Philomathia: Lee Krasner

The Leonard Lopate Show had Gail Levin on who just wrote a new biography of Lee Krasner. Since I learned virtually everything I know about her from the Pollock movie, I'm glad someone restored this woman to her rightful place in the art world. She was an Abstract Expressionist herself, as Levin learned when she went to interview her about Pollock's legacy years ago and this she only found out because the gallery owner that was hosting the interview said, "You know, she's a painter too." She is best known for the 14 year period of her life she spent with Pollock and then for being a fierce protector of his legacy after he died in 1956. But her paintings are well regarded in the art world and do fetch high prices at auction-although, far less than Pollock's of course. Biography has a short piece about her here and here is a picture of Pollock and Krasner together, accompanied by a story about how artist/wives get short shrift in general (although there are big exceptions like Georgia O'Keefe and Frida Kahlo and since Krasner spent so much time promoting Pollock's legacy, perhaps this was partly inevitable.)

So one of the things I thought was interesting was Lopate mentioned he didn't want to get into the circumstances of Pollock's death (drunk driving accident that also killed a passenger) because his girlfriend Ruth Kligman who was also a passenger in the car at the time had been on the show. I remember her from the movie where she was played by Jennifer Connelly and which did not portray her in a flattering light. Apparently, she was a figure in the art world herself although it's debatable as to how much of that is because of her predilection for dating famous artists. She seemed to hook up with a lot of artists (Pollock of course, De Kooning, Jasper Johns, and she claimed Andy Warhol had a crush on her which, yeah ok.) And she was a painter herself-she has a website with a cross-section of her work. She died in 2010.

Final thoughts on Bangkok 8

Let's enumerate the qualities that make a detective novel protagonist, variety male: divorced, misanthropic, drinks too much or is in AA, if he has kids he is alienated from them. That's part of the reason that I thoroughly dug this book. Sonchai Jitpleecheep is a Buddhist but not above drugs or drinking if the situation calls for them (the Buddha says we must be flexible after all.) He's not married nor does he seek female companionship and is so trustworthy around women that a performer friend asks him to help her practice her act, busting balloons by shooting darts out of her lady area. He doesn't take bribes but doesn't mind the practice as he understands how it keeps the wheels turning. In all seriousness, I envy his zen while realizing what a fucked up statement that is.

I think the story could have been outlandish in other hands (murder by cobras on crank, forced gender reassignment surgery, that FBI agent who becomes instantly petulant that Sonchai doesn't want to play "Do you like me, circle yes or no"-ok, she's still ridonkulous), it was all handled well by John Burdett. Who is apparently a non-practicing British attorney in Hong Kong. I do have to wonder if the reason most of the Americans are rubes or villains (the big exception is Bradley's older brother Elijah) is because of the author's nationality.

I feel like one of the farangs described in the novel, totally seduced by Thailand although I've never been there and I obviously wouldn't be going to hang out in Patpong (well, the people-watching would be quite excellent.) I feel an Thai-themed reading jaunt coming on. After I read the book club choice for April that is. Nastrovya!

First and last for Bangkok 8

First:

The African-American in the gray Mercedes will soon die of bites from Naja siamensis, but we don't know that  yet, Pichai and I (the future is impenetrable, says the Buddha.)

Last:

Inside, our live entertainment is singing "Bye Bye Blackbird."

Naja siamensis is a spitting cobra, one of the six species found in Asia. It appears that all Najas are cobras but not all cobras are Najas.

Some great lines from Bangkok 8

Does this accurately represent the Thai police force? I have no idea but the Western way of doing things is certainly not the global way of doing things so it wouldn't surprise me.

First, I have to love any character (incorruptible Buddhist cop, or arhat, Sonchai Jitpleecheep) who mourns his partner's murder in a unique manner. Specifically, getting stoned and dancing in a Bangkok brothel where his mother Nong, a retired prostitute, once worked:

I'm pretty far gone, of course. The yaa baa [meth] has fried my brains, and on top there has been beer and ganja. The mamasan turns the music up real loud and I'm dancing a blue streak. Dancing like a tart. Dancing like Nong the goddess, Nong the whore. ...The mamasan plays Tina Turner's "The Best" on the sound system and everyone screams, "Sonchai, Sonchai, Sonchai."...Nobody remembers Bradley [the American marine and murder victim], or if they do I don't remember them remembering. I am very stoned.

Sonchai explaining the Thai police force bribery system to the female FBI agent Jones (btw, her character seems like a rare misstep in a book full of solid, memorable ones. Would an FBI agent act so slutty, needy and childish? I hope not.):

"You must understand, the Royal Thai Police Force has always been way ahead of its time. It's run like a modern industry, every cop is a profit center."

And this exchange later when Jones throws a fit over the Thai way of doing things:

"Tell me where you want me to drop you off, because what I need right now is a big fix of crass Western culture. I'm gonna go back to the Hilton, order American food to be brought to my big, bland, air-conditioned room and watch CNN until I remember who I am. This is a magic-ravaged land, you know that? Coming here has made me appreciate whoever it was invented logic, because before logic I think the whole world was like this."

