House of Jorob

NaNo! NaNo! NaNo!

National Novel Writing Month tally through Day 4, today: November 4.

Word count: 6,478.

NaNoWriMo Under Way!!

National Novel Writing Month started yesterday, November 1.

Which means somewhat shorter posts this month.

1,667 words per day, going elsewhere.

Today is Day Two.

I've got 3,300 words down.

Wheeeee!

Harry Nicolaides: Lèse majesté Followup

Harry Nicolaides received the minimum sentence permitted under Thai law after pleading guilty in mid-January, 2009.

For insulting the king.

Three years.

Details are here. (The text of his offending prose is here.)

A month later, he received a royal pardon.

He returned to Australia having spent almost six months in a Thai jail cell.

For insulting the king.

I suspect there will be a book coming out of this.

Hopefully he won't be scheduling any book signings in Thailand.

Harry Nicolaides: The text of Verisimilitude

Harry Nicolaides is still rotting in a jail cell.

For insulting the royal family.

90 cellmates, an open toilet, and a cement floor.

Makes me want to jump on a plane and tour lovely Bangkok right away, lemme tell you.

Piling on to this poor guy's slumping shoulders are an entire herd of Internet disparagers.

These paragons look to the complete printing (50 copies), and the number of copies sold (7 sold). and write that Nicolaides is suffering from a publicity stunt gone somewhat south.

And that he deserves it.

Who are these people?

Well, there's Chuck. Classy guy, Chuck: "Harry Nicolaides is an attention seeking fool."

Then there's Val1089. Very sympathetic guy, is Val: "Harry is a fool, but not in the way you think he was. The book was never published, and possibly never written. Harry submitted the potentially objectionable passage to the Thai gov't himself to see if it would be lese majeste. It was all a publicity stunt to help sell the novel, before it was published."

He goes on to "wager you won't find a single copy of this book anywhere, nor will you find anyone who has read or seen a copy."

Yep.

A genuine authority, is Val.

A copy of Harry Nicolaides's entire text is here. It's in a pdf that popped back up on the net within the last ten days or so. Apparently it was pulled down as a sign of encouragement to the Thai police department, who were considering releasing Harry.

Harry's still locked up, so the book is back up.

Here's an excerpt from Verisimilitude --one that contains, if not all of the apparently offending words, at least some of them:

"From King Rama to the Crown Prince, the nobility was renowned for their romantic entanglements and intrigues. The Crown Prince had many wives "major and minor" with a coterie of concubines for
entertainment. One of his recent wives was exiled with her entire family, including a son they conceived together, for an undisclosed indiscretion. He subsequently remarried with another woman and fathered another child. It was rumoured that if the prince fell in love with one of his minor wives and she betrayed him, she and her  family would disappear with their name, familial lineage and all
vestiges of their existence expunged forever."

The King's a hypocrite.

He's gone on record as saying people should be able to critize the king.

And yet this sort of thing happens.

Must be good to be a king.

<sigh>

I'm not travelling to Thailand any time soon.

Wonder if the prosecutor is going to file for my extradition?

Banned in Bangkok: Harry Nicolaides and Lèse majesté

Harry Nicolaides screwed up.

Big time.

The former university lecturer in northern Thailand self-published a book called Verisimilitude in 2005.

Bangkok courts have just sentenced him to three years imprisonment.

Not for self-publishing fifty copies of his novel.

For allegedly insulting King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn in it.

And then being in a place where Thai authorities could arrest him.

A Thai website described the book as an "uncompromising assault on the patrician values of the monarchy".

Nicolaides described his novel as a commentary on political and social life of contemporary Thailand.

The book sold seven copies.

At least one of them had to be from the Thai government, I'm guessing.

Thailand has Lèse majesté laws on the books.

Thailand has a throne.

And one is not allowed to insult it.

I went hunting for a copy of the text that was so insulting.

At the moment, I can't find it.

It's supposedly three or four lines of text that deals with certain Thai prince and his....love life.

Or love habits.

I'm not sure, since I can't find the freaking passage.

