Who's Coffee And Why Is (S)he In Love?

On Jalan Sri Hartamas 1, en route to Publika at Solaris Dutamas, you may have noticed a sign outside Eastern Nursery just after an overpass. It sounds like and odd declaration of love.

Who the hell's Coffee and why is (s)he in love?

Actually, it's just an odd name for a coffee bar tucked away in the nursery. Experience tells me good brews are to be had in places like this. Unfortunately, on the first two occasions I had a look, the place was closed.

A signpost marks the start of a path leading to a sheltered extension of a potter's barn. The signpost sports a wooden "Open/Close" sign that doesn't always mean what it says. If you can't open the café's Facebook page, open your ears. If the barista is in, there'll be music drifting out of the shelter - which I heard when I dropped by on New Year's Day.

One is also advised to show up a little after 2pm during weekends, when the café is most likely to be open.

Just when you think it's already tucked-away... it's just
like Aladdin's Adobo Shack

Established in June 2011, the Coffee In Love Café is reminiscent of those vendors' shacks in the Caribbean you might have read about. Assorted bric-a-brac here and there gives the whole décor a rundown yet quirky feel. Fake chillies, a gas lamp, old statuettes, wooden figurines and potted plants accent an interior festooned with salvaged furniture: chairs of all makes and sizes, old cabinets and kitchen cupboards, and wooden classroom desks.

The interior of Coffee in Love Café - an American Picker's
kinda place. Don't think all the items are for sale.

A water feature (in the background) are also made from recyclables: PVC pipes and paint buckets, and also serves to funnel run-off from a rain gutter. A blackboard for miscellaneous announcements was singing the owner's praises.

"Have you seen the owner?" Yes. "Is she cute?" No comment.

On a cabinet near the bar is the speaker where the music comes from. Depending on the barista and the help, you can have Latino/Spanish pop hits to jazz - good coffee house music. The whole décor adheres pretty much to the re-use and recycle principle espoused by the founders.

One of them, the supposed owner Helen, worked in the F&B business for a while. She calls herself an artist now, but opened the café to serve good coffee. "In KL it's easy to find crap coffee," she told me when I'd dropped by days ago.

Where did she learn how to make coffee? "Self-taught," she replied.

"100% Colombian Coffee" - that's what goes into every cup. They grind only as much as they need for each order. Only a few stray beans remain in the grinder's bin. This is good because coffee beans should be kept in the tin when not in use. They degrade when exposed to air.

You "like it STRONG and HARD?" Colombian beans'll do it for ya.
Ask for the Piccolo Latte (RM5). If you ask nicely, the barista may
even make you a a triple espresso - if your heart can handle it.

Like most of their hot beverages, my latte (RM7) comes with a square biscuit that tastes like a Marie's Biscuit - good for taking the bitter edge from the coffee. After a few sips, however, you won't mind a bit.

Cold water is served in re-purposed wine and spirits bottles and
glass jars that provide good photo opportunities for shutterbugs.
Brown sugar is provided but not necessary.

The brew? Kicks like a mule, their Piccolo Latte in particular. With less milk than the latte, you can better feel the strength and, perhaps, the quality of the brew. I wasn't doing too well on the taste department then because I'd scalded my tongue.

I got out my writing materials and tried to fill a few pages. Though it looked like a good place to get creative, the warm, humid weather saps much of that impulse in no time - not that it's a bad thing. Coffee in Love is more of a place where people can chill and get caffeinated after lunch.

The atmosphere will lull aspiring Hemingways and W Somerset
Maughams into a tropical torpor no amount of caffeine can jolt.

Few things beat sipping a steamy brew of Colombian Supremo beans in a warm, humid shack, surrounded by earthy sights and smells and with music to match. And a barista who says he likes coffee and half-jokingly greets you "Good morning!" when you arrive because, I guess, the day doesn't really start without a good cuppa.

Slanty art shot of the counter. You'll most probably find these two
at the Café on weekends, when it opens from 2pm-ish to 6pm.

So you'll forgive a lot of things about this weird little corner. Electric fans provide air conditioning when there's no breeze. There may be mosquitoes about. Rain will make it nice and cool, albeit quite damp. Damp air's no good for my lungs, but a great excuse for another warm beverage. Good coffee itself is already hard to come by, so don't complain about the latte art.

