About Amazon

I don’t use Amazon all that much these days, but I do find its wish list function a useful tool with which to jot down books and other products I might wish to buy (from someone else) in the near future. Except that of course I forget about my list for months at a time, and the items on it become incrementally less desirable additions to the tsundoku pile.

For some reason, today I found myself rummaging in the depths in the deepest recesses of my list, going back as far as 2006. Many of these titles ring not the faintest bell. And I muse on what version of myself thought I might want to read the following:

• Shyness and Dignity, by Dag Solstad
• The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, by Lewis Hyde
• Living Life Without Loving the Beatles: A Survivor’s Guide, by Gary Hall
• The Giro Playboy, by Michael Smith
• Dork Whore: My Travels Through Asia as a Twenty-Year-Old Pseudo Virgin, by Iris Bahr
• Beware the Lobster People, by JJ Flitwick
• Thirteen, by Sebastian Beaumont
• Yiddish with Dick and Jane, by Ellis Weiner
• Gents, by Warwick Collins
• Transparent Imprint, by Michael Barnard
• What The Actual: Exasperated Incredulity Will Save America, by Muriel Chong
• The Edgier Waters, by A Stevens
• The Amnesiac, by Sam Taylor
• Three Trapped Tigers, by Guillermo Infante
• What Was Lost, by Catherine O'Flynn
• TM: Corporate Brand - Dream #69, by Nenko Joretsu
• I Am Not Sidney Poitier, by Percival Everett
• Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, by Declan Kiberd
• Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are, by James Harkin
• The Great Dog Bottom Swap, by Peter Bently
• Gribley’s Last Conundrum, by Horatia Mannix
• Mobius Dick, by Andrew Crummy
• Callisto, by Torsten Krol
• The Last Mad Surge of Youth, by Mark Hodkinson
• How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

Except that three of these, inevitably, are titles I’ve just made up. But which one? Without looking back at the list, even I can’t remember.

Crazy Rich Asians and the irrelevance of getting things right

I’m not certain how accurate the recent story was of one Tao Hsiao, who supposedly killed himself after enduring a five-hour shopping marathon with his girlfriend. I mean, I’m sure the poor guy died, but there’s just something too neat in a narrative that has someone’s last words being “don’t you have enough shoes already?” before he leaps to his demise from the seventh floor of a Xuzhou mall. It encapsulates so much that we feel about consumerism and gender and above all the social and economic changes that have overtaken China in the past few decades that it feels more like an urban myth than a random slice of domestic tragedy.

On one level, I suppose Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan, doesn’t warrant such scrutiny, since it admits to being a work of fiction. (Incidentally, I only came across it because of a review by my dear friend Leyla Sanai, who I’ve never actually met, as is the way of friendships lately, and she’s been a bit poorly lately, so please send her all your love and good vibes.) As the title suggests, it’s a satire about a group of fabulously wealthy ethnic Chinese and there’s good fun to be had in the clash between brash ostentation and what we might once have had the confidence to define as good taste, a battle that’s going on throughout the Sinosphere. As I type this, I’ve got in front of me the menu for a Bangkok restaurant that lists scallops done three ways, incorporating the holy trinity of culinary flash – caviar, truffles and foie gras – on one plate. Maybe it works, maybe it tastes great; but ultimately that doesn’t matter as long as you’re eating something most people can’t afford. There’s a certain degree of richness beyond which you’re allowed to get things totally wrong – factual goofs, not just aesthetic solecisms – and nobody’s going to point it out. This is where I roll out my story about seeing a group of high-rolling Thai-Chinese businessmen ordering the most expensive claret on the list and dropping in ice cubes.

Back to the book. Hey, I understand how irony works and I understand that what characters say and do and think may not reflect the attitudes of the author. As you’re probably only too aware, American Psycho is one of my favourite novels, and I know that when Bateman misattributes songs by the Ronettes and the Rolling Stones we’re meant to be in on the joke. But you can’t always assume that. If one of Kwan’s characters says that a hotel is nine blocks from Piccadilly Circus tube, or that someone’s double-majoring at Oxford, should we chuckle because these silly Asians, no matter how rich they are, don’t know how British cities or British universities work, maybe because they’re too rich to have to care? Or should we hope that for his next book he gets himself a better editor?

