The Inevitable Round-Up

Looking back on the books I read in 2013, the first thing I notice is there's quite a lot of them.
According to my Goodreads stats, which I think are pretty accurate, I read 42 books this year, clocking in at 12,872 pages. The page count is a bit iffy, since a lot of them were on the Kindle, but still - the main thing I notice is it's a lot more than last year. Before that the count is hard to compare, since I wasn't keeping track of my reading as I went along.

I attribute this increase in volume mainly to more sensible working hours. I owned a Kindle in 2012 (it was my birthday present from my wife), but while it helped me read more on the way to and from work, I was often too cream-crackered to do any reading.
That's still sometimes been the case this year, but in general I've been reading every day.

Looking at the spread of ratings, I am quite pleased. Mostly 3 out of 5s, and bear in mind that 2 is "it was OK" and 3 is "liked it", with 11 4-star ratings, and five 5-stars.
My theory is that if you give too many ratings over three, you just aren't being a very discerning reader. Having said that, the ratings are based on how I felt when I finished them and, like Roger Ebert's film reviews, try to compare the reading experience to books of a similar type. In other words, I don't seriously think The Time Traveller's Wife is better than Swann's Way overall, I just enjoyed it more on the bus to Aberdeen.

So, I don't know, maybe I do think it's better than Swann's Way. (And I nearly gave TTTW 3/5 anyway, except when I'd just finished it, I couldn't bring myself to mark it down for the earlier clunky bits.)

At the other end of the spectrum, my grand unified book-ratng theory holds that if you don't have at least a few ratings below 3, you're staying too much in your comfort zone when selecting your books.

So, half a dozen merely OKs, including the very disappointing The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - I'd rather have read your actual memoirs, Umberto.
And mercifully only one outright bad book this year - Redshirts, by John Scalzi, which reads like the novelisation of a forum discussion thread.

Those 5-star books:
The Death of Mao - James Palmer
A bit of log-rolling for a mate, this rating, but it is properly a good book. I must admit I enjoyed it less than his 1st book, The Bloody White Baron, since the subject matter is less pulp-adventure stuff and more like the sort of thing I used to have to read at university and then for work. Still, good book.

Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor

Well worth finally getting round to.

The Hittites & Their Contemporaries in Asia Minor - J.G. MacQueen
I nearly gave this less than 5/5 but then wondered, well, what am I marking it down for? Being a bit dry? Not helping me out with pronouncing Turkish place names?  So, full marks as an introduction to the Hittites.

Watership Down - Richard Adams
I was of course familiar with the film, and picked this up expecting something of a light distraction, the sort of thing you might get from The Wind in the Willows or a Wodehouse novel. Instead I got a very moving, gripping epic and lots of useful information about rabbits.

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
My book of the year. I had avoided reading this for absolutely ages, put off by descriptions of the book's structure that made it seem dour, daunting and abstruse. Instead it's a page-turner that's grand and silly and sad and everything else.

So there you go.

Pretty narrow to begin with

Tea Leaf Nation runs a piece on the resignation of Chen Hongguo 谌洪果 from Xibei Zhengfa University, quoting his lament on the "narrowing path of academic inquiry".

Getting on for 10 years ago I interviewed a professor of anthropology at Peking University who was keen to stress the limits of expression in his own field. The example he used was that you couldn't talk about any downside to "development" (in the "development studies" sense), because promoting just that was Party policy. You could say what you wanted about things the Party didn't concern itself with, but you didn't get to challenge its decisions.

That a legal professor is feeling the CCP pinch now, rather than years ago, makes sense. Although politics has always been touchy, law and the study thereof has been a boom industry since, oh let's say the 1990s - between 1949 and 1972 only one detective story was officially published in China, because "crime" wasn't a thing, only counter-revolutionary activity, and it wasn't until the 90s that lawyers in China became really numerous. And you can carve out a lifelong career without getting into issues of whether laws are righ or wrong or actually enforced.

Once you start talking about legal reform, though, you're talking about changing things on Party territory. And you still don't get to tell the Party what to do.

Malandros

Much to my surprise, I appear to be working on an RPG with the intention of getting people I don't know playing it.

The high concept pitch: Gangs of New York meets The Wire. In Brazil.

(The high concept pitch needs work.)

People I do know are mostly away for Christmas but in the New Year I hope to arrange some playtesting. The basic structure of the storygame part is OK, since it's based on the DramaSystem SRD - and Hillfolk already exists, so we know that works.