Though they had some in the beginning, food is very occasionally served here. The tiny place looks like it can only accommodate about twenty patrons at a time. And they only open during lunch on weekdays and after lunch on weekends and close at around six in the evening.

But with prices from RM3++ to RM10, it's damn good value for several good beverages (you're probably begging for a thrashing if you want them iced). And there's wi-fi.

It's been open seven months, but quite a few people have found it already (Facebook is fantastic that way). The Coffee In Love Café Facebook page has all the updates, and they announce their café openings there, too.

I had no reason to stay until they close, so I got up to leave and ask for the bill. They got P1 wi-fi and update their clientèle on a social network, but Coffee in Love's cash register is a Milo can on a pulley - so old-school, it's Jurassic - so you don't get a printed receipt. This is by far the greenest and coolest (style, not temperature) café I've been to.

---

Coffee in Love Café

c/o Eastern Nursery
132KV, SGBT - TNB 8-10
Jalan 1/70A, Taman Sri Hartamas
50480 Kuala Lumpur

CLOSED FOR GOOD

News: Publishers, Privacy and Memoirs

This list is a bit late, but my thought processes are borked and I can't think straight enough to write coherently.

• Print On Demand: A collaborative and real-time history of Occupy Wall Street, written by those who were there. Now, history is written by its characters, not historians.
• Community appeal saves a second-hand book shop in the UK. Maybe there's hope out there.
• An all-women comic book team kicks back against sexism in comics with their Bayou Arcana anthology.
• Komputing koach Kim Komando asks, "Got a dream for 2012? Why not publish a book?" The last time I saw her, she was on TV, demonstrating WordPerfect, Compuserve Prodigy and Lotus 1-2-3 on an Amazing Discoveries infomercial. Yes, it was that long ago.
• Will the UK's Leveson inquiry give rise to a privacy law that impacts memoirs? Particularly those with details that friends, colleagues and relatives may object to?
• Michael Korda says most Hollywood memoirs are dull, overrated and probably ghostwritten.
• Ooh, publisher Melville House has come up with their HybridBook™. Instead of CDs, I think, you get a URL. Do some things stay the same the more they change?
• What's coming in 2012 for the book publishing sector. Hopefully, not a variant of the so-called Mayan apocalypse.
• The story of Sixty-Eight Publishers, set up by and mainly for Czechs in exile.
• And for laughs: the diary of failed Doomsday prophet Harold Camping.

Also: Paul Callan (The Dulang Washer, 2011) is working on a new novel, and we're converting an e-book collection of Tunku Halim's scary stories. The second book in Tuttu Dutta-Yean's The Jugra Chronicles is scheduled for this year.

I'm also putting together a page for manuscript submissions. The company appears to have no official online portal for submissions, save a phone number and an e-mail address. So, I'm making one.

Some Pieces Fall In Place

Coming down from a long Christmas weekend of doing mostly nothing, I realise that it has come to a point where I can go for a month-long holiday and, upon returning to work, find myself not feeling refreshed. Bad sleeping habits might be a factor.

I wasn't sure how to respond to this post that filled the gaps in my pro-indie bookstore article. And I couldn't put a finger on what I'd felt as I typed it out.

One can say my piece was "biased". I was too tired or blasé to craft a more balanced take on the subject. Besides, some stories on small bookshops were recently published. Responses to Manjoo's Slate article, maybe?

I am aware that in Malaysia, there is no apparent reading culture. Rarely does the average reader's connection to books go beyond the product and the shelf it came from. How are books published? How does one write a book? What does it take to print one? Do readers know or care? Do they even need special places for buying or reading books?

Before he'd personally watched a pig get slaughtered or kill one himself, Anthony Bourdain claimed his understanding of where meat came from was not ...complete. Perhaps Manjoo's understanding of small independent bookstores would similarly benefit by an extended stay in Malaysia where he can witness the slow death of at least one indie bookshop.

I loved bookstores as a kid, but lamented my limited time in them as the folks had to leave for home. Though I have the freedom and money to spend in bookstores, I don't seem to be doing that a lot. Perhaps the force behind my piece was desperation. The urge to do something, however ineffectual, to delay the inevitable.

