Pop culture and Irish Modernism collide! Again!

I was wondering why there was such a plenitude of second-hand copies of Flann O’Brien’s novels in the second-hand bookshops of Chiang Mai and said as much to a young Irishman with whom I was enjoying a conversation about his national literature. Demonstrating immediately his knack for rapid character appraisal, he looked at me like I was way out of touch with the times. ‘You do know Lost, the TV show, don’t you?,’ he asked, quite politely I think. I confessed that whilst I was aware that there was a TV show called Lost on air from time to time, I had not ever had the pleasure of watching it. Had I known then what I know now! Lost, apparently, takes its narrative structure from The Third Policeman! All that mangling with the timescheme, the notion of a reality beneath (this is how it was described to me), all of that is poached, and acknowledged to be poached from the wondersome Flann O’Brien. That one episode of Seinfeld owed its plot to Krapp’s Last Tape was big news. (Of course, it was still news to me several years after the Seinfeld episode was first broadcast.) That Flann O’Brien should inveigle himself on the scene thus was delightful news. With Bloomsday approaching, I’m now sorely tempted to make grandiose claims for the impact of Joyce on popular culture but will endeavour to restrain myself for just a few days more.

Constant advice

Even far from the grandpaternal sphere of influence, I am bombarded with messages about moderation as far as alcohol consumption is concerned.
I took this photo whilst cycling, very sober, along the Mekong on the way to the Golden Triangle. I’m assuming this is a warning against overconsumption rather than an exhortion to a red-wine fuelled state of existential crisis.

Weird statistical blip

I’ve met plenty of randoms on the road thus far: young things bright and dull, earnest folks, Vietnam Vets, lost souls, retirees, ferals, bearded Oklahomans, hippies, wannabes, geography teachers, masseurs, one person NGOs… Startlingly, however, the demographic group that is most highly represented is high-end finance wonks on the lam. By that I mean investment bankers, private equity whizmoids and project financiers aged from about 28 to 35. I’m almost able to pick them out now, twigging always to a giveaway air of efficiency which has to do with pockets and watches and always being able to find a pen. Generally they’ve taken some time off work – between deals, between jobs, before an MBA, or if they’re French, for an année sabbatique – and abandoned the business class lounge in favour of the slightly infra dig dream of fair to middling travel around Asia. They all seem like nice enough people and most are endearingly apologetic when they tell me what they do, shuffling around the point and then shrugging and admitting, yes, I guess I’m going home to go to business school, mmm, I’m working out the finance for infrastructure projects for whatever government. I’m both amused and bemused by the reticence. Is it just me who gets the aw-shucks treatment? Do my glasses make me look more judgmental than your average bear? I am, but that’s beside the point. It’s not like I’m wearing a badge declaring my pinko affiliations (‘those we don’t convert, we eat,’ perhaps) and anyway, I’m not so much in favour of the violent destruction of global capitalism as its reorganisation. They’re safe, in other words. I’m a gentle person operating in mellow mode. We’re all safe. Some of my dearest friends work in finance, I always tell them (it’s true). Then I give them my best sympathetic look and say, they work you people very hard, don’t they. You deserve a holiday. And then we’re friends.

table for one, sir?

The food situation when travelling alone is an interesting one. Obviously, it’s a situation that I’m managing OK. I’m (ahem, splutter, gulp) hardly starving out here. On the upside, one is neither restrained nor impelled by the requirements of another’s appetite or tastes. For me, this usually licences an early lunch. I would abandon ship if I had to eat with a cowardly-bellied companion. I’m still surprised to meet people on buses and so forth who tell me that they are enjoying travelling in Asia, the people are lovely and all that, but the food’s a bit much, innit? Fools, I leave them to their baked beans on sugary toast and inane chatter.

