Philobiblon

Today’s splash headline:
Toxic cloud chokes south
Oddly enough, I’m typing, not suffocating …

Had a small whiff of petrol smoke about 5-6pm last night. That was it.

New arrivals in Bangkok are easy to spot; after a day or two in the city they’ve got a dazed, bemused look, and move slowly, hesitantly. This Bangkok-itis is an extreme form of the culture shock that many tourists experience in foreign lands.

There are two factors that make it particularly acute in the Thai capital. First, so much of the environment seems familiar – glass-and-steel office blocks, modern cars, familiar fast food restaurants. Yet it is also so foreign. Underneath the office blog might stand a baby elephant, its owner begging for funds. Amidst the modern cars zip scores of death-defying motorcycle taxis, their riders’ bright jackets clashing with the mini-skirts of the high-heel-shod women perched precariously side-saddle behind them. Then they’ll be the shrine on the corner thronged with fortune-tellers.

Bangkok is where east meets west, modern meets traditional, the past meets the future. And while often they’ll stand in stark opposition, they’ll also blend to produce astonishing new hybrids.

The visitor who seeks easy answers might turn to a guidebook, and for some of the more obvious sights get a sentence of two of explanation. Or they might turn to a scholarly historical study, explaining temples and sculptures. But Philip Cornwel-Smith’s Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture is the first book that I know of to try to explain Thailand as it is today.

This is a prodigiously illustrated (by the photographer John Goss) text, accessible, but informative enough that even people who’ve lived in Thailand for decades will find plenty they didn’t know.

Of course I was aware, having lived in Thailand for almost five years, that trucks were usually heavily decorated, particularly in their upper parts. But I didn’t know that these works were designed to placate the journey spirit, Mae Yanang, or that each cab represented the sacred Mount Meru. The frequent inclusion of Western film stars in these images in no way interferes with this.

But it might take the first-time visitor a while to notice these, being too distracted by more disconcerting sights, such as the kathoeys (lady-boys) who can be seen at work and play around the capital without the locals batting an eyelid. (I used to live in the African rag-trade district of Bangkok, Pratunam. A kathoey was an otherwise entirely ordinary staff member on one of the stalls. When Africa met Asia at work, there was frequently some cultural confusion.)

Cornwel-Smith explains the understanding of gender and sexuality – so different from the West’s – that underlies the phenomenon:

Thais make a distinction between gender – a public identity to be kept riab roi (proper) – and sexuality, which remains undiscussed, unrestrained. Thai society tends to regard sexual urges – at least for males – as natural and requiring plentiful, but private outlets. Hence polygamy, once banned, resurfaced through minor wives and the fancifully themed playgrounds of the sex industry. With women’s virginity still a commodity to be guarded, kathoey have offered a non-disruptive outlet for single males.”

This acceptance has helped to encourage Thailand as a destination for medical tourism of a specific king – gender-reassignment surgery. Up to 1,000 operations are thought to have been done on foreigners each year. And many kathoeys have taken up the practice.

Yet after centuries of a place in Thai society, new conflicts have emerged. Following the recent morality crackdown by the Shinawatra government, the rights of kathoeys have become a political issue, Cornwel-Smith reports, quoting Thanyaporn Anyasri, 2002 “Miss Queen of the Universe”, who said: “I want to be the world’s first transexual prime minister so I can legislate laws that promote homosexual people’s equality.” He then quotes a representative of a Buddhist foundation saying that since every person has gone through innumerable reincarnations they are likely to be kathoeys at some point in the future, so should think about equality now.

After contemplating all of that, the first-time visitor might need a drink and a nice meal. If they’re very brave, that might include the “prawns of the air” (grasshoppers), deep-fried whole and sold from street stalls, and some Red Bull – one of the few Thai traditions to really make it big inter (internationally). Cornwell-Smith will explain too why there might be tiny pink tissues on table, and for afters a pudding so sweet it will set your teeth on edge.

Many more aspects of Bangkok, from the skin-tight police uniforms (the government was keeping up with Western fashion in the Sixties, but then got left behind) to the numbers of dogs roaming the streets. There are also sections on Thai music, festivals, decor, gardens and much more.

If you’re the sort of visitor to Thailand who just wants to swan down Khao San Road and then lie on the beaches, you won’t need to buy Very Thai. But if you want some great stories to tell about the country – not just accounts of what you’ve seen but explanations for the curiosities and complexities – then this is an essential book.

