Of Pickles and Crossbows - Variety and American Superstores

You’ve got to understand: we don’t have anything like Walmart in the UK. We have superstores and supermarkets, sure - huge, square slabs of buildings where you can pick up some food or pencils or toothpaste or whatever else - but we don’t have anything like the sort of variety that you can find a five minutes’ drive away from Utica College. 

I made my first pilgrimage to the store of stores about a day or so after arriving in the US on exchange. Jetlagged, disorientated and in dire need of some coat-hangers, I picked a cart from the entrance and rattled it on inside and, immediately, was distracted by a colorful BACK TO SCHOOL sign that was looming overhead. I started rummagine through all kinds of flashy but entirely unnecessary products. Where, by the way, have rainbow colored pencils been all my life? 

After a few minutes stationary with the stationery my eye was caught by some other aisle, then another, then another - before I knew it, I’d been sucked up in the irresistible materialistic pull of all the weird, wonderful, and often pretty nasty items on display. Craving a quick snack? Ty one of our pickles, sealed in with its juices in a handy ziplock bag! Take a look at out new range of ‘wildlife’ bathmats - step out the shower and onto the stinking beast of your choice today! Feel your firearms are missing the mark? Set your sights on one of our new crossbows, available online!

I couldn’t really buy much of anything, of course. Student budgets don’t usually tend to accommodate croquet mallets or inflatable bounce houses. Even so, it’s not so much my wallet I’ve been fearing for. My wallet has a picture of Batman on it anyway and can probably take care of itself. No, what I’m all too conscious of every time I rumble my cart through the doors of Walmart (and other stores like it) is how much time I could spend exploring in one trip. Truth is, every time I go in I can’t help but get sidetracked and go off exploring. It’s not safe, really - there’s a real danger that one of these days I’ll pop in for some cereal and emerge fifty years later, blinking at the sun, waving a box of fruit loops and apologetically mumbling something about “getting a bit distracted”.

Moral of the story, then. If you ever see me half-submerged in the box of discount DVDs, spending half an hour contemplating what kind of thickness my pillow should be or something else entirely unproductive, do me a favor and drag me out of the store. I pay in pickles and crossbows.

My Week as a Recovering Nail-Biter

My First Fortnight at Utica College

Captain's Blog: Diary of an Exchange Student, 1

Since my last post I've been reading:

Last of the Mohicans - James Cooper

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Memories of Ice - Steven Erikson

Captain's (B)log, 7th - 13th September

Because every day should be meaningful, except Tuesdays.

Saturday 7th September

Spent my first eight hours playing Dungeons and Dragons with some new friends and, seeing as I slept in until the back of noon, didn’t manage to do much else. I played as Cain - a middle-aged half elf ranger who had spent the majority of his life roaming oriental plains, eliminating varieties of dangers for less experienced explorers. As it turned out, Cain spent most of today messing around in taverns, interrogating locals in his stilted B-movie monotone way of speaking, and staying away from action for the sake of self-preservation.

Overheard a guy having a chat on his phone while sitting in a bathroom stall. “Yeah, I’m doing great, man”, he said down the line as his bowels took off in such a way as to make the Apollo missions hang their heads in shame, “what about you?”

Sunday 8th September

International department hosted an event - ‘Meet and Greet over a Sweet Treat’ - their way to get older, full-time international students meeting those who’ve newly arrived (with sugar as bribery). Thirty or forty people showed up, and each of us were made in turn to stand and tell the sugar-high group their name, nationality and one interesting fact about yourself. I muttered something about enjoying books. It’s quite painful coming to terms with your own banality, though someone suggested later that I should’ve opened with ‘My name is David, I’m from Scotland and I actually quite miss the colonies’.

Speaking of reading - cracked the spine of Moby-Dick today, which I have to read in the next two weeks for class. It’s a monstrosity; I wonder why Captain Ahab didn’t just take the darned whale down by cracking it over the head with a set of Melville’s complete works.

A friend asked me to write a column for the school paper, perhaps about my experience in Utica as an International. I agreed while immediately starting to wonder what kind of stuff I could get away with...

Monday 9th September

Created a new game today, though still needs a name. It goes like this - whenever I take the lift (sorry, elevator) up to my floor, I stand to attention and salute just as the door is about to swing back. Had a couple of strange looks so far, and a few people who’ve laughed at/with me as we walked past each other. Still waiting for the hero to return the salute but I’m sure they’re out there somewhere.

Passed page 100 of Moby Dick. Established so far that we’re to call the protagonist Ishmael and that he needs to sit down and define the relationship with his buddy Queequeg. 

Finished the day by playing some night-time ultimate frisbee on the football field. In other news, recently uncovered a hidden fear for fast, disc-shaped objects.

Tuesday 10th September

A  small part of me died at lunch today when I overheard a girl at the table behind us say through her nose “I’m telling you, calculus is literally a killer”.