But I need to sit down and try out all my guesstimated difficulty numbers, character generation, and so forth.

Then there's just the small task of explaining in writing what the idea is. 


(Picture from the exuberant Salve A Malandragem! blog.)

A Separate Reality

I've been reading a bit about latter-day Carlos Castaneda, after setting up his cult compound, Tensegrity, all that business.

The events after his death are a Delta Green scenario waiting to happen.

E.g. http://www.salon.com/2007/04/12/castaneda/

This bit -
"He’d become disillusioned with another hero, Timothy Leary, who supposedly mocked Castaneda when they met at a party, earning his lifelong enmity."

- made me think of Johann Hari. another writer of imaginative veracity, who took umbrage when the Dalai Lama made a (pretty tame) gag about him being fat, and heaped scorn on said lama in print whenever a paper-thin pretext present itself.

Carlos Castaneda vs Johann Hari. Maybe our parents were right and the 60s really were better.

Dissident Nostalgia

There's been a fair amount of to-do on HK's streets this past week or so, not as much as in Singapore*, but at least demonstrating political engagement rather than the usual grievances about how capitalism doesn't guarantee you'll get your money back.

If you were shown this photo of the future in 1996, would you believe it possible?

Probably yes, but I think you'd jump to some very different assumptions about just how Fascist China had decided to handle things from 1997 onward.

I don't think the old flag got this much play when it actually was the flag of Hong Kong Across town, a pro-China activist was ripping it up as the standard of traitors.


* The Guardian claimed "this kind of violence is unheard of in Singapore", which is, well... unheard of done to the cops, sure.

You can't take it with you

Over at Big Lychee, a commenter holds forth on the topic of Hongkongers' widely-expressed reactions to the death and deprivation in the Philippines in the wake of the recent typhoon:

HKers abject lack of compassion for victims of the typhoon, and rather venal approach to the bus tragedy, is shameful. I believe the resentment comes from the fact that the Filipinos who live here reflect an uncomfortable truth: you can be happy, you can experience joy, without constant striving for material wealth. And when HKers witness this – joy for the sake of joy – it makes it so much harder to pretend that the new car, apartment, gourmet meal, fulfills and satisfies the soul.
And so, rather than using the uncomfortable feeling to spur contemplation of the nature of true happiness and life fulfillment, HKers choose to judge and hate and deny the only really happy people who live here. Sad.

Gravity

We (that is, EXPLODATRON) have a done a new song, called Gravity
Why not give it a listen?
It's about space stuff, although that might all be a metaphor for human relationships - it usually is!

Remembrance Day

The man on the right of this photo had the same name as me, give or take a middle name. In 1942, aged 23, he was shot down with the rest of his crew over the IJsselmeer by Reinhold Knacke, a fighter ace who would live less than a year longer himself. 

W/Ag Sergeant Thomas McGrenery's body was never found. His name is inscribed on the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede. 

The idiotic opinions of my youth

Thanks to the internet digging of a friend, I recently gained access to a cache of stuff I wrote when I was at university. Some of it even earlier, in fact, as I believe the drinking game (remember when that was an internet thing?) designed to accompany viewing the BBC 2 programme Late Review was devised with some friends in the Sixth Form.

There's a set of capsule reviews of films I watched in the year 2000 that provides supporting evidence for the contention that everyone's an idiot when they're 21. The tone of all of them makes me cringe, as does the implied presumption that anyone would want to read a paragraph on what I thought of Barry Lyndon or The Third Man.

That said, I think I stand by the last sentence in the bit about Blade Runner: "How Ridley Scott then went on to make G.I. Jane eludes me."

The Golden Mile

I recently watched The World's End. As advised by a friend of mine at a recent pub quiz, it is indeed a bit of a mess. It's good but by far the least of the three "Cornetto" films.

Probably the key misstep is that it goes too quickly from the Body Snatchers paranoia period to the running-away-from-aliens bit. Staying there a little longer would have helped the pacing and made the continuation of the pub crawl more believable.

Speaking of pacing, that speech-making at the end felt like it went on forever.

Still, as I say it was fairly good. I might have enjoyed it more, too, if it hadn't been filmed in Letchworth, which made me see the real geography instead of the fictional town you're supposed to see.

