intercultural commerce

For some reason our support staff are largely south American, I have no idea why or how this happened. I guess one person must have got the job, then recommended it to everyone else in their circle? In any case, they speak hardly any English, and every time management wants to pass one a message, I get called over to do the translating. Since the support crew know me as the sole Spanish speaking person on the “other side.” I have become the person they seek out to solve various odd issues, or when they have queries about life in this strange country. However, every time I try to clear things up, I wonder if in fact I have made their confusion greater. For example, stella (one of the cleaning ladies, a Columbian) called me over to ask me what a word meant: vegetarian. I explained that this is a person who eats no meat, but I could tell by her expression that my explanation had not succeeded. The poor woman asked me how could a person live without meat? And why? I explained that such things are common in this country, and that I myself was one of these strange non-meat eaters. At this point I thought Stella might fall over, by I tried to explain that I have an allergy and I really can’t eat meat for this reason. I thought I had got the message across, but some time later it somehow came up that one of my male colleagues was also a vegetarian, and I found myself being pulled aside again. “do you think he is gay?” Stella whispered to me over her vacuum cleaner. I responded that to my knowledge, the colleague in question was quite straight. “yes, but he is one of those….you know…..vegetarians!” and the whole conversations started again, with the end result being that although Stella accepted that I was vegetarian, she would never accept that a man could be.

Now I have come across this issue before, in and out of Latin America (like in France, as recently as ten years ago) so it was not a big surprise for me that eating habits could lead to doubts over a man’s sexuality. But some of the other questions that come my way are harder to anticipate. Recently, I was pulled over by a Peruvian, who had recently started, and had a very worried expression on his face. “who is this Paddington person?” he whispered. I had to ask him to explain, not believing he had just asked what I thought I had heard. It seemed every time he told an English person he was from Peru, they asked if he knew Paddington, and he had thus started to wonder who this famous fellow countryman was, and what he had done to become so well known in our work place. With some hesitation, I found myself explaining that Paddington…was, um, a bear….from Peru. The Peruvian guy looked more baffled than ever, and pointed out, I am sure quite correctly, that there are no bears in Peru. So, I ended up describing the entire story of Paddington turning up in the station of the same name, with a tag around his neck, and being taken in by the Brown family…..feeling that my retelling of the story sounded much weirder and illogical than the whole thing had seemed as a child. Seen through Peruvian eyes, the story did start to seem a bit odd….

Pichiciegos

“you’d have to be British to want this” complains one of the characters at the beginning of Rodolfo Fogwill’s Los Pichiciegos, the tiny 154 page novel which has been credited for helping bring down the Argentine junta in 1983.
I completely understand the character’s point. One of my first thoughts after setting foot on the Falkland islands was “why the hell do the Argentines WANT this?”
I had been prepared in advance that I was to visit a shithole. I had spoken to family friends, war vets, who had described it in gross detail: miserable weather, with snow possible at any time of the year, Antarctic winds hitting you in the face relentlessly, mined beaches, frozen food and penguins. The main artistic attraction is a garden filled with plastic garden gnomes. Why a war was fought over this place is beyond my imagination- had Thatcher or her predecessors been sensible, they would have got rid of the place long before Galtieri and co attacked. And Galtieri’s men were not up to any fighting, as Los Pichiciegos makes clear. Unlike the British, the Argentine army was made up of 19 year old conscripts, who were unmotivated, unequipped and unwilling to fight. The book has been compared to Catch-22, due to its black humour and graphic descriptions of soldiers’ lives, such as the problems of shitting when so many people are confined to a cave, and many have diarrhoea. At first this problem was solved chemically….but then disaster struck: “En esas putas islas no queda un solo tarro de polvo químico. ¿Por qué lo derrocharon? Lo derrocharon, lo olvidaron: ¡No queda un puto tarro de polvo químico! Ni los ingleses ni los malvineros, ni los marinos ni los de aeronáutica: ni los del comando, ni los de policía militar tienen un miserable frasquito de polvo químico, tan necesario. No hay polvo químico, nadie tiene.” After this, they are forced to shit outside at night in subzero temperatures, or take endless amounts of constipation provoking pills. As the war moves to its inevitable end, the characters, all Argentine deserters (los pichis) who have been hiding out in a cave and feeding themselves by raiding the pockets of deal soldiers and bartering with the British, sit and watch the remnants of their army queuing to surrender, a sad end for the army, but the end the pychis meet is even worse, accidentally gassed to death the last day of the war.
The book was published right as the war ended, riots followed shortly thereafter. It is easy to understand why.