Aside from that, studied. I can be wild sometimes.

Wednesday 11th September

Baking hot today. There was a clubs and organisations fair on at the student lounge which I only managed to attend by peeling myself from shadow to shadow and stopping every fifteen paces for a water break. Somebody brought a snake along with her (“She’s from the bio lab, we were going to bring the tarantula but we thought that seemed a bit much”), which got passed around as people signed up for a few different bits and pieces. I put my name down for the Reading Society and the League of Extraordinary Nerds (you know you’ve found a solid group when they name themselves League of Extraordinary Nerds). 

Also, got a new mattress today after I complained that the old one felt as though I were resting on the bones of the previous occupant. This new one feels a bit moist. Might just sleep on the floor for a semester or two...

Thursday 12th September

On a mission to convert the floor to Doctor Who - sat a friend down tonight and made them watch Matt Smith’s entrance episode. I think they enjoyed it, but it was hard to gauge their reactions over my giggles and squeals of delight at every third line of dialogue.

Was informed in a breezy, off-the-cuff sort of way in one of my classes that we have a ten page essay due in a fortnight.

Was a bit late for dinner tonight (meals are fully paid for at the start of each semester)ended up being told the place was closing up ten minutes after I sat down. Smuggled a full loaf of bread out in retaliation. A crime for the ages.

Friday 13th September

Page three-hundred of Moby-Dick has been breached, and I’m proud. Found out that the Flesch-Kincaid test (which measures the readability of a novel, the lower the number meaning the more difficult the text is to read) measures some parts of the book as low as -146.

Got a chance to write up my column for the school paper, a piece about Walmart and how they have to stock everything under the sun and then some solar winds just to show off. I had quite a bit of fun writing it, almost entirely because I got to use the line ‘It’s not my wallet I’ve been fearing for. My wallet has a picture of Batman on it and can probably take care of itself’. My number one fan is pleased, at least.

For an adventure with Krom and the Customs desk, click here,

Or for a worry-ridden pre-exchange ramble, click here,

Or go here for my discussion of a certain socially-dismissive Bangkok driver

Since my last post I've been reading:

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

The Last of the Mohicans by James F. Cooper

Memories of Ice by Steven Erikson

The State of the States: My First Fortnight in Utica

The name-badge pinned to the hefty chest of the man at the customs desk told me his name was Krom. Krom, the first man I met in the states, was a heavy guy, probably somewhere in the late thirties; he had a crop of shortish black hair and a horizontal, unsmiling mouth. I strode up to his desk, handed over my passport and papers and, already jet lagged, tried hard not to curl up into a ball right there and then and drift off to sleep. It had been a long flight sandwiched between queues, and, by local time, it was only eleven in the morning. 

Krom began to tick through what I guess was standard procedure for a teenager with a visa. Thumbprints; paper-checking; having a staring contest with a stalked camera with wires buried somewhere into Krom's PC terminal. I started to buzz with a tired satisfaction. Soon, I realised, I’d be through, off to start my student exchange properly. I let my mind slip to a kind of dazed planning area. I’d have to catch a train to New York City first. Grab a coffee, perhaps have a wander through central park. Take another train north and up to-

“Where are you staying?” Krom's sharp New Yorker’s accent, surprisingly high, sliced through my thoughts. “What’s your purpose of coming here to the U.S?”

It was an easy question, needing less mental processing power than what did you read on the plane or David, why were there so many typos in your blog posts anyway to answer. For whatever reason Krom's question took me totally by surprise, and I spent at least three seconds standing silently, staring just below the little ‘tache where the question had come from. Krom wasn’t amused.

“Sir?”

I let my mouth clunk open to allow what felt like the entire universe poured out:

“Sorry just tired I’m an exchange student here I mean an exchange student from the United Kingdom coming here I mean New York for two semesters which starts on wednesday at Utica College and-”

“Where did you say you were studying?”

        “-Sorry I though I said I’m studying at a place called Utica-”

        “Where did you say that was?" Concern in his face.  "New York?”
        “-Yes Utica College New York-”

The man’s eyes burrowed themselves into concerned slits - he'd clearly no idea where I was talking about. Properly awake now, I wondered what happened to persons suspected of making up their destination. A quick google check? A more serious conversation in a darker room? Would Krom just press a hidden eject button and watch the spring-loaded floor launch the liar back across the Atlantic? Probably not, but I thought best to brace and prepare for take-off just in case. There was another few seconds pause, then Krom’s face slackened and his mouth dropped to a small oh. “Oh!” he said. “You don’t mean Ewe-tick-ah. You mean You-deh-ca!” 

It took everything within me not to say “No, you-deh-ca!”