In Thailand in particular, in restaurants rather than at streetside vendors, in smaller towns rather than cities, I have been the happy recipient of what I have come to term the Five Star Spinster Treatment. If not a truth universally acknowledged, it is a general and widespread assumption that a man travelling alone in Thailand is looking for a young wife. Whilst this may not apply in all cases, there are enough Western men of a certain age squiring Thai ladies of a certainly much younger age to give the assumption some credibility and perhaps to justify a little frostiness of treatment now and then. I’ve met more than one earnest and sensitive young man travelling in search of enlightenment and meaningful non-sexual cultural exchange who has complained that white men are unfairly stereotyped and treated as second-class citizens, all as much of a mindless lecherous cashed-up muchness. That’s terrible, I can’t imagine what that would be like at all. Gender stereotypes, how terribly, terribly awful for you. And what a perfectly dreadful thing to think of a reiki master, I coo and then I get the hell out of wherever there is so that I can dine alone and revel in Five Star Spinster Treatment. This means that you arrive at the restaurant and establish that you want a table for one. Yes, yes, just one person. As it’s low season, few establishments are heavily patronised. The menu will arrive and inevitably so will a gentle soul who will assess whether you are truly worthy of FSST. You’re travelling alone? Yes. Oh dear. Are you married? No. Oh, so you’re a spinster? Ooooh dear. You like Thailand? Yes, yes, yes. A little conference will take place between staff members, knowing and sympathetic looks will be exchanged, et voilà, forget about your book and notebook and postcards and staring vacantly into space for a shower of kindness and attention will soon fall upon you. I’ve learnt to await and answer vast numbers of questions about my family, my brassy haircolour, my bravery, my great height, my itinerary and then to submit to some basic lessons in Thai manners as well as extra fruit, lots of water and a fair amount of giggling. It’s excellent, so excellent that I’m able to ignore that much of it is kindness borne of extreme pity.

On the other hand, one of the downsides of travelling alone is that you can chicken out a little more easily on the so-called brave menu options. I walked past the insect vendors at the Chiang Rai markets three times and couldn’t quite make myself stop and buy up some worms. Had I been travelling with someone else, I know exactly what would have happened. I would said something tough like, ‘I bet you’re not game to eat those purple silk worms. Me, I’d eat a heap of them in a jiffy.’ I’d back myself into a corner and wind up chomping down handfuls of crickets and bamboo worms in order to maintain my Honour. Without an audience, eating insects almost doesn’t seem worth it. That said, I’m still regretting not sampling the spiders deep-fried and coated in sugar that I saw in Cambodia. Nothing deep-friend and coated in sugar can be all bad.

The Transcendental Signified

I haven’t written a whole lot about Thai food and that’s not because I haven’t been eating up a storm but rather because it all just seems just a little bit quotidian, a little bit lunch-on-King-St to extol the virtues of green curry or thick rice noodles or stir-fries with basil and chilli or cashew or whatever. Also, I must admit that my addiction to green curry has hit some sort of critical point and I’ve been ordering it, usually with tofu, yellow tofu at that, with some frequency, ie. everyday. I’m convinced that fresh coconut milk makes everything taste better. What particularly appeals to me about the green curries here is, however, the abundance of eggplant (long, crunchy and tiny all at once) and the absence of unwanted random vegetables like carrot and cauliflower. I am a great lover of both carrot and cauliflower, but I do not particularly enjoy finding them in an undercooked state in a curry. Nonetheless, coming from the city of the five dollar Thai lunch, it doesn’t seem like big news to announce that green curry is currently at the top of the Menzies-Pike culinary pops. Especially when accompanied by a Singha (although rah-yah-blah travellers all over the place tell me that Beer Laos is the best beer in Asia). I’ve also been eating a helluva lot of papaya salad, or somtum, which is offered everywhere, with multiple variants, and makes me feel extremely wholesome. Pad thai is not exactly a great gastro-discovery but the good folk at the roadside noodle carts will cook it up for less than a dollar and, wonder of wonders, use the really wide rice noodles (sen yai?) rather than the thin sticky ones if you ask, or rather, point nicely. Extra wide rice noodles – squishy, starchy and oleaginous – are an ingredient that I confess a passionate and irrational love for so I’m pretty pleased that they can so competently and quickly be turned into pad thai. Come to think of it, I’ve also found myself in ten baht rice noodle heaven at the bus stations. In my opinion, this is what junk food should be all about: stodgy noodles pre-fried in soy and garlic and loads of oil, sprinkled with peanuts and sugar and dished up to go in twenty seconds. A splosh of chilli sauce the colour and consistency of tomato sauce wouldn’t go astray either. Condiments always elevate junk food, I think, by virtue of the opportunity they provide to personalise the standard.

Anyhoo, from Chiang Rai, I made my way to Chiang Saen, a town beside the mighty Mekong, a river I haven’t seen since I left Phnom Penh six weeks ago. Being peckish, I installed myself at a restaurant across the road from my guesthouse on the banks of the Mekong and ordered the Mekong Fish Special Hot Soup. It was a toss-up between that and the Fried Four Red Fellows, which would have been a brave gastro-adventurer choice indeed. Always order the specials, always order things made from local ingredients, aren’t those the rules? I had a complicated and not exactly lucid conversation with a gentleman at the Chiang Rai markets about fish and he told me that the best fish going is Mekong catfish and that there’s too much of it so not to worry about supplies running out anytime soon. I later worked out that he was talking about the Giant Mekong Catfish, the largest freshwater fish in the world, which lives in deeper basins of the Mekong and whose capture is traditionally heralded by a ritual which involves chicken’s blood and rice wine. It is also alleged to taste like pork. I have not eaten a great deal of catfish in my time, let alone much Giant Mekong Catfish but I nonetheless humbly submit that I detect nothing porcine in the flavour of the GMC.

