Wulfwyn

They called her beautiful Wulfwyn 
She rode through deserts and streams
Named her beautiful Wulfwyn 
I met her in my dreams

Her father was the ruler of a kingdom 
He ruled the seven seas
He held the rain in his hand 
He controlled the windy breeze 

And she grew up on a mountain 
Riding horses in the wood 
She drinks from  golden fountains 
She wears the leaf green hood

But her father was struck down by an evil God 
Her father was killed by an evil lord
And Wulfwyn had to ride away , 
Wulfwyn had to cross the shore ....

Wulfwyn is a new character who came to me recently. I don't know much about her besides what is in the song there and also that her boots are leafy green too, to match the hood as its described there. She entered into the most recent story I'm scribbling when I had two of my other characters hanging around trying to make it through a place called the Scorched Lands. I'm not sure if she is going to wind up being good or evil. Maybe a bit of both. At the moment she has sort of taken control of the tale and led the characters safely out of the Scorched Lands to a magic Tower some miles away. I'm thinking I might...I almost want to say I want to have her kill my main character thus far (a half elf named Carviel) and then maybe steal the entire rest of the story; but I am also a little attached to the half elf so I don't think I will do that. Instead I think I might have Wulfwyn reveal some sort of massive secret. Like maybe she is a far more powerful magic user than she let on to be and she is, who knows, being chased by an evil God within the universe of the book. I think I'm going to make Wulfwyn good....

"Over mountains far and wide 
I carry thee my fairest bride
Through the Dreadlands high and low
Here we are and there we go 
Look into the Crystal light
See me dance in the dark of night
Hold my hand and I'll swing you high
Never ever say goodbye."

Song of Sorrow

I don't remember where I met her,
I just remember her face
She was the prettiest girl I've ever seen
She had the prettiest taste

She wa born south down in deep Kentucky
but she came up north,
and she used to sing these songs
that brought the angels forth

Her father was in New Orleans
he was doing hard time
The judge gave him a thousand years
and one of his eyes was blind,

She said to me he murdered someone,
did it with a knife
Stuck a blade through some rich mans throat
took a rich mans life,

When i asked her why it happened
all that she said
was that the bastard had tried to rape her
and so her father had killde him dead

but the father he had no money
so the judge went and laid a curse
and then everything in her life
went from bad to worse

but she was the prettiest woman
that i think ive ever seen
she used to sing these golden songs
make me feel like i was in a dream

and when she disappeared
i just sat down and cried
cause i knew that day when she was gone
that a part of me die

Continued thoughts on fantasy writing in the modern age

Ernest Hemingway might seem like the furthest author to take note from when one goes about writing fantasy, since everything he wrote was exclusively set in reality ( or perhaps some sort of dream sequence) but one thing I have found very interesting when it comes to the Hemingway "mode of writing" when it comes to attempting fantasy is that, instead of trying to take most of my inspiration from solely other novels, one thing I've tried to do is to pull a 'sort of' Hemingway by instead taking the inspiration from adventures I actually had once upon a time, not in reality, but rather in the virtual reality of the big fantasy games.

 This might, at first, sound utterly ridiculous to some - I don't know - I suppose to me it sounds sort of absurd - but what has shocked me most about the experience is actually just how difficult it is to try and explain certain scenes I experienced whilst playing some very good games, in writing. 

Take the scene featured in this video I am watching now, which features about 50 or so players in the virtual world of EverQuest, all simultaneously trying to kill a massive red dragon, in some sort of huge castle, called Lord Nagafen. At first glance, there is really nothing that looks all that impressive about the video just as a viewer, especially considering the fact that the graphics are now something like 20 years old. But, if one takes just a second and tries, in their minds eye, to transform the shoddy old computer graphics into what this scene of 50 epic players attempting to slay a dragon might look like in a film, or better yet, in actual reality, I can't help but feel that one is suddenly given a very incredible and imaginative vision that is well worth writing about, and certainly compares to anything that Hemingway would have written of his own real adventures in a hunting book like the Green Hills of Africa...

 It is also, of course, quite challenging to write about, and more than that, something that has seemingly never been written of before, oddly enough.

 For, I don't know about you, but I have been through a number of fantasy books, and yet I still can't think of a single scene that even comes anywhere close to the imaginary madness that is 50 separate characters all trying to slay one dragon. 

This, of course, is probably as a result of the fact that most books are generally written from the point of view of one character, and they are very bogged down,much of the time, with endless obsessions over plot, and theme, and whatever that specific character may or may not be thinking. This is especially the case in the world of literature that some big wig and highly critical magazine like the New Yorker might find worthy of praising on Sunday morning. Hence it is the case that, though I am sure many dragon slaying scenes exist in novels, something tells me that a great deal of them tend to just deal with one or two or maybe a small group of characters attacking them. There is never this enormous gathering that takes place, because in a certain sense, it really is very difficult to gather that many people in one book. In a video game world, of course, this isn't at all the case. Characters are literally running around everywhere. And I mean everywhere. They enter in and they leave often with no warning. They're actually more like reality than most books, oddly enough. 

 Sometimes, for example, some random elf might just be sitting by the entrance of a dragons cave somewhere, and you see them before you enter, and they randomly decide to toss you a certain Cloak of Good Light or some such thing. The cloak may very well change the entire rest of your gaming experience. Hell, it might even be the only reason you go on playing for the rest of the winter, because it was such a high level item that it gave you the ability to slay everything with ease, et cetera...

How many times, however, does something as random as that really happen in fantasy books or books at all for that matter? In my opinion, not very often, and I think this is a part of the reason we have seen such a mass exodus from the literary realm into things like television or, now, multiplayer video games. I think the leaving behind of literature by the commoners has much more to do with a lack of excitement and randomness in stories, rather than it does with the challenge of reading them. And I think Hemingway was seeing this massive problem even all those years ago when he was trying to write. I think he was sitting there reading a lot of books from his contemporaries and he was absolutely bored to tears, because all they were ever describing were either the interior lives of their characters, and their love life or something, or maybe they were describing rather dry subjects, like how a President kept order in the White House, or how someone ran their house, or was trying to start a business. Or of course they go on and on with this dialogue describing how a family came to be, or then to fall, etc. 

Look at some of the most popular books of the 1930s (Hemingways time) and you'll start to see what I am saying: There is I, Claudius by Robert Graves, which at first glance seems like it might be a fun romp through Ancient Rome, but is one of the most dreadful slogs I've ever endured, all about some family and their interior problems, then there is something like The Grapes of Wrath, which yes it is a great book, but is again so filled with this obsession of plot and "reaching somewhere". Finally we have another one like Brave New World from Huxley - which is another absolute classic - but is deeply concerned with introducng us to some whole new place, where everything gets unusually complicated and every description has to be the most enormous undertaking, etc. Then there is even the Hobbit by Tolkien himself  -- which you think I would praise -- but even in the Hobbit, nothing random really happens. Everything is dreadfully sequenced, put in order, organized, and this idea of a destination is endlessly harped over. Nobody ever just swings a hammer into some magic evil gooses head, and grabs a pair of golden eggs it drops, and then runs off happily, to do it again, or to maybe steal a sword and then just start raiding random places.  It always has to be some insanely advanced thing with some ultimate "meaning". Then the people turn around and wonder: why don't the commoners read us?  

In other words, Hemingway, though he is known as the realest of the real writers, actually sort of pursued a fantastical style of writing in the only way that was available to him at that time. In my opinion, though he still obeyed a lot of rules, he did somewhat deviate and throw convention to the wind in a way these other writers did not do.  He went to the jungle in Africa to hunt, after all, and many of his early stories deal with fishing, and just sort of sitting out there, wandering arond near lakes in the woods, and catching the most random fish. No one has to come to some enormous conclusion about life, no one has to figure out a theme, they are just out there catching random fish, and often they are the most beautiful scenes I've ever read from him. So you see, he didn't write of dragons, but he wrote of an exciting and random hunt all the same, and many random characters often enter in, in a way they don't in many "high class" literary novels.

 It's all about the randomness, you see. The lack of this aspect is what, I'm convinced, is killing so many modern books, and especially these older ones, for people. People want excitement and real adventure. Both of these things do not involve casts of characters or themes or the ever present plot that insists all novels must "go somewhere" or "wind up somewhere, eventually". We are still very much trapped and very deeply concerned with these uber organized styles of writing the old writers were obsessed with. In my opinion, the umbilical cord needs to be cut.  

So this brings me back to trying to write the scene with the 50 characters trying to kill a dragon, and why it doesn't really exist in many books: Writers couldn't figure out a way to work it into their intolerable plot, and so it has never got the chance to get written. If the writer had somehow found a way to work it into the insufferable plot -- which I think is the great killer of so much creavitiy -- we would probably see this scene, and many others like it, continually. But writers literally, solely because of plot, don't allow themselves these "one off sketches" oftentimes. The start of books always have to revolve around us being introduced to the cast, and then from there we often have to follow them through a series of movements that "get them somewhere", and so 50 random people slaying a dragon never manages to get worked in, because who would all those other 46 people be? 

Everything, and I cannot figure out why, but everything with writers always seems like it has to be about this enormous all encompassing picture, and if a scene doesn't work its way into that plot and that picture, it has to be scrapped. It cannot be included. Cannot! 

Think though of how much we have lost due to this obsession that, for the most part, only the school teachers, the New Yorker magazine writers, and the literary professors are responsible for. Think about how many scenes so many common writers will never allow themselves to write just because they don't know what scene might come after it, or what scene come before it. Think about the scope of how many random characters most common writers will never allow to enter into their stories, because stories need to have a "specific cast" and they are convinced that every character needs an endlessly specific purpose and that we must know them down to the pair of underwear they are wearing. No one ever seems to just pass in and out of  the traditionally laid out novels. You talk to a fish merchant, and he has to lead you somewhere. He can't just say good morning. 

