Considering Max Brooks' "World War Z: An oral history of the zombie war"

In the shadow of their resurgent vampire and werewolf brethren, zombies have enjoyed a renaissance of their own (ha, irony) in the past decade or so.  For obvious reasons, they lack sex symbols as potent as those found in Twilight and True Blood, but be sure, this return is just as real.  I would go ahead and estimate the origin with the release of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake in 2004 and the accompanying innovation of zombies who don't just stumble along but run and cling to ceilings.  In the years since Robert Kirkman completed his The Walking Dead series; Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising were released for the Xbox 360; George A. Romero wrote and directed Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Survival of the Dead with their contemporary social and political allegories; and Seth Grahame-Smith regurgitated Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with no allegories, original ideas, intelligent thought or fun.  Complete media saturation only awaits the inception of the zombiecore musical genre.

Like most all things that manage to attain some level of lasting popularity, the academy has begun to treat zombies with a degree of respect, that is by suggesting the monsters can be used to explain their pet political, social, cultural, literary, historical, economic, gender, philosophical models.  Max Brooks brings the same pretension to the masses with World War Z.  The narrative is global as the war is revealed through interviews with survivors.  They describe the first isolated cases, the spread, the failures, the response, the survival and the victory.  They describe it as scientists, soldiers, politicians, mercenaries, refugees, businessmen, heroes, cowards and every other conceivable position.  They describe it from China, Pakistan, Polynesia, Canada, Cuba, Australia, both coasts of the United States, space and all the other nations.

From these many perspectives, Brooks crafts something that is less story and more essay.  Like the sub-title says, it's an "oral history," not a novel.  Brooks is not so much concerned with narrative as with explications of historical and contemporary national trends in the face of an undead threat.  At the worst, his ideas are insipid.  Vacuous celebrities retreat to a fortified mansion to survive the zombie masses while their every minute is recorded by webcam.  The upper classes have no real skills and are reduced to learning to live and survive from their former housekeepers and repairmen.  At other times he does arouse some interest as he suggests that South Africa, by adapting a plan originally intended for the containment of black revolution, creates the common national response to the zombie threat and the French, tired of being the losers in every war, decide they are going to throw every able-bodied citizen into clearing Paris of the infestation and never retreat.  Unfortunately, these individual moments are lost in the greater mass and limited by the interview form where introduction, rising action, climax and denouement are compressed into a few pages, also messing up the pacing for the greater work.  Brooks gets lost, too, in the many voices in World War Z.  There are too many and too little time to develop them.  They end up being defined more by their fit to stereotypes and quirks of personality than real presence of character.

These are all fairly minor problems against the greater one of the straight-faced approach to zombies.  They're ridiculous creatures.  They shamble and moan and ask for brains.  Their bits fall off.  They can be defeated by walking away quickly.  They deserve academic pretension as much as Weird Al and Dane Cook.  A zombie outbreak means the world becomes a playground.  The ideal medium for the zombie genre is and always has been video games and their ability to fully immerse one in the freedom that only comes when there are no more police or security guards and violent fantasies have a perfect outlet in those who lack every semblance of humanity.  Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland were great to the extent they realized this.  Steal a Lamborghini.  Drive it until the fuel runs out and steal a Hummer next.  Bash in the decaying brains of zombies with golf clubs and chainsaws.  Hang out in Bill Murray's Hollywood mansion and make china plates your target practice.

Two days now

When I had told people that Demetra and I would be spending a year abroad in Kenya together, they often offered warning about what it could do to our relationship and how difficult it would be to deal with one another afterward should the worst happen.  I understood and accepted this as a possibility but a far distant possibility not worth serious consideration.  Like Germany not being awesome at the World Cup or Hitchens opting to display the slightest degree of humility.  A year together in a foreign land where we would only know each other, where we could only depend on each other, where we would be with each other constantly, where we would be dealing with children every hour of every day, where we would need to manage a strict budget, where we would be stressed unlike anything in life before meant something else to me.  It meant that if we could hack through it all and still care for one another and enjoy our time together, then there was precious little that could stop us from caring for one another or enjoying our time together.

Of these two possibilities, certainly not containing all eventualities but pretty clearly defining the polar points on which others could be compared, I was right.

One option was left for me.  By late November I had decided to propose to Demetra.  The difficult part was finding the time and place to do it.  The neighborhood near the Nakuru center was not one to take a moonlit walk through, and I wanted to make it special.  A break at Hell's Gate National Park in early December seemed a good possibility in a new place and with a little privacy, but I lost my nerve.

This was troubling as January came closer.  At the beginning of the month Demetra would be flying back to the States to take interviews for medical school and would not return until February.  If I managed to propose before then, she would be able to tell her family and friends about it personally.  I also did not want to wait another month.

In a spectacular display of atrocious timing, my malaria recurred on Christmas day.  I spent three days in bed taking more medication than food.  On the evening of the third day, I was on my back in bed on top of the covers as I was in the midst of another hot spell.  Demetra was sitting next to me writing letters to friends on her laptop.  I had asked her to stay, so we could talk and I could be distracted by how I felt.  Demetra was leaving in less than a week.  Work stress was about to be kicked up a notch as we prepared for her absence.  I made a choice.

I believe my line was, "Would you like to get married?"

She kept typing.  She either thought that I intended it in the abstract or thought my illness was greater than expected.  I posed a slight variant of the same question.  She put her computer to the side and made me rephrase one more time.  I asked, "Will you marry me?"

Two more days now and she can't take back her answer.

Six days now

During my five months of study at the Ludwig-Maximilian Universität in Munich in late 2007 I traveled enough to pick up Turkish, English and Irish stamps on my passport.  I spent a day at Oktoberfest proper and tasted Franziskaner and Löwenbräu.  I saw my first ballets and operas.  Except for the very occasional DVD, I saw no movies.

I don't necessarily regret this.  Visiting friends and new cities and seeing Carmen and Tanguera, not to mention Bloc Party and Rodrigo y Gabriela concerts, was pretty excellent.  Also, replete with such delights as the third Spider-Man, the second Fantastic Four, the third Shrek and the first Transformers films and bereft of anything of interest save Ratatouille and Stardust, the summer previous was not one to inspire hope for the fall and winter offerings.  And then There Will Be Blood, Sweeney Todd, Shoot 'Em Up, Eastern Promises, Persepolis and all the rest were released in the last four months of 2007, more than enough to turn it into one of the greatest years for American film in my memory, and I missed them because I was Germany.

But the AMC  in Spokane picked up a lot of the films nominated for the major Academy Awards for a second round, and I had my chance.  Short of funds from being in Europe when the euro peaked around $1.54, I figured the only possible way to catch up with them all was by spending afternoons in the theater on a single ticket.  Needing the confidence of an accomplice in this, only Demetra volunteered, thus fulfilling one of two life goals for her.  The first weekend we followed No Country for Old Men with Juno.  The second weekend Demetra us in sneaking past the ticket taker to the escalators and Jumper after Atonement.  Those two weekends were the start of something.

Which makes it appropriate that late in April I called Demetra.  After a few minutes of small talk, she finally asked whether I had anything to ask.  There were a solid four seconds of silence before I managed to ask whether she would like to go to Die Fälscher the next night.  There was a "The Rules" party that same night which had otherwise engaged the rest of our friends, which was fine with me.  I had a shift that night and met Demetra the theater.  We enjoyed Karl Markovics' performance, we listened to the music of Hugo Díaz for the first time, we were reminded that the Holocaust was a very miserable thing.

We went back to her apartment and managed another two hours of small talk.  Standing with a hand on the handle and the door ajar and very nearly choking, Demetra asked again if I had anything to ask.  There were another solid four seconds of silence before I managed to ask if she would like to date me.

That was the start of something else.

Seven days now

In one week's time things are going to change.  A lot.  Changes of the fundamentally sort.  Life altering, you could say.  Before that happens, there are a few stories I would like to tell.  At least two.  Maybe more.  We will see.

