Five questions
Nov. 16th, 2018 03:56 pmQuestions from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks. If you want questions, ask.
1. What's your default icon? I really like the art style, and I don't recognize it.
It's Shaun Tan's -- Tales From Outer Suburbia.
2. Place in the world you'd most like to travel that you've not been?
Excluding Greece, where I will be in, dear god, six days... Well, there's Antarctica, and on a less life-reshaping plane of likelihood, there's Florence. Someday I will go to Florence. Those are places I've seen and read a lot about -- the Florence in my head is accreting material quite rapidly, and Antarctica doesn't need to, one documentary has established it forever. This last trip has made me more aware of how many more places I haven't read anything about, though. I passed briefly through Calgary and through Nadi, I'm following someone's facebook posts about visiting Hanoi... That doesn't change the answer to the question, but it makes me think about how it might change. (And writing this has got me thinking on Norway, where some of my family's roots go. It doesn't take much thinking to make me want to go most places).
The other thing about being in North America is that it brought home to me how little of New Zealand I've seen as an adult. My family road trips to the islands' points are ten years old. So in terms of near-future plans, I want to go walking in the South Island, hear the roaring of the wasps in the beech forest around Nelson Lakes again,* visit the people I know in Dunedin. Also, I see the Rimutaka mountains every day from my flat. Sometime in the next year or two I want to stand on them and look back.
3. Something good you read recently?
The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford. It was there in a local second hand shop when I got home. I read it with the intention of writing about it here, and found that wasn't going to be fully possible. It's a very good book on the level of incidents and individual observations, and it handles indirection like a scalpel. On the level of characters and plot, it is waiting patiently for me to read it again and fathom it. I see the logic of what did happen (well, except for some of the convolutions in an inn), but not why it was correct that those things happened and not anything else, which is partly a matter of lacking historical context and partly the book's unpadded complexity. Off to read the relevant Shakespeare, among other things. In the meantime I can write about the book's first chapter, which I have the most finished sense of.
( Cut for spoilers, even though it's only the first chapter, because I enjoyed some of its surprises )
4. Mermaids or unicorns?
When I think about it, I don't meet many of either. I would say, in theory, mermaids. When I think 'unicorn' I have to struggle to come up with an image, and when I think 'mermaid' I think of many, sea and mangrove and river and coppery lake, solitary, schooling, city-building... Unicorns are more brittle in my head, I suppose. Since I've been reading answers to these questions, and it was waiting on the shelf, I've just read The Last Unicorn -- which I like very much, but it doesn't change the brittleness. She's a unicorn of fairy-tale, and could only change so far while staying that.
5. Favorite visual artist?
Still going: Shaun Tan. Sometimes I see art and want to write the stories of it. With Shaun Tan, whenever I have that feeling, a moment later I think, 'No, this drawing is already that story.' And I love Tales from Outer Suburbia and The Arrival. (Which I must look at again now I've been travelling). I don't follow his work from book to book. I forget he exists for long periods, and then go, "Oh wonderful, Shaun Tan has done two more things!"
But I have recently been in New York and Boston, so, oh dear, Turner? Rembrandt? My options have opened up substantially! I will say Monet. Growing up with my fatherleaflemming's faded print of Monet's bridge didn't prepare me for the way it glowed. (Which is the kind of preparation I'd have wanted, actually).
*Terribly invasive creatures, those wasps, so I shouldn't keep them as a sentimental touchstone, but I do.
rushthatspeaks. If you want questions, ask. 1. What's your default icon? I really like the art style, and I don't recognize it.
It's Shaun Tan's -- Tales From Outer Suburbia.
2. Place in the world you'd most like to travel that you've not been?
Excluding Greece, where I will be in, dear god, six days... Well, there's Antarctica, and on a less life-reshaping plane of likelihood, there's Florence. Someday I will go to Florence. Those are places I've seen and read a lot about -- the Florence in my head is accreting material quite rapidly, and Antarctica doesn't need to, one documentary has established it forever. This last trip has made me more aware of how many more places I haven't read anything about, though. I passed briefly through Calgary and through Nadi, I'm following someone's facebook posts about visiting Hanoi... That doesn't change the answer to the question, but it makes me think about how it might change. (And writing this has got me thinking on Norway, where some of my family's roots go. It doesn't take much thinking to make me want to go most places).
The other thing about being in North America is that it brought home to me how little of New Zealand I've seen as an adult. My family road trips to the islands' points are ten years old. So in terms of near-future plans, I want to go walking in the South Island, hear the roaring of the wasps in the beech forest around Nelson Lakes again,* visit the people I know in Dunedin. Also, I see the Rimutaka mountains every day from my flat. Sometime in the next year or two I want to stand on them and look back.
3. Something good you read recently?
The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford. It was there in a local second hand shop when I got home. I read it with the intention of writing about it here, and found that wasn't going to be fully possible. It's a very good book on the level of incidents and individual observations, and it handles indirection like a scalpel. On the level of characters and plot, it is waiting patiently for me to read it again and fathom it. I see the logic of what did happen (well, except for some of the convolutions in an inn), but not why it was correct that those things happened and not anything else, which is partly a matter of lacking historical context and partly the book's unpadded complexity. Off to read the relevant Shakespeare, among other things. In the meantime I can write about the book's first chapter, which I have the most finished sense of.
( Cut for spoilers, even though it's only the first chapter, because I enjoyed some of its surprises )
4. Mermaids or unicorns?
When I think about it, I don't meet many of either. I would say, in theory, mermaids. When I think 'unicorn' I have to struggle to come up with an image, and when I think 'mermaid' I think of many, sea and mangrove and river and coppery lake, solitary, schooling, city-building... Unicorns are more brittle in my head, I suppose. Since I've been reading answers to these questions, and it was waiting on the shelf, I've just read The Last Unicorn -- which I like very much, but it doesn't change the brittleness. She's a unicorn of fairy-tale, and could only change so far while staying that.
5. Favorite visual artist?
Still going: Shaun Tan. Sometimes I see art and want to write the stories of it. With Shaun Tan, whenever I have that feeling, a moment later I think, 'No, this drawing is already that story.' And I love Tales from Outer Suburbia and The Arrival. (Which I must look at again now I've been travelling). I don't follow his work from book to book. I forget he exists for long periods, and then go, "Oh wonderful, Shaun Tan has done two more things!"
But I have recently been in New York and Boston, so, oh dear, Turner? Rembrandt? My options have opened up substantially! I will say Monet. Growing up with my father
leaflemming's faded print of Monet's bridge didn't prepare me for the way it glowed. (Which is the kind of preparation I'd have wanted, actually). *Terribly invasive creatures, those wasps, so I shouldn't keep them as a sentimental touchstone, but I do.