more lists

I have been an avid reader of what I shall call travel fiction for decades. I use the term “travel fiction” as a difficult compromise- much of travel literature is clearly exaggerated or even completely fictional, yet it is classified somehow as “truth.” Meanwhile, many books call themselves fiction, yet read largely like travel books. The ones I normally like the best are those that combine fiction with travel successfully. I remember the first such book that fell into my hands when I was about 9 or 10- The Drifters by James Michener. Hardly a work of great literature, but at the time it seemed quite revolutionary to me at the time and I stayed up with my torch under my blankets in bed to find out what happened next.Soon after, my father found a bunch of expired lonely planets at the local library, on sale for 25p each. He brought them home to me and I read them all, underlining my favourite parts- from the consumption of guinea pigs in equator to growing penis gourds in parts of the Pacific. I suppose it is not surprising that some decades later I choose to pursue a doctorate in travel literature. Yet I actually prefer travel fiction, as it generally takes itself less seriously, not being burdened by the label of “truth.”

So in a fit of office boredom, I decided to construct my list of best travel fiction works. Not all the works are of great literary merit (in terms of writing, the first two are in some ways mediocre) but I included them due to the overwhelming attraction I felt to the story, its characters, its setting and the fact that it made me want to run to my closet and grab my sack, stuff in some underwear and do a runner. What did surprise me when I looked over what I had written, I was surprised how much Anglo-Saxon stuff was there, which struck me as odd. I don’t normally like reading Anglo-Saxon literature, I don’t even like reading much in English! But clearly this is a genre at which the Anglo-Saxon world excels, just as they also dominate heavily in the supposedly “non-fiction” travelogue industry….the reasons as to why can be the topic of someone else’s phd….

Just as a note though: I didn’t include Kerouac’s On the Road, as I could never get into it….nor is Greene’s the Power and the Glory on the list, as embarrassingly I have yet to read it!

 

1. The Beach. Alex Garland’s backpacker classic. I have read it several times. It is pure pulp fiction, but I find it addicting!
2. Shantaram. Gregory David Roberts. Again, pulp fiction. I never got into the mystical/spiritual parts, and I certainly do think it is more fiction than truth (but who cares!) yet the descriptions of the Indian underworld are incredible. Funnily enough, I once found myself being put up in a small hotel just down the road from Leopold’s, the café where much of the action takes place. So, some mates and I walked over to the café for a drink, and who did we run into? Gregory David Roberts. He apparently still goes there regularly, and is treated like a Bollywood celebrity by the staff. He looks every bit the ex-Australia convict he claims to have been.
3. A Moveable Feast. The Great Hemingway, who claimed “if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.” Moving back some decades to the Paris in the 20s, I read this tale of the Lost Generation in school, and liked it so much I reread it in my free time. Probably the only time I genuinely liked something on the school curriculum.
4. Sheltering Sky. Paul Bowles. Twisted tale with some unforgettable characters. Odd echoes of it reappeared in Esther Freud’sHideous Kinky, which picks up on the same North Africa to the point of destruction theme.
5. In a Free State. V.S. Naipal. A gritty combination of foreignness, sex and sleaze.
6. Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip. A surreal work written by two Soviets during the Stalin era. Basically like Borat, circa 1935, these two oddballs drove across the US, observing capitalism up close.
7. Travesuras de la nina mala. Mario Vargas Llosa. The writer hits on every hot spot: Cuba in the early 60s, Paris’s left bank in the mid to late 60s, then moving on to protests in Trafalgar Square in the early 70s and glimpses of Tokyo’s weird business culture in the early 80s. all starting from Peru, naturally.
8. Tender is the Night. Fitzgerald. Although the Great Gatsby is the one that appears to have been classified as Fitzgerald’s great classic, I always preferred this one…
9. The Razor’s Edge. Somerset Maugham. I really don’t generally like American fiction. I normally avoid it deliberately. Yet three of my choices (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Maugham) all represent a slice of Americans camped out in France in the interwar period. It is amazing how a relatively small expat community could inspire and produce such as rich volume of literature!!!
10. The Berlin Diaries. Christopher Isherwood. A variation on the Americans in Paris, this one features an Englishman in gritty and decadent interwar Berlin…..my literature teacher caught me reading it when I was about 12 and felt it was not “appropriate reading material” for some one of my age, which obviously increased my interest levels dramatically.
11. Cuba and the Night. Pico Iyer combined with El Pintor de batallas by Perez Revelte. These two have a series of common themes (jaded war photographers as protagonists, lost love) although in mood they are quite different.
12. The Asiatics. Frederic Prokosch. Published in 1935, this is another classic of the genre I suppose....Camus called it the first “geographical novel,” as its nameless protagonist zips from Lebanon to China.
13. Out of Africa. Karen von Blixen-Finecke. Ok, again, some might classify this as biography, but I am going to include it anyway….von Blixen-Finecke must have been an amazing character though, I doubt she needed to stretch her imagination too far….

