While fellow blogger Colin Cotterill has his hounds lined up on the beach conducting a seminar on the finer points of the Trotsky movement inside the dog world, I am reporting from Eel Swamp. I am light years behind Cotterill’s mind-meld that merges him into oneness with his dogs. The truth be told, I don’t have all of my ducks in a row. I can see the evidence of the skid marks as evolution has braked hard as it passed me in the fast lane, leaving me on the shoulder of the road of life with a pair of binoculars and two ducks.

A brief recap on the Eel Swamp ducks. Over a month ago we moved our mosquito repellent and sleeping bags and five dogs to a hovel in Eel Swamp. One small brown duck occupied the pond. Rumour was the construction site workers left the brown duck behind. After finding a place for the two cartons of mosquito repellent, netting, tent poles, and sleeping bags, the wife, her mother and the maid—with time weighing heavily on their hands—focused on the brown duck, which was named Khemchart (translation: ‘Good Life’). They all agreed that he must be terribly lonely swimming endless circles in the pond.

Khemchart looked happy enough to me. I thought that this drake indeed enjoyed the good life. But what do I know? Don’t answer that.

The women answered it for you and me: nothing. No surprise so far. Moore’s knowledge of ducks hovers just above zero when it comes to understanding the deep psychological state of an abandoned duck. The solution (the maid’s idea) was to buy Khemchart a female companion from a Klong Toey market vendor. This being Thailand, it seemed important that the duck should have white feathers. No matter that Khemchart is clearly a dark shade of brown. The maid found the white duck, the prospective wife at the market. Baht 195 for a wife is at the low end of price. With ducks you buy your bride by her weight. I suspect that is the price for a ‘kitchen’ duck rather than a domestic ‘pond’ duck. I have no doubt that in buying the duck at Klong Toey market as a companion as opposed to soup was something of a first. The vendors bought lottery tickets using the maid’s birthday for the winning numbers.

Like many new brides ripped out of her snug, secure Bangkok environment and plunged into the alien terrain of the countryside, the white duck—named Mali or Jasmine in English (my wife’s idea)—was released into the pond. Several days later, Mali flew over the fence to the pooyai baan’s estate and landed in the middle of a golf green. The estate has an even bigger pond. Her vaulting over the fence appeared to be the duck version of film Runaway Bride. Mali seemed unwilling to live contently on the pond with Khemchart and had hatched a sinister scheme to fly back to Bangkok. The local workers combined with the women of Eel Swamp ended Mali’s escape plans and she was returned to the pond and told to know her place. After another abortive attempt to fly over the fence—foiled by the pooyai barn’s watchful staff, Mali appears to have lost her travel lust.

Back in the pond, Mali’s been carefully watched by the women. Daily they waited for Mali to bolt again. The result is a little like the Eel Swamp version of a State of Emergency. Mali’s not exactly under house arrest, but her movements don’t go unnoticed on both sides of the fence.

In fairness, it should be noted, Mali has made no further escape attempts. The mother-in-law felt that Mali’s angst was caused by the absence of a house of her own. With the assistance of the maid’s husband, they built a pond side thatched roof A-frame, a tiny replica of the kind building that rich people use when they go to ski at Whistler Mountain, in British Columbia. The pond duck house featured a small entry way and some side windows. It looked like a primitive spirit house. The mother-in-law, wife, maid, and maid’s husband, along with the staff across the fence on the pooyai baan’s side, all waited and watched. Neither Khemchart nor Mali have ever ventured inside the A-frame house. They squatted beside it. Walked around it. Did that shiver of the feather thing coming out of the water in front of the A-frame, before flopping down, back turned to the door.

About the same time, doubts circulated as to Mali’s gender. She had a couple of strikes against her. Her pedigree to start with: she was an ordinary Klong Toey duck intended for the pot. Second, Bangkok women of all species are demanding, picky, flighty and liable to take flight at the first opportunity to explore a bigger pond (or putting green). Third, serious doubts about Mali’s gender circulated like wildfire after she suddenly mounted Khemchart doggy style in the middle of the pond. Mali refusal to live inside the house built for her cast doubt on whether she was a woman. All the women at Eel Swamp agreed that female DNA draws them to settle down in the best possible nest. Not Mali. She wasn’t having anything to do with house and Khemchart seemed more of a buddy than a wife. How could that be? Unless Mali wasn’t a female but a man, the women agreed that men pretty much slept anywhere, were fence jumpers, and had a thing about golf courses. I can’t say their logic was faulty.

My mother-in-law, using advanced sound wave listening techniques, concluded that Mali was a female. It was in the fine detail of the quack. Thai is a tonal language and that apparently gives them an edge in decoding duck quacking, which apparently has eight tones for females—Charlie Parker on the Sax and three tones for males—Kenny G. holding that one note long enough to pass out for lack of oxygen. The lack of tonal males is what makes female ducks quite fatalistic about being taken to Klong Toey market to await their date with a cooking pot. Of course, I may be reading too much between the lines. But that is what writers do. Read between the lines as they write lines for others to read between.

If the tonal test is inconclusive, my mother-in-law has another test up her sleeve. She says a male duck, a drake in formal duck talk, has a big crest on the top of its head, while the female has a small crest on her head. Big and small are relative terms, and getting close enough to the top of a duck’s head begs a question: if you are that close, why not check the bit of the duck that proves conclusively the point at issue.

A couple of weeks have passed since Mali came to live in the pond on Eel Swamp. All of that initial excitement and anticipation has faded. A little like one of the police or government crackdowns that crank up emotions for two weeks before moving onto the latest outrage or novelty to blast through the daily noise of life. Entire days pass without any of the women mentioning Mali or Khemchart. They stroll passed the pond without even glancing at them. The ducks have merged into the daily landscape of life. They swim across the pond day after day, and as I watch them it becomes increasingly clear how little difference it really makes as to whether Mali is a female, male or katoey. She’s our duck. She’s content to stay on the pond. She even seems to have grown fond of Khemchart. But I am betting that she’d rather be pate than sleep in that ramshackle A-Frame built for her and Khemchart at the end of the pond.

