Groggy and confused, Vince had but half an hour before awoken on a musty mattress partly covered with a sweat-sodden bed-sheet. Vince was unsure what had jolted him: The forty or so Thai construction workers in the half-built building behind, the balaclavaed hole-digger from the road gang out front, or the yelling guest-house staff in his chosen accommodation. Whatever it was, Vince quickly realized that he was back in the third world, leaned over the edge of the sticky mattress, and flipped on the overhead fan.

Vince still likes to use that dated, pejorative term 'third world', conjuring up as it does images of peril beyond the bounds of civilization, far from the word he comes from. The heart of darkness. It adds excitement and adventure; "I'm heading off into the third world; I might be gone a long time". What's a 'developing country' anyway? (to use the more politically-correct term) -- Vince has never been anywhere that is not developing in one way or another.

Standing out there in the baking heat of a Bangkok spring, peering in to that hole in the road, Vince meditated on a theory of his. He likes the way they divide us up, those World Bank economists and IMF bureaucrats, according to our gross domestic products or per capita incomes, but Vince has a much better scale: noise. It always holds true: the noisier the country the poorer it is. Vince always knows how far up the economic ladder a country has crawled by using his ears, and he is far more accurate than the boys from the World Bank. Thailand, he surmised from this morning's research, was dirt poor.

Vince took his sore head out of the direct sunlight, helping himself to the cover of a noodle stand, and flipped open his notebook. 'Bizarre Noises from the Third World', he wrote at the top of a clean page. All kinds of noises flourish in the third world, emanating from both man and his machines, running amok over the social fabric. Vince wrote 'fighting whores' next to a pencilled '1' on the page and remembered some wild times in Manila. Then came the Chinese monks performing a paid-for wailing service outside of a dead neighbour's apartment, in traditional funeral rites complete with microphones and speakers, gongs, bells, cymbals, and drums. The list swelled to include floating karaoke bars booming music through the night, medieval dog catchers and their quarry, amphetamine charged teenage gangs racing scooters through the still night streets, and so on. The night before he beheld the wonders of Ankor Wat, Vince tried to sleep through the cracks of a neighbour's axe as he chopped his way through a shoulder-high pile of coconuts -- the night shift.

With the same zest that rich-country people try to avoid noise, residents of the third world gleefully go about producing it -- and there is no escaping or insulating yourself from it. Get used to it or leave.

Vince has been to Hollywood and Geneva, where even the harmless buzz of a lawn-mower is legislated against, and it seemed to him that he had been shoved through the gates of a cemetery -- the suburbs were resounding with the silence of death. Not for him, he thought.

A decade ago Vince lived in Hong Kong, a developed economy by any economist's measure, even if the way of life can get measly and horrible, where the winners are stifled by their own success and live in a kind of poverty of opulence. Anyway, he quickly sickened on the cash-first approach to life -- where people work a lifetime just to buy a caged apartment, little more than a box in the sky with bars on the windows -- and fled to the Philippines. Ignoring airport busses and taxis, he walked out of the airport, slung his bag over his shoulder, and hiked into the city, making a mental note of impressions of the third world as he went: flip-flops -- nobody wears shoes in the slums of the third world; families living on the street; Coca-Cola, and so on. The point of this diversion is that noise was on that list, somewhere near the top.

The noodles were delicious, by the way, and feeling invigorated Vince skipped off to a nearby chemist's to look for a few pairs of ear plugs, relishing the thought of the rowdy adventure ahead of him.

(c) Paul S. Davey, November 2001, Thailand

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'The voice of his generation,' trumpeted the blurb on the back cover of a dog-eared Hunter. S. Thompson collection of letters. This sentence and its accompanying sententious diatribe spun Vince's mind -- he had to sit on the beach for a while and collect his thoughts. The beach was in Thailand, on a small tropical island known as Koh Chiang (Elephant Island). As he sat there on the white-sand beach, looking out over a clear, blue lagoon, Vince tried to think about what he was doing with his life and put things in perspective.