Brick-and-mortar bookstores may eventually be a thing of its past, but should its passing be brushed off with a toss of a pen, like Manjoo did, without a care for the people who work at and frequent those places? To be replaced with the likes of Amazon? Please. The thought of letting such a shapeless, faceless behemoth dictate what I can or should buy or download - and at what price - makes my blood run cold.

Maybe it's just me, writing about how I'm missing something that's about to disappear. Not like it's going to change anything, but it's better than doing nothing.

Maybe.

Another Red Future, Imagined

Probably my last book review for 2011. I not sure if I can call The Fat Years a "thriller", though. And so ends another year.

---

Red future

Hegemony and hope in an ascendant China

first published in The Star, 30 December 2011


With a tagline like "The notorious thriller they banned in China", a critique of China's ruling Communist Party is what you'd expect in these pages. But it's not exactly what you think.

Originally published as Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013 (loosely, "A Golden Age: China In 2013"), Chan Koonchung's work of speculative fiction was translated into English as The Fat Years. It starts "two years from now", ie after this novel's publication earlier this year. China has emerged ascendant from the aftermath of a global financial crisis. Some famous brands have fallen into Chinese hands, including Starbucks.

In one of the now Chinese-owned Wantwant Starbucks outlets, Old Chen, a former journalist, current author and resident of Happiness Village Number Two, is moved to tears by China's prosperity; some of those tears end up in his "great-tasting" Lychee Black Dragon Latté.

Earlier, his friend Fang Caodi pestered him for the umpteenth time about a missing February (yes, he means the month, the entire month). Big deal. Politically inconvenient timelines tend to disappear in China. That doesn't bother Old Chen – much. He's divorced, getting old and has writer's block.

Hope for his second spring in the country's golden age comes in the form of an old flame, Wei Xihong aka Little Xi. A former judge disillusioned by the system, she quit her job and eventually took the Raja Petra route (ie, she became a dissident blogger, for those who don't get the reference). Chen's search for her would put him on a course to unearth the truth behind the missing month, the details of which are only remembered very vaguely by several characters.

Born Fang Lijun, Fang Caodi is an asthmatic and jack-of-all-trades who returned to mainland China after years of wandering and renamed himself after an elementary school. Fellow asthmatic Zhang Dou, who was once a child slave, is now a wannabe guitarist. These two guys come to believe in the hand of the Chinese government behind this collective national amnesia.

Things come to a head one day when Zhang, Fang and Little Xi surprise Old Chen by pulling up to him in a black SUV with an unconscious government official bundled up at the back. Will he talk? And if he does, what will they learn?

The Fat Years describes so many things that are so close to home in modern China. Polemics for and against a totalitarian regime, its ideology and ruling elite are conveyed through the book's characters. However, it could do without the lengthy preface, which sort of gave the ending away. That and the translator's introduction pretty much summed up the novel for the casual book browser, who'd probably leave it on the shelf. Which would be a pity.

With its folksy narrative and dialogue and occasional bits of humour, The Fat Years is not stridently didactic about – nor a full-blown parody of – China's situation.

It's more about folks like Old Chen, Little Xi, Fang Caodi and Zhang Dou. Particularly Little Xi and Fang, whom the author considers among the many "incorrigible idealists" in China: "... the people languishing in prison or under government surveillance – human rights lawyers, political dissidents, ... public intellectuals, whistle-blowers...".

Despite the bad news in China (factory worker suicides, dodgy food manufacturers and callous drivers in horrifying hit-and-runs and so on), the presence of people like Little Xi and Fang gives others hope. That things aren't really all that bad, and that they will get better. That there are still people out there trying to make things better.

For me, the romance between Old Chen and Little Xi gives the book a bit of much-needed heart and gives us a glimpse of that hope. After Little Xi had gone into hiding, Old Chen tracks her down, but she refuses to see him, so they communicate through e-mails and comments in a forum thread.

Briefly, Old Chen's entreaties to Little Xi made netizens on both sides of the Taiwan Strait forget about politics to split hairs over the duo's online exchanges. Opinions differ, but they seem to agree about one thing: "Stop faffing around Little Xi, make up with Old Chen and everything will be okay!"