 I can't stress it enough: all the characters are always lifers...they're in the book for the whole ride, or they are not there at all.  You would never in a million years, like I said with that elf in that cave before, just get handed off a random cloak that helps you slay everything, by a character who then disappeared completely from the text with no explanation whatsoever. In a book,this act would, for some reason, feel strange, and perhaps the writer would be accused of actually creating something "that doesn't seem real". Yet, in video games, or even in reality, things like this happen literally constantly. 

For example, a typical night in the wilds of EverQuest (since slaying dragons only happens for the experts) usually involves nothing but fun randomness: You will be sitting at the base of the dungeon, looking around for other characters, hoping someone shows up, then you might find a high level magician who is willing to go into the dungeon with you, and when you get into the dungeon you suddenly find two high level warriors who join the party, and the next thing you know you go on for a full night of six hours slaying everthing in sight in the dungeon. Then at one in the morning you count your treasure and you go to sleep. No plot. No goal. No intense discovery of God or some life. Nothing of the sort has happend to the character, beyond just one single good hunt.  In a book, this thing cannot be. Those two random high level characters who entered would have to meet the guy again tomorrow. They would have to become his best friends, or his traitors. They would have to adventure with him further. Something would have to be found in the dungeon that ruined everything or spun the characters out into something further. And I just can't fathom why I suppose? Why do we find things that don't come to some great big conclusion worthless to write about? When oftentimes those things are actually the best of all? 

Just some food for thought. 

 

Americans the Incapable

How my Best friends American College experience was the first thing that taught me the Americans are half-assed intellectuals at most

My best friend in high school was largely the exact opposite of me, and I always kind of thought that I kept him around back then just because I needed something to remind me of what I actually always liked, which was reading and history, even though I felt I could not personally pursue those things in an American academic setting, due to how much I always - to put it simply - despised high school, and especially middle school teachers.

 I was that odd child with no place in the conformist world that is the horrifically empty American country: I loved to read and to write, but I did not like to wear polo shirts, or play football, or even to discuss football, and so I was condemned as a hater of God and man, and made to be a social outcast. As a result of my anger over this, I essentially failed everything.

 My best buddy was essentially the same, except that he somehow managed to avoid ruining his grades. He was an outcast in high sschool with good grades. He also did not like sports.
He was a different sort of outcast entirely; but I quite enjoyed him, mostly because he was one of the smartest individuals I had ever had chance to meet in an otherwise vapid and utterly clueless American town. When he got into college, I imagined he would become an even bigger, and better, intellectual, than he already was. It never occurred to me in a million years that college could possibly send him in another direction. I thought the threat of conformity was just coming to an end, when high school did. I always worried about him, because he would often let peoples comments get the best of him (on the rare occasion he was exposed to others in HS) and I really believed he would be safe in college. When he left to go off to it, I wasn't,  or at least I don't recall being, the slightest bit worried. I thought he'd come home a far more gifted intellectual; and I couldn't wait for what he would teach me (as in high school he had often taught me a lot he would learn in his various AP classes, etc).

I was horrifically mistaken. The Americans never cease to ruin things for people, and what they did to my friend in college was nothing short of mortifying. For it was essentially as though everything they couldn't do to him in high school, with their dumb fucking jock game, they somehow managed to make up for once he was at college. He returned to me the literal first winter after leaving a completely changed person: his hair was cut , he was lifting weights,wearing polo shirts that said "American Eagle" on them, discussing football and canoeing, and his favorite band had ceased to be the Misfits, and had suddenly become Phish. He, in other words, had become an ultra conformist. The Americans got him. They hooked him. They set off an atom bomb just like they did in Hiroshima, except this one was in my boys head.

Meanwhile, of course, I was left to watch and wonder for many years: What, exactly, had happened here? How did they manage to do it? Well, though at first it didn't make the slightest bit of sense to my young self, I quickly came to understand it once the years had passed and I looked at it in retrospect: Of course the Americans destroyed him as an intellectual, and turned him into a jock, when he want to college, in a way that they couldn't do when he wa smerely in high school. After all, he actually had to go and live on a great big campus once he was at college, and since he went to a sort of small and contained college, the conformity level of it all must have been absolutely deranged (and from stories he told me, where the senior frats made him strip and hazed him, it indeed was).

 He himself, you see, was ,I think, traumatized by the entire event (he started drugging and drinking more than ever, and nearly committed suicide in his 5th year) but he also didn't really know how to feel about it, I don't think, just like I didn't, because...well, if he wanted to become a bigger intellectual, and trust me he was really such a good one before he went, isn't this the exact place he had to go?

So one would think that it was indeed the exact place he had to go. Until of course one turns around, years later, and realizes that Europeans, who actually are posh intellectuals and who have done infinitely more philosophizing than the hayseed Americans (who cannot do much of anything besides import foreign people to create technology for them in California) do not engage even slightly with "sleep over campus culture" when it comes time to go to college, in one of their majestic European cities.

 They just commute there, perhaps on an evil thing called a bicycle, and maybe, if they have money, or their parents do, they live somewhere near the university building in an apartment that is probably filled more iwth regular citizens, rather than insane collegiates whom one has to seek to be accepted by, and kiss the toes of ,etcetera. No one in Europe waltzes around forcing you to strip down and get hazed your freshman year. No one plays those pathetic American campus drinking games where one must drink six 40 ounces of booze in two hours or John the Football Slave will knock you out. No one gets a chance to rape the ass of naive 18 year old girls who just moved to campus, and then of course no Vice President Biden has to cry about it (which has in fact occurred here).

When I discovered this all of course, about the Europeans, after witnessing my friend descend from being a confident intellectual into someone who now does little more than try, obsessively, to keep polo shirts clean and make sure his arms are big, and who seems deeply ashamed about his entire intellectual high school past (because in America being able to read means you are, in short, a dick sucking faggot) I was aghast with shock and awe.

The reason why ought be obvious: I realized instantly that, had my best pal been in Europe, he never would have been ferociously wiped down with this weird campus cult thing that he came home iwth that first winter, and then ever afterwards. Had he been in Europe, where people can actually think straight, and where universities began, he probably would have kept on going more or less just as he had been in high school: In other words, he would have delved even further into intellectualism, he probably would have stayed a little socially awkward (and it would have been for the better), and he also wouldn't have ever become so obsessed with this wretched polo shirt wearing football bullshit.  Alas, he was in the Country of the Hayseeds and the Southern Football Baptists, and so in order to pursue an education he had to high tail it , first, out of our entire state, leaving all he knew behind, and secondly, he had to go live on this obnoxious campus where, because he was so awkward and shy etc, he was broken almost instantly by vicious sons of bitches who made him feel so badly about himself that he came back not just a different person, but also, quite frankly, a broken person who was never again the same.

For the honest truth is that the kid I knew who left all those years ago at 18 to go to the dirty American college campus, that kid was an intellectual who I never saw again. The kid who came back returned with a mask on his face, and it was glued on with super glue, maybe even bolt or sewn right into his flesh. He never got it off. And sadly, it pretty much seems he still can't...

So that is my story of how I came to learn that the Americans are only half-assed intellectuals. For, you see,if they were full intellectuals, they would know, just like Europeans know, that sleep over campus culture is full of shit, and not good for studies.

But alas, the Americans like to rape one another and play football and they must, oh god they must, play those drinking games. And so on it goes...

Michael Moorcock and Fantasy

So I just got done reading a rather discouraging (and certainly rather old) comment from the fantasy author Michael Moorcock - 77 years of age as I write this -- in regards to the fantasy genre, where he said something along the lines of "...if I were a young writer now, I would not even go anywhere near fantasy. For when I got started with it, it was a young genre and, much like rock and roll, it hadn't really been created yet. So you could do your own thing with it..."

I must say,since I do dearly love Moorcock's tales of Elric of Melnibone, and often skim through them when in need of inspiration,  I do find his comments very debilitating, but at the same time I also find them somewhat ironic (I think that would be the word) if only because, well, even here in 2017, guess what? One of the big reasons I took to the fantasy genre recently, after many and I mean many years of utterly ignoring it (basically since I was a teenager) was basically for the precise reason Moorcock claims to have taken to it all that time ago in his youth: The genre actually still feels young, and in many ways, hardly touched, depending upon which angle you look at it from.

 To Moorcock of course, I suppose this would seem ridiculous, since he has, over the course of his life, watched the fantasy genre go from a little seed of a few scattered books and fairy tales, to something that now *seems* rather all encompassing with blockbuster films, video games, a wide variety of books, action figures at Toys R'US, and certainly TV shows, et cetera. And all of that is true...the fantasy genre has certainly grown exponentially over the years, and it definitely has far more of a mainstream flavor. Significantly more. Many, many people, especially in the west, are definitely very aware of all of this stuff now. It's not a secret anymore.

Still though, in many respects, the genre does actually remain fairly untouched in my opinion, if only because, when you really look at it, it is not actually as mainstream as it seems. The fact of the matter is that most of these characters have yet to be taken seriously still (notice how most mainstream actors don't really play wizards) and I personally am of the belief that pushing characters like Elric of Melnibone and others into a mainstream sphere is just as much of an interesting battle as initially creating them ,in Moorcock's time, must have been. There is also something else I think, which is this: Many of the early fantasy stories were horrifically trapped in a sort of "medieval" prison of sorts (i.e. the men had to be chivalrous or the women had to be in long robes etc.)

