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Manga Cafe Mika

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:06:07 GMT

Thanks to Deb Aoki who told me about the news I had missed while I was overseas, I was lucky enough to attend the pre-opening weekend of Manga Cafe Mika, the first Japanese manga cafe in San Francisco. There's one other Japanese manga cafe in New York city, Manga Cafe Atom, and there's a few Korean and Chinese manga cafes scattered here and there from what I hear, but Mika is one of a very, very small number of pioneers ploughing this hopefully fertile ground.

Located in San Francisco's Japantown, Cafe Mika wasn't fully ready for business when I went in on May 26 -- the Internet computers weren't set up and there was just one pot of coffee chugging away -- but it was thrilling to set foot inside it and browse. According to the owners, a lot of the cafe's manga stock came from a manga cafe in Okinawa, so there were tons of tankobon of mysterious older manga -- shojo, shonen, seinen and josei from the '70s and 80s -- to please my retro-manga tastes. There were also shelves of more recent popular titles -- in the photos you can see a nice set of Emma, the Welcome to the NHK and Haruhi Suzumiya manga, and more. They've also got a good selection of recent shojo, shonen and other popular series -- the Shonen Jump lineup and so forth. But listing specific titles is just going to leave people asking "But do they have -----?" and I can only answer, "Probably." It's a small cafe, but they have a good selection. As someone who's fruitlessly tried to convince Kinokuniya staff to let me read their manga for free, a huge smile spread on my face to see those very same tankobon without shrinkwrap, delectably available for reading, only a few hundred feet away in the same mall.

As I said, the store doesn't officially open until this coming weekend, and some things are a little rough around the edges. At the moment, English-language titles only fill two shelves, the rest of the cafe's selection being in Japanese, so it's really a place for people who want to check out untranslated series. And maybe that's all right, because even if they expanded their English-language selection, could they reasonably attempt to compete with Borders, San Francisco's Best Unofficial English-language Manga Cafe, where you can grab a copy of The Last Uniform off the shelf (never mind why, this isn't about me), walk to the cafe area, sit down, drink a mocha latte, and return the book to the shelf after you're done without the bored store clerks even batting an eye? (For actual manga-BUYING, on the other hand, I'd recommend Comic Relief...) Another question is food and drink, whether you can buy it there and whether you can bring it in from outside, which was unresolved when I talked to the store clerks. Lastly, there is the hourly price (I'd prefer a flat fee supplemented by expensive drinks, rather than having to look at the clock when I should be looking at people getting blown away in Gantz), and the little gaps in their collection that may inevitably appear and need to be smoothed over (where's that yaoi section, people?).

But the chairs were comfortable, the location is perfect (if you live in San Francisco), and I'm already dreaming of all the weird and wonderful tankobon just waiting to be read in my own home city, like finding a library with a copy of the Necronomicon. Rather than "Will I go to this manga cafe," the question may be "Will I ever LEAVE this manga cafe?" Good question...

The Fall

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:20:40 GMT

I wasn't a huge fan of Tarsem's previous popular movie, "The Cell" with Jennifer Lopez (nice visuals, kind of a cheesy plot) but this one, coming out on May 9, looks pretty interesting.

Manga: The Complete Guide Eisner Nomination

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:15:40 GMT

Well, I'm back from India, but never mind that for now. For the moment I just wanted to share the news that Manga: The Complete Guide has been nominated for a 2008 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Work!

I'm really honored to be nominated and I'll definitely be at Comic-Con this year.

Common Culture

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:09:51 GMT

* Conversation with a Twentysomething Western Tourist:
"So what do you do?"
"Do you know Japanese animation, anime, manga?"
"Never heard of it..."
"Well then... do you know Pokemon?"
"Nope."
"Well, basically I work in comic books."
"Oh! What superhero do you do?"

* Conversation with a Twentysomething Bhutanese Guy (in Traditional Bhutanese Clothing, Of Course)
"So what do you do?"
"Do you know Japanese animation, anime, manga?"
"Yeah! Do you know Dragon Ball Z?"
"Know it? I worked on the English version of it. Just the manga, not the anime, but still...'
"Cool!! I used to watch the anime all the time... I saw up until the part when Goku is fighting Freeza but then they stopped showing it on TV. Does it keep going after that?"
"Uh, yeah, some people would say it goes on too long..."
"Yeah, I'd like to watch the rest of it then... hey... do you know some free website where I can watch it online?"

Good Luck, Tibetans

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 06:27:46 GMT

As my trip to India approaches, I face the disturbing realization that there's no way I'll have time to finish posting entries about my 2007 Egypt trip before I have to go overseas again. The closing entries on Egypt will have to wait 'till after I get back.

Originally I was supposed to go on a GAP Adventures tour of Tibet and Nepal (with a brief pass-through of India), but the recent protests and repression in Tibet forced the tour companies to change their plans. Tourists and even foreign journalists were all forced out of the region, which was wracked with ethnic and political violence -- Tibetans vs. Chinese -- for most of the second half of April. The Chinese side is winning, of course, unless you count a little bit of bad P.R. (but not nearly enough to stop the Olympics). Lhasa, the main city of Tibet, has become gradually more touristy and ethnically Chinese over the last few decades, but after this recent struggle, the thought of going to some hastily-cleaned-up, Potemkin Village tourist version of Lhasa is particularly unappetizing. It's too bad my tour didn't leave a month earlier or I could have been there right in the middle of it -- and neither side is particularly mad at Westerners, so I don't think I'm being too reckless. For now, the future of Tibet is anyone's guess, but a speedup of repression -- as opposed to the previous gradual assimilation policy -- seems likely. I've been checking Phayul.com for Tibetan news.

Anyway, good luck, Tibetans. Maybe I'll get to see your country eventually, if it's ever quite the same as it was before. Instead, I'll be wandering about the ricefields of Bhutan dreaming of politics and shrines and gods. See you all later, sometime far from now.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:43:20 GMT

It's safe to announce this now: I'm going to be the editor for Del Rey's November 2008 edition of the manga adaptation of Gankutsou, aka The Count of Monte Cristo. Like the anime, the manga (by Mahiro Maeda and Yura Ariwara) is super-stylish, with lovely art and more than a little bishonen aestheticism added to the story in addition to the science fiction elements. (And in case anyone is curious, of course this means that someone other than myself will be reviewing it for Otaku USA.)

To be honest, I wasn't very familiar with Alexandre Dumas' original Count of Monte Cristo when I took the assignment, but since then I've become a huge fan of the story. It's an awesome fantasy, in the "what if this happened to you" sense of the word. Patrick Macias and I used to join in complaining whenever a movie's hero was motivated by 'destiny' or some other lame thing: what's wrong with good old-fashioned revenge? It worked in Lone Wolf and Cub and Old Boy. Old Boy, after all (not to disparage it), is basically just 1/100th of the Count of Monte Cristo. (Incidentally, I think that the brilliance of Old Boy is that the main character's enemies force him to spend his entire twenties in a dingy room watching TV and eating take-out food. This is something that everyone can relate to, since many people *willingly* spend their twenties doing this. Old Boy just makes it someone else's fault.)

I've particularly enjoyed the French TV miniseries which seems to have more of the original story squeezed into it than most adaptations (although none of them are exactly faithful, and all of them have their ups and downs). Gerard Depardieu, as the Count, is a total badass. His features are tough as nails. His voice is smooth as velvet. His face looks like it's been repeatedly beaten against the bells of Notre Dame, and he's not happy about it. Just listening to him deliver sinister, vaguely threatening monologues, while menacing violins play in the background, makes my heart race.

My other favorite thing about this miniseries is that Mercedes, the Count's ex-fiancee, is played by Ornella Muti, who I had never seen before. Maybe I'm blinded by hormones and plunging necklines, but she pretty much dominates every scene she's in. She's certainly an extremely beautiful 40something (at first I thought "Feh, they cheated and used a too-young actress!"), and again, listening to her and the Count subtly fish for eachother's feelings is delicious.

Anyway, totally apart from these two, the Count of Monte Cristo is a great story. Embarrassingly, I still haven't read the entire 1,000+ page novel yet, but it's sitting here on my bookshelf calling out to me. The French miniseries version is only about 75% accurate -- they remove some major plot points, add a new love interest, and chicken out by not making the Count quite so bloodthirsty and violent -- but it's good. On the other hand, if you want the full-on bloodthirsty angsty side with the scales tipped in the direction of handsome, brooding men rather than attractive women, I wholeheartedly recommend Gankutsuo. And now back to writing...

Egypt: May 14-15, 2007

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:04:33 GMT

The highlight of our sixth day of the tour was a trip to the Valley of the Kings, the richest site of royal Egyptian tombs. The valley is located on the west bank of the Nile, so in the morning we took a ferry across the river, where we faced our next mode of travel: donkeys. A team of riding donkeys had been provided for us (or rather, a team of normal donkeys had been provided for us to ride... they didn't have racing stripes or cost 25 gold pieces or anything), and most of us clambered onboard and followed Khaled on the long road to the tombs. A few unadventurous souls took a taxi instead. The rest of us rode our steeds along green fields, beside a canal choked with water-plants and lilies. Periodically thwacking the donkeys to get them to speed up, we rode through the fields and out to a desert highway, which climbed steadily into the hills, surrounded by barren dryness. I felt like I was in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Eventually the asphalt widened and we came to a great parking lot surrounded by the cliffs of the Valley.

VALLEY OF THE KINGS (Photos)

The Valley of the Kings is incredible. For the price of a single admission you can only enter a limited number of tombs -- I think three, with the small tomb of Tutankhamun costing extra -- but I didn't have any complaints. Apparently the site was chosen in Pharaonic times because of the good stone and the relative ease of guarding it from tomb-robbers, since it is shielded by high hills. (Still, with the exception of Tutankhamun's tomb whose entrance was buried beneath rubble, all the crypts had been robbed well before the 20th century. A few thousand years is a long time.) In the visitor's center was a model showing a cross-section of the interior of the mountains, which were riddled with tombs, descending incredibly deep. They would make perfect bomb shelters. The tombs are relatively linear and don't connect to one another -- in fact, one wonders at times how the builders avoided crashing through the roof of a preexisting tomb -- but they are deep and the carvings and paintings are beautiful. The low ceiling of one tomb was painted with thousands of stars. Human-headed snakes and fabulous monsters and deities decorated everything. You're not allowed to take photos in the tombs, so you'll have to take my word for it. Some tombs were carved high in the walls of the cliffs, reached by modern stairs; others were buried in pits. Within, the air was uniformly stale and hot, muggy and dead, much like inside the Great Pyramid. A few tombs are in poor condition, or being restored, and are not open to the public.

