48. Travel

I am presently in Kuala Lumpur. No guidebook, no strong idea of what is here. I am a bad tourist, for sure. But somehow we've gotten out and enjoyed ourselves the past couple of days—failing repeatedly to get on the Hop On Hop Off tourist bus, mostly because of crowds (it's a four-day national holiday), which means we've been walking. Just walking, just looking around. Occasionally stopping to take a photo or get something to drink. The city feels quite intimate, really—despite the bustle. Today, we'll try for the bus again, maybe hop off at the Bird Park and the National Mosque. Not too much.

Yesterday I came across this post on FB, which resonated (click on it to read it):

And then just now in my inbox, a poem by George Bilgere, which is somewhat in the same vein:

Once Again I Fail to Read an Important Novel

Instead, we sit together beside the fountain,
the important novel and I.

We are having coffee together
in that quiet first hour of the morning,
respecting each other’s silences
in the shadow of an important old building
in this small but significant European city.

All the characters can relax.
I’m giving them the day off.
For once they can forget about their problems—
desire, betrayal, the fatal denouement—
and just sit peacefully beside me.

In the afternoon,
at lunch near the cathedral,
and in the evening, after my lonely,
historical walk along the promenade,

the men and women, the children
and even the dogs
in the important, complicated novel
have nothing to fear from me.

We will sit quietly at the table
with a glass of cool red wine
and listen to the pigeons
questioning each other in the ancient corridors.

I'm more interested in sipping wine and listening to the pigeons than in cramming it all in. It's still all of it, in any given moment, no matter what we're doing.

And to close—speaking of being randomly in the right place at the right time—check out this fabulous flash mob performance in, yes, Paris. Oh to have been wandering through that square at just that moment!

47. A few days before our big trip

I typically get anxious before a big trip, but not this time. (So far.) Today I had two chores on my radar: clean off the card table in the living room (done) and go to REI to shop for a pair of pants (done) and return a bear vault—the smallest model, it's not allowed in the Yosemite backcountry because bears have been known to pick them up in their jaws and carry them away (also done: $78 refund, baby). 

I keep thinking: I've got all the bookings—airport shuttle, flights, hotels, car—printed out and in my blue plastic folder; I've got my passport. I've even got 40 colorful Australian dollars, from a long-ago trip. What more do I need? Even if I somehow lost my suitcase, I could pick up whatever I lacked in Kuala Lumpur—which surely is a shopping mecca? 

Tomorrow I may clean out the fridge. Put away the jigsaw puzzle that's been sitting on my desk for months. (One of our housesitters came by yesterday for "the tour," and he noted the puzzle with interest. So maybe they're into jigsaws. I'll get the place ready for them in that regard.) Do some dusting. (Dusting is one thing we're pretty bad at, generally. Oh! Look at the huge pile of insect corpses under those lovely floaty webs! I will be investigating all the corners tomorrow.) Vacuum.

The housesitter who came by, Josh, didn't flinch at the "lived-in" look of our house. So whatever cleaning up I do will probably be more for me than for him and his wife. Something I'd like to come home to.

I don't enjoy the travel part of travel. (That is, I don't like being in-transit. I love being wherever I'm going.) This upcoming in-transit day will be very, very long—and I'm too cheap to spring for business class. I don't get on an airplane to be comfortable. Maybe one day before I die, though, if I still have any money left (a dubious notion in this country at this time), I'll book a luxury flight to... somewhere. The last place on my list, maybe. 

What would that be? What is my list? It's certainly changed over the years, as I've checked places off and as my boundaries have shrunk. Because yeah, I find that as I age, I'm less adventurous. I hate that. I'm glad Kuala Lumpur jumped into my face and yelled, Come to me! And then nudged me into continuing on to Western Australia—which I visited some thirty years ago, but that was on a tour, and this time we're winging it. Wheeee!

What is my list? What places would I still love to visit?

New Orleans
Prague
Spain
Greece
Tasmania
South Africa and the Western Cape (this would be a good destination for that first-class booking)
Namibia (again)
Berlin
Japan (again: in 1982 we spent two and a half months there on our honeymoon; I bet it's changed and hasn't, both)
the Maritime Provinces of Canada, and also Quebec (both Quebec City and Montreal)

There's still some exploring to do. And I'm not getting any younger. These ten places, before I die. It's a mission.

