London, Part 1

If my last days in LA were tragic and heartfelt and oh-so-momentous, after being in London for a couple days I’ll say the sense of anti-climax is huge. It’s a vacation. Like any vacation. Not a drastic change in lifestyle, not a tremendous leap forward in personal development. Maybe that’ll come in college. But so far, we’ve been to the British museum (where I think I concluded that I’d love to study history if it wasn’t all fucking Europeans…I want Aztecs and Mayans and Egyptians and Vikings!), and seen a show on the West End (39 Steps…a very slapstick British comedy. Good fun, but it’s parody of noir made me wonder, “is there such thing as meaningful noir?”). I had a beer with my parents in a pub, which was not nearly so surreal as I thought it might be.

I did this last year and I’m doing it now—waking up really early (like, 6:30! No joke!) and walking around London. It’s really pretty cool seeing the city wake up. Yesterday I saw two foxes, in the heart of the city, around a private garden!

Finished Kafka’s “The Trial.” It’s about a man who is on trial in a terribly inefficient legal system for a crime which they certainly don’t tell him and it seems unlikely if anyone really knows why he is on trail. I wish I knew why the hell Kafka is so good. I still have “The Castle” left to read and I’ll try to emulate his style while reading that, but it seems to me that his action is so minimalist around the central theme or plot that it’s hard without a great premise to be Kafka-esque. I have to say that “The Trial” and “In the Penal Colony” are my two favourite works of his right now. Both have an intense realism that makes their strangeness even more terrifying than the outright near-magical realism of “The Metamorphosis.”