Bonjour from Paris

Bonjour from Paris Cara - Tuesday jetlagged

Criminal Teletubbies

I admit that I am the least orangised author participating on this blog and I apologise. If you are in the mood for excuses, read on, if not skip to the next paragraph. Last week I had a deadline the day after my blog posting was due and was so swamped that I did not even have time to put up a notice to explain or apologize. I did not have time to add milk to my coffee, drank it black to save seconds. Today I am travelling so this posting will not be all that hot either.

All I have to offer today is am Icelandic news item that caught my attention last week and I found funny. Here we subtitle foreign programs on the TV, we do not dub. Sometimes this can lead to errors in translation as I have previously srote about but this time the error was technical, namely the wrong subtitles were put on a childrens program many of you will know, not for its brilliance in plot or dialog but for its bizarreness which appeals to the very young. I am talking about the Teletubbies. This was on the screen but the subtitles were from the Sopranos. Here are two screenshots borrowed from visir.is that give you an example of what went down:

Lala to Po: That was.... last week last week when you killed the dog.

Lala to Po: I know that you were high on drugs at my mother-in-law's funderal.


Good thing is, no harm done - the viewers of this particular program cannot read.

Yrsa - Wednesday

Guest Author Luke Preston

Melbourne doesn’t have anything to match the drop-dead-spectacular beauty of Sydney.

But I’ve always remembered it, from the time I spent in Oz, as an attractive city of genteel people possessed of the best restaurants in all of Australia.

It has also topped, more than once, the list of  Best Places In The World To Live.

I was somewhat surprised, therefore, to read the portrait Luke Preston painted in his new book, Dark City Blue. Has the place changed so much in the years that I’ve been away? Or did Melbourne always have an evil side that I never knew?

Either way, I’m sure the city fathers won’t be thanking Luke for this book. But many readers will.

Dark City Blue is a gritty, dark crime novel that people who like gritty, dark crime novels are sure to love.

And it’s a steal, for only a little over three dollars. (American, not Australian) Unfortunately, it’s only available, at the moment, in a Kindle format:

http://www.amazon.com/Dark-City-Blue-ebook/dp/B009DF1IBI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1351269757&sr=1-1&keywords=dark+city+blue

Today, the author is going to tell the drinkers among us how they can take a walk on the wild side in his home town.

Leighton – Monday

MELBOURNE’S MOST DANGEROUS BARS

Melbourne is a city that likes to drink. Beer, wine, spirits, motor oil, it doesn’t matter. If it’s going to get you tanked, a Melbournian will drink it. It’s a city with bars hidden down dingy back alleyways, in abandoned warehouses, vacant car lots and in the converted living rooms of people’s houses. Essentially, if you have three milk crates and a room in Melbourne, you have yourself a bar. But there are some places, that no matter how pretty the bartender or loud the music, that first step inside may be your last.

KITTENS

68 Cecil Street South Melbourne

In the world of bars, pubs and nightclubs, Kittens is the one place that just should not exist but has somehow, through some moral loophole exploited by the devil himself, survived. It’s the bottom of the barrel of strip clubs in a city with more than its fair share. Any rule that has the guts to step foot in the place is thrown out the window. The carpets are sticky, the music loud, the drinks cheap and ugly and so are the women.

The main threat of Kittens doesn’t come from the poisonous booze or the tattooed bouncers, but the punters who walk through the door and think that spraying the roof with gunfire should be part of the night’s entertainment. For some reason that I haven’t yet figured out, this happens on a regular basis and twenty minutes after it does, the girls all bail for the night and the joint resembles a gay night club, but without any of the class.

MAIN THREAT: Gun shots & STDs

YOUNG AND JACKSON

Cnr Swanston and Flinders Sts

The Young & Jackson Hotel, at the heart of the city, has existed under one name or another, since 1861. It’s played host to travelers and locals, beggars and celebrities and has witnessed the world change over the years through newspapers, widescreen televisions and bar-room gossip.