In the spirit of the film, I've created a Golden Mile pub crawl for Hitchin, where I went to school: http://goo.gl/maps/VP5VM


View Larger Map
On reflection, it might be better to do it in the reverse of the order there, going from H to A instead. Partly because you'll want your wits about you on Nightingale Road, and partly because there's just not so far to walk between pubs in the town centre.

Shanghai 1930 errata

Blood on the Snow, the companion book for Robin Laws' game Hillfolk, contains a series pitch called "Shanghai 1930", which is about pretty much what you would expect.

Despite being well done for the most part, whoever wrote it went off the rails in a couple of places and just started making up random stuff.
Here's a little in the way of unofficial errata:

p. 45 (replaces the first 3 paragraphs, up to "The Western interests...")

Western Characters

As part of the humiliating settlement the Western Powers forced on China after

the Opium Wars, Shanghai became a treaty port, where British citizens were permitted to trade with anyone they chose and to rent land. The British were soon joined by the Americans and other foreign nations in gaining similar privileges, and a parcel of land outside the old city of Shanghai became the International Settlement. 

Not a free city, nor a colony, the International Settlement exists in an odd legal limbo wherein every resident (or at least all of those from a country with Most Favored Nation status) is subject only to the laws of his own land. This does not stop the foreign settlers (chiefly the British and Americans) from calling for military aid from home in times of crisis. The International Settlement is the hub of the city and is what most people think of when they think of Shanghai. The Settlement maintains its own police force (the Shanghai Municipal Police) and volunteer armed forces, and is governed by the Shanghai Municipal Council, which is elected by qualified residents (defined mostly by land ownership) and consults with international consuls. 

Chinese law does not apply to any citizen of the following nations: Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United States. These foreign nationals are instead tried by a consular court if they are accused of crimes under their home countries’ legal systems.They can also, of course, get done for breaching the Settlement's own bylaws.

To the south of the International Settlement is the French Concession. Unlike the Settlement, this actually is sovereign French soil, and French law applies to all within its boundaries.

p. 46 (replace whole paragraph on The Bund)

The Bund: The western shore of the Whangpu is built up with European-style granite

skyscrapers. The name of this stretch of the International Settlement comes from the Anglo-Indian word bund, meaning an embankment. It rhymes with “fund”.

Pale Fire connections

Nova Zembla
is the name in Dutch for...

Novaya Zemlya
where in 1961 the USSR detonated history's largest nuclear explosion...

the Tsar Bomba.

Bombycilla
is the genus of birds better known as the

waxwing.

The Bandung Octopus House

Ever since my wife first told me about a "weird house with a scary octopus on the roof" where people say witchcraft is practised, I have been somewhat interested in this locus of lurid rumour -- though not quite enough to go to Bandung just to see it.

Located on Pasteur Road, the house has a statue of a large black cephalopod on its roof, grasping the house with its tentacles -- the design of the house itself suggests a submarine being grappled, and has seaweed-like ornamentation in places, which implies the sculpture was always part of the design.

The house dates back to the 1980s at least. According to some sources, the octopus was originally pink, but the paint has mostly peeled away. You can still see pink paint on the suckers, in some photographs. The peeling paint and general disrepair of the house's exterior is often cited as one of the things that makes it so creepy.

I say 'cephalopod' because neighbourhood residents say it's a squid, not an octopus, according to this Bandung Citizen article: http://citizenmagz.com/?p=2451

That article also features an interview with the head of the neighbourhood association, who says it's just an ordinary house, the octopus is a decorative cover for a water tank and he's never had any complaints.

Rumah Gurita from a distance

 

But then... he *would* say that, wouldn't he?

Stained glass windows - and a cross between
seashell and submarine designs?

Also noted by internet commenters are a number of stained glass windows, featuring playing card designs (picture at right), Jesus, 'figures of antiquity' and an inverted cross (I have yet to see pictures of any of these).

Another recurring feature in accounts of the house is that it has "no door", or even that it can only be viewed from a distance and disappears when you approach -- one account describes the writer and his friends becoming groggy and disoriented, finding themselves on an unexpected street, defeated by some kind of magical barrier: http://cerita-misteri.reunion.web.id/2011/10/misteri-rumah-gurita-di-bandung.html

How this squares with accounts where people claim to have knocked on the door and spoken with a caretaker is unclear. The neighbourhood watch guy in the article linked above says that they used to get a lot of people ringing the doorbell for a prank or a dare, so the people inside don't answer the door any more.

