shower meme
Jun. 4th, 2003 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maribouSo I got this meme from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
corivax, first, and I think anoisblue must be credited with inventing it. I've also solicited interviews from other people, because I'm a question-glutton, and I shall be posting answers to those questions under separate cover.
Here's the deal:
If you want me to interview you--post a comment that simply says, "Interview me." I'll respond with questions for you to take back to your own journal and answer as a post. Of course, they'll be different for each person since this is an interview and not a general survey. At the bottom of your post, after answering the Interviewer's questions, you ask if anyone wants to be interviewed. So it becomes your turn-- in the comments, you ask them any questions you have for them to take back to their journals and answer. And so it becomes the circle.
Answers forcorivax:
(n.b. i am very stubbornly against picking just one of anything, so I've taken the liberty to multiply my answers a bit. I never said I gave well-behaved interview, merely that I would enjoy it. And I somehow can't imagine thatcorivax minds.)
1. You have an understanding I envy of the weight and reality and magic of books. Tell me about the book that influenced you the most and how / why.
All the wonderful books I read as a child seem to have fairly heavily influenced me, judging by rereadings. Adult books, enh, not so much - though maybe I just need to be farther away from them to be able to trace their influence.
That being the case, I've fretfully reduced my answer to two of the earliest "serious" books i remember reading, and rereading, until they flowed in my veins:
Roger Lancelyn Green's _Myths of the Norsemen_ - Some of the things which captured me in this book: the fierceness with which the gods strive for their desires; Ask and Embla, the trees who became the first people; Odin's ordeal, and his two ravens; the giants; the social complexity of how the various races (man, giants, gods, pre-gods, etc.) were intertwined; the creation myth (ohhhhhh, the creation myth); the humor; Loki; Freya and Frigg and, for some reason, apples. It mattered because of the sheer power of the stories, which came to live and draw breath in my head. Also, it taught me to be proud of my earthiness, to revel in my delight for dirt and rot and gut-driven actions. I didn't believe in those gods, but I wanted them to be true. I ended up seeing Catholic rituals and dogma through the pre-existing filter of these myths, so that the Christian story resonated through Ragnarok and Baldur's rebirth, rather than the other way around. [The caveat to this is that I'm under the impression, as an adult, that Green's version of Norse mythology was heavily filtered through his own Christianity.] And, well, Bifrost made such an impression on me that I've never been able to see a rainbow without wishing to ascend it.
The Once and Future King, by T. H. White: My immersion in this book was certainly a contributing factor to: a fascination with natural history, particularly *old* style natural history; a fervent desire to be chivalrous, and a concomitant curiosity about the social customs pertaining thereto; a particular way of speaking, overspecific, full of large words, and almost - deliberately stilted? - for the purposes of self-amusement; and a willingness to risk all in an effort to leap onto the right thing. The original delight of my small mind with the idea of a person living backwards through time has led to to an inexhaustible interest in time travel and probably started me upon my explorations of physics. Again, this is a living, breathing, compelling story, a myth that drew me into all sorts of history.
Both books are as filled with wonder as was the world I saw around me. Reading them was akin to a long, sustained cry of delight, one that had room for sorrow in it. Still is; I could gratefully dip into either of them out loud at any time, with any person of whom I'm fond, under almost any circumstances.
2. Tell me about a favorite dream of yours.
Three instead. Can't help it! Not sorry!
1 - I once dreamt 30 years in a single night. I don't believe there were any gaps; it really seems as though it were 30 years composed of 365 days each, and each day composed of 24 hours, and so on. Though I don't see how that could be, and after stumbling about in too-much-experience-leads-to-confusion for a week, I promptly forgot most of it. My brain was kind enough to leave me with a single symbolic image: The sun has just finished rising in the east. Water rushes down into the river. I dance naked and alone on the top of a high sandstone cliff, bare feet drumming my welcome to the day.
2 - I've twice had a dream which was entirely composed of riding on the backs of giant bears and whales, diving through the ocean, feeling completely safe and intimate and held on their backs while awed by the beauty of what we were seeing. I think other people feel about flying dreams the way I feel about this one.
3 - When I was about 18, I had a few serial dreams in which I was a 12 year old boy. I spent these dreams in close collusion with my friend the giant Angus, adventuring through a landscape in which my grandmother's white farmhouse was a focal point of safety.
3. If you could be any fictional character, who would you be, and why? Alternately, if you could be a new character in a pre-existing fictional world, which one would you pick?