Winter of content

Following on from what I was saying a few days ago about the degree of sincerity and commitment with which some people buy into the pop-cultural tropes of the 1980s, Boris Johnson’s recent hymn to the Bell Curve is apparently another pronouncement from on high that may or may not be ironic. But it does express the political zeitgeist, following David Cameron’s recent admission at the Lord Mayor’s banquet that his government’s whole austerity package is an ideological crusade rather than a pragmatic necessity prompted by economic circumstances.

However, the clearest manifestation of this trend is not political but commercial. In importing the US phenomenon of Black Friday – without also adopting the preceding Thanksgiving festival that gives it a wispy veil of moral justification – British retailers are at the ones at the vanguard of a full-blooded, non-ironic 1980s revival, persuading people that their social value is determined by how much stuff they have. And of course Friday’s bout of acquisitive savagery is just a curtain-raiser for the big event.

Roger Moore and the all-you-can-eat cultural buffet

Out of Bangkok for the weekend, we flick on a movie channel and find, of all things, The Man With The Golden Gun. It’s a justly derided effort, the point where knob gags and silly sound effects finally got the upper hand; the egregious Sheriff JW Pepper returns, the Jar Jar Binks of the franchise; and although some previous Bond girls had been pretty inept standard bearers for feminism, surely Britt Ekland’s Mary Goodnight was the first to be a certifiable moron? The only reason we end up watching it is to catch my brother-in-law’s cameo as a voiceover artist. (He dubbed the cocky Bangkok urchin who helps Roger Moore fix the motor on his boat, and then gets pushed into the khlong for his troubles.)

The depiction of the Thai capital is culturally confused, to say the least, especially when it comes to the martial arts scenes. Although Bond attends a muay thai (Thai boxing) bout, he also finds himself tussling with sumo wrestlers (Japanese), then confronted with what appears to be a school of kung fu warriors (Chinese), a couple of whom dabble in krabi krabong (Thai swordplay); and he’s finally rescued by a pair of feisty sisters – one speaking Thai, the other Chinese – who show off their karate skills (Japan again). And when we finally get to Scaramanga’s lair in Khao Phing Kan (now more commonly known as James Bond Island, on Thailand’s Andaman coast), we’re told it’s in Chinese waters. We’re being presented with one big, homogeneous exotic Orient, like one of those pan-Asian restaurant buffets where you’re encouraged to pile inept renditions of satay and sushi and green curry and dim sum on the same plate.

The following day we stop off at a place called Palio. It’s essentially an open-air shopping village, supposedly designed to resemble an Italian town, although the attention to architectural detail and authenticity doesn’t appear to have extended to the stuff in the shops. There are several places selling sort-of antiques in a non-specific European style, with Capodimonte knock-offs and faded French tapestries jostling against Union Jack cushions and a few postcards of Audrey Hepburn; in one, we’re serenaded by a compilation of German love songs. Lots of Thai people like the notion of Europe, and the veneer of sophistication it brings with it; but actually engaging with the details at a level deeper than a fake Gucci bag seems to be too much effort. Maybe this is Asia taking its belated revenge on 007.

In between we pay an all-too brief visit to Khao Yai national park. It’s the rainy season, so the forest is at its peak of lushness; and the macaques are as endearingly obnoxious as ever. There are meant to be wild elephants but I’ve never seen one there and neither has anyone I’ve asked. Occasionally you see the evidence of their fleeting presence: piles of dung; crushed foliage; maybe a footprint. And I wonder if someone on the park staff has the best job in the world, going out just before dawn to create teasing, hopeful hints of something that doesn’t actually exist.

I’m looking over the Wall and they’re looking at me

Yesterday, Small Boo bought one of those sparky thingummybobs that you use to light a gas hob when the built-in ignition’s gone wrong and you don’t want to get someone to come in and fix it because they’ll see how mucky your oven is. It’s called a Robotron, and perusal of the packaging informs us that it was made in the GDR. Which ceased to exist in 1990. Everything was the future once, including this: