Nothing new to report really on the political stuff. Seems this new PM is going to take a run at things but my guess is the PAD won’t back down. Who knows - maybe the whole PPP party will get disbanded in the meantime. Let’s hope it does not flare up too much since we need a breather to try and get tourism back on track. Enough of all that.
Lots of activity on the blog in case you have not noticed. We had a record day for pageviews yesterday.
Thanks folks. We appreciate the eyeballs a ton.
Quick recap:
BBK Trolling Starbucks - not for pastries.
On tap is WW, Quagmire and a newbie. YP working on a hair gel comparison chart between UK and Thailand.
I always dig when others write about the blog. Here is a site in Singapore linking to us complaining about how the Asians tip too much in the P4P scene. Generally I don’t think about it much but I must admit this is a little over the top:
Anyway, now I “fear” to continue my FR. Imagine I already stated tipping the waitress 500 Baht for informing the agogo dancer of my interest. My continuation may upset some bros here.
No offense dude. By the waitress a drink but 500 baht for just getting her to call the girl over? Silly.
Next subject a bit touchy and let me just clarify that I am completely against human trafficking, underage girls and so on. Just sick shit. So here is an article from the SF Gate somehow making a connection with Thailand, underage girls and so on. Once again my premise here is that I am not saying none of this goes on but what I do not get is where? Getting some quotes from people, talking about the police gift baskets and then declaring it is all hooked together is so silly. Police get these baskets for everything - I don’t know how many we have handed over through the years.
What I never understand is why they don’t work harder as reporters or NGOs to connect the dots. Where are the girls going? Who is managing them? Who is using them? Seems an article exposing some of that would go so much farther to help eradicate it than a puff piece about Johnny Walker gift baskets.
I am in the final throws of moving. The palace awaits me. The Grotto is prepared. I just need to move. I hate fucking moving but this move I am finding that it is providing a good sense of closure and new beginnings. I am dumping some old shit, I got my mountain bike going and I sold back a bunch of used books.
I boxed up a bunch of books on Sunday and headed to the Dasa Book Cafe. Surprisingly they bought most of my books and while I was perusing the aisles I found some books I wanted but much to my complete amazement I saw a book on the register that I have been looking for going on 4 years now.
A Woman of Bangkok. I was stunned. It is almost impossible to find this book. It was first published in the early 1950s with many reprints and different editions. This book is the Bangkok handbook from yesteryear. It describes an English dude who comes to live in Bkk but works all over the country. It describes the bar scene, the brothels and lifestyles of the time. I just can’t put it down.
The amazing thing is most of what is described is similar to today. The bargirl games, kiks, and the insight and experiences of foreigners and working girls. Honestly change the environment(rice paddies in bkk) and the dates and it would be relevant today. It shocks me how things are pretty much the same in many respects.
Anyone else read this book? Weird thing is I cannot find out anything about Jack Reynolds - the author.
There is this thread on Thai Visa but nothing that concrete. Some stuff on Thai Oasis. There is nothing on Wikipedia and nothing on the publisher anymore.
I will dig more and finish the book but was curious if anyone knows anything about this book?
Will leave u all with this from a loyal reader:
An American is having breakfast, in Paris, one morning (coffee, croissants, bread, butter and jam) when a Frenchman, chewing bubble-gum, sits down next to him. The American ignores the Frenchman who, nevertheless, starts a conversation.
Frenchman: ‘You American folk eat the whole bread??’
American (in a bad mood): ‘Of course.’
Frenchman: (after blowing a huge bubble) ‘We don’t. In France, we only eat what’s inside. The crusts we collect in a container, recycle it, transform them into croissants and sell them to the states.’ The Frenchman has a smirk on his face.
The American listens in silence.
The Frenchman persists: ‘Do you eat jelly with the bread??’
American: ‘Of Course.’
Frenchman: (cracking his bubble-gum between his teeth and chuckling).