Seems the prosecutor of the case has warned reporters recently that the law prohibited publication and repetition of the material.

I would guess that when you're a reporter in a Thai courtroom, looking at a shackled and orange-prisonsuit-clad 41 year old author who's been incarcerated for the past six months for writing the passage, you tend to listen to the prosecutor.

Because AP didn't print it.

Neither has anybody else.

I can see where we, as heavy-handed westerners or worse, heavy-handed self-centered Americans, need to respect the legal systems of other countries.

Back off, I'm sure my French readers would tell me.

If I had any French readers.

Lèse majesté laws stifle everyody: Thais and foreigners alike.

And I'm sure if Harry were of Thai descent, I'd have never even heard of him or his plight.

So Harry brings a spotlight onto archaic, backwater laws.

Too bad it wasn't intentional.

I mean, he had been part of Thai life for over four years.

He's an author. A reporter.

He had to know what could happen--he sent passages of his book--including the potentially offensive one-- to the Thai government in advance of his printing.

But nobody answered him.

I guess he figured no news is good news.

Oops.

If I find the passage, I'll be sure to post it, and link to the source.

I'm not going to Thailand any time soon.

Below are my references.

I suspect that Thailand has pretty much banned most of them--they banned YouTube when there was a spate of monarchy-mocking vids in 2006/2007. These days YouTube is available to Thais in a filtered form.

• Australian, Harry Nicolaides, Sentenced For Insulting Thai Monarchy
• Australian jailed for three years for insulting Thai royals
  
• Lèse majesté and Harry Nicolaides
• The trouble with Harry
• Writer Harry Nicolaides jailed for insulting Thai king
• Australian Harry Nicolaides Arrested in Thailand
• On Thailand, Harry Nicolaides, and Populism

Bookshelf: Virtual Light

Virtual Light
William Gibson
c 1993

I skipped Gibson's Virtual Light when it first came out.

No idea why.

I just didn't read it.

Picked it up at the library the other week.

Man.

I already raved like a candy-jacked child over Gibson's work back in May, 2008.

So, I'll keep this simple.

The premise behind Gibson's writing is that it is of the near-future.

But unlike other fiction created 15 years ago concerning the near-future, his work still holds. The illusion of near-future is still working.

Part of the trick likes in his structure: He doesn't stick dates on the narrative, but he will stick dates in as history. So, for instance, we read about something happening in 1996. The book, being written in 1993, has lost its predictive power over whatever was tied to the '96 date. But because nowhere in the narrative is there any glimpse of the date supporting the "present" through which the narrative flows, 15 years later the '96 date stands in the context of the novel as backstory, as history.

Just don't waste time reading the book jacket. It says we're reading about 2005. Nowhere in the text is that actually established....you need to do some math adding and subtracting dated reference points from the narrative with a fixed date from one of the character's backstories to reach that conclusion.

Even so, nothing creaks.

Except for one thing. 

Dialing into the 'net.

Sure, the connective power of always-on cable and DSL connections wasn't close to being affordable in '93.

But they were jacking in to the net in Neuromancer. It's not like the concept couldn't be explained to a generation growing up on modem-squawks without bogging down the text.

Maybe it was the visual end of things.

Like the Wachowski brothers found themselves stuck without a dynamic visual for that ride through the real world onto the Matrix, without a telephone.

Ever tried playing World of Warcraft on a dialup connection? The freakin lag would have killed Neo long before any cranky virus application could have hurt him.

Bookshelf: Shinju

Shinju
Laura Joh Rowland
c 1994

Tokyo. January, 1689

Sano Ichiro, tutor, samauri, now yoriki, a senior police commander, finds himself assigned to investigate a shinju, a double-suicide by two lovers. Except his superior instructs him on exactly how he wants the case closed. "You will dispense with the matter as quickly and quietly as possible." For although the man was a peasant, the woman was daughter to one of the wealthiest, most powerful lords in the region. And as is customary with love suicides, the girl's identity would be kept confidential while the man's disgrace would be cast upon his family.

Except Sano isn't very customary, try as he might. His personal honor gets in the way of so many things: filial responsbility, duty, loyalty, conformity, obedience.....