During the day, the hotel is a museum-like piece of architecture and design but by 2AM, the old war horse of a pub reverts back its good old fashioned street violence days. Drunks, young and old, plague the front bar mouthing off, starting trouble and looking for any excuse to get into the thick of it. Fights will erupt for no reason whatsoever and if there ever was a reason, nobody could remember it in the haze of the hangover the next morning.

MAIN THREAT: Being hit from behind

THE ANGLERS TAVERN

2 Releigh Road Maribynong

The Anglers Tavern sits along the Maribynong on the edge of the city and is the first port of call for all those who live out in the suburbs where good drinking holes are few and far between or altogether non-existent. Monday through to Friday, The Anglers Tavern is a nice waterside venue where the food is reasonably priced and the water setting calming. But even on those relaxing days in the sun, the horrors of the weekend are present on the blood stained concrete and the stale smell of vodka Red Bull in the air. Unlike most other bars, the violence doesn’t explode in the late night mayhem but in the traditional Sunday afternoon, booze soaked sessions. By five, the joint is packed with hundreds of people, all hammered and creating an environment more volatile than the Greek economy. Brawls break out regularly for no reason that anyone can remember and if they could, probably wouldn’t understand. So if you find yourself at The Anglers Tavern late into a Sunday afternoon, keep your eyes on the floor and if you can’t do that, you better be prepared to get your knuckles bloody.

MAIN THREAT: Riots, bashings and bad music.

THE CARLTON HOTEL (circa 2007)

The retro entry

193 Bourke Street

The Carlton Hotel was a joint you could go to after you had been kicked out of all the others... and they would take you. The entrance was nothing more than a hole in the wall that led up to the second floor where punters from all walks of life could shoot pool, listen to the juke box trapped in 1987, and drink themselves to sleep (as long as the snoring didn’t bother anyone). If you could get over the smell of the urinal, which few people could because it engulfed the entire bar, then you could sit back and enjoy a Carlton Draft at eight in the morning. If you were in the mood you could do a spot of shopping from the two-bit crims who would pass in and out like a mobile shopping service with stolen tee shirts, DVDs and whatever else they pilfered from the night. The old Carlton Hotel (because sadly it has been refurbished) was dangerous not in a physical sense, but it was your soul that took the hit. If you found yourself in there between the hours of 7 AM and 10 AM you weren’t visiting, you were home.

MAIN THREAT: A broken heart

The bars of Melbourne can provide the locations that play backdrop for those cherished memories that make up the history of your life. They can be places where the best times of your life are spent, where you fall in love or simply just the place where you discover your favourite drink. But if you’re not careful, they can fill your mind with horrific memories that your soul will never forgive. So if you’re out and about in Melbourne, having a few drinks, having a few laughs, just keep your wits about you, your mind sharp and occasionally throw a look over your shoulder -- because you never know what might be coming when you’re not looking.

The Name Game

The cellphone app referred to below

I'm in Bangkok, so it would make sense for me to write about Thailand this week, the way I thought I would every week when I joined MIE.

But there's a problem.  I've done virtually nothing here except hit my head against the next Poke.  So I've spent all my time in my own fictional Bangkok and almost none in the real thing.

Thanks, then, to Howard Marder, who sent me a piece from the Wall Street Journal that supplies the raw material for this piece. Because of Howard, I'm in Bangkok, writing about a trend in Bangkok I learned about via New York.  Who says we don't live in a new world?

Thais, like Chinese and members of some other Asian cultures, believe that names confer luck—good and bad.  I'm personally an example of this; when my first novel was about to come out, my Chinese wife consulted a numerologist about my name, and “Timothy Hallinan” came up much luckier than “Tim Hallinan,” which is the name under which I live daily life in the real world, whatever that is.  I double-checked the advantage of that name in an incense-heavy session with a Thai monk in a temple at the edge of the Gulf of Thailand.  "Timothy" came up aces both times.  So there you are: the reason I sell all these millions of books is that I chose a luckier name.

