Entry tags:
You ask, I answer
"You" in this case being ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
riverlight.
1) Tell me about a place you find particularly beautiful or that you particularly love.
One of my favorite spots in Milwaukee is the top of the hill in Kilbourn Park. The hill used to be the city's underground water reservoir, so it rises with very man-made suddenness from the landscape, diverting one of the city's major east-west roads in a curve around it. I was totally mystified and fascinated by it the first time I drove that way, and went back that night to climb the hill and wander around it. The top of the hill gives a view all the way out to Lake Michigan over the northern end of downtown, and if you're there on the hour you can hear church bells chiming, and it's very quiet and serene.
2) Tell me a little bit about your relationship with T.S. Eliot.
My relationship with Eliot began when I was fifteen and my tenth grade lit class was assigned to memorize and recite a poem of our choice from our textbook, with extra credit offered for any poem over twenty lines. I memorized "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which, if you are not familiar with it, I believe runs to 128 lines. I loved the poem and loved performing it, and on the strength of that single work tended to identify Eliot as a favorite poet. In subsequent years' textbooks I read "The Wasteland" and "The Hollow Men" and remained firmly attached to Eliot, but I still didn't seek out the rest of his poetry. In early 2004,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
splash_the_cat made this icon:
I was just getting into Stargate, so I snagged it, and out of curiosity I googled up the poem it came from, Little Gidding. I still remember sitting on the couch in the apartment I shared withiulia and B, reading it for the first time; I had given up on the Catholicism I was raised in three years before, but this was the first time I had ever had the sensation of reading and connecting with something that felt sacred. I wanted to run around grabbing people by the shirtfront and making them read it, except I was afraid it wouldn't mean the same thing to them, that it would be just a poem.
Eventually I got a paperback copy of The Four Quartets (of which "Little Gidding" is one) to carry with me everywhere, all the time; I've read those poems countless times, and they continue to mean a lot to me. And almost two years ago now I got two lines of it inked into my shoulder, to really really carry with me everywhere all the time.
3) Where would you like to travel next?
Boringly, I'd like to go back to England and see a bunch of places I saw eleven years ago again, and hit other places around the UK that I missed. Likewise New York, though in that case it was only four months ago. Which new place next, hm. Italy, I think; I'd love to see where my mother's family comes from, although this time of year hanging out on the sunnier bits of the Adriatic coast also sounds really appealing. *g*
4) When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?
I remember being three or four and sitting at the dining room table while my older brothers did schoolwork, very intently pretend-writing on a sheet of paper. I didn't know how to read or write yet but I knew I wanted to put words down on paper. By the time I was seven, and my second grade teacher made stories we wrote into little books by spiral-binding them, I was intensely proud to be "published". So I don't remember ever first knowing. Writing was always there.
5) What's your favorite scent?
Oranges, of scented things. Frying onions or warm bread, of foods. Books, of course. *g*
6) What's your favorite joke? (Can you remember jokes? I can't; I really literally can only remember one.)
I can only remember terrible (in the stupid, not vile, way) jokes. My favorite is this one:
How is a duck the same as a bicycle?
They both have wheels, except for the duck.
:D :D :D
7) If you could have lived in any historical era/setting, where would it have been?
Oh man, I wouldn't, unless you count the future and I could leap up. I'm too curious about what happens next to ever be willing to step backward (to say nothing of too conscious of how much hard-won progress has been made in living conditions and social justice to bring us to the present time--the past was a scary, scary place). Also I would be irresistibly tempted to meddle with everything if I were knowingly transported into the past.
That said, I sometimes feel sad about having been born too late to see the Moon landing and experience that first step of humanity into space; if I had to live anywhere in history having been born about forty years earlier would have been interesting and probably not unsurvivably awful.
But I'm an optimist, so I assume I'll live to see people set foot on Mars and send missions to extrasolar planets and every other what next that I can't imagine, which will be even better. :)
ETA: I have now spent half an hour grimly contemplating my absolute moral responsibility to do whatever I can to avert the 9/11 attacks in the event I am transported back in time. I am about to get in a car for six hours to go spend a weekend with my family. MUST THINK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. PUPPIES. MUST THINK ABOUT PUPPIES. /ETA
Anybody who made it to the end of that and would like to answer questions, say the word and I will ask some!
riverlight.1) Tell me about a place you find particularly beautiful or that you particularly love.
