index

It's got mystery, it's got murder, it's got train travel, it's got the line "Hercule Poirot addressed himself to the task of keeping his moustaches out of the soup."

Quick (for Pynchon) fun (for Pynchon) jaunt through conspiratorial world of fresh-from-the-dot-com-collapse Silicon Alley, NYC; a modern take on film noir but like in books and also with computer stuff. A good mess to untangle with some snazzy characters and hijinks, the coarse barrage of people places and things might make you miss the fact that there are some pretty neat dynamics at play, insightful and honest! At his best, Pynchon falls into himself in a bit of an ouroboros of facts, figures, references, pedantry and pretension that goes for pages and pages and is...maybe...a bit tiresome actually - but this is perhaps not him at his best and instead just entertaining. I'll finish Gravity's Rainbow one of these days but in the meantime am happy to have found this one.

Not Pratchett's best, not the best Pratchett featuring these characters, but I mean, still Pratchett, still heartfelt and earnest light silly fantasy about racism and war. Good fun, and would recommend, but maybe not for someone's first experience of Discworld.

Part autobiography, part literary criticism. I was a bit skeptical at first, and maybe to a certain extent throughout the entirety - while most of it is beautifully wrought, there is a tendency for Pitol just to simply start listing off names and places and books and works of art. Worse than that, they are lists of names of which I recognized only a small amount, and read even less! So basically both pretentious and an insult to my intelligent wordliness. (Reading the translator's note at the back, I discovered that the description of a man he saw in a bar in Barcelona as "the little black princess of the heaths" was in fact a reference to the nineteenth century novel Das Haideprinzeßchen? Which has a German wikipedia page, but no English one.) Unlike, say, Terry Pratchett, this is not an easy read.

Chiang Mai lies in the north of Thailand, a small university town founded in the late 13th century as the capital of the kingdom of Lan Na, staying that way for a few hundred years. But I don't know much about that, as my knowledge (as unfortunately usual, I reluctantly admit) comes mostly from a cursory glance at the wikipedia page. Normally, my research is a bit more in depth, but these days as my travel is coming to a close I've gotten a bit lazy. And, hey: maybe the lack of context is helpful. For shouldn't the beauty of an art work come completely from the conversation its existence has with the viewer? And what greater art work isthere than an entire city and hundreds of years of history and culture? is the only lame excuse I can come up with. And there are so many more engaging things to read and do than just getting a basic grasp of your surroundings.

My timelines are getting a little bit fudged. It is so infrequent, these days, that I actually sit down and write, that I am never able to finish an entire post in a single sitting. Of course, by the time I return to finish it, I have enough material for another post. But! I am on a 10 hour bus ride now, so hopefully I'll have the patience, the time, and the battery life to play catch up.

At night the stars come out in force and as night falls, lights begin to turn on in the houses and villages spread out over the foothills of the Himalayas. One night, there were clouds in the skies, no stars and Asunda (a South African volunteer who is taking a break from law school and has established in his hometown a community garden and is planning on starting a community library [or rather, true-brary, he says]) described it “as if the stars had fallen from the sky and sprinkled the countryside.” The effect is glorious; the lights are spaced out in constellations and only vaguely hint at the nature of the rolling terrain underneath. Kripa is a Nepali college student and hurt her ankle in December when she turned off her flashlight to better appreciate the effect. Her ankle hasn't gotten better because she just has kept working, kept walking and given it no break.

Nepal though: Nepal is also a nice country.

The Hyderabad days, I must confess, were comparatively uneventful, although not without note. Punctuated by the occasional visit by a high school friend of Aahlad's I mostly stayed in his bed, catching up on my Netflix and reading and learning Nepali and playing on my computer. His foot slowly got better, but every time he went to the doctor's, they ordered a longer recovery period. He wasn't complaining: it was an excuse to stay in bed, and keep relying on his mother for breakfast (and lunch, and dinner) in bed. I must confess I enjoyed that perk as well. His family was interminably hospitable and kind, really indulging my (and of course, their son's) laziness. My mom had told me to fatten up before I go to Nepal: some extra insulation against the cold and snow. This, combined with my habit of not saying “No” to hosts, meant that I ate a good deal of food, in proportion to the amount that Aahlad did not eat. His mom was quite pleased with this.

Welp. While scooting along on scooters shortly after sunset yesterday, we encountered a particularly bumpy set of speed bumps. There are two different types of speedbumps in Goa: one large one, that occasionally catches you off guard and you get a bit of air and otherwise you just slow down, or a series of small thin lines – sometimes, they are just painted on! But these ones, they were pretty bumpy, and Aahlad was thinking that they were painted on, so he was going a bit too fast, and he started loosing control. To accelerate on a scooter, or at least the ones that we were using, one simply grabs the right handlebar and rotates it towards you. To one relatively inexperienced in the art of scootering, perhaps more familiar with biking, the instinct when you are loosing control is not to release the handlebars but to double down and tighten your grip, perhaps pulling yourself towards the handlebars. This, one might be able to note, is not a good thing. When Aahlad started wobbling a bit, he leaned forward, gripping tightly on, and in fact accelerating. He slipped off the road, got back on, wobbled a bit, and then went over for the last time, falling down a scraggly bank with his bike on top of him.