I'd be Mary Poppins. Perfectly able to combine love, care, self-discipline, extreme competence, and wonderfully strange friends in amazing alternate universes. She's also profoundly enigmatic without even a hint of being coy. (AND she can fly.) If I could pick any fictional world in which to exist, it'd be the future Mars that Kim Stanley Robinson imagines. Such freedom, such complexity, such possibility. Or else I'd just settle in at Callahan's Cross Time Saloon and never leave (I'm *firmly* of the opinion that the place needs a library, and a library tender).
4. I think all geeks were bizarre children. Describe yourself as a child.
I'll be terribly lazy, and free associate for a bit: curiosity, delight, talking to everybody, climbing trees, watching bugs, odd skipping and hopping and counting games, peeling things (rotting logs and fungi and lead paint and &c), fascinated by adults, anti-obedient, impatient with superficial social interactions, expectant, constantly wrapped in the mystic, desirous of people who could do things and explain things and be kind, preferably all three at once. Not so different from myself as an adult really, only less scarred. I remember recognizing God in a dandelion. I spent hours and hours at or around the public library, sometimes more than I spent at school, and the textures of the various objects I touched there still spring immediately to hand. I had a scooter, which I rode all over town, and I loved the feeling of the wind against my face.
5. Tell me about a time when you were struck by the beauty of something.
It's actually harder to think of an extended period of time (more than a few hours) when I wasn't struck by the beauty of anything.
The problem is that the more struck by something I am, the harder it is to put into words later.
I'll tell you about a time in which I was extraordinarily grateful for being struck by the beauty of something, how would that be?
I was 20 or 21, and weeping in the deserted university chapel, and I suddenly looked up and truly saw the slightly pretentious stained glass windows and the worn wooden pews and the dirty-around-the-edges linoleum floors, and I was awed by their loveliness, the combination of color and age and use and having-been-made-carefully. That doesn't tell you, but maybe it points a little bit.
6. Post or link to a poem or song that you feel describes you very well. Explain how.
Ack! I can't narrow it down to one poem, without being either utterly unoriginal, or overly flip, so I shall content myself by narrowing it down to one poet, Yeats, and request that the reader triangulate, correcting as necessary for the inclusion of the poet's voice itself.
The Cat and the Moon
The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.
Oh, yes, I know this part of me. The fierce stalker, world-reflecting, self-centered, and pretty-footed: cold and yowling and pure. Reading Shakespeare, I always wanted to be Tybalt.
A Crazed Girl
That crazed girl improvising her music,
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling she knew not where,
Hiding among the cargo of a steamship
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved hungry sea.'
This is a tragic (if stubbornly triumphant) poem, and I don't usually belong in tragedies. But when I find myself there, I do desperately wind myself in what consolations I can attain - I well remember throwing myself forward into things to avoid drowning. I too seek beauty, always. And the first three lines are generally applicable.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Ah yes. My heart's internal home must neighbor Yeats'. The peacefulness and earthiness and rocking motion of this poem are mine too. So shall I; so do I. I taste this poem, and smell it, and feel it on the tips of my fingers.
Hmm. I feel like the poems themselves say more about me than my efforts at explaining their relevance can. Now that I'm done being grandiose for a bit, I'll confess that I've never found a single poem or song that made me say "Ah, yes, me, exactly," as opposed to "ah, yes, part of what me is." or "ah, yes, the emotion I'm currently having." I suppose it might be because the poets I'm drawn to (with certain notable exceptions) tend to deal very much in the concrete, in story and moment, rather than in character description. And then, it's entirely possible that I actually have an entire store of such lyrics somewhere, and have just temporarily forgotten about them. Mind like a trapdoor and all that.
So, anybody want questions?
corivax, first, and I think anoisblue must be credited with inventing it. I've also solicited interviews from other people, because I'm a question-glutton, and I shall be posting answers to those questions under separate cover.Here's the deal:
If you want me to interview you--post a comment that simply says, "Interview me." I'll respond with questions for you to take back to your own journal and answer as a post. Of course, they'll be different for each person since this is an interview and not a general survey. At the bottom of your post, after answering the Interviewer's questions, you ask if anyone wants to be interviewed. So it becomes your turn-- in the comments, you ask them any questions you have for them to take back to their journals and answer. And so it becomes the circle.
Answers for
corivax:(n.b. i am very stubbornly against picking just one of anything, so I've taken the liberty to multiply my answers a bit. I never said I gave well-behaved interview, merely that I would enjoy it. And I somehow can't imagine that
corivax minds.)1. You have an understanding I envy of the weight and reality and magic of books. Tell me about the book that influenced you the most and how / why.
