Sonchai Jitpleecheep

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Bangkok at Night

During this hottest summer of my life, I have entertained myself by reading all the Sonchai Jitpleecheep novels by John Burdett. Sonchai is a member of the Royal Thai Police, while at the same time serving as a pimp in the Soi Cowboy brothel run by his mother and his boss, Colonel Vikorn. In all, there are six novels in the series:

  • Bangkok 8 (2003), named for the Bangkok police district controlled by Colonel Vikorn
  • Bangkok Tattoo (2005)
  • Bangkok Haunts (2007), with the word “haunts” to be taken literally
  • The Godfather of Kathmandu (2009)
  • Vulture Peak (2011)
  • Bangkok Asset (2015)

I assume that, since no new titles have appeared in the last eleven years, that the series is complete.

Reading the novels, you get a great picture, not only of Bangkok, but of several other Asian countries as well, including Laos, Cambodia, Kathmandu, and Dubai. The picture that emerges of Bangkok is a crowded one, like the above photo, but one tempered by the Buddhism of Jitpleecheep in an atmosphere of outrageous criminality.

Burdett has also written several other books, which I will eventually evaluate—though I feel that the Bangkok novels are going to be tough to beat.

I have always loved reading mystery fiction set in other countries, such as the Inspector Ghote novels set in India by H.R.F. Keating; the Napoleon Bonaparte novels set in Australia by Arthur Upfield; the Mario Conde novels set in Castro’s Cuba by Leonardo Padura; the Inspector Espinosa novels set in Brazil by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Rosa; and the Judge Dee novels set in Tang Dynasty China by Robert van Gulik. And that’s just to name a few.

When Will We Invade Canada?

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Maybe it’s the heat; maybe it’s the constant nibbling away by this administration at anything that makes sense. I just have this feeling that our Presidente, Donald Trump, is planning to invade Canada. He didn’t get his way by bullyragging Denmark to get Greenland. Maybe he figures that Canada, being right next to Greenland, would be even better bets to insure America’s “security.”

As the second term revenge tour continues apace, Trump is getting as nutty as Caligula and Heliogabalus combined. Is ICE his new Praetorian Guard? Will we have a new Presidential Election, or will the Donald generously insist on continuing on as Dictator for Life?

It surprises me to see the United States coming apart like a cheap suit. I guess that 250 years were all we were entitled to enjoy as a nation before becoming a shithole country.

The Supremes

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The Supreme Court Justices in 2022

I feel sorry for the three liberal members of the Supreme Court. They are trying their best to see that justice is done; the conservative members, on the other hand, are trying their best to see that the whims of Donald Trump are rigidly enacted into law.

This is nothing short of infamous. I keep thinking of the court of the damned in Stephen Vincent Benét’s story “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” They may have been convoked by the devil, but they actually produce a just verdict and free the New Hampshire farmer, Jabez Stone. The real-life Roberts court, on the other hand, will go down in history as having gamed the system to please the most unworthy president this country has ever had.

The fact that the judicial system of the United States can be gamed so readily indicates to me that the Constitution is badly in need of revision. Part of the gaming, however, is that three-fourths of the states—which are required for any amendments—will never accede to going against a totally corrupt president’s wishes. The thirteen states which could kill the amendment would be rural Southern and Midwestern states which, together, would constitute a small minority of the population of this country.

Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers of this country chose to mistrust the voters rather than the politicos.

What to do?

After the Trump madness is over with, the following justices should be pressured to resign: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh. They are nothing less than traitors.

Anthropocene

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The term Anthropocene refers to a geological epoch in which human activity is the dominant force shaping Earth’s climate, environment, and ecosystems. It is an increasingly grim subject in an era in which wildfires, unseasonable storms, and global warming are changing the way the Earth looks and the way life feels.

In 1950 when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, William Faulkner gave a very uplifting speech:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

In my opinion, Faulkner was being altogether too optimistic. In 1950, humans were not yet slaves to the smartphone and social media; and recreational drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine, heroine, PCP, and fentanyl were nowhere near as prevalent as they are today. What I find particularly grim is that people no longer read books (unless they are dinosaurs like me).

Because of climate change and the preponderance of dysfunctional nations, large masses of people are migrating beyond their borders and stressing the economies and politics of hitherto prosperous countries such as the United States, England, and Germany. Donald Trump is not an isolated phenomenon: Possibly he is a portent of things to come. (Perish the thought!)

“At a Certain Age”

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Polish Poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

Born in Lithuania, Czeslaw Milosz had a chance to witness firsthand many of the horrors of the Twentieth Century. Milosz is perhaps my favorite Eastern European poet of the 20th century. In 1980, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here is a poem of his entitled “At a Certain Age.”

At a Certain Age

We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
Was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.
It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: “That’s me.”

A One-Man Band

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Did I say one-man band? Actually, he was a one-man symphony orchestra. Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was not only a poet, writer, translator, and philosopher. He was eighty poets, writers, translators, and philosophers. Born (and died) in Lisbon, Portugal, Pessoa wrote under approximately eighty heteronyms.

These heteronyms were like pseudonyms, except that each wrote in a different style. In a way, Pessoa constituted an entire literary movement. The work for which he is best known, The Book of Disquiet, is a collection of fragments in no particular order—and probably one of the greatest works of the Twentieth Century.