As the author puts it: "No society can afford to be without idealists – especially not contemporary China." After all, it can be argued that a bunch of idealists put China on the path it's treading today – and their job is far from done.

---

The Fat Years

Chan Koonchung
translated by Michael S Duke
preface by Julia Lovell
Doubleday (2011)
307 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-385-61918-9

News: Institute d'Egypt, Indie Bookstores and The 99¢ Question

Sinus acting up, and out of fresh saline for irrigation. I had something written and stuff to write as well, but ah, what the heck... Rudolph's red nose might also be a symptom of a sinus problem.

• Caught between between protesters and Egypt's military, the Institute d'Egypt, the research centre set up by Napoleon Bonaparte when the French invaded in the late 18th century, caught fire when both sides clashed. Among the treasured writings housed in the Institute was the handwritten 24-volume Description de l'Egypte, which includes two decades' worth of notes by over 150 French scholars and scientists on Egypt's monuments and its history. Like the Institute, over 190,000 books, journals and writings - some of which were 200 years old - were damaged by the fire, possibly beyond repair.
• News of another death in the literary world were nearly swamped by tributes to the late Christopher Hitchens. So George Whitman's Shakespeare and Company is not the same storied bookstore frequented by Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. Whitman's S&Co, was originally called Le Mistral and is about half a century old. The place is now being managed by his daughter Sylvia, and as seen the likes of Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs.
  
  Speaking of bookstores and old gentlemen: Thank you, Leong Siok Hui, The Star for bringing The Penang Bookshelf to our attention. She also put together a profile of the owner.
• Previously, there was speculation about how Jane Austen died - was she murdered? The same is now being asked of Robert Ludlum, author of the Bourne Identity. Is there something ... undignified or mundane about natural causes, etc that some sensational cause of death needs to be applied to authors of note?
• Will book promos go Bollywood? After completing his book, the first in the Shiva Trilogy, Amish Tripathi made a film trailer as part of the book's marketing. It's not a unique case; there are some video trailers on a web site for a series of alternate history novels depicting Elizabeth I of England as a descendant of a Druidic vampire-killing priestess. My review of the first book has yet to be published.
• Frustrated at having her books pirated, Spanish novelist Lucía Etxebarria has threatened to quit writing. While we can perhaps sympathise with the Basque author, blogger The Digital Reader thinks she should be taking steps to reduce the pirating of her works - like, maybe, introduce cheaper, more accessible e-editions of her books? - instead of merely throwing hissy-fits.
  
  The head-desk inducing irony, according to the blogger, was that Etxebarria did not want to publish e-book versions "because that is easy to pirate. It would have been like throwing it straight to the lions." ...Then again, it's not as if every writer is like Paulo Coelho and can give away free books.
• Elsewhere, people are wondering if 99 cents is too cheap for an e-book. How does one come up with a win-win-win-win pricing scheme for authors, publishers, retailers and readers? One reason why it would be better to price an e-book above 99 cents:
  
  

  The difference in royalty earnings between a self-published book at 99 cents through [Kindle Direct Publishing] and a $2.99 book through [ditto] is roughly $1.66 per book. ... At $1.66 per book, authors need to sell only 24,100 books, or 2008 per month to earn $40,000 per year, not a stellar salary by any means, but enough to make writing more than just a passion. Remember, most indie authors are not selling 2000 copies of their books per month - they’re lucky to sell 50.

  
  It's only a matter of time before 99 cents would cease being a fair price for e-books.
• Teachers in the US are publishing their own textbooks "for niche courses ... for which a suitable book doesn't exist; to self-publish supplementary material for a class; or because sudden curriculum changes can put widely used textbooks out of date", thanks to self-publishing firms. In light of the reported disintegration of the US school system, this bit of news is heartening.
• Write a book, get it published, what could possibly go wrong? Peter Bromhead finds out. Make sure this doesn't happen to you.
• Steven Piersanti, President of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, presents a cheat sheet-style piece about his ten awful truths about book publishing and a list of strategies for responding to them.
• Will the 21st century see the death of books? Nay, says the Guardian. "Far from killing off the book, the digital age is proving a boon to innovative publishers and authors, many of whom are using new technology to breathe life back into old ideas." Profiled are three such innovations: online subscription publishing site Unbound, hybrid books and Boxfiction, "the TV show you read"... what, reading TV?
• Another case for the existence of the physical book: signed, annotated secondhand books as collectibles of historical value.
• Writer and editor Robert McCrum lists fifty things he learnt about the literary life and outlines a new map for the changing landscape that is the world of books.