My first memory of Demetra is not of the time I met her.  That time we were all sitting around the table in the Hopkins House classroom.  The bookshelves hemmed in close enough that you couldn't walk past when someone was in a chair, and I was sitting to face the door.  We were all introducing ourselves.  Leslie was the miracle girl from Saipan.  Patrick wanted to go on to become director of the CIA, Supreme Court justice or pope.  Stephanie wanted to design roller coasters in France.  Andrea's father was formerly of a religious order.  Franciscans, perhaps.  But I don't remember what Demetra said, where she sat, what she looked like.

My first memory of Demetra is of the second time I saw her.  She pulled the nail from the hypnotist's nose during orientation.  She laughed.  I saw the nail again later that year when visiting her apartment.

That was near five years ago.  That was a long while ago.

Considering Meja Mwangi's "The Cockroach Dance"

David Campbell is done with pictures of African poverty.  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.is done with the stories.  Meja Mwangi isn't.  USA Today would be embarrassed by the depths of depravity in Mwangi's descriptions of Dacca House in The Cockroach Dance, and even Newsweek wouldn't be willing to repeat them as often as Mwangi does.  The cockroaches of Dacca House dance and dance often.  They dance on the ceiling and on the floors and on every other available surface.  They sleep in shoes and swarm the dirty dishes.  They have become so accustomed to their homes that they no longer flee the light.  When he wearies with these descriptions, Mwangi moves to the courtyard of Dacca House where no one remembers the last time the garbage was collected and where the single public toilet smells so foul that men and women void in the single public shower.  Beyond Dacca House there are the grease stains that are the open-air garages on River Road.

It makes an appropriate parallel for the spirits of the people.  The landlord of Dacca House forces the family that lives in the bathroom only just large enough to hold their bed to pay monthly rent.  The street mechanics have no compunction against selling car parts back to the men they stole them from the night before.  Street sellers offer only stolen clothes and rotten vegetables.  The rich never release the hounds because they were never restrained to begin.

As much as he rages against the many injustices of this world, largely in how it is perpetrated against himself, Dusman Gonzaga is content to merely exist in it.  Until the final third of the novel, when Dusman begins collecting signatures for a petition to force the landlord to perform basic upkeep and lower the rents, there is no plot, only Dusman's passing activities.  When the tires of his broken car are stolen and he fails to discover the thief, Dusman looks for someone who will buy the wreck.  He gets drunk.  He enjoys the services of a prostitute in an alley in the rain.  He visits an Indian doctor who specializes in the diseases that follow such services.  These characters are introduced, they play their roles and they never appear again.

It is a style that plays to Mwangi as he seems less interested in telling a story and developing full, characters than exploring their greater condition.  This works at times.  The history of Dacca House itself, beginning as the home for an Indian businessman, his family and extended relations and later sold to a Kenyan entrepreneur who builds cardboard dividers in the rooms to take more tenants, is fascinating.

It also makes Dance feel like a "Greatest Hits of Nairobi Poverty."  Dusman is less an original character than a type who does all the things one would expect of a poor man in Kenya with no family.  The characters he meets fit into tight roles and stand in for greater swaths of society complicit in the situation.  It forces Mwangi to fall back on stereotypes to move on with minimum fuss.  Dusman's conclusion that his white psychiatrist cannot understand and never offer useful analysis because the good doctor has never visited Dacca House is trite at best.  There is a good story to be told about Dusman's supervisor who is terrified of being replaced by a white expatriate, but Mwangi spares him only a few paragraphs.  Likewise in Dusman's refusal to reveal his tribe after arrest and a con job carried out with a white couple.  These fascinating themes and ideas are never referred to again and have no impact on the end of the story.  They are left to another writer to bring to their fullness.  Pity.

Then again, Dance was released in 1979.  Maybe stories of African and Kenyan urban poverty were still fresh and original then, and it was enough simply to recognize these topics as worth writing about.  Mwangi was doing something right.  His novels Kill Me Quick and Going Down the River Road won the Jomo Kenyatta Prizes for Literature in 1974 and 1977 respectively.

The best part of being back

I was planning once a blog post to practice answers to questions I could expect about this past year upon my return.  How was your year?  What was your favorite part?  Your least favorite part?  Would you do it again?  In the two weeks I've been back now, those questions have not yet been posed to me.  Okay, maybe by a few close relatives, but that's it. 

Conversations about the past year have proceeded along two paths.  If fellow conversant was aware of my most recent whereabouts, their first question was "Are you glad to be back?" or something on similar lines.  If fellow conversant was not aware of my activities, they would ask about how I've been since we last saw one another.  Once Kenya and Indonesia came up in my response, they would ask "Are you glad to be back?" or something on similar lines.

In both situations, my reply was the same: "Yeah, life is easy again."  It still surprises me to hear this.  It was not some specific American pleasure.  My daydreams weren't of hopping shows all afternoon at a multiplex or a two-egg omelette filled with sautéed, fine diced celery and onions.  When we bought the tickets and the flight out was temporally nearer than the flight in, when the Children's Office demanded another bribe, when KPLC cut the power, when I was exhausted beyond measure, my only wish was for the easy life in American again.

I guess the answer has surprised people.  More than a few have paused before pushing on, and I've had once to fill in the following explanation to bring the talk back to pace.  I worked hard this past year.  My days in Nakuru started at 5:30 in the morning when I would wake up the boys and prepare them for school.  Assuming there was no trouble in giving out pens and exercise books and no one was sick, the last of them would leave a little after 7.  I would start my computer and the Internet at this time to check for priority email before a director's meeting to discuss the day ahead.  Most days I would have to leave the center for a few hours to meet with school teachers or withdraw money from the bank or visit our lawyer.  When I got back, normally around lunchtime, I would still have to complete a minimum of four hours of online work, stuff like volunteer recruitment, newsletter and media, all the behind-the-scenes work necessary to keep the Foundation a viable international organization.  By the time those hours were done, the rest of the children had come back, and there was no rest in tutoring, disciplining, monitoring, playing with them until 8 when we locked them in their dorms.  I would have an hour break before walking by the dorms once more to make sure lights out was observed.  I was well exhausted by then.  No problem I was working over seventy hours every week.

With no children living at the Bali center and only a computer class or two to teach in the afternoons, life in Indonesia was easier.  I devoted most of my hours then to online work and could actually keep to the required eight a day.  Not that the stress was much better.  Something was always going wrong somewhere.  A center hadn't budgeted appropriately and needed more money for some emergency.  Not enough new director applications were coming in.  Someone didn't follow protocol in contacting sponsors.  Always something.  If there was not some fire that needed extinction, there was another fire that needed ignition.  By that time I was one of the senior volunteers with the Foundation and carried a lot of responsibility to deal with these.  Feeling as though the whole thing is going to come down around your ears without immediate action on your part is not the greatest thing for your emotional health.

Maybe those I speak with imagine life in the developing world as something more relaxed and outside the frenzy that so many Americans exist in.  Perhaps they imagine Kenyan days spent on the savanna from sunrise to sunset and Indonesian weeks with spare hours not spent on the beach or in the ocean.  Within such a dream, the only joy they can imagine in coming back is a return to modern conveniences: high-pressure shower heads with reliable hot water, flush toilets, air conditioning and all the rest.  Yeah, those things are nice, and I certainly did miss them when the water in Kenya only ran three out of four days or when I was grasping with my fingertips at the cross bar on the door to keep my balance over the pit toilet, but I got used to them.  They weren't that big of a deal after a month or two.

Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning that concentration camp prisoners who once slept in fine beds with only their wives soon adapted to sharing slats with as many as seven others, many of them snoring, under a single thin blanket.  The centers were no death camps, and I adapted as well.  Spend too much time in a nation where people can convince themselves that a decision with regard to the design and material of their flatware is of importance and you can forget what you really need.  But I will always take the country where more people have to make that choice than whether to pay the rent or for groceries that week.