Resolving Mali’s gender appeared to me as a muddle created by ambiguity, doubt and indecision. There is another explanation. Just maybe I’ve had a lesson in the Thai version of Schrödinger’s Cat, that old quantum physic problem in which the cat is neither dead nor alive until someone in a white lab coat opens the lid and looks inside the box. The pond is a kind of box with a lid on it. Mali, then is neither a male nor female, as no one has looked. I like the idea that Mali’s gender is somehow suspended in this state of all gender configurations.

Next time you are in a restaurant and seek duck on the menu, think of Khemchart and Mali idling away their days at Eel Swamp. And in some distant universe, the likes of Khemchart and Mali are looking at a menu with people like us on it. Maybe one of us made it out of the market and into a private pond and garden, tried to escape, and figured out there is no real escape, that it was better coming to terms with the pond you know rather than searching for the perfect pond over the horizon.

I am back from the country hovel at Eel Swamp. For nearly a week I had mud, water and shit midway up my wellies. It is the Monsoon season. Rain or shine, spending time with animals is a good thing. Animals have a lot to teach us. Here are a couple of observations from studying my five dogs and two ducks. First, animals aren’t divided into religion let alone into religious sects that target rivals like insurgents setting IEDs for the next Humvee to roll over. Second, animals don’t hang out with each other because of a share ideology. They have no real politics to speak of. Like religion, politics, is simply absent from their day. You may protest that animals aren’t rational, don’t have logic or analysis working for them. True enough but at the same time animals never consult astrologers before making a decision.

Of course, you’re going to point out that dogs form packs with a pecking order. Yes, that is true. But the top dog doesn’t promise change you can believe in, or health care or daycare for puppies. Might is right keeps the pecking order a well-oiled machine. Life is basically sniffing each others asses and urine trails, eating, begging for food in between meal time, sleeping. And Oscar, the Lab, sometimes picks up his ball, brings it to me, I throw it, he looks at the ball and at me with those large, sad eyes, as if to say, “Why did you do that? Now I’ve got to wander over in my old sweet time, lift a leg to keep the urine trail fresh, have a nice drink of water, and yeah, ‘Why was I going over here?’ He often forgets the ball destination. For dogs it is all journey. They have no real destination to speak of. They happily travel with nothing remotely equivalent to our world of frequent flier points as an incentive.

Dogs, as far as we know, despite the dialogue above, have no interior monologue going on. Dogs aren’t Hamlet. They don’t argue with themselves. They don’t suffer doubt, make holiday plans, worry about growing old or whether global warming will cause their urine trails to dry into nothingness. In other words, dogs have no conception of the future. That alone relieves them of huge anxiety. Marlowe, who is 14 years old, is going deaf, his eyes are clouded, he’s slower in getting to his feet, and he’s still nursing a hernia resulting from a fight over a bitch. But Marlowe behaves pretty much the same way as he did when he was one year old. He has no perception that he’s an old man, and that fighting other, younger members of the pack, over a woman at 91 years old (in human years) is bound to be a losing battle. Dogs don’t know their limitations.

It’s not just the future that dogs are oblivious to thinking about, it is also the past that eludes them. Elephants may have a memory for slights and rough treatment but dogs have no such memory. Yell at them, and an hour later, they wag their tails, and lick your hand. Forget to feed them, and, hey, no hard feelings. None of that boiling up rage over what someone did a day, a week, or years ago. My dogs don’t wait in the dark to knife someone who caused them to lose face. I love dogs because they seem free of the kind of delusionary thinking that passes for day-to-day human mental activity. In their lives, they don’t need wire taps, guided missile, loyalty oath, preachers, assault helicopters, GPS, Internet, Twitter or Facebook.

A dog looks in the mirror and doesn’t know it is looking at itself. There’s something to be said for lack of awareness of self. Because it is our sense of self and sense of time that, from a dog’s point of view, could be more usefully spent tending a urine trail and looking for food. Dogs don’t write anything down. Because they basically don’t need to remember a lot of stuff, and they don’t have to search where they last left their reading glasses or car keys. Dogs are both freer than we are even though from our point of view they are locked in a mental prison with no possibility of escape. Life is filled with these trade offs. Knowledge is the devil that spins us like a top. It equips us through books, movies, folklore and myth to face a more complicated mental world where we are convinced the stakes are much higher. We suffer from knowing too much, from our inability to easily forget or forgive, and from entangled emotions and intellect that fight like two overtired mud wrestlers, with the battle ever shifting and never ending.

Things like face, revenge, the past and the future, are so much part of the human species, that we marvel having animals around us that are happy, content, and playful, day after day, in the absence of such mental processes. Years ago, Thais frequently would tell a foreigner, “Thinking too much is no good. It gives you a headache.” I haven’t heard any Thais saying that lately. A lot of them seem to have a headache.

Sanuk or fun and sabai or feeling comfortable are also standard Thai ways of being. Or so it was in the past. You don’t hear many Thais talking about sanuk or feeling sabai. It’s because they’re too busy thinking too much. We laugh at dogs because they lick their balls (at least my four male dogs do) and fail to laugh at ourselves for constantly licking our emotional wounds, real or imagined, not to heal them but to remind us of our enemies, to reinforce our rage, and to plot our payback.

When I am away from Eel Swamp and the animals, I soon leave their world and float back into the human world of Bangkok. The thing about my dogs, is they never leave their world, not for a moment, because that is only the place they live, in the moment, and I envy them for being content to be in that big Now.

As for the two ducks, that is for another blog. Here’s a preview: The Klong Toey market duck (the white one) bought as a wife for the existing duck at the pond in Eel Swamp may turn out to be a male. No one at Eel Swamp has made a physical examination to determine the duck’s gender. Ducks are hard to catch. But that may not be necessary. My mother-in-law dismisses the need for such an examination. “Leave the duck alone,” she says. She says a duck’s gender is determined by the tone and timbre of its quack. Gender floats to the surface by examining the voice register. In her mind a female duck’s musicality is as distinct as Mozart is from the Rolling Stones.