‘We don’t. In France we eat fresh fruit for breakfast, then we put all the peels, seeds, and leftovers in containers, recycle them, transform them into jam, and sell the jam to the states.’
After a moment of silence, The American then asks: ‘Do you have sex in France?’
Frenchman: ‘Why of course we do’, he says with a big smirk.
American: ‘And what do you do with the condoms once you’ve used them?’
Frenchman: ‘We throw them away, of course.’
American: ‘We don’t. In America, we put them in a container, recycle them, melt them down into bubble-gum, and sell them to France.’
good stuff
View all comments by The Soi Lawyer
55555555555!
View all comments by BIG GEORDIE BILL
I have a copy of the book. Picked it up second hand a few years ago. I guess they have some rarity value now. How much did you pay for it?
I have also heard that Jack Reynolds may have been a pen name (as the thai visa thread suggests) as the writing is too good for a first time writer. No idea who however but it is someone who has spent a lot of time here during that era. I also assume its based on fact….
View all comments by MSB
msb - I paid 1000 baht for mine. It has a cover that was not put out much.
I assume a pen name as well but who is it? I was also curious how much of the bar facts are correct but it all seems pretty straight.
interested in selling yours? I have friends looking for another copy.
thanks!
View all comments by sideshowBOB
Worst breakfast in America
Bob Evans Stacked and Stuffed Caramel Banana Pecan Hotcakes
1,543 calories
77 g fat (26 g saturated; 9 g trans)
2,259 mg sodium
198 g carbs
109 g sugars
Saturated fat equivalent: 26 strips of bacon
Sugar equivalent: 12 chocolate chip cookies
Sodium equivalent: 12 small bags of potato chips
Now if you could “Mangoize” this, I might show up for breakfast.
View all comments by But Different
I have a copy I picked up about 12 years ago. As you said, things seem pretty similar to today.
I think it is called “A Woman of Bangkok”, not “in”.
Seems to be one for sale on e-bay: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Jack-Reynolds,-A-Woman-of-Bangkok,1974_W0QQitemZ280269302939QQcmdZViewItemQQimsxZ20080921?IMSfp=TL080921142001r20083
View all comments by Nok Opayop
Yeah, ‘A Woman of Bangkok’ was a pretty good book in it’s time, but look what this bastard did to us. He was the fellow who first gave birth to the whole Thai-hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold genre of fiction that in its full flower has been responsible for bringing us Christopher Moore and Dean Barrett. In my view, whoever Jack Reynolds really was, he has one hell of a lot to answer for……
View all comments by Old Asia Hand
I just saw the Four Mod peeping tom footage.
Just thought Id let yas know.
Its good but not great, I wont be chuck wulling to it.
View all comments by dek waan
oah - i think it actually portrays the hooker as pretty harsh and the dude as pretty gullible. i am enjoying just the overall tone and descriptions of the era.
no one knows who the dude was though?
dw - what is it exactly you are talking about?
View all comments by sideshowBOB
@@@@sideshowBOB
Sep 23rd, 2008 at 2:40 pm
oah - i think it actually portrays the hooker as pretty harsh and the dude as pretty gullible. i am enjoying just the overall tone and descriptions of the era.
**********************
Hey, you’re right. That’s Steve Leather’s ‘Private Dancer,’ isn’t it? Something even more embarrassing for this clown to take responsibility for. Bastard.
View all comments by Old Asia Hand
OAH - can’t entirely side with your logic
this was written in the 50s and I think the writing is pretty good. Whatever came later is not really this guy’s fault but the fault of modern writers for not doing something new?
View all comments by sideshowBOB
bob - make me an offer.
View all comments by MSB
ssB - dek Wan is referring to story about some Thai girlie group that got filmed getting all soapy in their hotel room:
RS not cooperating over girlie duo video: police
September 22, 2008
The head of Royal Thai Police’s Children Juveniles and Women Division yesterday complained that RS has not yet fully cooperated with an investigation into a short video of girlie duo Four-Mod in a toilet.
