Five Questions Meme
Oct. 29th, 2018 04:47 pmQuestions from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ursula:
1. Tell us about a book you liked when you were sixteen.: I'm pretty sure sixteen was the year of LOTR, all the LOTR, overwhelming LOTR. I still have not made the post about re-reading LOTR this summer.
But, hmm. Let me think. I think sixteen was the year I read Sara Douglass The Betrayal of Arthur. You could make a good case that that book shaped the next decade and a half of my life. I haven't re-read it since about 2006, and am slightly afraid to (although I think I did scan the intro in 2011, decided it wasn't terrible, and recommended it to undergrads). It is, essentially, a pop history not of King Arthur but of Arthurian legend, structured around key differences between English and French traditions.
I definitely don't share Sara Douglass' sense that the English Arthur was 'betrayed' by French romanticisiation, but, well. I do care a lot about cross-cultural comparative Arthuriana.
Beyond that... I had already read Douglass' high fantasy quest series, and her alt-medieval fantasy Crucible Trilogy, and the latter said in its bio that she was a medieval-early modern studies researcher. This book gave me a sense of what that meant, and of the connections between the fantasy worlds I identified with and the world of academia. I mean, there was also Papa Tolkien, but he was long dead, whereas Douglass was Australian and alive.
I'm still sad for myself that she had moved out of academia by the time I joined ANZAMEMS, and now she's passed away. I cherished a hope of encountering her in academic spaces one day.
2. Tell us about a book you discovered when you were a university student.
Which time around?
I've been thinking a lot this year about the books I read in first-year English: Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things' and Drusilla Modjeska's 'The Orchard'. Small Things I cherish: i have the same copy, I have read it multiple times and it's on the relatively short list of books I will never discard. I loved it for its beautiful prose, and I loved what the first-year lecturers did with it - it was a great tool for Patriarchy and Colonialism 101.
The Orchard I cast off at some point - it was confusing, thought provoking, but weird. I thought I wouldn't read it again. I was wrong: I bought it in e-book in 2013 (commentary here) and re-read it and was blown away. I definitely did not have the emotional maturity to process it properly at seventeen, and I know I will re-read it again multiple times more as I age.
3. Are there any habits you are trying to create or destroy? I am attempting to become a Morning Person. Or at least, a person who is awake early enough in the morning to be a late morning person. I reluctantly accept that it's just going to take me two to three hours to be functional - if i move wake-up time earlier maybe I will be functional by a normal time! Gosh.
Also apparently my guts hate me less if I get up early, which let me tell you, is the most depressing reason to get up early I've found yet. Ugh.
4. Tell us about a plant you particularly like?
This is a plant that is both new and familiar to me! It's now growing - and growing huge, see below - just below the septic tank in my parents' backyard.
I must have seen this plant on previous visits, because it got planted there before they moved to Perth in 2012. So it would've been there when I visited in Jan 2015, and all the times after that. But I guess this time was the first time I'd visited in early spring, and hoo boy - this tree attracts parrots! This past August it even had a wooden climbing frame attached to it, which Dad built for a flightless juvenile lorrikeet they adopted. Lorrie would, I'm told, eat and sleep in the enclosed verandah with Peachy, but go outside during the day to hang with his birth family. Dad built him ramps up into the tree so he wouldn't miss out on anything. Alas, it seems like Lorrie's flightlessness was a product of ill-health - after a couple of months he suffered a rapid demise.
My parents' couldn't identify the type of tree, so were just calling it the Parrot Tree. It began life as a potted plant, and when I was a kid lived unremarkably in a pot on the verandah under the name of Umbrella Tree. Turns out, after I sent photos to various corners of the internet and then via Katie to her mum, that is in fact its common name - it's Schefflera Actinophylla, a tropical native of northern Australia, which is much beloved of parrots.
5. Can you choose a favorite Knight of the Round Table? Me, choose? Amongst such noble doofuses?
Of course. Team Gawain all the way. (The REAL question is which Knight would I vote off the island?)
Comment if you want questions from me!
Hey uh speaking of Gawain I have a short story out, in an actualfax anthology! I haven't got my copy yet, international postage being what it is, but it is in A Hand of Knaves, ed. by Chris Large and Leife Shallcross. If what you really wanted in life was Gawain, in Space, here it is! (If that wasn't what you thought you wanted, I have it on good authority that it will be what you wanted once you read this.) It's called 'A Tale of the Marriage of Gawain', because I am bad at titles, and it's a queered, spacecowboy retelling of the Loathly Lady folktale.