This blog entry - http://ryanz-grill.blogspot.hk/2009/04/rumah-gurita-di-bandung-sebelum-tol.html - describes a 2009 visit where the door was answered by a portly Chinese man who said the owner used to be a sailor, and that he spends most of his time in Jakarta.

A year earlier, the blogger "Manson Davis" had a similar visit, but when his videoed the conversation with the caretaker, his phone developed a mysterious glitch and the video file was corrupted. Manson Davis' blog is now offline and not on archive.org - just because it was on Friendster, or something more sinister?

In fact, the house was raided by the cops in May this year - http://news.liputan6.com/read/601498/diduga-tempat-ritual-seks-bebas-polisi-periksa-rumah-gurita.
As you might expect, they found nothing. A police spokesperson said it's just a normal house with three people living there.I suspect this will do little to affect the Octopus House's reputation.

Pink suckers - allegedly the original colour
of the whole thing

The most common theory about the house is that it is a church of Satan. Typical stories include a woman going to the house and leaving the next morning "sick and covered in scratches" -- and presumably with only hazy memories of what happened, although this isn't specified.

The more detailed, prurient accounts generally involve evangelical protestant minsters, naive girls and parties at the house that start with worshipping the Devil before going predictably Eyes Wide Shut. Here's an example -- note the use of larger, different coloured text for what the writer considers the key words: http://iseng-posting.blogspot.hk/2012/01/misteri-rumah-gurita-bandung.html

This is tediously unimaginative but seems to be the only narrative with traction on Indonesian forums. One or two places suggest a link with the Illuminati, which is slightly more interesting but still not much off the beaten path.

I hope someone can step forward in future with a new, compelling, mostly implausible but not outright falsifiable story that will give this piece of unusual architecture the occult, conspiratorial urban legend it deserves. 

The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, by Sax Rohmer

 Well. Where to begin?

Probably with the racism. I mean, this book is really very racist. It's not even subtext, or implied like that time a Bond film appeared to suggest that all black people in America were connected to a kind of Caribbean mafia. It's just right there.

In fact, it's so right there that at first I thought it might just be the characters' point of view, with some authorial distance added by the use of a Dr Watson-style narrator. But really the further you go, the more the novel (titled The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu in its original UK release -- I have the US version, complete with reference to "Cold Harbor Lane") appears to be the work of a complete loon, whose views on race relations map exactly to those of his two protagonists. That both characters differ not one iota on the subject is a strong clue that the Yellow Peril is supposed to be real, although the actual role of Chinese and other Asians in Fu-Manchu's plan -- and whether or not their participation in being a Peril is active or conscious -- is described in inconsistent terms at varying points in the plot.

It was symbolic of the subtle, intangible power manifested in Dr. Fu-Manchu, as Nayland Smith -- lean, agile, bronzed with the suns of Burma, was symbolic of the clean British efficiency which sought to combat the insidious enemy.

It is so ridiculous that it becomes vaguely amusing. Consider, for example, replacing "Chinese" with "Dutch", in the following:

No white man, I honestly believe, appreciates the unemotional cruelty of the Chinese.

But of course as I am not part of the ethnic group being maligned, it's easy for me to not be upset by this. I can only hope that Chinese readers today are able to view Rohmer's writing as the same kind of bemusing backhanded flattery that I see when Iranian propaganda paints Britain as a malign world power with tendrils of evil operating conspiracies across the globe. Britain may well be malign, but Iran seems to be the only place where it is still the go-to mastermind behind bad things that happen.

To return to Fu-Manchu, it does have good points which go a long way towards explaining its popularity apart from British xenophobia, as powerful a resource as that can be. Rohmer's brand of Yellow Peril lunacy translates into a breathless pace that carries the reader along in its mad energy, beginning the very moment Empire-trotting adventurer Nayland Smith bursts into the office of Dr Petrie (the Watson analogue) like Lord Flashheart and immediately begins expositing on the way to the first crime scene.

Personal drama? Characterisation? Rohmer cares not for such things, except perhaps for Smith's oft-noted tendency to tug at his earlobe when thinking.
Indeed, it's the preposterousness of the action that makes it fun, creating a rising what-on-earth-could-happen-next tension from set piece to set piece, although this does wear a little thin towards the end.

The daftness of the prose, meanwhile, makes it frequently very funny - usually unintentionally, although there are places where I suspect Rohmer was being uncharacteristically dry.

