The entrance recalls one of the masses of  remainder-stocked, clearance stores around Tottenham Court Road, but the interior does not disappoint.The ground floor makes for an easy, that is to say, undemanding welcome with rows of recent fiction and classic literature with the itinerant running the additional the risk of being held captive by rows of stationary: diaries, notebooks, calenders, postcards and the like.

Upstairs, via an uncommon stairwell, finds the shop changing into a little bookshop, as an actor falls into character; the reader here becomes a willing hostage, wandering amidst random passages and corridors created by neatly arranged shelves, each strategically positioned in relation to another. The tightly defined subject shelves nonetheless melt one into the other, effortlessly, anonymously.

I am particularly engrossed with Sheldon Wolin’s most recent work (and generally perturbed by the pricing of books in the heart of the EU). A woman waltzes by, wrapped up in warmth but still carrying the sting of cold, one that sticks to her winter clothes. It feels as if she has brought an invisible cloak of the icy outside indoors. It burns like a scent.

That’s what I miss about Old Europe and its early spring chill.

Further down the road, before le Th̢̩tre Royal de la Monnaie, is another creature. Sterling Books is a friendly place Рalmost out of place in the dour Brussels day. Yet its charm offensive fails: the books are all too topical, the rows of shelves in an indecent straightness to one another. Worse still, even the lazy, late winter sun did enough to dispel its attempted coziness.

They are, nonetheless, all intrinsically good people, with a goodness that washes away sullen souls, always. Happily, this process of friendly acquisition is a mutual exercise, and I feel quietly privileged for it; not the privilege of granted status, but that wrought from daily toil and the struggle of personalities.

This diaspora of friends – this Thomaspora – encircles our world, from Bavaria, to sunny California, London and the English Midlands, Rome, once again war-torn Lebanon and here in Singapore; it extends beyond our terrestial form, extending to envelop the Heavens.

It sometimes feels as if I am an expatriate, distanced and disentangled from these fellow creatures, my fellow creatures, and I am longing for a moment when time can be halted and space compressed, when this circle can surround me again.

That the first night was disturbed by dreams of a bout between two twisted partners came as a mild jolt; that the second and third nights continued with this torrent of nightmarish images of loves betrayed and lovers destroyed questioned my psyche. This was not a welcoming sign. As if this Persian verse was meant for me:

Mayhmaan gar che aziz ast walayken cho nafas
Khaffa maysaazad agar aayado waapas narawad

A guest is very dear but like our precious breath, it will suffocate us
if he comes and does not go back to where he came from.

Does this bed carry the conjugal history of unhappy loves? Or is this antagonistic Sleep a corollary of daily screenings on television each evening: one which reminisces the overthrow of the Shah through a series of montages interspersed around old news footage; the other lauding the sacrificial deaths of young men during the Arab-Persian War.

Perhaps the bed had to share its memories; a catharsis to shed itself of its heavy weight. Perhaps it was Michael Clanchy’s Abelard: a medieval life, on the bedside table, motioning toward the denouement between Abelard and Heloise. Perhaps it is time to find another room.

Perhaps it is unfair of me to assess both Moore’s slightly humourous but ultimately benign jottings and Caulfield’s more assured, extended ruminations; as a regular traveller to the African continent, I am surely excluded from their target demographic. Nonetheless, my scepticism is due less to the failings of the respective authors and points to a deeper malaise; I suspect that the books’ limitations are more fundamentally rooted in the genre, assuming it is meaningful to speak of it as a distinct genre, and explains the generous shelf space given to such a field.

They are bound by expectations of Otherness identifed and accentuated, and face further contraints set up by their near second cousins – journalismo - to string endless anecdotes and humdrum observations by the dozen. Hence no room here in this genre for the state-sanctioned hit squads that rid Ghanaian roads of gangs of thugs; nor of the HIV+ prostitutes that roam Mombasa’s streets.

Such sanitisation of foreign terrain and experience is not the most offensive aspect, however; neither is the lure of exotic locations, or of misadventures accidentally on purpose chanced upon. Surely the basis for a good book transcends the division of genres; yet requisite to this particular genre is the complete annihilation of the narrative craft. In other words, herein lies the crux: travelogues exemplify Kantian approaches to Idealism.

