Författare: xikano_2

The distance between you and me isn’t much;
Your freedom, say the Americanos, stops where your nose begins.
I miss, missing is wanting, to covet.
The monarch is an immigrant.
Do they too yearn after the forest in Michoacán?
Or are they happy in Canada too?
Perhaps they like the ride more than the stops ….

I read in a computer magazine that they sell at Kvantum that weblogging is the hottest new thing around, could it be? Frankly it worries me when things get popular because the minute it skyrockets in the media’s front pages it means that the new darling of the press will soon fall to its demise.

Weblogging for me is a practice thang to keep abreast with my writing skills and a demonic tendency to believe that I might actually publish something some day, if only I could figure out in what godforsaken language I should do it.Writing in three languages is like having multiple personality disorder, really, one body and three different people acting all very weirdly.

It is a gigantic task to be able to say the only one thing you have to say and believe that you have three different ways of saying it. I’ve discovered that it principle if I have something to say it becomes very difficult to come up with something more original than that even though it was said in a different language, Its repetitious, really.

I wanna write and I wanna become a writer, even a shabby one ..erh …I think am that already, but really, I wanna… I just don’t know how.

We might go to Paris, I never been there, but Paris has certainly been inside of me for a long time. It all started with Pepe Le Pew , a Warner Bros cartoon character that enthralled us with his amorous stints and failed attempts to get a lover, he tried that French voice of his. For a while I thought that love was a French domain, way before I discovered that it really belongs to the Latin family which comprises of all that which has Latin roots. America’s infatuation with France is always a love affair. Lingerie, champagne, perfumes et cera …! When I think of Paris I inevitable think of the Eiffel tower. France is such a strange place, to the point that I never in the world might of thought that I be there, maybe ….

France … I have a luggage full of prejuicios as we say in Spanish. Cinco de Mayo, Maximilian and Carlota, Sinaloco et cera.

France also has the charm of being an old enemy. Well, inasmuch as English is my language I know the chisme between the English and the francophones …gosh, why is it so difficult to be americano these days ?

On the cover of the book, you can tell he’s flirting. There he is, on the front cover, staring at you, sideways, coquettish almost, with his blurred hands in a pose that exudes calmness and a defiant attitude, just Chicano enough to fool you to believe that it is what you are seeing, a real tromp d’oiel. Near his Indian looking face there is the word Brown. You know it’s subliminal, he’s toying with raza, you know brown is for us like red is for indians. He is actually not even that brown as the cover of the book presents him.

I feel he wants to get closer to his xente, there are too many words in his recent book that have those extras that english doesn’t have and that Spanish abounds with, little accents and other orthographic niceties, I mean why in the world would he otherwise employ the diaeresis in naí¯ve? Or accent other words? Then there is the word ”discovery”, yes, in quotations, you know that has been a darling word in raza speech for years.

I’m not done withya yet Richardito …

Meanwhile, at the paper company where paper for stocks are made a Q & A was taking place …

– When the stars shone ..that’s when.
– Any particular motive as to why just then?
– Look Ed, the guy is a fraud, there is nothing more to it.
– Here, take my handkerchief., you seem to be developing a sweat in your forehead.
– Jaja, very funny.
– Exactly when did you see them like that together?
– I’m distraught, can’t you see?
– I see what you mean, but I, in as much as I sympathize with your emotions, the company requires of me to record all activity that took place prior to the incident.
– ”incident”? is that what they’re calling it?
– I really don’t have time, if you want to I can send some other people to …
– Fine!, I caught them in there with their clothes nearly off, my girlfriend laughing and the guy sweating like a hog, there, happy!?
– Just procedure Mark, some valuable paper was destroyed in the ensuing passion and now they have to pay for it ….

