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If they find the bodies in the basement
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grailquestion gave me one of the most beautiful quotations I have ever heard:
If you leave comment requesting a quick analysis, then I will respond to you about the following . . .
1. I'll respond with something random I like about you.
2. I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I'll name something we should do together.
4. I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me (or just me).
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
6. I'll leave you a quote that is somehow appropriate to you.
7. I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you.
8. If I do this for you, you must can post this on your journal so you can do the same for other people.
grailquestion gave me one of the most beautiful quotations I have ever heard:If you leave comment requesting a quick analysis, then I will respond to you about the following . . .
1. I'll respond with something random I like about you.
2. I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I'll name something we should do together.
4. I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me (or just me).
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
6. I'll leave you a quote that is somehow appropriate to you.
7. I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you.
8. If I do this for you, you must can post this on your journal so you can do the same for other people.
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---L.
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---L.
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1. You own a 1983 Baedecker Guide to the United States.
2. Pretty Balanced's "Romeo and Juliet (Why'd You Come)."
3. Meet in person and read classical smut.
4. Odyssey!Homer.
5. "Paul Bunyan and the Photocopier."
6. When correctly viewed, everything is lewd . . .
7. When did you first read Ovid?
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Eurydice appeared brindled in blood and she said to Orpheus:
"If you play that fucking thing down here, I'll stick it up your orifice!"
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trashintroduce the myrmidons to Orpheus aftertheyI get done with Oedipus and Iocaste.)I can think of way worse introductions than Paul. And Lehrer is certainly appropriate.
In re: #7 -- I bounced off the classic Penguin prose translation of the Metamorphoses in college; I first read it all the way through in verse ... sometime early grad school, say around age 23, shortly after discovering Catullus. I then glommed onto everything else and have been arguing with him ever since.
Thankee.
---L.
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It should be in your inbox. Enjoy!
I then glommed onto everything else and have been arguing with him ever since.
Cool. So far, I like the results of your argument.
Vergil is the first real Latin I remember reading, but Catullus was the first poet I ever imprinted on. (Thank you, Dr. Fiveash.) I'm pretty sure I read at least a little Ovid in high school, but my primary introduction to him was the Amores in college; and then I did a whole class on the Metamorphoses, which was bizarre because I knew most of the stories, but somehow I hadn't ever read the epic. And I've since become very fond of the Fasti. Yay, the Lemuria.
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BTW, did you hear that A.E. Stallings has a translation of Lucretius coming out next year?
---L.
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I just read his Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto on the train up from New Haven. I liked very much.
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I need to get his Catullus.
---L.
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I don't remember loving his Catullus. This may be partially because I don't really like anyone's translation of Catullus—he's like Sappho; I prefer him so much more in the original—but even so, Peter Green did not make my heart flutter. Which his Poems of Exile did, for whatever that's worth.
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---L.
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1. Your ability to worldbuild the everyday through the mythological, so that crab fishing and teaching Chaucer have the weight of epic or waking the sun. The sea shrugs and is satisfied.
2. Jill Tracy's "Anything at All."
3. Attend more cons!
4. Σίβυλλα, τί θέλεις;
5. Your hair was streaked red and blackly bronze as an autumn sunset, so you must have been in your descending phase; the hotel room looked like a library had exploded on the bed, and I read Pindar and Greg Nagy while you sat cross-legged by the window, writing about Alice and Ištar in the late afternoon light.
6. In the dark, in the dawn, with your wedding dress in tatters / You reveal the yearning desert in the country of your skin.
7. What story would you like most to be able to tell?
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2. Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer's "Lancelot."
3. Anything, for God's sake!
4. When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back . . .
5. I remember you in a quilted black shirt and a baseball cap, and ghost-pale, but I am sure about the conversational racket and the loud music and the city lights on Boston Harbor, when I realized we both knew the same books.
6. And I hate to watch you blocking all the exits, turning into a ghost / What can I do to get you off the dance floor?
7. Do you still listen for God to start speaking again?
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b) Did you edit the lyrics on purpose? (The lyrics I find online seem to be pretty consistently saying 'get you on the dance floor')
c) Re: #7, right now I'm just waiting to heal. Once I've got the right number of holes in my body again I'll have more free mental space for such thoughts . . .
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Check your inbox.
b) Did you edit the lyrics on purpose? (The lyrics I find online seem to be pretty consistently saying 'get you on the dance floor')
I did not edit the lyrics. I don't have access to the CD booklet for Das Not Compute, since I got the album from a friend, but there are reviews that back me up (Pitchfork, Sound Checks) and I'm pretty sure I'm not mishearing the song . . .
Once I've got the right number of holes in my body again I'll have more free mental space for such thoughts . . .
Totally reasonable. Heal soon.
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2. The Cuckoo.
