Ubud, 48 hours later
Rainbow in the bathroom sink (sounds like a ska song), Alila Resort.
Consolata (via text): As in Alila talaga? Ano yung resort next door, Hampas-lupa?
Us: Hinde, Muchacha.
Ubud is extremely laid-back and relaxed, making it a great vacation place. The sidewalks, where there are sidewalks, are very narrow, and in town they’re covered with pink stone slabs with gaps just wide enough to sprain your ankle on. While you’re minding where you step cars are whizzing by on the two-lane road which is really a one-and-a-half lane road, and motorcycles are trying to squeeze between them. It’s an accident waiting to happen, and the amazing thing is that these accidents don’t happen. Because no one is stressed about the possibility of an accident!
We can’t live here, the lack of stress would kill us.
So we brought our own stress. Usually our editors don’t mind if we skip a column now and then, but this week we felt compelled to meet every single deadline. So on our first day in Bali we skipped the fabulous dinner with famous writers to pound out two articles. The column on the Paco Larrañaga documentary had to come out immediately because it’s on a limited theatrical run (Although we hear the screenings in Cebu are packed so maybe they’ll extend their run?) and we have to tell people to watch it. Then the other movie review has to come out Sunday just because we want to be first. When vacationing in a stress-free haven, make your own stress!
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Our first session went well. We were on a 9am panel on electronic publishing with Jon Campbell who’s written about rock and roll in China, the reigning Australian poetry slam champion Luka Lesson, journalist and e-book publisher Tom Vater (Visit the Crime Wave Press site, which publishes crime fiction set in Asia. They accept submissions.), and Kristina Olsen, a musician and publisher of enhanced e-books. They’ve all been/are in bands. Later it occurred to us that we were in a band, too. On the management side, but still a band. Interesting.
We were asked how we read books these days. We prefer books on paper because we like that paper and ink smell and because if we hate the book we want to be able to hurl it across the room with great force (Dorothy Parker said that). However, Leo Tolstoy changed our mind about e-books. When we were reading War and Peace it was so heavy and cumbersome that even if we were getting temporary biceps from hefting it we began to wish we had an e-book reader.
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We set off for our interview with Chang-Rae Lee with some trepidation because we’re new to his work and he would spot our ignorance immediately. This trepidation turned into terror when we saw his morning session. Chang-Rae Lee is as elegant as his prose: he looks like he doesn’t sweat and his clothes don’t wrinkle, and when he opens his mouth perfectly formed paragraphs come out. He looks like the potentate of some stylish country that wouldn’t give us a visa. All his interviews are serious. So we did the only thing we could do: we confessed our lack of seriousness. Then it became easy. The podcast will be posted in a couple of weeks.
Our interview with Jeffrey Eugenides did not push through. We’ll have to corner him after his session this (Saturday) morning.
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The main street in Ubud is lined with shops selling Balinese crafts and souvenirs, batik, beads. It’s more expensive than we expected, even with one million rupiah in our wallet (Php1 = 230 Rupiah). [Horror story: our ATM card which has not failed us in 15 years of traveling wouldn’t work, probably because the card is 15 years old. Fortunately we noticed that our peso ATM has a Cirrus logo so we tried using that. It worked! Disaster averted.]
After trudging up and down Monkey Forest Road looking at shops and exuding enough perspiration to irrigate a field, we spotted a store called Pithecanthropus. Ooh, title of a Charles Mingus album. Charles Mingus, as you know, designed a toilet training system for his cat. Of course it’s possible the store has nothing to do with Mingus, but we walked in anyway and found these.
They look like strands of DNA so we bought them.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
October 6th, 2012 at 07:58
“He looks like the potentate of some stylish country that wouldn’t give us a visa. All his interviews are serious. So we did the only thing we could do: we confessed our lack of seriousness. Then it became easy.”
Can I say how glad I am that you got Lee as your first interview for the podcast? I would imagine that somebody who has had the “model Asian” life (Ivy education, career in finance) before being compared to Ralph Ellison right out of the gate on his debut would be intimidating in person, but I’m glad that you were able to hit it off, in some way or another, with the lack of seriousness for a change.
*looks at Amazon gift card; plans on downloading Native Speaker and Surrendered for next e-book purchase*
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Wait, it’s 230 rupiah now to a peso? That exchange rate is crazy. I still think that the rest of Bali can be a bit of a tourist trap, though (Kuta Beach is basically their version of Bora) so watch your money wisely. ;)
October 6th, 2012 at 20:48
I read Native Speaker last year and it just blew me away. So excited for your next podcast with Chang-rae Lee!
October 6th, 2012 at 21:10
A question for Jeffrey Eugenides that will not make you sound incisive:
When you were writing The Virgin Suicides, did you channel your inner-thirteen year old girl in order to write the character of Cecilia, probably the most depressed of the Lisbons?
October 7th, 2012 at 19:14
lestat: Actually he kind of answered that!