There is no gynecologist near Eel Swamp to confirm or deny the white duck’s gender. The household is betting she is a ‘she’ though the odds vary day to day, depending on latest reports on her tone scales. This isn’t Julie Andrews singing the Sound of Music theme song. There’s a lot of variation on a theme in the white duck’s quacks. The gardener has made a side bet that the white duck is a katoey.

Next week: The Strange Case of Duck Gender at Eel Swamp.

I want to write about sex and about death. Since writing was invented it is hard to think of a writer who didn’t embrace these two states of the human condition. They jockey throughout life like two racecars fighting for pole position, and we go along for the ride, strapped into the passenger’s seat of both cars, pretending that we are at the wheel. We avoid thinking that sooner or later we are going to crash both cars. Our brains program us to believe that we are Formula A professional drivers. That individually our skill shapes, alters and controls our destiny. It’s a simple delusion that sitting in the back is the same as being at the wheel but it does pull us through the day (and night).

That’s the reality of life. Your two cars are going over the cliff and into the void. Sex is the one that usually stalls out and sputters to a stop first. Old age sputters, too, and sometimes needs a little push before gravity takes over. And if you look in the rearview mirror, you’ll see a long line of cars right on your bumper about to follow you into the void.

Why the gloom, Moore? What Celtic genes are switching through your synapses that sends a chemical bath through your neuron system and comes out the other end as the ritual of a shotgun marriage between sex and death and a James Dean finality to all of it?

Sir Frank Kermode

It started with Sir Frank Kermode died on Wednesday in Cambridge at the age of 90. He’d written over 50 books. He’d been knighted. He was a Shakespeare scholar, too. Sir Frank wasn’t a relative, a mentor, a friend or even someone I’d recognize passing him on the street. His drive over the cliff of life has been noted in the literary blogs, that faint cluster of stars in the far reaches of the visible Net universe.

Sir Frank with 90 innings at the plate and 50 home runs is inducted into the Pantheon of those few who are nominated by the living as having accomplished a good life, left behind a body of work with his name attached, and contributed to our knowledge and understanding about literature. I think of Sir Frank as someone who represented the high road, what we call ‘high culture.’ He is scheduled to go from life to myth and legend. That apparently is the best we can hope for when the nose of our car points due south and into the void.

So far I suspect a number of readers have been skimming this article impatiently wanting to know when do we get to Sex. That’s the leveler, the Pantheon of beings that gets our engines going. Either you do it, read or watch others doing it, talk about doing it, buy medicine that promises doing-it performance, shop for doing-it accessories, think or day dream about doing it, or have dreams in which you definitely out distancing Robocop in the doing-it department.

Shigeo Tokuda

This brings me back to Sir Frank. We don’t think about old people having sex. Dying, yes. That’s what they’re supposed to do, get out of the way, make way for the young horny ones in our midst. Let’s take a short drive down the low road. Our driver is Shigeo Tokuda, who started his porno film career at 60-years old, and fifteen years later, hitting the 75-year mark, has 200 films under his belt (so to speak). Mr. Tokuda (no knighthood on the horizontal bamboo mat in his future) claims no need to swallow a Viagra before the cameras roll. His position (he assumes many in his films) is that getting and maintaining an impressive erection is purely psychological. Most of Mr. Tokuda’s co-stars are females who are around 30-years old. There is a whole genre of porno films labeled ‘elderporn’ where the age difference between the elderly male and his counterpart is best measured in light years. There is also a sub-genre of elderly women having sex with young men but apparently the market for such films is thin.

When Shigeo Tokuda follows Sir Frank over that cliff for his final take, he may not be remembered for his insights into Shakespeare but for his starring roles in such classics as Tit-Lover Old Man Kameichi and His Horny Pranks.

High road or low road, like blue pill or red pill. You have a choice in the road you take. Authors make that choice every time they start a book. Writing blends death and sex into myth, folktale, legend and serving up a strong brew turns us into addicts. We drink down to the last dregs such stories and ask for a refill. The reality is Sir Frank’s opus makes believe that lives devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom are the pinnacle of human existence and shows our true potential for opening our minds. But our dirty little secret is that we’d trade places playing Shigeo Tokuda’s understudy in our old age rather than parsing the meaning of Hamlet into a book-sized essay. In our heart of hearts, something tells us that while we can never aspire to the likes of Sir Frank, we have a fighting chance to follow Shigeo Tokuda’s example to the final moment when the lights are cut and the stage goes dark.

I could leave Sir Frank and Shigeo at this point. But that would do both of them a disservice. There is something not quite right in the mash up of two very different lives that should stop us from snickering into our hand. This is where SLIM comes into the picture.

The SLIM, which is short-hand for Small, Limited and Impermanent, describes the outer ring dimensions of a single human life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re aiming to be Sir Frank or Mr. Shigeo, SLIM is what all of us are stuck with, including you. We have a sense in a celebrity driven world that some lives appear to be inflated, expanded beyond the normal, and indeed in a real sense these lives give the impression of a SLIM violation.

But there can be no such violation. The human condition is the same for everyone. No one is an exception—no one is immune to SLIM as it is the fundamental rule of defines our existence.

There is another point about the high and low roads. The guardrails and yellow line down the center are come from morality, laws and ethics. We are taught from an early age to follow these rules of the road. But we love our outlaws and our porno stories nonetheless.

The best writers sculpture stories populated with characters who promise to have found a trap door and chance of escape from SLIM. In reality fiction, such a conceit usually is the characters undoing. In fantasy and science fiction, the elements are bent, twisted, and the way out is something that looks vaguely like the human condition but is post-SLIM, like the promise of post-human singularity life. The digital world promises a kind of abstract immortality that is impossible in our analog biology. In the digital universe you are converted into a kind of ‘fingerprint’ in a book where we keep track of whose existences are worthy of remembrance.