Now Moorcock did, in fact, do a lot of pushing forward with this, which is one of the reasons I began to read him (as Elric of Melnibone takes drugs, and is not necessarily chivalrous) but it still doesn't change the fact that even Elric is more than a bit bound by a type of convention that Moorcock, writing largely in the 70s and 80s, simply couldn't have gotten him out of at the time.

One thought that occurs to me continually whenever I read or think about fantasy tales, especially those written in the past, is the manner in which, though you can't see the time period in which they were written painted all over them (like you can if you read,say,  a mafia story from the 70s) you can still see it once you actually look close enough, and this is really why I think it is actually more important than ever that something like the fantasy genre not just be randomly abandoned now that we are at a point where we have a heavy shelf filled with fantasy books behind us, from the past. Moorcock is essentially shaming the modern, young writer with his statement, acting as though, just because there is a wider and more significant foundation to fantasy now, and thus more to work with and less to single handedly create, one shouldn't be bothered with it. This is ridiculous, however.

 For the real truth is that a writer should rejoice at how the bookshelf is filling up and getting heavier. I don't believe it should be looked at as a damning thing. It should instead be looked at as a saving grace. If we were to follow Moorcock's philosophy, we would have to create a new genre every five years. We would also have had to cease writing stories set in actual reality tens of thousands of years ago, since those obviously have nothing original about them. Therefore I can't help but wonder: Since you wouldn't have done fantasy, what would you have done, exactly? What other genre would you, in your great genius, have possibly created? And would you also abandon that genre the second three other people were writing in it? It doesn't make any sense.

There is also the additional fact that Moorcock, as good as some of his Elric stories are, really isn't as "original" as he perhaps falsely  seems to think he is. Put simply, the guy wasn't working with as new of a genre as he seems to want to lead people to believe he was. This is the biggest and most curious fact of all with fantasy writing: In a certain sense, though it is new to literature, it isn't actually new in terms of world history. For, you see, by the time he came around in the late 60s or early 70s, fantasy had already been something that, again, though it wasn't really being written of in many novels that the New Yorker would want to review, was definitely available to the scholar who was studious enough to head backwards in time and read of almost literally any folklore or fairy tale that history had to offer. Fantasy tales have always been around; you merely had to know where to look for them. The only thing thats really changed in our time is that now serious artists feel like they can pursue them in very long winded novels without being laughed out of the room. In a sense, fantasy is really taking a similar leap to something like - and you'll find this shocking - cross dressing. In the 1950s, nobody was going to be caught dead cross dressing. Now its a serious political debate that people cannot wait to discuss and participate in and start nightclubs around, etc. The characters are beginning to invade new and ever more glorious rooms. They're escaping the "ghetto".

Alas, this all sort of reminds me of an argument I had recently with someone who tried to tell me that RA Salvatore "invented" the dark elves single handedly. It sounds like a silly argument to be having, I know...but it's annoying because, well, RA Salvatore did not invent dark elves, German folklore did, and they were originally called the 'dokkalfar'. RA Salvatore did an extraordinary job taking the dark elf myth to the modern idea of a novel, and then successfully popularized that novel in many circles; what he did there was fantastic; but it still doesn't change the fact that the idea that he "invented" them is an absurdity. But so too of course wuld the idea that JRR Tolkien invented the elves, the wizards, the idea of small men with hairy feet, and these other things, be an absolute absurdity - and yet I am sure many people believe just that, since the idea of the folklore has been all but lost in our modern day.

People look at the Lord of the Rings and Game of the Thrones as though they are these masterful inventions that have never existed outside of the minds of the two authors who created them, and this is, in my opinion, dreadfully annoying, especially in terms of Game of Thrones, which is really just a story of kings and queens doing what real kings and queens did in the Dark Ages. In fact, much of Martin's inspiration is said to have come from an actual historical event which you can see in the White Queen from Starz, an event called 'the War of the Roses'. To me, watching Game of Thrones is often akin to watching literally any Shakespeare play I've seen a million times before. I'm not fathoming the great originality the masses are seeing; because I have read the **real** history of this all that the author has, I suppose you could say, stolen.

The truth when it comes to myself and the fantasy genre is that men like Moorcock, Tolkien and George Martin, as interesting and skilled as they all are, simply weren't enough to push *me* personally into the genre, and neither was the modern counterculture or pop culture/Comic Con thing, as cool as it is, either. For whatever reason, perhaps arrogance, I do not know, I needed some other sort of foundation to exist in my head in order to convince myself that fantasy was worth writing, and ironically my reason is the exact opposite of Moorcocks: I am deeply invigorated by the fact that these tales actually, in some form or other, go back thousands upon thousands of years. and have deep traditions all around them.

 I am not disturbed by it, nor do I think it is a reflection on my lack of "originality". I am actually invigorated and intrigued by it, and it makes the tales that much mor interesting -- and more mysterious -- to me. It connects me to an old line and makes me feel like I am not just working with some stupid thing that, you know, only gets sold at Wal-Mart for a season, and then finds itself in the bargain bin. For most people, Lord of the Rings seems as though it was some silly trend that belonged solely to the early 00s at this point, and the same thing can be said for Moorcock's novels, if we are to apply the sort of rules he wants to apply to it saying what he is about young writers. We would have to trap Elric of Melnibone as a part of a silly early 70s trend, instead of letting him breathe as a single part of a huge and very long line of fantasy storytelling that stretches back thousands of years before him, and shall stretch on thousands of years after him, and after World of Warcraft is gone, and another game arrived,  as well.

Hence, you see, fantasy actually serves and helps to inspire me, just like it would seem it did George Martin, to simultaneously thumb through old Dark Age history as I go about trying to craft my stories. I enjoy plucking freely from these old things, and trying to spin them as best as I can in new ways....

 With Moorcock, however, it is almost as though he is saying he wouldn't want to work with the mythology of the elves just because they are, well, mythological and date back thousands of years. Are you not going to include mountains in your stories either then? Strawberries? Plants? Rivers? Streams? Horses? Dogs? Swords? I mean, again, going by this criteria, you would have to rip up everything, as nothing could possibly be "original" enough.

Absurd.

-- signing off

Songs

Do you know the troubadour? 
Do you know th emagic?
Do you know the tales of Turambar?
Stories oh so tragic... 

Do you know the dark black gates?
That lead to the deep?
Do you know the fallen Queen?
locke in a death sleep? 

chorus

Do you know the golden staff?
That the sorceror Zenfire wields?
D you know of the men of Rohan
with their swords and shields?

Do you see the dreams at night?
The fire and the flame,
Do you believe in the Dark Lord? 
Will you say his name? 

chorus

And have you heard of the cleric ome?
With her magic spells that heal?
would u swear by moon and sun?
that all these things were real?

Cna you count amongst the stars?
can you feel the air? 
come with me into the dream
I will meet you there

The Ballad of Italia

I'm goin to Milano when the sun shines,
I'll be in Rome, in the suummetime,
I'll be stoppin in Florence , and sweet Venice too
Napoli, I never could forget you...

I think I'll paint me a picture like Botticelli,
I could maybe make me a Caravaggio,
You know what they call me down by the Spanish Steps?
They call me the Great Michelangelo

oh Im goin back to italy againx 3
im gettin the hell out of here my friends

Well you know I love drinkin me my good wine
And all the best comes from Tuscaneeee
So im headin out in the morning on that big airplane
And I hope you'll never again see me

Sword Thrower poem

Watch him As he throws his sword
And it pierces through the flesh 
He's killed three orcs! And he'll kill three more
Now tell me what comes next?
He'll travel on to the Forgotten Lands
He'll bring his lady fair
They'll smoke the herb and drink the wine
And then move on from there 

There are creatures lurking underground
Whom he seeks to end
He shall travel to the deep deep west
Where he has few friends
And on and on he will shoot his bow
On and on he will sing
On and on he will fight and battle 
Soaring on the frozen wing 

For he is the sword thrower
And you shall hear him scream 

The Jewels

The Silver earrings of the adamanrels
The bards gonna find them... 
Her mother used to dream about them
Her father, he used to scream about them
The silver earrings of the adamanrels

Here is a short little song I came up with yesterday afternoon on my piano. Recently I've found that as I'm going about writing a lot of my stories I'll actually click out of the word processor for a moment, when inspiration seems lost, and I'll try instrad to lift the tale over my piano a bit, and sing it, just to see what I get then, and it is actually yielding some interesting results. Tolkien of course did this often while he would write the various Rings books, and I do think it may have contributed to him reaching the end, as if you read his letters you'll see he often actually suffered to plow through. At any rate, what I find so interesting is the fact that, though this song is only 4 lines, it basically contains an entire book, if not a trilogy, right there within it. Incredible really....

Pouring Rain poem

When the rain comes, and the wind it blows
There are faces in the window of the ladies you know
And when the rain comes,& the wind it screams
We sit by the fire and we tell of our dreams

Oh when the rain pours, the old man snores
The children come inside,& we shut the doors
The fisherman and sailors, come sailing to shore
And we all love each other a little bit more

This piece is preferably to be sung with a mandolin; but the bard who is making an attempt can also try a lute if necessary.

Ireland and Mars

They say they're gonna go to Mars now
They say they're gonna go past the stars
And oh, you know, well here we are
We're still in Ireland

We never became Americans
We never became Englishmen
Now we won't be Martians
We're still in Ireland

Could you build a Galway on Mars now?
Could you build a sweet Belfast?
Could you build a Dublin on Mars now?
How dare you even ask!