And so do the Thais, and at an increasing pace.  A female weight-lifter who won Silver in the 2008 Olympics changed her relatively brief and uncomplicated name (for a Thai), Junpim Kuntatean, into the much more prepossessing and more difficult for sportscasters  Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarakoon, and won Gold in 2012.  I remember Bob Costas (or someone) saying, "And, umm, the Thai woman has taken the Gold," and who can blame him?

There's an element of playfulness in the Thai character, and that extends to the act of changing one's name.  After all, something like half a million Thai men who believe they should have been born women live openly as Katoey, or ladyboys, many of them working in everyday occupations—bank teller, shop girl, whatever—with new, sex-appropriate names, and they usually accomplish the entirety of this rather sweeping transformation with less official attention and less red tape than an American would go through to open a bank account under a fictitious business name.  If society sees one's sex as fluid, why get all rigid about something as trivial as a name?

But things are getting out of hand.  In the old days, one consulted an expert who considered your real name, your birthdate, and your goals in life before coming up with something like Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarakoon.  These days, as name-changing enthusiasm grows, people can just go to a Website, pay the baht equivalent of ten bucks, and get the name that will lead to good fortune.  Stuck in traffic?  Use the new cellphone app.

One of the wonderful things about Thailand is that the Thai government doesn't react to absolutely everything by passing a new law.  But with the population turning into someone else at such a brisk rate, stricter regulation is inevitable (and has already begun).  Obviously from a legal perspective, the name you choose for romantic and financial success can also be seen as an alias.

So if you want a lucky Thai name, grab one while you can.

I'm not certain the Thai enthusiasm with name-changing would benefit the U.S.  After all, with the election as close as it seems to be, it's probably a good thing that Mitt Romney is stuck with the worst nickname of any president since Grover Cleveland, who was known (but only very privately) as “Toodles.”  With a luckier, not to say a less absurd, name, we might be looking at President Jaroenrattanatarakoon right now,

Tim -- Sundays

Disasters Come In Different Packages

Hello, Sandy.  Goodbye all plans for the next two weeks.  Yes, what you see at the top of this post is just a glimpse of what the hurricane that hit the US eastern seaboard this week did to my northwest New Jersey community. That’s the road between the state two-lane highway and my farm.  There were four places just like this along my road, all blocked with down trees, and I cut away enough to squeeze my pickup truck by and out onto the paved road.  I had no choice.  I had a houseguest I’d promised to get back to New York City in time to catch a plane back to Athens.  My Greek publisher decided on her way back to Greece from San Francisco that it would be nice to spend a few “quiet” days in the country.

Her visit started off quite lovely with breakfast at the local diner (owned by a Greek, of course) followed by a most memorable prelude to her wished for “quiet” time: wind, rain, wind, BOOM, rain, wind CRASH, rain…and so on.  When quiet finally came the following morning, it was accompanied by no power, no phone, no Internet, no generator.  And with two million people in New Jersey without electricity, I can assure you that living as I do at the end of a long road in the most sparsely populated part of the state, with a down power line somewhere in the middle of the woods that serves only my home, this fella will be the very last soul in New Jersey to go back on the grid.

But I expected that. What I didn’t expect was for my generator to go on holiday for Halloween. A real trickster that old &^%$.  But it does pay to do business with locals.  The next morning the owner of the company that installed the generator and his technician hiked the quarter-mile in from the highway, through the rain, carrying a new battery.  Then they hiked it again later that day to bring in something else they needed to repair it.  They’re now on my permanent good guys list.

As long as I have power I’m happy.  I don’t mind the fallen trees—as long as they don’t take out a structure—it’s why I have chainsaws.  In fact, I love my chainsaw.  It’s a very sophisticated editing tool—with a mind of it’s own, so be careful.  But unlike Scrivener, you can’t take a snapshot to save what the story was before you cut.  You can’t change your mind (or regrow a limb of any sort) once you cut.  So be careful with your edit and be happy with it. 