Books and films and music—the arts—offer readers a chance to transcend their human condition, sweep aside the SLIM, and substitute a human condition that is much larger, borderless and permanent. The journey to find such alternatives is our tragedy. Noir is the world where the characters never will stand a chance at such transcendence, a world where all the guardrails and center lines are an illusion, the headlights are switched off, and the character drive blind. In the noir world, at each step, the reader understands the utter futility of fighting SLIM. Shigeo Tokuda will one day need to pop a Viagra, and later on the day will come when even Viagra won’t do the trick. Laughter will rain down from the rest of us when that happens, as we secretly believe that unlike Shigeo we will be spared this humiliation as our young co-star lights a cigarette, wraps the sheet around her and winks into the camera.

50 books, 90-years old is an accomplishment; make no mistake about that. Sir Frank gave us our best shot at blowing a hole through SLIM. Bigger caliber rounds have bounced off the shell of SLIM before, and bigger rounds will be loaded and fired in the future. Why do we continue to believe the impossible can be achieved in a single life?

Because so much of life is in working out the daily stuff of existence, Sir Frank working over a draft of a book, Shigeo driving to the studio, brushing teeth, eating, checking email, taking a phone call, reading a newspaper, gossiping with a friend, helping out someone in the family or a neighbor. It doesn’t add up to much. It lacks weight and importance. It is so incredibly impermanent. We crave a life that tips the scales as having been heavy and strong and long.

As writers we undertake the tasks of finding the location of such weight and meaning among the rubble of day-to-day existence and attached these dispatches which makes life grander, more exciting, and purposeful. Unless you write noir which puts your nose into SLIM and asks you as the reader to keep on breathing.

Like bends in the road, a story—noir or otherwise—demarks a path, and characters need a good reason to go down that path, equipped with the skills to negotiate the twists and turns, and dealing with the troubles along the way. The destination is, as they say, not the reason to travel; it is the journey and what happens along the way that defines us.

Last Sunday morning I stumbled half awake (my usual early morning fog) from the bedroom of the condo into the kitchen. I had orange juice on my mind. Normally the kitchen is empty at 8.00 a.m. On this Sunday, though, the counters and floor were piled with plastic bags from Klong Toey market, fruit and vegetables spilling out onto the counters. My wife was talking to our Burmese maid. On the floor was a plastic basket and inside the basket was a duck.

A white duck with its feet tied. It looked at me, I looked at it, then at my wife and finally the maid. “How did a duck get past security?”

“The guards just laughed,” said the maid.

I wasn’t exactly laughing. “Let me get this straight, we have a live duck in a building in which all pets are prohibited except gold fish. The duck wasn’t going to cut it as a fish.”

“It’s for Pattaya,” said my wife, as if I were far too slow off the mark.

“Our duck needs a wife,” said the maid.

I started to understand this was one of those Saturday morning conspiracies. The women had taken in their minds that a bachelor duck had to be miserable and the way to fix his life was to buy him a bride.

You need some background about the groom—the male duck who was about to have a blind date with the white duck in my kitchen.

We have cobbled together some buildings on a plot of land near Pattaya. There is a small pond on the land. And in that small pond is a duck. A solitary male duck that I had assumed was a mallard. A wild duck that had found a sanctuary away from the maddening crowd.

“That duck is a wild duck. He’ll have nothing to do with this duck from the market,” I told the women.

Later that morning, we set off for Pattaya with the duck in the backseat. I had gone back to the condo unit for a book, the wife and duck were already downstairs in the car. As I got out of the lift, I saw the signs of duck vomit, duck shit, and duck food, and this wasn’t difficult, as the maid and wife had left a nicely defined trail of feathers, food, and poop that led from the lift to the condo door. The whole floor smelled foul. I held my breath. The damp duck smell seemed to seep through my pores.

You can only hold your breath for so long. I found that when I got in the car and saw the duck looking at me from the backseat—this time she had her wings tied too, to prevent hazard of duck flight I suspected. That bad smell filled the interior of the car. My wife who is usually the first line of defense in the bad smell department was suspiciously quiet. It would have been anti-duck to fuss about the odor. I braced myself for the hour and a half drive, mouth-breathing, as I clutched the steering wheel. It so happened that at the entrance to the elevated Expressway, two Thai police officers, wearing those cheap versions of surgical masks, pulled me over. He asked for my driver’s license, I unfastened my seat belt, found my wallet, and gave him the license.

“What’s the problem officer?”

“You’re not wearing your seatbelt.””

“Of course I am not wearing my seatbelt. I’ve stopped and you’ve asked to see my license. I needed to remove the seatbelt to get the license.”

He looked at my wife. “She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.”

As we approached the tollbooth, my wife who faithfully wears her seatbelt had unfastened her seatbelt to check on the duck (bad timing). That made her a felon I guess. The cop kept looking at the duck. It crossed my mind that I could go down in history as the first crime fiction writer who used a duck to pay a bribe to a Thai cop. I was getting ready to hand the duck through the window, when he asked, “What do you two do?”

There are just so many ways I can answer that question. The one answer that is never used: “Well, sir, I am a writer of fiction.” That’s a good way to lose a duck. Instead I said, “I am a lawyer, sir. And I am on way to advice the chamber of commerce how to increase tourism in Thailand. Duck farming,” I said.

“And I am a consultant for the UN,” said my wife.

I glanced back at the duck as if she was obviously on an undercover humanitarian mission and had risked herself to check on the condition of white ducks.

That admission, fortunately carried the day, as no self-respecting cop is going to take a duck from the husband of a UN consultant and not get some blow back from the big flock of swans in Geneva. He waved us through. No money had changed hands. I saw the cop in my rearview mirror, his facemask protecting him against the worst of the duck smell and realized for the first time why they wore those masks.

On the rest of the drive, having just escaped arrest, possible forfeiture of the duck, and other outrages, the conversation between my wife and me was subdued. “The pond duck is not going to like the market duck. He might attack her. After all she’s going into his pond.”

“He’ll bond with our duck.”

