I gather from the comments of some of the fans of the program W Strone Sztuki (Towards Art) on Polish Radio 2, now discontinued, that they do not like the new program Jest Taki Obraz (There is such a painting) which replaced it for the same reason for which I do not like it. The new program is... well, American. It discusses contemporary art as if it were the same category of activity as the classical arts, so you get Van Eyck and Damian Hirst side by side (indeed, you get entirely meaningless comments like "Van Eyck inspired Damian Hirst"); often discusses works from which I tend to shrink -- the sort that belong in the other room; and when it does discuss works which I like, which belong in this room, it discusses them in ways which strike me as either vulgar or dumb.
Or, usually, both.
But above all, in American ways: whole programs are nothing but a repetition of what the participants gleaned in American art criticism. A better -- more honest -- title for the program would be "American Theory of Art in 100 Objects".
With such a title, the program might be considered a kind of popularizing program. Such programs do have their place, they are a kind of translation project, I suppose. But if so, then this one does not qualify because it does not translate well: it does not translate into Polish -- a language traditionally used in polite society in Poland -- but into some horribly mangled and perverted, degrammatized and gracelessly foreignized thing. Its so grammatically and phonetically inept that it sounds... unschooled, retarded -- the foreign terms used are both formed and inflected no better than an elementary school kid from the provinces might.
Thus, for instance, today's program talked about dezajnerzy, by which the participants meant projektanci (designers). It's a bad import: anyone who speaks English half-decently knows the word is pronounced [dih-zahy-ner] meaning that the Polish equivalent, if one were needed, should be dyzajner.
Of course, the participants wanted to use the word dezajner because it sounds with it (American), whereas the word projektanci sounds -- well -- old (Polish). But if that is the case, then why not have the program in American English? That would sound even more with it. Better yet, why not make the program in American English and air it in Texas and leave us alone?
More to the point: when we use the word dyzajner because it sounds better than its equivalent projektant, we are engaging in a kind of deception. Our message is not merely the equivalent of the English concept "designer", for which purpose the word projektant would do just fine. The meaning of the term dezajner is "a cool, fashionable person engaged in the old business of projektant which this person makes very exciting through his superior coolness". Clavell's readers will fondly remember the dwarf deer; Orwell's -- The Ministry of Truth.
Like any attempt to pervert language, the exercise is deeply suspect.
Just how suspect is made apparent by a parallel from the anglification of Japanese politics. When a Japanese politician uses the new word manifesto instead of the tried and true seiken kouyaku, he replaces a familiar, legible word, made familiar by its frequent use and additionally transparent by its being written in ideograms which make its semantic roots abundantly clear; he replaces this word with an unfamiliar word which is on account of its unfamiliarity naturally hard to grasp. This new word is slippery by virtue of its lack of dictionary definition, and its use allows the speaker to be vague, to make uncertain and deniable claims and promises. In short, the use of the word manifesto is intentionally deceptive.
Five hundred years ago the great astronomer Copernicus described the phenomenon known in English as Gresham's law; he was not the first to discover it: Arab scholars had written about it two hundred years ealier. The principle is summarized in the dictum that bad money drives out the good. In other words, when the government begins to debase the currency by issuing coinage with lower metal content, people prefer to use it to make payments (thereby getting rid of it) while they hoard the good money, with the result that the good money disappears from circulation.
We better take care.
If it is true that good writing depends on good thinking, then, it follows that good thinking depends on good language -- a language which is clear, or, as the evangelist puts it "Yes, yes, no, no". When we have debased our language and replaced it thoroughly with the new, useless coinage, a language of vague images rather than clear meanings, we will become even dumber than we are already.
You have been warned.
Feb 20, 2011
Feb 6, 2011
Lying about ugliness
It is customary for women to make fun of men for being the silent types, by which they mean -- not talking through their problems like "normal" people should. But it is often not possible to talk about our problems: first, because our interlocutors generally do not understand them -- as most for instance do not understand that it really does upset me to be in ugly rooms, surrounded by ugly, badly dressed people; but, more importantly, because by talking about our problems honestly, we tip our hand. For instance, if I were to tell anyone that I have never overly loved my mother (i.e. never particularly desired to have her company, approval, or sentiment), my interlocutors would most likely say (or at least think) that I am cold, selfish and ungrateful, by which they would in fact understand that I am not likely to develop and emotional co-dependency and therefore not easily emotionally manipulated.
