness in allowing the man to hitch a ride.

This swerving and sliding between elevated language and pop-cultural reference is pretty much constant throughout the text, and personally, at least on my first reading, it wore a bit thin. Though one reviewer has suggested that the book may be “the ‘Howl’ of the 9/11 generation,” Veitch’s text doesn’t, to me, quite succeed as a poem on the level of Ginsberg’s. But Veitch’s work is, to be fair, perhaps not intended to be read as poetry (despite the MP3 above) in the way “Howl” is: after all, this is a graphic poem, and the images and text interact, adding up to more than the sum of the two.

So once I got over my resistance to the text — my insistence that this was not “great poetry” — I discovered that what Veitch was doing constituted a really fascinating approach to storytelling, somewhat akin to a film where the only voice you hear is a narrator’s — Chris Marker’s La Jetee comes to mind, though it’s a tenuous comparison. Anyway, I think there may well be more there than I picked up the first time through. My reaction to Can’t Get No was opposite of my reaction to what I think are poems that don’t work, and thus I call the book a successs: I wanted to brave the barrage of prophetic narration to see what happened in the end to the marker-tattooed man, to the Muslim couple, to the women who gave the man his marker-tattoo.

And it is here, at the level of the characters, that Veitch does the most amazing things. Without a single line of dialog from their mouths, each of the characters comes to life, but also seems to win sympathy. I found myself invested in each of them, and wanted to see what happened the next time each reappeared on the page, as each of them did several times. It is because of the wonderful handling of these characters that when finally I finished reading it, I realized that I’d read it all the way through in a single sitting, even though I’d had other things to do, even though I was still sick from food poisoning: despite all the possible reasons I had for not reading it, I’d kept turning those pages, rapt.

And that says something.

Which sounds curiously like a system thought up by people who are scared of and vaguely uncomfortable with the Internet. Hey, wait, that’s exactly how Korean Internet Banking works! (Except with outdated ActiveX controllers which I hope the French government isn’t foolilsh enough to get tied up with.)

Mind you, the 공인인증서 — the Korean equivalent of this kind of certificate that is basically a domestic online banking ID certificate — is handy on occasion: it’s nice at tax time, since many of your deductible expenditures have been automatically tracked for you, and you can (given a decent internet connection, a computer with a Korean version of Windows, and the patience of a saint) access all your documents and print them off from one place, no sweat. But even with these certificates, you need passwords. You need them because even when you’ve authenticated your identity, you need to be able to verify individual transactions, as noted by the commentator I’ve linked above.

It puts me in mind of recent (ie. during the past few years) debacles in which major shopping websites in Korea got hacked, with the personal data of millions being downloaded, all because the government that (ridiculously) required the use of a lot of personal information for any random activity online also failed to set and enforce standards for the security of the data it was requiring commercial operators to store and collect for them.

A single mode of authentication sounds to me like a major step down in security — centralization is going to make this a nightmare for the masses as soon as exploits and cracks are found, and they will eventually be found. And if it is going to be secure, people are going to have to keep using passwords, verifying their identities in other ways, and so on. A system might be possible, but I’m nervous about a government implementing it on a huge scale, in a system connected to millions of people’s finances, before it’s run the gauntlet of hostile hackers.

Meanwhile, the single bank card number and password security system for my Canadian account’s online banking site seems to have held out well, security wise. No complicated registration procedures, no wacky ActiveX controls… but then, Canadian banks assume their customers aren’t dumb enough to give their passwords and account information to their kids or strangers who call them on the phone.

By contrast, pretty much every Korean banking or finance interface I’ve used in the last year asks me questions to ascertain whether I’m being voice phished — which goes to show you that a security system is only as good as its users’s training and level of intuitive comfort and commonsense with regard to the system in general. We’ll see whether the French public is ready for this kind of a change, though current plans seem to be set for a very soon due date, if you ask me.

I took cover, but while I was safe from the laser blasts and projectiles, those voices were inescapable. I listened, trying to figure out what they were saying, but it was no use. It soon became apparent that they were exchanging way more data by this bizarre voice protocol than I could pick out: I could just barely detect structure in the static of their shrieks.

Woke to some idiot with a hammer banging nails into the walls of the place downstairs. Pounding nails for an hour. Too little sleep. Ah well…

I’m not one for interpreting dreams, but…

Well, this was likely just a side-effect of the kicking-in of a new medication I’m on for the short term. No, not a psychoactive medication. I’ll put it this way: I’m starting to wonder if I just have undiagnosed (and mild) bladder stones or something. The Indonesian doctor I’m seeing is handling it wonderfully, and even has a funny sense of humor, of sorts. After prescribing me medications and explaining how we’d confirm the diagnosis I received in Korea, he also made one more prescription: he told me I should marry, because “it’s good for health.” I’m not sure whether he’s talking about regular fllushing of the prostate, or the wider health benefits, but anyway, it was amusing at the time.

By the way, what the hell was with the original mix video? It sucks in a large variety of ways, so much so that I daren’t get started on it:

(Update: Okay, if there’s any more proof that anyone can do anything, one of the main members of Black Box was a classically trained clarinet teacher., says Wikipedia. Sure, that’s not saying Valerio Semplici couldn’t have had a burning interest in house music alongside the classical training — just as Somtow Sucharitkul could be both a significant SF writer and a major opera composer/director — but how many classical clarinetists do you know about whose work can be heard in dance clubs around the world… not to mention, with frightening regularity, in the shopping malls of Southeast Asia? This is a group whose most famous tracks, as Wikipedia notes, “are still heard on rhythmic radio and in clubs on a fairly regular basis to this day.” Bizarre.)