Both “Four”, Sakonrat Woraurai, and “Mod”, Kunachaya Chairat, broke down in tears when they found out about the video.
“The music company has given information on the phone only. This is not enough to seek an arrest warrant,” the division’s head Maj General Wisut Wanichbut said.
According to him, there are three suspects involved in recording the singers in the toilet while the girls were staying at a hotel in Khon Kaen.
“These suspects are close to the hotel owner,” Wisut said.
He said the video clip later slipped into the hands of a woman, who posted it on the Internet.
“Then, manufacturers of pornography have used the clip to make money,” Wisut said.
He said laws allow police to prosecute those who posted the clip on the Internet or sold it even without any official complaint from the singer.
“But we believe the ones who recorded the singers should be arrested too. So, we need cooperation from RS,” Wisut said.
He said the victims must officially complain against those who broke into their privacy before police could bring them to justice.
nationmultimedia.com
View all comments by Pattaya Ghost
ha just looked for the book and someone i know came up on the search. I still think one good book on the kingdom is the book that shall not be named but it does not smile either
View all comments by GoodLife
ssB… i did a little search and seems others have been trying to find this book then i came across a website that says Jack Reynolds also went by Jack Jones here are the comments
“A Sort of Beauty, dated 1956, published in the UK and credited to Jack Jones”
Looks like it was later released under the name of Jack Reynolds and title of “A Woman of Bangkok”
the link to that blog: http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Jack-Reynolds-woman-Bangkok-t6609.html
Now like the friggn tequila i cant find i have two missions before i get back to the Big Mango.
View all comments by GoodLife
dek waan - whats the link?
goodwife - yeah the first round of it was published as a sort of beauty by Jack Jones. Also a pen name.
I have never seen copies of that one or first editions of a woman of bangkok.
its a fun read!
View all comments by sideshowBOB
Just Purchased “a sort of beauty” copy it will arrive in a few weeks $30 US. According to another site the author is deceased.
Masestro Dobel Tequila - Spoke to Rep it is not available for retail only sold by the glass in some LA restaurants and clubs.. will get a taste.
View all comments by GoodLife
gl - bring it over. sounds cool!
bummer on the tequila!
View all comments by sideshowBOB
The book you are all talking about has two titles: “A Sort of Beauty” (UK print) and “A Woman of Bangkok” (US Print). Available on ABE Books. It was banned in Australia, initially.
The author was Jack Reynolds, born in England in 1913. I believe ‘Jack Jones’ was a psuedonym the US publisher insisted on. Never the less, it was well-received and got a good review in The New York Times. I do not know when he (presumably) died.
Reynolds spent WWII in China as an ambulance driver with the Quaker Friend’s Ambulance Unit, where the travel writer Bernard Llwelynn, who died in June this year, was a colleague of his, and mentioned meeting him in Bankok in the mid-1950s in his book, “With my back to the East” (1958). Reynold moved to Bangkok in 1951, married a Thai country girl, and had several children, who would be in their late 50s by now, if still living. Reyonolds was supposed to have written several other novels of this sort, but I have never seen them.
Hope this is of interest.
View all comments by Megapoint
Megapoint, thank you very much! I have no idea how you found this out, my Googling drew a blank, but I’m very grateful for the information. I’m also looking forward to reading the book, which the Ugly Backwards Hillbilly Mangobrother is going to lend me. Or I punch him in the throat with an oven mitt full of hot coals.
View all comments by Pants Elk
Glad to be of help from here in distant Hong Kong.
The New York Times review said of “A Sort of Beauty”, “It is the stuff of comedy…This is Mr. Reynolds’ first novel, and he is something of a discovery…he is at his best when displaying powers of farce and high comedy. At times the lying, grasping, impeninent and wholy immoral Vilai becomes twenty times larger than life. She is the real thing — a comic character on which the author has blown the winds of life.”
