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In The Honourable Schoolboy, the spy Westerby goes to the races in Hong Kong to observe his quarry, Drake Ko. He spots one of Ko’s associates in the owners’ box.

“Shading his eyes and wishing he had brought binoculars, he made out one fat, hard-looking man in a suit and dark glasses, accompanied by a young and very pretty girl. He looked half Chinese, and half Latin, and Jerry put him down as Filipino. The girl was the best that money could buy. . .

“”That’s Arpego,” said Grant, in Jerry’s ear and indicating the fat Filipino. “He owns Manila and most of the out-islands.”

“Arpego’s paunch sat forward over his belt like a rock stuffed inside his shirt.”

LeCarré, originally uploaded by 160507.

For the next month I’m going through the LeCarrés, so if anyone spots a copy of Smiley’s People, let me know (Forget Constant Gardener, zzzzz). I just finished Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is wonderfully bleak and nerdy (We consider nerdhood an honor). So that’s what the fuss was about. Was, because the Smiley novels are harder to find in stores, which probably means fewer people are reading them, which bolsters the argument that the audience is getting dumber. Another reason to miss the Cold War: enemies you get to know so well they’re practically your friends. After all, your adversary is the instrument of your destiny.

In Tinker, George Smiley is looking for a mole inside the Circus (British intelligence). Having been ignominiously booted out of the Circus, he has few allies and assumes everyone an enemy. He only knows a few details, not the whole picture, so he has to sift the rest out of files he has no access to. His allies manage to get their hands on them, and they start plowing through reams of documents, just digesting vast amounts of data. If there are gaps, they point to what the mole doesn’t want him to know. It’s basically auditing, but thrilling. Occasionally someone gets killed in a brutal manner that the author doesn’t dwell on, because it’s a given that if anyone is found out, he’s already dead. It’s about waiting patiently for something to click into place and show how everything is connected. Then you wish you didn’t know, because it destroys your faith in institutions, nations, and human beings. It’s a deep, dark pit that LeCarré plumbs, and it’s a trip worth taking.

Another resemblance between Saffy and Koba Stalin: She insists on being in every picture, and Stalin had his associates erased from his pictures—and from this world.

Rex Libris, originally uploaded by 160507.

“We have few badass librarian stories. Joss Whedon gave us Rupert Giles, who can swing a sword as well as shelve a tome. Kelly Link introduced us to Fox, the gorgeous and similarly sword-wielding librarian in the story “Magic for Beginners.” The husband of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time-Traveller’s Wife takes care of Special Collections as his dayjob. The orangutan librarian of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is not to be messed with. Infinite librarians inhabit Jorge Luis Borges’s very small story, “The Library of Babel. “

“This is a fine company of heroes, but, given what we owe librarians, it is still an insufficient tribute. Librarians were among the first to stand up to the Patriot Act. They safeguard the sum of our knowledge and keep it findable. They let us read books for free. They spend their days battling forces of darkness and ignorance, and now they have Rex Libris to demonstrate this to the world.

“James Turner’s square-headed, noir-ish, immortal survivor of Alexandria’s famed library is a marvelous creation. He wears a dark suit and speaks with the accent of a hard-boiled tough guy. He fights demons and villains and alien warlords. He carries weapons and equipment in his notebook by “fictionalizing” them first. He’s read everything ever written, and he knows where to find it all. . .” From a review by William Alexander in Rain Taxi.

Sold!

I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries, but I’ve never met an inspiring librarian, much less one who could tell me how to slay demons. All they ever said to me was “Sssh.” They shushed Me, the nerd who sniffed books! Well there was the nice nun at St Theresa’s, but I don’t remember her name.

In the early days of globalization, before Amazon and Google, we acquired our books on trips or relied on friends abroad to get them for us. To personally step inside Swindon was to have a bookgasm. Peter Greenaway saw the connection between bookstores and sex and used Swindon (or a bookshop that looked like it) as the location of his pretentious movie The Pillow Book, now remembered mostly for Ewan MacGregor’s naughty bits.