Photographing Africa

I liked this piece by David Campbell, calling for alternative stories and pictures of Africa, when I first read it, and visited his blog Imagining Famine where he develops the idea from day to day.  I think he's right, for one thing.  There are pretty strict expectations when it comes to African photographs.  If the pictures deal neither with the humanitarian issues of poverty, famine and civil war nor with the tourist spectacles of nature and wildlife, they are something of a shock and take a moment to register as truly African.  To see pictures of Sudan Premier League's Al-Khartoum at practice is jarring in the same sense as seeing pictures of LeBron James hosting a barbeque.  With some thought you can recognize that these are not ridiculous images.  They do make a certain amount of sense.  Of course the Sudanese like to kick balls into nets as much as the rest of the world and surely James needs to eat, but these are not the first images we expect from either.  In calling for a conscious effort to explore new photographic themes in Africa and help people unconsciously realize that the continent and its 53 nations have an existence beyond the 'famines and coups' storyline, I think Campbell's intentions and hopes are good.

Unfortunately I really can't see how his approach is much less patronizing than the stereotypes he refutes.  It still depends upon us treating the Africans in the appropriate manner.  Where is the African agency in this?  We can throw planes full of Americans into western Europe and the pictures they bring back will not slide far beyond them and their families at the base of the Eiffel Tower or them straining to hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  Do we honestly think here, though, that these are the totality of France and Italy?  No, and it's not because Americans are doing such a great job of portraying them in their cultural fullness in Hollywood blockbusters and popular fiction.  It's because they promote themselves.  They're not waiting for Americans to treat them with dignity and tell their stories.  Their writers, filmmakers, singers, musicians, dancers, sculptors, painters, bloggers, journalists, photographers and all the rest are already doing it and have been for decades and centuries.  The answer to African stereotypes by the West is not further attempts by the West to get it right but an African response.  Kenyans telling Kenyan stories, Nigerians taking Nigerian pictures and Zambians writing Zambian songs.

Like I began, I think Campbell is right.  There is a standard plotline to African stories throughout the West that should be exposed for how shallow and incomplete it is at describing the depth and breadth and complexity of an entire continent.  The appropriate response, though, is not, necessarily, to take new and different pictures but to support those Africans already doing it.  Read Wizard of the Crow.  Listen to a Tumi Molekane album.  Make a global market for African artists and allow them to bring produce more and share more still with the rest of the world.

My just voiced complaints withstanding, should you like to see some of these alternative visual stories of Kenya and its neighbors to the north, west, south and beyond, check out African Lens.  It has some good stuff.

Back in the States

There was a week in Montana immediately after flying in to America, but now I am back in Minnesota, my home before Nakuru and Spokane before that. It's nice. I enjoy being new places and discovering the new things in them, but it is good to return to the familiar and see how it has changed, what has been built, what has been destroyed, what has opened, what has moved, what has closed and all the rest that is different after eighteen months.

It's nice to be back in the States, too, and see how it has changed in the past year. It's hard to comprehend a year away from a place especially when it feels as brief as this past one. I've tried to give it some context by imagining all the things that I have missed. A season of Gonzaga basketball. The Saints' Super Bowl victory. The Tiger Woods scandal. The emergence of Justin Bieber. The release of Lady Gaga's "Telephone." The series finales of LOST and 24. The first weeks of the Gulf oil spill. The election of Scott Brown and the rise of the Tea Party. John Paul Stevens' retirement from and Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court. The reports on Fr. Murphy's abuse of deaf children and the Church's failure to act. With the Internet, it has been a smoother return as none are surprises, but it remains strange to only be told that they are happening and that they are important. It's like a junior high English teacher trying to teach transitive verbs and subjective pronouns. You may admit they exist but seeing how they matter is another thing entirely. Most of these may not be world altering events, but at some point, they did matter and became part of the cultural consciousness, a consciousness that I missed.

Of course, it's not just the country that has changed. A lot remains the same here after just a year, but I see it differently after my time on Nakuru's outskirts and during trips into Pokot. Like physical space. Yes, my first days back were spent in Montana where there are approximately six people per square mile, but please, consider the strip mall. A shopping complex whose retail space is rivaled by that of the park lot. Absolutely ridiculous. Consider the traditional mall. The halls between RadioShack and Bath & Body Works are wider than Balinese and Kenyan highways. I have been in American closets larger than clothing shops in Nairobi.

Consider, too, the sense of that space. Bali, as a volcanic island, has beaches at the bases of mountains, and Kenya has the expanse of the Rift Valley, but these landscapes are taken as a given. Construction takes place within the boundaries set by these natural features. Rice grows in terraces alongside the Balinese mountain sides. Farms are on an incline along the Rift Valley's walls. In America, though, the land is changed to suit our needs. Hills are built for freeway interchanges, hills leveled for future neighborhoods and tons of earth shifted for the purposes of forming land better suited to knocking a white ball into a distant hole. Urban American land is whatever we want it to be.

As long ago as my months in Munich, I learned that it was a good idea to keep private English conversations quiet. It was a strong bet that someone within hearing on the U-Bahn could speak English fluently. While those odds are not quite the same in Kenya or Bali, they are good enough to keep it quiet still and speak quickly with an accent. English fluency is even higher in America, but it is has taken me aback to realize that again I can understand people's conversations in restaurants and in the halls. Feel like an awful eavesdropper now when I catch even a single phrase in passing.

And no one notices when the white guy goes by. It's good to be back.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: Wedding

Sixteen years previous I attended my first wedding and reception. It was for my mother's eldest sister. As the largest and strongest of my cousins then and now, I was the Bible bearer. Six years previous I attended my second wedding reception. It was for a long-time family friend and his Ukranian bride whom he had found through an international chat room. So, by this count, last night I increased my attendance of weddings and related activities a full 33%.

I had spent the morning and afternoon traveling to and from Songan village on Mount Batur where I collected the children's thank-you letters and pictures for their sponsors. Spending roughly six hours on the way to and from, switching buses on narrow Bali road and taking a motorbike more-or-less straight up a mountain until we broke through the clouds only rarely has never had the most beneficial effect on my mood. My bottom ends up sore from bouncing on seats of generally low cushion, my back sore from carrying my backpack and camera all day, and my hands and forearms sore from holding the rest of me tight against the aforementioned motorbike seat. Walking back down the street to the villa, I was thinking only of some time in the ocean and an evening with the best episodes of Chuck.

Instead, walking past the mosque and through the crowd that had spilled out from it into the street and the empty shops across from it, a village leader and member of our center's advisory council came out to shake my hand and, turning to show an open palm toward the entrance and the buffet line just beyond, asked, "Service?" The only thing keeping me for turning straight in was my less than adequate appearance. I went back only for Demetra. We made it back by the time the night fell. The marriage itself was long past and in the time it took me to shower and dress in the finest Kenya's streets had to offer, the crowd had well dispersed. There were still processions in with the groom, accompanied by striding men in military dress who would throw strikes in and blocks against every side; processions out to fetch the bride; and processions back in with the bride, but it was tame.

And would you know, it was fun. I hate social events where I know few to none. I hate the forced attempts to find something to talk about before the conversation draws its final breath while we commemorate its end with a further few minutes of silence. I ought to hate those especially where the conversation with most is limited to a handful of words in English and Indonesian, but it worked. I didn't have to worry about the mingling. I was free to spend time with the few I knew without trying to ingratiate myself with a host I would never see again. I said hello to the surprising number of people whom I had met in the past weeks, the kids who came to the center for classes, our teachers, the es campur woman, the nasi campur woman, another advisory council member.

And the food. The first line had brownies, pastries filled with lightly sauteéd vegetables and hard boiled egg, chocolate jellies, fish crackers and garlic fried peanuts. That was the snack line. The buffet line had chicken on a stick and cow on a stick, both in a peanut sauce; ground fish on a thicker stick; beef in a curry sauce; chicken meatballs, bigger fish crackers and spicy hot potatoes bits. Know I now why all the shops on our street were closed for the past week, and women just sat in the emptied rooms peeling garlic. Tasty times. I'm a terrible vegetarian.

I'm really glad I went. In just these two months, Bali has celebrated something like three public holidays, and I've twice seen roads stopped by processions to temples. A lot goes on around here, and I was missing it all. I had no idea, and then I get invited to this. It was a nice surprise. It was a good end to my time here.