Me, Bookstore Snob? ...Yes

This came about several days late, mainly because I was wondering if I could word the whole thing better. I'm still wondering about it now. Why send this to TMI? Well, thought I'd give it a shot.

I've included a couple of other links related to the story that I forgot about in the text below. The Internet reacted a lot faster than I thought to the Slate article.

---

Happy to be a bookstore snob
first published in The Malaysian Insider, 20 December 2011


"Independent bookstores are expensive, inefficient and don't deserve to be saved."

This snappy headline and the Slate article it was associated with nearly made a bookstore manager cry.

Jen Campbell, who runs the Ripping Yarns bookstore in the UK, is planning a series of bookstore-related articles in response to said piece by Slate's resident tech geek Farhad Manjoo.

What might have got Manjoo's goat was a New York Times article by Richard Russo (a little daisy chain going on here, methinks) that pivots the pro-indie bookstore/anti-Amazon argument on the notion that indies are bastions of literary culture, something which Amazon does nothing to promote.

Though he has criticised some of Amazon's allegedly egregious business practices, Manjoo argues that the company has done more for the literary culture than, perhaps, indie bookstores, which he considers "...the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologised local establishments you can find."

And he adds that although Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is "an easy guy to hate... if you're a novelist - not to mention a reader, a book publisher, or anyone else who cares about a vibrant book industry - you should thank him for crushing that precious indie on the corner."

It's quite an interesting piece, and Manjoo makes some cogent points. He's also right about other aspects of bookstore snobbery. Bookstore browsing or haunting, in my case, is a meditative experience, a source of comfort (or an escape) in bad times. Surrounded by shelves and shelves of books, I feel calm. Some days, being in a bookshop makes me want to write.

But his overall argument for Amazon as a better driver of literary culture reminds me of a news report back home that equates a high-income/knowledge country as one that publishes 27,000 books a year.

"Buy more books," they said. We are, judging from the crowds at a warehouse sale I attended months back. But books are meant to be read; how many of those bought books would be read in a month? Two months? And are these the kind of books that really work the gears in your head or merely cranium stuffing? 

Literary culture is more than just the book. It's the people (authors, editors, publishers, book designers, readers and critics) and the institutions (schools, universities, libraries, archives and yes, bookstores). It's the history; the book as we know it has been around for ages. To touch a physical book is to hold the tangible results of centuries of literary evolution, and the hard work of the people and institutions that put it together.

Even as the publishing industry moves towards digitisation, the inevitable loss of some of that will be painful to many. The death of George Whitman, for one, prompts one to ask: what will become of his storied bookstore by the Seine?

A piece of tech or a shiny on-screen user interface doesn't elicit that kind of emotion. Nor does the history of Apple or Steve Jobs gives one that fuzzy warm feeling. (No, I'm sure that buzz's just static electricity.)

Yes, you can still buy physical books from Amazon, maybe with discounts, if you're feeling all tactile and stuff about history and the romance of the book.

But the whole online thing feels cold to me.

The 24/7 convenience is great for long distances and hard-to-get books, but we already spend so much time online for other things, and we don't need another reason to stay wired and indoors.

Bookstores in general are hard to run. Indie bookshops, even more so. Which is why the people who run them are exceptional, especially when they're familiar with their products, the industry and the communities they serve. Some of them are out there, still soldiering on - which might explain why Manjoo's apparent dickishness has strummed more than a few nerves.

Slate readers would note that Manjoo writes this way at times, so the article doesn't necessarily reflect his character.

The extinction of the bookstore would just mean one less excuse to leave the house. However, it would also mean an end to one of the connections between the people who make books and those who read them - which are already fraying.