Declaration of interest: The author used to commission writing from me when he was editor of Metro (then Thailand’s answer to Time-Out) and I was a writer there. Online from that time I have an article about Khunying Supatra Masdit (billed by some as most-likely to be Thailand’s first female prime minister) and a piece about the Maldives. They’re not the paradise you think.

As the Queen of Scots walks to her execution in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, she breaks off to confront the Earl of Leicester, the man who has vacillated in his affections and allegiance between her and Queen Elizabeth. Mary spits at Leicester: “You chose the hard heart, not the tender one.”

That might sum up the central conflict in the play, which pits two visions of womanhood, and queenhood, against each other, and the world of men in which they must operate.

Phyllida Lloyd ‘s production, transferred from the Donmar to the Apollo, makes the most of this magnificent conflict, putting the women in period dress and the men in modern bureaucrat uniform of suit and briefcase. The women are at centre stage, literally in the spotlight, but they are buffetted by waves of men seeking through flattery, through blackmail, through trickery and even sometimes force, to turn them into mere puppets. READ MORE

In his weekly “anti-yob” announcement – found every week in a Sunday paper near you – Tony Blair is running around trying to establish controls over small children and their parents, turning them all into images of Fifties suburban respectability.

“Blair argues that family ties have weakened and communities fractured over the past decades, allowing a new kind of disorder to flourish that the courts have failed to tackle.”

Meanwhile, as the Guardian in a fine piece of journalism yesterday, reported on a year’s toll of domestic violence: “For December 2003 to December 2004, the period of our research, we found 68 cases that had resulted in convictions for murder or manslaughter, or in which the perpetrator had committed suicide (many cases are still ongoing, or have yet to come to court).”

There’s just so many horror cases it is hard to pick out one; and in some cases the final court verdicts are astonishing, like the one in which “nagging” was established as mitigation!!! (Heh mate it is simple; if you don’t like what your wife says, leave!)

Sarah Jane Dudley, May 16 2004 Dudley, 33, a mother of two, was burned to death when her ex-boyfriend, Anthony Frost, pushed a lit carrier bag through the letterbox of her home in Bargate, Derbyshire. Frost, 47, told Nottingham crown court he had called Dudley but dialled incorrectly and flew into a rage when a man answered. He denied murder, but admitted manslaughter and reckless arson; he was jailed for 10 years in December 2004

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And Tony Blair wants to “strengthen” the family. I’d say loosening the bonds – so women and children (and men) subjected to violence can escape – is a more urgent priority.

Just discovered a wonderful blog “written” by a Bangkok street dog. Yes, I’m a bit soppy on the subject because:
1. I used to have (or rather “feed” to use the Thai term) a rescued street dog called Lucky.
2. Because next week I’m going to Battersea Dogs’ Home and will hopefully be coming home with a Britsh sort-of street dog, or a rescue dog anyway.
I promise, however, not to turn this into a dog blog – well nothing more than the occasional pic …

Australia around a century ago was considered a “working man’s paradise”. (Yes, the women didn’t do so well, but not as badly as they’re going to do now …)
From the Sydney Morning Herald:

The tough penalties, largely overlooked in the week’s legislative frenzy, dovetail nicely with the new industrial relations regime. Workers who quit over poor conditions – a workplace agreement that strips them of all but the Government’s five new minimum standards, for example – will end up penniless. Ditto for workers sacked for alleged misconduct, with no right to appeal under unfair dismissal laws. And those who would like Christmas Day off, or to be paid penalties for the graveyard shift, will think twice about rejecting a job that provides neither.
If the alternative is no money for eight weeks, no right to an unemployment benefit, then many will become compliant wage slaves in the new industrial order.

Note to the SMH – please! stop splitting all stories into two pages. Yes it might get up your click count, but it is intensely irritating.

* The “out of Africa” thesis of human evolution is, it seems, if not dead, then certainly in need of substantial modification. This report is quite technical, but well worth wrestling with. And if supported by further evidence, it means a total rethink about our origins. We’re all both African, and Chinese.

* David Mamet’s theory of how to write a play, via a heavy critique of The Night of the Iguana.

* The Guardian looks at whatever happened to the end of hereditary peers. Short answer: Tony Blair has left them there because he doesn’t have the guts to face the issue.

I’ve got a solution to solve the elected versus appointed conundrum – select members of the House of Lords by lot. (All citizens over the age of 18 included – and paid a reasonable sum for participation.) It has a perfect democratic pedigree (ancient Athens and all that), and would reproduce the delightful dottiness and eccentricity of the old Lords, combined with a dogged commonsense to restrict the Commons’ wilder flights of fancy.