Jolene

This will be a less than engaged blog post, but forgive me. We all get one, do we not?

I was reading some of Shakespeare's sonnets, some of the selections in which Shakespeare really debases himself with the pretext of being in love, and I couldn't help but feel like Shakespeare was just not right in some respect. I mean, It feels noble to think of the lofty heights to which one would aspire in order to bring back some heavenly token of affection for their lover, but it is quite another, much more sickening and perverse thing to think about the depths to which one would descend as well. I was trying to think of a modern example of a similar debasement in the name of love, and one of my favorite songs of all time came to mind: "Jolene" by Dolly Parton. Laugh if you will, but Jolene is a figure mythological par excellence. "Your beauty is beyond compare/ with flaming locks of auburn hair/ and ivory skin and eyes of emerald green. Your smile is like a breath of spring, your voice is soft like summer rain, and I cannot compete with you Jolene." Jolene sounds in this first verse of the song like a praise-worthy nymph, but how much darker she turns out to be. Certainly she is more of a goddess of the underworld type. She is beautiful, as any goddess should be, but dangerous as well. insofar as the figure of the tripartite goddess is concerned, she plays the role of the dark side with great efficacy, most clearly representing the temptress: "He talks about you in his sleep/ There's nothing I can do to keep/ From crying when he calls your name, Jolene/ And I can easily understand/ How you could easily take my man/ But you don't know what he means to me, Jolene." If Ever I thought Shakespeare had brought himself to the lowest sphere of being for his lover, Dolly Parton of all people, up and proves me wrong. The song Jolene is a model of what the Shakespearean sonnet can become in the hands of a modern lover who is equally as sincere, and willing to go one step further than even Shakespeare himself in vying for the affections of their lover. To address ones problem face to face, to submit to the superiority of another lover, this is far lower than pretending to be the "Spaniel" of some lover, as Helena puts it. "I had to have this talk with you/ My happiness depends on you/ And whatever you decide to do, Jolene." And you thought you loved your significant otter? Would you not just cast her or him off if they were being unfaithful and saying the name of their illegitimate otter in their sleep? Othello up and kills Desdemona just because of an unconfirmed rumor about the act! 

I guess the main point of this was to show that, although Shakespeare has certainly been the recognized epitome of the lover/poet for the English language, he has not gone to such lengths as to entirely monopolize the language of love. Although the instances in which someone outdoes Shakespeare are few and far betwixt, they are there, serving as a reminder that genius, or at least sincerity, can come from even the unlikeliest of sources.  
Jolene (Alternate High Fidelity Version)

The 4th Wall

I feel like I should provide my own analysis to Nabokov's Symbols and Signs, if for no other reason than that it's very enigmatic, and the more angles we approach it from, the better.
So when I started reading it, I didn't really know what to expect. I knew what it was supposed to be about, but not the way in which it would be presented. I noticed that there were a lot of red-herring type of things in the story, which was to be expected, given its nature. What I determined then, was that the meaning probably had something to do with what was not being told to us, more so than what was. This makes analysis pretty difficult, since there are a lot of things not being told to us, but there are few things that are not so much addressed, but that may still be reasonably inferred. What I came up with was this:
The boy might have been right. The trees might have been whispering about him, and the thunder clouds far far away from his immediate sphere of consciousness might have been rolling out plots against him, and the whole world might have been out to get him if for no other reason than that it was his story. Everything in the story WAS about the boy in one way or another, so how was he supposed to escape that? He was just hearing all of the coughs in the proverbial audience, which no humans are supposed to hear, since to us there should be no audience, right? in other words, that fourth wall that actors are never supposed to break, don't look at the camera and all, that boundary has been recognized by the character in this story. Ironically it is supposed that the boy has a mental disease because, to the other members of the story, the character is not a character, he is a real person. So really the character who is crazy, is actually the boy who knows too much, and he is trying to tear a hole in his reality, so that he may join us in this one, which in a metaphorical way he has done, since we've all spent time thinking about him. The other idea posed, then, is that we may very well just be the characters like everyone else in the story, simply ignorant of the fact that the fourth wall exists. (This, of course, is a metaphor not to be taken literally. Please do not try to fly out of this reality and hurt yourself) And what better way to defeat a wall than to go over it? what better way to transcend the version of reality that we see, what greater freedom is there, than to fly?