It would of course be all true, but unwise to advertise. People are willing to enter into barter with us when they think that they can easily have the better of us; if they suspect that may not be the case, they will simply refuse to play along.
And this is the reason why we do not talk through our problems, not because we are tough or silent or because we want to pretend that we are.
*
Now, not being able to talk to anyone is a bad thing, because it prevents us form dressing our true thoughts in words and therefore from taking a closer look at just what it is that we think we are thinking. My purpose here is to write things which I could never write in any of my public blogs -- so that I can see what they look like once they are dressed in words. Things such as as my finding that I have never overly loved my mother: which, once I have written it, makes a lot of sense to me.
(There is a downside to writing here, though: the honest view of the world, when one surveys it, is truly very dark; if taken seriously, it discourages any human contact at all).
*
Or writing openly, for instance, that looking at ugly people depresses me.
To say this seems unkind, but it is an aesthetic fact. The ugly may tell us all they want that slighting them on account of their ugliness is unfair, or even immoral, but the truth is that we pretty people simply cannot help ourselves, and trying to be otherwise is like putting a lion on a vegetarian diet -- both we and the lion will simply wither away. Of course, we pretty people have to keep mum about this fact for fear of offending the uglies -- and the timid -- and one consequence of that silence is that all public discussion of aesthetics is fake, missing its central element: the way experience of beauty differs between the pretty and the ugly.
Keeping mum about our true feelings regarding ugliness also has a negative impact on our own selves: forced to dissimulate about the way we feel about ugliness and the uglies -- which, given that the uglies are in massive majority we must for strategic reasons -- we sometimes manage to convince ourselves that we do not mind, thereby losing the clarity of mind and purpose needed for successful pursuit of happiness. It's a rare man who can talk and behave as if he thought or felt some way without letting that thought or feeling confuse his self-perception. Not speaking about ugliness, its dangers and effects, not confronting what it does to us, not staring the truth in the eye has a debilitating effect on us. Unrecognized beautism drills within us like the worm of unrecognized homosexuality might an ostensibly male man.
It would of course be all true, but unwise to advertise. People are willing to enter into barter with us when they think that they can easily have the better of us; if they suspect that may not be the case, they will simply refuse to play along.
And this is the reason why we do not talk through our problems, not because we are tough or silent or because we want to pretend that we are.
*
Now, not being able to talk to anyone is a bad thing, because it prevents us form dressing our true thoughts in words and therefore from taking a closer look at just what it is that we think we are thinking. My purpose here is to write things which I could never write in any of my public blogs -- so that I can see what they look like once they are dressed in words. Things such as as my finding that I have never overly loved my mother: which, once I have written it, makes a lot of sense to me.
(There is a downside to writing here, though: the honest view of the world, when one surveys it, is truly very dark; if taken seriously, it discourages any human contact at all).
*
Or writing openly, for instance, that looking at ugly people depresses me.
To say this seems unkind, but it is an aesthetic fact. The ugly may tell us all they want that slighting them on account of their ugliness is unfair, or even immoral, but the truth is that we pretty people simply cannot help ourselves, and trying to be otherwise is like putting a lion on a vegetarian diet -- both we and the lion will simply wither away. Of course, we pretty people have to keep mum about this fact for fear of offending the uglies -- and the timid -- and one consequence of that silence is that all public discussion of aesthetics is fake, missing its central element: the way experience of beauty differs between the pretty and the ugly.
Keeping mum about our true feelings regarding ugliness also has a negative impact on our own selves: forced to dissimulate about the way we feel about ugliness and the uglies -- which, given that the uglies are in massive majority we must for strategic reasons -- we sometimes manage to convince ourselves that we do not mind, thereby losing the clarity of mind and purpose needed for successful pursuit of happiness. It's a rare man who can talk and behave as if he thought or felt some way without letting that thought or feeling confuse his self-perception. Not speaking about ugliness, its dangers and effects, not confronting what it does to us, not staring the truth in the eye has a debilitating effect on us. Unrecognized beautism drills within us like the worm of unrecognized homosexuality might an ostensibly male man.
Feb 5, 2011
Self-talking cure
Recently, by accident, the old wounds opened up. For a month I was miserable remembering how my mother tormented me and how cruelly my father, when I rebelled, rejected me.
How strange is our memory: it has been twelve years since then; six since I even remembered about it last; but now the wounds opened up and it was as if they had been cut only yesterday.
