Misc

Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

On vacation!

 Posted by (Visited 7450 times)  Misc, Open thread
Nov 182005
 

Blog posts may slow down somewhat. I intend to read, visit family, play guitar, and sketch, not necessarily in that order.

The Making Light blog does open threads every once in a while. Consider this to be one. Post whatever, have a conversation amongst yourselves. Argue politics and religion.

I’m in Seoul…

 Posted by (Visited 5680 times)  Misc, Reading
Nov 082005
 

Or actually, I’m out of it, wherever this hotel is. Tomorrow I’ll see the city proper.

I suspect the city will be branded Samsung. Everything else here seems to be. 🙂 In the immigration line at the airport, the screens telling you the rules were not only flat-screen Samsung TVs, they also were interrupted by ads for Samsung phones.

Had dinner with Jason Della Rocca. I surely didn’t need to travel quite so far to do that…!

Finished off that Warshawski novel (it was Hard Time, if you’re curious, but I don’t have much to say about it). But I also finished off Fifty Degrees Below, which is Kim Stanley Robinson’s sequel to his earlier book Forty Signs of Rain. I enjoyed it, but as usual with his stuff, it can feel kind of slow in places. You could call it the brainy version of The Day After Tomorrow — it also deals with a thermohaline shift, as well as with other dramatic forms of climate change, but it’s DC-insider setting (the halls of the NSF) gives a very differentperspective on events. Most of the book is told from the point of view of a scientist who has some problems interacting with the rest of humanity — someone who spends a lot of time thinking about evolutionary biology. The real story, however, is happening slightly offstage — the battle for the hearts and minds of the public as regards climate change.

It’s full of sharply observed details about how life would adapt if there were things going on like cold snaps to 50 below in DC. I was particularly amused when the reinsurance companies showed up willing to pay billions of dollars to dump thousands of tons of salt in the North Atlantic; it was the cheapest way out for them. If anything, the weakness of the book is that it demonstrates all too clearly just how adaptable humans are — by never crossing over into the sensationalism of Day After Tomorrow, it also makes the catastrophes cozier. A whole bunch of DC homeless manage to survive that cold snap, for example.

This is a spiritual take on the issue as well, what with the presence of Tibetan monks and a possible reincarnated lama, the protagonists’ delving into Ralph Waldo Emerson, and so on.

OK, I’m drifting off (my biological clock still thinks it’s 5am) and I can’t seem to wrap up my thoughts on the book into something coherent. So I’ll stop there. 🙂

From Taipei to Seoul

 Posted by (Visited 4682 times)  Misc
Nov 072005
 

I’m in the lounge at the Chiang Kai Shek airport in Taiwan, boarding a plane to Incheon Airport in about an hour. My bags are way heavy — probably heavier than they allow — because Taiwan is comparable to a sauna, whereas Korea is apparently near freezing at night. I’m struggling with this keyboard, which appears to handle every language known to man, but cannot supply a backspace key of a reasonable size, so I keep typing backslashes.

I am looking forward to exploring a little bit of Seoul, since I have never been. It will be interesting to contrast it to Taipei. The first time I was in Taiwan was in 1999, and I visited the capital, and the cities of Tainan and Kaohsiung. The country has changed tremendously already. Back then, as I noted in the poem “Driving to Tainan”, it reminded me of New Jersey. Today, it reminds me more of the other side of the river. A district that was mostly rice paddies now holds a six story mall. Wide boulevards and gardens, more cars and fewer motorcycles (though they still exist in profusion), and PC games for sale in the 7/11 stores. At Chili’s you can get the chicken crispers and they taste pretty much just like back home, and the menu is all in English.

There’s something of the vibe of say, Shanghai, where you still have that “expat” feeling. The Westerners cluster in certain bars and restaurants, and if you wander in the right direction, you’ll come across the parts of town that still exhibit life as it was. In Taipei, it feels a little bit harder to find that. Everyone speaks English — passably to excellently — and even the Snake Alleys are marked with posters in English saying “Please no photos of the snakes.”

In the toy stores, you find Japanese comics and Finnish Moomintrolls. On the radio, it’s an American interviewer joshing with a British comic about his character with an Australian accent. Last time I was here, I was taken to an expat bar. There was a jazz band from San Francisco fronted by an R&B singer who couldn’t make it in LA. The room was half local, I would guess, but the mixed drinks were mostly Western.

It isn’t that this bothers me; if anything, the Taiwanese have a remarkable accomodation with their tangled cultural heritage. Rather, the thing that strikes me, as I move from black Lincoln Town Car to Grand Hyatt to Chili’s to mall to shopping district with giant signs (Sony, Panasonic, an extra virgin olive oil ad depicting a naked woman swimming in olives) to luxe airport lounge with Internet terminals that support eight languages — the thing that strikes me is how there’s a whole world that exists that many never get to see: the world of the jetsetter, which is really a bubble-world. A world where the closest you come to beef noodle soup served by the side of the road is when you get taken out for lunch to sample the local cuisine, and get lucky enough to have a guide who prefers the real stuff. A world where you go out shopping for local souvenirs and end up in a mall that carries mostly foreign goods.

There’s a comfort in getting the International Herald Tribune delivered in English at your door each night, but I also miss that rare thrill, the moment back in 1999 when I was led between a gaggle of motorcyles, down a wet alley where laundry hung from windows, my host telling me that he was sure there was a good place to eat around there…

Down an alley we find a square,
An empty lot loomed by cosmetics ads.
Plastic sheeting circles plastic tables,
A sizzle of shells, sashimi and squid.
The fish eyes are everywhere, and
Taiwan beer tastes very familiar:
Perhaps there is only one beer, and many bottles.

In bubble-world, there is only one core experience, like the beer in those bottles; it’s like there is only one black and white coloring book, and we fill it all in with “local color.” It’s sitting down at a computer in an airport lounge to find it pre-equipped with Skype, since you just finished reading your V. I. Warshawski mystery.

And yet–I think this is the future. From it, Cleveland or Jacksonville look as provincial as Tainan, and like the classic New Yorker cartoon, your perspective inverts until you see the whole world as nothing more than the spaces around airports.

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