I smiled, relieved and happy that we understood each other now. Krom handed my papers back to me, flashed me an official - but not entirely cold - smile, and beckoned me past into the land of oppurtunity, where, somewhere, the wake for the letter T was being held.

It’s been two weeks since I’ve arrived in the country. I’ve savoured (or savored, depending where you’re reading) the delights of Taco Bell and Dunkin‘ Donuts; I’ve been to Wal-Mart and gotten lost, twice. Since meeting other international students I’ve been partially cured of my geographic ignorance and can successfully locate Finland and Serbia after a minute or six with an atlas. The reason I start right back with Krom and You-deh-ca, though, is that my first conversation with my first American was enough to recognise there are some details to American culture that I’ll never properly get to grips with. Pronunciation, as it turns out, being pretty far down the list. 

For example, the fist bump. In the UK, the knocking together of two fists only ever occurs as a joke. Here, the fist bump is completely interchangeable with a handshake. It’s not hallowed territory, but it’s not taken ironically either. I can’t get used to it. When somebody greets me with their knuckles all I can do consistently is flinch.

Or, take the driving culture. In Utica, nobody walks. No-one. One day, early on, a few internationals ventured out for a snappy five hour stroll and we couldn’t see a single other human being on the pavement (slash sidewalk) that whole time. If Neil Armstrong was so desperate to step on fresh, unexplored ground, he could have saved himself a lot of man-hours by visiting central New York. The lack of pedestrians is so disconcerting, actually, I’ve started referring to off-campus meanderings as going through the graveyard - it’s got that same you’re-doing-something-wrong sense coupled with the eery certainty that somebody, somewhere, is watching you. 

Also, the parties. Well, the party - singular. I’ve only been to the one, a college-organised affair that I assumed would be fairly safe to drop in on. Imagine the look on the face of the almost-entirely inexperienced, bespectacled teenager who still cherishes his childhood toys, therefore, when he walked onto the dance floor and saw a hundred or so Miley-wannabes bent over and gyrating around the middle of some classy gentleman, most of whom looked unsettlingly pleased with themselves. The windows were drenched with sweat, keeping out any light that wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I turned to a friend and tried to calmly explain to her we’d somewhere walked past the dance floor and somewhere into orgy central, but she just laughed. “Oh, that’s just how we do it here!”, she said, moving off into the crowd. I didn’t dance very much that night.

Just three differences between cultures, enough to make the point. Still, the fist-bumping kerb-hating dance-mating qualities of my new home make it all a bit more interesting, I think, and practically every day a new nuance presents itself for inspection, too many to be referenced in a post like this. From now on I’ll try keep a daily diary of my time in the land of the free post chunks of it up between (more sporadic) regular posts. Watch out for the first lot of entries in a week or two. See you then - in the meantime, if you find yourself at a US college party and feel like dancing, bring protection.

How did I feel about the exchange before I left? Click here to read some pre-travelling angst,

Or here to see my world-wide pledge to stop nail-biting,

Or here if you want to join my little book club. No biscuits, lots of self-indulgence. 

Since my last post I’ve been reading

Nineteen-eighty Four - George Orwell

Memories of Ice - Stephen Erikson

Howards End - E.M Forster

The Wayfaring Adventurer versus the Melon-sized Butterfly: Contemplating a Year Away

You can find Utica pretty much bang in the middle of New York, almost exactly at the shallowest point of the Mohawk river (or so wikipedia says, at least). The city holds a population of somewhere just over sixty-thousand people, as well as the 1993 Guinness World Record for the largest donut. Seriously. Utica has been mentioned several times in the Simpsons; several films I'd never heard of have been partially shot there. If you try and find if anyone important lives in Utica, a Google search will essentially respond with a ‘not anyone you’d know, silly Brit.’ 

Why the information? Well, because Utica also happens to be the place I’ll be spending my next year as an international student. In just over two days’ time, I’ll be blearily wandering out Newark airport with a bag filled with textbooks and ugly shirts, set to spending a while in the land where colour has one less U in it and where pants are the second thing you pull over your legs each morning.

My year away has, understandably, has been the main conversation I’ve been having of late. 

Are you all ready to go? Pretty much, I think so. 

So you've packed everything yet? No, but the David of tomorrow will be all on top of that job. 

Okay. And how are you feeling actually going away? 

That’s a good question. Say, have you watched that new Breaking Bad episode?

I’ve not figured out to reply to that ‘how are you feeling’ question yet, at least not succinctly. The truth is, when I sit back and think properly about the fact I’m shunting myself several thousand miles to the west, a whole boatload of feelings rear up in my stomach, sail the hydrochloric seas for a while before firing their cannons somewhere into my internal organs.  

There’s excitement, obviously. Taking the initiative of moving to a strange place makes me feel like some sort of wayfaring adventurer, going independent and choosing his own cereal in the morning. Though I’m actually legally becoming a child again by moving to the states, there’s a very real sense that my doing something this dramatic is the big step towards being a fully fledged man. A man who goes into sulks fairly easily and owns several water pistols, but a man regardless.