After this dungeon crawl I was ready for a drink or a break, but our guide led us out to a rocky gulley behind the visitor's center, where our donkeys were waiting. Instead of taking the road, we would be going down the hills the hard way, i.e., going directly over them. Our donkeys clambered over heaps of loose stone as we climbed, climbed to the east. With our overactive imaginations we assumed that every shard, every piece of loose rock might be a fragment of some ostraca, a door-carving from some tomb. Donkeys are slow, but very easy to ride, and extremely strong for their size. They're so small I felt sorry for them, particularly for the donkey bearing the weight of six-foot-plus Jake Forbes. When we reached the top of the cliff and saw the Temple of Hapshepsut hundreds of feet below us, we clung worriedly to the donkeys, who rode unconcernedly along the brink. It was a long way down, and I wondered how far you could fall and live. We had to ride single file, and there was a scary moment when a donkey seemed to briefly lose its footing. Glancing down from the heights in trepidation, I saw a small niche in the cliff wall a few feet down, about big enough for a person to fit into, which was completely filled with discarded plastic water bottles. This took me back to reality and I managed to stay on the donkey as it clambered down the hills back towards the Nile.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully with internet cafes and wanderings in Luxor. The next morning I woke incredibly early for the most expensive (and worth it) option I chose for the entire tour: a balloon ride. Before the sun rose, I was already back on the west bank of the Nile, where a truck drove us out into a field where two hot air balloons were waiting. I'd been in a hot air balloon before, but I had forgotten how the engine blasts fire into the balloon just a few feet from your face, forcing you to turn away from it. The balloon inflated, the engine roared, and we rose, accompanied by the sound of tourists taking out their cameras. I went into recording mode. Periodically, I had to remind myself not just to take photos, to actually look with my own eyes, to realize I was in a balloon in Egypt, to try to soak it in, to connect.

LUXOR BALLOON RIDE (Photos)

I love drawing aerial shots, and I wanted to see the landscape all at once, so I knew this would be great reference. Unfortunately, I'd set my camera on the lowest possible resolution without realizing it, but I still took dozens of photos. The green of the farmland, the palm trees, the pink and blue and tan houses passed beneath us. Many of the houses, I saw, were roofless, and in one I distinctly saw a bed (I couldn't tell if it was occupied) and a ceiling fan hanging suspended from a single beam. Sadly, I was briefly reminded of a level from Counterstrike. The Colossi of Memnon stood out among the farmland, and I saw countless temples and archaeological sites, some no more than foundations, riddled with holes like ant-infested ground. On the eastern edge of the farmland, a road demarcated the start of the dry land. Beyond lay the bluffs, and beyond them, the Valley of the Kings. On the bad side of the dry land, just over the hill from the Valley, is a ramshackle village named Qurna or Gurna, which is famous for the generations of tomb robbers that dwell there. I wondered if they were still fencing artifacts, still digging up antiquities beneath their homes. The wind carried the balloons north, and soon we started to descend. The ground was so riddled with diggings I wondered if we would crash down into the open pit of a tomb. But we drifted over the road out into the desert, and braced ourselves against the basket as the balloons skidded into the beige-colored sand. Two trucks converged on our crash site and helped the tourists out of the basket, then gathered up the deflating skin of the balloon.

Finally, when the balloon was successfully manhandled, the balloon crew linked their arms and did a song-and-dance for the tourists. When it was done, one of the balloon guides -- who had narrated our flight -- placed a hat on the ground. "There is a snake in this hat, but it only comes out if you feed it money!" A few people placed some pounds in the hat, including myself, but apparently not enough to tempt the snake. Without any hard feelings, the truck drivers sped us away from the crash site and towards the docks and downtown area to the east.

MEMNON AND THE WEST BANK (Photos)

Instead of going all the way back to Luxor, though, I decided to spend the rest of the day in the West Bank, walking around on foot. My first stop was the Colossi of Memnon, a pair of statues which were particularly famous in Greco-Roman times. The Greeks and Romans (like most people, I guess) were pretty culturally chauvinistic; they rarely bothered to learn foreign languages, and when they encountered gods or heroes from other cultures, they usually worked them into their own belief systems. Thus, when ancient Greek writers wrote about the Egyptian god Amun, they usually just referred to the god as Zeus (who they considered to be Amun's nearest equivalent) rather than even mentioning the name "Amun". This habit, known as interpretatio graeca, could be considered to have good motivations, bringing together conflicting belief systems into a harmonious whole. And after all, if there really are gods, it makes sense that different people would have different names for them, rather than the Egyptian gods just controlling Egypt, the Greek gods just controlling Greece, etc, like in some fantasy RPG. But the practical result of Hellenism, of the Greek domination of the Mediterranean (not to pin the blame solely on interpretatio graeca, of course) was often that Greek presumptions and prejudices would be accepted whereas actual indigenous traditions were forgotten. Scarcely any Greeks or Romans bothered learning Egyptian demotic script or the "sacred" hieroglyphs, and vast amounts of knowledge were forgotten. As someone wrote in a review of the book Berossos and Manetho, "The winners write the history books... more importantly, the winners read them." In the case of the Colossi of Memnon, the Greeks, not knowing who the statues were originally modeled after -- and apparently unwilling or unable to find an Egyptian who knew -- named them after Memnon, a mythological Ethiopian hero from the Trojan War. "Big statues in southern Egypt, near Ethiopia...? Who's the biggest African king mentioned in Greek mythology? They must be statues of Memnon, of course!" The name stuck, just like other invented Greek names. The very name "Egypt", for instance, was a Greek name which replaced the Ancient Egyptians' original name for their country, "Kemet." Like "Germany" as opposed to "Deutschland", or "Japan" as opposed to "Nihon."

Although today they are so beaten and thrashed that their faces are essentially sanded away, the Colossi are still impressive. I photographed them from several angles as shepherds drove their flocks through the fields nearby, and then I went wandering off towards the Temple of Hapshepsut, which I had previously seen from the air. I was supposed to meet Jake and some of the other tourists there. Soon I was walking alone on the highway at the edge of the desert, with Gurna on the left of me, an ancient village of mud-brick houses seemingly growing out of the sand. I saw almost no people at first, but soon there was movement, and a flood of little kids -- about six years old on average, boys and girls both -- came pouring out from between the buildings and cheerfully ran up to me. Following along behind them was an adult man with a mustache, like a child-herder. He was wearing a bluish-grey djellaba and smoking a cigarette. He had a faint crease in the area between his eyebrows, as if from squinting into the sun.

"Are you going to the Temple of Hapshepsut?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, as the kids milled around me.

"It will take you an hour to walk there if you take the road," he said. "There's a shortcut through Gurna. I'll show you. Ten pounds."

"No thanks, I'll walk," I said. I thought it would be sort of interesting to walk through Gurna, but I wasn't sure I had a ten-pound note, and I didn't want to ask him to change a 50. So I went back to the highway. the kids tagged along after me for a long time, very young and friendly and persistent, trying to sell me little handicrafts. Eventually I decided to give some baksheesh to a little girl, and while I was digging the pound note out of my wallet I noticed that I did, in fact, have a ten-pound note. I had a change of heart and walked back to where the man with the cigarette was still waiting by the side of the road.

"Okay, I'll do it," I said. "Ten pounds, right?"

"Yes," he said. I gave him ten pounds (or was it five pounds?). He said something in Egyptian to one of the little boys, a little cute kid about kindergarten-age. "Machmood here (I'm sure I'm misspelling his name) will show you the way."

The little boy smiled and started to lead the way between the houses. For a short time we were followed by a crowd of other urchins, trying goodnaturedly to get me to pick them for a guide instead: "Sir, don't go with him!" "Sir, don't go with Machmood, he's crazy!" But we soon outpaced them. He was a very smart, bilingual little kid. As he led me onward towards the faraway bluffs he made small talk.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

"I'm from America," I said.

"Are you married?"

"No," I said. I smiled as I reflected on how unimaginably old I must look to this six-year-old Egyptian boy: me, 32 years old, with my muttonchops and glasses. When I was six years old the adults had been... adults, some alien creatures, not real human beings... and even the seven-year-olds had looked like intimidating macho figures. I clearly remember imagining the seven-year-olds riding around the playground with leather jackets and motorcycles. I used to have a fantasy that all adults were monsters wearing masks, and when you got old enough, they would "have a talk" with you and reveal themselves and strip away *your* mask too, and there, behind your familiar face, would be a hideous thing. I remembered too that when I was a little kid, I'd thought that when I grew up I would just spontaneously *change*: my appearance would become unrecognizable, and I'd be a grown man with a beefy jaw and a broad chest and huge muscles, probably playing sports, wearing a baseball shirt, making out with cheerleaders. My vision of the future Jason Thompson was an entirely different creature from "me". The future came, of course (except for the huge muscles, sports and cheerleaders), but instead of striking me like a sudden lightning bolt, it came so slowly that I never saw it happening, and the outline of the six-year-old Jason Thompson never completely died, or perhaps it died in its sleep, like an old beloved pet, never realizing that it died. And the same for the 12-year-old me, and the 16-year-old, the 21-year-old, 26-year-old, and so on and so on, all the way up to the present one. When I thought of my previous selves I thought of a phrase from the Bible, the phrase, "Let the dead bury their own dead." (Yes, I'm really drumming up the monotheism on this trip. I'll talk about the vulture goddess later.) They are laid atop one another inside me, or in some distant place, like the hardened rings on a tree, or like the Egyptian temples that were rebuilt over and over on the same site.

"Inshallah," he said, the very common Arabic expression which means "god willing."

"Inshallah," I replied.

Soon we came to the end of the village, and there, a long stretch of dirt and rock stood between me and the parking lot, and beyond it, the Temple of Hapshepsut with its steps and pillars. His work done, my guide asked for baksheesh. "Sir, a few pounds." I didn't have any more small change, so I dug around in my backpack for something else to give him. I gave him a phone card with about 10 or 20 pounds on it, which I hope he was able to exchange to someone for even a fraction of its worth, and a whole bunch of pencils, remembering my encounter with the pencil-hungry steward on the train. I also gave him some tourist stuff that had come with the balloon ride, which was probably worthless, but it was the best I could think of. At first he was disappointed that I didn't give him any money, but I think that my random gifts were finally good enough. "Thank you," he said as I left. And I said "thank you" and waved goodbye. I had gone a few hundred steps when I turned and saw the little boy waving from the top of a small ridge, and I waved back, and Machmood turned and went back to Gurna, and I continued on my way.

The Temple was amazing up close, with long low steps that seem to go on forever, and I soon met up with Jake and the others. Although they don't advertise this fact, the Temple was the site of a horrible massacre in 1997, in which 60 tourists were gunned down by Islamic fundamentalists. The Temple rests in a corner between sheer cliffs -- the same cliffs which I had looked down from on donkeyback the day before -- and there is nowhere to run, so the terrorists had killed the guards and trapped the tourists within the structure, and gunned them down, one by one. I didn't see any bulletholes or bloodstains, but I wondered what it had been like. After looking around, we went back to the parking lot and hired a taxi which took us to some of the other sites on the West Bank: Medinet Habu, and Deir el Medineh, the "worker's village" where the people who worked on the tombs had *their* cozy tombs. In one small temple I made the faux pas of taking a flash photograph of some ancient, faded paintings (the flash photography can damage the paint).