This reminds me: one of the things I’ve been meaning to clarify for my North American readers about “shopping malls” in Jakarta is that they’re not exactly like malls back in North America, at least not the malls I’ve experienced there; they differ in some rather interesting ways. Well, interesting to me, anyway. If you’re curious, you can check out the extended post. Social Function. What I remember of malls in Canada was that they were primarily:

• a place for teenagers to hang out cheaply
• a place for middle-class people to do their shopping “conveniently”
• a place for people with no better options, especially college students, to work

Well, the last point I’m not so sure about: I don’t know what someone working in the Giordano outlet in this or that mall in Jakarta makes, or how good a job it is on the scale of employment opportunities in the city. But as for the first two points, they don’t map so well onto  Indonesian malls. There’s a reason that you get checked for bombs and weapons at the doors of these places — and yes, you do. Cars pulling up get checked, usually in the trunk and scanning the underside of the car with a mirror; people have to surrender their bags to security guards for a moment while they’re checked for anything dangerous. (The checks are usually cursory, but they are constant.)

There are definitely malls catering to different social classes, some of them adjoining directly. You can tell you’ve moved into a lower social class’s mall because the air conditioning is set lower, and because the clerks look less pale, and ever so slightly more haggard. But even so, the people one sees walking around in malls here veery often look like businesspeople, or professionals, or whatever. As was said to me last night, “They’re so dressed-up and made-up and look so confident.” Some malls are frighteningly exclusive — the kind of place where someone pays as much for a wristwatch as one would for a car, I’m told — and even the less posh places cater to what I imagine must be the lower portion of the upper crust of Jakarta’s population, the upper middle class. Teenagers are not so abundant in malls, and instead of haggard parents pushing a shopping cart loaded with kids through a K-Mart, what you see is giant trains and robotic elephants and horses being ridden by kids, their nannies following close behind, while the parents are off trying on the newest fashions, getting a drink, or having some quiet time.

I think one reason for this difference is climate: exclusive shops in the West seem to prize private ownership of their location and facilities, but then again, one needn’t tromp through blistering heat, or endless tropical rain, to reach their door. Jakarta being what it is — a city where walking to places is a dangerous proposition unless you’re immune to the effects of collision, and where the climate is a thing of extremes — most people who can afford it are happier being in a single air-conditioned complex. It’s exclusive, of course: exclusivity is a very important concept in Jakarta. Thus the notion of “exclusive” malls catering to clientele who’d never set foot in your average North American-styled mall.

Food. Some of the best food to be had in Jakarta can be gotten at malls. Not all of the best, to be sure — there are high-quality restaurants that occupy their own buildings — but in the classier malls in Jakarta, you can find safe and wonderful Indonesian food (something you cannot assume in your average street restaurant), as well as amazing Italian, Chinese, and Japanese food — we had a killer meal of Italian food the other day — and all kinds of other stuff from around Southeast Asia. Yes, you can get sick from mall food too — I had some soup I shouldn’t have had, for example — but often mall food is the safest bet.

I didn’t really used to be the kind of traveler who worried so much about getting sick from food, but then, I’ve never gotten such bad food poisoning anywhere as I have in Indonesia, while being as careful as I have been. Anyway, if you’re in the sticks, you’re safer to go with satay, since it’s grilled meat, or with nasi goreng, which is a kind of fried rice dish.

That said, I still want to try a little more food at establishments outside malls. The few small stand-alone restaurants I’ve visited have been quite nice, though with little hitches at times. Stones in the rice, things like that. I’m hoping on one or two of our side trips out of the big city, we’ll run across nice smaller places.

Drink. My sister once worked in a shopping mall bar in our hometown, and having seen the inside of the place one day when I dropped by for some reason — were we meeting there at the end of her shift? I can’t remember — the phrase “shopping mall bar” conjures up all kinds of images of mediocrity, of middle-aged unemployed guys drinking their afternoons away. Classy is the last thing you’d expect, but in Jakarta, there are some very nice drinking establishments inside malls. You can get a mojito, Erdinger Wit, Leffe Blonde (if your lucky), or a Singapore Sling, and enjoy it in a pretty classy, low-key setting. (That is, not surrounded by tons of stereotypical older white guys grouped with young Indonesian women who look like they’re dying to get out of the country; without massive clouds of smoke, or loud groups of people shouting at one another.)

Of course, young and single Westerners in Indonesia might not like such places — they probably prefer bars where they can meet other young single people — and maybe it’s midddle-aged of me to say it, but if you want a drink and conversation in a really pleasant, civilized environment, with the option of good food on the side, I haven’t seen a better place in Jakarta than in some of the city’s malls.

(Then again, I’ve not visited many bars outside malls, either, so… grains of salt, folks.)

Music and Art. In shopping malls in the west, “music” and “art” are something to be bought and sold, at best, and at worst they’re just background crap of the worst kind. Well, in some of the malls I’ve been to here, music means live music, as in live music shows. Okay, a lot of the music hasn’t really been to my taste — smooth jazz and pop songs about love dominate — but even so, it’s hard to deny the oodles of talent I’ve seen in the few performers I’ve run across. We saw one pair of singers at the Pondok Inda 2 mall the other day, and I swear, the male singer could have made a living singing in New York, he was that good. (He did a rendition of “Spain” that made me get over the horrors of having played that song in high school big band, for example.)

Also, and this is neither here nor there, but musicians here seem really eager to meet audience members. They’re always shaking hands and chatting. It’s kinda cool, and reminds me of how visiting musicians behaved during set breaks at The Bassment, the Saskatoon jazz club I frequented in my teens and early 20s.

And as for art: I’ve seen some pretty amazing paintings on display in malls. They’re not for sale, as far as I can tell — no price tags, no contact information, just names. The art is for people to see and enjoy. Again, not all of it is my kind of thing, but it’s important to note that it’s not all plain old representationalist: some really abstract or unusual work finds a place alongside giant kittens and the semi-abstract images of Chinese carp underwater. And people actually stop to look at the paintings, take them in, enjoy them. I have mixed feelings about some of the stuff I described above, but the presence of (and interest in) art and music is something I think is really cool.

Well, there you are: my thoughts on malls in Jakarta.