One of my favorite spots in Milwaukee is the top of the hill in Kilbourn Park. The hill used to be the city's underground water reservoir, so it rises with very man-made suddenness from the landscape, diverting one of the city's major east-west roads in a curve around it. I was totally mystified and fascinated by it the first time I drove that way, and went back that night to climb the hill and wander around it. The top of the hill gives a view all the way out to Lake Michigan over the northern end of downtown, and if you're there on the hour you can hear church bells chiming, and it's very quiet and serene.
2) Tell me a little bit about your relationship with T.S. Eliot.
My relationship with Eliot began when I was fifteen and my tenth grade lit class was assigned to memorize and recite a poem of our choice from our textbook, with extra credit offered for any poem over twenty lines. I memorized "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which, if you are not familiar with it, I believe runs to 128 lines. I loved the poem and loved performing it, and on the strength of that single work tended to identify Eliot as a favorite poet. In subsequent years' textbooks I read "The Wasteland" and "The Hollow Men" and remained firmly attached to Eliot, but I still didn't seek out the rest of his poetry. In early 2004,
splash_the_cat made this icon:I was just getting into Stargate, so I snagged it, and out of curiosity I googled up the poem it came from, Little Gidding. I still remember sitting on the couch in the apartment I shared with
iulia and B, reading it for the first time; I had given up on the Catholicism I was raised in three years before, but this was the first time I had ever had the sensation of reading and connecting with something that felt sacred. I wanted to run around grabbing people by the shirtfront and making them read it, except I was afraid it wouldn't mean the same thing to them, that it would be just a poem.Eventually I got a paperback copy of The Four Quartets (of which "Little Gidding" is one) to carry with me everywhere, all the time; I've read those poems countless times, and they continue to mean a lot to me. And almost two years ago now I got two lines of it inked into my shoulder, to really really carry with me everywhere all the time.
3) Where would you like to travel next?
Boringly, I'd like to go back to England and see a bunch of places I saw eleven years ago again, and hit other places around the UK that I missed. Likewise New York, though in that case it was only four months ago. Which new place next, hm. Italy, I think; I'd love to see where my mother's family comes from, although this time of year hanging out on the sunnier bits of the Adriatic coast also sounds really appealing. *g*
4) When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?
I remember being three or four and sitting at the dining room table while my older brothers did schoolwork, very intently pretend-writing on a sheet of paper. I didn't know how to read or write yet but I knew I wanted to put words down on paper. By the time I was seven, and my second grade teacher made stories we wrote into little books by spiral-binding them, I was intensely proud to be "published". So I don't remember ever first knowing. Writing was always there.
5) What's your favorite scent?
Oranges, of scented things. Frying onions or warm bread, of foods. Books, of course. *g*
6) What's your favorite joke? (Can you remember jokes? I can't; I really literally can only remember one.)
I can only remember terrible (in the stupid, not vile, way) jokes. My favorite is this one:
How is a duck the same as a bicycle?
They both have wheels, except for the duck.
:D :D :D
7) If you could have lived in any historical era/setting, where would it have been?
Oh man, I wouldn't, unless you count the future and I could leap up. I'm too curious about what happens next to ever be willing to step backward (to say nothing of too conscious of how much hard-won progress has been made in living conditions and social justice to bring us to the present time--the past was a scary, scary place). Also I would be irresistibly tempted to meddle with everything if I were knowingly transported into the past.
That said, I sometimes feel sad about having been born too late to see the Moon landing and experience that first step of humanity into space; if I had to live anywhere in history having been born about forty years earlier would have been interesting and probably not unsurvivably awful.
But I'm an optimist, so I assume I'll live to see people set foot on Mars and send missions to extrasolar planets and every other what next that I can't imagine, which will be even better. :)
ETA: I have now spent half an hour grimly contemplating my absolute moral responsibility to do whatever I can to avert the 9/11 attacks in the event I am transported back in time. I am about to get in a car for six hours to go spend a weekend with my family. MUST THINK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. PUPPIES. MUST THINK ABOUT PUPPIES. /ETA
Anybody who made it to the end of that and would like to answer questions, say the word and I will ask some!