Ok I had intended to make a list of 10, but I have got carried away here and should stop, before the list takes on a life of its own and extends into the hundreds….there is so much out there! And it all makes me wonder, where to next?

old boy

 As films go, it is sadistic, gory, twisted and sick.It is like a Shakespearean tragedy in the epic scale of the characters’ personal destruction.It hits all the sicko themes, from incest to torture, as the audience is treated to teeth being extracted by pliers and unforgivable sex scenes. Yet somehow you have to watch to the end. It was directed by Park Chan-wook, one of Korea’s best directors, and he did a grotesquely beautiful job. Every gesture and musical rhythm is planned, so that there is a sort of sick artistic beauty even as someone blows his brains out in a lift. There is a scene in which the protagonist Oh Daesu fights his way through a line up of baseball bat wielding thugs that ends up resembling a baroque painting more than a modern film.The film is drastically different to the mange in almost all the details, including motivation of the antagonist, who is responsible for having locked up Oh Daesu for over a decade in a private jail. Yet the central themes are the same: the protagonists life is being manipulated and ultimately destroyed by another over a trivial childhood incident. Oh Daesu seeks to avenge his 15 year suffering, and yet it is too late, his life has already been manipulated out of his control and can never be reclaimed. I don’t think I have ever seen a film more twisted.

Время для паники ещё впереди

I dont know how it is possible that some people actually even imagine the race might be close. it the citizens of any other country were voting, I am sure Obama would be leading by 25 percentage points at the very least. Yet, instead, things could still go wither way. and lots of people here in Europe (and probably elsewhere) are still expecting the worst. After all, no one imagine that Bush could possibly win in 2000 (and to be sure he didnt technically) but he ended up in the White House none the less, and years of chaos have followed. A ridiculous war has pointlessly led to the loss of tens of thousands of civilian lives, sent the US spiraling into debt, and tarnished the country's already bad reputation abroad. the use of torture in jails which hold people apparently indefinitely without trial is both disgusting and uncivilized. the Bush years are now (thankfully) ending, with one of the idiot;s final acts being a 700 billion (and rising) bailout of the banks. the country is in recession, and may be heading for depression. Kids are being taken out of school, people cant pay their medical bills, and foreclosures are seeing people loosing their house across the country. Now, given such a situation, it seems hard to imagine that anyone could possibly imagine voting the Republican party back into office, Yet the US appears to be a country of extremes, in-which religious zealots actually get taken seriously and have political clout. Their judgement clouded by irrational forces, they seem capable of making wierd choices, even one involving Sarah Palin.

I stand with Puff Daddy (P Diddy, Diddy) on this one: Sarah Palin, she scare me! (youtube "diddy blog 24 Sarah Palin") And McCain is 72. So lets all hope Obama wins, otherwise my friends on the West side of the Bering Straights might wake up one morning to the sounds of Palin, as she rears her hear and decides to obey her God's will- AND INVADE CHUKHOTKA!!