I like Sundays because it is so quiet. Not just in the house, but the entire neighborhood. It is like everyone is napping, the entire world, hypnotized by the blue sky and sun. I told Lee that I will go hiking at the place by my house, but it is so lovely to be lazy, to not do anything. There is beauty inside the house too, a sleepy kind of beauty. I washed the dishes and cleaned up my room after the mess of manuscripts that I left in a pile on the floor. I always feel slightly depressed at the end of a semester. Lee tells me I don't know how to say goodbye. It's true. I'm terrible at it, and am always too sentimental. I starting missing these strangers. It is so strange and silly.
Over the past few days, I have been thinking about one manuscript in class in particular. I couldn't understand why I felt nothing when everyone else in class talked about how moved they were--is there something wrong with me? Perhaps. Perhaps for me, the problem is the same one I sometimes find when reading poems--the language is already so packed with emotions that it just leaves me no space to feel. Sometimes, that is why I don't like prose that is too rich in emotion. In fact, I think I am drawn to prose that has a lack of emotion, that asks me to bring to it the emotion. Don't know if I am making much sense. For me, it is always about a feeling. The best kind of stories leave an intense emotional response, a strong feeling which I can't quite put my finger on. Sometimes I cry from the impact of this feeling. It is not one feeling in itself. It is the feeling of coming so close to something but not quite getting it. I've tried explaining this to Lee once, but it just came out all silly and nonsensical. I'm always after that feeling. And just the day before, I found it in Edith Wharton's The Muse's Tragedy. I was elated. Yes! I discovered a writer I like, only to be disappointed by the story that followed. Maybe it is just a rarity. I wonder if Edith Wharton knew that that story was an especially powerful one? How wonderful if one day I too can create something that someone else would think: What is this feeling that I am feeling and how should I put my finger on it? And why can't I stop shaking?
By: Nippy | Monday, May 30, 2011 at 5:38 AM | | 
Just finished American Pastoral. So I was surprised by the ending. I was expecting to be surprised but not in the same way. On the cover,or on the "acclaims" page one of the critics mentioned something along the line that Roth is compassionate to his characters. I agree to some sense, but not totally. When I got to the end, the first thing I thought was: This guy is a freaking literary terrorist. He functions like Merry does in the story, I have never read anything where a writer so lovingly and attentively build up these characters and their world with such care and detail only to bring them down with such glee in the end. He was joyingfully destroying his characters. I don't quite understand why though? It is tragically comical, or comically tragic or both, but I don't understand why he has to do that? Why are we in the point of view of a character who is laughing at this family at the end of the book? Roth was extremely cruel in my opinion. The narrator of the story makes this quite clear in the opening and I have never forgotten that the whole thing is a re-creation of this person by the writer narrator, but still, I don't understand the point of the book? Why this crazy manic ending? Don't understand, and I doubt I will. Besides, I believe that Roth is trying to write a tragedy here (in the classic Greek sense of it--fatal flaw and fall from greatness all that), which I have always found slightly..how shall I put it..I've always felt this form of tragedy really wicked and dark. Because it doesn't really cause readers to share pain, it is a displacement of it. I end up thinking: sure am glad as hell, I'm not that guy. Wow. That's crazy. Poor guy. Glad it's not me. There is something gleeful in this kind of tragedy and I'm just not a fan of. You tsk tsk at Othello. You tsk tsk at the Swede.
Still, it is admirable how Roth is able to move through time. He is a master at it. Flashback and back again. Flashback within flashbacks. Flashbacks after flashbacks.
By: Nippy | Saturday, May 28, 2011 at 2:10 AM | |
Reading Philip Roth's American Pastoral because the classmate whose writing I admire and whom I kind of have a crush on mentioned that it is his favorite book. I'm 80% through the book and I can't help but feel distaste for it. I'm hoping that things will change in the last section of the book, that will surprise me, but currently, it reads like a super political, very very pro-American (urgh!!) book, bursting with the glorious American ideals--and an older generation's angst against the changes that have been taking place in America.
