between five and seven
For once, I think I am going to answer memes before I forget they exist. You will want to read this: there is free music within. (Aha, I know how to lure!)
From
builtofsorrow:
1. Leave me a comment saying that you want me to ask you 5 questions.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better. If I already know you well, expect the questions may be a little more intimate.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.
i. If you could read any book anywhere, which book would it be, and where would you choose to read it?
Oh, this is difficult. I love to read books in interesting places, and suitable ones (once I cleaned my bedroom because the haphazard atmosphere of it was not suitable for the book I was reading), because Mo is right, books do catch memories like flypaper, and sometimes when I am reading the memories rise out like picture-book pop-ups. I read I Capture the Castle once while walking, at my last house when I used to take a walk around the neighbourhood every afternoon, because the road was gravelly and there were trees (very young trees, to be sure; young trees haven't any secrets and aren't especially interesting on their own, but trees in groups are always a bit interesting at least); it was one of those beautiful summer afternoons that is golden and green, warm, but not thick, with a bit of wind, and ever since, when I read the Midsummer's Eve chapter (which was what bit I was on; fitting, too!), it has the taste of that day in it. I read Emily's Quest lying on my stomach on the weather-worn picnic table in our back lot and listening to Over the Rhine during one of the first weeks it was properly spring. I read Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince in the middle of the night in small tent in the woods during a thunderstorm (at least there was the first night, when I was reading Order of the Phoenix; I can't remember if it rained the second night or not), and also read a bit of Half-Blood Prince sitting on a rock in the middle of a brook by where we were having lunch.
But where would I like to read? There's a question for the ages! I have always wanted to read in a cathedral, I think. I would like to sing in a cathedral, or read aloud, all alone, with no light but candlelight or sunlight. I would like to read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell at the window of a tumbledown stone house overlooking the foggy English moors. I would like to read Stardust on a warm summer night nestled in the long long grass with the air full of fireflies. I would like to read Sunshine on the roof in the middle of an October thunderstorm, with an apple and caramels and cocoa (and perhaps a cinnamon roll!). I would like to read The Eagle of the Ninth by Hadrian's Wall. I would like to read poetry in some volatile space or weather -- a café, or a train, or on craggy rocks overlooking the ocean. (I would love to read on the shore -- not the beach, I hate beaches, smelling as they do of suntan lotion and sweat and plastic, full of people having their best go at contracting skin cancer and making orange fools of themselves with hardly any clothes on, and luridly coloured swimsuits everywhere. I love going to the beaches in the winter, when everything is silver and lonely and driftwood and seaweed are washed up all over the sand. I would like to nestle by the waves, just out of reach, and read, and play music, and wander along the waves, and sing.) I would like to read The Lord of the Rings perched in a tree (I found the perfect reading tree, but alas! it was not on my property nor at a place I am likely to visit again). I would like to read L.M. Montgomery sitting on a rock by a bracken-filled pool in the woods. I would like to read Madeleine L'Engle late at night someplace without electric lights, beneath the turning of the stars, reading by the light of a candlelit lantern.
ii. As a child, did you ever consider running away? Where would you have run to?
I don't think I thought seriously about running away at all, mostly because there weren't many places to go. I couldn't have gone to what we called 'the little store' -- a convenience store a block away; it was a special treat to get lunch there: a hot dog, a bag of crisps (always Cheetos, for me), a drink (Sunny Delight), and some sort of dessert (I went back and forth between Little Debbie cakes and ice cream bars) -- because I wouldn't have had any money with which to buy things, and stealing from my parents would be (and is!) unthinkable. Money, anyway; for whatever reason nicking an extra cookie or three from the cookie jar never seemed to be on quite the same level! In Massachusetts I might have run off to the playground, but it was graffiti'd and run down and not terribly interesting. The problem with living on the edges of cities is that there is nowhere to hide: in the country I might have had a woodsy hide-away, and in the middle of a big city I might have found a library or some such place to hide out in. But anyway I have always done my running away into the pages of books.
iii. If you could switch places with a heroine in any book, with whom would you switch?
Oh, it would have to be someone with whom I feel a great kinship -- Emily Starr, or Cassandra Mortmain, or Jo March, or perhaps Meggie Folchart or Lucy Pevensie or Wendy Darling or Meg Murray, because they were given gateways to other worlds, which is something I still dream longingly of. ...Although: if I switched places with Nymphadora Tonks, I would have Remus. I am rather liking that picture.
iv. If you could be fluent in any language, which would it be?