I hadn’t been to HK in years, and as luck would have it my hotel is three blocks from Swindon. From outside the bookshop looks the same, surrounded by retailers on Lock Road. Inside it seems smaller, or maybe it just looms large in the memory. Near the door is a table full of current bestsellers. It’s when you go to the shelves that you see where the years have taken their toll. Most of the books are old, the pages turning brown. These were probably the same books I didn’t buy the last time I was here. And despite having older titles in stock, they did not have a single one of John Le Carre’s Smiley books. Nor did they have John Burdett’s new Bangkok novels. The store itself has a slightly shabby air. It has been beaten by the megastore chains and the Internet, but it continues to exist like a beacon to the brain.

In our younger and more vulnerable days, the nearest outpost of civilization to Manila was Swindon bookstore in Hong Kong, a temple where you could inhale the scent of printer’s ink on new paper and get your brain high. First time I ever went to HK thirteen years ago, Jedi master sent me on a quest.

- To Swindon go you must.

- Where is that exactly?

- The street name I forget, but to that department store near it is.

- Um, Hong Kong is full of department stores.

- Ah! Joan Crawford it is.

- Mommy Dearest? Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?

- Talking about what are you?

- You said Joan Crawford.

- Padawan not listening. Lane Crawford I meant.

Mat reading Saki, originally uploaded by Koosama.

There are quite a few stories about talking cats, and this is probably the best one: Tobermory by the unbearable, spellbinding Saki (H.H. Munro).

Guga reading Bangkok Haunts in a Bangkok hotel, originally uploaded by 160507.

My old boss Teddy Boy taught me that the best way to prepare for a trip to a city you don’t know is to read a detective novel or mystery set there: at the very least you get an idea of its topography. Hence Michael Dibdin for Venice and other Italian cities, Andrea Camilleri for Sicily, Georges Simenon for Paris and other French cities, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind for Barcelona. Arthur Conan Doyle for London, that’s elementary. For Bangkok I read John Burdett’s Bangkok Haunts, the third of his much-praised series in which the protagonist is half-Thai, half-American policeman Sonchai Jitpleecheep. (I couldn’t find the two earlier books in Manila stores, but I just got the first, Bangkok 8, at Bangkok airport.)

The Thai Buddhist background gives Jitpleecheep and his co-workers a different perspective on crime and human nature. At the start of Bangkok Haunts, a pathologist explains to an American FBI agent why the woman in a snuff movie did not seem terrified at her impending death. Later Sonchai patiently tells the same agent why his partner on the police force, who is not gay, is about to get a sex-change operation. Bangkok Haunts is Brilliant and Riveting, Dark and Sleazy. Let’s just say it won’t reinforce your cheerful view of human nature. Maybe I shouldn’t have read it right before my first trip to Bangkok, but it made the experience more intense.

The book describes something called “the elephant game”, a nasty form of execution used by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The executioners make a bamboo cage in the shape of a large ball, and put the condemned man in it. Then they bring in an elephant and encourage it to play football. The elephant starts kicking the ball, and when it gets annoyed–elephants are irritable–it starts whacking the cage with its trunk. Then it gets bored. Humans are quite fragile.

So I arrive in Bangkok and practically the first thing I see is an elephant.

Saw The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Richard Burton. Man it’s bleak. Not a laugh in the whole movie. And yet it makes me want to read the entire Le Carre oeuvre. (Alright, the Smiley books. Constant Gardener, ewww.) There are no heroes. The spies are regular schlubs, they don’t carry cool gadgets or drive snazzy cars, and they don’t actually engage in hand-to-hand combat. They wage war with their brains: reading the enemy, predicting their moves, finding exploitable flaws. Double-crosses become triple-crosses become quadruple-crosses. “Intelligence” lives up to its name. One has to admire the cold, calculating bastards who run the agents. I wonder if the fact that the espionage genre has moved on from John Le Carre to the Tom Clancies reflects the decline in “intelligence”. Technology aids the clever, and it also enables the mediocre; it democratises.

