stuff 'n other stuff

Russian is a beautifully constructed language, with simple near phonetic spelling and a logical grammar – yes there are exceptions and a whole swag of rules, but it’s simple – six cases, three genders, three tenses, the past and future tense having an imperfect and perfect view, the present always being imperfect (who couldn’t love that?).

Sure the rules for numbers are a little odd, and because the language is so inflected sentences can consist of words in almost any order one has to become sensitive to dramatic effect, but overall wonderful and simple. No more complex really than teaching yourself perl or python, if you want a computing analogy.

Except of course for the genitive plural – which is needlessly complex and which squats like an unreformed toad in Russian grammar books saying, so you thought this was easy, I’ve got news for you…

I’ve always had this fantasy that one night in 1918, at the People’s Commission for Enlightenment, in Petrograd, which of course was a building with colonnades, a group of grammarians had been assembled to reform the genitive plural.

– But Comrade Lunacharsky, the genitive plural, it will take weeks

– I want it done, if we are to teach the peasants and the minorities to read we must simplify, simplify

– Comrade, there is no tea, no vodka, not even tobacco, we cannot continue, we cannot start

– Very well, I will arrange supplies

And in the chaos of the Revolution,  the grammar committee never reconvened, for want of a packet of tea and a bottle of Stolichnaya …

Last month I was at a meeting in the University of Maryland Library, and for some reason, the meeting room was absolutely freezing, so during a coffee break I took a walk round the shelves to try and warm up.

For some reason my eye was caught by ‘Trinity Tales’, a set of stories cum reminiscences about life in Trinity College, Dublin, in the sixties. I have a weakness for tales of university life, perhaps because I’ve spent most of my working life in one, so I ended up ordering a second hand copy through AbeBooks.

I’ve never been to Trinity, and my knowledge of the place is confined to that gleaned from living for six months in a share house with two girls, one of whom I lusted after ineffectually, who had graduated from Trinity at the end of the seventies. In fact the nearest I’ve ever been to working at a university in Ireland was having a job interview at QUB in the early eighties, which was quite surreal. It looked sort of like Scotland, it sounded sort of like Scotland, but instead was this strange paranoid place with a constant background of armed police and armoured cars.

I digress. During the six months sharing a house in Hull Anne and Bridget told me tales of the English faculty, some strangely bizarre, and of  life at Trinity and in Dublin, making it sound a strange exotic and somewhat louche place. The place portrayed in Trinity Tales is not the same place in Anne and Bridget’s stories, which was most definitely an Irish place rather than an Anglo-Irish university, but the loucheness is definitely there.

Trinity in the sixties emerges as a sort of anglo bubble, populated by mildly pretentious arty people with a background chorus of hooray henries and other Oxbridge rejects. No real mention of scientists, medics, or students from the north of Ireland, or indeed many from the Republic, although to be fair the sixties was still a time in which Catholics needed a special dispensation to study at Trinity. Most of the stories also date from the earlier part of the sixties from a time before the Troubles, so perhaps they can be forgiven their political disconnection.

In short Trinity resembled St Andrews in the seventies, a small isolated bubble which provided a stage for various personalities to stride and posture and establish themselves. In a small community such things are marked, and in a larger one unnoticed in the main.
It’s also true that like St Andrews, Trinity appears to have attracted more than its fair share of personalities, because it wasn’t quite mainstream.

Did I like the book? Yes, for its portrait of a now vanished world of university oddness and eccentricity, but at the time and in the flesh I might have been irritated both by it and them, which in retrospect would have been unfair as, while life is not a dress rehearsal, university is …

In Evanston  (Illinois, greater Chicago, basically NorthWestern University and the Lake) for a project Bamboo meeting. Like all my visits to the States the whole experience is slightly weird and disorienting. If Australia is Life on Mars, America is most definitely a separate reality.

Australia is of course Life on Mars because it is a dry desert of a continent and far away from anywhere in terms of timezones and distance. While South East Asia is our nearest neighbour, we’re still talking about an eight or nine hour flight to one of the big south east Asian cities from the south east corner of Australia. The south east being where most of the people live – draw a line from slightly west of Adelaide to slightly north of Brisbane and you’ve got eighty five percent of the population in the triangle. Most of these eighty five percent live in three agglomerations – SEQ, aka Brisbane and the Gold Coast, the NSW sprawl from Newcastle down through Sydney to Woolongong, and the sprawl of Melbourne, the Mornington Peninsula and Geelong. Adelaide has more taste than to sprawl though I’m sure it would secretly like to.