How Pro-America can an American novel get? I'm just really hoping the ending would surprise me....please. I am hoping that I will be proven wrong, (I want to be wrong) because other than that, it is exceptionally written. Well, I find out when I get to the end. Shouldn't be too long now...
By: Nippy | Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 4:04 AM | |
Maybe in a few days, people would stop talking about "rapture". The word turns me on, and always makes me think of sex. Getting raptured on the plane, raptured on the street, raptured in church, raptured in the bathroom... ok ok ok...
It is just strange when I hear people talking about religious rapture... For me, at least, it is very strange.
By: Nippy | Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 8:04 AM | |
I really should delete this blog some day. It is so silly (and how embarrassing, if someone else reads this without my knowing--everything is so laughable. They'd think: Who is this ridiculous human being?). But oh well.... who really cares? Not me.
By: Nippy | Sunday, May 22, 2011 at 2:58 PM | |
I'm fucking crazy!! I swear. I'm crazy crazy crazy!!! And I wish I was a guy, then I won't be such an emotional thing and I can mess people up real bad when I want to. Beat them to a pulp! (hahaha--the joy just thinking of it). Lee thinks I'll make a really shitty man--I agree, (weak, crying all the time, and wanting to resort to violence) but still. I want to be able to beat someone up, or at least give the impression that I can, so crazy, white, old, assholes won't come picking on me!
Hahaha...If only I was a man, I'll beat the asshole till he begs for mercy---yeah...wouldn't that be nice...
By: Nippy | at 2:46 PM | |
Reading about the Singapore elections, from far away and after the fact. Is it apathy? I can't quite say. I've always been someone apolitical, because I had never cared. I don't know if it is the cycnic in me that views it all as a strange bizarre showcase that ultimately jsut rings empty. You know, the case of: the same differences? Singaporeans are celebrating, and rightly so, for more voices in the parliament. Maybe this is what the rootlessness my sister talks about comes in. I don't have a home, and I don't care about governments. It doesn't matter where, I just can't get riled up, I don't get excited.
Again, I wish I was in the midst of all that excitement, I wish I cared more. In the duration of the few weeks leading up to the election, I received an email from an acquintance asking me, nay, beckoning me to take a stand. Not that she was insincere in anyway, she was in fact truly and deeply involved in what she believes in and asks of me to do the same. Then the question sets in, what do I believe in? I believe in lots of things, but politics is not one of them.
It has always struck me as strangely pretentious, all this talk about politics, building a better future and all that stuff--it feels like a show. You gain people's favor and then you do whatever the fuck you want once in power. I feel that the whole idea of democracy is pretty much a pretty lie. People believe they have a say, but really you give them a choice between shit sandwich A and shit sandwich B, and they are happy to pick one. They are happy just to have a say. Perhaps, it is reassuring to know that the country is going to hell, and one is partly responsible for the shape it takes.
I know how this post is coming off--strangely bitter and cynical--but I don't believe that anything true that one can believe in can be made public like that(in the case of politics) and still remain sincere. When one person does something because she believes in the justification of that act, it is drastically different than one person broadcasting what she believes should be done and asking others to follow her.
Perhaps, in this sense, I am truly anti-authoritarian. It is the classic case of don't tell me what to do, and what future I should be building. But when it comes to things I truly believe in, they are not quite so tangible and they don't take the shape of a seeable vision of the future through someone else's eyes. It is purely private and within that space, I struggle daily to find the right words for all these things I believe in. And it can't be captured in catch phrases and castles in the air of something big promised. Nothing is promised, it is worked for day after day. And I can get angered by all the false political slogans and dirty political scandals, but at the end of the day, I don't believe that politics is the way to freedom--whatever the hell this word is really suppose to mean.
By: Nippy | Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 5:33 AM | |
