[Daylight and Nightmare, by G.K. Chesterton]

From “The Angry Street”:

“And you?” he cried terribly. “What do you think the road thinks of you? Does the road think you are alive? Are you alive! Day after day, year after year, you have gone to Oldgate Station…”

My rage at Culvert seems judgmental to me now and perhaps also a little excessive, but I can tell (since these are my own words) that the anger also stems from my resentment towards my adolescent peers who thought that the source of all the problems in the world came from authority and that everything would be solved if we could simply do whatever we wanted.

[Tales of the Long Bow, by G.K. Chesterton]
[Babel Tower, by A.S. Byatt]

Also from “The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce”:

The over-powering charm which pigs exercise upon us at a certain time of life; when we hear their trotters in our dreams and their little curly tails twine about us like the tendrils of the vine—

Prepare yourselves for an incoherent rant. I’ve been reading Babel Tower and Babbletower, the latter of which is the book-within-a-book inside the former. Culvert, the “visionary” of a utopia where everyone is free and there are no servants or masters and people can pursue their own pleasures, is the most ridiculous and stupid excuse for a sensualist I’ve ever seen. Why not be honest and say directly, “I want to have sex”? Why does he have to say that he’s emancipating mankind from oppression? I mean, do poverty and wretchedness disappear just because this group of rich, spoiled brats have now decided they will do whatever they want without any regard for the rules? I know Byatt wrote it as a criticism, but oh, did she succeed all too well in making me hopping mad.

Culvert proposes (idiot that he is) that they should engage in dramatic performances that represent their “new social order” on a regular schedule. But what if everyone decides to follow their own desires and refuse to put on any play whatsoever? And why doesn’t he just say, “I want to go watch an orgy every week”? And that whole, “let’s preach universal tolerance, but we want to murder the colonel because he has ‘blood on his hands’” incident was even more infuriating. If they are supposed to follow their instincts and live in perfect harmony, what on earth are they supposed to do if they have a secret homicidal maniac in their midst? After all, the would-be murderer only fulfills his desire by cutting someone’s throat. I am not speaking of murder that comes from anger or malice, but the sheer love of violence that is the one instinct of which these inhabitants of La Tour Bruyarde refuse to speak. (I think they all sink into a pit of sadomasochism later in the book. Serves them right.)

I really despise Culvert. I don’t even hate him. He irritates me like a fly I want to squash but can’t because he’s in a book. I hope he ends up miserable and wretched as a beggar rolling in the blood left on the streets of Paris after the Terror. Let him preach his visions there! I could have cheered when Colonel Grim asked who was going to clean out the latrines in the new utopia. For you see, in all these declarations of freedom, the bathroom really is key. I don’t object to your principles, though I may think them ridiculous. What I really object to is your utter neglect of details, the small things that end up making your life a living hell if they go wrong.

For real comfort, you need order and discipline. And all it requires is an occasional temporary delay in self-gratification. Culvert is a blithering idiot, and I hope his Babbletower collapses on him soon.

(Yes, I do realize that my reaction is the entire point of the book, and possibly of the book-within-a-book as well. I’m not supposed to like Culvert. Still, this is supposed to be tempered by a begrudging half-admiration for the man who is constantly described as “intelligent” and “brilliant”. But there is no such ambiguity on my part. I am a fanatic. I despise Culvert and all other fools like him, and I most decidedly disagree with the assessment that he is “brilliant”. He is simply inventing a whole social theory to justify the fact that he’s obsessed with sex, something which is neither original nor impressive. Self-righteous moron.)

[Tales of the Long Bow, by G.K. Chesterton]

I’ve been going off on a G.K. Chesterton reading rampage, and I have a funny quote, from “The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce”:

“I have every reason to believe,” affirmed Pierce solemnly, “that Gurth the Swineherd made use of this identical building. I have no doubt it is in fact far older. The best authorities believe that the Prodigal Son stayed here for some time, and the pigs—those noble and much maligned animals—gave him such excellent advice that he returned to his family. And now, Mr. Oates, they say that all that magnificent heritage is to be swept away. But it shall not be. We shall not so easily submit to all the vandals and vulgar tyrants who would thus tear down our temples and our holy places. The pig-sty shall rise again in a magnificent resurrection—larger pig-stys, loftier pig-stys, shall yet cover the land; the towers and domes and spires of statelier and more ideal pig-stys, in the most striking architectural styles, shall again declare the victory of the holy hog over his unholy oppressors.”

I finished The Man Who Was Thursday last night, and I reaffirm my goal to try to write like G.K. Chesterton. I really can’t describe the book adequately, but it was like one of those dreams where you’re terrified or wildly delirious but you don’t want to wake up because you want to know what happens next. Chesterton’s prose is vivid and dramatic, but just a little bit tongue-in-cheek so that you don’t know whether to hide under your blankets or to just laugh out loud. It’s surreal and yet believable at the same time—you’re sort of sucked in by the story until you find yourself a million miles from where you began. And I sound like the back cover of a cheap paperback.

[The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton]

Oh, and The Man Who Was Thursday is really an absolutely wonderful book. For example:

And in some strange way, though there was not the shadow of a shape in the gloom, Syme knew two things: first, that it came from a man of massive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him.

(It has just occurred to me that it may not be self-evident why this particular sentence is so wonderful, but it’s too much trouble trying to explain it. Also, explaining things tend to take the flavor out of them. Let it suffice to say that I read this sentence and felt delighted, though it was indeed surreal and slightly frightening, “nightmare” that it is.) I have decided that one of my life’s goals will be to write like G.K. Chesterton.

