world photography day

Tibet

Laos

Burma

Indonesia

China

Cambodia

Turkey

Vietnam

Nepal

spill ink

Writers and artists know it's all about choosing your tools wisely.

In our case it's a well traveled 15-year old Mont Blanc Meisterstuck 149 piston fountain pen, with a 14K gold nib and platinum inlay. The art of writing. Language, writing, culture and civilization.

Been with us since passing through Hong Kong en route to a hotel management gig in Beijing. It's the feeling, joy of heft, ink distribution and quality. The edge on Moleskine paper, touch, sensory stimulation. Slowing down.

If you use a fountain pen you know what we mean. These days people crank out material with anything handy. Just a small suggestion to test out a fountain pen next time you're in the market for a quality writing instrument. Savor the precision.

Many Chinese students learn writing using them, especially at the pre-university level. Maybe it's the ancient influence of calligraphy and the fine arts. Before ball points and gels become ubiquitous in their lives.

An Edinburgh, Scotland school teaches students how to use a fountain pen.

"The pens improve the quality of work because they force the children to take care, and better work improves self-esteem," principal Bryan Lewis said. "Proper handwriting is as relevant today as it ever has been."

Let's have a meeting! Yes. English teachers unite!

Let's get dressed. Pack our Moleskine notebook filled with poetry, drawings, dreams, stories and visions. Let's collect one fountain pen filled with green racing ink. Remember water. You've gotta have H2O where you go. It's gonna be a hot one. Seven inches from the mid-day sun.

Let's go to a class tomb on old campus surrounded by luscious green trees straining to light. They are a canopy of welcome relief. Rose petals wither on the ground.

Smile and greet your compatriots, your stalwart educational guides. Take a seat. Look around. Engage your senses.

Gaze out the window toward the lake. It is shimmering. You hear scraping. What is it? Local workers are building a wall. A new Great Wall. Exciting. History in the making. How do they do it?

It's simple. Materials and raw labor.

Ten local village men and women - who do most of the heavy lifting - bags of cement, trowels, shovels, a few plastic buckets, water, piles of gray bricks, empty drums for support, some boards, and a couple of wheelbarrows.

Step 1. Build rickety scaffolding using drums and boards. Remove the old steel fence. Discard to side.

Step 2. One team mixes cement and water. Shovel into buckets. Another team puts bricks into a wheelbarrow and pushes it to a dumping area.

Step 3. Men wait for women to hand them bricks and buckets of cement. They slather on the goop and align bricks. Brick by brick the wall goes up. It blocks the green sward, blue lake and wild flowers.

Only the sky is safe.

Step 4. Another team coats the exterior with a bland gray mixture.

It's never going to be finished. Art is like that. It's so beautiful we feel like crying.

Someone steps to the podium and starts speaking - using exquisite language - about the value of education. Cost benefit analysis. Profit and loss statements. How we have a huge responsibility to our shareholders.

During a brief moment of silence you hear a shovel, a trowel and laughter.

Another day dawns in paradise.

Free Ice Girl 24-28th

Ice Girl in Banlung in e-book format on Amazon is free from 24-28 June.

Ice girl sells in Banlung, Cambodia. It's a wild west town south of Laos. It's near The River of Darkness and animist cemeteries.

She is an independent author/publisher. This is her story with a gonzo attitude.

She meets Leo, a wandering Chinese boy.

After being released from a Chinese Re-education through Labor unit near the Gobi he walked south.

He taught university students in Fujian how to be more human.

He walked to Hanoi, Sapa, Saigon and Laos collecting stories.

Ice girl and Leo share ideas and stories about cultures and the human condition.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Uncertainty Principle

The world gave me a strong sense of querencia, a Spanish term for homeland, “a place - like a bull facing death in the ring -  where you feel comfortable dying.”  - Lorca

"I am a character in my own story," said Omar, "a hakaawati, a professional Persian storyteller inside the shadow of my imagination. I manifest an oral way of transmitting khurata, fanciful stories, inside the ocean of stories."

"Wonderful, said Jamie. "I like the part about the sacred wisdom circle. It’s a magic story. Reminds me of a woman talking about her Ghost Dance. In her wishes, lies, dreams, memories and reflections she is a Wovoka, a Paiute weather doctor with power over rain and earthquakes. Her Ghost Dance magic is destined to return souls of those who have died. Is it my turn?"

"Sure Jamie, just keep it shorter than life because a reader doesn’t want to struggle if the narration is hard to follow."

