I am an American who's taught English in east Asia for the last six years. Currently in north Thailand (just made a move!), with no plans to return to my home country except for the occasional visit. Live music and Mexican food are the only things I miss about the United States.
Literary tastes are all over the map (and may be best...
more »I am an American who's taught English in east Asia for the last six years. Currently in north Thailand (just made a move!), with no plans to return to my home country except for the occasional visit. Live music and Mexican food are the only things I miss about the United States.
Literary tastes are all over the map (and may be best reflected in that my two favorite writers are probably Henry Miller and Kawabata Yasunari) but I tend to read mostly what's commonly referred to as "literary fiction." Favorites include, but are certainly not limited to, Bruno Schulz, Tanizaki Junichiro, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Witold Gombrowicz, Rabindranath Tagore, and Patrick White. I have no interest in Harry Potter.
Also, I'm a film lover, and have a burdensomely large movie collection that ranges from Japanese silent films to low-budget Kazakh and Georgian (the country, not the US state) films that about ten people on Earth besides me have seen. But it's not all about the totally obscure: I also really love classic Hollywood, Buster Keaton, screwball comedies, westerns, etc. Modern American films I'm not so impressed by. But I'm curmudgeonly like that sometimes.
Also do a lot of photography in my spare time, records of my travels around Asia that range from valleys in furthest western Mongolia to Tibetan mountain towns to metropolitan Japan. Currently working on my rural Vietnamese catalogue.
And yeah, like a lot of readers I fancy myself some kind of writer. The next great literary genius just waiting to be foisted upon the unsuspecting public. But the heat here in the 'Nam, man, it's a real motivation killer. So, since I currently have a small and not particularly well-maintained studio apartment near the sea I also enjoy many a fine, sunny day of sitting on the beach with a few local pals, drinking beer, eating seafood, and going for a swim. Which reminds me, today's my day off! What am I doing here...?
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