A final point. After Kenya, Bali was a relief in so many ways. Yes, there was an ocean and black sand beach not more than a hundred meters from the center. Yes, children only visited the center for three or four hours a day providing in their absence a very appreciated quiet. Yes, I could cook for myself. Vying with these all for tops, people didn't care as much that I was white. I still stuck out and drivers would pull off the road in front of me to ask if I needed a ride, but kids weren't singing mzungu when I passed. Then the newly weds ask Demetra and I to take a picture with them. Before the military troupe. Before their brothers and sisters. Before their parents. Yeah.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: The Weekly Kid: Some girl

I'm sorry, but I don't know her name. She came to the Balinese dance class last Wednesday, and her name is amidst the three on the sign-in list.

Which makes this a great opportunity, in my final edition of 'The Weekly Kid' as I will be flying back to the States this Tuesday at the completion of my year with IHF, to let people know that we support more than those children who live at our centers. We also host English, math and computer classes that any children in the community can attend. If you would like to support one, please visit the site.

Considering "The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition"

Hemingway's legend precedes him. Not his reputation, mind you. His legend. It goes beyond a general recognition of the superior quality of his writing and his preferred themes. It goes into his very life. I don't know how many other writers can pull this off. Tolstoy and Dickinson, definitely. Eliot, Vonnegut, Woolf and Salinger, maybe, to a lesser extent.

About Hemingway's work I know that he once wrote about a man deep-sea fishing and wrote more than a few times about World War I and the Spanish Civil War. I also know that he won a Noble Prize for Literature. About his life, I know that he drove an ambulance in World War I. I know that he practiced journalism for a spell and that its style had a lasting influence on his fiction. I know that he spent a lot of time in Paris. I know that he was a chronic alcoholic. I know that he died in Key West.

It's a fascinating experience. I wouldn't call it a pleasant experience, but fascinating is appropriate. I read his stories and look for evidence of this personality and character, those instances where the reality touches and informs the fiction. Heminway favors protagonists who are writers and reporters, most often on the fringe of the action rather than in the thick of it. A good many stories are set in and around and throughout Spain, Italy, Florida and Cuba. The characters drink a lot. They drink at the end of work. They drink in boats. They drink in cars. His sentences toward the brutal in their lack of adornment and pointedness.

It's a foolish exercise. What writer doesn't draw upon their life experiences, their philosophies, their family and friends to create their stories? A teacher read to my class in elementary the memoirs of Gary Paulson. Later that year he read some of his stories, The Raft and The Winter among them. I was disappointed to discover just how many of the scenes and incidents in those were drawn from his personal experiences. Know enough of a writer and one will find that knowledge reflected in their works without effort.

Which is what makes the departures from what one would expect knowing the stories of Hemingway all the more interesting. By all accounts, Hemingway lived his life outloud. He sought the parties and did not flinch from attention. His characters are nobodies and outsiders. At best, they are the ones recording the exploits of heroes and the successful, or their guides in foreign lands. They are cold and withdrawn men. Even those like Manuel Garcia in "The Undefeated" who seeks glory in a final bullfight or Harry in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" don't seem very much to care. It's something else to mark the passage of time, not so different from taking another drink.

What does this reveal about Hemingway that is not immediately present in his biographies and profiles? Are these characters, seemingly so closely modeled on him in their professions and political interests, signs of how Hemingway saw himself? How he wished he were?

Is this even the right question to be posing? This one may be a bit much to ask now. It goes to the very reason we read. Do we read to learn about the individual or about the universal? Do all the particulars of the story in the characters and their concerns, the settings, the times matter only insofar as they reveal the universal? Do all the particulars of all the stories only matter insofar as they ultimately reveal the greatest particular, the writer alone? I tend toward the former, but that's less the point here. Hemingway's legend distracts. It intrudes on the stories and breaks them apart.

Of the stories themselves, I find it odd that they would remind me so much of Chekhov when Hemingway held him in such little regard that he wrote, "Chekhov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer." For both of them, it's difficult to even refer to the majority of their works as stories. That would imply a beginning, middle and end to the action, but those are difficult, if not nigh impossible, in most of the pieces. It would be better to describe them as sketches. Characters are introduced. They enter a place. They interact with others. Nothing of consequence happens. They leave. The piece ends. Resolution is rarely offered, but that's understandable as the conflict itself, if at all in existence, is buried deep.

So, like in the case of Chekhov, it was difficult for me to enjoy most of what I read by Hemingway. I like it when things happen in stories. Except for "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "The Capital of the World," "The Undefeated," and "Under the Ridge," not incidentally my favorites in this 650-page collection, things don't happen in Hemingway's short fiction.

Not to say it isn't good work. Even the most obtuse in the collection has the ability to affect in a hurried read. It's just difficult, and when that difficulty is repeated from the beginning every few pages, it becomes too much. Reading straight through this Finca Vigía edition was a terrible idea. Hemingway's stories and sketches work best as palette cleansers that strip all the unnecessary out of the story and even some of the necessary in an early challenge to see what really is essential. Hemingway is even kind enough to provide palette cleansers to his own stories with fifteen "chapters" interpolated between stories. It's telling when as much action is depicted and implied in these one and two paragraph pieces and their scenes of war as the full surrounding stories.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: Yet another ad in Travel + Leisure

You can find the original pictures used in this ad among my Picasa albums at a higher quality and without cropping. The design isn't that exciting. I like the first two ads I submitted more.

Yet this July this ad will mark the third time I'm published in Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia. That's pretty cool. Now I just hope it brings in some sponsorships.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: Canang Sari

These are canang sari. You know now more than I do about Bali than I did in my first two weeks here, which is really rather disappointing because the things are omnipresent. My first few days in Bali I had to walk nearly an hour to the nearest Internet café, and I spent most of that time avoiding these things because those that hadn't been set in front of every home, store and restaurant along the way had blown farther along the side of the road to fill in those spots they hadn't been set. I was absolutely terrified of treading all over one and having some grandmother pop out and shake her finger severely at me for not paying due respect to the island's ancient traditions.

A week or two later I finally bummed around Wikitravel's entry on Bali and figured out what they are. Turns out it's totally cool to walk over and on and through them. This amazes me. Near as I can tell, canang sari are a big deal. People don't just drop them on the ground and call them good. They may buy the leaf wrap and a few flowers from a grocery store, but they stock it full with their own incense, rice, cigarettes and coffee grounds. When they put it down, they throw water around. Then they come back around later in the day to do it all over again. I've had bemo drivers take a break to set cananga sari down on the way to the next city over while the rest of the passengers waited patiently. The Balinese even have waist-high stone thrones to hold them in along the roads and inside courtyards and keep the thrones with a checkered wrap.

But they don't care what happens after the carang sari are down. That picture at the very top? Like Ankh-Morpork, canang sari are just stacked on the remains of that which came before. Ants take away the edible offerings. They dry brown and are swept away, and no one is bothered.

I don't know, but if I had put that much effort into something on a daily basis, I expect that I would make a bigger deal about what happens to them when I go back inside. I guess that's part of why we travel, though, to discover new things and new ways of being.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: Snorkeling at Tulamben

I know there was a time before I learned to swim, but I don't know exactly when this was. I do recall very nearly drowning in the headwaters of the Mississippi River. That would give some indication of a time I knew no stroke or crawl. It's likely that incident, combined with a mother who was a former lifeguard and a father who enjoyed bringing me along on fishing trips, is the cause of this inability to remember a long-distant past where swimming was not a part of my skill set.

As any proper boy should, I preferred swimming in lakes and rivers to swimming pools. As such, I can't remember either a time where there wasn't at least a single set of fins, mask and snorkel in our towel closet. Their promise is of seeing underwater, watching walleye and perch passing by and crayfish scuttling between rocks. Their power over the young is an undeniable one. In practice, this didn't work so well in the dark of Minnesotan waters. The state name comes from Ojibwa or Chippewa or something and means "cloud-tinted water." Maybe that's true in southern Minnesota. A better name for that in the north would maybe "mud-tinted water" or "Coke-tinted water." Your hand is just a lighter brown stain in the water twenty-centimeters before your eyes in Lake of the Woods. Any farther and it's not even that.