I made it back to NYC late Wednesday night, an easy thing coming from the west, an impossible journey from the east, and my publisher made her plane on Thursday.  I went back to the farm Friday morning to deal with the mess Sandy left (no, not my publisher, her name is Aikaterini). Here are some photos of two mega-Norway spruces that narrowly missed taking out part of my barn.  One was almost Rockefeller Center Christmas tree size.  Yes, it could have been a contender.  Alas, such disasters are part of the natural order of things.

Which brings me to another sort of disaster, and a (brief) rant triggered by Greece’s inimitable Aegean Airlines Miles&Bonus frequent flyer club.  Not only are they inept, their consumer relations skills are a cross between “the fine print says ‘buyer beware’” and “go f**k yourself.”  And God forbid if you should point out an error on their part, for you’ll never get a reply. You’re simply ignored. 

Thankfully, hurricane Sandy was a once-in-a-lifetime disaster.  But Star Alliance member Aegean Airlines’ frequent flyer club is proving to be a lifetime of disaster.

But this too shall pass.  I was assured of that Wednesday night by an oracle I found in the temple of Upper East Side establishments pictured below. Delphi wasn’t available.

JG Melon's

I feel better now.  Thanks for listening.

Jeff—Saturday

Nicht Cricket Mein Fuhrer

I have a book to finish by next Tuesday, so here's one from the vaults, a particular favourite, and one which has led to very interesting project which I'll be telling you all about in the near future.

You might have guessed from some of my blogs that I love sport. You might also have guessed from my books and blogs that I'm fond of history, too. So, when a story comes along that combines the too, you can imagine my excitement.

The Nazis hated cricket. Nothing strange there. So do half the world's population, including great swathes of the population of those countries who play what some consider to be the planet's most bewildering game. (Not me, I utterly adore it. There are two places I genuinely feel at peace - on a cricket field playing, or in the stands watching. One day I will bore you all about my teenage prowess and how I coulda been a contender.) However, what had always intrigued me, to the point where I purchased an out of print book for lots of money in order to find out, were the reasons why Hitler (that's him on the far right in the pic up top, taken during the First World War) and his pals hated cricket. The game had taken a foothold in Germany between the wars. Teams were springing up everywhere. Yet by the start of World War II there were only four teams in the whole country, all in Munich. The Nazis simply regarded the sport as un-Aryan, too British, and therefore in some way morally degenerate.

That is all I knew. The wonderfully named 'Gentlemen of Worcestershire' toured Germany in 1937 and I've always thought the story of the tour, English gents illicitly playing the noble game against like-minded cricket lovers, to a backdrop of governmental disapproval, stomping jackboots and the gathering storm of war, had tremendous dramatic possibilities. My research is ongoing, but the reasons and story behinds Hitler's distaste for the game were unravelled somewhat this week.

British journalist John Simpson has compiled a history of new reporting in the 20th century. While delving in the archives, he came across a fascinating article written in 1930 by Oliver Locker-Lampson, a British right-wing MP and Nazi sympathiser. It was about the Adolf Hitler he knew, written to coincide with his rise to power. It turns out, during the First World War, that Hitler was a closet cricket fan and thought it might be an ideal preparation for war. He wanted to know more so he approached some English PoWs who were in the same military hospital.

“He had come to them one day and asked whether he might watch an eleven of cricket at play so as to become initiated into the mysteries of our national game,” Mr Locker-Lampson wrote. “They welcomed him, of course, and wrote out the rules for him in the best British sport-loving spirit.”

Hitler then returned with his own team and challenged the British to a “friendly match”. Immediately after the end of the match, Hitler declared the game “insufficiently violent” for German Fascists. Had he played a team of Australians, it could be argued he might have formed a different opinion.

Other than its gentility, the Fuhrer had several other issues: first, with how long it took to play the game (and he wasn't the first to raise that objection, nor will he be the last.) Secondly, he felt it unmanly that batsmen wore pads to protect their legs, from which I can only deduce that he was never hit in the shin by a cricket ball from a fast bowler, because he would have been a signed-up, card-carrying believer in necessity of wearing pads if he had. It bloody hurts, and unlike, say, baseball, a good batsman has to get his foot as near the ball as possible to play the most efficient shots, which is hard to do with a fractured fibula.