On top of that, there’s a feeling of potential that comes from the move - that anything-could-happen-ness of flying into a new place with new things. Granted, I’m more one for tea parties than keg parties, but still there’s a new backdrop to poke around in, and not just on a small scale. Utica is situated at the red star, below-

- and its position, I feel, gives an oppurtunity to head to a bunch of places during holidays or if there’s a dip in the workload that would be cost a bundle in flights otherwise. I could go to New York or DC, I can finally visit this Walmart place everyone is apparently so very keen on.

Third, last, there’s the fact I’m a bit scared. Am I allowed to say that? When I told one friend I was feeling the nerves they took my hand, but then when I told another he told me to stop being such a tool and man up. Naturally, I sulked for a bit and shot him with my water pistols. 

There’s quite a lot of fear, actually. What if I struggle with the way things are done? What if the learning jump is too big - or worse, too small, leaving me to play catch up in my final year of my degree? What if people don’t understand my accent? Most struggle in Scotland. It’s all a bit scary. I have to leave my dressing gown behind. I wasn’t lying about that excitement and sense of potential, but I have to recognise I got a lot of it from videogames and they get me to explore by sitting in the same place and wiggling my thumbs. I’m not easy-going, my DVDs are arranged alphabetically and I get close to breaking down if there are toast crumbs in the butter. Throwing myself into the unknown like this is new, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t as nerve-wracking as it is exciting. 

Still, that’s partly why the whole thing will be so good for me. The odds are the opening line of my next blog will be The first thing I did in America was get lost, and getting lost is a learning experience and therefore possibly a good thing. 

So, excitement, potential, nerves; all merging into a melon-sized butterfly that lives in my stomach and flaps about whenever somebody asks me how I’m feeling. At the same time, though, I couldn’t expect myself to be feeling anything else. I’m ready (as I’ll ever be) to get on that plane, and I know full well - if the worst that can happen is I spend a year in a room reading second-rate sci-fi - I’m going to have a good time, evil butterfly and all. Keep the irn-bru chilled, folks: I’m off for an adventure and I’ll see you in a bit. 

Oh, and nobody mess with my DVDs while I’m gone. 

Click here if you want to see my attempts to go cold turkey on my nail-biting habit,

Or, if that’s a bit too high octane for you, I review classic literature here.

Since my last post I’ve been:

Reading Dickens’ Women by Miriam Margoyles and Sonia Fraser

Reading ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

Watching Firefly/Serenity (and wishing it hadn’t taken me this long to get around to it)

My Week as a Recovering Nail-Biter

Like many addicts, I can point to a single scene as the source of my nail-biting habit. I was somewhere near four years old at the time; my main investments were in orange peel and jumping on things. I wasn’t showing any signs of being a child prodigy, then, but I did get that there was something up when I wobbled into our kitchen one evening. Dad was eyeing the back of his hand, my mother standing beside him. He was looking disappointed in himself, annoyed, like he’d stepped on scales and found out he’d packed on a small cow. 

“WhasamatterMummyandDaddy?” I said, using my best growed-up voice. 

“Well,” said my mother, looking at me between the fingers of her husband’s left hand, “Daddy’s been biting his nails again.”

“Wieseedointhat?”

“It’s not always on purpose”, Dad told me, dropping his fingers. “Daddy sometimes doesn’t realise he’s biting them when he is, see?”

Here the images flicker and my walk down memory lane comes to a brick wall. Probably, my tiny self-absorbed self said something close to “Ayeonleewanted Abiscut Notchyoorlifestory Gosh” and wandered back out the kitchen, but I can't say for sure. Regardless of what else happened, anyway, that day became the first I thought it might be a fun idea to bite down on the keratin at the end of my digits - and that wild ride has only sped up since. Fifteen years on, I chew my nails when I read, and I chew them when I write. When gaming I chew between loading times, and it'd likely be slower to take a buzz-saw to my hands after each study session. As my days as a teenager begin to dwindle (and thank goodness for that), each finger looks on its way to a party dressed as a car crash.

I’m not very proud of being part of the Nail Biting Society. It’s not part of my twitter bio. I don’t join Nail Chewing Rallies and I usually give their Facebook invitations a decided Ignore. Eating the ends of my hands is something I just tend to do. So when - fifteen years after they accidentally set me on my habit - my parents sent me the message 

“Visa appointment fixed. They take fingerprints so better stop biting nails ASAP”

I wasn’t that worried. Hey, I thought. This’ll be easy. I’m a strong kind of guy, after all. Resolve of iron. I bought myself some of that anti-biting solution along with a few packs of gum. I was travelling with friends so I had people to provide counsel and, if needed, a chastising flick on the ear. Give it a week or two, I was sure, and I’d be hand modelling for cash in my spare time. 