I’d get into a detailed analysis of the list, except that I have other crap to do, so I’ll navel gaze momentarily instead, and note that I just realized that both of the stories I published laast year featured female protagonists with names ending with the letter i. Two’s enough. Ah well, I’ve already got more stories lined up for publication in 2010 than I published in 2009, and it’s only the start of February. So it’s a good year already!

BLAM! BLAM BLAM BLAM! Die, you zombie project! Die! BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. BLAM.

BLAM BLAM.

There, I think it’s dead. Off to bed.

ORIGINAL POST:

True story: the paraphrased correspondence between one freelancer and his so-called editor (as patiently translated, or at least paraphrased, by his collaborator):

(A few months ago.)

Editor: This passage, about the chess game. We like it, but… can someone really win a chess game in five moves?

Freelancer: Yup. Apparently you can win in just two moves.  I Googled it. I’m a pro, okay? Here’s a link.

Editor: (Without responding, goes off into a paroxysm of horror about how much she has to do one some other project for which the absolute beheading loss-of-job deadline is tomorrow.)

(Yesterday.)

Editor: Um, like, so are you like totally sure that someone can win a chess game in like only five moves? I have to do layout tomorrow so I’m doing every *&@^&#! last thing at the last *@&#^! moment as usual and I’m in the frantic panic in which I end every project in my whole life, but  which I’ve never thought about perhaps avoiding in the future by managing time and deadlines better.

Freelancer: Oh, for &@^##%!’s sakes, has you ever heard of the  mother^&@^#%$ing Internet? It’s really handy for looking up &##^@& *@^$$^# like this! Oh, hell, here’s a link. (Again, I may add.) Now please stop asking this same question again and again; do it once more and I will kill you to death.

Yes, kill you to death. Think about that.

Editor: (Goes off into a paroxysm of horror about some other random thing that was confirmed weeks or months ago, becausethe absolute beheading loss-of-job deadline for The Freelance Project That Refused to &#^@%! Die is tomorrow.)

(It’s much worse when the repeated inquiries are whether this or that grammatical structure is actually, really, truly correct. After the third repeat, you start thinking of colorful ways to say, “If you know something I don’t, write the book yourself.”)

Oh yes, friends, this is of course from the annals of The Freelance Project That Refused to &#^@%! Die — which is actuall;y about to die, insofar as I’m concerned, tonight. Or, at least, of this I have been assured.Sartre’s line about hell being other people? I was on the verge of reworking it into “hell is other people’s parents” though that’s slightly mean and unfair —  ”hell is other people’s parents’ hangups” is bit fairer, if less funny (and I can’t find either on Google, so I tentatively claim coinage, whee!) — but now I think I can safely say that hell is freelancing for certain Korean educational publishing company textbook editors.

(Who, yes, actually highlight accidentally repeated words and email the file back with, “This is a repeated word, perhaps unless it is grammatically necessary for some reason we should cut it?” written in blue-colored flowery Korean phrases too difficult to read on sight, instead of just editing the word out like they ought to. And the fact they include smilies with every vague, “This question isn’t good, please put another,” without the slightest hint of why the question isn’t good, that makes me, well, can one use the word feral to connote a desire to tear open throats with one’s bare teeth?)

I should note that this freelancer is actually getting off easy. Someone he knows worked for three years on a textbook, with some bigwigs, and after 3 years, the bigwigs were still nattering on for whole 8+ hour sessions every day for the last week, scrambling to get everything just exactly right. Because 3 years wasn’t quite long enough to finish a few hundred pages of content. Sometimes I wonder if people just crave self-torture as a way of convincing themselves they’ve worked hard. Luckily, this project was nothing so insane as that.

Still, there’s more, so much more to rant about — like how it feels to be reduced to making changes that make no sense, because that will shut up the editor and finish the damned thing sooner, or how it feels to be dealing with people who don’t know how to use a track changes function (well, who probably don’t know how to use anything but the worst word processor around, which, if it has a track changes function, certainly doesn’t have one compatible with anything the majority of Planet Earth uses) — but I’d rather go finish these last three chunks and be done with this blasted thing forever!

Next time someone suggests a freelance textboook gig to you? Run. Don’t walk — run in the opposite direction.

Okay, it’s draconian — a death penalty is over the top in this case and should be reserved for things like murder or pedophilia or drunk driving or being a pop star comparable to Britney Spears — but it’s annoying in the middle of the night, and there needs to be some kind of incentive to shut those bloody things off quickly.

(The full list of stories is here, in case you want to check out the rest…)

(And what it does is, it lets you read bite-sized chunks of a text by email or RSS feed on what is, obviously, a daily basis.)

My first reaction was, “Huh?” followed sudden memories of rants by friends who follow Harlan Ellison on the idea of never giving anything away for free. Then I thought of people like Cory Doctorow and the like, who argue that giving stuff away for free is the way of the future.

When I was feeling a little better, I googled around a little and saw that Nancy Kress had gotten the same email, and signed off on the same sort of contract. Well, I figured, if it’s good enough for Nancy Kress… and anyway, I don’t think I’ll be making any more money on that story. Hell, the Korean translation is in the works at the moment, but even that’s going into a zine, if I remember right!

Well, then, just the other day, I got a second email containing a contract for the use of “Lester Young and the Jupiters’ Moons’ Blues” for some kind of ebook Kindle anthology thing. And that republication does pay, which is nice. That story has done quite well for me in a number of ways. So anyway, I managed to get to a computer workstation where I could download, print, and scan the contracts for the two stories today, and emailed the scans off. The net result is that two of my stories will soon be accessible in different ways online.

Now, for getting a few new stories out there. My freelance nightmare is almost over — cash flow problem and all — and my research is going well. But ths weekend — meaning Friday/Saturday — is a weekend in the country, so the freelance wrap-up will have to come next week.

Moronic parents demand Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary be banned from schools.

Moronic school board complies. (Okay, maybe just temporarily.)

