We're in Hanoi. Every time we go somewhere else it becomes clear again that we live in the least cool city in Asia. In bed in the hotel now with our balcony door open - it's rowdy with traffic out there and there's a guy at some night spot nearby playing guitar and singing in Vietnamese, amplified, with the gentle inflections of Elvis's upper range and a loose melodic structure that, pleasantly, I can't quite arrange into a tune. I'm tempted to close the door to quieten things down but the fresh air is so good - it's 17 degrees out there. At home you wilt if you have the windows open for any time at all.
We just ate dinner at a bright, bustly multi-storey restaurant down the road, and then took a little walk by the lake nearby. There was a crowd of carollers in white boiler-suits with JESUS stamped across the front. They seemed a bit timid in their singing and dispersed pretty quickly, while another crowd, of mature ladies dancing in formation to house music, went hard for track after track. There were Ceroc dancers too, and every other person seemed to have a red cocker spaniel. Cars and motorbikes talk to each other with their horns, and to walk across the road you just walk slowly with intent into the flow of the traffic. It doesn't feel scary. One block over from the hotel is an intersection lined with street bars. Many dozens of young Vietnamese in their 20s sit on the road and footpaths on short plastic stools, drinking beers for about 30c each and huddling together in their black puffer jackets against the cold. It's winter here.
The concierge gave us detailed advice on what to do tomorrow but I am so tired, and we have plenty of time here. Grandma's funeral is at 1.30 tomorrow, so I want to be careful and thoughtful with what I do. I keep feeling some kind of - like, inflammation in my old attachment wound, is the only way I can describe it. Mind going back to the same old sore spots, wants to worry over them, fruitlessly, then to pursue something to try to ease it.
I read Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman on the plane. Mostly I think it's about time, proposing fiction as a kind of navigation tool for the future. But I don't think I like it, because every scenario Katurian proposes has only two options, bad and worse. Even his pig story has just two options - bad for me or bad for them. Tupolski's story is the alternative that turns the ending - bad vs miraculous craft, but that doesn't work for me. Caryl Churchill's Far Away begins on similar territory - the working out of the individual's complicity or responsibility (ability to respond) to brutal power - but it ends up in much more interesting places to me. Weirdly it seems more socially mimetic as it continues and becomes more fantastic - while McDonagh seems to end up expressing something about a personal limitation? Neither of those thoughts is right, precisely. Churchill with the war incorporating animals, weather etc seems to go into some substrate of the social, into a base increment of defensive collectivity. McDonagh... what is he saying, that to save a child from the horrors of the imagination requires care plus prodigious mathematical foresight in artistry, to the point where it's inconceivable fantasy? That just seems like bullshit. And it's this elaboration - the sense that he is through all this *saying something which must be fathomed* that makes it seem weaker than Churchill's transparency.
We just ate dinner at a bright, bustly multi-storey restaurant down the road, and then took a little walk by the lake nearby. There was a crowd of carollers in white boiler-suits with JESUS stamped across the front. They seemed a bit timid in their singing and dispersed pretty quickly, while another crowd, of mature ladies dancing in formation to house music, went hard for track after track. There were Ceroc dancers too, and every other person seemed to have a red cocker spaniel. Cars and motorbikes talk to each other with their horns, and to walk across the road you just walk slowly with intent into the flow of the traffic. It doesn't feel scary. One block over from the hotel is an intersection lined with street bars. Many dozens of young Vietnamese in their 20s sit on the road and footpaths on short plastic stools, drinking beers for about 30c each and huddling together in their black puffer jackets against the cold. It's winter here.
The concierge gave us detailed advice on what to do tomorrow but I am so tired, and we have plenty of time here. Grandma's funeral is at 1.30 tomorrow, so I want to be careful and thoughtful with what I do. I keep feeling some kind of - like, inflammation in my old attachment wound, is the only way I can describe it. Mind going back to the same old sore spots, wants to worry over them, fruitlessly, then to pursue something to try to ease it.
I read Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman on the plane. Mostly I think it's about time, proposing fiction as a kind of navigation tool for the future. But I don't think I like it, because every scenario Katurian proposes has only two options, bad and worse. Even his pig story has just two options - bad for me or bad for them. Tupolski's story is the alternative that turns the ending - bad vs miraculous craft, but that doesn't work for me. Caryl Churchill's Far Away begins on similar territory - the working out of the individual's complicity or responsibility (ability to respond) to brutal power - but it ends up in much more interesting places to me. Weirdly it seems more socially mimetic as it continues and becomes more fantastic - while McDonagh seems to end up expressing something about a personal limitation? Neither of those thoughts is right, precisely. Churchill with the war incorporating animals, weather etc seems to go into some substrate of the social, into a base increment of defensive collectivity. McDonagh... what is he saying, that to save a child from the horrors of the imagination requires care plus prodigious mathematical foresight in artistry, to the point where it's inconceivable fantasy? That just seems like bullshit. And it's this elaboration - the sense that he is through all this *saying something which must be fathomed* that makes it seem weaker than Churchill's transparency.
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