There are several editions of The Book of Disquiet. I have read the Penguin edition translated by Richard Zenith.

Today, while eating lunch at the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Mar Vista, I was reading an old New York Review of Books and came across this passage in a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa:

To say things! To know how to say things! To know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That’s what life is about: the rest is just men and women, imagined loves and fictitious vanities, excuses born of poor digestion and forgetting, people squirming beneath the great abstract boulder of a meaningless blue sky, the way insects do when you lift a stone.

I first learned about Pessoa when IO read José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984). It turns out that Ricardo Reis was a poet and prose writer, author of Odes and texts on the work of Alberto Caeiro. Interestingly, Reis and Caeiro were merely two heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.

The man constituted an entire literary movement in his person!

Obviously, I had to get to know more about Pessoa. I plan to read more of his work if I had world enough and time.

Not the Wind, Not the Flag

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The following is from Paul Reps’s book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen & Pre-Zen Writings. Over the last sixty years, I have read this book several times and regard it as a treasure. In fact, it was the second book I read after I moved to Los Angeles late in 1966. The quote consists of a zen koan followed by a commentary and quatrain from Ekai, also known as Mu-mon, written some time in the 13th century.

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: “The flag is moving.”

The other said: “The wind is moving.”

The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them: “Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.”

Mumon’s comment: The sixth patriarch said: “Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.” What did he mean? If you understand this intimately, you will see the two monks trying to buy iron and gaining gold. The sixth patriarch could not bear to see those two dull heads, so he made such a bargain.

Wind, flag, mind moves,
The same understanding,
When the mouth opens
All are wrong.

“Wind, Water, Stone”

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Mexican Poet Octavio Paz (1914-1998)

In this short poem, Mexican Poet Octavio Paz reveals the secret of the deserts of Mexico and the American Southwest.

Wind, Water, Stone

For Roger Caillois

Water hollows stone,
wind scatters water,
stone stops the wind.
Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,
stone’s a cup of water,
water escapes and is wind.
Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,
water murmurs going by,
unmoving stone keeps still.
Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:
crossing and vanishing
through their empty names:
water, stone, wind.

On Heat and Laziness

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When It Gets Hot, I Turn Lethargic

The massive heat wave that is the Summer of 2026 has made me extremely lazy. I still do a lot of reading, but I don’t travel much, even locally. If I head toward any of the valleys, I find nothing but hot sun and triple-digit temperatures.

Even my Thursday trips downtown are affected. For next Thursday, the predicted high downtown is 93° Fahrenheit (34° Celsius). In that case, I would be tempted to stay near the coast, where I live. Even that could be hot enough for me considering the constant humidity of 60% or more.

Climate change is turning me into a sort of homebody. I still do a lot of reading. (Current book: Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast.) The temptation is to turn this blog site into an extension of my Goodreads site, except with pictures. That I don’t want to do: I like my posts to show more variety.

That high-pressure area that has encamped over the Arizona desert is bound to break up at some point. And there is a limit to how many Pacific storms could send constant humidity our way.

I live in an 80-year-old apartment building that was constructed without insulation. And we don’t have air conditioning. So it doesn’t take too intensive a heat wave to turn it into a sweat box. What with our recent meteorological history, I’m not a big fan of summer.

Two Blind Warriors

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Shintaro Katsu as the Blind Swordsman Zatoichi

I am thinking of two incredible blind warriors. One is from the Japanese cinema circa 1970s; and the other is from the literature of Edwardian England, around the time of the First World War.

During the 1970s I was a big fan of Daiei Studio’s Zatoichi films. At the time, Daiei owned two movie theaters in Los Angeles: the Sho Tokyo in Downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo and the Kokusai on Crenshaw just south of Adams. Both theaters are long since gone.

Zatoichi was a blind masseur and gambler who also was a samurai-grade swordsman who could slice his opponents to ribbons due to his superior hearing ability. Between 1962 and 1989, Daiei produced some 26 Zatoichi films starring Shintaro Katsu. At the time, Daiei had some excellent action directors such as Kazuo Ikehiro, Issei Mori, Tokuzo Tanaka, and Kenji Misumi. Probably my favorite title was Zatoichi’s Fire Festival (1970).

Skipping to the other blind warrior, we have Private Investigator Max Carrados created by Ernest Bramah, a London tea merchant, who was also responsible for the Kai Lung stories, which can be described as fantasy Chinoiserie.

Max Carrados may not have been a swordsman, but his skills were no less incredible.In “The Coin of Dionysius,” a man named Carlyle investigates a Sicilian tetradrachm, taking it to the blind detective:

For a few seconds Carrados handled the piece with the delicate manipulation of his finger-tips while Carlyle looked on with a self-appreciative grin. Then with equal gravity the blind man weighed the coin in the balance of his hand. Finally he touched it with his tongue.

“Well?” demanded the other.

“Of course I have not much to go on, and if I were more fully in your confidence I might come to another conclusion—”

“Yes, yes,” interposed Carlyle, with amused encouragement.

“Then I would advise you to arrest the parlourmaid, Nina Brun, communicate with the police authorities of Padua for particulars of the career of Helene Brunesi, and suggest to Lord Seastoke that he should return to London to see what further depredations have been made in his cabinet.”

Both the Zatoichi films and the Max Carrados stories are highly entertaining, even if a bit fanciful.