"That's true," I agree. "Magic is preindustrial."

A running counterpoint is a radio show that Sonchai listens to which is a really clever, non-clunky way of cluing the listener in on the finer points of Thai psychology and thickening the atmosphere to a stew-like consistency (It's also a running joke that no matter what the topic, the host keeps returning to his favorite talking point, the growing popularity of a dangerous penis enlarging surgery among Thai men.) Here is a Buddhist monk guest commenting on Western culture:

"Actually, the West is a culture of emergency: twisters in Texas, earthquakes in California, windchill in Chicago, drought, flood, famine, epidemics, drugs, wars on everything-watch out for that meteor and how much longer does the sun really have? of course, if you didn't believe you could control everything, there wouldn't be an emergency, would there?"

(I question whether anyone is watching that much CNN in a Thai monastery but who knows. Maybe Anderson Cooper is a bodhisattva.)

And speaking of the Buddha, here is one of my favorite exchanges, between Sonchai and a young American named Ferral he has just rescued from the Hole (literally a pit outside of the station.) A little back story is needed here. The student came into the station and made a big show of dropping a small bag of marijuana at the counter. Sonchai explains to one of his counterparts the student did it so he could pay a bribe and then write about the experience on a website that specializes in stories of Americans "in peril" in the third world. This enrages his colleague who forces the student to smoke the bag of marijuana on the spot, burns the money and throws him in the hole for a few hours (which causes Sonchai to regret his honesty.) When Sonchai returns to the station, he finds the detective has left the station and the kid is still in the hole 10 hours later. Sonchai rescues him and the kid tells him he prayed to every deity he could, including Buddha who talked back (I'm sure the Up In Smoke-sized spliff had nothing to do with that):

He taps my arm. "The Buddha's great, isn't he? Terrific sense of humor. He tell you any of those jokes of his?"

"No, I don't think I've ever been quite that intimate."

Ferral shakes his head. "Cracked me up, man. Really cracked me up. Well, thanks for the experience."

...

I watch him go not without a tinge of envy. In nearly two decades of meditation the Buddha has not told me a single joke. Surely one would laugh for eternity?

When Sonchai and his late partner Pichai were young, they killed a yaa baa dealer. Sonchai's mother sent them to stay at a Buddhist monastery. The head monk was Sonchai's boss, Colonel Vikorn. Here he explains to another police colonel why Sonchai is such a pain in the ass to them:

"Tell me about yourself," Suvit says. "I mean, how did a wet little creep like you ever become a cop in the first place?"
"He was an accomplice to murder."
"Not a bad start," Suvit concedes.
"His mother's father was a close follower of my brother. He and his fellow felon spent a year at my brother's monastery....You don't know my brother. He can dismantle your mind and rebuild it the way some people take clocks apart and put them together again. Afterwards nothing works properly, but the thing still manages to tick. That's what he did with these two."

This book has some great scenes, too many for me to recreate and lots of funny moments like here where Sonchai forces his mother into finally telling him who his father was-an American serviceman who took her back to the States where she went into a culture shock freak out and ran back to Thailand:

"You deprived me of a crack at the presidency of the United States because you didn't like the food? That's very Thai."
"You got a crack at nirvana instead. What kind of Buddhist would you have been if I'd stayed in America?"
I choose to ignore this brilliant riposte. "I could have been an astronaut."
"No you couldn't, you can't stand heights."
"What did he do, what was his profession, what he a drafted man?"
"Drafted. He was going to be a lawyer."
"What? American lawyers are millionaires. I could have been a senator at least."
My mother has dried her eyes. She is a master of abrupt recovery. "Children of American lawyers all die of drug overdoses at an early age."


The whole chapter with the Russian expat former physicist now pimp Andreev Iamskoy is brilliant. I hope he returns in future books. The Buddha was a brilliant salesman because he sold nothing, literally. Now that's funny.

More research for Bangkok 8: Gold is estimable but jade is priceless

Jade figures prominently in this story and I really don't know a lot about it.

First, the Chinese character for jade (that the FBI agent points out in a store as proof of the owner's connection to China) is yu:

According to the book Chinese Calligraphy by Edoardo Fazzioli, the character represents 3 pieces of jade tied together with a string. The dot is a modern development added to distinguish the character from the one that means "king." The character for jade is a radical, meaning it's one of the base characters that form many other combinations.

I know almost nothing about Chinese script so I'm moving on before I really fuck it up to the subject of jade itself. It's actually two different minerals: jadeite ("hard jade") and nephrite ("soft jade") although people didn't realize that until microscopic examination in the 19th century. Jadeite is the rarer of the two so it's naturally more valuable. And the soft/hard designation is accurate but not that meaningful. Jadeite is indeed slightly harder on the Mohs scale. Jadeite appears in a larger number of colors than nephrite. The bright green variety of jadeite, colored by the element chromium, is called imperial jade. Because of the higher value associated with the green color, people have naturally taken to dying jade to simulate the color or passing a mineral like serpentine off as jade (its relative softness is what will give it away.) There is a WikiHow article that gives you the steps to determine whether your jade is the real deal or a rock from someone's backyard slathered in food coloring.

