Everything we do tonight is wrong, wrong, wrong

[sovay]

From kraada, a meme. I will be out of town for the weekend and potentially AWOI (absent without internet), so my replies may take a few days, but—

Comment and I will:

1. Tell you why I added you to my friends list and/or why I keep you there.

2. Associate you with something. A song, a color, a work of art, a character in a play, a piece of fruit. SOMETHING.

3. Tell you something I like about you.

4. Tell you a memory I have of you/us.

5. Associate you with a character from a book or a film.

6. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you. (Or else I'll just ask a random question. I reserve that right.)

7. Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.

8. In return, you must spread this disease in your LJ.

Comments

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

Hit me.

[larryhammer]

If it weren't for #8, I'd be in.

---L.

[zdenka]

Mrreow?

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Sure.

Shoot.

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

What the heck, I'm in. I'll get round to putting it on my page eventually.

Though now I'm trying to figure out what piece of fruit you are...

Everything we do tonight is wrong, wrong, wrong

Seconded.

[kraada.livejournal.com]

I like tagbacks :)

[setsuled.livejournal.com]

Well. I suppose you could always do more writing . . .

[sovay]

1. I consider you one of my more awesome friends: therefore, even if I rarely manage to speak to you twice in the same month (for which I have no real excuse: I am a lousy correspondent), at least this way I can keep some tabs on you and in the process appreciate the always informed and quirkily intellectual weirdness that your brain seems to run on.

2. A kiwi fruit. I will contemplate why.

3.You made bread at odd hours of the night and chanted the Kaddish with voiced glottals and emphatic consonants and announced your engagement with such conversational deadpan, it was almost lost in the cumin seeds.

4. The "Volga Boatmen" retrograde inversion.

5. Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, from Phil and Kaja Foglio's Girl Genius.

6. What language would you most like to hear spoken?

7. "You crazy mammals!"

[sovay]

If it weren't for #8, I'd be in.

You can make it up in memic karma.

1. You invented a Greek myth. Dude.

2. The Mountain Goats' "The Anglo-Saxons."

3. You are evaluating The Canterbury Tales on a scale of ninjas. I repeat: dude.

4. You provided excellent conversation about Princess Tutu. Of which I still need to see the second half.

5. Hexel Barr, from Patricia McKillip's Song for the Basilisk.

6. Which verse form do you most wish you could write straight off the top of your head?

7. In practice, I have only ever seen the stick figure Some Guy. But looking at your page of icons, I strongly approve of the sexy Enceladus.

[sovay]

1. You are a polymathic geek of the first water. I think our brains pick up some of the same radio static. I have just lost my license to mix metaphors.

2. The kumquat.

3. More than occasionally, you react to particularly interesting information with an approving headbang and sign of the horns.

4. On observing me to bite the end off an ice cream cone and vampirize out the remainder of the ice cream, you declared that I must be your long-lost, alternate-universe twin.

5. Telemain, from Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles.

6. What is the first book you remember reading?

7. The photograph of you and . . . whatever it is you have on your fork . . . is particularly charming.

Though now I'm trying to figure out what piece of fruit you are...

Oh?

[sovay]

Well. I suppose you could always do more writing . . .

That's my other deadline . . .

1. Your dialogues on movies are unfailingly interesting and I love your comics.

2. Recoil (with Nicole Blackman)'s "Breath Control."

3. I speak only from experience of Boschen and Nesuko and Moving Innocent, but your characters have the ability to shift from consistently smile-worthy humor to punch-in-the-heart pain with as little as a line of dialogue or a shift of expression between panels: and then back. I do not know if that is a balance I could pull off, much less maintain.

4. You set me up with a prince.

5. Tadhg Conneelly, from The Secret of Roan Inish (1994).

6. Where does your name come from?

7. I'm inexplicably fond of the one with Donald Duck about to be grabbed around the throat by a book.

[sovay]

1. With your interests in opera and supporting characters, it would be extremely unintelligent of me to ignore you.

2. Bob Dylan's "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands."

3. You speak cat.

4. This year at Halloween, you carved the most classical pumpkin I have ever seen.

5. Adam Wayne, from G.K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

6. What role—in the theatrical genre of your choice—would you most like to perform?

7. It used to be "But why is the tea gone?" (And, of course, now the icon is itself gone.) I therefore vote for the radish that knows no Greek.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Mrf?

Nine

[sovay]

1. I convinced you to get a livejournal, so it would have been fairly shabby of me not to read it. But also you wrote a book that was autumn in almost all the ways that are important to me.