I am wavering between Welsh and French, because both have such a lovely, fluid, slightly exotic taste on my tongue -- Welsh is wilder and has more tang; French is like very good chocolate. I think I am leaning towards Welsh because it is in danger of dying out, which grieves me terribly. I suppose my speaking it fluently wouldn't help matters much, especially as I don't even live in Wales or near it, but I suppose one more fluent speaker would be good, somehow. (Anyway it was Tolkien's favourite!)
v. Russell T. Davies moves in next door to you. What's the first thing you do?
Aside from the very first bit, which is to be completely shocked and wonder why a major television producer from the United Kingdom has just moved into a rather small and not particularly interesting house in Pennsylvania, USA? (Assuming he wouldn't move into the church, because that would be weird, there is only one next-door.) The first course of action, then: EX-TER-MIN-ATE! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!!! (Unless perhaps I slipped a card under his door first containing certain doctored passages of 'Prufrock'. Then I would call in the Daleks, who are only too ready. Oh, you poor darlings, I know, he's a horrible man. You all thought you were getting to retire, nice and proper like, until out of the blue he shows up and interrupts your holidaying on the French coast and your Eight fantasies with "HEY GUYS, GUESS WHAT! YOU'RE NOT REALLY DEAD! LIKE, AT ALL!" and makes you work and work and work. And the hours! Unfortunately labour laws in Britain currently only apply to humans, and trust him to pick up on those sorts of loopholes.)
(Don't tempt me, Nelle!)
Nicked from
mermaidrain: seven songs that I have been a bit in love with lately.
i. way over yonder in the minor key - billy bragg & wilco.
Two or three years ago I read this wonderful biography of Woody Guthrie, and there was this passage, quoting something Guthrie had written about his mother Nora, who had Huntington's Disease and went mad from it, and she used to play piano -- he wrote something about how her mind used to go 'way over yonder in a minor key', except there was more to it than that. It was such a gorgeous piece of writing that I wrote it down, but I have lost it, and the book is packed away in the basement someplace (I keep looking for it, but haven't found it yet). Sometime afterwards, we were holidaying at a cabin in late September, and I heard this song on satellite radio. I recognised the chorus immediately (though this time he has recycled the lyric to pertain to himself and not Nora Guthrie) and had a bit of a squee moment. As it turned out, it's from a project to put music to and record some of the thousands and thousands of lyrics Guthrie left behind after his death. I ran into an mp3 recently, and it's exactly as magical as I remember.
ii. winter - tori amos.
This song? Makes me ache all over. It's that beautiful. And it hurts, somehow; I find myself longing terribly for something, but I don't know what that is.
iii. jig of life - kate bush.
This song is sort of frenzied and has a haunting ritual-chant sort of feel to it; it brings to mind faeries and the ancient Irish and ceilidhs held thousands and thousands of years ago in some stony place.
iv. breathe me - sia.
Right, so, virtually everyone on the f-list has got this already, I'm sure. I resisted it for quite some time, because it was Popular and all of that, but then I actually heard it, and I was gone. It's beautiful, and that girl has a voice all her own. I love the way she lingers over words.
v. i'm gonna deal with you someday - linford detweiler.
I mentioned that for my birthday my father bought me Linford Detweiler's solo piano album I Don't Think There's No Need To Bring Nothin', which is almost indescribably lovely: it's atmospheric and sort of timeless, like poetry without words. (Also very good to write to.) It was recorded in the living room of a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Ohio, and you can hear the piano creaking and sometimes Linford breathing and it's all kinds of amazing. (The living room -- I have seen pictures -- is exactly where I would record an album; it is perfect. Although the old bus with vintage recording equipment was awesome, too. Linford and Karin, why are you able to record albums in such fascinating places?) It's difficult to pick only one song of the eleven (they all fit together, like bones in a skeleton, like parts of the same story), but this one does stand out a bit -- it's sort of a we-shall-overcome hymn out of the ashes, mournful and hopeful and almost triumphant.
vi. sweet ones - sarah slean.
This song is so deliciously catchy that I created a whole new tag on last.fm just to accommodate it. It's very upbeat and a tiny bit delirious and has just an edge of that Sarah Slean spookiness.
vii. city of blinding lights - u2.
It makes me happy. Ecstatically, spinning-about-ly happy. I can't say why; certainly not because of its inclusion in the superlative mix
lady_moriel gave me for my birthday, or its reminding me of Boston. I know, absurd.
* * *
Today we were in the car, and I was listening to Kate Bush, and suddenly we drove past this overgrown bit of woods, with tangley trees and long long grass and stones and wildflowers, dipping down into the earth, all shade-grown and dappled, with a twisted long-dead tree bough in the middle of one little hollow, and I had a brief flash of one of my wonder moments -- it was the sort of place where, if you walked into it at the right time of night or day, maybe under the right moon or arrangement of stars and spheres, the world behind you would disappear, and you'd find yourself in another one entirely.
