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To hear something other than our own hearts
Still aten't sleeping. Because ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yhlee asked me some questions:
1. What's the first myth you remember reading/being told?
Oh, God. That's actually a difficult question. From about the age of three, I read everything that wasn't nailed down and several things that were, so I have a lot of trouble identifying first contact with a lot mythic or folkloric motifs unless I can tie them to specific books or movies, and even then I'm often still not sure about when. I cannot remember ever not knowing the Greek myths, for example; I've been trying to figure out for years when in elementary school I was reading the book of Aztec myth/history that used "bitch" quite casually to mean a female dog (and therefore wrecked my ability to parse certain kinds of profanity until I was in high school). If anyone remembers the year of the Ramses II exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts [edit: 1988 and it was the Boston Museum of Science, saith my mother], it's a good bet that I became aware of the Egyptian pantheon around then, but the gods I remember learning are Khnum and Nut, not Anubis and Bastet. I got year-kings simultaneously from Peter Dickinson's Merlin Dreams (1988) and a book of collected world mythologies which included Tezcatlipoca. I wish I knew when my elementary school staged its student version of Gilgamesh. Let's just go with the Norse myths, because those have an identifiable start point: second grade, I discovered the D'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants (1967) in the Atrium library and kept not returning it.
It's not a myth, but I learned "The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry" from my mother, who sang it to me as a lullaby. I don't know when I learned about mermaids, either.
2. What is your favorite dessert on an autumn evening?
(I don't know if they actually have autumn where I am now . . . I suspect not. I will live vicariously!)
I am one of those people who eat ice cream in the dead of winter, so I don't really have seasonal desserts except for things like Fourth of July strawberry ice cream or flaming plum pudding at Christmas; but I really like baked apples or apple pies, with a lot of true cinnamon and currants or cherries thrown in, and in this hemisphere it's easiest to get hold of apples in the fall.
3. What bird reminds you most of home?
One that I'll never lack for, I think; I used to get woken up by argumentative crows.
4. When you listen to music, what's the first thing you notice?
("It depends" is totally valid!)
If it has lyrics, whether it makes a story for me. This is not the same thing as a narrative. If it's purely instrumental, whether it's three-dimensional. This is not the same thing as a classical structure. Otherwise it's just a sort of sonic skim and won't particularly register. Also, of course, whether I think the musicians are any good. Periodically I run into a piece with a terrific concept and the execution just makes me want to remove my ears.
5. Rain or snow?
Snow. Winter is my second favorite season. Perhaps inevitably, it is raining right now.
If you would like five questions of your own, comment!
yhlee asked me some questions:1. What's the first myth you remember reading/being told?
Oh, God. That's actually a difficult question. From about the age of three, I read everything that wasn't nailed down and several things that were, so I have a lot of trouble identifying first contact with a lot mythic or folkloric motifs unless I can tie them to specific books or movies, and even then I'm often still not sure about when. I cannot remember ever not knowing the Greek myths, for example; I've been trying to figure out for years when in elementary school I was reading the book of Aztec myth/history that used "bitch" quite casually to mean a female dog (and therefore wrecked my ability to parse certain kinds of profanity until I was in high school). If anyone remembers the year of the Ramses II exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts [edit: 1988 and it was the Boston Museum of Science, saith my mother], it's a good bet that I became aware of the Egyptian pantheon around then, but the gods I remember learning are Khnum and Nut, not Anubis and Bastet. I got year-kings simultaneously from Peter Dickinson's Merlin Dreams (1988) and a book of collected world mythologies which included Tezcatlipoca. I wish I knew when my elementary school staged its student version of Gilgamesh. Let's just go with the Norse myths, because those have an identifiable start point: second grade, I discovered the D'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants (1967) in the Atrium library and kept not returning it.
It's not a myth, but I learned "The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry" from my mother, who sang it to me as a lullaby. I don't know when I learned about mermaids, either.
2. What is your favorite dessert on an autumn evening?
(I don't know if they actually have autumn where I am now . . . I suspect not. I will live vicariously!)
I am one of those people who eat ice cream in the dead of winter, so I don't really have seasonal desserts except for things like Fourth of July strawberry ice cream or flaming plum pudding at Christmas; but I really like baked apples or apple pies, with a lot of true cinnamon and currants or cherries thrown in, and in this hemisphere it's easiest to get hold of apples in the fall.
3. What bird reminds you most of home?
One that I'll never lack for, I think; I used to get woken up by argumentative crows.
4. When you listen to music, what's the first thing you notice?
("It depends" is totally valid!)
If it has lyrics, whether it makes a story for me. This is not the same thing as a narrative. If it's purely instrumental, whether it's three-dimensional. This is not the same thing as a classical structure. Otherwise it's just a sort of sonic skim and won't particularly register. Also, of course, whether I think the musicians are any good. Periodically I run into a piece with a terrific concept and the execution just makes me want to remove my ears.
5. Rain or snow?
Snow. Winter is my second favorite season. Perhaps inevitably, it is raining right now.