So it wasn't for a few more years that a snorkel and mask proved of any use to me whatsoever. That first time also happened to be in Key West. This past Sunday, I went snorkeling again, this time around the wreck of the USAT Liberty outside of Tulamben. To be clear, the Lonely Planet Guide calls it the best and most popular dive site in Bali. It is still nothing in comparison to Key West and its waters clear as the air above, teeming aquatic life and stretches of brilliant coral. Snorkeling outside of Tulamben the water was so murky that I couldn't see our guide or Demetra if they were more than a few meters to any side though the water was clear down to fifteen at least, it bordered on crowded with so many snorkelers and divers crowding in around the sunken mass and much of the coral had taken on the colors of the rusted hull.

That's not to say it was without its particular pleasures. I kept pace with the divers below, popping the biggest bubbles they released and letting the rest wash over and around me. I saw the electric yellow and blacks of angel fish, others with brilliant blue lines running along their fins, others still no larger than a minnow but brighter than an Easter egg. A school of silver fish the length of my forearm circled around me, away from their Neanderthal cousin, the size of quality club sub-woofer and depth of my extended hand.

I am an unusually fortunate person.

Totally worth the sunburn. It was the first time I bothered to put on sunblock this whole year, and I fully expect to be in pain another two days at least. I haven't had one this bad since first grade.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: The Weekly Kid: Redita

I've got nothing on Redita except that I am very much impressed with how light his hair is. That is unexpected.

As always, if you can afford to give up a dollar a day or even just a few dimes, the money can go a long way toward helping to pay for a child's education and daily needs. Please consider picking up a sponsorship. Thanks.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: Alila

I remember the twins who were my classmates throughout elementary and high school. Our graduating class was small enough that they could divide all of us between three teachers in each grade. Since the two of them were never allowed in the same class, the odds strongly favored my sharing a classroom with them each year. I remember every spring they would leave for a week and return to show us a home video of their travels in Mexico. Every year.

I remember being jealous. My family never went to Mexico. It did go to Canada on occasion, but that was hardly noteworthy. I could walk to Canada. Neither did we spend our vacations in hotels. We eschewed cities entirely and spent our vacations in tents and sleeping bags on grounds of varying levels of hardness. When I was younger, before Boy Scouts and Little League and part-time jobs and all the rest put certain demands on my time and that of my parents, they were weekend trips throughout the state parks of Minnesota, Lake Bemidji, Old Mill and all the rest. When those certain demands were being made of my time and that of my parents, these weekend trips were consolidated into two-week spectacular journeys through the Canadian Rockies, Banff, and Jasper and all the rest.

I appreciated these trips only sporadically. Having plenty of time for reading on the days it took to drive out and back. That was appreciated. Not spending our nights in hotels and days visiting museums was less appreciated.The rest of the time I was too focused on the misery of the current hike to have any other opinion. Within a three-day span we could spend the day going up a mountain which may have challenged several regions of Hell for searing heat, another day moving from boulder to boulder to protect ourselves against whipping snow on the way up another mountain, and the final day, otherwise very pleasant, being chased up by German and Japanese hikers twice my dad's age. A body of water of a temperature and size and cleanliness appropriate for human entrance would have gone a long way toward alleviating some of these complaints, but these were necessarily limited at such high altitudes and where the buffalo roamed.

Nonetheless, years afterward, nigh on a decade by this point, the experiences have left something of a mark on my personality. Mostly in that my vacations are frugal affairs. I have not managed to arrange camping trips of my own, but this past year, whenever I left Nakuru, the nights were always spent in the cheapest rooms. The bathroom and shower in our Mombasa hotel were shared among the entire floor, and our Nairobi rooms were shared with roaches. If we paid more than five dollars for a full meal, we were paying too much.

Sometimes, though, I grow weary of these austerity measures. At those times, I am especially glad that I am now in Bali and not Kenya. When the feeling edged along the edge of my consciousness earlier this week, Demetra and I walked to Alila, a boutique resort not more than ten minutes from the center. Our destination was its Seasalt Restaurant. For near three hours we moved from side to side in our megibung, a shared dish. A cone of turmeric rice rose from and the center and dishes of green beans tossed with bean sprouts, pork soup, chicken on a stick, green beans with duck, fish grilled in a banana leaf with a brown paste, pork on a stick, sliced jackfruit surrounded it. Salts of three essences, lemon, chili and sesame seed, were available if the seasoning left something to be desired. I dearly wish I had memorized the menu because the full names of the accompaniments with their three-sentence descriptions do the meal more justice than my words. The meal was completed with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream and pieces of durian and a cup of black dark Balinese coffee.

It was, in a word, wonderful. There was time to nestle comfortably in the chairs and reflect. So I reflected, sipping soda water with ice and looking out on the manicured lawns of a green to rival that of the Emerald Isles. Past them was a clear pool surrounded by lounge chairs and sun umbrellas. As the sun set and darkness grew, hidden lights singled and illuminated tended palm trees.

I reflected, even given the time and funds to do so, would I spend my vacation in a place like this? I thought no. I still think so. I think it may be that there are two drives that push us on our vacations. The one is relaxation, an opportunity for rest and pampering. Not only are the stresses of the daily grind of work and career left behind but the very need to care or plan for ourselves. The restaurant serves your meals. The people clean your bed and clothes. At a place like Alila there is no real need to leave the resort's confines but should you ever feel the need to leave its pool and spa and culinary school behind, it organizes bike rides to its organic farm in the mountains and scuba trips. The people at the courtesy desk have your life handled.

The other impulse to vacation is adventure, the chance to explore a new city, a new land. It's about not knowing what you will find. When something is found, it is different and new. Adventure takes energy and an acceptance of inevitable frustration, but it comes the closest to gnawing clean the marrow of life. Alila is replaceable throughout the world. There were resorts in the same style outside Mombasa, and I am sure there are others in Costa Rica and on the coast of the Mediterranean. The only difference between them being the color of the skin of those serving you.

I am not going to say which is better because we all need something different at different times, but I will say that one does offer the opportunity for much better stories.

So, thanks, Mom and Dad, for teaching me this impulse and making my trips beyond the borders of the United States that much more interesting.

World Cup

The World Cup begins in ten days with the match between South Africa and Mexico. For the first time in my life, I care. Three different blog posts on the sport in the past months may have suggested this. I know the schedule and will be watching games. I don't know what games the Indonesian channels will broadcast, but I will watch games, be they Ghana and Serbia or be they North Korea and Portugal.

Now I am presented with a dilemma: for whom should I cheer?

The obvious choice would be the United States. It is, afterall, my home nation. But it's not so simple. I don't like cheering for winners. I didn't like the Bulls when Michael Jordan played with them, I didn't like the Cowboys in the early 90's or the Patriots in the early 00's, I've never liked the Yankees, Manchester United is quickly moving up my list of despised franchises, and I can imagine nothing more boring than an NBA Finals culminating in a best of seven between the Lakers and Celtics who together have more than half of all the championship trophies. Where is the fun, the excitement, the satisfaction in cheering for a team whom everyone expects to win and the headlines the next day exclaim that it's their first championship of the decade?

On the face of it, the States wouldn't appear to break this rule. No one expects them to win. They should be able to get out of their group, but anything more than that is going to be overachieving. The difficulty is that the States are too good at every other sport. That America is always among the top three nations for medal counts in any Olympics is a little gross to me, so why should I cheer for their dominance in yet another competition? It's alright to cheer for Canada in hockey and Indonesia in badminton because that's all they have going for them, but does the United States really need another trophy to demonstrate how collectively awesome it is? It doesn't help either that their uniforms make them look like pageant models.

My second choice would be Germany for the family and for having lived there, but how much better of a choice are they than the United States on these criteria? Though they may not top the Olympic medal counts, they are always near the top, and they actually have World Cup championships in their history. At least Adidas can design a good jersey.

So who's left? Not terribly much. New Zealand is just too trendy, but I do appreciate that their nickname is the All Whites, a nice complement to their All Blacks. I can feel like I belong with that team. I guess I could swing for Greece for Demetra and since they really need something to be proud of after dragging down the euro, but I kind of want to cheer for an African nation. I would like to go for South Africa, but I would also like to have a pony in it past the group stages. Can't go for Nigeria after they, along with Tunisia and Mozambique, slapped around Kenya in the qualifying stages. I could go for an East African nation, but that's not happening for another decade or two.