(Another link here.)

Yup, it seems some parent noticed a definition for “oral sex” in the dictionary, freaked out because their fourth/fifth grader might look up that word and see something “graphically sexual,” and then asked the school to ban the book.

The thing about people like this is that banning one book is never enough. If they manage to ban one book, the next thing you know they’re going to be making blacklists and rooting through the school library with lists of books they want out.

But it’s never enough.

Soon they’ll realize their kids, like most kids in repressive and controlling families, are simply consulting collegiate dictionaries at the homes of their more permissive friends, after school, looking up words like “orgasm” and “coitus.” Oh, yes, the horror.

Soon, they’ll be fighting the fight at city hall, trying to make laws about IDing anyone who wants to buy a collegiate dictionary or a copy of any anatomy textbook. Wanna buy a volume of Gray’s Anatomy? How old are you, kid?

And it’s never, ever enough.

Sooner or later, they’ll realize that their kids have been looking up words from collegiate dictionaries online. Looking at pages like the Wikipedia entry for oral sex. They’re going to start with a selective list of webpages for the school board to ban, but they’ve already learned their lesson, and unless those webpages are banned from the city entirely, there’s no way to protect their children from the horrors of knowing something about humnan sexuality before the age of 37.

And it’s never, ever enough.

Suddenly, for the sake of the children, the libraries will have to be burned, because, after all, there might be a book in there that mentions breasts, or a nipple, or a testicle. Those naughty books that mention sex tangentially have a way of hiding among the respectable ones about gardening and Jesus and the glory of war. And kids, they have a way of sniffing them out. It’s a thing.

So the libraries will burn, not just offline, but, as we march into the glorious technofuture, the online libraries. Manybooks.net, that purveyor of filthy public domain texts, will be shut down after its evil proprietor is excommunicated and exiled as punishment for having a Sexuality section in his collection of public domain texts. It won’t be enough that you’ll have to make a trip to California (or wherever the headquarters is) to show your ID to a clerk at Amazon.com if you want to buy a copy of an eBook edition of the Kama Sutra, because, by God, who knows whether you won’t just copy it onto some sixteen year old kid’s Kindle?

Oh, make no mistake, these folks aren’t against freedom of speech. They will uphold your right to publish a webpage, as long as nobody on earth sees it, especially not the children. Books of all kinds have too long been willing to harbor among them the texts which, through provision of knowledge of human sexuality, provide too great a threat to the children, and we need to think of the children now, for they are, after all, our future.

And we will, and it’ll be fine, just fine, after a hundred years or so, when they’re really organized and have finally conviced lawmakers to go ahead and license the use of net-capable computers. After all, words are dangerous, books are weapons, and there are some things that kids under the age of 19 (or 21 in some states) should not know.

Meanwhile, deprived of books and media for entertainment, the now-illiterate kids of the world will be doing what kids in most preliterate societies did for entertainment: bonking one another silly. Good job, protective parents of America!

Or we could just let kids look up “oral sex” and “orgasm” and “coitus” in the dictionary, and talk to them reasonably and thoughtfully when, assuming we have open lines of communication with our kids, they ask about it. You know, that thing they call parenting?

… because stuff one liked in high school should never be revisited without at least a little virtual support.

And to think my friend Mike let me blast that in his mom’s car as we drove through the cold prairie night.

Yup, this is what was on TV tonight:

A prime time comedy SF TV show in Indonesian about a UFO and some people who retrieved it and made friends with the aliens inside. Miss Jiwaku also picked out what seems to be (maybe!) some kind of plot thread involving some kind of device (a drug, maybe?) that makes people smart, and which was malfunctioning, or misrouted, or something, and the “dealer” of that tech who seemed to be in some sort of trouble. I found it bewildering, to be honest. It seems to be a 2010 production, from the one tiny bit of info available on the show’s subpage on the producer’s website.

If you’d like to see the website — though there’s not really more information there than I have here — click on the poster. After the intro, you’ll see a list of TV and film projects, and UFO is under the TV projects. (Among which, I might add, there seem to be a few other SF/fantasy-looking projects, if the posters aren’t just purely metaphorical.)

And by the way, I can’t help but be reminded of India’s “first SF film” (of 2003) Koi… Mil Gaya, which featured an almost-equally fake alien, some cutesy comedic drama, and a plot about intelligence augmentation. One wonders if this is not just an Indonesian revamping of E.T., but rather the Indonesian revamping of the Indian revamping of E.T. (with Rain Man thrown in for good measure, tho Wikipedia claims it’s really an adaptation of a Satyajit Ray story!).

The demographics I’m talking about are micropopulation dynamics: the national demographics of enrollment in her Bahasa Indonesian language program at University of Jakarta have shifted, such that there’s a lot more Koreans at the university, in the neighborhood, and… at our Starbucks.

(Which prompted this advice from Miss Jiwaku to a new Korean student who enrolled this semester, a friend of a friend already enrolled last semester: “DON’T hang out with the other Koreans. Not if you actually wanna learn Indonesian. Make Indonesian friends,. Hang out with students from other places. But stay away from the Koreans as much as you can!” This is advice I’ve heard other bright people going abroad give one another: various people I’ve known have gone to places like Montreal, Adelaide, Saskatchewan and Edmonton, Iowa, and some tiny town in Scotland, because those were English-speaking places and there were not many Korean students taking language courses in those places. They were desperate to avoid Koreans. The woman who went to Adelaide told me Koreans basically ruin language schools one by one, over-enrolling and swamping classes with Korean students who, mostly, are overcome with the freedom of not living with mom and dad and lose control, studying not English but, well… all that naughtiness that is off-limits back home. One student, years ago, confessed to being given crack by some friends, and being told it was pot. CRACK. For all you mommies and daddies of yuhaksaeng, just think about that for a sec. I’m talking about CRACK.)