All the wonderful books I read as a child seem to have fairly heavily influenced me, judging by rereadings. Adult books, enh, not so much - though maybe I just need to be farther away from them to be able to trace their influence.
That being the case, I've fretfully reduced my answer to two of the earliest "serious" books i remember reading, and rereading, until they flowed in my veins:
Roger Lancelyn Green's _Myths of the Norsemen_ - Some of the things which captured me in this book: the fierceness with which the gods strive for their desires; Ask and Embla, the trees who became the first people; Odin's ordeal, and his two ravens; the giants; the social complexity of how the various races (man, giants, gods, pre-gods, etc.) were intertwined; the creation myth (ohhhhhh, the creation myth); the humor; Loki; Freya and Frigg and, for some reason, apples. It mattered because of the sheer power of the stories, which came to live and draw breath in my head. Also, it taught me to be proud of my earthiness, to revel in my delight for dirt and rot and gut-driven actions. I didn't believe in those gods, but I wanted them to be true. I ended up seeing Catholic rituals and dogma through the pre-existing filter of these myths, so that the Christian story resonated through Ragnarok and Baldur's rebirth, rather than the other way around. [The caveat to this is that I'm under the impression, as an adult, that Green's version of Norse mythology was heavily filtered through his own Christianity.] And, well, Bifrost made such an impression on me that I've never been able to see a rainbow without wishing to ascend it.
The Once and Future King, by T. H. White: My immersion in this book was certainly a contributing factor to: a fascination with natural history, particularly *old* style natural history; a fervent desire to be chivalrous, and a concomitant curiosity about the social customs pertaining thereto; a particular way of speaking, overspecific, full of large words, and almost - deliberately stilted? - for the purposes of self-amusement; and a willingness to risk all in an effort to leap onto the right thing. The original delight of my small mind with the idea of a person living backwards through time has led to to an inexhaustible interest in time travel and probably started me upon my explorations of physics. Again, this is a living, breathing, compelling story, a myth that drew me into all sorts of history.
Both books are as filled with wonder as was the world I saw around me. Reading them was akin to a long, sustained cry of delight, one that had room for sorrow in it. Still is; I could gratefully dip into either of them out loud at any time, with any person of whom I'm fond, under almost any circumstances.
2. Tell me about a favorite dream of yours.
Three instead. Can't help it! Not sorry!
1 - I once dreamt 30 years in a single night. I don't believe there were any gaps; it really seems as though it were 30 years composed of 365 days each, and each day composed of 24 hours, and so on. Though I don't see how that could be, and after stumbling about in too-much-experience-leads-to-confusion for a week, I promptly forgot most of it. My brain was kind enough to leave me with a single symbolic image: The sun has just finished rising in the east. Water rushes down into the river. I dance naked and alone on the top of a high sandstone cliff, bare feet drumming my welcome to the day.
2 - I've twice had a dream which was entirely composed of riding on the backs of giant bears and whales, diving through the ocean, feeling completely safe and intimate and held on their backs while awed by the beauty of what we were seeing. I think other people feel about flying dreams the way I feel about this one.
3 - When I was about 18, I had a few serial dreams in which I was a 12 year old boy. I spent these dreams in close collusion with my friend the giant Angus, adventuring through a landscape in which my grandmother's white farmhouse was a focal point of safety.
3. If you could be any fictional character, who would you be, and why? Alternately, if you could be a new character in a pre-existing fictional world, which one would you pick?
I'd be Mary Poppins. Perfectly able to combine love, care, self-discipline, extreme competence, and wonderfully strange friends in amazing alternate universes. She's also profoundly enigmatic without even a hint of being coy. (AND she can fly.) If I could pick any fictional world in which to exist, it'd be the future Mars that Kim Stanley Robinson imagines. Such freedom, such complexity, such possibility. Or else I'd just settle in at Callahan's Cross Time Saloon and never leave (I'm *firmly* of the opinion that the place needs a library, and a library tender).
4. I think all geeks were bizarre children. Describe yourself as a child.
I'll be terribly lazy, and free associate for a bit: curiosity, delight, talking to everybody, climbing trees, watching bugs, odd skipping and hopping and counting games, peeling things (rotting logs and fungi and lead paint and &c), fascinated by adults, anti-obedient, impatient with superficial social interactions, expectant, constantly wrapped in the mystic, desirous of people who could do things and explain things and be kind, preferably all three at once. Not so different from myself as an adult really, only less scarred. I remember recognizing God in a dandelion. I spent hours and hours at or around the public library, sometimes more than I spent at school, and the textures of the various objects I touched there still spring immediately to hand. I had a scooter, which I rode all over town, and I loved the feeling of the wind against my face.