Sure enough, I found days one and two on the wagon (a little less crowded and easier to stay on than the gambling or alcohol equivalents) a pretty comfortable ride, though mostly because there wasn’t much to try and chow down on. For those first forty-eight hours, I went about with a kind of happy determination that the world was on my side and nothing could possibly defeat me. When I woke on day three and saw - to my horror - my nails were growing to what seemed an absurdly long length, that optimism dissipated. I felt I'd become the Wolverine's gangly second cousin at some point during the night. A small voice at the back of my mind began to slither its way forward; telling me to repent of my wandering ways and get my nails back to what to their standard stubbiness pronto. 

Regardless, I held on and decided to persevere. I am strong, I told myself. I shall not let my mind fall prey to the desires of the cuticle. My nails will soon be of fair length and my brother won’t be able to point at my fingers as a way to break the ice at gatherings. 

It’s hard to explain the allure in biting nails. At bottom, thinking about it, it’s just a nagging sort of feeling that won’t go away until you cave in. Like having to finish a drink even if you’re not thirsty ,or a bad joke that your brain won’t let go until its told. Thank goodness for the solution I had purchased, then - I’d put my fingers in my mouth and get hit with a dose of anti-nail biting solution, a taste next door to running your tongue down Sauchiehall street on a Friday night. Worse, the gum I was chewing would soak up solution and make the flavour stick around until I could find a place to spit the whole mess out.

Day six was worse than the first five piled together - the morning and afternoon were made up of driving down one of Australia's more dull, rain-specked highways with that annoying voice tagging along for the fun. Then, once we’d stopped at our motel for the evening, we were forced, in the name of hygiene, to spend time in a hokey little laundromat and watch our clothes spin themselves clean. Bored, I had to spend most of that time pacing and trying very hard to forget I had hands.

“We’re all very proud of you, David,” one of my friends said, leaving those beside us to guess for themselves what class-A substance I was recovering from. “Real proud.” I glared at him, unwrapped a fresh stick of gum. Somehow I stumbled to the end of the day digitally intact.

I crumbled on day nine. We were boarding a lengthy night-flight to Singapore and my travel buddies had somehow managed to beat the seatbelt sign to switching themselves off. I couldn’t sleep myself but I wasn’t fussed about it. I had a book, after all. And an iPod. I had one of those head-rest televisions...but, I realised (with a little jump in my seat that startled a couple of air hostesses a little way off), what I'd forgotten to bring in my hand-luggage was my nail solution. Worse, since we were headed for Singapore and very much hoping not to be flayed on arrival, all gum had been binned hours ago. If I was ever going to give up, I was beginning to realise, it was going to be right about...

Several hours later I walked through the baggage stands with ten fresh stumps where my progress had been. I was back to car-crash hands, and all the battles I’d fought that week had been thrown out the window thirty-thousand feet up. . The little nagging voice had shoved to the front of my head, wreaked havoc and, job done, had abated. 

The injury I'd done to myself in heading back to my nail biting ways went deeper than my fingers, too - it had lowered my self-confidence the same level as the guy whose girlfriend introduces him with “this is my...friend...”. I had taken on my habit, with bravado, and had lost rather easily. So much for being resolute, I thought. So much for being strong. 

Now, If I stopped the words flowing at that last paragraph, this would turn out to be a fairly depressing post. I failed, after all, and failures as a rule tend not to do very well at things. Why not write up the sequel to that high school blog or another post another game review? People laughed at those. Sometimes even in the right places. 


Well, the reason I'm sharing my failures with you, fair readership, is that I’m going to try again. The second I hit that ‘post’ button marks my attempt to get back on the straight, nicely filed path of hand hygiene and drag myself back onto the wagon. I hope it’ll work. I’d like to be able to open canned drinks again without help. That's the dream, isn't it? So, you catch me a week from now with nails looking anything like this:

Be a pal and flick my ear for me, would you? Thanks.

[No nails were harmed in the composing of this blog]

To see me self-righteously dismissing well-loved literary classics, go here,

 here I tell a slightly distasteful yet unfortunately true tale of a recent car ride.

Since my last post I've been reading:

Prince of Thorns - Mark Lawrence

The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

God Collar - Marcus Brigstocke

All Booked Up

Somewhere between tuning the keyboard towards schools, cafes and tangents the size of Norway, I’ve mentioned that I study English literature at university (the proper course title is English, Journalism & Creative Writing, but that takes a lot of effort to say). 

When I tell people what it is that I study, I can get a few different responses. There’s the Good-luck-getting-a-job face; there’s the equally probably lets-change-the-subject-before-my-insomnia-gets-cured body language. The best, rarest, reaction, though is when somebody asks if what I've been studying is any good.

