Books Abroad
Books Abroad
"I probably looked like a weirdo waving around a book—a long list poem, no less—in the hot sun outside the Petronas Towers, but it seemed less obnoxious than the influencers doing photo shoots"
The semester finishes late in China, and I needed to come back early in August to take care of some administrative business. So I fit in only a very short trip this summer, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Jakarta, Indonesia.
I avoid checking in baggage whenever possible, and this time my ultra-budget flights also put limits on carry-ons. So it was just me and my backpack. I made space for two books—Lilly Dancyger’s Negative Space (2021), a memoir about her father Joe Schactman’s life, art practice, and addiction, and Moez Surani’s Operations (2016), a long list poem of military operations that I’ve been struggling to finish an article on for some time.
I arrived in KL well before my hotel’s check-in time, so I decided to walk around the river area near the Little India and Bukit Bintang neighbourhoods. I still can’t forget the smell—I don’t know if it was the tropical plants mixed with cooking and maybe incense, but I’d never been somewhere with such a lingering and pleasant atmosphere (fitting given that Surani’s 2016 project Heresies involved the production of scents that attempted to recreate the smells of Baghdad, Barcelona, Hiroshima, and Waco). It was hot and I was getting tired, so I decided to rest on a park bench that was next to the river and under some trees and tall bushes.
I’m still not sure what happened next—there was someone watering the plants and trees behind me, and there had also been a light rain earlier in the day that had left small puddles of water on the benches. Whatever it was, I discovered later that my copy of Operations had been severely water-damaged—just absolutely soaked through (although my pencil marks remained weirdly legible?). Nothing else in my bag had been affected.
I went to bed that night with the book perched on the upper door hinge, the closest thing to the A/C. It looked like a dead bird. This approach seemed not to yield much in the way of results. The hotel room also had no window, so sunlight wasn’t an option. The next day, when I went to the Islamic Arts Museum on the recommendation of a Malaysian student, I just kept the book open on the desk, hoping the stale air would do something.
Wandering around afterwards, I encountered something called Market Square Junk Book Store. Despite its name, this was easily the best used bookstore I’ve ever seen. If I’d known about it I’d have brought a carry-on. The organization was a bit iffy, but in terms of genre they seemed to have… everything? Including fiction (literary and genre), poetry, history, literary criticism, and things like political pamphlets from the ‘50s. I picked up only Stephen Spender’s Eliot and Gore Vidal’s Burr for a colleague. To my shame, the “junk” books were all sealed in plastic and preserved in whatever condition in which they had come to the store. I hung my head.
The last thing I did was go on a long walk to see the Petronas Towers. It was a hot, dry, sunny day, so I decided to take the opportunity to continue drying out Operations. I probably looked like a weirdo waving around a book (an avant-garde list poem at that) in the hot sun and breeze. Then again, the various Influencers in the Wild doing elaborate phone-photo shoots in front of the towers seemed infinitely more obnoxious.
The towers were impressive; the area was a photo-op hellhole. I have a lot less to say about Jakarta. The traffic is as bad as people say, the European tourists were seemingly pretty skeezy. A mostly dry place, alcohol is available only in “fruit markets,” at which they gouge you with $15 strawberries and worse prices for the booze. The old town was somewhat pretty, but all the museums close incredibly early. I tried to find something to appreciate about the city, but it was a challenge. The entire time, though, Surani was sitting in the sun on my hotel room’s windowsill, slowly getting just a little dryer.