By the admittedly weak criteria of best team names and jerseys, the only choice is the Ivory Coast. Their jerseys are a brilliant orange, and there's an elephant on their right shoulder. The team name, the Elephants, stomps all over Les Bleus or Die Mannschaft. That is a lot of awesome. Unfortunately, they are captained by Didier Drogba, a highly unpleasant man.

I've got nothing. Oh well. Here's to South Africa advancing to the knock-out stages, to France crashing and burning for their handball and child prostitution scandal, to New Zealand living up to everyone's hopes, to a new nation taking the World Cup and to a little excitement in the tournament.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: The Weekly Kid: Seri Kasih

This would have been a more interesting picture had I taken it a week ago when I last visited Songan. I stayed about two hours in the village to observe a class and distribute the TEP money, and Seri Karish did not once take a pink scarf from her mouth. I guess she was sick or something.

So, if you are looking for a little way to make the world a better place now, please consider picking up a child's sponsorship. For no more than a dollar a day, you can pay for their education, their medicine or their daily needs. It makes a difference.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: Traffic

I am not sure whether the traffic is worse in Bali or Kenya. To be sure, drivers in both nations proceed with an identical reckless abandon for their safety and those of others. Riding someone's bumper to get a headstart when trying to pass them and the two trucks ahead of them in a single go is common on these opposite ends of the Indian Ocean. It's even more exciting in Bali where the dominance of motorbikes mean one will pass a truck even though a motorbike is coming in because they can both safely fit in a single lane at the same time. Accidents were regular. I saw trucks on their sides on the roundabouts at least every two weeks, and in my one month in Bali, I've already seen one motorbike bite it on a turn and another graze a fellow rider.

So, to determine the relative safety of the roads in Bali and Kenya, one must look beyond the personalities of drivers to the roads themselves and their environs.

Road quality. Though all roads with the exception of the highway running from Nakuru to Nairobi are marked with potholes and rough enough that driving on the shoulder is a more comfortable alternative to the asphalt, I have to prefer those of Kenya to Bali. First, I am fairly certain there are single lanes on the American freeway wider than the two-lane road circling Bali. They like it narrow, and there is no shoulder, just a ditch. On the other side of the ditch the trees and homes and businesses are already pressing in. A free cow could be thrashing through the forest, and you would have no idea until hooves touched asphalt ten meters ahead of you because you couldn't see it through the flora a few seconds earlier. That may explain why the drivers are so fond of leaning on their horns and letting anyone know that they are coming through. The only times I remember it being clear on one side of the road are on the mountain switchbacks which just produce a whole other set of problems.

Safety equipment. It's generally ignored in both nations. I would estimate that somewhere around half of all motorbike riders and their passengers in Bali wear helmets, and the only times I remember people in matatus snapping shut their seatbelts were when we slowed at a police checkpoint. Indonesia does take this category, though, by virtue of its public transportation not forcing me into calming breath patterns. Any trip where the bottom of the matatu didn't fall out beneath my feet, a bare rod didn't tear my shirt or an overheated engine didn't melt my shoes was a good trip in Kenya.

So, in the absence of real research into the statistics of road fatalities and insurance claims, I claim it a tie. Actually, I think I'll give Kenya the slightest advantage. They don't have a roving motorbike gang who spray painted the anarchy symbol in pastel blues and purples on their white T-shirts and thus inspire other drivers to aim for them.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: Rice paddies

I feel bad for Kansas and Iowa and all those other states which effectively function as enormous corn and wheat fields. "America the Beautiful" may celebrate the amber waves of grain, but I understand spending the better part of a day driving along I-35 through a landscape decorated only with said waves and punctuated by the occasional period of a town and its exclamation point of a water tower can be rather difficult. That may be why people prefer they remain fly-over states.

Rice production in Bali, however, is absolutely celebrated to the point that its become part of the island's attraction. A voluntourist is staying at the center now, and she told us about her time in Ubud where she spent a few hours on a tour of the paddies. The guide told them all about the techniques and process and local superstition toward walking sunset. That's when the red lights appear. I just don't ever see the Nebraska State Tourism Board managing something like that.

Not that I blame Bali for taking advantage. The rice paddies are absolutely beautiful. It has something to do with the rest of the island's environment, I think. If you can see more than a hundred meters in any particular direction it means you're either on the ocean shore or nearing a mountain summit. It's almost claustrophobic how tight in the coconut palms and banana trees and other flora press in. But then you break through into a field of rice paddies and see the terraces climbing the mountain sides, it's something special.

It's the utter sameness of the mass farms that gets to those driving by, I think. It's the sense that so far as you can see behind you and so far as you can see ahead, there is no difference, the sense that you can fall asleep for two hours and wake up feeling that you have moved no farther ahead because the landscape is the same. This is not the case with rice paddies. They take their shape according to the contour of the mountain and every edge is defined by a line of long grass just wide enough for a single person to walk along to the next paddy down. Scrub trees dot these lines. At the occasional intersection a crude hut stands on stilts to give the farmers a break in the shade. Taut line are pulled across paddies with sheets of plastic and torn cloth tied on and blowing in the wind to keep away birds. So far as I can tell, there is no set season for planting and harvest. I have seen workers wading through the mud with hoes or pushing on cows with plows. I have seen them planting seedlings. I have seen them cutting and beating the long growth. I have seen the stubble patches and the fires lit on them. I have seen all of these stages from a single vantage point on a single day.

I hope this picture does something to capture their magnificence.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: The Weekly Kid: Pikolih

Kid lives in Songan. It took all morning to drive their last on motorbike, and then we went straight up a mountain. That's hardcore. And uncomfortable.

As always, if you have a little extra money, maybe as a graduation gift or some such thing, please consider using it for a sponsorship and making a full education possible for someone else.

Considering Lorraine Heath's "A Duke Of Her Own" and Phillipa Ashley's "Decent Exposure"

A certain pattern can be discerned in my reading choices this past year. The gracious may call it a passion for the highest of the arts. The less gracious would aim more closely toward snobbery. The first six months were filling in gaps in my experience with the canon. A few hundred pages of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, about an equal amount of Borges and O'Connor, significantly less Mann. The last six months were trying to catch up on the contemporary scene. Names like Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum and Rebecca Curtis may not be as well known, but I found them by picking through the winners and runners-up of the past few years of some shorty-story collection contest.

The collected short fiction of Hemingway finally broke me. Somewhere around page 300 I couldn't take another scene of people drinking and being miserable. I needed a break. That break turned out to be Lorraine Heath's A Duke Of Her Own and Phillipa Ashley's Decent Exposure. They are grocery store soft-core porn at their pinnacle. Duke has the bare-chested, dark-haired beefcake exploding his blonde woman into ecstasy as she holds him from behind. Exposure has a blonde of Bratz-proportions, only replacing the melon head with a pin head, prancing across the cover with a calendar showcasing a bare-chested, dark-haired beefcake.

The similarities don't end with the covers. They open with fiercely independent women embarking on new projects and careers when their old lives don't live up to their expectations. Lady Louisa Wentworth becomes a chaperone to eligible society women. Emma Tremayne pitches a nude calendar to raise funds for the local mountain rescue team's new headquarters. Ironically, they could have had a much better title by having Emma pitch a bake sale. Anyone for Buttered Muffin? These bold life choices bring them in contact with men of clipped sentences and withheld backgrounds. Duke Hawkhurst is pledged to another woman but is redeemed by being a duke. Will Tennant left a woman at the altar but is redeemed but wanting to turn some lakeside real estate not into a resort but playground. From the beginning their public irritation with one another can be nothing but repressed lust. Heath and Ashley explain. "She did not stand out in a crowd, but she did manage to stand up to him, and he found that more intriguing than any physical characteristics she might possess." "Emma had to concede, even though it went against all her principles, that at six feet three, dark-haired and disgustingly handsome in a rugged, rough-edged kind of way, Will Tennant was the only one she'd have paid good money to see naked."

There are some misunderstandings, there are some revelations, there are some sex. Poorly written sex. "Raised up on an elbow, he leisurely allowed his heated gaze to roam over her flushed body like a gentle caress. She wanted to pull him down, ask him not to torture her so." Curse those gentle caresses. Curse them to the eternal inferno. "Accepted now, the brisk tenderness that was Will. Like now, as he freed her of the tight restraint of her bodice." I'm not entirely convinced women are writing these scenes. They read an awful lot more like a man singing the song of himself.