The condescending note is very 1950s, but at least they liked the book! Bernard Llewellyn (1919-2008) had this to say about his 1957 visit to Reynolds and his family in Bangkok (sorry I don’t have time to type out the whole thing, this comes from “With my back to the East”, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1958): “As we drove about, Jack was always saying how this street and that had chanmged since he last came along it; while the Chinese hotel where he stayed when he first came to Bangkok [in 1951] seven years ago now lies in a quarter where practically none of the old landmarks remain… Formerly the city was criss-crossed by canals or kluangs which were excellent for breeding mosquitoes…But heavy traffic has led to much road-widening, and more and more of these kluangs have been filled in or covered over to give the fleets of gleaming American cars more room…Jack’s house was tucked away in a cul-de-sac in Bang Kapi on the northern side of the city. His wife, Pen, was a village girl; she had borne him two lusty boys and was carrying her third child. She spoke no English; so I had to speak to her through Jack who translated into Thai. Philip, the younger son, said little. For most of the day he would like in his hammock strung across the living room. His brother, David, small, bright-eyed, mischevious, was just about the most entrancing small boy I had ever seen…He had been in China and seen the changes the Communists made [after 1949]. Then he moved on to Hong Kong and, after a breif interlude there, had taken a UN job in Bangkok. Last Fall [1956] his first novel [A Sort of Beauty/A Woman of Bangkok] had been published in England and the United States and banned in Australia; he was now sweating away at his second and third… Over the garage he [Jack] had made himself a work-room. The desk and floor were littered with paper and typescripts and manuscript books curled upa t the edges. When the wooden shutters were opened the sunlight streamed in, and the more beer you drank the more your forearms sweated into the paper. I didn’t know how he got anything done at all!”
Cheers,
Mega
View all comments by Megapoint
Two more things I have found out: the only other book I can confidently ascribe to Jack Reynolds is “Daughters of an Ancient Race”, a group of short stories about Chinese women. Seems to be a semi-fictional account of his WWII years in China, published I think in the mid-1960s. So he probably never finished either of those two novels Llewellyn referred to.
The other thing is, that “A sort of beauty” was successful enough for there to be a German translation, “Versuchung in Bangkok” [Temptation in Bangkok], published by Rowohlt in 1959.
View all comments by Megapoint
Beautiful stuff, Mr Point. When Goober Pyle wakes up I’m sure he’ll add his thanks.
View all comments by Pants Elk
mega - awesome stuff. just finished the book. was quite entertaining.
PE - I was holding for u but after those last comments…
View all comments by sideshowBOB
My copy arrived, the title is “a sort of Beauty” but by Jack Reynolds not Johnson. there is a picture of the guy in the back, i will take some pictures and send it to ssB.
have a bottle of much to young 05 Caymus opened @ 4PM ready to read… cheers!
goodwife
View all comments by GoodLife
Johnson? Never saw this name in connection with this book. Anyway, enjoy it. It would be interesting to know if any of his children are still in Bangkok, or even his wife, whom I am going to hazard the guess was born about 1930, or slightly later. From what I have I learned about Reynolds (he is not very good at disguising his own experiences in the book’s narrative) I will further hazard that she was from Korat.
Megapoint
View all comments by Megapoint
mp - not sure as well but one can tell he is writing about what he did. not what he has heard about.
View all comments by sideshowBOB
oops sorry I ment Jones…
View all comments by GoodLife
Picked up a copy of Jack Reynolds - Woman of Bangkok on Ebay. It is a first edition hardback, with the original title of A sort of beauty. Cost me 30baht, plus 180 baht for postage. Keep ya eyes peeled, it is a good book.
View all comments by Auk
This is from the Time magazine:
This is a Bangkok that only a farang, or foreigner, could love, and it felt oddly familiar even 50 years ago, when Jack Reynolds gave us his nakedly titled Woman of Bangkok. What we need now is a Thailand not for export only and not confined to the shadows of Bangkok. Women occasionally escape the Suzy Wong headed treatment (which is why Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind, a straightforward diplomat wife’s account of Bangkok in the ’60s, still sells), as do those who step out of the city (as in Tim Ward’s What the Buddha Never Taught). For the rest, though, it remains a curious�but telling�irony that the one country in Asia that boasts of never having been conquered is colonized in the imagination night after night after night.