As the sky turned over to afternoon the taxi driver convinced us (or did we ask him?) to stop by one of the specialties of Luxor: an alabaster salesroom. Alabaster is a fairly fragile, but beautiful stone, and the alabaster wares are made in two different styles: machine-worked, which is shiny and glossy and smooth as glass, and hand-worked, which is finer and has a more glittery, mica-like appearance. The unctuous salesman, whose English was excellent, tried to convince us to buy this or that as we browsed the one-room shop. Luckily for myself, one of my companions that day was an excellent haggler, who managed to get what seemed like a pretty good price for a small alabaster jar. After he agreed to her price, I picked up a just slightly smaller jar and offered just slightly less than she had paid for hers. He pleasantly suggested a higher price. I repeated my original offer with a vague, smiling, "I don't really care if I buy this jar" attitude. He agreed. This was mere Level 1 haggling, but it worked. As he was hastily wrapping our goods in newspaper, he asked us for a favor: could we please not tell the taxi driver that we had bought anything? (So the taxi driver wouldn't ask for his commission.) We said sure. We went out to the car with our alabaster pieces concealed in our bags, and said we didn't buy anything, but thanks for taking us there, can we get back to the ferry now? In the middle of the taxi ride, though, I forgot and I blurted out something like "Boy, we got a good price on that alabaster" or something like that. @#$%. Oh well. We made it back to the ferry and went across to the East Bank, and then the next day we began the final stage of our journey: the Western Desert.

Review: Only Words

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:59:05 GMT

From reading lots of Boy’s Love over the last two years, I’ve come to the politically incorrect conclusion that the main reason I like gay-themed stories is not because of any fundamental interest in them, but rather, because same-sex relationships offer more potential for angst. At a biological level, perhaps, the neurons of love are the same in straight and gay relationships, and on a pornographic level, the reader’s preference just depends on what particular type of naked bodies they like to see (and how happy they like their happy endings). But just speaking from personal preference, I love stories of anxiety and sexual repression. To use straight examples, that’s why I like Repulsion and The Remains of the Day and Splendor in the Grass (I LOVE that movie). To use a gay example, that’s why I like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home but never really got into Dykes to Watch Out For. That’s why I spent my early twenties reading old-school tragic gay stories: The Boys in the Band and Tennessee William plays and The Face That Must Die and The Fall of Valor. Yes, I know that repressed homosexuality is a cliché -- I loved John Waters’ parody of same, the repressed heterosexual hairdresser in Cecil B. Demented. (“I’m straight, so I hate!”) But whether it’s two men or two women or one of each or whatever, I do like it sad and angsty. In fiction, that is, not in real life.

So when I started reading Boy’s Love (having never read any kind of romance novels or anything before) I was surprised that Boy’s Love was, generally speaking, so blissfully escapist and blind to these issues. (Of course, to call Boy’s Love “gay-themed” is perhaps fundamentally inaccurate.) Later I discovered the angsty, tormented side of Boy’s Love... only to discover to my horror that this borders on the rapey side. In addition to my general dislike and moral qualms about nonconsensual stories, there’s the fact that so many nonconsensual Boy’s Love are so damn happy about it -- stories like the inexplicably popular Love is Like a Hurricane (well, I guess it’s explicable, if you’re a perv). Of course, the “serious,” depressing rape stories are often even worse—World’s End made me want to enroll Eiki Eiki into psychoanalysis. My point is that there are few Boy’s Love manga which manage to deal with dark themes without degenerating into either creepy, clinging codependency or LOLrape. (I can’t believe I actually wrote that last phrase. To quote Saya no Uta, “Is...is this really okay?”)

One story which manages this perilous tightrope-walk is Tina Anderson’s Only Words. It’s the only OEL-BL manga I’ve ever read, so I can’t compare it to others, but it hits the notes of both sex and dark emotions in a believable way. The setting is German-occupied World War II Poland, in the dead of winter. The protagonist is Koby, a young man who was in training to be a priest, until the Nazis converted the church into a barracks and ended his plans. Now he is teased at school by Hitler Jugend thugs, who call him a Polack and ask him “Hey, holy boy, why aren’t you wearing your dress today?” One youth, the blonde, scarred Oskar Keplar, is particularly cruel. But perversely, the introverted, self-sacrificing Koby finds himself wondering what it would be like “to be at their mercy... to be at his mercy.”

And so begins a strong, simple tale. Anderson makes good use of the historical setting, as in her Gangs of New York-era gay/transsexual horror novel Gadarene, which also combines gritty realism, poverty and sex. (And in Gadarene's particular case, a lot of gore and ghost-slime.) The combination of Nazis, Boy’s Love and sexual coercion obviously makes for an even harsher cocktail, but the violence here is far more psychological than physical; BL manga such as the melodramatic Finder Series and the retarded White Guardian are much more graphic and unpleasant. (Actually, Only Words’ combination of Nazis and homosexuality instantly makes me think of Donna Barr’s The Desert Peach, another excellent gay-themed WWII comic which is about as far as possible from Only Words in mood.) Stark and realistic, unencumbered by overexplanation or unjustified romance, the story’s emotional content is strong. Another good thing about the book is Caroline Monaco’s not excessively manga-influenced art. Although her backgrounds are often pretty cursory, her characters look great, particularly the sexy young men who look like actual men—muscular and chiseled but not bearish, with painfully sensitive eyes. (There’s some sample pages here.)

I enjoyed Only Words, and so did a female friend of mine. This brings up another topic: although I read Only Words more as a story than as erotica (to the extent that these can be separated, ahem *cough*), I’ve often asked myself with BL, “would I be more uncomfortable with this story if it had a male-female nonconsensual relationship?” I have to admit the answer is, well, yes. As a basically straight man I would be less at ease with the scenario and my expected reaction to it, but (as I imagine is the case with the intended female audience of most BL) a homosexual relationship, even one which to me feels as plausible as the one in Only Words, somehow exists on a different plane. But now I’m drifting far afield, far away from this story whose most powerful moments take place in alleys and woodsheds... drifting out into the snow and cold.

Manga Bible and Manga Messiah

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:18:26 GMT

My latest column at comixology, a comparison of two manga Bible adaptations, is online.

Egypt: May 13, 2007

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 05:44:40 GMT

At this point I’ve talked about race and religion, and I’m running out of fiery subjects, so the next few posts will be a bit shorter. When I woke up on the boat I found that our pilots were discouraged by the fact that there was no wind, and so we would not be able to sail downstream for part of the morning like we had originally planned. Instead, our pilots grabbed oars and rowed us across the river to the opposite side (on which the road ran), where our group rendezvoused with a bus Khaled had called on his cell phone. Driving in a few minutes what would have taken hours on the felucca, we made our way to Kom Ombo, a relatively small town and the site of an impressive temple (it’s the place where Polnareff fights Chaka, aka the Anubis stand, in Jojo). :/ A group of Japanese tourists was visiting the site at the same time we were, and my ears perked up as I heard the language. A professional tour guide, I realized, has to know a LOT of languages. I believe Khaled knew three or four. We also ran into plenty of European tourists -- Europe is so much closer to Egypt, after all -- and I heard Italian, French and German being spoken.

A final note on Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: if you’ve been to Egypt, it’s totally clear that Hirohiko Araki based his heroes’ travels on a tour he took. They start out around Kom Ombo, go to Luxor, and then take the train all the way to Cairo, bypassing the areas inbetween... exactly the same way that all the major tourist itineraries bypass the middle of the Nile Valley. (There are tombs and sites there, of course, but apparently it’s not well-developed for tourism and there’s a fair amount of Islamic fundamentalists in the region.)

KOM OMBO AND EDFU (Photos)

Back on the bus, we stopped again at Edfu, the site of a huge temple of Horus and the Horus statue I put online in one of my earlier posts. Like most of the major temples of Egypt, it was built on the site of earlier ruins, as the priests would petition the government for money to rebuild an older temple on he same site. I think the idea was to mimic the ancient floor plan and keep continuity with the past, but I’m not sure how closely they followed it, as the Edfu temple -- with its blocky design like twin bunkers of stone -- seems to follow a relatively distinct late Egyptian architectural style, inasmuch as I know about these things. Edfu was rebuilt in the Ptolemaic era, around 300-30 BC, so it’s one of the most “modern” temples. While we were hanging around in the tourist area outside the temple, one of the members of our group cheerfully accepted the not uncommon offer of a “free” tchotchke -- some necklace or scarf -- from one of the guys trying to sell stuff in the parking lot. As soon as she accepted it, the guy either asked for money, or tried to get her to buy something else (I don’t remember which, it’s a standard ploy). Instead of giving the scarf back like I would have done, she kept demurring “Uh, no, You said it was a gift,” and finally ended up retreating onto the bus with the cheap scarf. The angry merchant hung around the bus for awhile, not yelling or anything, but looking pretty annoyed. I felt embarrassed for all of us.

We continued onward to the place where we would stay for the next few days: Luxor, once known as Thebes. The site of the Valley of the Kings, Luxor is one of the major -- perhaps THE major -- tourist capitals of Egypt. The main drag runs along the east side of the Nile, a line of tourist-oriented blocks and tree-lined streets, surrounded by a thicket of yellow Egyptian housing to the east. We were traveling in the off season, the summer, and the streets seemed mostly empty, the sunlight gleaming off sandstone and dust. Everywhere there were tourist-oriented restaurants, hibernating hotels, and most of all gift shops, in a number which seemed totally disproportionate to our small group and the small amount of tourists on the streets. One night in Luxor, some of the party went to a nightclub, where they were the only people there. Taxis drove and horse-drawn carriages continually clip-clopped up and down the main street of Luxor offering us rides, although as proud cheap backpackers, we usually declined. Once we got off the immediate tourist track, though, the people came out and things got considerably more lively, and Jake and I spent some time wandering through the back alleys, looking at fruit and vegetable stands, buying fresh-squeezed juice from vendors, and eating bread and pastries sold to us by an attractive bakery girl in a headscarf who spoke good English and cheerfully quoted us a totally high price which she knew Jake and I wouldn’t say no to (though we did exchange an “oh well” glance).

DOWNTOWN LUXOR (Photos)

I spent some time in Luxor looking for suntan lotion and batteries and the local internet cafe (where I had an excellent orangeade). At one point, I wandered into a small shop lined with the usual bric-a-brac. The store owner said he didn’t have the right kind of batteries, but just wait there! He’ll go get them! And soon he came back, no doubt with batteries from another shop, at a markup. (Things like this happened a few times when I was in Egypt -- there’s some very resourceful businessmen there.) After I bought the batteries, I noticed some photos of one of the Coptic popes on the wall, and asked the store owner about them. He said he was a Copt and invited me to sit down and have some tea. How about it? Oh, and how about some shisha?