Well some things you just can't replace
& the Emerald Isle puts a smile on my face
Oh some things you just can't remake
No matter how much money or men you take

They say they're gonna go to Mars now
They say they're gonna go past the stars
And oh, you know, well here we are
We're still in Ireland

We never became Americans
We never became Englishmen
Now we won't be Martians
We're still in Ireland

Poetry

I walked through the Forest of Arden, 
I knew me the Lady Anne,
It was I who put the rings of lightning
On queen Elizabeth's hand
And it was I who walked through the hillside
And gave birth to Tanelorn
It was I who created the kingdom
And I was here when the world was born

And I rode through the realms of evil 
And I raised my fair white Staff 
I sailed across the Golden Sea 
And i saw my face in the Looking Glaass
I once kissed the Duchess 
The duchess of fair Nirthiel
And I heard the Devils of darkness 
When they cast their foul old spells

And now I'm making haste for Gryffin
Cause in Gryffin the sun grows strange
I'll tear through the wind like fire 
I'll find out whose to blame 
I'll ride with my fair companions 
I'll wear my magic boots of red
And when I find the wicked ones 
I'll shear off their head 

Writing Advice Class

Want to know a good way to stay inspired as a writer when you are struggling with some sort of block? Here is the best advice I can give you, and it's the same that I, at times, constantly still have to remind myself with: Start a new story. Or, if not that,  start a new style of writing. You'll be surprised how much it helps you. Not just to find new ideas that you might play with for an hour or two -- but also to do something else that is, sometimes, even more important, for an aspiring scribbler: It will help you stay posted in front of the keyboard, and this is the biggest key of all.

Put simply, one thing I wish someone had told me years ago, when i first started writing, was that, when one is writing a long work, like a novel, one will often experience major blocks because, well, as a novel goes on and on, there are many different directions you can take the story in, and what winds up happening is that, as it gets longer and longer, the text also gets more and more precious (since you are investing further time in it, etc) and so, in my experience, novels often tend to sort of come to a halt at times, where you eventually want to step away from the keyboard after a scene, and really give the next scene thought. You do this because now you don't want to accidentally ruin a text that is good, and trust me, sometimes, in my experience, if you go too fast and push too hard, you will accidentally destroy a good text. Hence you start to get weary of your own manuscript and you force yourself to really think through each scene. Thinking isn't a bad thing but of course time spent thinking is often not spent at the keyboard, and so what happens is you drift off into this place where you might feel "blocked", since you will notice your word count lessen.

 In my opinion, however, it isn't a legitimate writers block one is feeling here. It's really just a block for that one specific story. I did not totally grip this years ago,of course, and so what would happen is I would often start to feel so disappointed in myself for losing track of one tale after, say, a month of ferocious work on it, that I would feel like a "loser" and a bad writer -- and what would happen next but that I would actually then maybe not write for a few months (1) and devote myself to something totally different. This , of course, no longer happens to me. Because I eventually came to understand the manner in which I think many novels are actually written 'behind the scenes' ,and what I firmly believe is that a great many of them are added to here and there. I really believe this, especially because I have followed a number of interviews with best selling authors - or just read their memoirs - and it seems to me that they use the same method I was using even when I was younger....but the difference was that I did not realize what I was doing, and they did. I.e. I thought I was a failure for running out of steam after a month and slipping a half finished work into a drawer, and they just slipped it into the drawer and started a new work, and then when that new work was half finished, they went back to the old one! Get it?

I believe it was Jim Morrison who once said that "art is never really finished; it is only abandoned". Well, no where does this theory of Morrison's apply more than when it comes to novel writing, methinks, because novel writing is so clearly the world of beginnings and endings, and so many times we writers , I think, tend to forget to think like readers, instead. And the real truth about readers is that - as demanding as they can be - they oftentimes take what they are given and do not really say much ,in my honest opinion. Truth be told, most readers do not analyze texts nearly as much as certain places on the Internet would have you think they do, which is to say that, oftentimes, even if a novel has a rather cruddy ending, or maybe even if it has a completely implausible beginning that makes next to no sense (and which I, as a writer, woul endlessly stress over) readers tend to just take it for what it is.

They, as a rule, tend to never really dwell on anything nearly as much as the author does. This should come as obvious but often does not. I, for one, on the occasion that I have jumped into some authors texts trying to see with an "authors eye" instead of a readers eye...have often been surprised at what I have felt I probably would have deleted in my own stories. Writers are always reading and re-reading their own manuscript. So you naturally tend to really dwell on each and every line.

And I think a lot of this leads to authors getting blocked because, believe it or not, but sometimes you might even already have written the ending to your story...without even realizing it. The reason you do not want to accept it as the ending, of course, is because, in the first place, you weren't warned that it was coming (since you don't see the pages of the paperback running out) and , in the second place, you know, as a writer, that you could still go on, if only you wanted. The reader of course doesn't know this. They see the end and that is it, it is the end. They don't sit and say "what is this guy doing? He should have written 20,000 more words at least." No. They just take it for what it is -- and then guess what many of them probably do?

They throw the book down on the floor - that's right! - and then they pick up another one and get started with a whole new story right away. And there of course is that other little thing readers do that, like I'm saying, writers ought to do too: Throw the manuscript you've been working on for the past 3 months on the floor, and start another one, just like you would start another book. Don't take it so seriously. Look at it just like you probably look at all those books scattered all around your residence. Allow yourself to escape it and start something new.  You certainly have done this before with your reading right? You've picked up a story at the store...read the first two pages..you put it down..you start another... then another. Take that approach with writing - at least sometimes -- and you might not believe what you find.

Kim Bonney interview

It may sound hard to believe to some ...still sounds hard to believe for me, but I went to see Kim Bonney the other day, at her property in Tallahassee, and I actually got in the door.

When her boyfriend opened it (he went unnamed) I almost thought I could have fainted. I'm like so many others out ther, from the new wave generation: I grew up reading Bonneys works damn near obsessively. I read about her escapades in California, and Hawaii, and then of course the great deal of time she spent in Rome, as a famous expatriate. And of course back then , reading her, if you wild have told me I would one day meet her , I would have told you you were a lunatic. But now it's happened. I not only met Kim Bonney ; I actually got into her house. It was in...well, if you've ever read a Bonney book then you'll know how much chaotic disarray they're often in. The house was the same way. Just like the books. Every room told a different story...some ended faster than others.

Running a search on my iPhone before arriving I came to find out that Bonneys house in tallahasse is worth almost $4 million. That's not including the new updates. It's a great deal for a girl who was born during the Great Recession in one of this country's hardest cities. Yet of course Bonney has always had a good head on her shoulders. When she was just 17for instance she famously read the book Across the Lake and into the sky, by Sarah Perez, and the moment she was done with it she began typing it herself...in order to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece.

I sat with Kim in her backyard and that was where the two of us talked, woman to woman. Kim was dressed in an outfit that seemed like it could have been out of her books: she had on little pink glow in the dark Timberland boots, one of her famous Scottish plaid skirts, a very clean looking sort of black and golden Gucci button down (roses on it, in gold) and her hair was pulled back into a long - very long -- ponytail that fell down her back . She was wearing a fitted baseball cap , the brim folded, dedicated to the Brooklyn Nets (whom Kim has been photographed a few times watching at Barclays Arena) . Joining us were a few people who live with Kim at her house, two younger looking 20 something girls who sat in total silence just staring at Kim (dressed in Scottish plaid too) and then a number of men (none of whom seemed to own shirts) who kept coming in and out of the hiuse, asking kim if she needed anything et cetera.

Occasionally during the interview kim would have one of the men sit down in her chair, and shed sit on his lap, or she'd have them stand behind her and massage her back & shoulders...her head and her hair ....at one point she even asked me (and I'm not making this up, it'd be defamation) but at one point she even asked me to hold a second to continue the interview, as she pulled a mans shorts off, and jerked him off, until he came. It was very strange. Hardly a sound was made. She directed his cum towards a garden of gorgeous scarlet begonias, and then licked the little that was left off with a wide smile on her face. She did allow me to take a photograph; but the magazine won't let me publish it unfortunately . I asked them: What did you really expect from Kim Bonney? The photo is now in my living room on my mantle; Kim was nice enough to autograph it. She wrote : "Kimberly Gina Bonney" and then she drew a pink rose & a red heart. I was practically on the verge of tears....

Of course you do not want to know about my fan girl love for Kim, you want to know about what she told me, specifically in regards to her next book Pink Wonderland , which is scheduled for release in late December, and then you probably want to know further details about the next book of hers (now the 5th) that they're adapting to film, Bonneys Heart , Due in theaters nationwide just a week from now. Well where to begin? I think maybe one of the first things I can tell you is that Kimberly seemed to be just as excited about both of the projects as any of us out here. In my own way I was shocked at this , since Ivr so often heard reports & tall tales about how Kim is so "indifferent" to her art, in the same way that she's "indifferent" to the men, and even her own children. But she was not indifferent at all here. Not at all. The comversatio began  with me giving her a compliment on the opening story in the Pink Wonderland collection, which is just called Jenny Whites Palace. I told her how Jenny White was probably one of the most vivid characters she had given me kn years...which is saying something since all of Kims characters are intensely vivid.

KB: well I'm glad to hear that. As you can imagine, she was quite fun to write. Very fun . The closing scenes of the story especially. It took me awhile to decide if I was sure it should be the first story a reader finds when they open Pink Wonderland, but ultimately one of my girls made me realize it was the only way, it had to be. Jenny is...very unique.

IN: I feel like the general theme of Jenny's story is about her overcoming her fear of sex.

KB: absolutely, overcoming both her fear of sex and also her fear of the dreams she keeps having, when she falls asleep at night. As Jenny's Creator, I wanted her to understand that the dreams were there to stay, and she had to embrace them, or else! (Laughs)

IN: I noticed that, like so many of your favorite characters whom you want to stand out for your readers, you had a scene where Jenny, sadly,  doesn't ever get to put on the plaid skirt, but she does go out for the walk in the snow, at the end, with a plaid scarf wrapped around her, looking for the men who will....