2. The color that comes with winter twilight, the luminous smoke-blue that fills the sky down into the streets and clings to the edges of things, branches, house-eaves, streetlights, so that you expect to breathe it in with the cold: there is an incredible depth behind that color, and it takes up space.

3. Your apartment is what branch libraries want to be when they grow up.

4. We were once accidentally locked inside an ornamental garden at Harvard.

5. Doctor Dianus Shaachen, from Tanith Lee's Faces Under Water.

6. Do you see any of your characters as avatars of yourself?

7. The one with your illustration of the tinker.

[setsuled.livejournal.com]

2. Recoil (with Nicole Blackman)'s "Breath Control."

And now I need to hear that song . . .

your characters have the ability to shift from consistently smile-worthy humor to punch-in-the-heart pain with as little as a line of dialogue or a shift of expression between panels:

You're sweet, thank you. Humour's a tricky business, as I have to trust myself that I can count on its effects as I move forward, yet humour can be so subjective. But I find pain and humour flow pretty naturally together--most people I know, myself included, when they talk about something painful tend to interject humour in order to ease self-examinations. I've used humour as a defence mechanism when I was kid, and I apply it sometimes as an anaesthetic when I need to have a discussion with someone about something sensitive.

4. You set me up with a prince.

What could I do? He threatened to quit if he couldn't have you.

5. Tadhg Conneelly, from The Secret of Roan Inish (1994).

And now I need to see that.

6. Where does your name come from?

It used to be the name of a character in Boschen and Nesuko's universe, but I liked it so I stole it, and now his name's Seluchen, which may actually be a slightly less silly name than Setsuled, but I chose Setsuled because it's slightly silly. I came up with the character in high school, freshman or sophomore year. Like many of my alien names, I started by spelling an English word backwards, in this case "delete", and then adding whatever letters I felt like.

7. I'm inexplicably fond of the one with Donald Duck about to be grabbed around the throat by a book.

Heh. Since you're a writer, I'm not sure it's so inexplicable. It comes from the 1945 short "Duck Pimples".

[mlle-rouge.livejournal.com]

Mmm... this makes me a little bit anxious ^^

[sovay]

1. The way you put together words, whether in poems or stories, is like reading another language, where all the allusions and triggers and even the basic import of images are vastly different: I'm trying to learn its grammar. And even if I don't, I'll keep reading.

2. The Squirrel Nut Zippers' "Wash Jones."

3. Reading your political posts is like pocketing razorblades. I mean this positively.

4. You sent me CDs, for no binding reason, and I really liked them.

5. Keller, from Lloyd Alexander's Westmark Trilogy.

6. If you had to describe yourself in lyrics, which song?

7. The slice of watermelon, now that I know the nightmare behind it.

[dasheiff.livejournal.com]

Comment.

[palecast.livejournal.com]

I think this will be a challenge - but maybe you like challenges. :-)

[xterminal.livejournal.com]

In love and in trouble, I guess.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

We HAVE the internet in Maryland, you know.

[larryhammer]

4. Yes, you do need to see the second half. All the prices are yet to be paid. You do, however, get to rewatch the two-part Swan Lake episode as a running start.

6. Woofs. While it's tempting to wish not having to struggle with a sonnet for a week, really what I want is write rhyme royal faster than a stanza a day (which is my average rate over the long haul).

7. :-D

I will meme again Monday.

---L.

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

1. Polymathic geek. Funny, that's what I'd say about you.
radio static Yeesh, I just used radio static as a metaphor in a non-public journal entry!
Heh. And, of course, your answer to Nine could've applied to me, too...HOW many people have you infected with this form of time-eating virus?

2. Don't think I've ever eaten one, oddly.

5. Haven't met him yet, have I?

6. I must have been about three, sitting in bed in some parent's arms, learning to read out of some book written more-or-less for that purpose: about some undersea creatures. I don't remember the details, only the last line "Spongey Sponge likes you too!" [This, of course, long before SpongeBob. Hm, a possible inspiration?]
...And the fact that whichever parent it was and I took turns reading passages, and I never wanted to be the one to read: they could read so much more fluidly, and do all the voices.

7. It's an octopus, silly!

What's this about being set up with a prince? Or have I heard this story? (Don't answer if you don't feel like it--this is not the meme. yet.)

Answer to question 6

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

The coins are often very old
by the time they reach the jeweler
with his hands and ashes
he will try the best he can
he knows he can only shine them
cannot repair the scratches
he knows that even new coins have scars
so he just smiles

-This Mortal Coil "The Jeweler"
The rest of the song is a little too drippy and dramatic, but the general idea holds pretty well for where I am.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Well, an you've the time and inclination, I'd be grateful.

Enjoy your weekend!