Anyway, as for this noisy quartet of Koreans in the Starbucks, today I happened to have my iPod with me, so I’m blocking out their half-shouted conversation that way, but if they start hanging out here everyday doing that, I’m eventually going to have to go teach them some manners ask them to keep it down a bit. Ruining all the Starbucks in Korea is their right, I suppose, such as it is, but outside Korea, we’re on neutral ground, and I did not take a holiday from Bucheon just to experience the exported version of the same crapworthy behaviour.They are so freaking loud. SO loud.

By the way, Koreans abroad? So obvious. High heeled shoes in unlikely places, boys who look like they’re trying to dress like gawky white teenagers trying to dress like rappers… and both the boys and the girls wearing too much face makeup. I swear: one guy in Miss Jiwaku’s class actually wears eye makeup and dresses like he is in a late-90s boy-band, and has a giant doll in his backpack.

Yet somehow it also amuses me.

And for those thinking there’s a self-contradiction there, I should note that Miss Jiwaku’s early and protracted stays abroad, and her general tendencies, make her unlike that loud, noisy, obnoxious sort of Korean-abroad I’m talking about. (Kind of like a number of Americans I know don’t wear Hawaiian shirts everyday or wander around loudly complaining that people where they’re living abroad don’t speak English well enough, and “need to learn.” The “ugly American” behaviour isn’t near as common as one might think from books and movies… though, I do remember once at jazz fest in Montreal, after waiting in line for quite a while, I thanked a cafe employee for giving my the coffee I’d ordered and she looked at me in shock and said, “Wait, you’re Canadian, aren’t you?” No lie.)

The stereotypical types are the ones who stick out when you see them. I’ve met some very nice Koreans here… like the Indonesian Language & Culture majors whom Miss Jiwaku considers friends, like the NGO worker she is pals with, like one couple we had coffee with on Sunday — well, they had coffee, I had water and groaned and ran to the toilet a lot… but I’m feeling much better now. Anyway… since it seems sometimes necessary to say so, I’m not slamming all Koreans. I’m noting how behaviour that’s quite widely tolerated in Korea sticks out like a sore thumb abroad — for example, like holding conversations at a half-shout in a quiet coffeeshop.

And, perhaps, observing I’ve been in Bucheon just a bit too long for my own good. Maybe been in Korea in general just a bit too long for my own good. Not sure.

That said, I don’t feel like I know any more about the culture of Burma from this book. I don’t have a clear sense of the place or its people, or even much of its history: Charney’s survey begins in the British colonial period, and it is only a couple of hundred pages long, dense and compact as the text and data are. It is a history of modern Burma, and modernity, in Burma, is inexticably political in focus there, so it’s not really a criticism to say I don’t know more about the culture: it was never the intention of the book to explore that to any great extent, obviously.

But there are some fascinating stories, such as the tragic tale of a Burmaphile British officer who, faced with a millennialist pack of Burmans stanging a revolt, had his men fire warning shots into the air. (The result being that the revolutionaries believed their magical charms and wards against bullets had worked, and charged on the British troops, and then were shot to pieces.)

There’s another wonderful story of a leader who, annoyed that Britain would not grant independence to Burma in exchange for Burmese support against the Axis, flew to Washington to seek support in pressuring Britain for the same end; failing there, he flew Westward for Burma, but landed in Pearl Harbor just after the attack, and, awed by the Japanese might that seemed to be on display there — with burning ships and a confused navy all about — decided to work with the Japanese. He struck a deal with the Japanese in Spain, but soon after was arrested by the Allies and sat in a war camp till the end of World War II.

And there are stories, over and over, of the ways in which Buddhist monks have sought to have a say in the politics and life of the nation of Burma, now called Myanmar.

But the most interesting thing, to me, is the portrayal of a society under military rule, supposedly for its own good, and just how absolutely, disastrously wrong this kind of thing can go. Reading it, I was put in mind of a recent conversation, the like of which I’ve had many times before, where an older Korean suggested that military dictatorship simply is one of those stages a society has to go through in order to achieve real democracy. I am dubious of this, of course: not only do I tend to think that the quality of democracy that emerges from a society that has been subject too long to dictatorship is, well, let’s say it’s a flower that never quite seems to bloom right, or at least doesn’t seem to do so for a very long time, but also because it seems to me not all democracies have necessarily emerged from military dictatorships. The argument smacks of a teleology that doesn’t seem to have the force of proof behind it, the same sort of fairytale just-so story that Ha-Joon Chang argues (in Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, another book I’ve just started) that we are constantly telling ourselves about how the richest countries got rich in the first place.

In other words, the necessity of military dictatorship as a stage in democratization seems, to me, like a convenient myth we tell ourselves to justify how things have so often, in so many places, turned out in the decades since 1945. I don’t know American history all that well, of course — a problem I am going to attempt to remedy this year, starting with Jay Winik’s The Great Upheaval — but it seems to me that the United States did not need to go through a military dictatorship. Canada managed fine to transition to a parliamentary government, if (unfortunately) not without first incinerating that frightful (even if nominal) wart of rulership by the inbred pack we call the British royal family.

Leafing through the introduction to Winik’s book, indeed, gave me a certain kind of perspective on Charney’s: Burma is the nightmarish vision of what happens when modernity slaps an old-world-order in the face and a new order steps in. It is something that Winik seems to suggest could well have happened in America, but for the intersection of a number of factors, trends in history, interests in other nations, and lucky moments, ideas, and encounters. A new country stands without clear leadership, and the old leadership is untenable. The military steps in, takes over (promising it’s not forever, promising to make decisions for the good of all), and is able to make decisions that are unpopular but deemed necessary. The problem, indeed the nightmare, is that there’s neither a check nor balance in the system entire than can ensure the military knows what the hell it’s doing in making those decisions: competence at keeping a complex, changing, big, and “undisciplined” (read: non-military) society stable is something we cannot expect a military cabal to have developed, after all. So the military is faced with two tasks: teaching its society “discipline” — which, inevitably, includes obedience, a singularly military trait, and one which sits poorly in a mind possessed of the knowledge of its own democratic rights and freedoms — and enforcing its decisions, whether effective or not, whether enforceable or not, whether sane or not. Add in random ideological leanings of various kinds — an ardent and unquestioning Maoism born as much from anti-Western sentiment as from any grand socialist visions, for example — and you have a recipe for disaster.

