Otherwise known as, memery! (And many thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks for providing the soundtrack. I am getting Horses as soon as I actually have some money.)
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your livejournal/website with the answers to the questions and leave the answers as comments on my livejournal.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
Questions fromgaudior, for whom I have to tell a family story that I hope she hasn't heard already . . .
1) When you get an idea, do you know right away whether it's for a poem or a story, or do you have to sit with it for a while?
Mostly I know right away because of the form in which the idea arrives: the language. If it's got cadences, line breaks, and a crystallized sense of the moment, there's a good chance it intends to be a poem. When I have characters, and if I'm lucky some conception of where they're going, that usually means a story. And if I've somehow gotten the structure wrong, I find out soon enough. A piece I wrote the other night made it through two lines as a poem before deciding it really wanted to be flash fiction instead. And then it and I were both much happier.
2) In your opinion, does New Haven really look better in the dark?
Absolutely not. Night brings out the fratboys who live on my street, who even as I write are smashing what sounds like glass—beer bottles, I presume—against the asphalt and drunkenly shouting at one another. (I would swear I just heard someone yell, "You smokin' asshole!" I'm amused by that.) Besides, daylight allows one to see the Gothic poseur architecture of Yale, which really is maybe the best thing about this city; certainly you don't come here for the bookstores. I'm being cynical: especially now that the days are longer and the sun higher, time-change and all, the cathedral look around here is lovely. Faces of stone take the afternoon light like honey and all the windows glitter, and the students have emerged to bask lizardlike on the steps of the library and the lawns of Old and Cross-Campus. I will never love New Haven, but I can appreciate its aesthetics better by Daylight Savings Time.
3) Who is a mythological figure about whom you think more people should know?
Agh. You had to ask something like that. Right now I'm experiencing an unaccountable interest in Namtar, the slightly treacherous minister of Ereškigal who seems (unlike his mistress) able to travel back and forth between the underworld, earth, and heaven; but I know little more about him than his roles in Ištar's Descent to the Underworld and Nergal and Ereškigal, so I might have to postpone recommending him until I've found out if there's more to learn . . . More people should know about Enki (in Sumerian; in Akkadian, Ea). He's conventionally identified as the god of wisdom, but I bristle the same way when people call Athene the goddess of wisdom: they're both far more about crafty, creative thought than philosophical pronouncements. Enki makes his home in the abzu, the sweet waters under the earth, and think about water for a minute—shape-changing, mutable, that will find a way up through soil and stone, and water is hard to control. You can't box up water. You can dam it, but watch out next time it rains. So in the Enuma eliš, the Babylonian epic of creation—otherwise known as Marduk, Marduk, He's Our Man!—it's Ea whose ingenuity saves the gods from death at the hands of their primordial father Apsu, and Ea whose tricky murder of Apsu provokes Tiamat's vengeful rage, and Ea whose son Marduk will eventually slay Tiamat and recreate the world from her vanquished corpse. In Atrahasis, the Babylonian flood myth, it's Ea who first helps out humanity behind the back of Enlil, king of the gods, and then cleverly contravenes Enlil's ban on warning humanity against the flood by warning not the Noah-figure of Atrahasis himself, but the reed-wall on whose other side Atrahasis is listening. In Enki and Ninhursag, it's Enki who gets the sun-god Utu to draw up fresh water from the earth for the city of Dilmun, and then Enki who gets himself into serious trouble seducing his female descendants until he eats the plants Ninhursag has sown from his semen and sort of self-impregnates: Ninhursag has to midwife eight gods from him, one for each plant, each to heal a different part of his body, before he feels better. In Enki and Ninmah, it's Enki who is willing to create an entirely defective and unsalvageable human being to win a contest with the birth-goddess Ninmah: who can find places in society for even the deformed. And in Enki and Inanna, it's a seriously blitzed Enki from whom Inanna obtains the MEs—what Rivkah Harris calls "the attributes of culture"—after a divinely impressive bout of beer-drinking, and then when the beer wears off wonders where all his powers have gone. How can you not love a god like that? Warily, of course . . .
4) Tell a good family story (preferably with an explanation of how the person's related).
(This is from my mother's side of the family, so you,gaudior, may already know it. But at least maybe you know a different version.) My great-grandfather Bernie, Israel Bernard Madinek, died in 1964. At his funeral, the officiating rabbi—who hadn't known him—had to fall back on general remarks and platitudes and as the story goes, kept repeating the phrase "Life depends on the liver," which finally prompted my grandmother to say, "But he died of a heart attack!" Unfortunately, when my great-grandmother Sofy's funeral came along however many years later, the service was performed by none other than the same rabbi: and he hadn't known her either. And as soon as he opened his mouth and declared that "Life depends on the liver," that was it. The bereaved family completely lost it. My aunt Naomi started laughing so hard that my grandfather had to smother her in his coat so that it looked like she was crying. And I don't think anyone ever asked that rabbi to speak at a family funeral again.
5) Where do you see yourself in seven years (it's more interesting than five)?