A few minutes after we arrived at Eel Swamp, the name of the surrounding properties, which includes our little hovel, my wife took the white duck and released her in the pond. The brown duck was already in the water. I waited thinking this was going to get ugly, and white feathers would fly. I also thought Starbucks was insane to sell coffee for $3 when you could buy it on the street for 50 cents. I was wrong about Starbucks—which the Thais took to like a duck to water—and I was dead wrong about the brown duck in the pond.

First he wasn’t a mallard. He was also a market duck bought by the workers who had nailed together our hovel. He’d been left behind. Sooner of later one of the workers may sneak back to claim the brown duck for dinner. In the meantime, he swam straight up to the white female and did what so many single male tourists coming from outside of Thailand do—he surrendered. After a day, she had him swimming behind her. She took over the pond. Two days into the program, the once proud male duck, hides in the tall grass and rarely goes into the pond for a swim. He has that haunted look of man on the run, under torture, or married. She doesn’t let him out of her sight. As if she was scanning the sky for younger, slimmer Pattaya ducks, the female duck is no longer that docile tied up creature I saw in the kitchen on Sunday morning. She had a bold mission—keep her man in line of sight while hunting for something to eat. Females are good at multitasking.

By Wednesday most of the duck smell had evaporated from my car. The brown and white ducks seem like they’ve been a couple for years. It doesn’t matter that they just met. There wasn’t a lot of choice in their mating. And may be there is a lot less choice in our own mating. The lesson for me in all of this, should the police pull you over for a traffic violation, it doesn’t hurt to have a live duck on your backseat. Actually it helps matters. Even a hardened cop understands that a couple who love animals and nature should always be given a second chance.

If you enjoy novels with a political twist, here is a list of the best 50 novels for political junkies.

The top five are:

· Brave New World, Aldous Huxley: Aldous Huxley’s classic novel is set in a world where a global government limits procreation and forces its citizens into a cycle of endless economic consumption. A must-read for anyone interested in tales of the extent to which a body will go to control its subjects.

· 1984, George Orwell: Released in 1949, Orwell’s novel depicts a totalitarian society in which the government constantly revises historical records in order to appear blameless and correct. Chilling and ahead of its time.

· Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury: The controlling political system of Bradbury’s dystopia has outlawed reading and, by extension, free and critical thought. The novel revolves around the way people cede control of their lives to silent governing units.

· Blindness, Jose Saramago: Jose Saramago’s searing work won him the Nobel Prize for Literature. His novel deals with the citizens of an unnamed city as they succumb to a freak epidemic of global blindness. The splintered government quarantines more and more of the people as society devolves. A harrowing look at how oppressive systems exist on all levels.

· Seeing, Jose Saramago: The sequel to Blindness finds many of the same characters returning, this time for a more direct attack on corrupt politics. The populace casts blank ballots at an election to protest the government’s distance and detachment, spurring the government to greater heights of alienation and control.

Source: www.onlineuniversities.com

To understand hardships from the inside, you need to be patient. People who suffer either complain all the time or stay silent. In both cases, the nature of suffering is communicated. It is in the crucible of anguish that defines the person in later life. Withstanding adversity in the face of overwhelming odds is difficult as it is rare. But people do arise above their hardships and we call that ability to keep going a virtue.

Our eyes are wide open to our own injuries, despairs, and insults but we are often blind when others around us have the same inflicted on their lives. We walk passed the beggar. We don’t notice the blind lottery seller. Or the old man selling baked bananas wrapped in banana leaves.

We over estimated the importance and duration of our own humiliations and underestimate the feeling of someone who has been humiliated. Often someone without power or influence suffer in front of our notice if we care to look. A child. A grandmother. A beggar.

Or a motorcycle taxi driver.

I take a motorcycle taxi most days in Bangkok. It is inexpensive, convenient, and fast. Traffic jams are legendary in Bangkok. The motorcycle is the best weapon to use when all cars have come to a halt. They carefully thread their way through narrow corridors, avoiding rearview mirrors.

Most of the major intersections in my neighbourhood have a motorcycle taxi stand. From a handful of drivers to a couple of dozen, the motorcycle taxi system allows the drivers to make a subsistence living. Often they are taking local residents to fancy condos, hotels or restaurants. The rich stay hidden behind the tinted windows of their cars and SUVs and utility vans. They wouldn’t be caught dead on the back of a motorcycle taxi. They’d rather stay inside their vehicle no matter how bad the traffic. To take a motorcycle bike would assault their personal dignity.

I see foreigners and members of the Thai middle class using them. Their passengers are delivered to places of luxury, buildings that they have vague knowledge about from TV soapbox operas. These drivers are never from the inside.

There approximately 200,000 motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok. That is a city-sized group of people—driver are mostly men but include women, too. Most of the drivers come from the Northeast of Thai. They have a limited education and limited alternative employment. Many of the drivers, having saved up money travel back to the Northeast, helping parents and relatives with farming activities and contributing money and information about the big city.

A lot of their time is waiting their turn in the queue in the hot sun. At each taxi stand a rotation system is used so that all drivers have a fair chance at the work. The local fares are ten or twenty baht. Few people use them for distant travel. I used them to go one kilometer to the gym or two kilometers to lunch.

Each time I arrive in one piece, I feel grateful. I pay the driver and watch him turn his bike, and return without a fare to his taxi stand. He’ll go to the back of the line and wait until those in front have taken a passenger. They have busy times of the day in the morning and then in later afternoon as offices begin to empty.

I’ve made an effort to know the young men at the taxi queue in front of my building. What I’ve noticed is they keep to themselves. I rarely see them talking to a passenger. The passenger get off the bike, pay and without a word disappear. No acknowledgement of the other person. There is no exchange except the name destination and the handing over of the fare on arrival.

Where is the dignity in such a daily existence? Is it the way of all big cities that those who are at the lowest rungs are excluded from respect, dignity, and self-worth? Unless we find value and meaning in the experience of such people, the universal reply from those we exclude is alienation, suspicion and unrest. If dignity were a sustainable resource dispensed through the taxi ranks in Bangkok, and the drivers became the messengers that those around had started to notice and talk to them, acknowledge their existence, the building blocks of trust might be sufficient to construct bridges inside the larger community.