I think I finally figured it out, I mean it’s like I have spent thousands upon thousands of neuron cells, good ones too, prima qualité, on the issue. I just couldn’t come to it by any other means, beer, cigarettes and the like erh, forget the like. I just felt like crap and I finally come to a sane and probable cause as to the root of said evil. I’m married and most of the people I hang out with are single. I naturally get a conflicting reaction when I come across them.

This is a nightmare of sorts. People actually wonder what am I doing in their solo midsts. It’s not my fault, I swear to God, but I forget what savage world the single scene can be, everybody is on the hit move. Heat too. The sad truth is that I get accused of hitting on girls just for talking to them, you think am paranoid? Just try and have a normal beer and a normal conversation in a bar anywhere in Sweden and all sorts of paranoia sprouts like wild weed on a hot humid summer day.

Girls will inevitably start wondering why am I even bothering to listen to them when I’m, I believe it to be so, having a common conversation. ”Right …” goes through the mind of the now half drunken girl, ”you want me!” What the?

Ok, time to go to my wife and kids …nice talking, I think, to you …

It is this sort of paranoia shit I have to put up with some of my friends, I swear to God, I need some real married couple friends to avoid these sort of single entrapments …

Ok, little by little I’ve managed to notice some things about my writing. The energy I place on the subjects I like need to be taken into account in which language they sound best …not.

Reading some of the articles on Chicano English (ChE) has been quite the rewarding event. It seems, first of all that there isn’t really a consensus about whether there is such a thing as ChE, typical isn’t it? Worse yet the bickering that we have out there in our big family about what to call us seeps all the way through academic papers in linguistics as well. So far I’ve read about three articles on it and they use everything from Che, MAE (Mexican American English) to English of people of mexican descent …jejeje qué mamones really. Anyways, the features for ChE is unlike AAVE. They (AAVE) speak a dialect but we seem to still be out in the patent office somewhere held up, apparently what researchers are befuddled about is the constant input of Spanish in our English.

Unlike the a-prefixing that dominates in AAVE, or third personal use of pronouns and possessives amongst other features typical of AAVE, (ChE) has only to its favor the prosody, that is, the way we talk when no gringo is around.

So the big question is still out there, is our english a dialect or not? Can I say, with all assurances, ” órale homes, I speaketh Chicano English ese …” ?

The buzzwords here are interference, code-swithching, and other bilingual goodies.

Granted, but my research ain’t done yet …so hold your breath while I see how we incorporate our special kind of English into the national conscious of the USA.

Fluffy grey cotton hovering over my head
endarken the grey matter in my brain.
My humor becomes inswept by a melancholic ghost of yore
who showers a song about water over my head.
I scuba dive this deep crazy mood,
engulfing me in a tormented soul
I knoweth no longer.
Yet 70% of me flies high into the sky.

My brain longs after it. It’s like wanting to be filled, to feel full again, but with what? Am I the world swallower, Galactus, from the X-men series? To an extent yes, writers do create entire worlds, don’t they? I crave it, you know? A story, I want one, it’s been a while, I need my fill, please, something classical of preference, something that has been established as a story, I tend to disregard new models of story telling. Don’t ask me why, it’s just that I feel that I haven’t even come out of the 19th century at times, and the fact is most of the best literature was written in those days. Nowadays very few writers are as exciting as those from the beginning of the 19th century; nowadays writers are just concerned with money, and they don’t live out their lives as writers did then. Richard Holmes is one of those very few who meet my stringent criteria for such writers, being that he is a modern writer in the sense that he is alive, David Lodge is intelligent. Nothing more, there is nothing artistic about him. On the other hand I could be dead wrong and he be an artist of highest rank.

I get these cravings for literature when I’ve worked on linguistics. It’s as if I’ve famished my lit side of the brain, I haven’t managed to convince that side of the values inherent in having a linguistic powerhouse as one’s ally.

Dressed in black
A wicked half circle on your mouth
Dragging your feet
10 minutes before doomsday
Dirty laundry stacking up
putriding morals lay unhung
Wilst propaganda laughs all the way …
Wake up !