If I am not being paid as a teind to Hell, I have absolutely no idea.
rushthatspeaks for providing the soundtrack. I am getting Horses as soon as I actually have some money.)1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your livejournal/website with the answers to the questions and leave the answers as comments on my livejournal.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
Questions from
gaudior, for whom I have to tell a family story that I hope she hasn't heard already . . .1) When you get an idea, do you know right away whether it's for a poem or a story, or do you have to sit with it for a while?
Mostly I know right away because of the form in which the idea arrives: the language. If it's got cadences, line breaks, and a crystallized sense of the moment, there's a good chance it intends to be a poem. When I have characters, and if I'm lucky some conception of where they're going, that usually means a story. And if I've somehow gotten the structure wrong, I find out soon enough. A piece I wrote the other night made it through two lines as a poem before deciding it really wanted to be flash fiction instead. And then it and I were both much happier.
2) In your opinion, does New Haven really look better in the dark?
Absolutely not. Night brings out the fratboys who live on my street, who even as I write are smashing what sounds like glass—beer bottles, I presume—against the asphalt and drunkenly shouting at one another. (I would swear I just heard someone yell, "You smokin' asshole!" I'm amused by that.) Besides, daylight allows one to see the Gothic poseur architecture of Yale, which really is maybe the best thing about this city; certainly you don't come here for the bookstores. I'm being cynical: especially now that the days are longer and the sun higher, time-change and all, the cathedral look around here is lovely. Faces of stone take the afternoon light like honey and all the windows glitter, and the students have emerged to bask lizardlike on the steps of the library and the lawns of Old and Cross-Campus. I will never love New Haven, but I can appreciate its aesthetics better by Daylight Savings Time.
3) Who is a mythological figure about whom you think more people should know?
Agh. You had to ask something like that. Right now I'm experiencing an unaccountable interest in Namtar, the slightly treacherous minister of Ereškigal who seems (unlike his mistress) able to travel back and forth between the underworld, earth, and heaven; but I know little more about him than his roles in Ištar's Descent to the Underworld and Nergal and Ereškigal, so I might have to postpone recommending him until I've found out if there's more to learn . . . More people should know about Enki (in Sumerian; in Akkadian, Ea). He's conventionally identified as the god of wisdom, but I bristle the same way when people call Athene the goddess of wisdom: they're both far more about crafty, creative thought than philosophical pronouncements. Enki makes his home in the abzu, the sweet waters under the earth, and think about water for a minute—shape-changing, mutable, that will find a way up through soil and stone, and water is hard to control. You can't box up water. You can dam it, but watch out next time it rains. So in the Enuma eliš, the Babylonian epic of creation—otherwise known as Marduk, Marduk, He's Our Man!—it's Ea whose ingenuity saves the gods from death at the hands of their primordial father Apsu, and Ea whose tricky murder of Apsu provokes Tiamat's vengeful rage, and Ea whose son Marduk will eventually slay Tiamat and recreate the world from her vanquished corpse. In Atrahasis, the Babylonian flood myth, it's Ea who first helps out humanity behind the back of Enlil, king of the gods, and then cleverly contravenes Enlil's ban on warning humanity against the flood by warning not the Noah-figure of Atrahasis himself, but the reed-wall on whose other side Atrahasis is listening. In Enki and Ninhursag, it's Enki who gets the sun-god Utu to draw up fresh water from the earth for the city of Dilmun, and then Enki who gets himself into serious trouble seducing his female descendants until he eats the plants Ninhursag has sown from his semen and sort of self-impregnates: Ninhursag has to midwife eight gods from him, one for each plant, each to heal a different part of his body, before he feels better. In Enki and Ninmah, it's Enki who is willing to create an entirely defective and unsalvageable human being to win a contest with the birth-goddess Ninmah: who can find places in society for even the deformed. And in Enki and Inanna, it's a seriously blitzed Enki from whom Inanna obtains the MEs—what Rivkah Harris calls "the attributes of culture"—after a divinely impressive bout of beer-drinking, and then when the beer wears off wonders where all his powers have gone. How can you not love a god like that? Warily, of course . . .
4) Tell a good family story (preferably with an explanation of how the person's related).
(This is from my mother's side of the family, so you,
gaudior, may already know it. But at least maybe you know a different version.) My great-grandfather Bernie, Israel Bernard Madinek, died in 1964. At his funeral, the officiating rabbi—who hadn't known him—had to fall back on general remarks and platitudes and as the story goes, kept repeating the phrase "Life depends on the liver," which finally prompted my grandmother to say, "But he died of a heart attack!" Unfortunately, when my great-grandmother Sofy's funeral came along however many years later, the service was performed by none other than the same rabbi: and he hadn't known her either. And as soon as he opened his mouth and declared that "Life depends on the liver," that was it. The bereaved family completely lost it. My aunt Naomi started laughing so hard that my grandfather had to smother her in his coat so that it looked like she was crying. And I don't think anyone ever asked that rabbi to speak at a family funeral again.5) Where do you see yourself in seven years (it's more interesting than five)?
If I am not being paid as a teind to Hell, I have absolutely no idea.
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