And then, a few generations later, when the great revolution still hasn’t happened, and the military are still running the show, except these are the heirs of the failed experiment, you have two possibilities: those who have power retain it, through whatever means necessary; or those who want power badly enough, and who can win the backing of the people and organize themselves wrest it from those who have it, and remake the social order (not necessarily for the common good, mind). This is the crossroads to which Charney leads us, with the deeply corrupted military elite (and their families, allies, and friends) on the one side, and the Buddhist monks of Myanmar on the other. The monks, the monks: he returns to them again and again, and suggests that they, in the future, will be the linchpin to whatever change will eventually come like a flood to this nation that has been waiting for so very long.

Lastly, other fascinating aspect of the book is the role Charney describes being played by hill tribes and other peripheral groups in Burmese history. I won’t go into them too much, but the way that such rural groups are paid lip service, are heeded, are suppressed, and how they respond to each of these things plays much more of a role in the formation of the present siutation than I ever really imagined. Charney doesn’t go into it horribly deeply, but he does return to it, as a major theme of political importance in Burmese history. It reminds me that in the Burma (indeed, the Southeast Asia) that I am imagining in the future, I must consider how the disenfranchised will play their part. (Something Ian McDonald, too, has reminded me of all too well in his novella “Vishnu at the Cat Circus,” in the book which I shall review next.

On the whole, for anyone seeking a clear and fairly quick overview of how Burma got the way it is today in the political sense, I doubt there is a better book out there. For someone like me, writing a novel set in a future Burma, there is a great deal of history included here which is worth knowing, even if I shall have to look further afield for the cultural and fine-detail stuff of scenery and culture that a novelist needs. This is not a shortcoming in the book, of course: it’s not intended as a primer for novelists, but as a quick and clear history of Burmese politics, and at this the book performs exceedingly well.

Before I say anything about this novel, two disclosures and a warning:

First: N.K. Jemisin is a friend; we met at the Launch Pad workshop last summer, and we went to and hung out at WorldCon last summer too. I don’t think that baises me too much: I know a number of people who are excellent and wonderful like Jemisin, but I wouldn’t say nice things about their books just on account of that; but anyway, in the interests of honesty and disclosure, I figured it’s best to throw that out there…

Second: I am not a regular reader of “fantasy” literature. Much as I am slowly discovering there is greater permeability between the genres than I generally have assumed, and though I am increasingly making short-length forways into the genre in my own writing, I am far from up-to-date with what is going on in the genre as a whole. Just thought I’d highlight the fact.

Also: there are some mild spoilers in this review. Nothing that gives away too much of the plot, but some people are just big whiners, and I figure I may as well warn you now. If, like me, you don’t mind knowing the vague shape and content of a novel before reading it, you should be fine with what’s below.

Reading N.K. Jemisin’s debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I finally see that the genre might have a few interesting things to say yet. I also see, suddenly, how a fantasy narrative featuring gods-as-major-characters (or even protagonists) could not only work, but could be the basis of a fascinating fantasy setting and narrative. I say this realizing that at the tender age of 12, I really could have gone off and read The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Mahabharata, or some of the world’s other great pantheonic mythologies and narratives.

The book, though, is more than just a story featuring gods as major players. Yes, it is a story, and yes, the character are mostly quite compelling, and yes, the setting is often gloomy, frightening, and powerful , yet also haunting and fascinating — especially all the deep backstory and cosmogonic secrets upon which Jemisin has built the world. There’s a wonderful set of clashing interests and powers, there’s a sense of an author breathing life into clay figurines and then opening the curtain to let us watch the bizarre show that ensues, and yes, there’s definitely a reason the book has been getting star-studded reviews all over the place. People who read fantasy will be well-rewarded by a trip into the gloomy halls of Sky, a gods-haunted imperial capital city ruled and populated by a single extended family so weird and complex (and dysfunctional) that one cannot help but watch, like the outsider protagonist Yeine, and cheer her on as she resists, survives, and searches for a way to fight back. It’s a driving narrative about a theocratic superpower, a country girl comes to the city bildungsroman, and a bloody good book.

I really liked and cared about a number of the characters, and found especially Nahadoth — a shadowy, powerful deity at the pinnacle of the divine cosmology, but who has been struck down very far — and the (mostly) human narrator Yeine quite interesting. Likewise, there are satisfying twists and turns to the interconnected mysteries that Jemisin sets up: a murder mystery, a theological mystery, and a mystery concerning her own identity, each with as many suspects as there are characters; a shadowy family history braided into the most monstrous of forms, and much more. All these elements — the threads of mystery, the interconnections between the characters — twine together, resulting in a very satisfying conclusion which, however satisfying, only amplified my desire to see more of Yeine’s world… especially the world that follows from the outcome of the novel, which is a heck of a thing for an ending to do, especially in a debut novel, and also exactly what Jemisin needed to do in the first novel of a trilogy. (In fact, I was actually annoyed because the preview for the second book in the trilogy, provided in the back of my advance reading copy, was so very short.)

But what I like about it is the level on which the book is also a meditation on fantasy and the fantastical imagination in the West, on narrative, on religion and power, family, and on self-definition.

On fantasy: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms describes a very unusual and often-surprising world littered with vastly different kingdoms all under the rule of one supreme hierarchic superpower, a family called the Arameri who rule the strongest of peoples around, the Amn. These bunch are, well… they’re interesting in a few senses, including the sense implied in the Chinese curse involving living in “interesting times”. One of the things I really don’t feel comfortable with in a lot of “classic” high fantasy literature is its baggage in terms of glorifying monarchies, empires, and theocracy — just like the fascist baggage in some classic SF. These are things that we revile in our daily lives as free citizens, with the (notable) exception of the rhetoric in popullar use in Christian churches.

