I'm really talking about myself

Last night, drunk as I was, I tried to describe to someone how amazing it is that the theme of Dylan's newer work is usually love. I failed to convey this irony. How a man made famous for his cynicism, originality and skeptical, biting voice could at long last, with all he has tried, despite all his snake-skin layers of personae and insights has come around to the same obvious truths we all already know when we're children.

Listen to this tortured journey through confusion and disillusionment that he penned in his twenties. It's alright ma, I'm only bleeding. A letter back home describing the pain of living in a fucked up unexplainable world. He's so serious. He's so pained. I know what he means. My mind has exploded too. I've wandered out into the cold too. This song encapsulates for me the very thing that made this man inspire me in the first place. If you can feel it, you can say it.



Now listen to this. All these years later, lost as ever in the same wilderness he's no longer spitting fire at it. He's no longer needling through the threaded mess of the unknowable. He just wants a hand to hold while he wanders closer and closer toward the abyss. wow.

Storyteller's License

So, I had a party last night. Come nightfall, here gather some of the most interesting people in my life. A girl of unique energy and eyes that delicately watch everything handed me a book borrowed from the local library. She thought I might enjoy some "uncommon thoughts on common things."

Just then, an old friend of the Hills celebrated Bob Dylan's birthday with the touch of his finger to the Pandora app on his new ipod touch. "Mississippi." It was the song I had introduce Bob Dylan to him and two other close friends. It was some uncommon perspective on common things which I handed to them on the dock of a placid bay under the full moon of a sticky Florida night.

Sychronicity, perhaps.

So I figured to supplement the previous post on Orwell's advice on writing, I'd share with you an excerpt from a note of the author at the beginning of the book I was handed last night, "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" by Robert Fulghum:

"This license gives me permission to use my imagination in rearranging my expereince to improve a story, so long as it serves some notion of Truth. It also contains the Storyteller's Creed:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.
That myth is more potant than history.
That dreams are more powerful than facts.
That hope always triumphs over experience.
That laughter is the only sure for grief.
And I believe that love is stronger than death."

True gifts too seldom are given over the superficial, material tokens we exchange over holidays and special occassions. True gifts carry weight and meaning. I shared Dylan's "Mississippi" in hopes that it would be heard as something more than just a favorite song. I've accepted this book knowing it's more than just a good read.

Politics and the English Language

According to Orwell, the following habits pollute prose writing in English:

1) Dying Metaphors
2) Operators, or verbal false limbs
3) Pretentious diction
4) Meaningless words
---"Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality...are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so but the reader" (109).

Furthermore, Orwell writes that "The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness" (111) and that political language "has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness...Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them" (115)".

For serious writers looking to write clearly, concretely, and concisely, Orwell suggests to ask the following questions before writing:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
5. Could I put it more shortly?

And, most importantly:

6. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? (113)


Once again, Orwell proves he is ahead of his time!

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From Why I Write