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Books El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

Drying out after the deluge

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Saturday, October 6

This beauty emerged after the rain finally relented.

After five days of pretty much nonstop rain, the skies cleared last night in a spectacular way. There have only been one or two nights since I arrived here (almost 8 weeks ago now) that we’ve had clear skies in the evening.

As if to make a great situation better, the power went out, creating blackout conditions. I walked out into the parking lot to star gaze. There are few things more humbling that standing beneath the stars in pitch-black conditions. That almost made all the rain we endured worthwhile.

The lucky streak continued this morning with brilliant sunrise filled with bird songs and the distant sound of surf. I was struck with inspiration and awoke at about 4 a.m. and started writing. I do that pretty frequently. The sun rises here every day around 5:30 and I love to sit there and listen to the jungle wake up while the light starts to filter in through the Treehouse. After all that rain, it was wonderful to walk out into a sunny morning after I was done writing. I guess the bad news is the inspiration created more complication in The Book. I was running parallel story lines. Now I have three, including a retelling of the Joe Magarac tall tale. It’s coming together in increasing strange yet interwoven ways.

I read Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The River” the other day for the first time in years. What an astounding story driven by her typical themes of the Southern grotesque and redemption. Her ability to craft rich, complex characters is second to none I have an anthology of all her short stories and I almost kept reading, but her work is so dense I decided to move on to something else. So I picked up Conrad’s Lord Jim, which I made a run at once and ran out of steam. I’m faring much better this time but still believe he should have made it a novella, ending with the trial Jim is subjected to. I haven’t finished yet, but the tale of Jim’s years in limbo after the Patna incident feels anticlimactic thus far. I love the way Conrad works the pace of the story, sometimes entering the “ripping yarn” territory and other times slowing down to dive deep into the characters’ inner impressions and motivations. That quality always floored me when reading Heart of Darkness. If you just pull it apart and put it in an outline, it’s an action-packed adventure tale. But he intentionally retards the pace, forcing the reader to turn inward and focus on the motivations and subtexts behind the action more than the action itself.

Gian swung by on Thursday and took me out to a resort south of here where I booked a room for when Lara comes to visit in early November. She’ll be here for about 5 days and then we’ll return to the States together on Nov. 7. Initially, we were going to go the discount route, but it will have been almost three months since we’ve seen each other so I figured, what they hell. Let’s go 4-star. Cristal Ballena definitely is that. It has a wonderful view of the ocean. While I was checking out the room options it was raining, obscuring the ocean in a thick, misty haze that was every bit as stunning as a clear Pacific view. Vultures circled lazily and a pair of macaws squawked there way through the rain toward the ocean, disappearing into the murk.

I’ve decided to name my favorite agouti — he is now Fela Agouti after the late, great African music legend Fela Kuti. He joins Chuckles the Gecko as my constant companions here.

This week, I head back to the states for a business meeting, but I’m not swinging through Ohio. I return here late Friday night, but I have to admit, I’m greatly looking forward to being able to walk into a store and asking for something in English and being understood. I’m just hoping I can navigate the airports without a setback for my ankle, which continues to improve in its glacial way.

 

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Books El Gringo Feo Music Bob Travel Bob

How to be a monkey

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Thursday, October 4

I wonder where the howlers go after they’ve spent a few days raising hell outside my window. Their calls grow progressively more distant over subsequent days until they disappear into the jungle. Then the cycle repeats.

A new website, How To Be a Monkey, attempts to answer that question. The site offers an inside look at what monkeys in the wild are up to. I’ve poked around in there and love it, even though my limited bandwidth here makes it slow at times. They’re tracking a group of capuchins here in Costa Rica at the Lomas Barbudal Biological Reserve, about 145 miles north of Uvita, near the boarder with Nicaragua. The star is Winslow Homer, a baby monkey that researchers tracked all day on Jan. 24, 2014. They then posted the results in a way that’s both educational and entertaining.

