Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew, also known as Wat Lan Kuad or ‘the Temple of a Million Bottles’, is in Sisaket province near the Cambodian border, 400 miles from the capital Bangkok. The Buddhist monks began collecting bottles in 1984 and they collected so many that they decided to use them as a building material.
It would have been the perfect transition from Fat Tuesday to Ash Wednesday.
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
Søren Kierkegaard
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Bob Dylan
Literature & History
Letters from an American
Beau of the Fifth Column
This American Life
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San Diego Reader
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Adoremus
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From Empty Hands
Ellen Finnigan
America
Commonweal
First Things
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All Manner of Thing
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Scrutinies
DarwinCatholic
Catholic and Enjoying It
Bad Catholic
Universalis
Is My Phylactery Showing?
Quotidian Quintilian
En pocas palabras
William Wilson, Guitarist Extraordinaire
Signposts in a Strange Land
Ben Hatke
Daniel Mitsui
Dappled Things
The Fine Delight
Gene Luen Yang
Wiseblood Books
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Quin,
you need to write your next novel inside one of those bottles they build little ships in. Maybe the opening could be just big enough to stick in one hand hold a pencil. Then when people ask if they can read your novel you can say, “it’s inside this bottle.” People will be so fascinated that it will get published for sure.
Many a frat house could take a lesson from these dudes. Instead of just letting those bottles pile up on the back porch…
Henri,
I like it. What if I write out each sentence on a grain of rice, and then fill the bottle with those grains? It could be something in the manner of Julio Cortazar’s “Hopscotch”, where the grains could be read in any order the reader happens to find them.
The basic plot would be about a(nother) Japanese soldier from WWII who remains secluded on one of those Filipino islands, thinking that the war still rages on all over the world. He has been waiting for an answer to the message in a bottle he sent out in December 1945. Now 83 years old, he finally decides to leave the island in search of his own message. He first travels to Japan, only to find that it is basically a weird hybrid of feudal Japan and modern America, with nifty electronics thrown in for distraction. So he travels to the U.S. because it has more or less run the world for the last 60 years. It takes him about 10 minutes to figure out that the U.S. is rather quickly turning itself into the U.S.S.R., another sworn enemy of WWII Japan, as well as (he learns), the Evil Empire of the last century. So why are the mighty Americans doing their level best to repeat the losses of the biggest losers of the 20th century? He realizes that the most logical, reasonable answers are the ones he is least able to stomach.
He moves back to his Filipino island and dies in relative tranquility.
Read in an entirely different order, the grains-of-rice-in-a-bottle novel has a plot much like your typical episode of Super Sabado!, or Marine Boy vs. Godzilla, or March of the Lemmings, a French documentary about mass suicide by little creatures that don’t know any better.