Then there are some more misunderstandings, some tears, some more revelations and finally a promise of eternal love.

Of course, that all is not even to begin to touch on the similarity that stands behind Duke and Exposure, propping them up and making their very existence possible. I am, of course, speaking of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice. The characters, the story arc, there is not an original idea in the whole. Hawkhurst even has a younger sister of whom he is terribly fond. Why even bother complaining about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? People have been scamming on Austen for decades if not since the very publication of Northanger Abbey.

Sometime ago I proposed that higher education should make an effort to teach its students why the canon is the canon by placing it against garbage contemporary literature. This view has not changed. Duke and Exposure have only inspired my return to Hemingway.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: Generosity

I cannot remember a time I ever dealt well with overt generosity, the giving of unexpected gifts and offer of a few dollars or a meal or whatever. It's not that the offer made me feel small or inferior or any of that. It's that I always took it too easily. One in three times, maybe, an attempt at a declination before accepting the repeated offer. A few minutes, a few hours later I would feel guilty because I couldn't reciprocate. They have treated me kindly. I have not treated them as kindly.

Which does not make Indonesia the ideal place for me. These are some generous people. I walk by our cleaner's two-room home to ask a single question on the way to buy groceries, and he offers me fresh fruit. I wait any longer, and he brings out a full loaf of bread and single-serving cups of water. One of our teachers in a mountain villages stops by his home to pick up some supplies before we meet the students. I get full lunch and a month's worth of fresh chilies from their garden in that time. Even the people who don't know me. If I'm waiting to meet to meet someone for the first time but they just happen to be out for the moment but will will soon be returning, out come the friend bananas and tea and coffee. They don't even give me a chance to say no. They just appear with cups and plates in hand.

The reciprocity guilt goes double here because even on a stipend I make way more money than them and have way fewer expenses when I live at the center, and it freaks me out when they hand me a whole loaf of bread and any similarly sized mound of food. I pull of a bite or two when the one I'm waiting for arrives. Three minutes late we have our stuff figured out. Am I expected to finish the whole thing? No one's watching me.

So I get tricky. Last few times locals have visited the center I've offered them tea and coffee and popcorn. Only once have I seen it all finished, even in a little glass. I have my answer.

Five year anniversary

Demetra says that she wouldn't be able to recognize herself from the person she was this time last year. We were graduating from Gonzaga then. It was before Bali, before Pokot, before Nakuru, before an awful lot. I agree but would push it even farther. I wouldn't know myself one year to the next going well back to high school. I started college. I lived in Munich for five months and traveled a not inconsiderable portion of Europe alone. I served at the House of Charity for one and a half years. Priorities shifted. Interests and tastes changed. New experiences were had. And that's really why I'm glad I started Spice of Life just a month before graduating from Lake of the Woods High School and kept it reasonably well maintained since then. It's allowed me to keep tabs on my life, on my growth.

So I'm glad to announce the five year anniversary of Spice of Life. In celebration I offer this list of my favorite posts from the past two years, the last time I looked back over this oeuvre.

Learning Argentine Tango: Astor Piazzolla's "Tango: Zero Hour"

I don't only dance the Argentine Tango. I like a little Salsa. I like a little Cha Cha. I like a little West Coast Swing. I never listen to those songs outside the dance floor, though. Tango I do listen to. Gotan Project, Hugo Diaz, Osvaldo Pugliese, Benito Calvez, Astor Piazzolla I listen to. Their compositions, their performances floor me. To move with them is something else.

Vegetarianism

I like to think that I chose to become a vegetarian for the right reasons. I like to think that so much that I shared with the greater public in a fairly permanent forum. I still agree with those reasons though they seem a bit sillier after my time in Kenya and seeing that butcheries were fairly common. To be more in line with the solidarity thought, maybe it would be more appropriate to move toward a highly limited meat stance instead of a no meat stance.

Considering "Outliers: The Story of Success"

Know what's more fun than writing about things you enjoy? Writing about things you abhor. Know how to make yourself superior? By taking down someone that so many others seem to think so well that they send every single one of his stupid, stupid books onto the best seller lists. It's such a cathartic hatred.

Considering "Fix" and "Kirschblüten - Hanami"

Thank everyone for the Spokane International Film Festival. No debate, the two best movies I saw in theaters in 2009.

More flash fiction

What? Someone enjoyed Christopher F. Heinrich's scribblings in fiction enough that they invited him to compete in an eight-person tournament? Oh yes. Just ignore the part where he went out in the first round.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Bribes

It's less fun to write about things you hate when they are actively screwing over you and those you care for. I managed to avoid deportation, though. That's good.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Fourth journey into Pokot

It's nice to think that it's simple. You give someone a few ladles full at a soup kitchen. You give someone else some scoops of maize flour and a quarter of a cabbage. They go through the line and say thank you. It's not always that way. You get through it.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: White

Turns out racism sucks, even when a large portion of it involves getting sucked up to. Who'd have thought?

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Rugby

Turns out I enjoy rugby. Who'd have thought?

Nine and a half months in Kenya: Departure

Nine and a half months of the most different, challenging months in your life cannot help but matter to and change you. I fail but try to capture some of that here.

Please, if you have any favorite posts of your own, mention them and link to them in the comments. I'm always interested to hear what you has interested you and provoked the most thought and response.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: The Weekly Kid: Dewi

DAY-we

Actually, like most every Indonesian I've met so far, she has three names, and I'm really not sure which one is appropriate to call her by. One might be a surname, one might be a formal name, one might be a casual name, I have no idea. We're going to stick with Dewi for now.

Maybe you only just realized that it was Mother's Day and would like to get her something more meaningful and original than chocolates and flowers. Please give sponsorship more than a thought. It's a gift that lasts throughout the year as she will receive a picture and letter from the kid every month that the sponsorship lasts.

"Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story"

A Nigerian author whom I'd never before heard of, talks (link courtesy of Katie's mom) about the importance of understanding that a person, a people, a nation, a continent, cannot be understood entirely through a single perspective. It's a simple message but an important one. We grow lazy too easily and forget that there are rich as well as poor, sick as well as healthy, good as well as bad in Africa and somehow fail to realize that Sudan is not Chad is not Morocco is not Kenya is not South Africa. Americans, I feel, should be particularly sensitive to this when we realize so clearly that New York is not Florida is not Texas is not California is not Alaska, but we make the mistake, too.

Now, we just need to read some more stories. Of the top 25 selling books within the 'African' category of 'World Literature' on Amazon.com, there are thirteen different writers. Five are Nigerian, four are South African, one is Kenyan, one is German, one is Australian and one is American.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: Waves

Three days now I have not once gone swimming in the Pacific since my arrival. I like to think there are good reasons for this. The first time an unexpected call from a friend in Germany went long. The third time we got back from Bangli village at sunset. The second time it was raining. In retrospect, that does not sound such a legitimate reason. What? Was I worried that I would get wet?

I made up for it all today. It was threatening rain again, and the wind was going as hard as I have seen on the island. The shore was higher than I had yet seen, and the waves were beating in. I paused on the shore to consider. The waves were large. They were cresting regularly. I didn't know the force crashing in. I didn't know the force pulling back. It could be dangerous.

Then I saw some local squat in maybe a foot of water for a quick bath. If a local could do that much, I could manage to go in all the way. I went back to the house to change.

I know I've swum in waves like these before. My memory may be exaggerating their size, but those coming in when the school band made its trip to Florida were worthy of note. My memory did not exaggerate their thrill. We rode The Incredible Hulk and all those on the trip. They didn't compare in the least to the Atlantic Ocean, and they don't compare either to the Pacific Ocean. To watch a wave twice your height coming in, to feel the water pull away until what once covered your knees is now only at your ankles, to stagger up and have just time for a swallow before the next comes in, those are exciting.

