Eileen's Song

You have one wing and I have another

Seeking shelter like sister and brother

Through the winter and through the summer

Like one angel we'll fly far away

Hold my hand and we'll make it right

From this hell that we live in

Cross the road until the light

Comes inside and lives within

It's a long and lonesome ride

When your friends have all gone home

But the roses in your eyes

They pull me in so I don't feel alone

You have one wing and I have another

Seeking shelter like sister and brother

Through the winter and through the summer

Like one angel we'll fly far away

Sometimes I just can't help but cry

When I think of what we've become

Like a soldier lost in the night

Forgetting all where he has come from

But the mud will soon become dry

And the sun will rise again

And the shadows in our eyes

Will fade away down to lower plains

Cause'

You have one wing and I have another

Seeking shelter like sister and brother

Through the winter and through the summer

Like one angel we'll fly far away

You have one wing and I have another

Seeking shelter like sister and brother

Through the winter and through the summer

Like one angel we'll fly far away

You have one wing and I have another

Seeking shelter like sister and brother

Through the winter and through the summer

Like one angel we'll fly far away

So my friend now this I say

I won't leave you hangin' on

Hold on tight now and don't fly away

'Till one angel we have become

~Burlap To Cashmere

Don't Dream It's Over

There is freedom within, there is freedom without

Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup

There's a battle ahead, many battles are lost

But you'll never see the end of the road

While you're traveling with me

Hey now, hey now

Don't dream it's over

Hey now, hey now

When the world comes in

They come, they come

To build a wall between us

We know they won't win

Now I'm towing my car, there's a hole in the roof

My possessions are causing me suspicion but there's no proof

In the paper today tales of war and of waste

But you turn right over to the T.V. page

Now I'm walking again to the beat of a drum

And I'm counting the steps to the door of your heart

Only shadows ahead barely clearing the roof

Get to know the feeling of liberation and relief

Hey now, hey now

Don't dream it's over

Hey now, hey now

When the world comes in

They come, they come

To build a wall between us

Don't ever let them win

~Crowded House

Pienso a veces en español. No puedo ayudarme, es un hábito que es muy difícil a romper. También me gusta hablarlo más que hago inglés. Es melódico, fluye como el agua o la música. Hay un ritmo a las sílabas que nuestra lengua germánica carece de alguna manera. Como un niño yo amó idiomas, lenguas, y códigos secretos, algo, cualquier cosa además de inglés aburrimiento y viejo. No confunda lo que digo, me divierte mucho para hablar inglés con tal que van la lectura y el escribir, aunque algunos escritores y poetas españoles exceden lejos de sus contrapartes inglesas. Es el misterio y el romance que me atrae. El inglés, para nosotros, es demasiado normal, demasiado mundano, y ocasionalmente algo diferente es necesario para refrescar la mente.

So busy...I feel terrible about the length of the time periods between posts on this weblog, but hey, what can you do? Here's part of my excuse: Narrative Project. Enjoy, and forgive the nostalgia.

"It's not easy to believe," he said.

"I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe."

"Really?"

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical
instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without
this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Marcel Proust, novelist

It is interesting to think of literature in terms of mathematics, having a common denominator of sorts that brings together all literary pieces and gives them an identity different from other examples of mere writing. I believe that this is a valid action; there is something inherently different in reading Emerson or Shakespeare versus Cosmopolitan. This is not to say that I am not highly entertained by Cosmo, but it is not where I would turn if I were seeking serious insight and inspiration. Except perhaps on what the sexiest color to dye my hair would be.

Boris Tomashevski and the Formalists analyze something I have sometimes wondered about in the past; the inherent similarities in most works of fiction. Take the modern fantasy novel, for a prime example. Every single one involves an unlikely hero, a quest, magic, monsters, damsels, and is always a bare minimum of 600 pages long. This is the fabula, correlating with the Latin fabula for story or tale. The differences, and the reason we continue to read and enjoy these types of novel, arises from the author's creative spin on this skeletal structure, the syuzhet. I believe that Vladimir Propp's analysis of role as opposed to character is a good insight into the extent of the effect of these differences on the central sequence of events.

The term "literary structuralism" strikes me as a rather odd one to apply to something as fluid and dynamic as writing, especially where narratology is concerned. Beyond the fabula, which seems to exist as a library of options from which the storyteller may choose the elements of his story, the trappings are up to the author's discretion. Of course there is a fabula, because in a certain genre the options for bare-bones story plots soon become exhausted and no more creativity is possible. However, chronology, point of view, and a horde of other aspects of the story are free for manipulation. "Any reasonably experienced reader knows that the relationship between narrator and narrated world is a complicated matter" (74). Therefore true structure is not an idea that can be easily connected with literature. Genre, perhaps, but literature as a whole relies on creativity, and there are far too many ways to organize (or not) a work of literature to claim that all writing follows a certain set of structural rules.