Jade can come in various shades of green mottled with white and in rarer instances yellow, black, pink or white. The Chinese actually valued the white nephrite and it is still valuable. There are 5 classes of Chinese nephrite if you really want to read more, the highest quality being Hetian.

Jade occupies a position in Chinese culture that extends beyond its market value. The Chinese have been using it since Neolithic times (a very hard period to nail down as it varies by region. Dates specific to jade use vary widely between sources so I'm not going to get bogged down in them.)  They only had the nephrite variety until jadeite was imported from Burma (still a world source) during the Qing dynasty, 1271-1368. There is more about China's love affair with jade here.

Jadeite was similarly valued by Mesoamerican cultures, starting with the Olmec.

The fabulous BBC4 radio series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, covered the topic of jade multiple times: an axe found in pre-Bronze Age Canterbury, a cup from 15th century Uzbekistan, and a disc inscribed by an 18th century Qing Dynasty emperor.

Finally, although the FBI agent makes a point of mentioning a jade sculpture is extremely valuable because its lack of color shows its age, I cannot find anything (yet) that indicates jade changes color as it ages. In fact, this jeweler's site says the contrary. I know it's a minor detail but it grates my cheese when a book, even a work of fiction, get some fact wrong.

More from Bangkok 8 and carbon dating the Voynich Manuscript

Bangkok 8 mentions the Hilton having a spirit house surrounded by phalluses because it it for males. Or something like that. I can't find any images of a spirit house garden for the Bangkok Hilton (the real one, not the prison) but Thai spirit houses are everywhere on the nets. And quite pretty.

This website has a selection of the various types. They are built to appease spirits and nearly every Thai home and business has them displayed in some prominent spot. They are typically birdhouse-sized although some seem to be doll house sized.  The pointed structures at the corners of the roof are intended to deflect evil spirits why they fall (why wouldn't they detract good spirits too? It's a mystery.) Here's some more about Thai spirit houses here. Interestingly, supposedly they are rarely occupied by birds despite their convenient size. They are also used in Burma, Cambodia and Laos.

I listened to this week's Skeptoid podcast this week about the Voynich Manuscript. I'd never heard of it but it's a famous medieval manuscript written in an as yet undecipherable language (it does appear to cryptologists to look like a language instead of gibberish.) What I thought was interesting was not the secret mojo that it no doubt contains if only we could just crack the code (I'll leave that to Dan Brown) but the discussion on carbon dating. They are able to date the paper but not the ink because ink isn't necessarily of organic origin. I had never thought about that before but it makes sense. They do not as yet have a reliable way to date the ink in any case and still rule out contamination from the paper materials. They can make a reasonable guess as to the age of the document however based on the paper as there is no trace residue of anything that would have cleaned previous writings off of the parchment. As paper used to be a high-priced item, this was a common practice.

It's quite pretty and has some...odd drawings in it. Here is a site with more information and images. Yale Library is its current custodian.

What I've looked up thus far for Bangkok 8

I'm loving this original mystery set in Bangkok. And bonus, I don't really know that much about Thailand. And I have to love a hero who falls apart and mourns his fallen partner and childhood friend by ostensibly investigating who might have stuffed that Mercedes full of drugged cobras and a python (no, really) but really by smoking dope, taking yaa baa (it's Thai meth, it literally means mad drug) and dancing with prostitutes. Original in a hero.

Yaa baa is apparently sometimes cut with caffeine because...the problem with meth is it just won't keep you awake?

Bangkok is really not the correct name of the city of course. It's Krung Thep to the locals. Bangkok was the original site chosen as the Thai capital but the King decided that a site across the river was better. The official name is officially the longest place name in the world. Translated, it roughly means this:

The city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city (of Ayutthaya) of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarn.

Apparently, if you get far enough into rural Thailand, there are people who won't have any idea what Bangkok is. Clearly the musical Chess flopping is to blame here.

Here is a map of Thailand that notes both Krung Thep and Bangkok on it.

Sonchai also mentions visiting a teak house so I went to look up some examples. And there I learned the world's largest teak mansion is in Bangkok. Most of the world's teak, alas, currently comes from Myanmar.

At one point, Sonchai eats papaya pok pok which is a dish of chilis and papayas that even the Thais can find hot. Here is the recipe. I like spicy stuff as much as anyone but papaya in a melange of chili sounds like a recipe for the most miserable vomiting experience of your life.


Sonchai also visits an old farang (foreigner, usually white) boyfriend of his mother's at Bang Kwang Prison which is also known as the Bangkok Hilton. It's about 7 miles north of the city on the Chao Phraya River. There is a lot more about this prison on the BBC's site here and here. The locals have little to no choice but I wonder about the Westerners who end up here. Did they not catch Midnight Express?