As I waited for my soup, I got quite nervous about what looked to be very much like a scorpion milling around amusing itself on the chair next to me. I also tried not to be aware that the party of Chinese businessmen drinking whiskey at a very impressive rate a couple of (empty) tables away seemed to be talking about and pointing at me in a fashion that I was finding a little disconcerting. All this was forgotten when the food arrived. Mekong Fish Special Hot Soup turned out to be tom yum à la Giant Mekong Catfish and I think it was the best darn tom yum I have ever eaten in my life. I’m quite attached to a kind of ersatz homemade tom yum administered as a cold remedy or, under dire and sadly more frequent circumstances, as a mid-afternoon hangover cure. Mine involves tom yum paste, stock, lots of lime juice, tomatoes, ginger and spring onions as the necessary ingredients with lemongrass and coriander and mushrooms and whatever as optional gap fillers. I highly recommend it to the suffering. Forget echinacaea, tom yum is up there with gazpacho as a panacea. Be that as it may, the tom yum at the Chiang Saen Riverside Restaurant left mine for dead. This is what it looked like before I started eating, a great tureen full of goodness bubbling over a spirit lamp.

The ingredients were just as you’d expect – ginger, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, coriander, little onions, a couple of types of mushroom, lemongrass, tomato, turmeric, chilli, CATFISH, lime juice, I guess – but the soup itself somehow wafted into divine realms of intense, definitive tom yummery. Eating this was a fully conscious ecstatic experience, all too brief, yes, but with no attendant agony apart from some suspect bits of catfish which I jettisoned. I was feeling quite reasonable before I ate the soup so can only speculate as to the extent to which it could heal and revivify the sick. Vastly, I speculate. I just kept right on dishing out little bowls of soup from the central tank until there was no more soup to go. When I reached this sad juncture, I had an inkling of why it had all tasted so good.

Check out the residue! Handfuls of pickled green chillies and whole dried red chillies and lemongrass spears, slabs of ginger and galangal, lime leaves and baby onions! There, my friends, lies the secret of tom yum, the road to good health and humour.

low profile fangin'

Here she is, Pink Shirley, the truest steed that e’er did bear a woman home.

Requests were tendered for a photo of me on the bike but I suffered an uncharacteristic bout of reticence and couldn't quite bring myself to ask anyone to take the necessary photograph. I couldn't swallow the slightly foolish feeling which arose when I considered asking someone to take the snap. And I definitely couldn't swallow the absurdly proud goofy grin which lopped onto my face everytime I got on the bike. Poop poop and all that. By the way, I think I deserve more kudos for actually hopping on the bike...

Anyway, I think it's time for a profile photo on this blog. The question is, do I post an image of myself looking quite dashing and respectable and employable and chat-uppable? Believe it or not, photos like this do exist. Should I post something joking and foolish in order to signal that I'm not taking this whole caper too seriously, that I came of age in the mid-nineties and will never shift out of the rut of self-deprecating irony? Or should I post an image of someone or something else entirely to show just how shifting and transient identity can be. A picture of my cat or a road sign or Greta Garbo or some earplugs or somesuch. These are the questions I am asking myself. Any suggestions welcome.

Paiku à la Piquée

This post is destined to have a small readership. Alas. To add colour and interest, I append this picture. Mexican hot chocolate (too good to be true) amidst the books on offer for casual reading at the Witching Well. For those short of eyesight, there is a book called Deerdancer, which is about shamanic shapeshifting, a book on love magic, and a beginner's guide to Scrying, which is communication with the spirits. I really am living la vida loca here.

Mountains sing to clouds,
Another bloody rain dirge.
Please don’t hum along.

Man, if you dig Pai
Get yourself to In-deeee-aaah.
With a spade, I guess.

Tribal tatts and dreads
Mark the anthropologists.
Tough dress code, this.

I float like a stone;
Monsoon strikes the yoga class.
Will this hut float too?

Mangos thunder down,
Sweet tropical torpedos.
There goes the moment.