KB: (laughing) embArassed to say it? Don't be, sweetie, please: the men who will finally gang fuck her into Paradise.

IN: Yes. It was unbelievable, the way you wrote that scene, some of your best work ever- truly. Well, do you think you could again explain the significance of the plaid for your readers? It's widely known of course in certain circles but perhaps some are still out there who might not know. Especially younger readers of the magazine now , who just turned 18 and got access, and who might be just becoming familiar with your work.

KB: of course! The Scottish plaid for me has always been, since I was 18, an incredibly incredibly erotic outfit for me, no matter if it's a scarf, or a shirt, or a skirt like this one I'm wearing now, due to the time I did in Saint Cloud.

IN: One year and a half, correct?

KB: that's right. And the man who saved my life, and kept me alive when they put me unjustly in Saint Cloud, he gave me a plaid skirt to wear, the first week I was there, and I wore it every day until release. He made me, it was required, if I wanted to sleep with him at night, in his bed, and be protected.

IN: you loved him.

KB: oh yes, him and a number of others, his good friends. It was shocking really, because I went into Saint Cloud thinking, ya know, that I'd find Hell, and hideous hideous men. I was badly mistaken of course. The men were much older than I was then but ..oh gosh...they were all as dripping hot as could be. It was out of this world.

IN: you wrote your first story whilst still in Saint Cloud isn't that correct?

KB: sort of. Mostly. Sure.

IN: Little Fire Woman.

KB: yes. I take it you've ...read it?

IN: a hundred times.

KB: good, good. Your favorite part?

IN: when Danielle steals the diamonds.

KB : ah yes, splendid choice. Thank you. I wrote that one night when my man got me high for the first time on the Dragon weed. It was...I had never been high at that point so..it was unbelievable. The smell of the Dragon weed I can still taste like yesterday morning. And then the way the men tasted after I was high on it, the way the sex felt. It was unbelievable, I honesty don't know how else to describe it even as a writer to this day. Have you seen the photos of me from then? How joyous I was...

IN: when did you realize you were destined to be a Writer?

KB: probably the same day I realized that Saint Cloud had gotten me hopelessly hooked on vitamin D.

IN: so it's all intertwined for you?

KB: Oh yes. I could not get off either at this point, even if I wanted. The addiction is very severe. The withdrawal would be so serious now, If I were to attempt to endure it, that I would , unfortunately, perish. But of course it makes not a difference to me, because firstly I enjoy it, and embrace it, and secondly I can afford it quite easily. As you can see. And you? Do you actively use or, just like to read of us women who do?

IN: Sometimes.

KB: how often?

IN: I generally use twice a month.

KB: twice a month?! Girl, surely you can afford far more. The magazine can't pay that badly.

IN: well, yes, I could.

KB: whose books you reading honey? If you can afford it, you get it. Sheesh! (Laughs) you want some right now?

IN: after the interview?

KB: ok. Very well. Whateva.i understand (smiles).

IN: for you then it's an integral part of the writing process?

KB: oh yes honey. I'm ferocious with it and I know would not be able to write a lick without it. I often go for a few days without food for example, because they like me thin, but vitamin D....couldn't last, not possible, couldn't write, couldn't think, couldn't sing. You see it in the work- I'm sure. It's all over it. Most of the characters , even when put into a situation where they are removed from it, will go to any lengths to get it. Like Gloria Sin, for one example.

IN: yes Gloria sin. I always think of her. She can't get the vitamins at all; but she instead somehow finds a way to survive on them through powerful imaginings.

KB: yes.

Old World Again

So I was now just reading over my previous piece Further Elaborations on my Europe Envy, when it occurred to me that for many Americans (early Americans, I mean to say) the idea that someone would be *jealous* of something like, as I put it, a 'medieval town', would be unfathomable, because, of course, in the actual period in which these towns were created, and even very much still in the 17 and 1800s, when the States were beginning, these 'medieval towns' were unbelievably threatening.

Everyone could not wait to leave them, because for the commoner they were indeed often hellholes and the King was a lunatic who couldn't wait to kill you, or get you killed....

 And yet now, here we are, in the year 2017, the vicious Kings and queens are long gone (generally speaking) no one in France is using the guillotine anymore, no one is put in the pillory anymore....and so, what has happened but that these old towns in Europe....have now all become almost just like  pretty little theme parks, displaying this pretty and quaint little "inspiring" past and are therefore enviable.....

This is really strange in a way when you really dwell on it, I think, because it goes to show you how Time (and yes, I feel I must capitalize Time) very much warps things so greatly to the point where, well, they are no longer the same things you thought they were, once you wait long enough to see them again. This is a very big point to make in the American study of the European continent, I feel, because in many ways all of us are *still* trying to pretend that Europe is  that same old place it was in the 1600's, even though it is not that place at all anymore - and has not been for quite a long while now. Like I said, the Europeans now have everything we have, on top of what they already had. They have two worlds, one the old foundation, and the other the new one, that we taught them to build. Alas, we don't want to see this, because it is discomforting, since we are lacking the foundation ourselves....

We therefore insist, some part of us does at least, on seeing the continent in this negative light still, because, like I said in the last piece, it benefits us to see Europe in this negative and old fashioned manner. Aftr all, if we don't see it in that way, then we have to accept that its old towns are interesting and beautiful and inspiring, and once you do that, you wind up feeling that sadness I put on display in the last article, because then you realize you are missing out on what is really, rudely assuming you are someone descended from European stock, your own deeper cultural history. You are missing out on these beautiful places that the European can enjoy for next to nothing but that you must pay thousands of dollars in plane tickets and hotel fees to merely glimpse for a week.

Now it might sound silly, but a friend I was discussing this with a few months ago described all of this "relationship between the continents" in a rather comical way during one conversation we were having, by comparing it to  World of Warcraft. I know - how could it compare? - but it actually does. For, you see, in these online worlds, there is always the original world that the programmers have created for you, in the first package you'll buy, and then oftentimes, if the game keeps going, aftre about a year or two, an expansion pack will be released (with a whole new continent in it, and new places to explore) that almost everyone who knows the game well will go absolutely insane for, and begin to obsess over. Typically, after that expansion pack is released, you'll see that all of the "old zones" that you first explored a year prior, upon the games release, become rather vacant, since eveyone gets so excited for the new ones, and oftentimes, especially in a game that lasts, this hopping from expansion pack to expansion pack keeps going and going, and in a game like Everquest, for example, you'll actually find that so many expansion packs have been released that now the original zones are all but completely empty. The zones I explored in the first days of EverQuest, when I was a boy, are now literally worthless. No one is in them. No one at all. Many new players, in fact, if they only logged on in the middle of Everquests life, **do not even know they exist and have never seen them**....

What's so intriguing, however, and what my buddy made it a specific point to say, is that, in recent years, as development for games like EQ and WoW has dried up, and no new expansion packs have come out, the player base seems to have started to experience a rather notable interest in heading **backwards** to the old zones, to go explore all of that long lost romance from once upona time. And this point my buddy made kind of brought us to an interesting point in the conversation: Is it perhaps possible that our longing, as two American kids, for Europe, in the early 21st century as we are, is it maybe the case that  this is a foreshadowing of what is to come next for many people, as this century marches on and the collective consciousness gradually begins to realize that, well, there is no where else to go now (besides space)? After all, if you look backwards in my own family line even just a generation, you'll see that next to no one seemst ohave even the slightest desire to live in Europe, mostly because they lived their entire lives under the now impossible to shake false idea that it was a horrific place where only horrific things happened, etc. They're like the players who came up halfway through Everquest: they have never played the old zones, and have only heard vague stories about weird they were, and so they don't care of them. But... if my pal and I feel this way about Europe as two American kids, just after reading its history on the Internet and watching shows.... certainly there have got to be others....and certainly, as time goes on, there will be more.... which kind of makes me wonder ,again, if this is all just a foreshadowing of what is to come. If there is going to maybe be some sort of, I don't know what you would call it, but a "re-exodus" **back** to Europe by large numbers of Americans in the future.

Because again, it really cannot be stressed enough: the original purpose to come here for those of us who were of European descent is now no longer relevant. The tyrannical kings are gone. Feudalism is gone.  The Europeans are doing fairly well. In Denmark the minium wage is $20.00 (andyes it is relative to our own money). Therefore, every single one of the reasons that many of us came here are gone, and as you can see, if you look at the Trump side of things, many poeple on that side of the aisle seem to be getting increasingly aggravated with how this country is becoming more and more diverse. They are also, I have noticed, frequently discussing Europe too. Alas, they are not discussing anything to do with its history like I am here, but rather how they want to stop migration of "infidels" there.

Which is why I say: Interest in the old continent does seem to be peaking for many Americans now, and one can't help but wonder what it means. Is it like Everquest? Where it has been so long since the last good expansion pack has been released that we now feel we must yet again make another run back through the Old World, and re-unite with all the old legends and locales....???

Further Incessant Elaborations on my Europe Envy

It is a perpetual feeling that I now realize I do not think will ever go away. It is the idea of being in a country which does not suit you; and feeling like you wake up and.. you feel like some hand is down over your mouth, I suppose, covering you, not wanting you to completely breathe. That is how I feel in the States almost constantly, and have felt for years now, and it is a very terrible thing because it is like an inescapable sorrow.

 After all, the reality of my actually getting out of the States is slim to none. I can hardly afford to travel around here. Getting the chance to actually thus leave the country--and set up residence permanently elsewhere, like in Florence, or London--is thus nothing short of fantasy. It might as well be equivalent to walking outside tonight and going for a walk in the woods, entering into a cave, and finding Gandalf the Grey there fighting a wizard. Or becoming the next Brad Pitt and starring in my own Troy...or Fight Club.  It ain't gonna happen.

