![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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!
no subject
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