No to the shisha, but sure, tea, why not. Egypt was totally validating my love of caffeine. As I sat there in the shade of the shop while he brewed a pot of tea in a tiny beat-up kettle heated over what looked like a lump of peat, I realized that I was being caught in one of the oldest merchant’s tricks in the book (the "be really nice and make them feel obligated to buy something" trick) but decided to go along with it for the experience. As the store owner puffed on a pipe and kept his eyes trained on me, and as I drank the sweet, sediment-filled tea, my own eyes scoured the shop looking for something to buy out of politeness’ sake, just like at the Alternative Press Expo. I eventually settled on a crude, partially broken statue of Jesus or some Christian saint.

“How much for that statue?” I asked.

“25 pounds,” he replied. That’s about five dollars U.S.

“How about 20?” I said.

“25, it’s handmade,” he said, or something like that.

I paid him. I suck at haggling. I only successfully haggled at one point during the tour, and it wasn’t then. Leaving the shop, I vaguely regretted ending up with this wretched clay statue, and when I got back to the hotel I took some photos of it, partly to commemorate and partly because I was considering just leaving it there rather than carrying it back to the U.S. I ended up keeping it and giving it to my friend Adam Burns. On the way back to the hotel an ancient Egyptian man asked me if I wanted to buy some pot. That was the only time I was offered drugs while I was in Egypt, and I was amused but kind of offended that I looked like a pot-smoker, although admittedly my sideburns were pretty crazy.

KARNAK TEMPLE DISTRICT (Photos)

On our first day in Luxor we visited Karnak temple, the great temple complex on the east side of the Nile. It’s in the heart of the city, a park-like area overgrown with weeds and surrounded by walls you can hop over; its vast acreage contains numerous buildings, as well as thousands of piles of broken pillars and stones. The head of the Theban pantheon was Amun, and the ram-headed god was represented in a great row of ram-headed sphinxes that greeted us at the entrance. It was late afternoon, close to sunset, and dogs lay sleeping on the street in the lingering warmth. The park was closing in just an hour, in fact, and we didn’t have nearly enough time to see the entire structure, so I split off from the group and went to the southern part of Karnak, where there were some Greco-Roman-era additions. We stayed together long enough for all of us to see the mosque which, hundreds of years ago, had been built on the site. In the centuries since the death of the Egyptian temples, so much sand and debris had covered the site that by the time the mosque was built, its floor was at least ten feet above the original floor of the temple. It hung as if suspended in the air, still apparently in use to some extent, protected by antiquity laws and the respect of religion. The original floor plan of Karnak had not been rediscovered until the modern era when people finally started to excavate the ruins. It was a powerful display of the passage of time. Of course, now that those stones are exposed, they are again vulnerable to wind and human damage, instead of being safely buried under the sand.

As I headed south alone over the heaps of toppled stone and palm trees, figures in djellabas started to flit among the ruins, and uniformed guards -- the “tourist police” -- glanced at me as I came near their posts. Some of the guards would leave you alone, but as at the Great Pyramids, others were working the same beat as the guys in the djellabas, looking for ways to supplement their income by being impromptu “tour guides.” Unfortunately, in addition to the language barrier, the majority of people doing this, as far as I can tell, hardly know anything about pharaonic history (or, more likely, they realize that most tourists hardly know anything about pharaonic history either, so they’re not about to go up and say “Good day, sir! Did you know that Isis of Koptos was viewed in the Ptolemaic era as a goddess of hair growth?”). Dressed in “traditional” garb as if they might be some mystic tomb-keeper (or, in the case of the tourist police, dressed in a light blue shirt and wielding huge machine guns), they walk up to you and point at a stela of Ramses and say “Ramses!” and then offer to take a photo of you in front of Ramses. Or perhaps they’re just pointing out a good picture, like “Pokemon Snap: Egyptian Edition.” In any case, they then expect a tip for their troubles, and if you’re really just tipping them to get them to go away, well, that’s part of the tipping experience. Whenever these people would approach I would either subtly adjust my route (living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, I am pretty used to cold-heartedly steering myself around panhandlers) or I’d mentally check my supply of small change. As the Lonely Planet guidebook had warned, my precious supply of 1- and 2-pound bills was growing ever lower. Many of the “amateur tour guides” were people who just sneaked onto the site, I think. On the other hand, Khaled pointed out that even the tourist police made very little money, and our tips were much-appreciated. Far more sympathetic were the usually aged men who genuinely worked as tomb-keepers, sitting around guarding the ancient temples and sites, rather than wandering around Karnak looking for wallets. I tried to save most of my money for the actual, hard-working tomb-keepers.

One of the most common questions I encountered from merchants and tourist-hustlers was “Where are you from?” I admit that I sometimes wimpily lied, saying I was British or Australian or Canadian rather than American, in case of possible anti-American feeling. If you said you were Canadian, the standard answer was “Canada Dry.” BA-DA-BING! Apparently “Canada Dry” used to be a popular drink in Egypt. Once or twice I said I was British, until I read Jake Forbes’ copy of Palace Walk (he had already finished it) and realized that Britain has a historically HORRIBLE relationship with Egypt! In full imperialist fashion, Britain ruled Egypt through a series of protectorates and puppet governments from 1882 to 1956, a period during which massive nationalist protests were held down by occupying British soldiers. Palace Walk has several historically-based scenes in which British troops fire on unarmed protesters. When Egypt finally became independent, there were massive anti-European reprisal riots -- particularly in Alexandria, a city which has been famous for its riots for more than 2000 years -- and most of the foreigners left the country. Until they were invited back to come look at the pyramids. So, Canadian or Australian was definitely the best option. The Jewish woman on our tour, as I’ve mentioned, regularly lied about her ethnic background (except to Khaled and the rest of us, of course). I would have done the same. As far as anti-Americanism, I can’t say I actually encountered any firsthand except for overpriced batteries and possibly this one teenage or college-age girl that Jake and I saw while we were walking around Cairo the first day. She was sitting on a bench with some guy while Jake and I walked past. “American! Bang bang!” she said in a mocking tone of voice, making gun gestures, unless my memory is embellishing it. We were just amused and kept walking.

We only had time to see a small fraction of Karnak, and the “Mummification Museum,” and soon we were back in the hotel. Next stop: the Valley of the Kings.

Yun Kouga's Loveless

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:15:12 GMT

Should I give Loveless another chance? I've fallen behind and been meaning to catch up on it, and I'd be happy to hear any impassioned defenses of the series. Yun Kouga's art is of course very attractive, but I didn't like the way the story shoehorned in the battle sequences... it took a good concept and, I thought, reduced it to the most basic level where you could, say, pad out an anime series by introducing opponent after opponent. As someone whose basic training is, admittedly, in shonen manga, I don't like fights which are just there to move the plot along... I like fights which are F*I*G*H*T*S. I've heard (from someone who would know) that Kouga has a definite end in mind for the series, which is good, but I got frustrated by the execution.

The best thing about it, from what I read, was the way it used the cat-ears thing to distinguish virgins from non-virgins... this reminded me of something I'd used to imagine when I was much younger, that people would have an aura revealing their sexual experience. Because of course, people who've had sex are essentially a different species from those who haven't, and this was a pretty brilliant way to show it... though I normally don't have much interest in the cat-ears.

Egypt: May 12, 2007

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 07:16:34 GMT

We woke up incredibly early, long before dawn. Jake and I had chosen to go on the optional jaunt to Abu Simbel, far to the south, several hours’ bus ride away. Abu Simbel is an archaeological site which, like Philae, was once submerged by Lake Nasser, the lake created in the 1970s by the damming of the Nile. Before the Aswan dam, the southern Nile Valley was apparently a deep ravine beneath sheltering cliffs; now, after the dam, the Nile broadens into a great lake with cliffs forming its barren, rocky sides. Above the cliffs stretches a seemingly endless desert; blue water meeting tan-colored sand, with almost no vegetation in between. We were so far south that I had almost expected to see some plant life or chaparral, here near the borders of the Sudan; but the Sahara desert extends well beyond Egypt’s southern borders.

It was a long and uncomfortable bus ride, with me curled up trying to sleep with the Koran for a pillow as the sun rose, and I drank the last of my bottled water early on. My stomach hurt from not sleeping enough. When I got to Abu Simbel -- the tourist site being apparently the only inhabited place for miles around -- I was grouchy and thirsty. There is only one place to buy drinks in Abu Simbel, and the cokes and bottled waters were 15 pounds, or about $3, triple what they went for back in Aswan. Out of sheer stubborn stinginess, I foolishly decided not to buy any water. I joined the rest of our party as they ambled along the edge of the cliffs, towards the massive statues of Abu Simbel -- after the Sphinx and the Pyramids, possibly the biggest icons of Egypt. The statues were incredibly impressive, but between my stomachache and my slowly growing thirst, I found myself sitting in the shade of the trees rather than giving them my full attention. I watched some passing cats hiss at eachother and arch their backs. Interestingly, as we left Abu Simbel, I saw what appeared to be a massive tour boat moored in the lake at the base of the sheer cliff 100 feet below. Obviously it was unoccupied, but how long had it been there? Did anyone actually pay to float around Lake Nasser’s Riverworld-like barrenness, or had the tour boat been stranded there since the dam was built?

ABU SIMBEL (Photos)

Back on the bus, with a dry throat and more Koran-reading. I was reading the 1861 translation by J.M. Rodwell, a Western churchman who threw in the occasional dismissive footnote, but mostly did a respectful, sonorous job with the text, from what I can tell. Carl Gustav Horn, who had lived in the Middle East when he was young was the first person I knew who had read the Koran (of course, Carl is deeply versed in religion, having read the Bible, the Koran and tons of Jack Chick comics). For myself, most of my previous knowledge of Islam, and Christianity for that matter, came from Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God, which laid out the basics of Jewish, Muslim and Christian history and the different fundamentalist movements associated with them. It’s an excellent book, but when reading it in early 2002, I couldn’t help but feel that Armstrong’s 2000 conclusion -- “the extremists are getting weaker” -- was outdated. George Bush was in office, fundamentalist Christians were having a blast all around the U.S., and fundamentalist Islam had come back from third place to punch the decadent West in the nose. As someone who went to college during the Clinton years, I had been stupidly unprepared for the right-wing shift of the Bush years, and in particular for the rise of religion. As a longtime atheist and science-fiction nerd, I had always assumed condescendingly -- oh so condescendingly -- that religion would eventually (1) die out, (2) get pacifistic and fuzzy, or (3) be relegated to the status of weird fringe cults about which “smart” people would chuckle and shake their heads, like in Transmetropolitan. The Left Behind books, Mel Gibson, partial-birth abortion bans, and 9/11 were proving me wrong. (For that matter, I hope Patrick Farley finishes his Left Behind parody, Apocamon.) I had never had the slightest interest in religion, but by 2004-2005 I was starting to feel I better pay attention to it, because it was playing a much bigger part in the modern world than I previously thought it would.