A lot of people will of course tell me that I am, what, a wee little cry baby who just needs to accept my "lot in life", and that I am trapped in the USA,and that this is the country I have to live in and, you know what,  I ought to love it actually becuas...."Hey, you could be in Africa, or North Korea, y'know? You could be working for pennies in some iPhone factory, or maybe an Ivanka Trump factory, sewing blue jeans together with a sharp needle for 14 hour shifts." The problem with these people of course is that I don't think they understand a little thing I suppose we will call RELATIVITY.

What is relativity? Well, I think it is basically the fact that, as someone who speaks English, I have an incredibly distinct connection to Europe that, obviously, people in Africa and North Korea do not have. Most people in Africa or N. Korea don't sit around, one imagines, reading in depth chronicles of the history of England or Wales, in the language that they were born with, like I do. This is relativity you see: I am speaking a language that connects me to this Old World, and thus makes me very sad, on the regular, because I am constantly reminded of this other world, and how it is ILLEGAL for me to live there or work there, as just a commoner making pizza or something, etcetc. I am speaking the language of a country in which it is actually illegal for me to live, that being England. That's weird! And trust me, it doesn't happen often. You won't find many other examples of this....

Which is why I think Americans really underestimate, in a sense, just how wide - and thus culturally confusing -- the ENglish language is, in a way. Most languages are, after all, like I was saying in a post the other day,  only really spoken in one country, that being their country of origin. This means that,  though many Italians and Poles do, for example, watch a lot of cinema from other countries, what often tends to happen is that, first of all, they usually dub the films over with their own language (which makes all the characters seem much more like them), and secondly, since they do this, they don't actually speak and they especially do not read the language, and so ...when they are reading, what happens?

Well, they tend to read everything with solely an Italian, or Polish viewpoint. Someone who reads in Italian doesn't have the experience of being able to read someone from a completely different country comfortably in their own native tongue, like I do, when I read authors and history from England. They don't keep accidentally - even if they don't want to  - bumping into these notable minds and intelletuals from some other country, like I do, literally constantly.....

They, you see,  can only read their own history from Italy, and the intellectuals that they do find are probably majority Italian, and if they find foreigners, they've all been translated, so they seem distant and removed. They are therefore, in my opinion, not constantly reminded of this "other world" -- because there is no other world for them that exists in their OWN LANGUAGE.

 I am endlessly reminded of it, of course, the second I want to go ...well, basically anywhere, since authors from England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland pop up constantly. So too do television shows, like one I am watching now, the White Queen (not a single American actor in the entire English cast). With the Internet this reach of English is especially evident, the moment you upload some videos to YouTube, too. Many of the songs I've uploaded there are much more popular in Wales or Sctland, etcetera, than the USA. Because I am singing in English, and especially because I am singing old songs , I have to somewhat  keep England in mind. If I were to write a song called "To Hell with Queen Elizabeth the Second, She is a Traitor to Us all" (the current sitting Queen of the UK), and it was t obe written in English, I might come up with thousands of angry comments from people actually living in England...even if the song was addressed to Americans as a joke. If I wrote it in Italian, guess what? Most likely, no one from England will ever hear it. Strange how that works. And I put this on display just to show my reader how, even though most of us in the States will never see England and don't even know anyone who has, we are still in pretty intimate contact with it just as a result of our tongue. Therefore,it's quit eoften in our minds. For instance, I cannot even begin to tell you how frequently I am directed to the English newspaper the Guardian when I am running searches on Google -- even if I am running searches about the States!

 This is strange, in a sense, because we Americans often have the idea that everyone all over the world is constantly being reminded of us, but the truth, again, is that the Italian running searches does not ever stumble accidentally upon papers from here. Neither does the German or the Finn or anyone else.....  

And this leads me to one other thing I want to express about the specific "perception" with which, I believe,  those Italians and other Europeans watch our cinema or our television shows, which are of course so often set in America, and which you would think serve to constantly remind them of America;  and what I think one has to realize is the fact that, as I always say, many of the "unique things" that can be found in the USA, that you would think make the show seem to be American, these things can actually also be found in Europe. Therefore I am of the idea that many a European watches our TV shows, dubbed into his language, and he probably oftentimes might feel as though he could just be watching Europeans. Essentially, he isn't seeing anything that he doesn't recognize. He sees skyscrapers, hamburger joints, Starbucks, department stores, and highways. Well, they have all of that too. So none of this really serves to constantly remind him of our country. It ...basically just looks like his country -- with a lot of stuff missing.

Which, of course, is precisely when you realize that this interesting little phenomenon  doesn't go the other way around. This means to express that, when you watch something like the DaVinci Code, which is set in Florence Italy, or even Harry Potter, when it starts in London, I believe, you know, as the viewer, that you are seeing a sort of city and set up that you will never ever see in this country. You are seeing buildings that cannot be authentically rebuilt. You are seeing towns that cannot be rebuilt here . I, after all, watch a show like the White Queen, and then I read of a medieval village like Canterbury in the U.K., and I start aching to live there, tomorrow, because it is just so radically different from anything here, that it looks like something out of an actual video game to me. So you think it would be basically the same for EUropeans when they watch something set here, in Orange County, California, say - and that would give you some satisfaction, I suppose, because at least we both want something the other has. There is this idea that the game is even, and perhaps maybe that we have someting over them.

 Unfortunately  -- and I really do mean unfortunately -- it is not to be. Because, unfortunately  you can find literally all of the things we have in America in Europe, as well.  Literally: all of them. . There is nothing that they will see in any American broadcast that he cannot have somewhere in his own Euro country. Nothing. My friends from Bolzano, Italy, right under the tip of Germany and Austria, have often sent me WhatsApp videos of them hanging out in hamburger joints with people rolling round on rollerblades serving them bad looking hot dogs.. "frankfurters".... with Elvis Presley blasting in the background. Its actually almost insulting..... "This is supposed to be for me..you fucking people..."

But then, an hour later, they send another video of themselves cruising their some gorgeous medieval town, that looks like it is out of some movie about where Santa Claus was born in 1350, and you're about to weep at seeing the beauty, and then you remember your sad lot in life, for you remember that these places -- probably places my own ancestors slaved to build back in 1201, long before we heard of America -- you see that these places, they literally cannot be recreated. Those things, and those very unique towns (literally, whole medieval towns you can be 'enveloped in' and live all your life in, like a theme park) are only able to exist in Europe. And this, in my opinion, is the thing that...well, to put it simply, sucks. Because what it shows you is that the Europeans, in many ways, literally do have the best of both worlds. They almost get to hop between worlds when they want.  For us Americans, this is not the case. We are quite literally trapped in the New World all the time. I always remember something a girlfriend from Venice said to me: "I suppoe when I think about it, I could never live in a country with no history. How do you do it really? What do people do? What is there to see? I just...don't understand. Where do people go when they want to see things? What is there to see if one has no history?" And the truth is that there is really nothing here to see. We are not made with this "tourist" bone in our body. In fact, if anything, many American vacations tend to revolve around going even further into "nothing": they want to go camping in the deep wilderness, or they want to go to the Grand Canyon, etc. Our whole perception of what it means to travel is rather different. We don't go "in". We go "out".

Hence, you see, there is truly  never any escape from the New World and its relative emptiness  -- unless of course we want to fly 14 hours across the Atlantic after paying for a plane ticket that costs $1400, and then some hotel we can't afford, to stay for a mere week, at a cost of what is probably our years earnings . But of course we can't do tht anyways, because Americans actually have the least vacation time out of any country in the entire developed world. Many Italians, for exampl, even poor ones, apparnetly have three-four entire weeks every summer where life simply shuts down and they go adventuring, sampling ancient historical sites in their own cities by train.  This is even better (more vacatio time) in Germany and Denmark and elsewhere, and almost every single person I have met from all of those countries seems to have tale after tale of city after city they have seen, all over the European continent. It's like these people are all constantly seeing something new. "Oh we're going to go to Athens to see the Parthenon...oh we're going to go to Naples to see the Palace..oh to Venice...to Berlin.." on and on it goes. It literally is like a theme park. They have 900 theme parks to go see every summer. Which is perhaps why they have collectively decided as a culture to offer all this vacation time. They understand there is something to see. They're almost like ...you could say...'collectively' basking in the fruits of two milleniums worth of building. They are enjoying a finished product.

We here are not. We are still building a new product, hence this is  all absolutely unthinkable in America. You are in the rat race from bith until death here, or you have nothing and all the Americns don't want to know you. There is no chance to see Europe ,oftentimes, for anyone but the wealthiest American .

 I, in some sense, actually had to risk my life to go there: I gambled on a random person from the Internet letting me stay in their house for a summer for nothing. For all I knew, I could have gottne off the plane and gotten my throat slit. Had I not done that, I could have never probably gone. I was so desperate to see it, however,after endlessly reading of its history and watching shows like the  intolerable White Queen, that i took the risk.

Honestly though, to get back to what I was saying before, about how mad it has driven me, having to be constantly reminded of these Europeans: I do not think I had ever really known jealousy, until I first really discovered what was going on in the Old World. I don't think I ever knew jealousy a day in my life until that day, and so in a way I really do think I curse it. For you see, I was really always very content with my life here, for as long as I can remember, and I am even still contented with it, when I look at it all from **solely** an American point of view. This means to say, for example, that nothing else going on in America has ever really left me feeling low, or wanting. I do not have any sincere envy for people who live in a single other Americn state, or city, or anything like that. It's almost all entirely irrelevant to me, especially since I do live in the northeast,which is one of the wealthiest regions on this entire continent, anyways. The only state that probably really attracts me is California, but it's so far from my line of  interest, in so many ways, with all the Malibu barbies and the reality TV show stuff, that I don't really think of it too much, so I'm not driven 'mad' by it. There are surprisingly few novels set in California. So again I say, I really never felt envy a day in my life, until I begna to discover just how differnet and awesome the Old World was. And I think it ties me to a Mexican in a way, because that's really what I feel like when I look at Europe: I feel like a Mexican who so badly wishes he could get in, that I'd almost actually be willing to shotgun somebody for the right just to be able to have a gig cooking pizzas there....