From
builtofsorrow:
1. Leave me a comment saying that you want me to ask you 5 questions.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better. If I already know you well, expect the questions may be a little more intimate.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.
i. If you could read any book anywhere, which book would it be, and where would you choose to read it?
Oh, this is difficult. I love to read books in interesting places, and suitable ones (once I cleaned my bedroom because the haphazard atmosphere of it was not suitable for the book I was reading), because Mo is right, books do catch memories like flypaper, and sometimes when I am reading the memories rise out like picture-book pop-ups. I read I Capture the Castle once while walking, at my last house when I used to take a walk around the neighbourhood every afternoon, because the road was gravelly and there were trees (very young trees, to be sure; young trees haven't any secrets and aren't especially interesting on their own, but trees in groups are always a bit interesting at least); it was one of those beautiful summer afternoons that is golden and green, warm, but not thick, with a bit of wind, and ever since, when I read the Midsummer's Eve chapter (which was what bit I was on; fitting, too!), it has the taste of that day in it. I read Emily's Quest lying on my stomach on the weather-worn picnic table in our back lot and listening to Over the Rhine during one of the first weeks it was properly spring. I read Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince in the middle of the night in small tent in the woods during a thunderstorm (at least there was the first night, when I was reading Order of the Phoenix; I can't remember if it rained the second night or not), and also read a bit of Half-Blood Prince sitting on a rock in the middle of a brook by where we were having lunch.
But where would I like to read? There's a question for the ages! I have always wanted to read in a cathedral, I think. I would like to sing in a cathedral, or read aloud, all alone, with no light but candlelight or sunlight. I would like to read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell at the window of a tumbledown stone house overlooking the foggy English moors. I would like to read Stardust on a warm summer night nestled in the long long grass with the air full of fireflies. I would like to read Sunshine on the roof in the middle of an October thunderstorm, with an apple and caramels and cocoa (and perhaps a cinnamon roll!). I would like to read The Eagle of the Ninth by Hadrian's Wall. I would like to read poetry in some volatile space or weather -- a café, or a train, or on craggy rocks overlooking the ocean. (I would love to read on the shore -- not the beach, I hate beaches, smelling as they do of suntan lotion and sweat and plastic, full of people having their best go at contracting skin cancer and making orange fools of themselves with hardly any clothes on, and luridly coloured swimsuits everywhere. I love going to the beaches in the winter, when everything is silver and lonely and driftwood and seaweed are washed up all over the sand. I would like to nestle by the waves, just out of reach, and read, and play music, and wander along the waves, and sing.) I would like to read The Lord of the Rings perched in a tree (I found the perfect reading tree, but alas! it was not on my property nor at a place I am likely to visit again). I would like to read L.M. Montgomery sitting on a rock by a bracken-filled pool in the woods. I would like to read Madeleine L'Engle late at night someplace without electric lights, beneath the turning of the stars, reading by the light of a candlelit lantern.
ii. As a child, did you ever consider running away? Where would you have run to?
I don't think I thought seriously about running away at all, mostly because there weren't many places to go. I couldn't have gone to what we called 'the little store' -- a convenience store a block away; it was a special treat to get lunch there: a hot dog, a bag of crisps (always Cheetos, for me), a drink (Sunny Delight), and some sort of dessert (I went back and forth between Little Debbie cakes and ice cream bars) -- because I wouldn't have had any money with which to buy things, and stealing from my parents would be (and is!) unthinkable. Money, anyway; for whatever reason nicking an extra cookie or three from the cookie jar never seemed to be on quite the same level! In Massachusetts I might have run off to the playground, but it was graffiti'd and run down and not terribly interesting. The problem with living on the edges of cities is that there is nowhere to hide: in the country I might have had a woodsy hide-away, and in the middle of a big city I might have found a library or some such place to hide out in. But anyway I have always done my running away into the pages of books.
iii. If you could switch places with a heroine in any book, with whom would you switch?
Oh, it would have to be someone with whom I feel a great kinship -- Emily Starr, or Cassandra Mortmain, or Jo March, or perhaps Meggie Folchart or Lucy Pevensie or Wendy Darling or Meg Murray, because they were given gateways to other worlds, which is something I still dream longingly of. ...Although: if I switched places with Nymphadora Tonks, I would have Remus. I am rather liking that picture.
iv. If you could be fluent in any language, which would it be?