The Singapore-Jakarta run, by contrast, is everything that Berlin-Frankfurt isn’t; Changi Airport, that consumer mall that masquerades as the region’s busiest air traffic hub, is a model of efficiency, busyness and business. It is an airport as you would expect in EveryMan’s nightmare. Take-off carries you over the eastern corner of the island nation and briskly over the straits of Singapore – there is no monumental architecture, no life; this is confirmed during the descent on the return trip. There is a feeling of returning familiarity, but only the kind of familiarity that welcomes a return to an unhappy home.

It is as if there is purpose for this particular route, in this haste: as if you are prevented from acquainting yourself with the sameness of the public tower blocks that houses the majority of its populace. Much as you wish for novelty and fascination, once, one day, someday, for one moment to be marked by wonder, you are slapped down in disappointment. This is true of every sighting of the island, and of every day in Singapore.

further reading:

Jakarta to
Aceh

That most personal, yet at once eternal, moment took place as if an ethereal, passing intangible took form. This fleetingness that materialized as the doors of the elevator opened into the rabid workaday morning decided to cling on to my company, much as a hungry kitten would. I immediately recognized this creature, of course, for who it was: that half of me that longed to rid itself of this island nation’s hold.

Long confined in expectancy, it, too, at last has a birth-time and date: Friday, 16th December, 2005, close to a quarter to 8. I wonder if the birthing of this originary instant, full of wishes and claims, would be better imprinted according to where longs for; in that case, and to be precise, it properly occurred late one Thursday afternoon (Pacific Time).

So now I scheme for my other half’s well-being: that it will survive its non-descript birth to become the person that I had hoped to fashion of myself, much as any well-intentioned paternal being aims at perfecting the specimen. Much as how popular Darwinism understands itself.

This island has been a home of sorts for four adult years, a relationship longer than any other I’ve developed with any random stack of bricks, in any town, country, region or continent; we have endured each other as would co-workers in a firm – professionally, which is hardly the basis for a symbiotic relationship at the heart of a home, or of any “belonging”. It is (far too readily) possible and necessary to write venomously of this place; to dispense all pretense of balance or fairness, and instead write in beautifully sadistic tones, with full sincerity, of soul-numbing barrenness.

People-watching constitutes a legitimate sport here in “Hell-A”, as Bill Hicks calls Los Angeles. It is an odd crowd that inhabits the Los Angeles cultural terrain – neither bohemian nor crusty; grounded, yet with a sprinkling of nouveau riche. I have never seem so many geriatrics simultaneously leaning against urinals; perhaps they otherwise stand little chance of balancing themselves, much less make it back to their seats for the second act. I was so not tempted to utter a “May I help you with that?”

Writing this in Seattle’s Online Coffee Co. seems negligent, an abuse of time and disrespectful of the city that awaits exploration.

I can’t talk to people who are … disabled

Sales guy at “Miss Sixty”, 3rd Street Promenade.

How’s the lice? … [in raised voice] How’s the lice in your hair?

Barnes & Noble customer to older, hard of hearing (?) friend. Is that what friends do?

LA has been fun for now. 5 days into the vacation and I’ve done all the major bookshops left in this part of Hollywood, with only three purchases. The best by far has been Dutton’s, one of a growing number of “community bookstores” in the trenches fighting against the brutality of Big Conglomerates.

I’ve too much time on my hands but seem content to remain unproductive. Found this site, though, that charts one’s travels and justifies the collection of 12 used passports that lies piled amongst unused airline tickets, annotated phrasebooks and unsent postcards. It seems my mortal memory cannot contain the wonders of Istanbul’s mosques, nor of breakfast on the Bosporus. The sight of gas being flared in the middle of the Romanian countryside, as a heavy fog envelopes the midnight air, and the bursts of blood red clouds that colours the terrain. Or speeding on Ghanian roads while dodging metre wide craters. Or the beggars who press their infant’s faces on car windows as you stall and snake your way through Jakarta’s mean streets.

Try it, courtesy of World66. My preference would be to show cities visited as opposed to the entire country; after all, countries are but names, while cities are the actuality of countries, displaying the life-blood of their inhabitants.