Strange ......


-ending

Fantasy and Rock Music

I've written many articles trying to explain exactly why Europe is so different from the United States, and why people take this difference for granted. I have almost beaten a dead horse to a pulp writing about ti so much. But now I want to try and explain to my diligent reader one of the origin points of how I came to realize just *how* different the two cultures were,by striking on something that is a little more modern, and more interesting for most modern folks: Rock and roll.

I want to try and explain just why rock and roll was really the first place where I saw this great big (and negative) difference (i.e. the States was negative, and Euro positive) and also just why the American relationship with rock and roll is, to me, one of the strangest of all time. How come? Allow me to give two reasons: One the one hand, we all know that, yes, Americans birthed rock and roll, in a certain sense, with the blues and the Memphis, Tennessee Sun Studios sound; but, on the other, we also know that the most memorable rock bands of all time all seem -- even still today -- to be English.  In addition to these two points, there is also the third point I want to make, which is the most controversial: Not only do I think the Americans never gave us a band that was even close to as fun as the Rolling Stones were; but I also think that the US culture accidentally even sort of killed rock and roll. This will be offensive, and misunderstood, I know, but let me try and explain myself.

The first reason that my statement when it comes to this will be taken as strange is because, when one looks into rock history, one is going to find that the entire English side of it is often very glossed over whenever it is being discussed, even in complete spite of the fact that almost all the great rock bands were English. What is instead endlessly focused on (even by the English band members themselves) is the fact that all the inspiration was taken from the blues, that they loved the US, and that they were so inspired by Elvis and Little Richard and so on. Figures like Keith Richards , Jagger, Eric Clapton, the guys from the Who, basically all of them, will come in and explain to you in interview after interview just how vital the United States was to their success, and just hiow inspiring it was. Usually, if England is mentioned, it's insulted and denigrated: "We couldn't wait to get the hell outta there.."

Of course, there is one key thing that people must remember about these figures and perhaps why they are saying these things, and glossing over Englands specific role in rock and rolls origin, and here is one reason I believe heavily in: They are paying lip service to the States,and buttering up to it, because ..well, the US has about 270 million more people living in it, than does England, which only has a population of 50 milliom. As a result of this incredibly enormous population, the English acts are quite correct that America is responsible for their success ...because they wouldn't have sold nearly as many records without them. At the same time as that though, they are very mistaken, in my opionion, if they seriously believe that they would have been the same sort of artists had they been born in the States, instead of in England.

The really harsh truth is that no country besides England could have ever possibly created these bands, for a few reasons, the biggest reason being that rock and roll was, at the height of its 1960s success, a very strange sort of fusion between New World excitement, and Old World artistry. Just take a look at some of the Rolling Stones most popular hits and you should see what I mean: many of them are almost shockingly British in nature once you look twice at them. "Jumping Jack Flash" for example, honestly, if you stripped it of its electricity, seems like a song that could have been sung in medieval times, at the Kings court. And then, never forget the costumes that Jagger and others wore : many of them look like they ought to be the costume of the "jester", a figure who of course, since we have nver had any Kings courts, has never existed in America, period. In other words, there is actually something deeply European and even Middle Ages about much of rock and rolls imagery, despite the fact that it later became known as this wholly American thing. Led Zeppelin was the most unapologetic in their Englishness; but the Rolling Stones are right up there with them, oftentimes, depending where you look, as well as the Beatles and Pink Floyd, in major, major ways.

Now, one big cultural connection that occurs between the "British Invasion" is actually, I believe, that it ties very much in with the success that Harry Potter has enjoyed here, because whats happening is that this stuff is all coming out of this exact same Old World pot of "mystery" that we, as Americans, are only able to get from the English, since they are the only people speaking this language in the Old World. Rock and roll is very deeply tied to a very specific European tradition of fantasy writing and theatre, believe it or not, that includes Italian Renaissance figures, William Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Frodo Baggins, castles and kings, and others. What many people who have never studied the deeper spheres of US culture fail to realize is that , no longer being in the land of castles and kings, and not having any of those ruins around us to go and see as we stop to get groceries (like Old Worlders do) we have often, especially before television, not had the first idea as to how to write about any of that stuff, at all. Americans in the mid 1800s could have never produced a text like Alice in Wonderland, and that text and its influence on the English rock bands ought never be forgotten. John Lennon, for instance, was heavily influenced (and says it somewhere) by Alice in Wonderland, and this influence is very easy to see in "Strawberry Fields Forever" and other 'hippy dippy' works by him. Mick Jagger at times literally seems like Peter Pan come to life.Look at Donovan from Ireland, who is far more imaginative than Bob Dylan ever was, ironically.  And it's also no coincidence at all that Johnny Depp based Captain Jack Sparrow, who seems like Captain Hook, off of Keith Richards. All the English rock characters really do seem like people from fantasy books, because many of them are coming from the exact culture that, even then in the 1960s, was already very deeply influenced by fairy tale culture.

Americans, on the other hand, are, as I repeatedly stress, coming from a "developing country" culture, and so they tend to value practicality and realism, and oftentimes they even tend to wholly reject fantasy as a realm of, well, "faggotry". There are no real American fairy tales...and so we have not often produced "fairy tale" type characters ala Mick Jagger and onwards. We have instead often produced characters who are more in line with our old folklore, characters like Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan the Giant Lumberjack, et cetera. Our current hipste r movement, of bearded boys who wear flannel shirts, is a testament to just how strangely close we still are with all of this. We still somehow really have not produced a wholly American fairy tale setting for our artists to truly flourish in, and this is why, to get back to rock and roll, you'll see that ...after about 1972 or so (which is when American rock bands first start to try to sink the English ones) rock and roll experiences a dramatic change: it goes from being the terrain of fairy boys like Jagger, with glitter and sparkling blue costumes and dance moves and gallons of eyeliner and eyeshadow, to being this hardcore outlaw biker movement that mixes more with, first, the Deep South and country, and then, later on, an almost toxic masculinity and Hells Angel sort of vibe.

It gets completely consumed bythe States and comes out looking more like something created in Las Vegas, rather than in London. The "faeries" get pushed out, and the ones that are left go dark..and rogue, and wind up as angry heavy metal heads. And , like I said, we never really see another band like the Rolling Stones again, because the Americans seriously cannot self produce one. Even if they could, for instance, the problem would be that the band would be rejected and altered at some point, and made to be something different than it was. In other words, it would get struck down and told to write "practical realism" lyrics, et cetera....

Of course at this point in the discussion the question becomes a sort of "well, if they sold many records here, doesn't that mean Americans like this sort of stuff?" and this is admittedly tricky, but I think the big issue is that it all, somewhere, goes back to the initial origin point of gaining success on those first opening stages. So, essentially, England, having the ability to accept fairy tale type things without prejudice, gave the Stones and things like Harry Potter their first push , and then, following that push, we are able to accept them on a bigger stage, but without that first push -- which Americans won't give - we don't ever see anything.

 If one does not believe me, then all one has to do is try and imagine it from a real life point of view:
Can you seriously imagine a flamboyant and effeminate boy like Jagger , making the rounds in many modern American rock clubs, with pink eyeliner on, and glitter, and those brightly coloured outfits he used to wear, and the long hair etc? The rings? The jewels? The love songs? Can one seriously imagine this act coming out of the South, or the Mid-West, or "low class" New York City? For me, it is impossiblet o imagine. This plane, I guarantee you, as an American, would be shot down on our lower stages. It could survive on our biggest ones, ironically, but it could never actually survive in that birthing pot, and so therfore it is never born. In England, on the other hand, it is able to survive the birthing pot, because they don't have this enormus prejudice against, well, basically anything that isn't about lumberjacks, gunslingers, and masculine men -- which, if you look at the direction American music has gone in since the 70s, you're going to see that such masculine themes are of the utmost importance to them. Hip hop, now the dominant music, is beyond obessed with a ferocious masculinity and despises faggotry, country music is obsessed with a rural conservatism that esssentially espouses the same ideals in a less vulgar way, heavy metal is obsessed with being eternally angry, and though it takes influence from fantasy, tends to take it all from the vicious Vikings rather than anything innocent; and when you do find the colorful modern performers that seem to have a rsemblance to Mick Jagger or Robert Plant , et cetera, from the States, what you will find is that they are, where else, trapped in the pile of "this music is for girls and gays".

Now one last thing I am going to add about this is going to take us into the world of cinema, rather than rock and roll for a moment, and what I want to do is look at someone like Johnny Depp again, for example, who seems very much like a sort of rock star, even though he is an actor. And what I want you to notice are two other notable figures behind him, two film directors, Tim Burton, whom he has worked with repeatedly, and then this man called Terry Gilliam,who did Monty Python. What is so incredible about these two men is that both of them work in the fantasy line -- they are some of the best fantasy type movie directors we have, in my opinion -- and whats so strange is that, well, they're both Americans who now, guess what? They both live in England , and have apparently taken up permanent residence there. And I can assure my reader that the reason this has happened is because of exactly what I say: Fantasy and faery tale sorts of things and alll of this stuff that initially gave birth to rock and roll...it is not accepted in the United States. It is just not accepted. Because it is not practical , and not real, and so it seems queer to the Americans....