Strangely, what cured me -- quite suddenly -- was not to reflect on how undeserved it all was; and how decent I had been throughout; but the opposite: to reflect on my mother's good reasons for having treated me as she had. In some way, her love for me had been spurned, rejected, unrequited, disappointed: I had fled from her to Asia.
After all, I realize this now, I fled to Asia only in part to get away from America, but also, and perhaps mainly, to get away from my mother's demands on my time and emotions. I could argue all day, of course, that she had no business loving me as much -- or, to paraphrase a philosopher, wanting as much from me, which is, in fact, the same thing; that it was unreasonable of her to expect that I would put her above my own ambitions or my own lovers; etc. But there is no arguing with facts, and the facts are these: she did raise me expecting me to make up to her for the sacrifices she took for my sake unasked; and I refused.
Did she have the right to feel spurned? No. Had I asked her to make these sacrifices for me? No. Was I right to rebel against her demands. Absolutely.
But is it understandable that she would feel spurned?
Yes.
So the story isn't, in fact, what I had thought all these years it had been: that I'd loved my mother and she rejected me. It is the opposite: that I had rejected her long before that, long before she set out to hurt me and withdrew from me my father's love.
Realizing this suddenly parted the clouds. Not because I understood how she had felt, but because I convinced myself that it was me who did the ditching first.
The unexpected therapeutic effect of this realization showed me in stark relief how our psychology works: we don't really care to see ourselves as just -- there is actually no satisfaction in that; we just want to see ourselves as having dealt better than we got, justice be damned. We're not very different from baboons really.
How strange is our memory: it has been twelve years since then; six since I even remembered about it last; but now the wounds opened up and it was as if they had been cut only yesterday.
Strangely, what cured me -- quite suddenly -- was not to reflect on how undeserved it all was; and how decent I had been throughout; but the opposite: to reflect on my mother's good reasons for having treated me as she had. In some way, her love for me had been spurned, rejected, unrequited, disappointed: I had fled from her to Asia.
After all, I realize this now, I fled to Asia only in part to get away from America, but also, and perhaps mainly, to get away from my mother's demands on my time and emotions. I could argue all day, of course, that she had no business loving me as much -- or, to paraphrase a philosopher, wanting as much from me, which is, in fact, the same thing; that it was unreasonable of her to expect that I would put her above my own ambitions or my own lovers; etc. But there is no arguing with facts, and the facts are these: she did raise me expecting me to make up to her for the sacrifices she took for my sake unasked; and I refused.
Did she have the right to feel spurned? No. Had I asked her to make these sacrifices for me? No. Was I right to rebel against her demands. Absolutely.
But is it understandable that she would feel spurned?
Yes.
So the story isn't, in fact, what I had thought all these years it had been: that I'd loved my mother and she rejected me. It is the opposite: that I had rejected her long before that, long before she set out to hurt me and withdrew from me my father's love.
Realizing this suddenly parted the clouds. Not because I understood how she had felt, but because I convinced myself that it was me who did the ditching first.
The unexpected therapeutic effect of this realization showed me in stark relief how our psychology works: we don't really care to see ourselves as just -- there is actually no satisfaction in that; we just want to see ourselves as having dealt better than we got, justice be damned. We're not very different from baboons really.
Racims without the coloreds
Polish racism is a fascinating phenomenon: it is entirely theoretical: it serves no purpose; it is entirely disinterested.
Western-European racism of the past several centuries had a purpose once: it was a useful ideology with which to justify foreign conquests: the coloreds were stupid, and therefore the White Man had to intervene for their own good. Today, in Western Europe racism appears on the wane -- mainly because the traditional roles have changed: Asians and Africans are today our customers, and increasingly -- investors. And customers, well, you know, our customers are our masters, as the saying goes. Therefore, the dominant mainstream ideology in the West today pretends that we are all equal, whether white or colored. What's more, it leans towards the sycophantic: after all, if you are trying to sell somebody a product, it's a good idea at least to say that you admire their culture.
Polish nineteenth century antisemitism, as ugly as it was, made sense, too: if you are a poor, lower-middle class semi-professional and find it difficult to compete with others on the basis of job skills alone, antisemitism can be a useful tool: the anstisemite says -- just as the South African racist did -- "Don't hire the dirty so-and-so, hire me". It's ugly, but it works.