Strange things have happened. The truth is that extend and scope of a shared, common experience is the best way to measure the health of any society. Break people into enclaves of poverty and luxury, strip them of self-respect, hope and dignity and suddenly there are society’s worst fear—fellow creatures who have nothing to lose.

Red light means stop; green light means go; and yellow light is proceed with caution. Except Thai drivers have a way of blurring the meaning of traffic lights. Signaling what is expected, what is wanted, or what one can get away with are mentally built from the cultural bricks of education, family, friends and neighbors. Simple signals such as yes, and no, like traffic signals aren’t always to be relied upon.

In Thai culture, it is a well-established tradition that before you enter the house of a Thai, you first remove your shoes. The feet, according to local custom, are the lowest part of the body. Walking on streets and pavements makes for dirty shoes. There are a couple of levels at work. First, your feet (and everybody else’s) occupy the lowest realm (pointing with your foot at someone is a major cultural gaff). Second, there are some practical health issues packaged with living in the tropics. Dog shit is one. Along with various parasites and bacteria which have been known to hitch a ride on people’s shoes and into their houses.

Even though this ‘shoe’ feature of Thai culture (it’s more like a fetish) can be found in every travel guide ever written about Thailand, it is not uncommon to find a foreigner walking straight into a Thai house as the horrified Thai hosts watch the clump, clump of shoes leaving the equivalent of CSI chalk lines outlining a dead body.

I have a good Thai friend who tells the story of his mother, one of those well-educated, well-read, articulate women I’ve met. A couple of foreigners were taken by my Thai friend to visit his mother. At the door, the foreigners (obviously having read a guidebook) had begun to remove their shoes. The mother insisted that wasn’t necessary. They looked at each other, they looked at the mother, and she repeated that they were welcome to keep on their shoes. So inside the house they went wearing their shoes.

An hour later the foreigners left, and mother and son closed the door. The mother sighed, shaking her head.

“What’s wrong, mother?” my Thai friend asked.

“You know what’s wrong,” she said.

He had an idea what she was getting at but at the same time didn’t want to guess.

“I don’t understand, mother.”

“Your friends walked through my house in their shoes. Why are foreigners so rude? Don’t they understand the most simple thing about Thai culture?”

“But you told them not to remove their shoes. I heard you, mother.”

She looked at him, slowly shaking her head, as if the foreigners had infected his mind.

“Aren’t they aware in Thai culture, that you always remove your shoes? I thought you said these foreigners knew Thailand.”

“They thought you’d made an exception,” he said.

“There are no exceptions. Shoes off. Always.”

He had to admit that she was right. His mother had, as an act of graciousness and courtesy had made a concession to their foreign ways, which she understood to be different. Westerners had no problem trampling over the floors of others with their shoes on leaving a trail of dirt and disease. But they, if they knew Thailand, then these foreigners would also understand that his mother’s concession was not to be acted upon. In her mind, the situation was perfectly clear. The foreigners should have known that in reality her “yes, please keep your shoes on,” should have been translated by the foreigners as, “yes, let me remove my shoes.”

As the son later told me, his mother had assumed the foreigners could “read her mind” and instead they merely heard her words and took them at face value. In a culture where face does have a high value, a mind reading an essential element in social relationships, a foreigner should understand that it is often necessary to go behind the words and into the interior desire and real intention of the person. No one should expect a Thai to spell out her true wish when the rules are plainly, obviously clear and without ambiguity.

This story isn’t just about shoes. It is about the intentions of people communicating in a public space where political and social relationships demand everyone is working from the same cultural rulebook. Paying a restaurant bill is another variation on this theme. Mind reading is a definite plus in Thailand (and most places) but foreigners can rest assured that often Thais are no better than reading each others minds than someone from Kansas fresh from the airport racing into Bangkok to find the real Thailand.

Writing a novel is the end product of a long creative journey. Much the same conclusion can be said about writing and directing a film. Since Monday I have been guiding Hollywood screenwriter Chase Palmer through Vincent Calvino’s world. Chase is writing the script for Spirit House. During the past couple of days, I have been thinking about how a novelist transfers and shares his world with a screenwriter.

The Vincent Calvino series—soon to have 12 novels—is over a million words spanning nearly twenty years. A screenplay runs about 120 pages in length. The film going audience will never read it. Instead they will watch the film. Their experience is what they see on the screen; not what is put on paper for the director, producer and actors. People who watch a movie (unless they are in the industry or writers) don’t understand or much care about the screenplay. Why should they? It is like the building you live in. How often to you think about the blueprints that were labored over, changed, revised in order to realize the physical structure. I suspect not often.

There is no brilliant film without a brilliant screenplay just like there is not brilliant building without a brilliant architectural blueprint. The producers of Spirit House brought Chase Palmer to Bangkok in order for him to get a sense of Bangkok and the world that Vincent Calvino occupies. Chase’s has just finished writing “Dune” a $150 million film for Paramount. Now he’s mentally leaving the science fiction and entering the world of Bangkok. Maybe that isn’t such a difficult journey.

It has been my task to act as a filter to that world. In the case of Spirit House, I wrote the book almost twenty years ago. Bangkok has transformed into a different place on many levels—from the skyline, to the politics, to the composition of the expats who live here. And Spirit House is a novel. Words on paper.

The film that Chase Palmer will write is the visual representation of those words, that world, and the people who inhabit it. I have concentrated on two central elements—People and enduring images. Each day has been a different round of setting and characters. From the Texas Lone Star Bar in Washington Square, Erawan Shrine, the Police hospital, police headquarters, Rajprasong, the Chao Phraya River, the Oriental Hotel, Lumpini Park, the Emporium, the sub-soi near Pan Pan on Soi 33, to the nightlife venues, including Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza, Patpong, the Thermae, Klong Toey, Tonglor, and the Arab Quarter off Sukhumvit Road.