In a story about the project, I was particularly struck by the comments of Susan Perry, an anthropology professor at UCLA, who notes the negative and positive impacts of technology on science education:

This is getting to be true even in Costa Rica, where kids … have some of the most endangered and interesting habitats in the world in their backyard. But they never go in their backyard because they’re looking at the TV or their laptop or their phone … Part of my job as an educator is to try to lure people in to nature. And also get them to understand that even if they don’t want to be bothered to walk outside … that they should at least be able to appreciate what’s out there enough to be the kind of citizen that promotes the conservation of those areas.

I haven’t had access to TV now for two months and I don’t miss it at all. And while I twitch uncontrollably at times because I don’t have the Internet bandwidth I’m accustomed to at home, even that has proven a gift. It’s amazing what you see when you go outside, get quiet and watch.

For the past few days, we’ve had drenching, nightlong rain. No thunder and lightning. Just rain. It abates midmorning before continuing again later in the afternoon, and during that pause, the jungle jumps to life.

A coatimundi. Photo by Clark Anderson, via Wikipedia and creative commons license

The other day I heard an aggressive snorting followed by the squeal of an agouti, who shot past me with his hair standing on end. I jumped up to take a look at what had rattled him and saw a coatimundi — a cousin of the raccoon— stomping around where the rabbit-like agouti normally forages for papaya scraps. Moral of this story: Don’t mess with a coatimundi.

I’ve also been fascinated by the blue flies who harass me as I write. I’ve never seen anything quite like them and haven’t made a specific ID yet, but they’re impossible to kill. They fly up and hover, drone-like, in front of me, but the second I move to swat them they zip off. I’ve yet to hit one despite numerous attempts and strategies. (It’s important to note here that I am not an amateur killer of flies; I’m able to snatch run-of-the-mill U.S. flies with my hand and hurl them to their deaths). It’s almost as if the singularity has occurred, but instead of humans merging with machines, these strange flies have beaten us to it.

I haven’t heard much from the howlers the past few days. I think when it rains like this they pretty much hunker down and ride it out.

Odds and sods

  • I finished Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Loved it. I’ve finally found one of the Russian masters I can relate to, though I intend to start revisiting the others now.
  • I read Henry James’ The Aspern Papers, which was mentioned several times in the fiction writing lectures I’m listening to. The way James crafts his characters is amazing, and the use of an unreliable narrator is subtle and very effective. The ending also fits John Gardner’s criteria for Resolution, where no other action can logically take place. One of the most difficult things in fiction, I think, is the ending. I’ve read so many great books that ran out of steam at the end or seemed contrived. Since I don’t know yet how The Book will end, that’s an ongoing concern I have.
  • Next up, Flannery O’Connor’s short story The River. This is driven because I’ve been listening nonstop to Ray Wylie Hubbard’s 1999 masterpiece Crusades of the Restless Knights. There’s not a bad song on it, and most of them are outstanding. Patty Giffin’s backing vocals are superb, especially on the song “The River Runs Red,” which apparently is based on the O’Connor short story. My obsessions sometimes become microscopic in this way. I just let them run their course. There’s also a wonderful bluegrass waltz on there, “After the Harvest,” that I can’t get out of my head. I think I’m going to quote part of it in The Book. Here are the lyrics (as transcribed by me, so they might be a tad off):

After the Harvest
Always before us
there have been true believers
rising up from
the rank and file drunks
now for a short time
we gather small treasures
and after the harvest
there’s sweet kingdom come

Once we had wings
and could fly over mountains
and in the blue yonder
we had a home
there was a time
we could all walk on water
if we saw a reflection
then we’d sink like a stone

There are these bridges
from the past to the present
there are these bridges
from now until dawn
there are these rivers
that flow on forever
we are like rivers
on our way home

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El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

A geek screed from the jungle

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Monday, Oct. 1

Breakfast of champions: Papaya, pineapple, banana, mamon chino, Costa Rican coffee and locally baked ciabatta. The jam is pretty damned good, too.