I felt a certain caution, however, since I have always been extremely gullible deep down. When I was a little kid I believed anything. ANYTHING. Christianity, astrology, magic, aliens, the Tarot, if I touched the crooked tree on the playground I would turn into a monster overnight -- you name it. At some point around junior high my willingness to believe anything flipped a switch and turned into a wary atheism, but at the core I basically have a primitive pre-scientific comprehension of the universe and I just stick with materialism to keep things simple and because I’m sick of arrogant Wiccans telling me they can use “magic” when they can’t even throw a 5d6 fireball... but I’m not exactly jumping for joy at the thought of oblivion upon death. In fact, I’ll keep my fingers crossed about that one. Only the realization that whatever happens upon death, “it happens to everybody” keeps it bearable. But what if there REALLY WERE certain people who went to Heaven, or retained their existence, and everyone else went to Hell or was wiped out? Oh man! That would be totally lame if you missed out! (Of course, if you are one of the lucky few going to Heaven, I don’t say this wishing to drag you down to join me in destruction just out of spite-- on the contrary! Be yourself! Enjoy!) But at my core, like the doomed protagonist of Brian Caldwell’s Christian end-of-the-world novel We All Fall Down, I have a certain sense of pride and contrariness, a certain romantic “rage against the dying of the light” sensibility, which tells me that I’d rather stick to my guns. And besides, if humanity exists to glorify and obey some other force, rather than carving out existence on its own terms -- well, that sucks so much I won’t even dignify it with a reaction. But I am still gullible and insecure and thirsty for immortality if I can get it somehow -- if James BeauSeigneur’s imaginative big-budget science fiction Book of Revelations novels The Christ Clone Trilogy can make me think “Whoa, this is way better written than Left Behind! Nice try at converting me, James BeauSeigneur! You ALMOST had me!” then obviously I’m still 6 years old on the playground at heart. I had been reading ancient Greek and Roman and Egyptian and Mesopotamian histories for some time now, so on one level, I was just branching out into the monotheistic ancient cultures... but on another level, my goal was to read both the Koran and the Bible (which I still haven’t read, I’ll get around to it eventually, man I was a terrible Episcopalian) without converting and turning incredibly right-wing like Dave Sim. COULD I DO IT?? BTW, did I mention that Scott Bennie’s “Testament” is an excellent role-playing game supplement?

So in short, in 2007, I had sort of settled down about my 2003-2005 Christian fundamentalist freakout, and I was getting interested and wary about the other big fundamentalism that, in the words of Berkeley Breathed, is sweeping the planet: Islam. Most Muslims draw their faith heavily from the Hadith, the oral tradition regarding the deeds of the prophet Muhammad, but the Koran itself is just a record of the actual sermons delivered by Muhammad (which he himself supposedly received from the Angel Gabriel), and it’s a pretty simple and to-the-point book. (To a casual reader like myself, that is -- I’ve been told there’s lots of esoteric readings if you look for them.) Being a series of sermons (the word Koran means “recitation”), the Koran isn’t primarily concerned with telling a historical narrative, like most of the Bible; it’s concerned with explaining the faith, why it’s legit, and why you should convert to it. (In fact, a lot of the stories in the Koran are stories from the Bible, such as the story of Moses and Pharaoh, or Sodom and Gomorrah.) Mainly, the Koran is full of in some cases remarkably modern-sounding, reasonable arguments to use against atheists and pagans and naysayers. What, you say you’re worshiping these idols because it’s a tradition, because your ancestors worshiped them? YOUR ANCESTORS WERE IDIOTS! IF YOUR ANCESTORS JUMPED OFF A BRIDGE, WOULD YOU DO IT TOO? THE IDOLS ARE JUST SOME THINGS PEOPLE CARVED, YOUR GODS DON’T EXIST! Or, maybe you’re wondering what happened to all the people who lived and died before they had the chance to hear the teachings of the true religion? Look, don’t worry about it -- there’s nothing you can do about it -- if God had wanted them to convert, they would have converted. For that matter, if God wants you to convert, you’ll convert -- and if you absolutely don’t want to, well, we’ll never agree, so let’s not bother arguing... “you to your religion and I to mine.” The Koran also doesn’t have any particularly hard-to-believe prophecies about the future, like the Book of Revelations, with its dragons, demon armies, false prophets, whores with “cups of fornication”, multiple-eyed lambs, etc. Instead, it mostly confines its predictions to two things: (1) the world will end eventually and (2) sometime before that happens, the Muslims are gonna spread all over the world and totally be the #1 religion! Lastly, of course, the Koran presents Islam not as a “new” religion, but as the true original form of the religion of the ancient Biblical prophet Abraham, and it states that all the really holy people in the Bible, including Jesus, were in fact Muslims -- the word Muslims just means “those who submit (to the will of God),” after all. So in short, with the exception of repeating over and over this one story about these guys who hamstrung a she-camel, the Koran is a very well-put-together package.

On that note, from reading the Koran, there are two main things that I don’t like about Islam (not counting the obvious infamous parts about virgin brides, etc.):

(1) the fact that women are officially relegated to second-class status (about which more later... though it’s worth mentioning that I’ve heard that pre-Islamic culture in the region was even more sexist, and it might just be a case of the prejudices of the time enshrined in stone, as it were)

(2) the same thing I dislike about most religions -- the general dissing of all kinds of speculation or imagination about religion, and the dissing of human endeavor in general. The anti-humanism, I suppose. According to the Koran, there’s nothing worse than making up things about God (this wording makes it sound like schoolyard rumors -- “You know, I heard that God’s mother always packs him a peanut butter sandwich”). Of course, this is an element of most faiths -- the truth is not negotiable or embellishable. Then in the Koran there’s the disapproval of representational art, specifically sculptures, which pre-Islamic Mecca was so famous for. God doesn’t like idols or statues, after all, and Islam (like Christianity at points in its history) has a strong iconoclastic tradition. But for myself, I love art, and I love fiction and fabrication. I was reminded of the scene in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce when the artist turns away from Heaven, because he can’t accept the fact that in Heaven and God, there is a beauty that he can’t capture or surpass with his individual creations. He can not, will not, recognize that his own status as a “creator” is ultimately inferior. It must have been frustrating.

So there I was reading the Koran and feeling very proud of myself for being all cultured. At the same time, I was starting to feel really sick -- a strange sickness in my head, a tiredness. By the time we arrived in Aswan I felt pretty bad -- I had minor heatstroke, or heat exhaustion, from my foolish refusal to drink any water at Abu Simbel. Luckily the next leg of our journey was totally easy. After joining our companions who had been chilling in Aswan all day while we rode to Abu Simbel, we went down to the banks of the river, split up and climbed aboard a pair of feluccas. As the boats set off, we lay on mattresses under a shady sail for a cruise down the Nile.

ON THE FELUCCA (Photos)

I myself sat in a lump in the shade, barely able to move. I was separated from Jake, who took the other boat, but I played some card games with some of my fellow tourists. The pilots of the felucca were Nubians, who did all the work while we sat there; at one point when the steering didn’t seem particularly onerous, someone invited the pilot to play cards, but he declined. The boat ambled slowly, ever so slowly, along the green banks of the Nile. Virtually every spot of fertile land was cultivated, but the countryside didn’t seem crowded; we rarely saw people on the banks. Instead, we saw water birds in the shallows. I found myself wondering how much the Nile rose during the inundation, and then wondering again how much *more* it had rose in the past, before the Aswan Dam had been built. The Aswan dam allowed the water level of the Nile to be controlled, preventing the droughts and floods that had plagued Egypt before, but it also trapped most of the fertile silt which came downstream from central Africa. Even now, Lake Nasser was ever so slowly filling with silt, burying the sunken ghost towns, tombs and temples which had not been moved (like Abu Simbel and the Philae temple) when the lake was built. What would it be like to dive in those waters in search of some underwater temple?

The boat stopped near a bridge so people could clamber onto land and pee in the bushes, and then we continued north, mooring in some out-of-the-way place around sunset. The pilots made a fire of dried palm fronds near the water’s edge, and after dinner everyone goofed off and sang and danced again, a little more unforcedly than the previous night, I thought. At some point I climbed up a dune to the border of the desert and, lying back in the sand, fall asleep. When I woke up the party had died down and I went back to the boat and huddled under the blankets under the stars.

More on Manga Tasting

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:27:04 GMT

I should have linked to the original podcast by Patrick, but now I must say I am impressed.

Egypt: May 11, 2007

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:22:52 GMT

We awoke to the sight of mud-brick houses and green irrigated fields, dusty roads with men in grey djellabas riding donkeys. The vast majority of Egypt, I had realized by now, was essentially poverty-level; this was really a Third World country, like nowhere else I had been. Khaled at one point told us, perhaps jokingly, that people had to pay taxes when a building was completed, so that was why there was such a vast number of roofless and unfinished structures sitting around, with heaps of bricks gathering dust. (Again, I thought of Hirohiko Araki’s drawings of same in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.)

The pencil-hungry attendant brought us bread and tea and plenty of sugar cubes for breakfast. When the train finally stopped, we gathered our stuff and headed off. The attendant stopped me in the hallway after Jake had left. “Sir,” he said with a faintly hurt voice, “Your friend, he didn’t give me anything...”

I gave the guy a few pounds (a pound is about 20 cents American). He was the most obsequious person I have ever encountered. We got off the train and felt the cool breeze of the Nile upon us, and above us, we saw a blue sky like nothing in Cairo. The air was warm, and palm trees grew in green lawns. We were in Aswan.

THE ASWAN HIGH DAM (Photos)

Right after we got off the train, after dropping our bags at the hotel, a few of us tourists chose to make an extra pre-lunch trip out to the Aswan High Dan and the Temple of Philae. Every day of this tour was packed with incident, packed with optional events, and Jake and I went on most of them. (The rest of the tourists hung out in Aswan or stayed at the hotel.) We rode a bus over the First Cataract of the Nile, where the river breaks up into little streams and runs over rocks and rapids. Passing by the remains of an old failed dam built by the British, we stopped briefly atop the Aswan High Dam, one of the architectural feats of modern Egypt. After pausing to observe the landscape, we got back in the van and drove to the shores of a lake. On an island in the lake was the temple of Philae, which (like the temples of Abu Simbel which we would visit the next day) had been disassembled and rebuilt on higher ground when the Aswan High Dam threatened to sink it underwater. We took a boat out to the temple. Philae was the site of Egypt’s last surviving temple of Isis, around the 500s AD, before the pagan faith was finally stamped out. The temple was, like many others, converted to a Christian church, and (according to wikipedia) Christian iconoclasts mutilated most of the sculptures. Even knowing this, even knowing that the site had been literally disassembled and rebuilt, the island was gorgeous. Swigging from my everpresent bottle of water, keeping my everpresent dorky hat between me and the sun, I wandered down to the water’s edge, where I saw a group of New Agers apparently performing a ritual to Isis. Later, I saw fresh flowers that someone had laid upon Isis’ altar.