"Therefore science is richer for our first brush with the enemy, and the enemy is poorer -- unless he has any more unclassified centipedes."

Passing round to the lawn, I met Smith fully dressed. He had just dropped from a first-floor window.

It can also be fun to try imagining any real person actually behaving in the manner ascribed to Smith:

[H]e leapt stormily to his feet, shaking his clenched fists towards the window. 
"The villain!" he cried. "The fiendishly clever villain!"



  Nayland Smith paced up and down like a newly caged animal, snapping his teeth together and tugging at his ear. 



 He stood up and began restlessly to pace the room, furiously stuffing tobacco into his briar. 

(These are all from quite separate places in the story, not one sequence.)


By the end of the novel, it remains unclear what Fu-Manchu's plan actually was, but never mind all that. At least by that point it's been made evident that he really does have a plan, and Smith isn't just some Sir Digby Chicken-Caesar figure needlessly hassling a foreign tourist.

Would I recommend The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu to others? Um... not really. Maybe if you like Dan Brown - Rohmer is very much cut from the same cloth.
Otherwise, while it's amusing in places, there are plenty of other pulp adventures that could go higher on your reading list.

One game to go

Citizen can save themselves from relegation on the 4th of May.
But will they?

Here's the current Hong Kong top flight as a Cann table:

36 South China 26
35
34
33
32 Kitchee 17
31
30
29
28
27 Tuen Mun -3
26
25
24
23 Southern -3
22 BC Rangers -13
21
20
19 Yokohama FC -9
18 Sun Pegasus 0, Tai Po -10
17 Citizen 3, Sun Hei -8

A draw against Kitchee (last year's champions) could be enough for Citizen to avoid the drop but a number of other results would then also decide their fate.

A Citizen win will save them from relegation regardless of what else happens, because Yokohama and Tai Po are playing each other. Citizen's positive goal difference is helpful here. 

Basically, every team in the bottom half could go down. Fun. Here's hoping Kitchee can't be bothered, since they can neither catch South China nor be caught by Tuen Mun.

Though much is taken, much abides

Last weekend I was helping out at the kids' capoeira class, minding the queue of miniature humans while they waited their turn to go and do a handstand or whatnot.

Their conversation turned to the subject of cordas and moving up to one colour or another. 

"She started when she was just little," said one, "that's why she already has a purple belt."

"I'm already nine," said another. "I just hope I can get up to yellow, that's all."

What hope, then, for those who begin in their late twenties or thirties? 

.

Auto-archaeology

Reading your own writing can be interesting as a way of spelunking one's thoughts from years ago.
For me, the City Girl columns in gou-rou.com are a good portal to my brain circa 2006. I used to write them in a single stream of consciousness draft, going back later to fix typos or work in a joke I'd thought of. Originally this was to capture the airheadedness of the persona writing it, but I did the same when the voice switched to the rather sharper Kitty Yip Kee Wah - I just changed the voice.

I happened to read this one today after looking at incoming traffic stats for the website's archive. Not sure what's going on there. About 50% is clearly a parody of American Psycho, I guess kind of an insider hint at a possible future plotline that never emerged.

I'm not sure if the rest of it has a specific reference point or if it's just a character piece. I thought the 'Rosy Dawn' cocktail was obviously a nod to the Aeneid (and Homer before that) but I just googled it, and it actually is a cocktail.

So yeah, I don't know.

Tortoises all the way down

On Sunday afternoon, CK, Leo and I went to Belcher Bay Park and played petanque on the grassy area there. A jolly time was had by all, despite the best attempts of a local toddler to make off with a boule.

The park was full of parents and kids hurtling about, mainly on the playground area. The grass was also host to an under-8s kickabout with a plastic pink ball and - what I found most interesting - two chaps who had brought their tortoises out for a bit of a walk around. They were the sort of creamy yellow colour one associates with the desert (the tortoises, that is) and seemed to be having a fine time wandering about.

The next day, coincidentally, I was listening to Frank Skinner's podcast, wherein he talked about having worked with a tortoise for a TV production. Tortoises are, of course, cold-blooded. So apparently, if you hold one up to your face on a hot day, its breath will be refreshingly cool.

Maybe we should get one. While not being a portable air-con unit, it could hang out with Dr Watson, our rabbit, and sometimes we could get them to do Aesop's-fable re-enactments.

.