[A Gesture Life, by Chang-rae Lee]

Started reading Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, which made me feel slightly betrayed, since he’s writing about a Japanese man who “fell in love with a Korean comfort woman during World War II.” It’s all very well to explore controversial issues, but he’s a fellow Korean, and irrationally, I wish he’d show more nationalism. I know, I know, it’s art, and therefore, we durst not argue with whatever the dictates of his artistic conscience demand. (I like the sound of that, “durst not.”) Still…

Also, it may be just me, but I find his writing incredibly dull. There’s an Ishiguro-esque quality to his style, but Ishiguro makes the content of his writing interesting, the nostalgic and wistful descriptions lingering over faded, yet beautiful things. The nostalgic and wistful descriptions here linger over an ordinary middle-class American life, albeit that of a Japanese immigrant. It’s just…tiresome. I think maybe the style itself could potentially be parodic, or at least evocative of modern Japanese writers, but still, I don’t enjoy this story. (Then I feel somewhat guilty, because Chang-rae Lee is probably the only famous Korean-American contemporary writer. But who says Asian-Americans should enjoy Asian-American writing? I didn’t like Native Speaker much either.) What’s odd is that my friends and I have criticized most Asian-American writing for dwelling too much on the “oh, I rebelled against my roots but I can never escape them” theme, but for some reason, this is exactly what I dislike about Chang-rae Lee. Not enough about Korea, or of Korean heritage. I want him to distill the essence of my Korean-American existence, in the exact manner of that cliched phrase. I want to see him muse about speaking the language, about wearing hanbok, about passing by “Koreatown” in Flushing, about sappy “trot” music that the grandparents love singing. I don’t want to hear of a wholly American life, where the man has an American wife and a normal job, all of which is falling apart, but in a typically American way. I want to read about “feeling caught between two worlds” when the writer is a Korean-American, and therefore like me. How silly is that? A shared nationality still allows room for infinite variations.

[The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen]

I’ve finished Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, which I concede is creative and ingenious and innovative, etc., etc., etc., but it was difficult to enjoy. I mean, considering that it’s about a midwestern American family, going through various stages of midlife crises and/or depression, it couldn’t be further detached from the world I live in. I suppose for the critics it captured the essence of being American and suffering the changes in ideas and ideals and ideologies, but as an Asian-American, who has lived on the East Coast all her life (and yes, those nine years in Houston counted as East Coast), it couldn’t be more alien.

One would expect that reading fantasy would, well, be escapist, and yes, it is to a certain degree. On the other hand, all the books I really enjoy are probably closest to me in terms of mental familiarity. Even contemporary mainstream books like The Lovely Bones focus on something I can relate to myself, like family life. The Corrections has very few chances for that kind of connection. I don’t understand these characters very well, and it’s hard to experience their world through their minds. And, well, the fixation on fecal matter and urine may have been thematically important, but was it necessary to describe the smell of rancid urine? I tend to have overly vivid reading experiences, and I nearly threw up on those particular passages. Sheesh.

Further progress in Gödel, Escher, Bach has proven delightful. There was this dialogue called “Ant Fugue”, which compared anthills to brains in a rather charming way. The dialogue preceding this one was called “Prelude…”. Makes you wonder at the cleverness of the author in finding an analogy to address a subject that also provides a pun like “Prelude…Ant Fugue”. Oh, and in between there was this pun Lierre de Fourmi, a fictional anthill who discovered the converse, so to speak, of Fermat’s Last Theorem. That n^a + n^b = n^c has an infinite number of solutions when n=2, but no solutions when n>2. This is of course a Diophantine equation, and Lierre de Fourmi supposedly discovered his Well-Tested Conjecture when reading Arithmetica by Di of Antus, mirroring the way Fermat thought up his theorem while reading Arithmetica by Diophantus. Even more clever that one can create such a pun on Diophantus’ name to reflect all the other ant puns going around…Lierre de Fourmi by the way means “bridge of ants”, which reflects an actual behavior of ants that illustrates Hofstadter’s whole point about anthills. It was really amusing, to say the least.

[The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, by A.S. Byatt]

I read a collection of fairy tales by A.S. Byatt over the weekend, including The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, which I liked, even though one would think I had very little in common with the protagonist. The way that reading stories sort of forces you outside of stories and yet trying to create a narrative out of your own life…it’s hard to explain, but it “resonated” with me.

[The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro]

I finished The Remains of the Day, the Ishiguro book, and it was really wonderful. I think Ishiguro did continue with his “can you trust the narrator?” tactics, but it was more along the lines of self-delusion in memories, in order to forget what you don’t want to remember. But what really struck me was this sorrow that pervades the entire story, the butler who is desperately trying to convince himself that his life of service to Lord Darlington was worthy of “dignity.” It was rather beautiful, especially at the end, when he finally is able to admit what he refused to admit before and then achieves a kind of peace with himself. I suppose to someone else, it could seem a bit sappy, and perhaps even transparent, but I thought it was so elegantly done. Really beautiful, liked it even more than When We Were Orphans.

It’s true though, not simply for this butler or those of his social standing in England. World War II was horribly devastating, the end of idealism, the huge turning point for Western civilization (and I suppose the rest of the world as well). World War I was pretty awful too, but I think it was World War II that broke the Western world’s original faith in man, that repudiated any belief in humanism. Admittedly, the trend had started before the war (thinking Freud and Darwin, of course), but somehow the sheer brutality of that war made it real. Suddenly, we weren’t anymore the enlightened rational beings that we wanted to be. The advent of our postmodern cynicism, I suppose. But growing up in the world of my parents, who were born during this turning point, I can’t help sharing the old butler’s nostalgia and bewilderment.