If you fall into that last camp, this post is for you. Here, you’ll find a mini-review of six texts I’ve studied in the past two years - three that struck me as especially worthwhile; three I’d rather eat than reread. Just my opinions, obviously.

May your literary adventures be strong. 

I liked: Anthropology - Dan Rhodes

I’m cheating already. Why? Because I actually studied Anthropology in writing class, not literature. I know you’ll forgive me if you pick up, though. The book is a sparkling collection of flash fiction (short short stories) exploring aspects of love and relationships. 

Put like that, it kind of sounds like a gushing mess, but most of the stories Rhodes has put together are way too sharp to ever be labelled ‘gooey’. Almost all the hundred-word escapades are bizarre, too - more likely to make you go ‘aaah’ than ‘oooh’. Look down  to see what I mean.

See? Best of all, Anthropology is as cheap as they come. Buy this, you. 

I didn’t much care for: The Land of Green Plums - Herta Muller

“So”, our lecturer said at the start of our second or third ever lecture, “Has everybody almost finished the novel?” Most gave some sort of acknowledgement that they had overcome the urge to commit seppuku with their copies and had managed soldier through to the end.

“Good”, said the lecturer “Because if you can read that book, you can handle really anything else we throw at you.”

It was a good point, but what a way to give it. Honing in on the lives of characters living under Ceaușescu’s Romania, Land of Green Plums is admittedly really clever. Annoyingly, though, it’s always striving to make sure you don’t forget how clever it is. The amount of symbolism crammed into each paragraph makes it hard enough to work out the main points of the story let alone how the band of merry metaphors fit in. 

For sure, my reaction has been influenced by the fact the lecturer didn’t so much throw us in the deep end as bury us several meters under the pool. Maybe if I pick the book back up as I go further into the degree I’d enjoy it more, but for now it’s staying on the shelf to think very hard about what it’s done.

I was quite fond of: Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe

A Renaissance play wherein a man sells his soul for twenty-four years of near-unlimited power. Sounds good, doesn't it? I’ll be even more blunt than that - Faustus is a text four centuries old and still manages to be more entertaining than Paranormal Activity Five will ever be.

In another blog, I talked about Faustus consuming my life as I neared exams. A month or so after that post, I saw got the chance to see the play being performed. Though I knew the whole thing back to front, Marlowe's play - or at least what we have of it - still managed to keep me rapt all the way through (apart from when the theatre decided to replace a couple of scenes with their own. That was scary for other reasons). 

The play bounces around comic and tragic as Faustus tries to come to grips with his power, the extent of that power, and how much of a role he has in his own salvation/damnation. Recommended.

I wanted to throw in the Styx: Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe

I bought this one on audiobook so I could listen to it while doing other things. I was still bored enough by the end to consider strangling myself with my earphones. 

For those who don’t know,  the novel tells the story of a man - no prizes for guessing his name - who goes and gets himself stranded on a desert island for a decade or three. I know Robinson Crusoe is considered a classic, up there with all the other behemoths of literature, but I just can’t get past how much of the book is made up of useless lists and details. They run all the way through. To me, the Sparknotes summary is actually a far more compelling read. 

And it only gets worse as the super-specific story goes on. Even after Crusoe actually manages to get himself back to mainland alive and kicking, only now with a handy sidekick/slave, Defoe keeps the monolithic paragraphs rolling for another forty pages give the ending of Lord of the Rings a run for its money in the it-should-have-ended-ages-ago competition. At the ending of the book, then, Defoe treats the reader to a thorough view of Crusoe’s bank details.

I’m not a fan.

In other news, J.M Coetzee’s ‘Foe’, a retelling of the Crusoe story with Coetzee’s own preoccupations mixed in, is well worth reading.

I prefer to most people: Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut

Many seem to think most novels can be swept into two categories. On one side we have LITERATURE, where you’ll find clever books being meaningful but rarely any fun. 

On the other hand we have literature, lower case, where you’ll have a fun ride but won’t really remember anything about it after  finishing it. The idea goes that you should read LITERATURE, but you want to read literature. LITERATURE is like being at a formal dinner; literature is like being at a barbeque.

This whole way of thinking suffers from one key disadvantage - It’s wrong, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, on its own, is enough to blow it apart. Within a story about a WWII prisoner of war who gets abducted by aliens (what) and time-travels apathetically through his own life, the novel bats around questions of meaning, free will and heroism better than anything else I've read. 

As a novel, it’d show up to LITERATURE's formal dinner wearing shorts and a t-shirt that said ‘pull my finger’. It's fantastic.

An alternative to capital punishment would be: The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy - Jacob Burckhardt

For the third time, I’ve got to admit I’ve referenced what I’m about to talk about already in another post. Maybe I’m running out of material, maybe I’m running out of bad jokes (I know a few who’d say the well dried up on the good ones a while back, hey-hey). Still, if you’d try and read this book, you’d know Burckhardt is worth a second round.