But today there are neither Asians nor Blacks in Poland (and only 7,000 Jews). Hating them therefore serves no purpose. It is entirely theoretical. It is -- disinterested. It is, as it were, racism pure, unsoiled by self-interest.
Its source is probably the very strong desire not to be a B-class nation anymore; imagining oneself member of the Great Ruling White Race probably helps us with low perception of our own worth and status. Perhaps, also, a strong desire to join the imagined Western Team (which, basically, means The A (for American) Team) also plays a role. For people who have not thought about the issues much, the Western team seems to be European, Christian, and white. (The idea that the Western Team may really be about law abiding, human rights and personal liberties is probably too sophisticated for most of us). Strongly desiring to be on the team, we want to be European, Christian and white. And, a little like the new boy in the playground, we feel that expressing strong animosities towards those who aren't on the team will somehow buy our way in.
Ironically, our outspoken racism has the opposite effect: it embarrasses precisely those into whose sympathies we wish to creep.
Symbolically speaking, our racism is a retread. Economically, we have graduated from driving previously-owned German cars, but only in time to test drive some previously-owned German ideas.
Western-European racism of the past several centuries had a purpose once: it was a useful ideology with which to justify foreign conquests: the coloreds were stupid, and therefore the White Man had to intervene for their own good. Today, in Western Europe racism appears on the wane -- mainly because the traditional roles have changed: Asians and Africans are today our customers, and increasingly -- investors. And customers, well, you know, our customers are our masters, as the saying goes. Therefore, the dominant mainstream ideology in the West today pretends that we are all equal, whether white or colored. What's more, it leans towards the sycophantic: after all, if you are trying to sell somebody a product, it's a good idea at least to say that you admire their culture.
Polish nineteenth century antisemitism, as ugly as it was, made sense, too: if you are a poor, lower-middle class semi-professional and find it difficult to compete with others on the basis of job skills alone, antisemitism can be a useful tool: the anstisemite says -- just as the South African racist did -- "Don't hire the dirty so-and-so, hire me". It's ugly, but it works.
But today there are neither Asians nor Blacks in Poland (and only 7,000 Jews). Hating them therefore serves no purpose. It is entirely theoretical. It is -- disinterested. It is, as it were, racism pure, unsoiled by self-interest.
Its source is probably the very strong desire not to be a B-class nation anymore; imagining oneself member of the Great Ruling White Race probably helps us with low perception of our own worth and status. Perhaps, also, a strong desire to join the imagined Western Team (which, basically, means The A (for American) Team) also plays a role. For people who have not thought about the issues much, the Western team seems to be European, Christian, and white. (The idea that the Western Team may really be about law abiding, human rights and personal liberties is probably too sophisticated for most of us). Strongly desiring to be on the team, we want to be European, Christian and white. And, a little like the new boy in the playground, we feel that expressing strong animosities towards those who aren't on the team will somehow buy our way in.
Ironically, our outspoken racism has the opposite effect: it embarrasses precisely those into whose sympathies we wish to creep.
Symbolically speaking, our racism is a retread. Economically, we have graduated from driving previously-owned German cars, but only in time to test drive some previously-owned German ideas.
Royal panties
I am unable to make up my mind how to feel about Princess Royal's new line of sexy lingerie. Is it more dumb -- trading the long term value of the royal brand for a quick profit on a ridiculous product; or more pitiful -- a princess aspiring to be... a fashion designer?
What's next? Personal trainer?
What's next? Personal trainer?
The Cambodian border ado
Watching the unfolding Thai-Cambodian border conflict is like watching a surrealist comedy: Monty Python could not have come up with anything more absurd. In one statement, for instance, the PM promised to solve the land-title problems of those Thais who live in the disputed areas. I read it at breakfast and nearly choked to death on my egg: if he does that, then Thais living in the disputed areas will be better off than the rest of the nation -- 95% of Thais don't have a clear title to their land because the state has failed to build the necessary legal infrastructure where it is perfectly free to do so. Clearly, it's in their favor, then, if Cambodia should dispute not just 4.5 square kilometers but the whole of the country. But seeing my gym assistant this morning shake his fist at the pictures of Cambodian army on TV I realize that he at least has not stopped to think about it.
