| Adam Aitken |
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| Written by Adam Aitken | |
| Saturday, 19 July 2008 | |
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Francais We talked about brochures for the elite catering school – the number of permissible fonts, what the Cambodians like what Westerners don't. The curious blurred line in a master-slave relationship, the curious intersections of semiotics and tribal nepotisme, how to be a player, her player perhaps, faire savoir versus savoir faire, my out-of-date guide book had no advice... Theories of the post- colonial, politics, blogs, pro-this, anti-that... all too abstract now once I'd seen the afterlife glow of the exhaust pipe blister on her perfect calf and watched entranced her expert application of Elizabeth Arden, the arabesques of her eyebrows. Only two weeks in the country, the way she accelerated le moto and disappeared down the track and from behind looked just like a local, heading for a creperie on Sivatha Boulevard. Maybe, in six months, she might eat anything, even spiders, go crazy like Gauguin, learn to paint in the dark. She'll do fine, I thought, living on her wits. Just fine. (AA April 20 2008) Louis De Carne's Diary Stunned by the noise of the waters we reached Khemarat where M. Delaporte awaited us. Nothing could express the horror of the petty mandarins, the imbecile governor, and the yellow waters twisting through a narrow pass, a child of seven smoking a cheroot, or the site of a prisoner impaled by the tusks of an elephant. The light a deadly shade, the forest a blacker hue of green, the boat shaped serpent-like, whirlpools we could not see. The river all tributary – no one knew or cared for the source or predominant direction of its flow, a river unfit for commercial intercourse. Man had fled its banks, an abyss on both sides. I was hot, too hot after my ramble through an expanse of fetid mud. I wondered what economic utility Parisians might find in a lake full of fish (how to get them to Paris?) But I could write all night in my tent cobwebbed in ennui and sucking on the leg bone of an iguana, or recline under the implacable serenity of the heavens, the all powerful constraints of influences so fatal to human personality, that thought dies away by degrees like a flame in a vacuum. At least I knew there were guards (of vagabond stock, with the timid air of the aborigine) whom I barely trusted posted around the perimeter. (AA March 08) Poem: A Map of Cambodia |
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