Also the book is pretty and there's a lot of great people in it! I don't know what they wrote because my copy hasn't arrived yet!
ursula:1. Tell us about a book you liked when you were sixteen.: I'm pretty sure sixteen was the year of LOTR, all the LOTR, overwhelming LOTR. I still have not made the post about re-reading LOTR this summer.
But, hmm. Let me think. I think sixteen was the year I read Sara Douglass The Betrayal of Arthur. You could make a good case that that book shaped the next decade and a half of my life. I haven't re-read it since about 2006, and am slightly afraid to (although I think I did scan the intro in 2011, decided it wasn't terrible, and recommended it to undergrads). It is, essentially, a pop history not of King Arthur but of Arthurian legend, structured around key differences between English and French traditions.
I definitely don't share Sara Douglass' sense that the English Arthur was 'betrayed' by French romanticisiation, but, well. I do care a lot about cross-cultural comparative Arthuriana.
Beyond that... I had already read Douglass' high fantasy quest series, and her alt-medieval fantasy Crucible Trilogy, and the latter said in its bio that she was a medieval-early modern studies researcher. This book gave me a sense of what that meant, and of the connections between the fantasy worlds I identified with and the world of academia. I mean, there was also Papa Tolkien, but he was long dead, whereas Douglass was Australian and alive.
I'm still sad for myself that she had moved out of academia by the time I joined ANZAMEMS, and now she's passed away. I cherished a hope of encountering her in academic spaces one day.
2. Tell us about a book you discovered when you were a university student.
Which time around?
I've been thinking a lot this year about the books I read in first-year English: Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things' and Drusilla Modjeska's 'The Orchard'. Small Things I cherish: i have the same copy, I have read it multiple times and it's on the relatively short list of books I will never discard. I loved it for its beautiful prose, and I loved what the first-year lecturers did with it - it was a great tool for Patriarchy and Colonialism 101.
The Orchard I cast off at some point - it was confusing, thought provoking, but weird. I thought I wouldn't read it again. I was wrong: I bought it in e-book in 2013 (commentary here) and re-read it and was blown away. I definitely did not have the emotional maturity to process it properly at seventeen, and I know I will re-read it again multiple times more as I age.
3. Are there any habits you are trying to create or destroy? I am attempting to become a Morning Person. Or at least, a person who is awake early enough in the morning to be a late morning person. I reluctantly accept that it's just going to take me two to three hours to be functional - if i move wake-up time earlier maybe I will be functional by a normal time! Gosh.
Also apparently my guts hate me less if I get up early, which let me tell you, is the most depressing reason to get up early I've found yet. Ugh.
4. Tell us about a plant you particularly like?
This is a plant that is both new and familiar to me! It's now growing - and growing huge, see below - just below the septic tank in my parents' backyard.
I must have seen this plant on previous visits, because it got planted there before they moved to Perth in 2012. So it would've been there when I visited in Jan 2015, and all the times after that. But I guess this time was the first time I'd visited in early spring, and hoo boy - this tree attracts parrots! This past August it even had a wooden climbing frame attached to it, which Dad built for a flightless juvenile lorrikeet they adopted. Lorrie would, I'm told, eat and sleep in the enclosed verandah with Peachy, but go outside during the day to hang with his birth family. Dad built him ramps up into the tree so he wouldn't miss out on anything. Alas, it seems like Lorrie's flightlessness was a product of ill-health - after a couple of months he suffered a rapid demise.
My parents' couldn't identify the type of tree, so were just calling it the Parrot Tree. It began life as a potted plant, and when I was a kid lived unremarkably in a pot on the verandah under the name of Umbrella Tree. Turns out, after I sent photos to various corners of the internet and then via Katie to her mum, that is in fact its common name - it's Schefflera Actinophylla, a tropical native of northern Australia, which is much beloved of parrots.
5. Can you choose a favorite Knight of the Round Table? Me, choose? Amongst such noble doofuses?
Of course. Team Gawain all the way. (The REAL question is which Knight would I vote off the island?)
Comment if you want questions from me!
Hey uh speaking of Gawain I have a short story out, in an actualfax anthology! I haven't got my copy yet, international postage being what it is, but it is in A Hand of Knaves, ed. by Chris Large and Leife Shallcross. If what you really wanted in life was Gawain, in Space, here it is! (If that wasn't what you thought you wanted, I have it on good authority that it will be what you wanted once you read this.) It's called 'A Tale of the Marriage of Gawain', because I am bad at titles, and it's a queered, spacecowboy retelling of the Loathly Lady folktale.
Also the book is pretty and there's a lot of great people in it! I don't know what they wrote because my copy hasn't arrived yet!