46. Favorite movies

Every so often, I google "long-term apartment rentals in ______"—typically some locality in Europe, because anywhere in Europe is surrounded by Europe, meaning travel opportunities; plus, I more or less can get by in some of the European languages. Tonight the winning city was Bruges, Belgium, where I found small but cozy flats in the €1,000 range. I could afford that. Why Bruges? Because it's a charming city, the climate might be not quite so hot in summer as southern France, I can speak some Flemish, and... why not? In any case, it's important to dream. 

That brought to mind the movie In Bruges, which is one of my all-time favorites. And that got me to thinking about other all-time favorites. So here's an off-the-cuff list, just because. (Not in any particular order. The numbers are meaningless, but I feel they're needed for "a list.")

And need I say: "all-time favorite" doesn't necessarily mean a masterpiece. It's just something that if I were stranded on a desert island (with electricity and a TV) I could watch over and over and over and, yes, over again. I have certainly done that already with all of these.

(I did have a little help, after I got to #9, from the iMDB list of the Top 250 movies. The rankings below reflect that list, which also explains the order of titles after #9. But then occasionally another favorite title, one not in the list, would hit me, disrupting the flow.)

1. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
2. Strictly Ballroom
3. Wings of Desire
4. Dirty Dancing
5. Looper
6. African Queen
7. The Music Man (I like to sing along)
8. The Matrix (#16)
9. Rashomon (#169)
10. The Usual Suspects (#48)
11. WALL-E (#56)
12. Singin' in the Rain (if only for the title-song scene) (#89)
13. North by Northwest (#105)
14. Die Hard (#115)
15. Mad Max: Fury Road (#184)
16. Beautiful Days 
17. The Great Escape (#159)
18. Bridge over the River Kwai (#174)
19. Fargo (#177)
20. The Sound of Music (again, to sing along) (#229)
21. The Wizard of Oz—of course (#234)
22. Back to the Future (#30)
23. Se7en (#20)
24. Casablanca (#45)
25. Diva

Btw, the iMDB rankings are calculated thus:

• The list is ranked by a formula which includes the number of ratings each movie received from users, and value of ratings received from regular users
• To be included on the list, a movie must receive ratings from at least 25000 users

As you may have noted, many of my favorites that came straight out of my head, not from a list, are not on said list. I'm not sure what that means. If anything. But it definitely makes me wonder what other favorite movies just aren't popping into my mind. I'll add any that do.

Book Report: King of Ashes

19. S. A. Cosby, King of Ashes (2025) (8/30/25)

This is the fourth book of Cosby's that I've read, and although it delivered in the dark-underbelly-of-criminal-activity realm—i.e., it's a decent thriller—I was really disappointed in the writing. The metaphors were laughable—so much so that I started keeping a running list. I know, most readers probably won't care about this, but every time one popped up I was thrown completely out of the story. Didn't Cosby have an editor? (Never mind a proofreader: the book is also riddled with sloppy errors.) Here is the list—which I started compiling only halfway through the book, so there are more examples:

