Memememememememememe.
Jun. 24th, 2009 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flyingratSo ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eugenetapdance had this rather interesting meme, and was kind enough to provide some words for me to respond to.
(Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.)
Poetry is something that I feel like I've been immersed in all of my life (although I've never written any worth the paper) and I can't even remember when or how it started. I can remember the middle-school English teacher who made us memorize 50 lines of poetry each quarter and recite them for the class (I can still declaim "The Cat and the Moon" by Yeats with great flair, thanks to her) and the 11th-grade teacher who explained Frost so that we really got it. I still miss my college days, when I got to meet some interesting modern Irish poets (my alma mater runs the only North American press devoted to Irish poetry) and even took a class on "Poetry in Performance" from Maya Angelou, where I really learned to appreciate the beauty of the spoken word.
It goes hand-in-hand with my love of music and art, to be sure, but I think poetry is special because it creates something magical out of the very daily fabric of our communications, playing with the sounds, shapes and concepts we use to structure and interact with the world. (Discovering e.e. cummings was a true revelation.) Plus, like literature in general (so spake Flannery O'Connor), poetry can be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us: words can shatter our understanding of the world, or put it back together.
I've also always liked the intersections in life and art, the places where thoughts, words and images from different worlds come together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. (In other words, come play with us at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fandom_poetry! It's a blast!)
Neruda: I confess that I'm pretty uninformed about Neruda's poetry in general, but there are quite a few of his works that I've come across recently that have grabbed me, especially in thefandom_poetry context. I almost wish I knew Spanish so I could read the originals, which I'm sure are profound in a different way.
Adrian: Why, oh why, am I so obsessed with a purple-clad Egyptian-wannabe supergenius with a fantastic cat and delusions of grandeur? I remember being intrigued by Adrian/Ozymandias when I first read the Watchmen GN, but it took the movie's portrayal for the character to really come to life in my head, and in a form far more tragic than I had anticipated. Adrian is someone who (like Rorschach) has consciously forged himself into a weapon against the evil he perceives in the world, and has had to leave behind a great deal of himself along the way...but in the movie I got a far greater sense that he was truly aware of what he had lost, the yawning gulf beneath him, and the idea that no matter whether a better world came of his grand plan, redemption was beyond his reach.
I'm intimately and painfully familiar with the type of intelligent, emotionally detached, self-important, overachieving, perfectionist, and inexplicably guilt-riddled personality that I see in Adrian, because those same words describe me also. "There but for the grace of God go I"...and without going too much into belief systems, that phrase is also critical to why I feel so much for the character, because that very concept of grace-- as I see it reflected in my husband, my friends, a stranger on the street-- is all that keeps me going sometimes. It's the crazy idea that there is a force quieter but more powerful than karma active in the universe, and that we don't necessarily all get what's coming to us. Although he probably talks a good line about it, grace is not something I ever see Adrian really understanding, because he's too wrapped up in his own rigid ideas about logic/control/his own brokenness, to see it...and my heart goes out to him. So, yes, there's a lot of the typically Mary-Sueish desire to "fix" Adrian in my appreciation of the character, but it's because it hits particularly close to home for me.
(And Matthew Goode's deliciousness had NOTHING to do with it, I assure you. *cough*)
Pratchett: Buggrit! Millenium hand and shrimp! I've loved Pterry's stuff for years, for many reasons: the excruciatingly deft turn of phrase and the mockery of established truths, to be certain, but above all the heart embedded in all of his work. It's the best kind of comedy, where you laugh with a lump in your throat, and cheer when the world is made anew.
Asia: I've been obsessed with Asian culture and history from a VERY early age, and again, I can't remember how it started (I suspect I was looking for the most "exotic" thing I could find at some point, and it stuck). I'm not complaining, quite the contrary-- it was our shared love of Japanese culture and history that brought my husband and me together. I was fortunate enough to be able to visit Japan and Hong Kong in college, and now I'm living 12 hours away from my home in the US, and getting to see a great deal of how the other side of the world lives and operates.
Asia is far too big to sum up in one lump (and that would be inexcusably arrogant) but I will just say that the more I see of the world, and the more I learn about its history, the more I appreciate all the ways in which we are staggeringly diverse and yet alike. It's something I hope I never lose sight of.