"Yeah, said the kid. "This twisted tale may have too much Zen for some readers to wrap their head around. You become the thing you fight the most. Let’s see all the beauty and ugliness without hope or fear."

"Ain’t that the truth. What is the sound of one hand laughing?"

Someone in the tribe asked Point to tell them about the beginning of his wandering ways. Omar wrote it down and translated it into new languages for historians.

“Fly, fly. After a steady heavy rain a pregnant peasant woman regretting the instant she spread her legs out of loneliness and desperation to have a child and anchor a man to her with birth weight, propped her mop made of strands, discarded rainbows, as her solemn dispassionate morose husband shucked peas and removed garlic shells from their protective casing.

"After the sky finished crying and washing student street where parades of disenfranchised spoiled adolescent Chinese youth sought shelter from the storm and well after open windows released cello notes from a child sitting upright tuning her eyes to black notes on white pages with a determination to master the instrument as another music student hammered piano keys behind locked doors, flies gathered around brown sticky eggplant paste slowly dripping off a cracked plate with feelers extending their appetite toward a thin white butterfly leaving a green leaf."

“Food,” said the fly, “I love leftovers. Delicious. I survive on garbage.”

A speeding silver water particle whistled past mirrors at 186,000 miles per second. It collided with correlation. Speed and spin are mutually exclusive. The uncertainty principle. If you know the velocity you don’t know the position.

“It meets my needs. It’s not easy to find work in this country.”

“Hey, tell me about it. Have mirror will travel. Maybe you could write something like Mirrors For Dummies - could be a market niche, you know, for stressed out A-type personalities. The kind with too much dinero and way too much time. Reminds me,” the fly continued, “my ancestor said, ‘We’re not here for a long time but we’ve been here long enough.’ Know what I mean?”

"Years ago, a counselor in a room of Oregon veterans said,  ‘After a war everything is easy.’"

 A Century is Nothing

Write on your hand in Burma.

Louis The Hero

“Books are an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” - Franz Kafka

*

King Louis, a free slave riding a white stallion roared into Bursa from a Turkish dessert. Waving a jeweled sword he scrambled onto a world stage facing ninety million screaming bloodthirsty catatonic maniacs.

“Live and let live. I am a hero. I’ve returned from the mother of all battles. We defeated fear and ignorance. As a bonus we slew greed. We are victorious. We’ve been killing humans for 4,000 years and still no one knows who the king is. See what I brought you,” gesturing past a gateless gate. Red rolling dust clouds obscured chained destitute slaves.

“Oh, shit,” said his twin brother, a shackled slave and former Freon-free refrigerator shyster from Polo Alto singing soprano, “looks like it’s sheer linen damask lace curtains for us.”

“You can say shit again,” sang Leo, an exhausted Chinese prisoner practicing free speech in Braille, a foreign language and Omar’s specialty.

Leo’s memory remembered hauling buckets of night shit to fields near his straw and mud Gobi hovel. It was the price he’d paid for questioning Authority at Beijing Normal U.

- Why do we have to read Mao’s little red book? It’s mush for pigs, he’d asked Authority.

- Because you are a tool of the state, said Authority.

- This shit stinks.

- Here, said Authority, Carry some more.

After that melancholy loss Leo didn’t take shit from anybody. Living in exile with silence and cunning he burned through levels of existence.

A stream-winner, he slept with Ratanakiri shamans in animist cemeteries. He exchanged stories about becoming with Rita, his friend and author of Ice Girl in Banlung.

Using sustainable dry yak-yak manure Leo discovered fire by rubbing precious stones together. Impressed, his tribe anointed him Chief of Cannibals.

He wore an alarm clock around his neck demonstrating Power, Prestige, Status & Esoteric Arcane Prescient Wisdom.

On stage raising his ruby, emerald and diamond mind sword Louis the crime smelter hero approached a line of wage slaves, Soma miners, shrouded widows, seventy imprisoned journalists and cheap coal powered grieving families. “Bend over. Stick your neck out. It’s not about justice. It’s about procedure.”

“Not me! Why Me?” exclaimed millions.

He brought justice down. He decapitated a screaming target. “Take that, idiot.” Heads rolled.

Revenge. Vengeance. Swift. Sweet. Complete.

A clear cheer erupted from Turkish sheep waving ticket stubs.

Louis turned to the masses. “Step right up ladies and gentlemen to The Greatest Show on Earth. Miracles revealed. Have your immediate future told,” he repeated with reported speech.

Slaves with a top secret security clearance in deep shadows played espionage chess in the middle game. They focused on position and material.

Your move, said Death, Be mindful.

The Language Company