Why the melodrama? Uncertainty, the sudden feeling that 'shit I'm wasting my life'. Everyone gets it, even people who are filling thoroughly useful roles. Vince knows an old man in China who stands outside of a park every day ladling out bowls of delicious, noodle-soup. And although he is providing a basic service by feeding people, and giving his customers immense pleasure, he regrets having wasted half his life doing it. Vince thought that he too was wasting his life by trying to write (luckily he hasn't wasted as much time on it as that old noodle seller).

What is really the point of all those words out there? Why do people go on with it? Mr. Thompson, or so the stained paperback cover would have us believe, tries to understand American culture (or its decline) by writing journalistic stories about it -- observing what's out there and then writing subjectively about it. We, the readers, get a picture of the rise and fall of America through the eyes of a witty commentator, complete with his own prescriptions and proscriptions. It's all there, critiqued in an amusing, crazy way by a sharp mind (often stupefied, however, by drugs and alcohol): the power structure, the government, the winners and losers, the in-crowd and the out-crowd, the ugliness and the beauty.

There was a hint of envy mixed in with Vince's emotion, 'Why am I not doing that?' he thought.

Publishers and reviewers (the writing business) are wizards at concocting illusions for us; they are alchemists turning scrap iron into gold, magically transforming the mundane into the sublime, muck into masterpieces. The writers sound almost biblical at times, prophetic and omniscient.

Looking back, Vince realized that he had been a victim of such hyperbole many times, buying books because some idiotic reviewer got carried away with his own pomposity. 'a life-changing masterpiece', 'thoroughly brilliant', 'the work of a genius', they scream at you, and you stupidly read the book expecting some kind of enlightenment. But the books never deliver what they promise. And you've wasted time and money again.

Literature seems to be intelligent people describing the hell that we live in. Popular fiction seems to be not-so-intelligent people helping us to forget the hell we live in by entertaining us. Both are nothing more than forms of escapism. Writers are never going to offer us solutions to the problems of life; they are never actually going to make our lives better. They describe, explain, titillate, and stimulate us for a brief moment before we have to get back to and face (alone) the misery that is our own lives.

Vince, sitting there under a palm tree, was not attacking writers, just the weighty value that some attach to them. They do a good job of observing and recording (often with sublime eloquence) the human condition and the havoc wrought by it. Some even plumb the depths of human consciousness itself. But do they take us to a higher plane, do they make the world a better place? Hardly.

Getting back to Hunter S. Thompson. Vince wondered if Hunter had ever realized a simple truth in life that the world out there is simply a reflection of what's in you: you are the world and the world is you. Mr. Thompson can happily spend his life depicting with zest and eloquence the society around him, but if he never realizes that the society is him and he is that society, then his work will remain as simple entertainment and he will continue to suffer along with what he is describing.

Vince is not as deluded; he knows that it is a slow and mostly futile process to prod and push society as a whole in the way that you think it ought to go (as writers and politicians do). It's much more intelligent to sit on a beautiful, deserted beach on an island near the Thai-Cambodia border (far from Hunter S. Thompson's world of fear and loathing) and try to understand and know yourself. Don't try to become the last hope for humanity; just relax.

(c) Paul S. Davey. November 2001, Thailand.

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Vince likes to write a bit, as you might have noticed, and he was living in Taipei at the time, so when he heard of the Taipei Writers Group, naturally, he was full of glee, but not at once, of course. The first mention of the group made him gasp a bit in disbelief, and on learning that some of the members had even been published he became incredulous. Writers! In Taipei! Virgill told him. Now, Virgill is something of an enigma himself: He can barely speak coherently in grammatical sentences, yet he calls himself a writer. He IS a writer god-damn-it: Vince has seen the evidence. Anyway, Vince and Virgill were chatting about adventure stories, the kind that are set in faraway places with very big mountains (Into Thin Air, The Eiger Sanction, Seven Years in Tibet etc) when Virgill suddenly admitted that he was a member of the group! Vince's incredulity was already at its peak, so when Virgill let out the next startling fact, Vince could only try to hide his horror: The leading light of this exotic literary guild was a German!

Holger.

Holger is a German living in Taiwan (and presumably using Chinese and German in his daily life) and writing in English. He writes about sea voyages; that's how the subject came up: Vince and Virgill were talking about adventures in the mountains, and....