Here’s to you, Nancy Reagan

One of the many pleasures of Pai is to make one’s way to a waterfall. There are at least four easily reachable on a motorbike. Got that? On a motorbike. A vehicle which I now claim as my minion. Anyway, the general concept is pretty simple: buzz to a waterfall, sit down, enjoy the view, and ingest a hefty dose of the good old ambient negative ions. Leave feeling refreshed of body and spirit. Easy. The only complication to the Pai waterfall pleasure scheme, apart from getting lost, is posed by the men of short stature who LEAP out of the bushes, both on the road to the waterfalls and at the waterfalls themselves, with marijuana and opium to sell. I tells you, the first time, I almost jumped out of me skin. I’m in the honeymoon period with my little two wheeler, Shirley, and the last thing I want right now is trouble, the kind of trouble that begins with some reasonably innocent sampling of the local specialties and some wayward cruising through the hills and ends with a ker-rash, a splatter of blood (mine), a tangle of metal (Shirl’s), a broken limb or three (mine) and who knows what else. So let it be known that I’ve said no to drugs in Thailand. Repeatedly. Put that in your pipes, and smoke it, kiddlywinks. Actually, it’s not just my fear of totalling my bike and myself which has made me shake my head regretfully at the leaping gentlemen. My good friend Sam very wisely put the fear of God in me when he told me that there are more undercover cops in Thailand than there are in uniform. Wherever I’ve been, I’ve heard tales of dumb farang getting busted for buying or using drugs in Thailand such that I suspect that at least one of the so-called hill-tribesmen who popped out of the bushes was just itching to turn me into the next high profile Australian drug moll. The very thought of the rogue’s gallery that I would join were this the case is enough to make me stick to herbal tea and tonic water for the rest of my life. What a tawdry comeuppance joining this parade would be: La Schappelle, deserving of compassion for being terribly unlucky or terribly stupid; Michelle Lee, living proof that pretty girls do get an easier run; Renae Lawrence, tough, tough enough to take Schappelle under her wing in prison and then…. moi? Surely not! Please agree that I just would not fit in. Heavens, if I were ever to be typecast as the clever, slightly awkward one who, out of everyone here, should have known better, this would be the time, and it would last forever. I cannot imagine that the depths of opiate dependency could produce a greater iniquity.

I realise that I’m hexing myself in writing this. If someone should mistake me for a mule (unthinkable) and shove some forbidden substances into my laptop case and thereby set in train some hideous travesty of both Thai and cosmic justice, please bring this post to the attention of my lawyers. Tell the media hordes that I’ll only talk to Red Kerry. Alone. Oh yes, and in the event of such misadventure, you will each be permitted three milliseconds of sadly resigned retrospective laughter at the bitter irony of this post and not a squitter more.

No beets in beatnik town

These are the first paragraphs of Tom Robbins’ excellent Jitterbug Perfume, a book to whose convoluted plot beetroot makes a significant contribution.

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is a melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin’s favourite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

And so it goes on. The beet is definitely one of my favourite vegetables and reading this book has incited a desperate craving for beetroot. Not just any old beetroot, mind you, but beetroot prepared by mine own hands: grated raw in a salad; roasted with horseradish or aioli or tabouleh or goat’s cheese; as the mystery ingredient in the magical magenta hummus...staining my hands and everything else, resisting peeling and generally causing trouble. Curse you, Tom Robbins, for inducing a serious pang of culinary homesickness and producing a fixation that will be difficult to immediately dislodge as I can’t recollect having seen a beetroot since I left Sydney, either unadulterated at the markets or on a menu.

Signs of the times

I do know that it’s quite cheap and not particularly sophisticated to take photos of signs in foreign countries and then laugh at them. That knowledge does not incite forbearance. After all, I could be devoting vast amounts of space to typographical errors in menus or somesuch and justifying it on the grounds that I grandiloquently theorised typographical error in my PhD.

Be cool. Be a waterfall here. Be a waterfall girded by some fierce and fiendish rocks. These rocks be sloshed and rocked by the waters of ages. Be watch out, smartypants white girl, or you be slip down into the abyss.
The poetics of international sign language. A potentially quite gruesome scenario is depicted here. If the jungle catches fire, watch out, ye conductors of motorised vehicles, because deer will flee the blazing shelter and obstruct your passage. And yet, this sign is quite beautiful, the sort of gentle whimsy that might make its way onto a threadless T-shirt. I’m still ropable that some scoundrel swiped my favourite threadless t-shirt from the washing line of my building. So much so that I have to post the image here.