If you would like five questions of your own, comment!
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1. Which fictional language would you most like to be real?
2. What's the first music you ever bought for yourself?
3. What's the most recent food you've learned how to cook?
4. Sky burial or catacombs?
5. What does your favorite color make you think of?
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Feel free to answer it!
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I would love to hear your reply.
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(Of course, so will
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I love hot cider, especially mulled. You're right; I can't even picture it SoCal.
I'll take five if it doesn't seem weird to you.
Not at all!
1. What musical instrument would you make for yourself to play?
2. Do you have comfort books?
3. What's your favorite dessert in summer?
4. Which historical figure would you most like to have known as a person?
5. What fandom would you actually live in, as opposed to write? (Obviously, the answer can be dear God, none!)
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1. Where would you like to live that you've never visited?
2. What tree would you turn yourself into?
3. What was the first ballad you learned?
4. Which gods would you least like to find out existed?
5. What's your favorite (real or fictional) band name?
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Quite possibly Australia or New Zeland. Scotland figures on the mental map too, as does Ireland. If we're not confining ourselves to real places, I wouldn't mind living in an Ellen Raskin novel.
2. What tree would you turn yourself into?
Bizarrely, I have contemplated this one a lot. The current front runners are olive tree, maple tree and apple tree. I seem to like trees that produce edible foodstuffs. Pomegranate tree is also newly in the running, also Jacaranda and avocado.
3. What was the first ballad you learned?
Hard to say. If we go strictly with Child Ballads, it's probably Matty Groves, of which I learned the talking blues version first. You can thank Frank Hayes for that, since I heard Like a Lamb to the Slaughter at least a year before I ever heard Matty Groves done traditionally. I think I knew Bonnie Susie Clelland before that, i.e. in high school, and probably a lot more things I will inevitably discover have a ballad core.
4. Which gods would you least like to find out existed?
Goodness, any large number of them, but I think Loki tops the list. I am also deeply unsure about meeting the facet of God that Job encounters. That seems like a particularly unhealthy scenario, especially if it's both at once.
5. What's your favorite (real or fictional) band name?
I am fond of our own, possibly from hubris, and mostly I think because I like the conceit of our band being named for the fact that people always mis-hear and mis-spell our names, and we are thus called Lady Mondegreen. Oddly the band is named after my LJ, via a song that
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Of course!
1. What do you drink by preference when it's cold out?
2. What season do you dream of most often?
3. What's the oldest game you know how to play?
4. What's your favorite item of clothing? (Worn by you or anyone else.)
5. What single song would you ensure is not forgotten?
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I also love what you said about music up above, when you were answering your own questions.
Could I maybe have just one--to be answered here on your journal--and could I ask you one, as well?
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Absolutely. Which birds do you most wish would speak with you?
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And my answer to you is not too imaginative, but it's one I feel strongly: crows, or catbirds. Crows because they surely have excellent tales to tell, what with the places they've been and the things they've seen, and catbirds because they're so inquisitive about people and so friendly seeming--I'd like to get to know one.
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Hah. My first best friend was a human boy; our mothers were in the same Lamaze class. We knew each other before we were born. For most of our childhoods, he had that flyaway hair so fair, it's nearly white. It's dark wheat-color now and he writes screenplays. He's getting married tomorrow morning.
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All happiness!
Nine
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Nine
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1. What's the most interesting thing made with chocolate you have ever eaten?
2. What film character would you most like to spend time with?
3. What's your favorite memory of spring?
4. What time would you like least to have lived through?
5. Who would you sing back from the dead for a day?
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You sound like me, that way.
If it's purely instrumental, whether it's three-dimensional. This is not the same thing as a classical structure. Otherwise it's just a sort of sonic skim and won't particularly register. Also, of course, whether I think the musicians are any good. Periodically I run into a piece with a terrific concept and the execution just makes me want to remove my ears.
Interesting. Of course, now I'm rather intimidated at the prospect of your hearing me, but I've been embarassed in front of enough musicians (including those I respect and those I love) that I've probably not got too much fear left. As long as it's not a stage situation--I'm not good at those, unless I'm with a group and I can pretend it's just tunes in the corner of a pub somewhere.
What does three-dimensionality entail?
My own relationship to music seems to be a bit odd, because so much of it revolves around playing with people.
If you'd be so kind, I'd like five questions.
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And this is where I have difficulty, because I don't have a great musicological vocabulary and I am trying to describe quasi-synesthesia: it needs to take takes up enough space in my head. A voice and a drum can do this, or three guitars in jagged polyrhythms. Most popular music does not qualify.
If you'd be so kind, I'd like five questions.
1. What instrument sounds most like the language you know best?
2. What was the first fandom you decided to write for?
3. What's your favorite street food?
4. Which historical cause has your greatest support?
5. Would you talk to a saint if one appeared to you?
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1. Who's the first fictional character you can remember liking?
2. Which poet do you have the most problems with?
3. What landscape scares you the most?
4. What book do you love that no one else has read?
5. What museum would you choose to live in?
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I'd like five questions, please.