Is this the real Bangkok? Aren’t you missing things? Of course it isn’t the whole picture. A movie, like a book, captures an essence. The entire scope is elusive and beyond rendering. So one must choose. And choose wisely—people, neighborhoods, and street life. The story must work. The characters must have depth. The surroundings need to support the story and characters. These are the perimeters that drive the creative fiction writing process. Whether the result is a book or a film, there are limits as to what can be included. Every exclusion is a kind of death, a little piece of reality chipped off the vase, and the hope is that what is absent won’t undermine what is present.

The visual images wash over like waves as I walked Chase through this world.

More importantly, though, are the people—Thais and farang—many I’ve known for over twenty years have opened their hearts and minds when talking to Chase. He has managed to hear perspectives from the highest ranked people in Thailand to those who live close to the edge. These people occupy separate worlds, which rarely connect. One of the things I’ve appreciated during this process is how divergent these lives are from one another, yet how close in proximity these lives are led. In the Calvino novels, the detective moves in between these worlds, sees links which aren’t apparent from the outside, and draws (hopefully) into the interior lives of Thais and foreigners. That is the hardest thing to visualize—this core place inside the human that is heart often hidden from the outside.

But if I can approach doing that in words (I know that I don’t always succeed), then I have faith that Chase can capture the right images that will demonstrate the relationships, the emotions, and the connections that I’ve written about. Colonel Pratt, who is a key character in the Vincent Calvino series, brings a spiritual and cultural dimension to the books. Part of the challenge has been to bring Chase in contact with Thais who will give him an insight into Thai culture, language, and Buddhism. Today he met with a close friend, a retired policeman, who was able to create that cultural bridge that will allow Chase to write a part for a police colonel that will show his humanity and dignity.

Bangkok isn’t one book or one movie. It is a complex community with conflicting values, people of all views, shady characters, saints and demons. Each one brings something to the table. Creativity is the connection of things in ways that are unexpected, that open worlds we thought we knew but realize our knowledge was lacking. Most of us live on the surface. Few want to go deep inside. That takes time and energy and can be troubling as we find things that challenge our beliefs, values, and worldview. But that is the nature of the creative process—the production of new associations, connections, revealing an infrastructure of relationships, dreams, promises, and conflicts.

In the best films like in the best books, we find ourselves emotionally touched by the journey, and if it has been a great journey, in some ways our lives will be changed. My hope is that in the week I’m taking Chase around Bangkok that the people and images will cluster into a visual experience of Bangkok and the people who live here quite unlike anything that anyone else has ever done. And when people find themselves discovering a place for the first time and finding something true about the human condition that, for a moment, will rise above the daily noise of everyday life and embrace them like a mother’s smile.

How do we understand another person’s perspective? To read another’s intentions, beliefs, desires and imagination is necessary in order to predict behavior. This ability to predict requires an element of empathy but that isn’t sufficient. It is necessary also to have a Theory of Mind about another person. We don’t often step back and ask ourselves how social, economic and political relationships depend on assessing the mental state of others.

There has been a great deal of international crime fiction in recent years. How should we judge fiction has been written by authors, who are not native to the culture? My answer is it depends on whether the book is premised on accurate representations of the reality of people inside that culture. That would include the four of us who write weekly on this blog.

The question in the back of a reader’s or a reviewer’s minds is whether the author has accurately represented the theory of mind in the culture where the novel is set. Most of the time, neither reader nor reviewer is in a good position to make that assessment. I am assuming, of course, that the theory of mind is different from culture to culture. While there is much common ground between people in various cultures, it must be said that cultural difference are important in assessing the intention of others inside that culture.

In a tense situation where tempers are raw, a smile in Thailand may not be a signal of appeasement. The offer of a wai from a hotel clerk doesn’t carry the same intention as a wai offered to a mother, a monk, a boss, or a general. Without a theory of mind that takes into account the language, history and culture of another person, it is possible to make mistakes. Even when you study the culture for years you can make mistakes. I make them. And I suspect that I am not alone. A gesture, expression or words that are fully comprehensible and predictable inside your own culture may fail you inside another culture.

We are creatures of habit. And our habitual ways of assessing another’s theory of mind is often done without much introspection. That’s where empathy comes into play. But most of us aren’t that reflective or critical; we float on automatic pilot, guided by inferences and attributions embedded in our mental processes. Once that happens, without empathy and introspection, the actual reality of how the other’s person’s beliefs and desires are different in subtle and not so subtle ways takes more effort, because the implications are more complex and the outcomes less certain. We like shortcuts. You can often tell reading a book set in another country (especially when you know something about that country) whether the writer has taken the shortcut on the literary expressway.

It is common that books are written just as investments are made and wars are fought by people who have made decisions based on the theory of mind of others. Many times, though, the premise of the other person’s theory of mind lacks an understanding of the other minds, which have different values and goals. Perhaps the theory of mind that assumes that Afghan villagers wish to have representative democracy won’t greet such a system with incomprehension and mystery. What makes one group of people laugh until they are in tears requires an understanding of how their sense of humor is shaped by their language and culture. Watching Thai TV is more fun if you are watching it with a Thai. They know when to laugh, when to cry and when to cry foul where, for the average foreigner, the intentions of the characters resonant in a different way such confusion and boredom. The cultural applause sign doesn’t flash for them.

It is a rare entertainer whose act transcends culture. Super heroes work the best because the theory of mind is one where the hero isn’t restrained by the usual forces that work on mere mortals. The more human and local the story and character, the more difficult it is to translate into another language and culture. Translators pull out theirs into another theory of mind.

Taboos, superstition, social structures, the role of men and women, and sexuality are cultural constructs—the concrete and steel of the mind. People assume their beliefs are universal because they are mostly sealed off in communities where that theory of mind works most of the time. It is only outside that community that the native theory of mind breaks down. We draw moral judgments based on the actions of others. But the person so judged may have done something morally acceptable in his culture such as an honor killing of sister but represents morally reprehensible conduct to someone from a different culture.

