~~when good stories go bad.

someone's rewritten `little red riding hood' again. um. this article about it makes me question whether to ever touch an english mythology/folklore class with a thirty-foot pole, ever again.
``Such tales are now routinely seen as allegories about social rules and transgressions, crime and punishment. They are read as Freudian texts about the relationship between men and women and as Jungian coming-of-age parables, tracing a familiar path that takes the hero or heroine from home, through a transformative experience (often in the forest or a faraway land) and home again, endowed with new wisdom or status."
    doesn't that just make it sound like the most boring thing since adam sandler's last movie?? just shoot me if i ever even come close to spouting stuff like that. because i may as well have been taken over by the brain-eating zombies that academics apparently are.

do i think that analyzing & deconstructing fairy-tales (or stories in general) makes them weaker and lamer? well....
no. of course not.
but if you do it without passion, without love for the storyness of the story-- my god. it's like a root canal. what's so magical about ``allegories about social rules and transgressions"?? ergh. i think i hate the word allegory, anyway. it's so... so... unmagical. implies all sorts of icky moralistic things. the very idea! morals in stories. *looks sick* i'm rethinking this whole english major thing (and i haven't even ever seriously considered it-- well, not really....)

P.S. ~~amy lowell writes poetry that feels like silk on my skin. silk and moonlight. *smiles* greatpoets is a good thing, after all.

P.P.S. ~~one more reason why ztrin is frightening, she's so good-- kabuki! harry potter! kabuki! aack~:)

~~give me love, or give me a window....

i'm in love. and... it's not what you're thinking. it's not with harry-- or draco-- or anyone, really. that's alright. i'm in love with light.
    my room is dimly lit-- that's ok, i love having a room to myself, dim or not-- but. i want windows. huge, huge windows. i want a window taller than i am-- a french-door window-- on the third floor-- looking out onto a garden-- green, i want green. trees and grass and rustling in the wind and sighing in the darkness and flaming in the fall. i want to see the sun rise and set right in front of me as i write. i don't have a view, presently. that's alright, really, like i said-- it's not perfect but it's mine-- this view. but i miss it-- i used to live in a room on the third floor. so it didn't have huge windows-- but the sun streamed in all the same. and there was green outside-- and the room was just bathed, basked in light, every day. i didn't spend much time in it-- i didn't have my own computer, back then. so i just slept there. i was so stupid. did i get wiser? well. i thought i'd found happiness-- and i can't say i'd refuse it now-- i'm in love with light-- but i leave my love for lesser things. i want windows where the light lingers until late into the evening, spiralling little threads into my room, to write by. and then, the moonlight. and the starlight. everywhere i go, i look at windows-- stare at the bigger ones, completely entranced. so much more fascinating than mirrors, they are. like eyes. the world-- just makes more sense-- or maybe less sense, the more you see of it. and there's so much to see. and it's all-- bathed in light. i forget color-- and i forget words-- but i never forget light. it's sort of the source of story, to me, the source of my first curiosity. the visual world, so intricate and maze-like, and endless. endless levels of detail, of resolution. so intriguingly framed by glass. i'm well-suited for that-- for sitting still, and looking, for a long, long time. i love to walk-- but i don't have to. i can sit still, and just look outside through my huge glass window.

it horrifies me-- people spending their lives indoors, with these small windows-- or no windows. artificial light, and monitor-light, and cold, air-conditioned light. all of it seems like being locked up, in an asylum, and you can't even see the exit signs. i grew up in a city, you see. i spent most of my life in buildings. the only thing that makes life bearable in the city-- besides the sky, and the trees-- still strong, still comforting-- are the windows. i can only live in a city with huge, huge windows.
    yes. stories. yes. they keep me sane, yes. but somehow i associate the physical pleasure of reading, also, with light, with laying on my stomach on a bed by a window, feeling the sun hit my half-closed eyelids, feeling my back tingle with pleasure, my body buzzing in that only-half-awakeness that comes when you lie still for so long. that, or cuddled up on a huge old armchair, again by a window-- but there haven't been as many of those. i always had my bed, though. well, before i told my mother to throw it out, that is.

summer light, winter light, fall and spring light-- morning light, midday light, late afternoon light, moonlight-- i love them all. love is light that just finally found its way inside you.
~~

«We are all prisoners but some of us are in cells with windows and some without. »
~~kahlil.