Rush forward a few feet to catch it before it crests and be gently pushed along. Take a few steps back and feel it crash down on you. Turn your shoulder into it and plant your feet to try and withstand it. If the wave doesn't, the current pulling back from the shore does knock you. The small waves I jump just to say I can. The large ones I dive under and through. For a blink I feel that I have cheated the water this time, and then it all comes down on the small of my back.

I have a bruise on my right shoulder and cuts where the wave drove me into the sandy bottom. I should have more. I was lucky. This ocean can do better.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: The rain

It rains a lot in Bali. Or I could just be a wimp. I'd have to check on that with my friends from Seattle or who spent a term at Oxford or who have lived on a coast. It was raining the day I arrived. It proceeded to rain at least once a day for the rest of the week. Then it took a turn for the sunny for the next. We've come back around to the rain for the past three days.

We get the whole range of rain's textures and depths in Bali. There is the drizzle where you hardly even realize it's raining until it comes to your attention that your shirt is a bit darker in color and a bit heavier than when you left the house. The sweat from a good 5k gets you more wet than a drizzle. There is the drip where the water manages to band together for a few good drops that, again, aren't enough to get you really wet but are enough to make it look like you struggle with getting the water from the cup into your mouth. There are the sheets. The rain comes down with a density and speed that you know even the potent combination of umbrella and raincoat are not sufficient to keep the wet out. I even saw lighting during today's sheets. No thunder, but there most certainly was a flash.

Sheets are not uncommon, and they do a pretty effective job of holding up all traffic while coming down as most people here ride motorbikes. They've adapted. When the rain starts coming in and a poncho isn't enough, they head for the nearest house. Doesn't matter if they know who it is. They just go and are welcomed. I went to a village about an hour outside the center to take care of some work for sponsorships. About halfway through the drips started. Not a minute after I took the last picture it turned into sheets. They let us hang out in their house for the next hour or so. It happened in Jakarta, too. I had gone into the neighborhood with the kids and other volunteers to deliver some fliers for the next month worth of classes when the sheets came. Kids got us into some house. I don't think they knew them at all because no one was talking, but they brought us tea while we waited another hour or two.

It's different. I can't imagine it ever happening in the United States. Even if you weren't getting around by car and totally ensconced against the rain, your first choice would probably be to duck into a bookstore or gas station or whatever. Doesn't really work here. Not nearly so bad as Kenya, but most stores here are little more than holes in the wall. Not a terrible lot of shelves and racks to browse before the owners start getting frustrated, but they would probably have no problem with me in their house. It's different.

Two and a half months in Indonesia: The Weekly Kid: Ramadhan

I know nothing about the kid except that he really likes Naruto. The letter to his sponsor is covered with Naruto fighting the kid in blue and that swirly ninja symbol. Still, he and others like him deserve a sponsor. If you have a little extra money, maybe as a graduation gift, please consider using it to pick up a sponsorship.

Considering "An Anthology of East African Short Stories"

One of my regrets following my five months in Munich was that I never really indulged in the culture. Okay, I did make it to all of the Pinakotheken (der Moderne thrice) and went to the opera (thrice), but the only music I listened to was the stuff Molly enjoyed enough at the pubs to find on YouTube, and I only went into bookstores long enough to buy texts for classes and Schiller for my grandparents. I didn't even take the literature class offered by Junior Year in Munich. Terrible, I know. I wanted to come back from Germany and be able to speak mildly intelligently about its culture and current. Had anyone asked me, the best I could have managed would have been, "The Englischer Garten was nice." It's a disappointment that I have never totally successfully purged from myself.

Coming in, I knew I would have more than twice that time in Kenya. I did not intend on making that mistake once again. Didn't really matter. Kenyan culture in the snobbish, highbrow sense, doesn't really exist. It doesn't even much exist in the pop sense. It's understandable, I guess. When money for discretionary spending is not exactly plentiful, and when your market is flooded with knock-offs and copies from the Western world and doing just fine, that isn't much of an incentive to start creating original work.

Sure, there is some Kenyan music. Mostly atrocious rap and gospel that makes me wince when I'm not doubled over in pain from it. There is benga, derived from Luo instruments and melodies. That's a Kenyan original. Strain yourself to the limit and imagine dumbed-down reggae. Benga is not exactly my favorite.

Thus the burden fell to literature to carry the torch of the Kenyan highbrow. I only picked up An Anthology of East African Short Stories, collected and edited by Valeria Kibera, on one of my last trips into Nairobi, and I didn't finish reading it until the week before I left. Now I know why Kenyan and East African literature is pretty well unknown in the States. It's not very good. Pretty terrible most of the time, in fact.

Consider this line from Jonathan Kariara's "Karoki." "He was a ridiculous little man, and Wahome, and the world, had a right to laught [sic] at him. A fit of laughter caught him, his neck muscles welled up with laughter and he spluttered as he saw himself for what he was." Clichés and bizarre imagery are, sadly, not unique to this story. Bernard Mgui Wagacha writes in "Who Am I?" "Now to be compared to my mother in cowardice is a serious insult to me. I rush at that spittle and rub it off furiously - and thus throw down the gauntlet."

Neither is the dedicated march to the theme and urgent need to bring everyone else along and make sure that they do not deviate from the course. Leonard Kibera wants you to be clear that executions invite mobs of spectators at a loss of their own humanity. "We, the brave men, seemed to drop our heads down in chorus and pressed together. With shame? Even that I cannot tell. But I found myself moving away - backing out? - towards home, tail between my legs." The feeling of hand holding is only drawn further out the editor herself as follows every story with a series of exercises that question the symbolism of certain acts and characters and prompts you to imagine yourself in the narrator's position.

It's really quite unfortunate because there is some great potential in these stories. Take the first paragraph of "Karoki."

"He was losing his teeth. His two front ones had grown alarmingly long of late, narrowing down almost to a point where they emerged from the pale gum. Now one had dropped off; the other, still standing, distorted the face slightly to the left. Looking at him you felt as if he had received a vicious slap to across the left cheek, a terrible slap which had made him wince, contracting his facial muscles to one side, and that somehow the face had not relaxed from the blow."

Not to say there are no good stories at all. One of the best of the anthology is Sadrudin Kassam's "Kingi," where the young narrator is drawn into the home of a pied piper. Interestingly, Kassam and his narrator are ethnically Indian. It's a story of the outsider's fascination with his home and its people, his parents' fear of it, and the man's obscure intentions.

Straight up, though, the best stories in the collection are by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Not surprisingly, he is also the only Kenyan whose writing is known and published in the West. In a sense, his stories in this collection are stereotypes of what one would expect from Kenyan writers. "The Return" is about a young man returning to his tribal village, freed from a detention camp during Mau Mau. "A Mercedes Funeral" is a microcosm of the possibilities available to Kenya following independence and how it all was squandered and eventually forgotten. They are very Kenyan stories in the sense that writing about the fall of the Berlin Wall is very German and about Escobar is very Colombian. If you have any passing knowledge of these nations, you know of them.

It makes me uncomfortable in a way. I absolutely respect Thiong'o's skill with words. He knows how to pace a story as the narrator of "A Mercedes Funeral" pauses his story to order another round. He can weave words together. He can understate things and slow burn them. I also acknowledge that detention during Mau Mau and the trajectory of Kenya following Kenya are immensely important to Thiong'o, and that national events like these have a place in literature. War and Peace contains the Napoleonic Wars. What bothers me is that he is the most famous Kenyan author, if not all of East Africa, that may be in due in so small part to the fact that he writes about things you would expect an African to write. It's like the West is desperate to prove that they can appreciate a real African writer and that they're totally open minded toward his African stories. It's like having a token black friend and always reminding your other friends that he can speak in ebonics and is really black. Would Thiong'o be as famous if he had preferred to write domestic dramas? I fear not. As this quote I pulled from Wikipedia which had pulled it in turn from The East African Standard says, "... it is very difficult for writers like Meja Mwangi, Francis D. Imbuga and Jared Angira to enjoy Ngugi's prominence, because the paths they have chosen are smaller. They do not directly draw from history."

It's unfortunate that these three and maybe another two or three are the only stories I have any interest in returning to later out of some eighteen. I picked up two novels before I left: Thiong'o's Petals of Blood and Mwangi's The Cockroach Dance. Maybe Kenyans are better at the long form. I can only hope.