Dangerous Books

Woe to the age when the most dangerous book becomes the worthiest. This deceptively polemic statement shouldn't be mistaken for the outrageous commonplace juvenile outbursts which condemn anything contemporary but worship anything that is 50 years before: like now when we look back on the 60s everything seems more romantic and picturesque; rusty old electric fans from the 60s can be sold at an obscene price at G.O.D. (which has really, by the way, lived up to its name in transforming the dirt on my soles to unaffordable luxury.)

'Public opinion exists when there are no ideas.' Whatever books that are ingenius enough to have earned public distaste are the worthiest ones. JK Huysmans rasied hell in Victorian England. A sure sign of genius. A story without a plot. Provocative images where artificial beauty takes over natural beauty.

Very much to my surprise Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story Young Goodman Brown has unwittingly touched a nerve or two in some pious young Hong Kong dames. The young gentleman in the portrait above with premature receding hairline is that very unpardonable sinner. The Scarlet Letter is his opus magnum; but his spark of ingenuity shines the brightest in his short stories. Young Goodman Brown at one dusk leaves his wife, aptly named 'Faith', for the forest on an unnamed errand. Torn between the dark forest and his 'Faith' he ventures into the forest and on his way he meets the devil himself. 'Take my staff if you feel too weary,' the devil says. Deep in the forest Young Goodman Brown is shocked to see all the pious villagers and priests are involved in a mid-night Black Sabbath - a devil worship ritual. His wife 'Faith', without the pink hair ribbons she ususally wears, stands in front of him perplexed and frightened. The devil baptises them with blood from a blood basin.

All the sexual symbols are here: the long staff (in the shape of a Serpent), the blood basin, the pink ribbons, the all too obvious Adam and Eve scene where the man and the woman are perplexed and frightened at their sexuality, the errand that 'can only be done at night', the wife that is afraid of 'loneliness' at night when the husband is away...

In class, one pious dame, whose freckles tell of sleepless nights without her Hello Kitty stuffed doll which has gone to the dry-cleaner's, whose dangling ends of trousers, exposing innocent white socks, tell of pubertal hormonal rush that surpasses her feeble mind, whose glazed eyes speak an eternal heaven with dancing virgins like in Disneyland, blushes and askes in her grotesquely horrid voice that inspires nothing but infernal wrath in me, 'Where is the sex?'

In my mind's eyes, I envision the hellish scene of her chatting joyfully about the Holy Scruptures with good people in a Saturday fellowship gathering of a third-floor church, strategically placed beside heavenly brothels, in a commercial building in Mong Kok.