THE TEMPLE OF PHILAE (Photos)

We returned to Aswan in time for lunch. One of the things I soon noticed about the Aswan region, to be blunt, is that there were way more black people than in Cairo. Embarrassingly, I had wondered for awhile about what Egyptians actually *looked* like, having heard many conflicting reports, particularly about the Ancient Egyptians -- they were Middle Eastern, they were Mediterranean, they were black, they were somewhere in between, etc. The issue is complicated, of course, by the fact that Egypt has undergone many population immigrations -- Greek, Arab -- and the appearance of the population has probably changed since pharaonic times, although this is questionable, and of course it’s even more questionable whether it matters. But there is that urge to identify some strain of “original” Egyptians, some “pharaonic” Egyptians of a type that doesn’t really exist, like... like the Cult of the Tomb Guardians in Yu-Gi-Oh!, or something. ~_~ (Cut me some slack, I edited that manga.) In Cairo, I had tried to tell if there was any physical difference between Copts and Islamic Egyptians, but I couldn't detect any. (There is definitely a cultural difference; the Coptic women don't wear headscarves.) E.A. Wallis Budge, the old racist Egyptologist, thought that the Ancient Egyptians had been black, and for him this led to the theory that Osiris was a major god because he had introduced agriculture and led the Egyptians away from the cannibalism “to which all African people are inclined.” E.A. Wallis Budge, ladies and gentlemen. Then there is this basically Afrocentric website, which claims that the Ancient Egyptians were black, although one of the Egyptologists on the Amun yahoogroup dismissed as being one of the most inaccurate websites she’d ever seen. What is known for certain is that (1) Ancient Egyptians did see themselves as racially distinct from the southern ‘Nubians,’ about which they had all kinds of negative stereotypes, as they did about all foreigners. (2) At the same time, there were several Nubian dynasties in Egypt, several periods in which Egypt was ruled by black pharaohs who originally came from the south. (And at other times there were Libyan pharaohs, Semitic pharaohs, Greek pharaohs, etc...) Anyway, the population seems to get more racially African as you go south, and our guide Khaled referred to the locals as Nubians.

Aswan, which stands on the traditional border between Egypt and Nubia, is possibly the most beautiful city I visited. Several islands stand in the river, among them Kitchener’s Island, which is a botanical garden park with a tourist cafe that sells expensive drinks, and Elephantine Island, which is also very green, but is mostly inhabited by Nubian farmers and boatsmen, among whose town and orchards we wandered. Boats were moored in the river beside tiny islands, really just mudflats covered in grass and reeds. There are several historical sites around Elephantine Island, and I was disappointed that I didn’t have time to see more of them -- and even more disappointed that my camera died in the middle of the day before I could photograph Elephantine Island or any of the other late-afternoon sights. I wish I had seen the Temple of Khnum and the Aswan Museum. But we saw a spectacular hajj picture on the wall of a house, commemorating someone’s pilgrimage to Mecca. We also saw an ancient, ancient statue of Osiris, probably of pink granite but so softened its features were almost indistinct, lying on its back in the dirt on the south end of the island. Khaled told us that until “about a century ago,” the local women had touched the statue (or walked around it) when they wanted to have a baby. They knew that Osiris was an old god of fertility. So slowly do things change, sometimes. The same progress which brought cell phones and bottled water to the island of Elephantine also brought the message: STOP WORSHIPING OSIRIS!

With my camera still dead, I climbed on a boat and crossed the Nile to the West Bank, where the late-afternoon attraction was my first camel ride. (Jake Forbes took a lot of camel ride photos.) The main difficulty with riding a camel, as far as I can tell (apart from expert stuff like actually controlling which direction it goes without an Egyptian guy leading it for you, of course), is staying steady when the camel gets up or sits down. They are such tall animals that it would be bad to fall off, and they sway back and forth when they stand or sit. We rode the camels back and forth into the desert and then tipped our guides and piled into a truck and drove away.

With the sun already behind the western hills, we drove north to another Nubian settlement, where the houses were painted light blue in the Nubian style. There weren’t many people in sight, but we passed a soccer field in the dusk. We piled out of the truck and were led into an enclosure-type building, with no roof and low painted walls about seven feet high, where we would have the “Nubian dinner” promised in the tour itinerary. As I got out of the car three little kids ran up to me with their hands out and I gave them some pencils or possibly money -- I don’t remember which, I hope it was pencils -- and then a mustached man shouted at the kids, saying something loud and disapproving. Through the language barrier, I apologized to him for encouraging his children into a life of beggary -- “I’m sorry, I didn’t think about it,” or something like that. After this incident I joined the others in the building, and we sat around on carpets and drank tea and ate dinner, in this little outdoor restaurant built to entertain tourists.

After dinner we sat around under the stars in the desert warmth, while a group of our hosts clustered in the other part of the enclosure and slowly began singing and beating drums. Although it was obviously a show for us predominantly white tourists who had to travel all around the globe for the opportunity to dance with poor black people in Africa, for a little while it felt so spontaneous that I was carried away and joined the rest of the group, tourists and hosts, in the sing-a-long. Soon we were all dancing around in a circle holding hands and running every which way, my everpresent guilt kept at bay, until perhaps when they started singing “In the jungle, the mighty jungle” which seemed a little excessive. Then it broke up and our hosts packed up and we left. But the day ended with everyone pleasantly exhausted.

Egypt: May 10, 2007

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:52:57 GMT

We awoke and joined the others in the lobby for the first day of our tour proper. (Actually, Day One counted as a tour day on the official dossier, although all we did was meet up for dinner.) Our morning destination was the Egyptian Museum, and our afternoon destination was the Pyramids of Giza, the great symbol of Egypt.

We talked and got to know our fellow travelers. Actually, it would take many days for us to get to know them even in the most superficial way, but let me say a few words to describe them, not naming names (although if any of them stumble on this site I’m sure they’ll be offended by my rank generalizations -- sorry everybody!). There were the two Portuguese women, both really friendly, one a licensed nurse who gave me shots when I was horribly sick later in the trip. There were the Canadians, chief among them the cheerful and vaguely New-Agey woman with tattoos of bare-breasted goddess-type figures on her bare sleeves, who I kept thinking was probably freaking out the Egyptians (although who was I to care, for one thing, and secondarily, who was I to throw stones, with my horrible haircut and my “Captain Spaulding the African Explorer” mentality?). There was the conservative Christian couple, who (if asked) talked casually about how they’d been to Europe but “Europe is spiritually dead” and about how the mosque we visited was “dirty,” although again, my own attitude towards Islam was just as dismissive in its own way, as I’ll eventually reveal. There was the old weatherbeaten happy-go-lucky blue-collar guy on his umpteenth trip to some exotic location. There was the thirtysomething Jewish woman on a side trip from Israel, a smart, outgoing traveler who nevertheless for obvious reasons wasn’t eager to advertise the fact that she was Jewish among random Egyptians. There was the wiry, athletic Asian-American woman who had made a lot of money working in finance and who was now in the middle of a three-or-four-tour traveling spree, going alone all around the world -- she had just returned from Nepal and was after Egypt she was headed deeper into Africa. There were some other people who, although cool, didn’t make a strong enough impression on me to be reduced to cheap stereotypes. And of course there was Jake and myself, who briefly gave off the impression of “possible gay lovers” to at least one member of our party. (I personally took it as a compliment.) They were a fun group of people to be with. Khaled, our guide, was also great -- although quite not the young hipster I somehow had imagined would be leading us, he was an incredibly experienced guide who sheltered us and took care of us like a mother duck guarding her flock. On more than one occasion he faced down angry cab-drivers, or smoothed over complicated situations, or negotiated reasonable prices for us, in a way that we as tourists could never have done.

THE EGYPTIAN MUSEUM (a few photos)

Leaving our luggage at the hotel, we proceeded to the Egyptian Museum. Cameras weren’t allowed inside, so my photos show only the exterior -- the pool of papyrus and lotus flower, the statues, the French fin de siecle architecture. Inside, the museum was cavernous and chaotic. Guides led tour groups from place to place, giving the same speeches over and over beside massive statues and blocks of stone. Most of the tour groups, including ours on that day, only saw the tiniest fraction of the enormous museum. I used to date a Museum Studies major, and it was pretty clear that the Egyptian Museum would not have lived up to her standards: the signage was sparse and inconsistent, and everywhere, in corners and display cases, thousands of unlabeled items were stacked. The sheer wealth of the collection awed me despite the poor arrangement, and I wandered around scribbling visual impressions of undreamed Egyptian bric-a-brac. In addition to the great statues and sarcophagi, there was a room full of wall paintings and fragments, showing still-colorful nature drawings -- plants, birds, animals of all kind. There were chariots, weapons, furniture. There was a room of animal mummies, from bulls to alligators to ibises. Perhaps most fascinating to me, there was a room full of Greco-Roman sarcophagi and funeral portraits -- artifacts of that weird end time when traditional Egyptian funerary rites were being adopted by Greek immigrants, and mutating under the cultural pressures. Portraits of curly-haired men and women were worked into the bandages above the mummies’ faces, in some cases photorealistic and beautiful, in other cases crude cartoons drawn in garish reds and yellows-- sometimes you had to wonder if these people just didn’t have any taste, or if they knew they had to settle for the “cheap portrait painter.” Walter S. Crane’s comic Sheba, set partially in the Ptolemaic period, got in a few good digs at the decline of traditional Egyptian embalming methods, but the results were fascinating to look at.

THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA (Photos)

I didn’t have nearly enough time that day to look at the Egyptian Museum, but soon we had to leave and take a bus to our next stop, the Pyramids of Giza. One of my friends who visited Egypt was shocked that the Pyramids were so close to the city proper, and from his description I feared the worst -- pyramids on an empty lot surrounded by chain-link fences, perhaps. But in fact, it wasn’t that bad. The pyramids are on the edge of a working-class neighborhood west of the Nile, but they lie above the city on a great bluff of sand, and a huge area all the Pyramids around is clear, containing nothing but sand. (And if you walked west from the Pyramids through the borderlands of the city, it’s only a few blocks to the true desert.) The super-pricey Mena House hotel, with its golf course, lies along the road directly beneath the Pyramids. We stopped and ate at an Egyptian fast food stand, where I had falafel, and then we proceeded up the road to the bluff.