The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy is a 19th century German work that talks about 14-16th century Italy, and, like the other two texts I’ve sent packing back to the publishers, this one - within the rather niche field that exists in - is seen as a groundbreaking piece of work. Scanning the blurb last summer, I was actually looking forward to getting stuck. That excitement lasted to maybe half-way down page four. 

It’s just really, really boring. It’s not that the words are difficult or the content is hard to swallow. It’s just dull. To give an example, selected at random:

In the great Federigo (1444-1482), whether he were a genuine Montefeltro or not, Urbino possessed a brilliant representative of the princely order. As a Condottiere he shared the political morality of soldiers of fortune, a morality of which the fault does not rest with them alone; as ruler of his little territory he adopted the plan of spending at home the money he had earned abroad, and taxing his people as lightly as possible. Of him and his two successors, Guidobaldo and Francesco Maria, we read: ’They erected buildings, furthered the cultivation of the land, lived at home, and gave employment to a large number of people: their subjects loved them.’

See? I kept catching myself rereading the same paragraph two or three times just because my brain kept flicking off.. As far as I know, I was the only one in the class who struggled to the end, but I can’t see myself picking it up again unless I’m short of kindling.

I could describe it a bit more, but instead I’m just going to give a link to a PDF version of the book (hooray, it’s in the public domain) so you can see for yourself. Bet you can't make it past page four. Go on, I dare you.

Click here if you would rather read an elaborate account of a man relieving his bladder in my presence. Nope, no joke.

Or how about some tongue-in-cheek observations of Christians, as a Christian?

If you're wondering, since my last post I’ve been reading/playing/watching:

The Shining by Stephen King 

Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson

Driven to Madness

(Or: some other half-baked pun for a story that still makes me gag a little)

(Or: some other half-baked pun for a story that will make you gag a little, all the rest of your days)

(Or: Seeing Red)

The four of us piled out the sticky, dirty air of whatever Bangkok street it was and into the taxi, with our wet fringes were clinging to our foreheads and the balls of our feet less than half a mile from crying ‘go on without us, lads!’ and crumbling to dust. Our little group looked to our driver - or, as we were near to calling him, Champion - with a mix of thankfulness and quiet awe. The man was lean, somewhere in the fifties, with a few wisps of beard straggled out from his chin under a thin nose and lips. A half-finished bottle of coke was sloshing beside snack wrappers and dustballs in the car door pockets. Our driver didn’t seem nearly as keen to study us - his left hand drummed the wheel in an annoyed getonwidit kind of way, head flicking from road to us and back to the road again.

“We’re looking to go to the grand palace?” Justin, eldest of our little band of travelers and leader by virtue of being able to navigate his way towards anything other than failure or a Big Mac, ventured. The wispy man with the annoyed gedonwidit gesture looked back, his face making it clear he didn’t understand a word of English (how dare he).

“Grand Palace?” Justin tried again. He brought out our map, then jutted a finger towards the Palace, which probably would’ve been helpful if the map looked less like a mix between a theme park guide and the Game of Thrones title sequence. It also, helpfully, didn’t speak Thai.

At first, our Champion still seemed nonplussed on where these ignorant tourists he’d picked up wanted to go. A few seconds passed, then, just as we thought he might give up and bustle us out his car, he thumbed the button on his cab meter, shrugged his shoulders slightly and set off to join the rest of the traffic.

This shrug, in retrospect, should have been thought of as a ‘massive clue’. 

At the time, we were too exhausted to really notice anything beyond a vague Ohlookthingsaremovingthatsnice feeling, watching the neon yellows and pinks of the signs and cars clashing against the grey buildings rather like a clown cartwheeling around a politician as he's in the middle of discussing tax reform. Slender trees sprinkled themselves along the kerb between shops and street-vendors. Stalls, with offers ranging from mostly-innocent to entirely obscene - including special ‘toys’ wrapped in cellophane - clustered in with each other, giving some streets an artificial, if seedy, canopy. 

‘Massive clue’ number two: the seedy stalls and shops were becoming more the standard than the exception. By the end of the ride, it seemed the guys who owned them were setting up shrines to viagra.

To our shame, it was only Justin who was beginning to wonder if things were perhaps not going as we had hoped. Under his breath - “I’m not sure he’s taking us to the Palace.” Out loud, in an awkwardly high voice, as what little hope he’d put on reserve from the earlier conversation was spilled out - “Grand Palace, yes?...yes?”

Our Champion didn’t seem too happy with our questioning him - all at once his foot punched down on the accelerator; he lifted his left hand off the wheel and slapped the flat of his wrist against the dashboard, pointing angrily to the road (which was now feeding itself under his cab rather quickly) as he started shouting, quickly and loudly ‘Grahnpalass! Yes! Grahnpalass!” His wrist did a little flick towards Justin as though brushing off a fly. “Granplass Shhh.” 