3. Order the kaiseki dinner at Miya's.
4. Best. Cousin. Ever.
5. This is neither first nor clearest, but the day after we talked for hours after midnight on the phone, you showed up on my doorstep in camouflage trousers and blue-black hair and I knew at once you were safe to lend books to.
6. Some people say you got a psychedelic presence shining in the park with a bioluminescence / Down these city streets I see you coming from afar.
7. Why blue (rather than any other color) hair?
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1. You didn't know, but you introduced me to a poem just when I needed to read it.
2. Jill Tracy's "Hour After Hour."
3. Go to a concert.
4. . . . damn typo.
5. I wanted to know what kind of deranged genius could create a badger Leonardo da Vinci icon.
6. I will sing your fears if you sing my neurosis.
7. Frankly, I still want to know about the badger Leonardo da Vinci icon!
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And a truly disappointing answer: I've no idea. I heisted it from someone else months ago, for it is truly brilliant. I am a badger fiend, even before the animation; my wife, however, has stopped me from getting the dancing badger tattooed on my personage on more than one occasion.
3. Go to a concert.
Absolutely.
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Eddie Izzard would approve.
"Bless me, father, for I have sinned . . . I poked a badger with a spoon."
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1. You learned to drive on a combine harvester.
2. The Squirrel Nut Zippers' "Wash Jones."
3. Sing.
4. Sea snakes in the Persian Gulf!
5. I think our earliest real conversation was about artificial intelligence, but I have always remembered your air trumpet with great awe and fondness.
6. Always giving up the ghost in your own private conversation.
7. How did you learn how to brew beer?
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Nine
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2. Jolie Holland's "Mad Tom of Bedlam."
3. Go for tea and used book stores.
4. The Sibyl's servant.
5. You wore blue and green like winter after-sunset and read in Pandemonium from a story I'd only hoped you were writing, and your voice changed with the turn of every character.
6.This ay night, this ay night, every night and all / Fire and fleet and candlelight and Christ receive thy soul.
7. What character do you see yourself as?
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2. Casablanca.
3. Not play chess, or cards, because I'd lose everything I owned, but how would you feel about visiting another museum?
4. Were you in a brawl? No, a bathtub.
5. The first time I saw you with your hair cut short, you looked like someone I'd never met before, and it startled me a little that your voice hadn't changed at all.
6. I remember brighter days when all this was a mystery / But you could write a letter then or, God forbid, come visit me.
7. How did you wind up at Brandeis?
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1. You see nothing wrong with a bureaucracy composed of amusing non sequiturs.
2. Sam Phillips' "Fan Dance."
3. Watch all those films we keep talking about!
4. "Peter Wimsey as asparagus?!"
5. My first real memory of you is almost certainly your twenty-first birthday, but we walked back once from Friday night services to Floyd Street, all in a group, and the two of us were singing "Barrett's Privateers."
6. 'Cause he feints and fades from view like a fighter ducks a glove / Though I play the highway kind and he the china dancer.
7. Would you really be anyone in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta?
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--Alison
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Not at all!
1. You always know where to find the mermaids.
2. Sting's "Valparaiso."
3. Admire the criminally cute Audrey.
4. Poets have fire in the belly.
5. In the first class I ever took with Luis, he introduced you as newly married and I didn't know you from the next TA, but I remember as soon as you started to talk about Yemayá and flowers thrown into the sea, I wouldn't ever confuse you with anyone else.
6. Her ear too is a shell, the peeping lobe there. Been to the seaside. Lovely seaside girls . . . Hair braided over: shell with seaweed. Why do they hide their ears with seaweed hair?
7. Am I correct that you're related to James Joyce? I have always believed this, but maybe it's only a spiritual descent . . .
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Now it's only fair that I do this for you:
1. I like catching glimpses of your inner soundtrack; you're always singing or humming a song.
2. This Ascension's Mysterium
3. Definitely admire the criminally cute Audrey, who now has a collection of eccentric little hats knit by her mother...
4. "Tell them I am young and beautiful!"
5. After Luis and I had shared some of our experiences with the class, I remember saying that we chose to live our lives through these metaphors.
Everyone looked a bit lost, except for you. You had this enormous grin and were nodding your head.
6. "Tem que gostar de poesia, de madrugada, de pássaro, de sol, da lua, do canto, dos ventos e das canções da brisa." -From Vinicius de Moraes' poem "Procura-se um amigo" (Looking for a friend): "Must like poetry, late nights, birds, the sun, the moon, singing, the winds, and the breeze's songs."
7. When are you going to learn Portuguese??
PS- According to family lore, James Joyce was related to my grandfather. No satisfactory evidence of this has been produced, so it might be some mighty Irish blarney...but I am glad we are original enough not to claim ties to Brian Boru, like the rest of the island!!!
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When are you going to learn Portuguese??
As soon as I can, because I want to read that poem in the original. : )