Ozzy and I talked up to Meridian Hill Park yesterday, where we found Joan of Arc looking down on the District from the top of the hill. Wikipedia alleges this is the only statue of a woman on horseback in D.C. Meridian Hill Park also has a great Dante statue and a tribute to James Buchanan.
When Isabel Allende asked how many Latinos were in the audience last night during her interview/book signing at the Washington Post, more than half the audience answered with raised hands. Very impressive. Almost as impressive as the interview. Allende was hilarious, mixing self-deprecating humor with broadsides against the patriarchy, smart women who refuse to identify as feminists and violence against women. At 71, she appears to be just hitting high gear.
Allende provided considerable insight into her artistic process, noting that she writes in Spanish and works in intense, focused stretches to craft her books. Equally impressive was how gracefully she handled the obligatory “magic realism” questions. Her latest book, Ripper, is a murder/mystery, and she’s bravely explored various genres during her prolific writing career. I have to admit, I expected her to answer a few quick questions and get on with the book signing. But she genuinely seemed to enjoy taking questions and engaging with her fans. It left me thinking that it’s time to pick up another one of her novels …
(An amusing aside: Before the event, Lara stood in front of the table where they were selling copies of Ripper, unable to bring herself to betray her “digital only” approach to book consumption. She didn’t break down and buy a copy, but I suspect it will show up on her Kindle any day now …)
My obsession with Cambodia began in the early ’90s in a stack of books at the Birmingham Post-Herald. I was ferreting through the review copies looking for something to read when I spotted To Destroy You Is No Loss, which details Teeda Butt Mam’s struggle to survive Pol Pot’s rein of terror in Cambodia. I’d been vaguely aware of the Khmer Rouge’s Holocaust, but this made it so human, so flesh and blood.
I think I came across the late, great Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia around the same time.
My Cambodia obsession snowballed from there as I devoured survivor accounts, histories (including Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over) and a biography of Pol Pot. I also grew fascinated with ancient Khmer history and the incredible architecture of Angkor Wat.
That’s what landed me in a subterranean lecture hall at the Smithsonian in D.C. earlier this week listening to historian Robert DeCaroli’s Urban Architecture in Ancient Angkor: Old Temples and New Findings. While D.C. was shivering in a Polar Vortex up at street level, I was reviving my dream of going to tropical Cambodia to explore these ruins. It’s been on my list for a long time. Perhaps 2014 is the time …
Several interesting tidbits I picked up …
- Ancient Angkor was the Dallas/Fort Worth of its day, boasting urban sprawl and low density development around a series of urban centers. DeCaroli said a professor of his once compared the development pattern to pot of boiling oatmeal where bubbles (urban centers) rise and fall.
- The audience (me included) gasped when DeCaroli projected the image of a footless Hindu warrior and then the image below, showing the feet of pilfered statues that still remain at the original site. The looted, footless sta
tue was put up for sale at Sotheby’s until international outrage prompted them to pull it and return it to Cambodia. - Drought is believed to have been a key cause of the decline of Khmer society, reminding me of a similar fate the Anasazi met in the American Southwest. It also explains the obsession with water — retention, management, irrigation, transportation — in Angkor.
- Varman (armor or protector) is a suffix on the rulers’ names. For some reason, knowing that is making it easier for me to get my head around the individual rulers who built the temples.
- Buddhism really didn’t enter Khmer architecture in a major way until Jayavarman VII built the Bayon temple, mashing up HIndu and Buddhist themes. But this was toward the end of the Khmer empire.