‘Massive Clue’ that our Champion might not actually be such a Champion number three: picked up on. Well, at least a little. Despite his fiery response, despite the almost definite fact that we were heading nowhere near the Granplass, none of us made any move to leave the cab. The man was our driver, after all. We were paying him. He wouldn’t, we felt sure, take us to any old place just to get a few extra Baht. 

“I think he’s taking us to the red light district,” Justin muttered out in his quiet low voice, presumably in case there was a danger the driver might suddenly have absorbed a Merriam-Webster’s.

Clue four, received.

It’s a running joke that a lot of men who come to Bangkok would have responded to “I think he’s taking us to the red light district” with “Oh, good! Which one?”. Not us: we resolved to leave the taxi as soon as the traffic was clear and our Champion/Anti-Hero had put his car back behind the sound barrier. 

Fate decreed, however, that before we got out there was to be one final, awful trial by taxi. We stopped under the traffic lights in the middle of perhaps four or five lanes of cars. Ex-Champion/Anti-Hero was finishing the last of his coke and we were discussing how best to continue our journey:

“Right,” one of us in the back said,  “he’s probably been taking us in the wrong direction, but-”
“Wrong direction? He knew exactly where he was taking us.”
“Guys...”

“-But it shouldn’t be too hard to get back on track.”

“Guys...”
“True. We can probably walk some of the way or get another cab.”
“Guys...”

“That or just take the subway-”
“Guys, he’s about to pee.”

Justin was speaking in the mutter again, barely audible. His entire face was staring, unblinking straight ahead like someone had stuck it there with an invisible vice.

Then, we heard a zipping, then a grunt. An unmistakable shloshing noise came, the sound of a recently emptied coke bottle being filled  back up.

“Oh, mercy,” said Justin. 

We could only just hear him over the sound of that shloshing and our own miserable internal wailing.

Still nowhere to stop, we four had a choice - (a) leave the car and hope the traffic lights didn’t change, or (b) shout at the man until he stopped. We opted for (c) be very British, look out the window and pretend it isn’t happening. He had been going for a good while, surely

slosh

It would have to to stop soon. We would, we thought, be

sloshh

laughing about this in ten, fifteen minutes.

After four or five seconds of the Ex-Champion/Anti-Hero/Worst Enemy emptying the Niagara into the plastic the red light flicked to green. For a wonderful second the man was forced to stop and take off the handbrake. Once he’d got the handbrake off, though, he was back to business 

(“Guys, I can’t look”
“Keep it together Justin”
“Easy for you to say you can’t see it”)

And back en route to what probably wasn’t going to be the Granpalahss.

Right to left: Justin, Michael, a sex-crazed monk we met (story for another post), Jonathan.

“Say, look at that building!” One of us in the back cried, pointing through the passenger window at a random slab of a structure, away from Ex-Champion/Anti-Hero/Worst-Enemy's side of the car. Those in the back agreed in high, appreciative sobs, then Justin took up the appreciation from the front, slapping his head to the left with a “Yes, look at that! Wow!” Meanwhile, the traffic was beginning to slow again. Our driver, without stopping - car or bladder - slanted his face to the left to see what we were all looking at. Failing to find what was animating us so (try looking down, buddy), he flicked his gaze from the scenery 

Slosh 

to Justin and 

Slosh

Stayed there. Though it came several bales after it should have, we finally reached our last straw. “We’re getting out now”, Justin said.

We waved for the driver to stop, pointed at the kerb, tried to hold it together for a little longer. Worst Enemy/Very Bad Man looked surprised. He lifted the bottle out and placed it beside the wrappers in the door pocket, lid still off and flies still unzipped. He shifted his vehicle to a closer lane. Worst- Enemy/Very Bad Man, after getting over his initial surprise that his passengers wanted out, turned a little angry. He started barking at us - we for once found ourselves very grateful for the language barrier - and screwed his face up into a scowl.

I took out a few dozen Baht, hating myself for feeling guilty. He took the money. For a brief second, our hands touched. We opened the doors and left the taxi.

 Though we’d met horror at one kind of red lights, we’d still managed to get out before the other kind really made its presence felt in any other way apart from the frequency of the questionable stalls. Still, we opted to subway our way out this side of town before taking a shower, arranging some therapy then calling our family to tell them we loved them very, very much. 

And just think. Somewhere, on the other side of the world, some innocent, tired tourists could well be piling out the sticky, dirty air of whatever Bangkok street it they’re on and into the taxi...

Oh mercy.

For a similarly written escapade concerning paying large sums of money to dance stupidly at clubs, you might want to visit this link,

Or here for my recent observations of Christians, as a Christian,

Or, if this one was all too much for you, click here to see a nice sunset.