So from the south east europe is twenty two hours, and the West coast of America a rather more modest fourteen. That fourteen hours of course gets you to LA, and LA is not America. The California/Oregon/Washington strip is separated from next really populous area by mountains prairie and pasture – and Chicago is that populous area, some four hours east of LA. Factor in immigration, plane changes and the general stuffing around that accompanies plane travel and basically you can say getting to Chicago is as tedious as getting to Europe.

So, Evanston.

When I got here I didn’t care. I was over travel – twenty five hours in cabs, airports and aircraft had removed any joy or excitement that was inherent in travel. And that’s not because it had been a bad trip. Admittedly going skiing the day before and falling and bruising my backside wasn’t in retrospect the best preparation for sitting in a plane, but United were as pleasant as ever, I just wish they’d put individual video screens like everyone else has on trans oceanic flights, and immigration at LA were again stunningly efficient and courteous, the connections worked, the cab I’d prebooked was ready when I got to Chicago, but even so, when I got to the hotel all I wanted was room service, a shower and sleep.

The next morning I was up early in an attempt to reset my body clock. After breakfast I walked round the town just to stretch my legs, go to the supermarket and pick up some teabags and the rest. And they had bookstores. And as we know I like bookstores. Market Fresh books was everything a second had bookstore should be. Interesting fascinating books, and slightly kooky in that the sold the books by the kilo (or being America, the pound). They weighed your books, and charged you by weight, not by what someone thought the book was worth.

And then to Barnes and Noble, where I played with a colour Nook and the new basic Nook – Nook being B&N’s e-reader. The new basic nook was smaller, lighter, and every bit as legible as my now venerable Cool-er and would certainly make a great lightweight reader.

The colour Nook was something else. before I saw it I’d doubted the value of colour in an e-reader, text after all is black and white, and things like screen sharpness and contrast are what counts.

All true, but reading the New York times on a colour nook changed my mind. Clear bright legible screen, and the moment one steps out side the appliance, it does just one thing model – colour definitely adds value. And of course, as an Android based device, the colour Nook is more open and can definitely do more than one thing. And of course, the other thing I did in B&N was look at books and not buy them, instead photographing their covers so that I can buy them later – and amazingly no one gave a damn and just acted like it was just normal to do this. Maybe everyone does, and it’s just me who thinks it’s odd.

The other thing I noticed about Evanston and the US in general is just how many people had iPads. Not tablets, iPads, even though the Samsung Galaxy and the upcoming HP tablet is being advertised heavily. Be it all the free wi-fi around or what but people are out there just using them, using them to watch movies, read books, magazines, tweet, email and the rest. In Australia, you’d call the iPad significant for its impact. In America you’d call it game changing.

So, Evanston. On the basis of the first few hours, unexpectedly pleasant.

Now we all know about the Pre Raphelites – mad sex crazed 1860’s loons who were instrumental in creating a lot of the faux medieval of the Victorian era. They were also damn good artists as the current exhibition of drawings at the Art Gallery of New South Wales shows.

In the main the drawings come from the collection of Birmingham Art Gallery – strange that all the time I lived in England and travelled to Birmingham for meetings I never thought to visit the gallery, but there you go.

The exhibition is cleverly put together, with sketches and preliminary drawings, including some of those for Ophelia, and a couple of finished paintings to show how the sketches translated into the finished works.

It shows that they were all good draughtsmen, with sometimes a little wit, and incredible attention to detail. What I found intriguing was a set of four doodles from a sketch book, which I’m sure were rough copies of illustrations from a medieval manuscript. Like a loon I can’t remember now who or what, should have written them down at the time. (actually it was from the Ladies and Animals sideboard by Edward Burne-Jones. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery have done a sterling job by putting their collection online at www.preraphaelites.org)

However, all in all a nice little exhibition and worth the trip to Sydney (or Birmingham).

work bookshelves, a photo by moncur_d on Flickr.

I’m about to move offices so I though I’d memorialize my own little bit of bookshelf porn – amazingly they’re (relatively) tidy and organised …

I’d like to recommend the New Mandala blog for its coverage of politics in South East Asia – its coverage of the Thai election has been superb.

As to the election itself, we now have a result, with a landslide win for Yingluck, and everyone is being responsible for the moment.