Has anyone read the book “Mai pen rai means never mind, or what the Buddha never taught”?
View all comments by Auk
It’s easy for that writer at Time to apply a contemporary yardstick, and to criticize novels like ‘A Sort of Beauty’ and ‘The World of Suzy Wong’ today. But in their time, they were revolutionary, not least in that they didn’t follow the social code which required one or both ‘trangressors’ to die or otherwise end up horribly. Richard Mason’s first two novels on the interracial love theme (the ones he wrote before ‘Suzy Wong’) do in fact follow that code, which is why ‘Suzy Wong’ was such a hot topic…
It’s interesting to see the parallels between Reynold’s novel and Mason’s, published a year later, though. Both involve the same sort of woman, though Suzy is far more sympathetic and rounded. Both involve a young son who dies tragically at mid-novel (and Mason sets this up far better than does Reynolds.) Having said that, which is to say that Mason was already a pro, and Reynolds was an enthusiastic beginner, the greatest weakness of ‘A Sort of Beauty’ is that Reynolds can’t decide what type of novel he wants to write: it starts out as a Bildungsroman, then becomes an epistolary tale for one chapter, then a kind of stream-of-conciousness piece, before going back to the ups and downs of Reggie. ‘A Sort of Beauty’, however, is far more explicit in its language than anything I’ve read from this decade, it must have taken the publishers a good deal of courage to print it.
View all comments by Megapoint
Have just received in the mail my copy of Jack Reynold’s “Daughters of an Ancient Race” (Heineman Educational Books, Asia, 1974.) Some interesting information: the blurb on the back reads: A fascinating collection of nine short stories with a mainland China settting, based on the author’s experiences with The Friend’s Ambulance Unit in China during 1945-51. The locale of these stories is a small village on the south bank of the Yangtse River, opposite Chungking [Chongqing], where the author was running a simple medical clinic. The stories portray in a racy fashion an unusual peasant woman, several of the Friend’s Ambulance Unit employee’s wives, the local midwife, and two girl members of the Chinese Communist Party….”
Inside, the bio blurb gives an update on Reynolds as of 1974: “Jack Reynolds lives in Bangkok with his Thai wife and seven [!!] children. He has had a swashbuckloing life. He is perhaps best known as a novelist (Woman of Bangkok), but he has been a trawlerhand in the North Sea, a motocycle speedway ace on the British circuits, and a U.N. Transport Officer in Thailand, Jordan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Nigeria. He was seven years in China as West China Director and Transport Manager for The Friend’s Ambulance Unit, where he supervised the distribution of medical supplies by truck, ran hospitals, fought diseases and regularly delivered babies.”
Quite a life! Now that we know there were 7 children, surely some must still be in Bangkok.
View all comments by Megapoint
mp - great info.
his character in WOB is an ex racer.
so I think a lot of it is modeled after his life in many ways.
where did u pick up that book?
View all comments by sideshowBOB
Authors write their own biographical blurb, so he’ll naturally put a spin on it - who wouldn’t? - but this is great stuff. Looking forward to borrowing up Goober Pyle’s copy soon!
View all comments by Pants Elk
pe - I was just noting how the stuff he lists is similar to his main character in the book
bbb wants a stab at it. should we?
View all comments by sideshowBOB
I ordered the book via ABEBooks.com., a great resource. It came from a bookshop in Australia. I am sure that almost all Reynolds’ writing is thinly disguised autobiography. In “With my Back to the East”, his friend Bernard Llewellyn even mentions driving in 1957 with him and his young son to Korat, and having dinner in the ’same’ restaurant as Reggie and his friends eat in Chapter 3 of ‘A Woman of Bangkok’.
View all comments by Megapoint