And so Sano resolves to look further into the matter of the shinju. And his life will never be the same afterwards.

There's a lot of introspective dialog here--we spend a lot of time in Sano's head as he moves about the countryside. For the most part Rowland makes sure to balance this material with a dose of character encounter. But there's one point where the novel hits a soggy patch.
Long around page 260 or so, the novel hits a dead spot. It was the strangest thing: one minute the narrative is flying along, the next minute it bogs down in an internal dialog that had me looking to skip ahead 30 pages or so. And that's rare. I think in all the books I've read over my life, I can count the number of times that has happened on one hand. After I finished the book, I went back to see if I could figure out what happened. Overall, I think it was just one trip too many for the solitary character's internal monolog thing.

Force yourself through the slow patch. There is some seriously good writing here, with a satisfying conclusion. Rowland's attention to detail is evident throughout. Although at times Sano's inability to see what the reader can see is coming from around the corner will make you grit your teeth a bit.

This was the first novel for Rowland, who has since gone on to produce a dozen books featuring Sano. I'll have to watch for the monologs, though. That's when the narrative wheels can get stuck in mud.

Ignore the flap; find the plot

I just found out I'm a bit of an oddball when it comes to reading.

I found that out the other day at the office.

What I do, when in the bookstore or library aisle:

• I pick up a book.
• I open the cover.
• I read the first couple of pages.
• I like, I take the book home.

Apparently, there's a whole other world of readers out there who read the front flap copy. And make their decisions on it.

Hell, that's no fun. I never read flap-stuff.

First, the author never writes the flap copy. So there's no sense of the narrative.

Second, half the time the flap unveils a couple of key plot points, trading them in an effort to get you to buy the book in the first place.

I like to ride along with the author, giving them between 50 and 100 pages to set up the book. I find that also give me the chance to adjust my own reading rhythms to the author's.

Can't get that from a flap.

Bookshelf: Mars Life

Mars Life
Ben Bova
c 2008

I burned through this in four days. Classic science fiction, set against a backdrop of social upheaval.

Jamie Waterman discovered cliff dwellings on Mars. The resulting explorations yielded an ancient race's footprints through Martian history, a history cut short by a catastrophic meteor strike.

OK, so what? Bradbury wrote the consumate Martian stories almost half a century ago.

Ah, well now.

Factor in the political victories of an ultraconservative religious movement bent on installing what amounts to a theocracy in the White House.

Stir in an anthropologist whose past includes exile from his university post and an unproven rape charge....and put him on the red planet. Along with Waterman's exotic wife. And 200 other Mars scientists who face a complete shutdown of their research when the funding for the Mars program is cut off.

Yep. I thought so too.

Like I said, I finished it in four days.

Bookshelf: The Runes of the Earth/Fatal Revenant

The Runes of the Earth
Fatal Revenant
The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
Stephen R. Donaldson
c. 2004
c. 2007

Kevin's Dirt.
Kevin's Dirt.
The man gave us Hile Troy, Saltheart Foamfollower, Ur-Lord, countless other memorable names and phrases through six volumes. The best he can come up with for the health-sense blindness that impacts the Land is Kevin's Dirt?

Oy.

Donaldson returns to his epic story, the story of Covenant the Unbeliever, after 20 years for several reasons, which he outlines very plainly on his website: Surprisingly, fear plays a part.

I felt the first trilogy was the best. A lot of the second trilogy felt forced to me. I felt I had to work my way through an awful lot of padding. Well-verbed padding, sure. But still padding.

So I approached the return trilogy with trepidation.

Then I found out there were four books in this series.

Oops.

Neither of these two new titles truly disappoints. Both are strong books, worth the time spent reading. As always, the conflicted characters are sometimes hard to take--there's a relationship between Linden Avery and a Haruchai that's maddening and it lasts all the way through Runes and into Revenant before finding a resolution.

If you've not read the first sets, you'll not notice that Linden spends an awful lot of time recapping what has gone before.

Me, I skimmed here and there.

The tetralogy is cheduled for completion in 2013.