5. Tell me about a time when you were struck by the beauty of something.
It's actually harder to think of an extended period of time (more than a few hours) when I wasn't struck by the beauty of anything.
The problem is that the more struck by something I am, the harder it is to put into words later.
I'll tell you about a time in which I was extraordinarily grateful for being struck by the beauty of something, how would that be?
I was 20 or 21, and weeping in the deserted university chapel, and I suddenly looked up and truly saw the slightly pretentious stained glass windows and the worn wooden pews and the dirty-around-the-edges linoleum floors, and I was awed by their loveliness, the combination of color and age and use and having-been-made-carefully. That doesn't tell you, but maybe it points a little bit.
6. Post or link to a poem or song that you feel describes you very well. Explain how.
Ack! I can't narrow it down to one poem, without being either utterly unoriginal, or overly flip, so I shall content myself by narrowing it down to one poet, Yeats, and request that the reader triangulate, correcting as necessary for the inclusion of the poet's voice itself.
The Cat and the Moon
The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.
Oh, yes, I know this part of me. The fierce stalker, world-reflecting, self-centered, and pretty-footed: cold and yowling and pure. Reading Shakespeare, I always wanted to be Tybalt.
A Crazed Girl
That crazed girl improvising her music,
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling she knew not where,
Hiding among the cargo of a steamship
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved hungry sea.'
This is a tragic (if stubbornly triumphant) poem, and I don't usually belong in tragedies. But when I find myself there, I do desperately wind myself in what consolations I can attain - I well remember throwing myself forward into things to avoid drowning. I too seek beauty, always. And the first three lines are generally applicable.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Ah yes. My heart's internal home must neighbor Yeats'. The peacefulness and earthiness and rocking motion of this poem are mine too. So shall I; so do I. I taste this poem, and smell it, and feel it on the tips of my fingers.
Hmm. I feel like the poems themselves say more about me than my efforts at explaining their relevance can. Now that I'm done being grandiose for a bit, I'll confess that I've never found a single poem or song that made me say "Ah, yes, me, exactly," as opposed to "ah, yes, part of what me is." or "ah, yes, the emotion I'm currently having." I suppose it might be because the poets I'm drawn to (with certain notable exceptions) tend to deal very much in the concrete, in story and moment, rather than in character description. And then, it's entirely possible that I actually have an entire store of such lyrics somewhere, and have just temporarily forgotten about them. Mind like a trapdoor and all that.
So, anybody want questions?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-06-04 10:00 pm (UTC)please forgive me
it was juicy, and tart on the brain
Interview me, please.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-05 09:51 pm (UTC)2. If not penguin, what would be your totem?
3. You can go anywhere for a vacation, as long as it doesn’t involve visiting anyone you know. Where do you go, and why? (Or would you choose to stay home?)
4. Of all the scholars you’ve had to peruse for your dissertation (grr! Argh!), which one was most interesting, and what did you like about his or her work?
5. It’s Erin-Pampering Day. Tell me what happens.
6. What’s your earliest regret?
7. What’s your most recent joy?
no subject
Date: 2003-06-04 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-05 10:04 pm (UTC)2. This question may betray a lack of close reading, but what exactly are you doing right now, in your lab? Or mayn’t you tell us? Please feel free to be publication-protecting levels of vague.
3. How did you come to know
4. Is there anyone who is no longer a regular part of your life, whom you wish was? If so, tell me about that person.
5. What do you most want?
6. (Selfish question time): You seem to have very
no subject
Date: 2003-06-05 10:47 pm (UTC)7. Many of the people I know online (and several of those I know offline) seem to particularly identify with an animal or plant. Is there any such biotum for you? Also, do you think biotum is a legitimate word? (I can't decide.)
no subject
Date: 2003-06-05 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-05 10:28 pm (UTC)2. Why do you call yourself Mordred?
3. What did you think of “At Swim, Two Boys”? Is there something else I should read instead? (I’ve been ogling the cover every time it shows up at my store.)
4. Have you ever had a dream that made you wake up and say, “Oh, I wish that were true?” If so, tell me about one of them.
5. To which of your qualities (positive or negative) are you most attached?