Jemisin’s not alone in responding to this baggage, of course: a number of contemporary fantasy writers are apparently doing so, according to the buzz floating around these days, and the trends I can extrapolate from the work of fantasist friends. As with SF, fantasy was too long pasty, male, and Eurocentric. People are moving on. However, what I found striking about Jemisin’s response to this baggage is how her world responds to it by taking seriously the idea of a pantheon, of gods incarnate, of empire. She explores the baggage by taking it seriously, instead of imposing a modern, twenty-first century sensibility upon it. Thus the world of the novel feels strangely like the world one enters when reading the chronicles of the Greek, Roman, Hindu, or Norse mythologies (though, to me, it felt more akin to a Westerner’s reading of Hindu mythology than anything): gods and mortals mating, great deities and godlings fighting wars (directly as well as through mortal agents and in avatar form), and the Great Powers enslaving one another as the power plays in the sky finally panned out one way or another — divine or infernal, if indeed they can be distinguished. In Jemisin’s world, they often explicitly cannot.

The interesting difference, though, is that Jemisin fast-forwards past the Big Long Historical Wars and revolts and hagiographies and recoveries, past the tangling of the divine and infernal affairs and the births of the demigod bastard children, to point us to one obvious but (as far as I know) rarely-explored fact: that such a glorious pantheonic cosmology really could, or perhaps even inevitably would, lead to horrors we can barely imagine. Think of the worst evil humans have visited upon one another. Now imagine that human capacity for evil fueled by magic, divine power fueling a theocratic empire. As above, so below: one of the striking suggestions is that the divine pantheons, had they been literally real, would have ended up embroiling the world in genocide, slavery, colonialism of kinds barely imaginable to us, as well as in total war of a kind of absolute it could devastate the fabric of the universe, and the wholesale mangling and bestialization of the general human spirit.

(I mean, we do quite well enough making the world hell for one another when only stupid human conflicts are at stake. Imagine how much worse it’d be if deities had spent chunks of our history duking it out, too. It’d be like all of humanity were the people in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, Korea, and so on, while the gods played the roles of the USA and the USSR. Not at all pretty, is what I am saying.)

To me, this was refreshing, a sort of modern response to the question of what would really happen in a world where Sauron was possible, and where there were no white and black cowboy hats for the gods to wear. What you get is a plain of all kinds of shades of gray, shifting and melding. The question that emerges then is the same question that emerges in adulthood, for us all, which is: how to self-fashion in a way that is responsive to the tangible, and compassless, reality we encounter, and which is still tied to one’s sense of self and one’s sense of values, without letting those values carry one down to the bottom of the ocean? How to be ethical in a world where ethics is constantly being renegotiated, and when one must, finally, create a self to go out into that world and take part in the negotiation, too? Not to give too much away, but the degree to which this novel suggests self-refashioning can happen, while still working with whatever you’ve got — the inevitable heredity, the inevitable past — is pretty astonishing. It also suggests that the degree to which reality and selfhood be mediated by others’ power, expectations, and demands is likewise quite astonishing.

It is difficult to miss the point that similarly, the Amn Empire, telling itself the same kinds of stories that imperialists in our own world have been telling themselves for ages, such as its divine providence, has been the agent of oppression, destruction, and violent “civilization” of the rest of the world that they have conquered. The point that Jemisin doesn’t quite come out and bang you over the head with — she seems to prefer narrative  land mines — but which is implicit, I think, is that theology is, or can be, not just an essential part of the colonial enterpreise, but also in itself as essentially totalitarian as  the colonial enterprise, period.

That said, what we see of the colonized world of the novel is mainly confined within the walls of the empire’s capital  city, a place shadowy, dangerous, twisted, and frightening, for reasons that become increasingly apparent as the plot unfolds. Sky, the city of the gods, floats above the world, but in a sense it is more like an underworld — a tumor that ought to be buried in the flesh of the world, instead protruding up into the sky and disguised as a marvelous metropole. The city is ruled by one family, the Arameri, and littered with gods-among-mortals: it is, one could say, the Vatican of the novel’s world-spanning cult. Yet the city is not only ruled, but also populated wholly, by members of the Arameri family (however tenuously related, in the lower castes).

It is a harrowing setting, in fact a place that is fairly twisted and, by the ethics of anyone I’d consider sane, relatively evil. That said, Jemisin’s handling of the setting ensures that we can see how and why the city got that way: she does some really excellent worldbuilding and in the end, even though Sky remains in many ways horrifying and certainly no place I’d like to visit, the reasons why it is how it is are to some degree comprehensible — to me, as well as to her protagonist, a young Northern barbarian woman of (partly) royal blood named Yeine who, like the reader, experiences Sky as a foreigner. For some reason, as I read and found myself horrified by this part of Sky, or shocked by that tradition in the city, I kept wondering what in our world would look fundamentally evil to Yeine, what she would think of the fundaments of our world, what she would say about our own status quo.

There are meditations on a number of interesting themes, such as the discussion at page 300-301, about what life would be like in if the gods simply abdicated and “went away.” As a non-religious reader, I found this discussion refreshing, especially since I have never seen such a discussion before in a fantasy setting. (That may be because I don’t read much fantasy, but it’s also why I don’t read much fantasy.) It also strikes to the heart of the novel, since a lot of what is explored relates to (though this is never overtly stated in such terms) the totalitarian nature of theology, religion, and empire — and how intertwined they are. Of course, this raises important questions about the ending, but I’m not sure whether Jemisin is planning on resolving those questions. I can’t say more about the question here without giving the ending away, and I daren’t do that, so, well, just think of this passage above when you hit the conclusion of the tale.