Education systems are deteriorating in some parts of the world, even as our collective attention spans crave faster, smaller bursts of entertainment. The business model of the big bookstore and the rise of the mega-selling superstar authors are partly to blame for the disconnect. Pushing big names out big stores in huge numbers does not necessarily indicate a growing reading culture - just more people buying books.

I'm aware that I'm arguing this from a mainly emotional angle. Perhaps with good reason. The need to express ourselves and the hunger for knowledge stems from passion. I don't go nuts at all the books I see on the shelves, but there's a certain connection I can make with it that I can't with a piece of tech.

Odd, considering my long IT background. But maybe not - it would explain the discomfort of the eight years I've been in IT.

Are indie bookstore lovers hopeless touchy-feely romantic about their weathered brick-and-mortar hangouts? Likely; in my case, "Hell, yes."

The digital transformation in the way we read and write books is unavoidable, but what is the publishing industry without the passion to write, package, archive and read through all that material? What could we publish or market without the urge to think, discover, dream, discuss and argue - and write or type it all down?

I believe it's the same kind of flame that burned in the bosoms of Jobs, Gates, et al - one can only be kindled by human interaction, conversation and sharing of ideas.

Technology like the Internet has certainly helped in bringing minds together and made sharing easier. But to say that online bookstores are better and more efficient at nurturing literary culture, well... wouldn't that be mistaking the medium for the message?

News: Hitchens, Manjoo and More Bad Books

Great Gutenberg, lots of news this week. Perhaps the biggest one is the passing of Christopher Hitchens, the combative, well-known atheist writer and journalist.

Expect these to become popular in the coming days

His last book, Mortality, will be out next year.

Some of his greatest Slate pieces can be found here. He even took time to comment on the Allah issue. I think that was the first time I got acquainted with his writings. Also:

• Virginia Tech was shaken up days ago by another shooting, where a policeman was killed. The institution achieved infamy as the site of one of the biggest campus shootings in 2007. But there was, according to author Matthew Pearl in his book The Professor's Assassin, another shooting incident that happened there - in 1840. Does this make Virginia Tech the most shot-up campus ever in the US?
• Slate tech writer Farhad Manjoo further stirs a teacup storm by suggesting that Amazon does more for literary culture than independent bookstores. I'd drafted a take on it, but such was the overwhelming response to that, I'm having second thoughts. Jen Campbell of the Ripping Yarns bookshop in the UK intends to respond with a series of bookstore-related blog posts. The Christian Science Monitor has one article about it.
• The reported flagging of Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going as haram by JAKIM generated quite a bit of buzz, with several voices weighing in. Among the latest was Dina Zaman's "Oh! Woe to the book lover" in The Star. No word yet from the Home Ministry yet on the status of that book, or the others that JAKIM flagged for banning. I'm hoping we won't have to wait for nine months.
• On a somewhat related note: Due to a misspelling, a book called Singapore Sucks! will be reviewed. The application for an import permit for the "series of satirical short stories, poems and essays about life in Singapore" listed the book as Singapore S. The editor was surprised by the decision to review the book because copies of it have been selling in Singapore for months before that.
• After much see-sawing, the controversial novel Interlok was reportedly withdrawn from the school syllabus. Perkasa is apparently crying foul, implying that it's a ploy to gain Indian votes for the rumoured upcoming general elections.
• Our government is prepared to allocate funds to writers to boost book industry, which is great. Utusan Publications and Distributors Sdn Bhd executive director Dr Ahmad Hairi Abu Bakar also said, "To achieve developed nation status by 2020, the nation needs to publish 27,000 titles annually compared to 18,000-20,000 titles presently." Okay, but how many of those books will actually be read? And how many of those books will actually help create a learning society?
• Amazon's best-selling books for 2011. The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan and The Abbey by Chris Culver made the list based solely on Kindle sales and were independently published using Kindle Direct Publishing.
• "How we do not kill each other": Author and former Gawker editor Emily Gould and Ruth Curry interview each other about their indie e-book business.
• Another chapter on the e-book price war between publishers and retailers.
• The New Statesman asks: Do books "prime people for terrorism"?
• Reader's Digest cuts 150 positions.