The dusk-to-dawn security lights were just coming alive one by one like fireflies.
He plucked up his glass like it was a brittle rose.
Roman stared at the crowd over the roof of the car, breathing in the cool night like a locomotive.
Roman’s eyelids shot up like a pair of roller shades. . . . A gentle silence fell over them like a plush blanket.
In the distance he heard a train cutting through the dark like a scimitar.
Recognition bloomed in Roman’s mind like a moonflower unfurling its petals. Slowly at first, then as fast as a hummingbird’s wings.
That was the far horizon he had to focus on, even as bodies fell all around him like falling stars.
The window rolled down and a telephoto lens emerged like a viper from a hole in the ground.
He laughed. It was a bitter sound like the rattle of bones in a graveyard.
Wiz’s body dropped like a bag of wet laundry. . . . He fell face down, half in the freezer, half out, moaning like a wounded deer. . . . Eddie cut off his giggle like he’d shut off a water faucet. 
He was sealing the second bag and putting it in the urn when an epiphany hit him like a cinder block to the face.
Rain, quiet as a secret promise, began to fall. [Okay. This one isn't execrable.]
The scotch began to warm his body slowly, like the pilot light in an oven igniting a burner.
“She ran upstairs like a scalded dog” [says one character who throughout the book is either drunk or high on serious drugs, or both, and who certainly doesn't think in similes . . .]
Traffic zipped by him as he grabbed on to the steering wheel like it was a life preserver.
He had dived into a life of casual connections or professional companionship because the idea that he was worthy of love was a notion that was slipping through his fingers as the years flew by like sand sifting through a sieve. Bit by bit, grain of sand by grain of sand, it had waned from his soul.
As his hand gripped the weathered brass handle, his heart jumped up into his throat like a startled rabbit.
He didn’t feel angry, but resentment like hot steam from a kettle rose through his body from the bottom of his feet to the top of his head.
Neveah sat at the foot of her father’s hospital bed in a chair that was about as comfortable as she was at a formal dinner for the Jefferson Run Chamber of Commerce.
A discordance that ripped through the atmosphere like a bag of nails in a washing machine.
Her long hair draped down over her shoulders like a tidal wave of black water.
The full moon shown down [through the skylight] like a beacon from a distant ship. 
Roman fired up the Challenger and peeled out of the parking lot, roaring through the night like a rider on a steed that had never known defeat.
The last streetlight blinked out like a lantern being extinguished as shots rang out through the night.
They had met at Trout’s, then driven out here to the Skids in a caravan that sliced through the night like a dagger.
In between them were a couple of piles of trash and debris like small yurts.
Chauncey’s smile faded away like a ghost in the morning light.
Chauncey collapsed like a bag of laundry tossed on the floor.
Dishes broke and shattered and spilled across the floor like confetti.

Every single one of those similes could have been dispensed with—they added absolutely nothing. On the contrary: they're plain bad.

As for the plot and the main protagonist—as in Cosby's other books, we find the hero pulled into unspeakable acts all in the name of "family," and so far I've appreciated that conflictedness. Though this time part of me also wanted him to just say, "Screw it, brother, sister, dad, I'm getting you out of here"—and not descend into the depths of criminality at all. And the way the story ends? Really? I'd say it's completely unbelievable, but then, in sum, the entire story is.

And if Cosby hit us over the head one more time with an "ashes" metaphor (the protagonist is the son of a crematorium operator), well, I don't know what . . . Maybe I would have had to burn the book? It actually ends with the oft-repeated phrase (in case we didn't get it the first time), "Everything burns."

I've enjoyed Cosby before, but this will be the last one I read. My other reports can be found here, here and here, if you're interested. In one of them I call the writing "great," so I don't know if Cosby has just gotten lazy, if the editing has gotten lazy, or if I was simply overlooking all the laziness in the past, caught up in the story instead. But this time? This time I'm simply disappointed and, yes, burnt out.

45. Moss Landing

My friend Barb and I met today for a walk around the nearby (halfway between us) harbor town of Moss Landing, home of MBARI—the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute—and of whale-watching enterprises. Here are a few photos.

The Moss Landing Power Plant (no longer active)

MBARI's newest research vessel, the David Packard,
named for the institute's visionary founder (and the
Packard of Hewlett-Packard fame)

MBARI's older research vessel the Rachel Carson.
We also saw the Western Flyer in the harbor, a 
reconstruction of the boat John Steinbeck and Doc Ricketts
traveled on in the Gulf of Mexico. It recently returned
from a 100-day voyage back in those parts. 

The dredging vessel, the Sea Horse—though it wasn't
actively doing any dredging that we saw.
A sizable barge did pull up alongside, as well as a
large tugboat. So it's definitely about to get going. 

Overhead at lunchtime.

This is Katie. I profiled her on Flickr,
on my 100 Strangers project. You can
read more about her—and the project
surrounding these enthusiastically-legged
seastars—there. It was super fun talking
with her.

A 156 million year old ammonite, one of several
beautifully preserved fossils in the courtyard
outside the Sunflower Star Laboratory and
Woodward Marine Market Restaurant. 