The end/





  

Italians and Poles and Irishmen

There is an old joke in the USA that is well known in many inner city circles (well, inner city circles of old, of course) that talks about social class and ethnicity and marriage.  The way it goes is this... "What is an Italian girl who marries a Pole?" The joke response: "A social climber!"

I can remember finding it online some years ago and thinking it was rather comical, and of course also knowing it was true, becuase I had personal experience with it, due to the fact that an aunt of mine, an Italian girl, married a Polish fellow, back in the early 70s or 80s, and not long after that, she took off from the "inner city" neighborhood of what was then a Little Italy, and fled for the boonie hills -- about a forty minute drive from here (the rest of us still live in Little Italy). The stories in the family, of course, abound about how "disgusted" my grandfather (an Italian, and my aunts older brother by many years) was with the matrimony. Him and his two brothers simply could not believe that she would marry a Pole. It had never happened in our family before, that someone would go outside of the Italian circle. She, the only girl, was the first one, and strangely enough, she was also basically the only one in the entire family who moved that far out into the hills, that early on. Hence, you see, from a wholly American angle, my Aunt (let's call her Anna) did indeed do a social climb. When I would drive out to see my aunts house and my cousins, my friends from this neighborhood (Italians, Spaniards, half blacks) would often be in absolute awe. She was living the real American dream. We were just still back there in the furnace. So, again, there was a clear sense of "social climb" that had happened, and it did indeed seem to be because of the fact that she married a Pole....

Some people, of course, might be a little "confused" as to why a Polish-American is, or at least was, of a higher social status in the USA rather than an Italian, all those years ago. There are a few reasons and most of them revolve around the fact that, when it came to the assimilation process, I am of the belief that the Poles were, first of all, far happier to assimilate to the American way (I'll explain why shortly) and they were also, in addition to this, and this must never be plowed over, not people who had, in the 30s and 40s, been allied against the United States in a very dreadfully serious World War.

On the one hand, the Poles were below a group like the Irish, because Poles did not arrive speaking English (like the Irish did); but they were also, at the very least, above the Italians, because they did not declare a war against the United States. If anything, they helped, in what little way they could, during that war. As a result, the Polock became a somewhat pitiable figure in the American imagination of the time, rather than a condemned one. Don't forget that Poland was the literal origin point of the entire WW2 fiasco: Hitler had gone to invade and the Polocks didn't know what was going on. They were unable to defend themselves, though the idea is that they "desperately wanted to". They hated Hitler, et cetera (so the official story goes). As a result, England, whom America later allied with, told Hitler it was time for war, in order to, initially, defend the Poles. So Poland played a very different role, and henceforth the Poles here in the States, whom I can assure you were effected by all of this, became people to be pitied, as I said, by whoever the strongest people here were (i.e. the employment opportunities).

The Italian was instead to be wholly condemned. He was already on rocky ground having arrived with no language, and then through the 1920s he had gone against the American government and sold illegal beer and wine... and now, my God, now his old country had just declared a deadly war against the United States government! Benito Mussolini became the most famous Italian in the world, and he was running around in Europe, sieg hieling with Hitler. This was all very bad, and this was all taking place when my great grandmother Maria Louisa, the mother of my Aunt Anna, would have been the age I am now: middle 20's. It was all a world away, but it haunted . And still haunts.

 Many people, for example, often try to draw parallels between the Irish and the Italian struggle to assimilate here. The Irish, after all, unlike the Poles, are somewhat heavily remembered, and so it seems like there must be something similar between the two groups. In truth, though, there are no parallels. No strong ones, at least. Italians and Irish people are literally as different as can be, adn the only reason the Irish are remembered is because they arrived speaking English and their old country still speaks it to this day. The bridge is easy to cross, and the old songs still easy to sing. In addition to this, I have often made the "joke" that one could even say the United States was God's great gift to the Irish and the Scottish. You could see it like a sort of reimbursement in their long historical tale: Here we have two countries of people whom the English had whipped and beaten into submission, and then forced English down their throat, and sudenly the next thing you know, there is this entire country (practically half a continent!) where people speaking English have broken off from the exact royal lineage and King that plagued them so .
 And so they of course came here in mass numbers and loved it and went on, for all of time, to sing the story of how absolutely fantastical this place was, et cetera. Many an Irish song is to this day is still a noted feature in the American songbook. As a folksinger , I have sung many Irish songs.So have Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Bruce Springsteen and onwards. U2 is from Ireland; they might as well be American.  As one can imagine, I do not really get to sing popular Italian songs, of course, because there are none. They aren't in ENglish, after all. Therefore they do not exist, and when they do get sung, they seem like songs from a truly foreign place. They do not seem like  "Danny Boy" or "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", which really might as well be American songs by this point.

At any rate, the reason I want to express all of this is really because all of our little "social climbing jokes" Stateside, where Poles and Irish people get to enjoy a better spot than Italians, and now Spanish speakers, have actually served to rather muddy our world view of what was going on historically , and even still today, in the Old World. From an American point of view, you see, one would take a look at the Old World and assume, quite naturally, that things are perhaps just like they are here. After all, if Poles and Irishman are superior and higher social beings here, then how on Earth could it not be exactly the asme everywhere, right? Except it is not the same, literally at all. It's actually the exact opposite: Poland is literally a nearly insignificant country in the history of Western Civilization, and as for Ireland and Scotland, the story is also exactly the same. The irony here is that their insigificance in the Old World is precisely what led to their higher placement in this one, because they came here in droves, and also because they  were far happier to forget the memories of the Old World (since it was awful for them) and thus assimilate, joyously and gratefully, to this one.

Being Italian is a very unique thing in the US country, I feel, because Italy itself is just...well, a very memorable country. Unlike Poland and Ireland, Italy actually has a very long, and mostly innovative, history that is studied and researched the world over, by people of all cultures, and in addition to that history, modern Italy is also still, as I said, a rather memorable place, once you head above Rome, where no immigrants left from. Modern Italy is a cherished vacation spot,  a very important fashion spot, an incredible wine making spot, and it is also considered one of the best food diets in the world. Also before I forget ...it is the center of the Catholic Church.

This might seem insigificant in a larger discussion about social groups in the States, where we are told history has been re-written with a bold point pen, but the reason that this is actually a problem for Italian-Americans, is because it , I believe, has left us with a sort of divided allegiance, when it comes to wanting to assimilate. It's almost as though Italians don't really know why they left in comparison to the other groups. Italy still seems pretty relevant and cool. It still seems chic. The others instead just seem out of the way...there's no doubt that they were good to flee. I'll never forget when I was around 17, I had a good friend who was actually half Irish who went to visit Italy with his Italian born father. He came home a different person: he started collecting Italian designer fashion, dressing "chic", wearing Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses , supporting the Italian soccer team,  et cetera. He saw Milano, after having lived in this rather dilapidated areao f the States we live in, and I really think his mind was "blown". His father was an immigrant, and he had probably associated him with the other immigrants in our neighborhood, who come from El Salvador and Mexico, and so he had probably imagined that going to see Italy would be like going to see a third world place. Instead, there he is in Milano, and he is seeing a world that looked better than the one he had just left. It became a strange sort of "...but why woul you leave this?" .

Which is why I say: this is a problem from a certain lens, because the culture of modern Italy almst seems ...well, superior to this American one. It seems cleaner, friendlier, more posh, elegant , an so on....

 Notice that you almost never hear someone talking of Polish-Americans, but Italian-Americans , even now 100 years later, still come up time and time again, even though they have no language bridge to connect them to Italy anymore. They have their own films, they have movie actors, they have Lady Gagas, et cetera. They are not as cut off as the Afro-Americans are, or the Puerto Ricans et cetera, but they're still a pretty notable group, particularly for people who you can't tell apart at first glance, who didn't arrive here speaking English, and who have been here for 100 years now.  Italians, for all intents and purposes, should have lost any sense of identity like the Poles did, the second they no longer spoke Polish. But this did not happen. Not at all.

And this is all because of just how memorable Italy is, in comparison to Poland or Ireland. I really can't stress it enough: Even when I do not want to remember Italy, I am still eventually forced down some other lane where it manages to pop up and flash itself in my face. Italy is there in the magazines, Madonna goes and does photoshoots there , and everyone who is rich, including even the President of the USA, Donald Trump, probably has at least one or two articles of Italian fashion in their closet. Trump's trademark suit with the red tie, is said to be an Italian suit, Brioni, and recently Ivanka was in the headlines for allegedly having stolen some sort of high heel design .... from - who else/ -- but an Italian designer.  They are apparently going to go to court over this. The Italians, after all, take fashion very seriously.

So, having said all of this now, here's what I will tell my reader as the pseudo historian I am (that's probably what my polish cousins by Aunt Anna, who don't like me much, would call me) about the entire tale : I think the American country is different for every group, and quite frankly, when it comes to the Italian group, I'm just not totally convinced, and I don't think I ever will be, that it was the best country to come to. However, I do think it's important that I make it very clear that, for the Irish, the Scottish, the Poles, and the other groups here now , I do suppose  it was Gods gift to them, but for the Italians I don't think it was the best place to come, and I feel it's very important to write this because I do not like how people just try to blindly group the Italian immigrant story in with all these other ones , when it was and is nothing like those other ones. I really wouldn't be at all hesitant to even go so far as to call the Italian immigration here the biggest mistake any Italian of those far off time periods could have ever possibly made. My family would probably be better off, and better educated, had we remained in Italy, especially had the immigrant just simply headed some miles north to Rome, instead of the desperate and very dumb move he made....

Some places just aren't good for certain people, and in my opinion, the United States just wasn't very good for the Italians.