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1. Which myth would you want to be part of?
2. Is there a fruit you hate?
3. What artist (contemporary or historical) would you like to have done your portrait?
4. Why did you learn the first song you ever performed?
5. Who's the most unconvincing fan-pairing you've ever read?
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Either way!
1. What shape would you take, knowing you could never change back?
2. What fictional planet would you most like to live on?
3. Who's the first actor (male or female) you remember noticing?
4. What weather do you sleep best in?
5. Which monster do you have the greatest affinity for?
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My answers are at:
http://thunderpigeon.livejournal.com/67165.html
Thoughts for a diary writ on water
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At your journal?
Would you like questions of your own?
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Please post wherever you like; if you wish to import the meme to your blog, be welcome!
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The version of Linear A I created for my fictional universe (I wouldn't mind if the real Linear A were deciphered, either, finally giving the Minoans their own voice).
Érih káethe adíh, ir yerán.
Tásen eráni sorihén, Ánassa?
Dhi kéri ten sóran, táira -- sírathen Perihán Adhirén énis adáir.
2. Sky burial or catacombs?
Sky burial… or, better yet, resting in the arms of the sea.
3. What does your favorite color make you think of?
My beloved color, that nacreous band that unites sea and sky at dusk and dawn, makes me think of journeys to worlds where the stars are strange.
4. What musical instrument would you make for yourself to play?
A cousin of either the bagpipes (with a smaller ascus) or the Cretan lyre (with more strings).
5. Which historical figure would you most like to have known as a person?
Emily Brontë… and Crazy Horse. I think they would understand each other well, too, the two stoic fierce mystics.
6. Where would you like to live that you've never visited?
My third lodestone after the Aegean Islands and the Scottish highlands: Aotearoa.
7. What tree would you turn yourself into?
Perhaps a rowan, with its bright berries standing out stark against the winter twilight.
8. Who would you sing back from the dead for a day?
My paternal grandmother, my namesake. She would be likely to follow the thread of my song... and I have so many questions to ask her.
9. What instrument sounds most like the language you know best?
The sinuous laments of the folk clarinet, like a dark human voice singing by the sea.
10. Who's the first fictional character you can remember liking?
Captain Nemo, as I described in The Multi-Chambered Nautilus.
11. What landscape scares you the most?
Landlocked places make me claustrophobic with the exception (so far) of New Mexico where the endless sky compensates.
12. What book do you love that no one else has read?
Ann Arensberg's Sister Wolf.
13. What museum would you choose to live in?
Amid the middle-class Minoan ruins at Akrotiri (Thera) for reasons I discussed in The Hyacinth among the Roses.
14. Which myth would you want to be part of?
I wouldn't mind living as an Amazon, the way they are depicted in Ellen Frye's Story Bones.
15. What artist (contemporary or historical) would you like to have done your portrait?
Rembrandt, though I wonder how unsettled I would be by the result.
16. What shape would you take, knowing you could never change back?
I am usually a mountain lion or falcon in my dreams. So...
17. What fictional planet would you most like to live on?
Gethen of The Left Hand of Darkness -- as a Gethenian, but after the second Hainish contact, so I could travel to the other planets, especially Ki-O.
18. What bird reminds you most of home?
Swallows -- they are graceful yet indomitable and travel very far. When I was young, almost every house had a swallow nest… they were symbols of both exile and homecoming.
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1. What would you name a ship of the line?
2. Which folktale/myth do you wish people would stop writing already?
3. What instrument would you be? (It need not be made of your bones.)
4. What dish do you most wish you knew how to make?
5. Which historical figure would you like to send a message to, and what would it say?
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2. I think any myth ought to be looked at over and over again as long as someone has something fresh to bring to the telling, but I have zilch patience with thinly veiled Greco-Roman-salad-bar hooey when it's obvious the awther hasn't read D'Aulaires even. (This is mostly a sin of YA.)
3. Viola da gamba. Must be played in an embrace, and not very much exposure to people's spittle.
4. At the moment, the flaming Talleyrand.
5. If I could safely change the course of history and not get paradox juice everywhere, I'd send it to Jack Phillips, Harold Bride, and Cyril Furmstone-Evans, and I'd say Really, you want to get that Marconigram out to the Carpathia<.EM> or the Californian before you do anything else. If I couldn't change history, I'd send a message to Shakespeare asking about Viola, but I wouldn't quite know what to say.
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---L.
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1. Who is your favorite author who has never been translated properly?
2. What animal do you think is mythologically underrated?
3. Which underworld would you prefer to spend the rest of time in?
4. What is the least successful erotica you've ever read?
5. What art do you wish were practiced more widely?
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Not at all!
1. Which lost document from history—letter, poem, shopping list, play—do you wish had survived?
2. Do you have recurring dreams?
3. Who is the most obscure saint you wish more people knew about?
4. Is there a fictional country you'd ever emigrate to?
5. What fruit would you never put in a salad?