...Well, okay, that was probably overly introspective. Fun meme (and let me know if you want to continue it!)
eugenetapdance had this rather interesting meme, and was kind enough to provide some words for me to respond to.(Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.)
Poetry is something that I feel like I've been immersed in all of my life (although I've never written any worth the paper) and I can't even remember when or how it started. I can remember the middle-school English teacher who made us memorize 50 lines of poetry each quarter and recite them for the class (I can still declaim "The Cat and the Moon" by Yeats with great flair, thanks to her) and the 11th-grade teacher who explained Frost so that we really got it. I still miss my college days, when I got to meet some interesting modern Irish poets (my alma mater runs the only North American press devoted to Irish poetry) and even took a class on "Poetry in Performance" from Maya Angelou, where I really learned to appreciate the beauty of the spoken word.
It goes hand-in-hand with my love of music and art, to be sure, but I think poetry is special because it creates something magical out of the very daily fabric of our communications, playing with the sounds, shapes and concepts we use to structure and interact with the world. (Discovering e.e. cummings was a true revelation.) Plus, like literature in general (so spake Flannery O'Connor), poetry can be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us: words can shatter our understanding of the world, or put it back together.
I've also always liked the intersections in life and art, the places where thoughts, words and images from different worlds come together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. (In other words, come play with us at
fandom_poetry! It's a blast!)Neruda: I confess that I'm pretty uninformed about Neruda's poetry in general, but there are quite a few of his works that I've come across recently that have grabbed me, especially in the
fandom_poetry context. I almost wish I knew Spanish so I could read the originals, which I'm sure are profound in a different way.Adrian: Why, oh why, am I so obsessed with a purple-clad Egyptian-wannabe supergenius with a fantastic cat and delusions of grandeur? I remember being intrigued by Adrian/Ozymandias when I first read the Watchmen GN, but it took the movie's portrayal for the character to really come to life in my head, and in a form far more tragic than I had anticipated. Adrian is someone who (like Rorschach) has consciously forged himself into a weapon against the evil he perceives in the world, and has had to leave behind a great deal of himself along the way...but in the movie I got a far greater sense that he was truly aware of what he had lost, the yawning gulf beneath him, and the idea that no matter whether a better world came of his grand plan, redemption was beyond his reach.
I'm intimately and painfully familiar with the type of intelligent, emotionally detached, self-important, overachieving, perfectionist, and inexplicably guilt-riddled personality that I see in Adrian, because those same words describe me also. "There but for the grace of God go I"...and without going too much into belief systems, that phrase is also critical to why I feel so much for the character, because that very concept of grace-- as I see it reflected in my husband, my friends, a stranger on the street-- is all that keeps me going sometimes. It's the crazy idea that there is a force quieter but more powerful than karma active in the universe, and that we don't necessarily all get what's coming to us. Although he probably talks a good line about it, grace is not something I ever see Adrian really understanding, because he's too wrapped up in his own rigid ideas about logic/control/his own brokenness, to see it...and my heart goes out to him. So, yes, there's a lot of the typically Mary-Sueish desire to "fix" Adrian in my appreciation of the character, but it's because it hits particularly close to home for me.
(And Matthew Goode's deliciousness had NOTHING to do with it, I assure you. *cough*)
Pratchett: Buggrit! Millenium hand and shrimp! I've loved Pterry's stuff for years, for many reasons: the excruciatingly deft turn of phrase and the mockery of established truths, to be certain, but above all the heart embedded in all of his work. It's the best kind of comedy, where you laugh with a lump in your throat, and cheer when the world is made anew.
Asia: I've been obsessed with Asian culture and history from a VERY early age, and again, I can't remember how it started (I suspect I was looking for the most "exotic" thing I could find at some point, and it stuck). I'm not complaining, quite the contrary-- it was our shared love of Japanese culture and history that brought my husband and me together. I was fortunate enough to be able to visit Japan and Hong Kong in college, and now I'm living 12 hours away from my home in the US, and getting to see a great deal of how the other side of the world lives and operates.
Asia is far too big to sum up in one lump (and that would be inexcusably arrogant) but I will just say that the more I see of the world, and the more I learn about its history, the more I appreciate all the ways in which we are staggeringly diverse and yet alike. It's something I hope I never lose sight of.
...Well, okay, that was probably overly introspective. Fun meme (and let me know if you want to continue it!)