I am wavering between Welsh and French, because both have such a lovely, fluid, slightly exotic taste on my tongue -- Welsh is wilder and has more tang; French is like very good chocolate. I think I am leaning towards Welsh because it is in danger of dying out, which grieves me terribly. I suppose my speaking it fluently wouldn't help matters much, especially as I don't even live in Wales or near it, but I suppose one more fluent speaker would be good, somehow. (Anyway it was Tolkien's favourite!)
v. Russell T. Davies moves in next door to you. What's the first thing you do?
Aside from the very first bit, which is to be completely shocked and wonder why a major television producer from the United Kingdom has just moved into a rather small and not particularly interesting house in Pennsylvania, USA? (Assuming he wouldn't move into the church, because that would be weird, there is only one next-door.) The first course of action, then: EX-TER-MIN-ATE! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!!! (Unless perhaps I slipped a card under his door first containing certain doctored passages of 'Prufrock'. Then I would call in the Daleks, who are only too ready. Oh, you poor darlings, I know, he's a horrible man. You all thought you were getting to retire, nice and proper like, until out of the blue he shows up and interrupts your holidaying on the French coast and your Eight fantasies with "HEY GUYS, GUESS WHAT! YOU'RE NOT REALLY DEAD! LIKE, AT ALL!" and makes you work and work and work. And the hours! Unfortunately labour laws in Britain currently only apply to humans, and trust him to pick up on those sorts of loopholes.)
(Don't tempt me, Nelle!)
Nicked from
mermaidrain: seven songs that I have been a bit in love with lately.
i. way over yonder in the minor key - billy bragg & wilco.
Two or three years ago I read this wonderful biography of Woody Guthrie, and there was this passage, quoting something Guthrie had written about his mother Nora, who had Huntington's Disease and went mad from it, and she used to play piano -- he wrote something about how her mind used to go 'way over yonder in a minor key', except there was more to it than that. It was such a gorgeous piece of writing that I wrote it down, but I have lost it, and the book is packed away in the basement someplace (I keep looking for it, but haven't found it yet). Sometime afterwards, we were holidaying at a cabin in late September, and I heard this song on satellite radio. I recognised the chorus immediately (though this time he has recycled the lyric to pertain to himself and not Nora Guthrie) and had a bit of a squee moment. As it turned out, it's from a project to put music to and record some of the thousands and thousands of lyrics Guthrie left behind after his death. I ran into an mp3 recently, and it's exactly as magical as I remember.
ii. winter - tori amos.
This song? Makes me ache all over. It's that beautiful. And it hurts, somehow; I find myself longing terribly for something, but I don't know what that is.
iii. jig of life - kate bush.
This song is sort of frenzied and has a haunting ritual-chant sort of feel to it; it brings to mind faeries and the ancient Irish and ceilidhs held thousands and thousands of years ago in some stony place.
iv. breathe me - sia.
Right, so, virtually everyone on the f-list has got this already, I'm sure. I resisted it for quite some time, because it was Popular and all of that, but then I actually heard it, and I was gone. It's beautiful, and that girl has a voice all her own. I love the way she lingers over words.
v. i'm gonna deal with you someday - linford detweiler.
I mentioned that for my birthday my father bought me Linford Detweiler's solo piano album I Don't Think There's No Need To Bring Nothin', which is almost indescribably lovely: it's atmospheric and sort of timeless, like poetry without words. (Also very good to write to.) It was recorded in the living room of a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Ohio, and you can hear the piano creaking and sometimes Linford breathing and it's all kinds of amazing. (The living room -- I have seen pictures -- is exactly where I would record an album; it is perfect. Although the old bus with vintage recording equipment was awesome, too. Linford and Karin, why are you able to record albums in such fascinating places?) It's difficult to pick only one song of the eleven (they all fit together, like bones in a skeleton, like parts of the same story), but this one does stand out a bit -- it's sort of a we-shall-overcome hymn out of the ashes, mournful and hopeful and almost triumphant.
vi. sweet ones - sarah slean.
This song is so deliciously catchy that I created a whole new tag on last.fm just to accommodate it. It's very upbeat and a tiny bit delirious and has just an edge of that Sarah Slean spookiness.
vii. city of blinding lights - u2.
It makes me happy. Ecstatically, spinning-about-ly happy. I can't say why; certainly not because of its inclusion in the superlative mix
lady_moriel gave me for my birthday, or its reminding me of Boston. I know, absurd.
* * *
Today we were in the car, and I was listening to Kate Bush, and suddenly we drove past this overgrown bit of woods, with tangley trees and long long grass and stones and wildflowers, dipping down into the earth, all shade-grown and dappled, with a twisted long-dead tree bough in the middle of one little hollow, and I had a brief flash of one of my wonder moments -- it was the sort of place where, if you walked into it at the right time of night or day, maybe under the right moon or arrangement of stars and spheres, the world behind you would disappear, and you'd find yourself in another one entirely.