Feb 4, 2011
The tale of two cities
A funny thing happened on the way to the dentist: arriving at the waiting room I was assailed by the sheer ugliness of everyone there: misshapen faces, flabby bodies, shapeless feet, very bad skin, cloudy eyes, dressed in rags, with uncombed, stringy hair. The waiting room, equipped "utilitarian" -- cheapest paint and chairs unrelieved by a single picture or flower; windowless; with low ceiling -- also smelled -- on account of the "carpet" -- an idiotic idea in any climate, but absolutely deadly in the tropics. I was compelled to wait nearly thirty minutes while trying not to mind the fetor and averting my eyes from the room and towards the off-grey walls.
My toothache turned into a headache.
I returned home depressed.
This is life in the big city. In the small city, people are perhaps not better looking, but they take care to dress decently -- iron their shirts, match colors, sit properly on their chairs instead of slouching. They comb their hair. They decorate their waiting rooms with a flower or a picture.
The people here on the other hand don't do a thing to look decent. Are they so demoralized by the ugliness of the environment? Do they not bother to make themselves look nice because they know the waiting room will be relentlessly ugly and so will be everyone there? Have they -- given up? Or perhaps they never had the aesthetic sense to begin with? Are they born aesthetically blind? The way people in my apartment building can sit on the hot chlorinated jacuzzi and not suffer skin irritation from the hot acid like I do?
I spent the next few days locked up in my apartment, not daring to go out. This has happened on several occasions before, when the relentless ugliness of a place got the better of me. I got that in college, in America; the ugliness of that place cast me into a long depression which I only managed to cure by leaving. Later, I suffered the same in Taipei -- and ended up leaving soon afterwards. I will leave here soon, too. I must.
Does this happen to you?
My toothache turned into a headache.
I returned home depressed.
This is life in the big city. In the small city, people are perhaps not better looking, but they take care to dress decently -- iron their shirts, match colors, sit properly on their chairs instead of slouching. They comb their hair. They decorate their waiting rooms with a flower or a picture.
The people here on the other hand don't do a thing to look decent. Are they so demoralized by the ugliness of the environment? Do they not bother to make themselves look nice because they know the waiting room will be relentlessly ugly and so will be everyone there? Have they -- given up? Or perhaps they never had the aesthetic sense to begin with? Are they born aesthetically blind? The way people in my apartment building can sit on the hot chlorinated jacuzzi and not suffer skin irritation from the hot acid like I do?
I spent the next few days locked up in my apartment, not daring to go out. This has happened on several occasions before, when the relentless ugliness of a place got the better of me. I got that in college, in America; the ugliness of that place cast me into a long depression which I only managed to cure by leaving. Later, I suffered the same in Taipei -- and ended up leaving soon afterwards. I will leave here soon, too. I must.
Does this happen to you?
Ignoramus XVII
Łysiak tells us that Chinese and Japanese painting does not count because it's mere calligraphy.
I wonder what he means by "does not count". If "does not count" = "Łysiak does not like", then, I think, he is right, though I suspect one should really parse Lysiak's "X does not count" as "Łysiak does not know first thing about X". Thus "Japanese painting does not count" becomes "Łysiak does not have a clue about Japanese painting".
All's in order, then.
In order, but still an embarrassment: the dismissal of Oriental painting as calligraphy isn't novel: various Europeans have been pronouncing it since the 17th century. One must wonder at the point of writing -- and publishing a book of plagiarized nonsense. I mean, novel nonsense -- e.g. "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" -- is just nonsense, why not publish it; but plagiarized nonsense is simply shameful.
Of course, the first European to dismiss Chinese painting as mere calligraphy was not expressing an original thought, either: the idea is Chinese and goes back to Yuan dynasty, when total disappearance of official sponsorship for painting starved the profession to death and left the art in the hands of scholar-poets, who recognizing how weak they were at what they were doing, called it, self-deprecatingly, "my graceless doodles".
European painting is certainly great, but European thinking about it isn't terribly original.
I am curious what Łysiak means by The White Man, by the way. He wouldn't mean The Great Pinko-Grey Race, by any chance, would he?
I wonder what he means by "does not count". If "does not count" = "Łysiak does not like", then, I think, he is right, though I suspect one should really parse Lysiak's "X does not count" as "Łysiak does not know first thing about X". Thus "Japanese painting does not count" becomes "Łysiak does not have a clue about Japanese painting".
All's in order, then.
In order, but still an embarrassment: the dismissal of Oriental painting as calligraphy isn't novel: various Europeans have been pronouncing it since the 17th century. One must wonder at the point of writing -- and publishing a book of plagiarized nonsense. I mean, novel nonsense -- e.g. "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" -- is just nonsense, why not publish it; but plagiarized nonsense is simply shameful.