I also realized that Russell Crowe wants to be Richard Burton. Same eyes.

Chris Farley, originally uploaded by Koosama.

Every time I see the trailer for Kung Fu Panda I think of Chris Farley. Why did I even watch Beverly Hills Ninja? It was singularly unfunny and embarrassing. In fact most of Farley’s work on Saturday Night Live was singularly unfunny and embarrassing. But I liked Chris Farley (and disliked David Spade, and no longer watch SNL). There was something touching about Farley’s performances–a desperate need to be liked, and a sense that he couldn’t help himself, he was out of control. Here was a guy who was ready to kill himself for a laugh. There’s a new biography of Farley by his brother and a biographer of Belushi. Why do comics have such unhappy lives? Or is it backwards: Why does unhappiness produce comedy?

Are nerds born or are they made? Now that geeks rule tech companies, lead billionaire lists, and are the auteurs, subjects and stars of Judd Apatow movies, has it become cool to be a nerd? Even people who must’ve been popular in high school now claim that they were nerds. If everyone was a teenage outcast, then who cast them out?

I do not like these belated claims of membership in the tribe.

Here’s an interview with Benjamin Nugent, author of American Nerd.

You need not have read a word of Patricia Highsmith to know that the name “Ripley” has come to mean “fraud”, “impostor”, “pretender”, anyone who pretends to be something he is not (And have we not all, at one time or another, done exactly that?), and on occasion, “murdering sociopath”. Andrew Cunanan was a Ripley–a man who faked his history, fooled a lot of people, went on a killing spree, and ensured his posthumous notoriety by killing an international celebrity.

Some years ago I attempted to use “Ripley” to describe a particularly inept individual who had risen to a position of influence by appealing to the gullible. I was immediately reprimanded by my friend Bernard-Henri Not Levy. “By calling him Ripley you not only insult Patricia Highsmith, but all who have adapted the Ripley novels for film, including Rene Clement, Alain Delon. . .”

“You’re right,” I said, “It flatters the clueless twit.”

“Lilliana Cavani, John Malkovich, Wim Wenders, Dennis Hopper. . .”

“Yes, I was wrong.”

“Anthony Minghella, Matt Damon, and Alfred Hitchcock as well, since Strangers On A Train was based on a Highsmith. . .”

“Alright, alright, I’ll call him Wipley.”

Recently I read an old profile by Alva Johnston about a famous Ripley, a man raised in New York City orphanages who managed to convince the American upper-class that he’d attended Eton, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. He claimed to be first cousin or half-brother to the last Czar of Russia, and the son of the man–or the man himself–who killed Rasputin. He conned a lot of people, but was so charming and amusing that they not only forgave him, they gave him more money. During lean seasons, as he waited for the latest newspaper exposes to be forgotten, he would do menial jobs, stow away on trains and ocean liners, sleep in subways. He was arrested many times for writing bad cheques, but never did much jail time, and in any case the wardens and prisoners would treat him like royalty. He went by the name of Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff, and he discovered that people wanted to be fooled.

James Reyes fashion show. May 20 & 22, 4pm, Shangri-La Makati., originally uploaded by 160507.

I’d been hearing a lot about the Gossip Girl novels, so I tried reading one. Yikes, this is what young girls are reading now, and to think we were thrilled every time Nancy Drew held hands with Ned Nickerson. And Nancy was 18, the legal age. The first Gossip Girl novel was so cruel, I read another one. Now I think it’s brilliant, the way the much-maligned American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis was brilliant. No, I haven’t seen the TV series, and I’m told it is to the Cecily von Ziegesar books as Wal Mart is to Takashimaya. True, 95% of movie/TV adaptations are to their literary sources as Wal Mart is to Takashimaya, and I know some GG-TV addicts.

No Country For Young Women in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.