“He had conned over (sic) the laws of cricket, which he considered good enough no doubt for pleasure-loving English people,” wrote Mr Locker-Lampson. “But he proposed entirely altering them for the serious-minded Teuton.”

The serious-minded Teuton never got chance to fully experience Hitler's take on cricket, because a few years later it was considered verboten to even play it. History does not record who won the game Hitler played in, but one can only assume his team lost and like all bullies he responded by taking his bat home. I reckon either that or he got a Golden Duck, which means he was bowled out first ball. Which sheds new light on the meaning of the old music hall ditty about Hitler only having one ball...

cheers

Dan - Friday

An Amazing Woman

Being a long-time educator, I always like to give little quizzes (Who got my last blog’s question right?).  This week’s quiz is perfect for this blog.  It is about a writer.

To whom was Ernest Hemingway referring when he wrote the following?  And what was the name of the book?

Ernest Hemingway

“She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.  I felt I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished for the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen.  But this girl who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers…it really is a bloody wonderful book.”

How’s that for a blurb?  I’d pay a lot for that.

Some more clues:  Her maiden name was Clutterbuck. She was married three times.  She had more affairs than quills on a porcupine.  She was best known for something she didn’t do.  If it wasn’t for a restaurateur, she would have died in poverty.  And if it wasn’t for the fact that the restaurateur read Hemingway’s blurb about 40 years after her best-known book was written, none of us would have known about her.

My aunt, who knew her, said of her that when she walked into a room, everyone knew it.  She had that sort of charisma.

She is represented in another famous book as a character called Felicity.

And had it not been for a premonition by her flight instructor, she would have died on the fatal flight that killed her lover, who had previously been the lover of the author who called her Felicity.

Sounds like quite a gal!

It is really difficult to keep track of her bedfellows, who included the son of George V of England.

As I’m sure you guessed, I am talking about Beryl Cutterbuck --- I mean Beryl Markham --- to whose bestseller, West with the Night, Hemingway was referring.

Beryl Markham

Markham was born in England and raised in Kenya, where on attaining adulthood, became part of the dashing crowd of Happy Valley.  She was a noted horse trainer, aviatrix, and bon vivant.

Many people think that she was the first person to fly across the Atlantic from east to west.  But that is not correct.  She was the first woman to accomplish that daunting feat – in September 1936.  She had hoped to make it to New York, but a frozen fuel line in her Vega Gull aircraft caused to crash on Cape Breton Island off Nova Scotia.  She survived.

Her book, West with the Night, was very well received when it was released in 1942, but soon went out of print and sank into obscurity.  Until 1982, when a restaurateur in California, George Gutekinst, read what Hemingway had to say of Markham.  Gutekinst fell in love with West with the Night, and all the associated stories.  He persuaded a publisher in California to re-release the book, which became a huge success after a PBS documentary that he produced, called World without Walls: Beryl Markham’s African Memoir.

Karen Blixen

She was found in Nairobi, in poverty and badly beaten from a robbery.  The proceeds from the book allowed her to live in comfort for the remaining three years of her remarkable life.

To wrap up a couple of loose ends:  The fatal flight I mentioned earlier that she did not go on, killed Denys Finch Hatton, who was previously Karen Blixen's lover (she of Out of Africa fame).  In the book Out of Africa, Markham is represented by the tomboy, Felicity.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there.  There are serious questions as to whether Markham ever wrote West with the Night.  One of the reasons people question her authorship is the very different style and quality of her other writings, in particular A Splendid Outcast.  There are several contenders as to who may have either written the book or contributed substantially to it.  All of them seem to have been her lovers, the most interesting of whom was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, of the Little Prince fame. 

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Boy, did this lass get around!

Anyway, I would hate for truth to get in the way of this great story.  I think that Markham was an extraordinary person in all aspects of her life.  And West with the Night is a wonderfully written book about an amazing adventure. It is a great read.

Stan - Thursday