44. Three poems by Chris Abani

A friend of mine recently got her MFA in creative writing (way to go, Jenny!), and one of her mentors was Chris Abani. I enjoyed hearing about his teaching style, which sounded a little like You've found an interesting theme to explore, now run with it. Among other, I'm sure, helpful tips. Abani was in the teaching faculty at Antioch University, where I got my MFA almost twenty years ago. I didn't encounter him because I was nonfiction, he was fiction. But his presence was felt. Anyway, hearing his name again prompted me to seek out his work. Here are three of his poems.

The Calculus of Faith

In the end I realize
every human body is a scripture.
The first miracle was a mango,
full and weighty with ripeness.
The second miracle was a sheet of onionskin
paper torn from a King James Bible
filled with oregano and thyme and smoked.
The third miracle was the smooth
turquoise of my mother's fountain pen.
The scrape of it, the insistent pull of its nib
and words, glorious and alive.
My fear is a hole I crawl into,
a hollowed-out log, a curve in a stump.
If you listen, if you listen—
in the book I am reading it is raining.

Durban, South Africa—Some Notations of Value

Metal giraffes march up the bluff
toward the lighthouse. In the moonlight,
whales, or their ghosts, litter the sand.

There is a museum by the park that houses
apartheid; contained in stiff wax dummies.

The tour bus stops on the road’s edge.
On the right a black town, the left Indian.
Pointing he says: This is the racial divide.

Stopping at the bar, the drink menu offers—
Red’s Divas only five rand each.

Each night the pounding sea reminds me
that, here, women are older than God.

These people carry their dead with them,
plastering them onto every met face.

Yet love hums like tuning forks
and the fading spreading sound
is the growth of something more.

Their absence is loud and I long
for the confetti flutter of butterflies.

Abattoirs litter the landscape with the sinister
air of murder, signs proclaiming: Zumba Butchery,
as though this is where the Zumba’s blood-
lust got the better of them.

The air conditioner in my room hums
a dirge to a sea too busy spreading rumors.

Death skips between street children
playing hopscotch in the traffic.

The woman singing in Zulu, in a Jamaican bar,
is calling down fire, calling down fire.
There is no contradiction.

White Egret

The whole earth is filled with the love of God. —Kwame Dawes

A stream in a forest and a boy fishing,
heart aflame, head hush, tasting the world—
lick and pant. The Holy Scripture
is animal not book.
I should know, I have smoked
the soul of God, psalm burning
between fingers on an African afternoon.
And how is it that death can open up
an alleluia from the core of a man?
How easily the profound fritters away in words.
And the simple wisdom of my brother:
What you taste with abandon
even God cannot take from you.
All my life, men with blackened insides
have fought to keep
the flutter of a white egret in my chest
from bursting into flight, into glory.

Chris Abani was born in Nigeria and became a vocal opponent of the government there. He was imprisoned several times, ending up on death row—but managed to escape to England. He now lives in the U.S. He once stated of literature, "The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about. I was a writer before I was in prison."

The Ghanaian poet Kwame Dawes was faculty at a week-long writing workshop I attended. I still, somewhere, have a video of him dancing with joy at an evening gathering. A couple of inspirations.

Book Report: Iron Lake

18. William Kent Krueger, Iron Lake (1998) (8/24/25)

A friend in a book group I once belonged to mentioned reading a couple of Krueger's titles lately and liking his style, so of course I had to look him up, having never heard of him. And then, learning he's a mystery writer, known, it seems, especially for his series featuring the former sheriff of a small northern Minnesota town, Cork O'Connor, I had to start with the first in the series (there are 20 in all, plus a prequel—so far). And it was good. It's moody and atmospheric. Several people die, one boy goes missing. There's an interesting interplay of Native American (Ojibwe/Anishinaabe) and Anglo culture. (O'Connor himself is part Irish, part Anishinaabe.) It's the dead of winter, so snow and frozen lakes figure in, along with saunas and Christmas trees. A corrupt judge, an ambitious politician (they happen to be related), an Indian casino, Cork's troubled marriage, and a trove of photographic negatives all enter into the story. 

Judging from the star ratings of the entire series on Goodreads, the books get better and better. I might try another one. I liked Cork in all his tenacity. And then there are Krueger's non-Cork books This Tender Land and Ordinary Grace, which also sound good.