The Pyramids are lovely, and huge, and completely worn down. In Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski’s sci-fi novel The Killing Star they are the only human structure which is still vaguely recognizable after the planet is carpet-bombed by genocidal aliens, and I’d believe it. You are no longer permitted to climb the pyramids, the way my dad did when he visited Egypt in the late 1940s, when *his* father, a surgeon, was a guest of an Egyptian noble. However, small groups of people sit in the shade of the great stones -- “tourist police” (who have a massive presence around the pyramids, that tourist magnet), people selling bottles of water, legitimate guides and somewhat unscrupulous, or entrepreneurial, guides trying to get you to give them a few pounds in return for taking a photo of you or pointing at the pyramids and indicating some supposed exciting feature. A few subsidiary ruins, and smaller pyramids, sit around the Great Pyramid, but I didn’t get too close to them. We did drive to a small observation bluff about a half-mile away, where tourists are trucked in the thousands to take photos of the Pyramids from this vantage point, and to be tempted by vendors selling Bast statues, Horus statues, pieces of papyrus, scarves, little stone pyramids -- the landfills full of merchandise and memorabilia which are for sale at every major Egyptian tourist site. Furthermore, clustered around this observation site are the most aggressive tourist-hunters I encountered in all of Egypt, guys dressed up in “traditional” garb who try to get you to take a photo of them for money, or make you put on their clothes and then take a photo of you for money. I took a photo of one of these guys, intending to pay him, and then somehow allowed my camera to actually be GRABBED away by him as he took a photo of me. I got the camera back, of course, but I was so annoyed that I deleted the photo he took. I kept the photo of him, however, and I paid him a few pounds and piastres. I don’t remember if it was him or someone else who discouragingly said “No piastres... piastres are toilet...” when he saw me whip out a 50-piastre note instead of a pound. (Of course I paid him more than 50 piastres, but not a whole lot more... maybe 2 pounds 50?)

We returned from the observation site and I decided to do something I couldn’t pass up: go inside the Great Pyramid. It cost about $30, if I remember correctly, and I gave my ticket to some men sitting in the cool shadow of the cave entrance on the western side. At the time, what most stood out to me was that one of the guards was the only guy I saw in all of Egypt with a long haircut (neck-length, mulletty, but with longish hair in the front as well). I myself had long hair and huge mutton-chops when I went on the trip, but walking the streets of Egypt, I soon saw that every single man had really short, conservative haircuts -- a couple of people even commented on my hair. Not that I would have blended in any better with short hair, of course. I wanted to call this guy “Brother!” and ask him why he was such a hair rebel, but I decided to wait until I got out of the Pyramid, and by the time I emerged he had left. Anyway, the interior of the Pyramid was muggy and dark, the stone was almost slick with perspiration. I smelled urine and sweat and human smells. Cramped, gated passageways led off in strange directions, but the main path led up, over a long staircase leading up the main gallery, its triangular roof high in the dark. The air was so poor and the cave so hot that I was sweating by the time I reached the top, and I crawled through the low passageway, illuminated by electric lights. There, in the top chamber of the pyramid, was the empty sarcophagus. A dim, indirect light filled the black room with shadows, and in the shadows a European New Ager was sitting in the lotus position, meditating in the corner. I said hello to him and we exchanged pleasantries, and then I left him in that sweaty, dark room, and clambered down the rickety wooden stairs into daylight.

Cameras weren’t allowed in the Great Pyramid, so I gave my camera to one of my fellow travelers, and didn’t get it back until after we were leaving the Pyramid and the Sphinx. The sphinx is in an awkward location, at the bottom of a hill beside the Pyramids, surrounded by low walls, in a sort of slough with puddles of water nearby. (Apparently rising groundwater is harming the structure.) About 200 feet away from the sphinx is a touristy cafe by the exit of the pyramid/sphinx complex, which appears to be the model for the cafe where the heroes fight D’Arby in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. Getting close to the sphinx, however, requires running a gauntlet of peddlers and tourist-hunters who are gathered round it like people playing “blob tag.” The pyramids aren’t nearly so bad because they span acres and acres -- it would take an army of salesmen to surround them -- but all traffic to the sphinx must pass through a narrow area, and while I watched, hapless European families would approach the sphinx only to have to constantly shoo away people pushing Nefertiti statues and pyramid keychains in their faces. I stayed clear of it; sadly, the sphinx is so small and ravaged there isn’t much to see anyway.

Our group of tourists soon gathered together, I got my camera back, and we made our way back to the cars. The area around Giza is apparently famous for its papyrus-making, and papyrus is pretty much only sold to tourists, so our guide Khaled -- in one of several very soft-sell attempts to crosspromote our trip with local businesses -- next took us to a “papyrus factory” where people tried to sell us papyrus. The papyrus sheets were basically posters printed with all kinds of designs -- pharaonic, Christian, Islamic, silly -- but I didn’t have the slightest interest in buying one, so when this smiling Egyptian guy descended upon me (and other people descended on everyone else in the group), I TOTALLY wimped out and pretended that I had to make a cell phone call and couldn’t get reception inside the building. So I hung out by the van fiddling with my cell phone until everyone else left, having apparently not bought any papyrus, and I assume Khaled told the papyrus people something like “Sorry, maybe next time,” and we went back to the hotel and from there to the train station. At the station, Khaled helped me buy a phone card.

The next leg of our journey would be by train, along the Nile to Aswan. Jake and I shared a sleeper car. As the train rolled on, our waiter/attendant opened the door and brought us dinner and our evening tea. When he saw that I was drawing in my sketchbook, his eyes widened at the sight of the pencils.

“What nice pencils,” he said (or something like that). “You know, my son is an artist.”

“Here you go,” I said, handing him a pencil.

“I have three sons,” he said.

I gave him two more pencils. After that, he showed his gratitude by leaving us an extra (or at least I think it was extra) pot of hot sweet tea, which Jake and I drank readily. After dinner I read the Koran in bed, until the rocking of the train put me to sleep (notice a pattern to these daily updates?). Outside, in the dark, the Nile flew by.

Egypt: May 8-9, 2007

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:16:41 GMT

Okay, now for more Egypt. Going back in time to May 2007...

DAY ZERO (Photos)

Jake and I got on the plane, and flew for 14+ hours of waking and troubled sleep, from San Francisco to New York to Egypt. I changed my money to Egyptian pounds in the New York airport, and was disappointed to find that I could have gotten a much better exchange rate if I’d waited ‘till Cairo. My first act upon entering the country, and every day afterward, was to slather myself with tons and tons of suntan lotion (Jake’s lotion, since I had forgotten my own). I probably needn’t have bothered; the skies above Cairo that first day were smoggy and gray and dour, hanging with a humidity I hadn’t expected to encounter in Egypt, and as our taxi drove into the city proper I looked out of the windows onto miles of rundown apartment buildings and old cemeteries and, in the distance, barren hills.

We finally arrived at the Garden City House Hotel in downtown Cairo -- an impressive old building with huge rooms, a vast echoing stairwell, and a rundown feel. Our faint apprehension at our so-so room (there were no towels in the bathroom) was brightened up when we went out on the balcony and saw a beautiful view of greenery, the river Nile, and countless minarets. We went out to explore the city. Cairo is a pedestrian’s city; streetlights were few, but cars constantly slowed down for passers-by and we basically walked wherever we liked. On the other hand, compared to the only other non-English-speaking country I had been in -- Japan -- there were almost no English street signs, and there among the narrow, tree-lined, radial streets, we soon found ourselves repeatedly lost.

It was at this point that I made my first major social faux pas. Every tourist book I had read had continually hammered a point about the importance of “baksheesh,” tipping. You were supposed to tip people for giving directions! Opening doors for you! Talking to you in the street! So there I was, with my wallet full of Egyptian pounds, certain that if I had ANY social contact with ANYBODY I would be obliged to pay them. The first few times that I asked someone for directions and then immediately thrust money on them, however, they responded with bewilderment or laughter. Once or twice they accepted it, but mostly they refused. Gradually I realized that I was merely being a moronic tourist waving money around. The truth, as I later discovered, is that “baksheesh” is not something that just everyone constantly gives to everyone else, but mostly, something that people expect in designated tourist areas or for designated service jobs. When you go near the Pyramids, or Luxor, or major tourist places like that, *then* there are swarms of self-proclaimed guides and helpers who make a living by (unhelpfully) pointing out the locations of monuments and so on, and then asking for money. It’s also a good idea to give it to luggage-handlers and all the same people you might tip in America. But there in Cairo, on that first day, Jake and I were pretty much just wandering obliviously around in a city where everyone else was trying to go about their normal lives, and if they gave us directions, they were just being friendly. (We did encounter one or two scam artists on that first day, but not many... just some people with an assortment of tattered American business cards, trying to make friends with us by claiming that they knew such-and-such person in the states, look, here’s his card, and would you like to stop at a souvenir shop?) After blundering around like this for awhile, Jake and I eventually stopped in a cafe where I was so fidgety and nervous that I accidentally spilled hot sweet tea all over the floor.

Embarrassed, I soon staggered out of the cafe and we made our way to a park where I bought some mint juice from a street vendor. The mint juice was so good I regained some of my equilibrium, and realized I didn’t need to try to tip people all the time. I joined Jake in wandering far to the northeast of the city... out in avenues where butchers hung filetted goats and lambs in the open air, through alleys filled with lamp shops and furniture shops, past clothing shops with the windows completely filled with dresses and shirts, with not an inch of wasted space. I was struck, as I had been in Tokyo, by the massive space waste of American cities, with their enormous suburbs, their vast streets wasting the land.

We wandered until the sun grew low in the sky, and then I started to get tired. I hadn’t really slept on the plane and it was probably about 6 am back in the U.S., on almost the exact opposite side of the world. We made our way back to the hotel room where I crashed out on the bed shortly after sunset without having dinner. The air was heavy in the room, but I slept like the dead.

DAY 1: COPTIC CAIRO (Photos)

Jake and I woke just before dawn. Our sleep schedules were off; furthermore, in the wee hours of the morning as at other times of the day, there was the sound of the mosques’ loudspeakers calling the faithful to prayer. We showered and prepared to make an early start of it by going to Coptic Cairo, one of the locations not on the GAP Adventures tour, which we would join later in the day. In the dim early morning light we got on the train and went south to Mar Girgis, Saint George’s station, in the heart of Cairo’s old Christian community.

Christianity spread rapidly in Ancient Egypt, and Coptic (“Egyptian”) Christianity is one of the oldest forms of the religion. After centuries of Islamic assimilation, only about 10% of Egyptians are still Christian, most of them not in Cairo but in the south, near the Sudan and historically Christian Ethiopia. But at one point Egypt was the center of a massive Christian church, which broke off from both Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox due to the usual nitpicky ideological differences, not long before Islam came into the picture. (In fact, the Islamic invaders were welcomed as liberators to a certain extent, since the common Egyptians were sick of being oppressed by their Byzantine overlords.) The Copts of Cairo, however, boast one of the oldest churches in the region, as well as a recently upgraded museum and bookstore, from which I bought postcards, but not the English-language leaflets of philosophy and religious instruction by Pope Shenouda III.