Of course, the first European to dismiss Chinese painting as mere calligraphy was not expressing an original thought, either: the idea is Chinese and goes back to Yuan dynasty, when total disappearance of official sponsorship for painting starved the profession to death and left the art in the hands of scholar-poets, who recognizing how weak they were at what they were doing, called it, self-deprecatingly, "my graceless doodles".
European painting is certainly great, but European thinking about it isn't terribly original.
I am curious what Łysiak means by The White Man, by the way. He wouldn't mean The Great Pinko-Grey Race, by any chance, would he?
Moralizing with adjectives
The night before, still in Phnom Penh, in a vain effort to forget my misery, I took a novel to bed (I think it was Murdoch's The Sea The Sea) but I had to put it away: the introduction was that awful.
It was relentless moralizing with adjectives.
"Moralizing with adjectives" is a category of discourse. It is the favorite rhetorical form when addressing one's own party members. It's a particularly empty form of rhetoric: because an adjective can morally praise or dispraise anything, a sock could be characterized as smug, or self-sacrificing. Such a characterization does not tell us anything at all except that the author likes the sock (or does not, as the case may be).
(Is it fair to generalize that proper speech -- one conveying meaning -- should contain no adjectives at all?)
The introduction was just such a succession of meaningless, value-laden adjectives relentlessly beating up on Yuppies, Margaret Thatcher, and -- well, some kind of invisible, unnamed enemy: "we are told", "we are made to", "we are taught", all wrongly of course, but the passive mode of the expression makes it resoundingly unclear we are told by whom.
The introduction's only discernible message -- one that could actually be tautologically paraphrased -- was the -- patently wrong -- claim that Buddhism's does not recommend withdrawal from society.
The overwhelming impression of the piece was the sensation of the utter and complete A.D. (agitated discombobulation). I felt both intense pity for the author, realizing in how much pain he was writhing, but I was also terrified to know how wrong and how confused a mind could be. Here I was looking in detail at the kind of unstable state of mind in which suicides or murders are committed.
Unbelievably, the publisher let the piece run.
Why?
Sick in Phnom Penh
Cambodia depresses in many ways. Phnom Penh is the same excrement cavity it was 5 years ago, littered with garbage and reeking of urine, and, as is the case with all 4th world countries, it is still expensive — featuring much lower standards for much higher prices than next-door 2.5th world Thailand. If anything, Phnom Penh is worse than it was five years ago: it now has hellish rush hour traffic, too.
(I suppose the minister of finance might argue that the extenuating circumstance for this traffic is that every other car on the road is a Lexus).
The National Museum’s collection is much less worth seeing than I had remembered it, perhaps because I have seen the Guimet since. Perhaps only one item’s really worth the trip — a shard of a gigantic reclining Visnhu from an island in the Western Mebon, disconcertingly smiling head plus fragments of three arms, which they will not allow you to photograph whether legally or illegally (too many staff busy selling offering flowers to bribe one’s way). There are also a gigantic Vishnu/Balarama/Rama group in black soap stone, and a sandstone headless squatting hunchback with a pigeon chest, a lintel with a Dhurodhyana-Bhima fight, and three pretty good Narasimhas — but none is worth the price of the trip.
There is no catalog for sale, either. I suppose I bought the last catalog they had — of female divinities in their collection — five years ago.
Airport departure tax is $25. This is an omission. It should be $1,000 and — I should have paid it.
Alas, the worst of the trip does not stay behind in Phnom Penh but packs into the airplane with me: they are my fellow tourists. Am I suffering from severe depression, or are they really what they seem to me: dirtier, poorer, uglier, more thoroughly tattooed and pierced and more disheveled than elsewhere? All look as if they’d been dragged out of garbage. And the faces, oh, the faces, goodness gracious, the faces: they aren't just ugly -- who of us dare cast the first stone -- they look positively wrong, misshapen, as if their maker dropped their freshly clay-shaped heads on the floor while they were still wet.
Mercifully, I say to myself, the flight is only an hour. But the seat’s so tight I am unable to move; and the back support curves inwards meaning anyone over 6 feet tall has to hunch. (Make sure you never ever fly Air Asia). Someone behind me opens a bag of some smelly... feed – chips? — and I nearly throw up smelling it.
I couldn't smell the thing without retching, but someone was eating it and no one else seemed to mind.
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