If I may wax just a bit more analytic (or even academic) for a few moments: while Jemisin doesn’t go into any long rants on the subject, the book clearly incoporates on one level a postcolonial and feminist response the more staid and familiar type of fantasy narrative we all know, templated from Tolkien and used to print off hundreds of trilogies since. Jemisin makes her response to this body of work not through any direct commentary, however, but instead — and much more effectively — through very careful, thoughtful worldbuilding, by exploiting the traits of her world in such a way as to grate surreptitiously against the assumptions of Eurocentric fantastical imagination — the type which dominates today (at least in the vast majority of the fantasy I’ve read). In other words, instead of pointing out the limitations of more traditional Eurocentric fantasies, she simply shows you a broader world and lets you detect the gaps in your imagination that limit how you interpret her world.

One simple (but effective) example that I enjoyed of was the very simple entho-geographic reversal of North and South: in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the North is the land of darker-skinned (”barbarian, in the case of Yeine’s homeland) folk, and the south is the land of the pale-skinned, “civilized” folk. This was a neat trick for me, one I appreciated since I had periodically to remind myself to reverse my orientation — a reminder of how very lazily , Eurocentric my own imaginary repertory, and that of a lot of mainstream fantasy, long has been. It’s a very minor point, and for all I know it’s common in high fantasy now to play this game with the reader, but for me it was a neat mental trick.

On the subject of Yeine’s homeland, I wanted to see Darr a little more, actually, because I wanted to see how a society where women do the fighting would, say, repopulate itself after a major war. That’s the one oddity I couldn’t quite figure out when thinking about Darr’s martial matriarchy. I imagine Jemisin has an answer to the question, but I couldn’t help but wonder anyway. I found it quite interesting how the Darre considered their retained “barbarity” something of a point of pride: as someone who is occasionally regarded as a barbarian himself, I tend rather to laugh at the implication, or get annoyed, rather than take pride in the label. Maybe I should, as a foreigner in Korea, reclaim one of their words for “foreign barbarian,” and take pride in it. Barbarians, at least, are free from the neuroses and sicknesses of a certain kind of civilization, as Yeine clearly demonstrates. That said, I also found it really interesting that Yeine’s people have not truly internalized the colonial order of the world: pride in one’s barbarism suggests awareness of the (usually pejorative) term “barbarian,” as opposite to “civilized,” yet the internalization of this pejorative sense is all but absent in Yeine’s use of the word. Anyway, I really wanted to see more of the differences between cultures, the differences between languages, the differences between races that are hinted at here and there throughout the novel.

Sexuality, too, is treated in a way that is less guided by the mores and ethics of European Christianity… let’s be honest, it’s not Euporean Christianity, which millions flounted, but Victorian prudery and American neo-Puritanism that Jemisin’s book sloughs and ignores like so much useless baggage.  That ’s probably more common in fantasy now, but anyway, but what I liked about it in this book was that the sexuality that permeates the novel ties together the empire, the humans and the gods, the gods to one another, and so on.  (There are mild elements of yaoi in this novel, though it’s gods-scale and not so much salacious as it is outright cosmogonic.) Incest among deities is part of the world’s fundamental mythology… but then, gods–like the rich–aren’t really  like us, are they? It took me a while to get used to the sexual elements in the book, especially their prominence, but that’s likely just because I’ve never read a romance novel before. There are definitely passages which read like (well-written) paranormal romance here — which isn’t my thing, but I didn’t find those to be distracting, as all those passages also are important to the advancement of the plot and worldbuilding, and reveal a lot about the characters involved.

Finally: family. That old saying, “As above, so below” certainly applies in Sky: the Arameri society living within the palace mirrors the society of the gods with which it is intertwined (in a fascinating way, incidentally): incest, fratri-/sorori/fili-/matri-/patricide, abusive relationships of all kinds, loveless pairings and loveless parent-child relationships, all make appearances. In a sense, the dysfunction of Sky and the darkness of the world of the novel amount to an intimate exploration of familial dysfunction — a dysfunction that extends to the scope of the pantheon’s theogony/theomachy (the creation of, and battles between, the gods), and the resultant cosmogonic manifestation of each at the very roots of the world we find ourselves exploring in the novel. In a sense, this book is all about dealing with, and fixing, an extremely dysfunctional family, and the theocosmic family echoes the aristocratic one, which echoes the world itself. It’s a very deft, fascinating setup.

And I have to say, for a debut novel, the ending is a goddamned homerun, and it even goes some way towards mitigating the one thing I didn’t like about the novel — the recurrent asides that Yeine, the narrator, engages in as she tells her story. (Jemisin’s conclusion at least makes it clear why her narrator so often reverts to those asides, though I still think the novel would run more smoothly without their being punctuated so clearly typographically and in terms of voice.) I won’t say more about this ending, even though there’s so much to say about it, because I can’t bear the idea of spoiling this ending for a reader. But will say that I was fighting to take mental notes as I was swept along, caught up in the action while I tried simultaneously to watch Jemisin cut the umbilical, tie it off, slap the novel’s ass, and hear it cry out, alive. As an author, she certainly has a grip on the practice of, in the famous words of Lester Dent on how to work toward the end of a novel, “Shovel the difficulties more thickly upon the hero.” But Jemisin also has a way of pushing everything so far beyond the limits you imagined that for the novel’s end, that you can’t help but shake your head and say, “Damn!”

Having said all that, I am obviously far from surprised at the positive reviews that the book has been getting all over the place. Jemisin’s done a wonderful job of putting together a bloody good first novel. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms comes out this February, published by Orbit, but Amazon will let you preorder it now. You can see sample chapters on Jemisin’s website, and if you’re one of the Early Reviewers at Librarything, the book is one of those on offer for freebies for the January list — on condition that you review it after reading it. Finally, check out Jemisin’s blog to see more reviews of the book, all of which are pretty spectacular, and her first blog post over at Orbit, which is about Power and Privilege in Fantasy.