Emotional communication even within a culture can be difficult and uncertain. Add the cultural element and such communication becomes a minefield. From an early age we learn to map other people’s emotional states. As children we learn the ABCs of anger, disgust, hate, jealousy and envy. These experiences form an emotional language that we learn to read in others.

When it comes to understanding a foreigner’s emotions and actions, most people are, in effect, autistic. They have a difficulty in understanding that a person in another culture will see things from a perspective different from their own. It is a theory of mind impairment and one that can easily work in creative works such as novels, plays and films. How do we know the author is showing us a perspective of Thailand, Israel, Turkey or Iraq other than simply a projection of their own perspective from their home culture?

Scarcity and the allocations of scarce resources are universal in nature. Start with money and sex. The way people in any society deal with the relative scarcity of money and sex and how they deal with crime when someone decides to take a short cut is often local and culturally based. Hierarchies are erected to allocate scarce resources. Each system of hierarchies believes in its superiority. International companies doing business in other cultures can miscalculate the importance and role of the local hierarchies in influencing the intention of the local partner. Information access is another concept heavily influenced by culture. The Chinese view about information access and the American view illustrate two different theories of mind trying to understand and cope with the other.

A theory of mind is judged by the competence in judging the mental states of others. We look to predict the intentions of others by understanding the beliefs and desires that are used to form such intentions. It is also how we measure, what we choose to measure and what we conclude from the measuring process. We need to get inside the mind of another to understand the source of beliefs, vanities, hunches, beliefs, wishes, desires—the place where emotions are formed.

Emotion formation of another is cultural at core. A theory of mind takes into account another person’s likely emotional response. The role of a mother, power of authority figures and structure, what is rude, what is polite, what is left unsaid, what can be said, when deference is required, and when someone is insulted, threatened, or made uncomfortable require an understanding of how this aspect of mind is created within a culture. The basis of co-operation also requires an accurate understanding of how other people value, create, protect and fund co-operation.

There is a tradition of pundits saying that foreigners can’t understand how Thais think. In other words, no foreigner could form a theory of mind about people who were raised in Thai culture. That is, in itself, an interesting theory of mind, suggesting that all non-Thais are basically rendered autistic when it comes to understanding how Thais form intentions and the true nature of their beliefs.

We’ve never limited in a time with a greater capacity for communication. But the ability to communicate hasn’t kept up with the facilities and technologies that allow for instaneous communication. It may be that we evolved with a time lag built in. We can only begin to comprehend a theory of mind about people inside our own culture, and now with many cultures accessible at a keystroke most people simply don’t have the time or inclination to do the heavy work of figuring out how others think and form their intentions.

One reason to read international crime fiction is to find a voice that reliably takes the reader into minds that have been shaped by different cultural forces. To understand how such people think, their morality, their emotions, and their beliefs becomes the first step to avoid the trap that one theory of mind fits all. So far I have been lucky to have readers and reviewers my attempts to examine, understand and illustrate the theory of mind of Thais. This mental framework examination works like a back story behind the obvious one that rolls out like many other novels.

My own bias is that without such introspection, an author may have created an entertainment but such a book doesn’t open any doors for the main reason I open a book—I want to know (without being lectured) about how the culture influences for social relationships and the way culture influences a character’s choices. We like to read a book, which offers up a version of your own theory of mind; it is like comfort food. Exotic food, like exotic culture is an acquired taste. The only problem is what forces have shaped our mind doesn’t always correspond to the forces that shaped the mind of people, their emotions and actions, living in other cultures.

Reading and then accurately writing about the mental state of others has always been difficult. Travel and communications were not easy until recently. But modern communications has made it seem that globalization has created a Global Theory of Mind. In a way, that is true. People communicate on a frequent base beyond their borders in ways their parents and grandparents could never have dreamt possible. But despite such communication, the basic limits remain. People still have different ways of attributing intention, displaying emotions, and acting that are products of their culture. Perhaps that will one day give way to a more general theory of mind. If so, that day is a long ways into the future.

You can’t walk through a wet market on a Friday morning in Bangkok on the Internet. You can’t join a group of Thais during their lunch break. Or you can’t talk to the Thai mystics who read cards on the sidewalk. There are hundreds of these small things that still require boots on the ground, time on the street and inside the cafes, and total immersion that is beyond the capability of our best software and Internet resources. Though, it is highly probable that nestled in deep time simulation programs will recreate any market, street, bar, restaurant, or public square, and inhabit it with people with a theory of mind appropriate to that time and place. Meanwhile, we toil on gathering theories of minds the only way we can—through observation and introspection and empathy.

I want to know something about the mental states of the people I write about. I don’t want my characters to become abstractions or projections. How to do that needs a combination of curiosity and diligence, and a love for the search of the underlying building blocks of perception and action. At some point in this process, I know I am getting closer to the truth when I begin to understand what I a Thai woman once told me, that she didn’t believe in ghost but admitted to being afraid of ghosts.

Tomorrow we have turned one year old on 15th July. Help us celebrate International Authors Reality Check celebrates its first birthday by leaving a comment of what you liked (and didn’t like) last year. We’d like to know if our blogs stimulated, entertained, or provoked. We hope they did.

Collectively we’ve been posting four original (hopefully witty, insightful, brilliant and memorable) blogs once a week. That is a lot of labour of love.

We’ve averaged around 10,000 views per month over our first year. That is a fair sized (and growing) number of people who come around to this site in order to take a peek at our words of wisdom. If you have a friend who you think would like the blog, send them an email. Welcome them to our blog on our behalf.

If you like what we’ve been saying over the past year, drop us a note. Or better still, you might want to click on our book covers to the right hand side of the screen, and go to amazon and buy one of our books.

Please let us hear suggestions, recommendations, rants, wishes, and opinions about international crime fiction. What is it that makes for a great reading experience? What can to be done better?

As we start our second year, we’d like to thank each of you for coming around each week and taking the time to read our weekly obsessions, opinions, advice and diary of the life of a writer. We will try to continue stimulating and entertaining. When we fail, let us know; when we succeed, you can let us know that, too.