It was still early morning when we arrived, and the museum wasn’t open yet. We wandered through the alleys between the old Coptic buildings, built on the ruins of a Roman fortress, which reminded me in the vaguest way of the back of the Episcopal church I’d attended as a child. Most of the faithful had not yet arrived for prayer, but the churches still seemed bigger than necessary for the number of attendants. Some sort of morning services had already begun, and the sound of chanting and praying echoed through the alleyways. A cleaning-woman indicated to Jake and I that it would be okay if we went inside one of the churches, so we went into a chapel -- an ancient wood and stone building -- and saw perhaps a half-dozen people seated among the pews, while altar boys performed the service along with a man in a massive ornate white robe and mitre. Hanging near the altar was a huge tapestry of Jesus, surrounded by glowing green Christmas lights. I had the thought that Coptic Christianity was like Catholicism with twice the imagination and 1/10th the budget. We dropped some money in the donations box and continued wandering around the grounds, eventually finding our way into the great Coptic cemetery in the back. The tombs were built like houses, shadowed with trees, with painted statues of Jesus and Mary everywhere as if as an intentional “nyah!” to Islamic iconoclasm. By now the museum had opened, so we went inside and looked at the strange Coptic art, that final fusion of ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman influences. The Coptic language had died hundreds of years ago except as a liturgical language which still provides clues as to the sound of ancient Egyptian, but there were old Bibles written in Coptic, with semi-hieroglyphic characters, vulture-headed and eagle-headed creatures looming over the vaguely Gothic letters like an illuminated manuscript. There were paintings of Saint George and the dragon, obscure animal-headed saints from fables, paintings of Jesus from monastic caves, and other fascinating relics. Children played in the courtyard as we wandered through the museum’s upper stories.

The sun had now broken free of the clouds, and we left and had some hot tea at a pleasant sidewalk cafe, making do with English and Jake’s smidgens of Arabic. I was already appreciating Egypt’s cafe culture, sort of the replacement for bar culture back home. Alcohol, after all, was forbidden on religious grounds -- if there was any surreptitious drinking I didn’t see it, except on the last night of our trip -- so perhaps as a substitute, people hung out for hours in the shade of the cafes, in shirts and pants or djellabas, drinking Coke and hot dark tea full of sediment and sugar. It was almost entirely a male culture, with only men in these cafes, but more on that later. Sometimes a little TV would be playing in the corner, sometimes people would be smoking from water pipes. Sometimes you could get karkady, a usually sweet red drink made out of hibiscus. Egypt had excellent non-alcoholic drinks -- tons of strange fruit drinks and sweet, tasty things. We passed by a bakery, where we bought some bread and pastries, which were delicious. At almost every meal we were served excellent, fresh pita bread or flatbread, which made American-bought pitas taste like the nasty, bitter dish-sponges they are.

In other ways, though, Egyptian food was a little bland. In upscale restaurants there was lots of rice and salad and meat dishes served in little clay pots, but the casseroles weren’t particularly spicy or flavorful. The standard “Mediterranean” dishes like kebab and falafel were everywhere, and were very good. Koshari is by far the best food I had in Egypt -- a fast-food mixture of rice, lentils, dried chickpeas, and macaroni. Pour tomato sauce, garlic and spices on it, and you have something like spicy pasta crossed with breakfast cereal. Fuul, brown beans which are also a common food, varied from a gross paste to very tasty -- it all depends on the seasoning, I guess. It must be remembered that we were on a fairly “cheap” tour and, later on, we spent quite a few nights being served simple communal food on feluccas and in tents. These dishes were actually very tasty at the end of a long day, even if it was just stew, or alphabet soup poured over rice. And whenever we stopped to rest, we drank tea, and Coke, and bottled water.

After lunch the sky got gray again, and we went back to the Garden City House Hotel and checked out, gathering our luggage. On the way out, the seedy-looking doorman followed us out the front door and informed us that indignantly that the towels from the room were missing. Jake and I both simultaneously and with the innocent confidence of truth told him that there weren’t any towels in the room when we got there, and the doorman raised his hands in a dismissive “If you say so” gesture and, not speaking another word, turned and left. This put both Jake and I in a good mood for the rest of the day.

THE CITADEL (Photos)

We decided to go to the Citadel, an enormous fortress built by Saladin on a cliff above Cairo, back in the 12th century. (I vaguely regretted that we didn’t have time to go to the Agricultural Museum, where the Lonely Planet guide promised “giant plastic fruits and glass cases full of stuffed birds”.) After a brief and satisfying haggle over the taxi fare -- we didn’t mind walking if we had to, and we were starting to get the vaguest lay of the land now -- we arrived. When we got there it actually rained for a few minutes, the wind dashing drops in our faces -- you can see the rain puddles in the photos. The Citadel was a massive fort, incorporating a mosque and several small museums. As usual I immediately evaluated the building’s zombie-proof-ness and gave it a high rating. The towering ceilings were impressive, but even more so was the view of the city to the west. Across the brown sea of minarets and apartments, we could see the Nile and the distant hill of sand upon which the Pyramids of Giza stood.

We took a taxi back to the main part of the city -- haggling again, but paying a little extra on the way down since we were now stranded in an out-of-the-way place and it was a long walk -- and made our way to the Happy City Hotel where, for the first time, we met the other 15 or so members of our tour. Khaled, our shaved-headed and youngish-looking 40-year-old guide, was there as well, making us sign our medical waivers, and on the rooftop restaurant we all clinked glasses and talked as the sun set.

After dinner I went to our new room at the Happy City Hotel, which although it lacked the character of the Garden City House was much nicer and cleaner, and I plugged my power converter into the wall socket, in order to recharge my batteries for my camera. Twenty seconds later there was a fizzling sound and a small burst of smoke and the light on my battery charger went dead forever. Rushing up to inspect the damage, I realized that I had gotten the “Egypt” power converter mixed up with another, almost identical power converter for a different country. The correct converter still worked, but the battery charger was dead, so for the rest of the trip I had to go on a constant quest for AA batteries, buying them for all kinds of prices from the modest to the outrageous. I was annoyed, but mostly relieved that the entire room hadn’t shorted out. And again, we slept. (Separately.)

More rambling on Saturday!

Return to Egypt

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:52:07 GMT

In just under three weeks I will leave on a three-week vacation for India, Tibet and Nepal, to wander and get visuals for my The Stiff. I’ll be back just in time for Stumptown at the end of April. On the occasion of this trip, it occurred to me that I never actually wrote anything about, or posted any photos from, my trip to Egypt back in May 2007, almost a year ago. Here are the photos. Now for some commentary, if you're interested...

Why Egypt? It all started with a random phone call from my friend Jake Forbes, who was feeling the wanderlust and wanted a vacation. The fact that he asked me to come along with him was just good luck on my part. Jake pretty much did all the planning, and I would never have done it without him. We considered going to Nepal, but Egypt was considerably cheaper, and so we settled on it for partially financial reasons. (I also felt a faint desire to travel to Egypt sooner rather than later, just in case there were still any bargains due to Americans being scared to travel to the Middle East, although I was probably a little too late for this, thankfully.) I have been interested in Egypt ever since I was a little kid, of course, and I also love Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe which talks about all the ancient civilizations, but my current fascination with Egypt dates back just a few years and owes itself mostly to the nerdiest of reasons.

So, let’s join the "in memory of Gary Gygax" nerd-meme and just say it: I was playing in a D&D campaign a few years ago when one of my fellow gamers, a guy who works at Aquarius Records, told me about a new RPG book. That book was Scott Bennie's Testament: Roleplaying in the Biblical Era. I was immediately taken with Bennie’s insane agnostic mixture of comparative religion, mythology and hit points. I was always somewhat into ancient history, but soon, with the convergence of history and RPGing, I was buying books like Egyptian Adventures: Hamunaptra and African Adventures and Aesheba: Greek Africa and still weirder stuff. From late 2004 to late 2006 I ran a weekly D&D campaign set in this potluck of Ancient Egypt, goblins and lizard men, and in the process I ended up doing TONS of research into the real setting (which of course clashed terribly with the fantasy elements that I had introduced in order to have a relatively familiar D&D experience and sate my players' desire to play halflings or psionicists -- sigh). But at the same time, I was doing tons of actual research and becoming increasingly more interested in the geography, the history and the religion of Egypt. Soon I was reading fairly hardcore books like Gunther Holbl's History of the Ptolemaic Empire, and branching out into general studies of the late ancient world: Tony Perrottet’s awesome and funny Pagan Holiday, Herodotus, Pliny, Thucydides, the outdated and prejudiced but colorful books of E.A. Wallis Budge. Frankly, most of my periods of intense historical research are inspired by some roleplaying game or another, so this was nothing new.

So it was to "get a feel" for Egypt, the landscape and the history and the sights, that I decided to join Jake Forbes on this trip. At the time I was deep in the middle of proofreading "Manga: The Complete Guide," so it couldn't have been worse timing, and I was stressing about work right up 'till the moment I got on the plane (in the process accidentally leaving all my suntan lotion back in San Francisco). I deactivated my cell phone voice mail since it would have been prohibitively expensive, and I quickly abandoned any stupid ideas of taking my laptop with me. We were to arrive in Egypt for a day by ourselves, and then join up with a GAP Adventures tour, Absolute Egypt. I brought along a huge floppy sunhat, a pouch full of electrical power converters, my digital camera, a copy of "Lonely Planet Travel Guides: Egypt," a soon-to-be-wrecked library copy of The Western Desert of Egypt, a sketchbook, and a lot of sunproof clothes. Jake brought a copy of Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk.

Lastly, I brought a (soon-to-be-ragged, also from the library) copy of the Koran, out of a feeling that I should try to understand a little of the dominant culture of Egypt of the last 1300 years, rather than just stuff that happened 5000 years ago (but hey! I'm into the Greco-Roman era of Egypt! That's a mere *2000* years ago!). And thus, in a way, my tourist foolishness began. For although my studies have been concentrated on pharaonic Egypt, and I knew no Arabic and had nothing but misapprehensions and stereotypes about MODERN Egypt, I had this vague idea that I would try to be a "good tourist" and represent America in a good light, and perhaps even discuss the Koran with some random Egyptian dudes in a cafe, like this New Yorker columnist once did. My total disconnection from reality should be immediately obvious from that statement... and in fact, this travelogue is going to be littered with dumb tourist things I did, and stereotypes, and crass thoughts, so if you want to retain a good opinion of me, please STOP READING NOW.

Still here? Okay. I'll post more tomorrow.

How I Review Manga

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:45:53 GMT

People often ask me "As a manga critic, what criteria do you use in your reviews?" I'm proud to say that I have finally answered this question in an article for the website of Otaku USA Magazine. This is possibly the best thing I've written since "Manga: The Complete Guide" came out back in October. I mean it: RUN, DON'T WALK to your copy of Firefox or Safari and CLICK ON THAT LINK IMMEDIATELY. Please check it out!

Here's a brief sample to whet your appetite:

Different Harlequins

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 01:53:41 GMT

I bet the publishers of Harlequin romance novels hate this.

Useless Thoughts on Napoleon

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 04:28:09 GMT

Man, most portraits of Napoleon show him as some short, fat, wide-faced old guy (and in fact, he still ranks high among "Most Boring Famous People of the Past" in my mind), but if portrait painters are to be believed, at age 32 he was relatively bishi.

New Interview/Review Online

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:17:40 GMT

I don't normally post reviews of my book here, but this one is a mini-interview as well: Forbidden Planet International.

New Column at Comixology: Part 2

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 04:16:04 GMT

The second half of my Comixology column on Guilstein, the cell phone manga is online.