At least once a week, I consider blowing up my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Google profiles and giving up on the social web. The data breaches alone are horrifying, and the intrusiveness of advertising increases daily. Heavy handed advertising ruined TV sports for me, making games tedious waits during commercial breaks for another tidbit of action. I gladly pay each month for an ad-free Netflix. And advertisers’ voracious taste for data is leading the Web down the same path. I use an ad blocker on my Chrome browser, which helps, but it doesn’t stop that constant, invasive data harvesting that occurs in the background. Not to mention the outright data breaches.

I have completely minimized my use of Yahoo! over the breaches they suffered and their criminal delay in acknowledging or acting on them. Someone should be doing time for what happened there. I keep that email address on life support with an auto-response warning senders I don’t monitor the account closely. Why don’t I just kill it outright? Because some key products/platforms use my Yahoo address and no sane, elegant way to change to a new address. I’m looking at you, Apple …

That’s why I’m cautiously enthused to read that Tim Berners-Lee, the “inventor of the World Wide Web,” is taking a sabbatical from MIT to work on a platform called Solid that will attempt to decentralize the Web, focusing more on peer-to-peer interactions and hopefully disintermediating middlemen like Facebook and Google. Pivotal to Solid’s thinking is the idea that your data will be stored by you, and you will decide with whom and under what circumstances that data will be shared.

Berners-Lee’s blog post makes some grandiose claims for what Solid will deliver. If someone pitched it to me via PowerPoint in a boardroom, I’d probably walk out shaking my head, thinking them quixotic, at best. But this is a windmill that’s worth tilting at, so it’s worth keeping an eye on.

My main fear is that they’ll build an Egghead Ghetto, a cave where only geeks and data junkies gather to hide from the commercial web. Getting regular users and attaining scale would be critical to the success of Solid. Developers and normal people would have to embrace it. That’s why I haven’t blown up my social media accounts. Like that Yahoo account, there is still some residual value there, some ability to connect with people I wouldn’t otherwise be able to, or with whom it would be much more difficult to interact.

Godspeed, Solid. I’m rooting for you.


Odds and sods

  • Today marks 3 weeks since I mangled my ankle. Progress continues, slow but steady. The meds are really helping, the swelling is down some and there’s a bit less wobble to my hobble.
  • I’ve started reading Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. I picked it up after Karl Ove Knausgaard discussed it at length in his book, Spring. My attempts to read the great Russians generally peter out before I get to the end. I greatly admire them, but they’re so heavy with religious themes and moral hand-wringing (not to mention the length) that it wears me down. Not so Turgenev. He’s more of a naturalist or realist and seems interested here in the idea of love, the relationship between generations, and how we behave in the face of societal change. His Bazarov character, a “nilhilist,” seems to herald some of the stupidity that would emerge decades later from the Russian Revolution.
  • Wildlife update. A blue morpho butterfly flittered past as I was writing this section, and last night, for the first time here at PurUvita, I saw a pair of macaws. They were distant — across the road, high in the trees overlooking the beach — but I heard their unmistakable squawks and after scanning the area for a few minutes spotted them right before they took flight, heading north up the coast. I wasn’t close enough to ID the specific type of macaw, but their profile in flight was unmistakable. They were raising majestic hell the entire way.
  • My next task this morning is a rewrite of a chunk of the The Book in third person. I’ve been worried that I’m outrunning my supply lines writing it from multiple first-person vantage points, and the fiction writing course I’ve been working through discussed the relative merits of each approach during the lectures I listened to last night. This seems a good time to do a gut check to make sure I’m not painting myself into a corner. I am smitten with that multiple first-person approach, though, especially after having read Tommy Orange’s magnificent There, There recently. But I’m not Tommy Orange … and maybe a more conservative approach would make sense here. We’ll see.