Vince rushed home to check them out -- they have their own website. And it was all true: the group really exists, some of the members have been published, and Holger is in charge. Holger had a piece of his writing there, on the website, about a trip he had made with his wife across the Pacific. It wasn't too bad -- the boat sounded seaworthy, but the prose didn't always float.

The next time Vince met Virgill, they talked about literature of the sea -- Conrad, London ... and Holger. Virgill likes the group, and is chummy with Holger so Vince held back his vitriol. But all that talk of the ocean inspired Vince. He ruminated on thoughts of Conrad's Marlow going up the Congo on a steamboat, looking for Kurtz; London's Wolf Larson sailing his sealing boat around the Pacific; Ishmael; and Captain Blye. Wouldn't it be great, he thought, to sell your house and give up everything, buy a yacht, and sail around the world and write about your adventures. Wouldn't it be great to have a house to sell? Or something worth giving up?

Later in the day, still dreaming of adventure, Vince read a piece by the editor of Yoga Today -- that's not a joke, it's a real job. She went, not surprisingly, to India, in search of the meaning of life. Not finding it, of course, she returned to her typewriter to provide us with a very full account of her adventure. Better that Holger, but not much.

"Fuck journalism," Virgill said a few days later. "Get real. You can't make money writing articles. People are selling that shit for nothing. How can you compete. I'm taking up fiction. It pays"

True to his word, Virgill was thumbing through an ancient Eric Ambler paperback to see how the father of the spy story did it. He had bought a box of them on a recent return to America.

"What is a novel?" Vince asked him.

"Eighty or a hundred thousand words; a five thousand dollar advance; and limitless royalties until you die."

Vince had meant the novel in a literary sense, but it was a good answer, especially if you are still carrying your student-loan debts towards a fast-approaching middle age.

Virgill was obsessed with espionage; his first book (and unfortunately so far his only book) was an A-to-Z of spies ('they use it at The Pentagon'). He loves spies, soldiers, mata haris, provocateurs, and agents. He researches their histories, their accoutrements, and their skills. He even likes to think that the CIA will soon recruit him as 'our man in Taipei'. Deluded? Maybe; but Vince, a confirmed pacifist, loves the stimulation of it all; he calls Virgill 'The Spy Guy From Kentucky' -- military chalk to his pacifist cheese.

Anyway, why had The Spy Guy given up on journalism? We have to go back a few years to Virgill's youth in The States, following his graduation from journalism school, where, as an enthusiastic young hack, Virgil let a freelance story about a group of crazy rednecks become an obsession. They formed some kind of a cult and he'd ended up following them for two years, sinking himself further in debt, and having his life threatened -- all for a lousy couple of hundred bucks. Nobody was interested in his expose so the book stayed on his floppy disk. He finally managed to sell a thousand-word article to some obscure magazine that nobody read.

"Fuck that; obsessions don't make you rich," he concluded.

But Virgill was good at obsessions. Vince was soon all ears to Virgill's previous obsession with Judaism. The facts were not as forthcoming on this chapter in Virgill's life (who could be proud of converting to Judaism?), but it seemed as if he had spent a few years studying to be initiated as a Jew!

"I was obsessed," was the only explanation Vince was able to get out of him. There was mention of a girl, there always is, but only in passing.

Today Virgill went over the Three-Rule with Vince.

"The Three-Rule works this way," Virgill began. "Always be working on three pieces at any one time. One article, one feature (or book review), and one book; that's the best. Must be three."

Vince supposed it could be two of one and one of another, or even three of one and none of the other (three books!), but Virgill wasn't too clear. Three was the point.

"An article takes three days," Virgill went on to say, "a feature three weeks, and a book three months."

Or was that three years for a book? Anyway there were lots of threes in there, hence the Three-Rule.

Vince added a few threes of his own. Try to write three pages a day (but don't scrimp on small pages). Read three classics a month (for edification), but see what the people are reading by buying as many second-hand books as three dollars will buy. Take a break at 3:00 p.m. and be in bed by three in the morning.

Unfortunately Virgill disappeared as soon as the war broke out in Afghanistan.

(c) Paul S. Davey, March 2002, Taipei

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