Questions of course remain of how well Pheu Thai will ride the social reform tiger while placating both the conservative old money parts of Thai society and the army …

well it looks like the world is finally paying attention to the Thai election with a good report in the Guardian (syndicated in the SMH among others), a good piece in the NYTimes on the impact of the social changes of the last twenty years on rural Thailand. I have a little anecdote to add to the NYT report – almost everywhere we went everyone had fairly zippy smartphones, even though there’s no 3G service worth a damn outside of Bangkok. In itself this is not unusual, in poor countries the mobile networks have often leapfrogged the wired infrastructure and are simply more pervasive – I’ve seen similar effects in Laos and Morocco.

Anyway, the anecdote. We were riding in a tuk tuk in Ao Nang when the driver muttered ‘sorry’ and pulled over to the side of the road, and pulled out a state of the art Blackberry, and checked his Twitter feed, grunted, tapped a reply and off we set again. Now it makes sense that a tuk tuk man would have a smart phone, even if it represents a considerable investment, as he doubtless gets jobs and bookings by email and text message – but twitter?

(For people deeply interested in the Thai election the Bangkok Post remains the most up to date with coverage with news of a possible offshore deal about Thaksin and another statement by the army saying that they won’t intervene.)

Something that struck me during our recent trip to Thailand was the sheer number of tourists from what used to be known as the sub-continent – a tribute both to the growth of discount air travel in both India and Thailand and the growing wealth of the Indian middle class – and yes, they were most definitely there to shop …

In Ao Nang, across the street from  some dodgy looking bars is a MacDonalds.

Outside the McDonalds is the usual garish Ronald McDonald effigy – except is Thailand, so the figure is standing, palms together in a classic wai gesture …

Thailand, being a poor country, is full of people trying to turn a dollar. Most are legit, some are dodgy and some are very dodgy.

The dodgy ones tend to cluster around where tourists go on the basis that you are both naiver and richer than they are. Mostly they’re fairly transparent, such as the friendly stranger who tells you ‘XYZ is closed today’ when it isn’t, and then tries to persuade you to sign up to an over priced tour of an alternative attraction.

The ones at the Grand Palace in Bangkok are in a different league. The other guys are amateurs compared to them.

This is how the scam works.

There are three gates. You can only buy a ticket to go in at the middle gate, which is the one opposite an overpriced French style pavement cafe. Your cab of course cannot get close for love nor money and so will drop you somewhere nearby.

Helpful official looking guys with neat white shirts, Thai flag pins and official looking badges on lanyards will see you working out just where the hell you are and intervene, directing you to one of the other gates, rather than the main gate (which has a sign warning you to ‘beware of wily strangers’). Reasons given include “we’ve opened an extra gate”, “there’s a lot of tour groups ahead, quicker if you try the other gate”.

At this point you believe them as they’re not spruiking anything, and given you can’t read Thai, you can’t tell the difference between a used Patpong bus pass and Thai museums staff pass.

So you go down to the other, wrong, gate and another similarly attired guy will say, “so sorry, we’ve just had to stop people going in as there’s too many people in already” which looks kind of plausible as you are now standing in front of a gate where they are clearly not letting people in. And again you believe him as he doesn’t seem to be selling anything. So you ask him when you should come back and he says something utterly reasonable like “First thing tomorrow to be sure, but you could try around 1pm as the tour groups are often gone by then”.

You of course have trekked across the city, and don’t want to come back tomorrow, as today’s your last day, or whatever so you decide to come back later, which leaves you stuck for ninety or so minutes. So you visibly wonder what to do.

This is when your scammer hooks you. “Look,” he says, “get a tuk tuk down to the river and get a boat to the market or the wats on the other side and come back at 1pm”, and when you look positive, he gets you a tuk tuk, and the tuk tuk guy looks legit, with a nice blue jacket with a logo on it, unlike the usual grubby pants and t-shirt of your standard Bangkok tuk tuk man.

The tuk tuk man then takes you to a pier not used by the river commuter service, but where strangely enough there is a guy doing tours of the river in a longtail boat at considerably more than the going rate …

Now I’ll admit we fell for the scammers in the white shirts, even though we’re experienced travellers. At first we even thought it was just a dodgy tuk tuk man, so we made our excuses, left, flagged down  a cab, and went  back to the grand palace – incidentally finding the only cab driver in Bangkok who didn’t know how to get to it – he had to stop and ask a newspaper seller – only for our white shirted friends to try the same scam on us again. This time we ignored them …