El Meemo

[talktooloose]

The Interests Meme
Comment on this post and I will pick seven of your interests. You then explain them in your journal and re-post.

mofic chose the following interests from my LJ-profile and I will explicate briefly because I don't want to do the things I should be doing:

Alexander Payne – The director of four brilliant movies, namely, Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt and Sideways. His intense humanism, his love of the absurd in the everyday, his full-on acknowledgement of how damn painful life can be... all of these hit me just right. He is an artist I admire tremendously and try to emulate. He knows that it is the details which tell the big picture.

Yiddish – Both my parents were born in Canada but spoke Yiddish before English. Although they only spoke it when my grandparents were around, I heard a lot of the language. I'm far from fluent in it and I can read at a pace of about a line in two minutes, yet it is somehow deep in my ear and my soul. I recorded a CD of my dad telling Yiddish jokes and singing Yiddish songs a few years ago and I was surprised how much I understood. There is a deep poignancy to the death of Yiddish as a living language and as the language of the Judaism that I most readily idenitify with; secular, socialist justice-oriented. The death of the Six Million was also the death of a culture.

Getting suspended for your interests – This was a joke interest created, I think, by 33mhz during the "Strikethrough 07" debacle. It seems a kind of punk badge of honour to me. I've never really gotten into much trouble for my interests in life but I've always been curious to know how I would react if I were. I live an open but non-confrontational existence. I admire kick-ass punks with attitude.

Finder – is one of my favourite comic books. It is the creation of a brilliant woman named Carla Speed McNeil. There are currently 8 volumes of the socio-anthropological SF epic. She can draw like a dream, write like a dream and she's done it all as an independent. More recently as an independent with two kids under the age of four. Her website is here.

Maureen F. McHugh – Another favourite. She is the author of four wonderful novels, China Moutain Zhang, Half the Day Is Night, Mission Child and Necropolis. She reminds me a bit of Carla Speed McNeil in that they are both unsentimental and rigourous lovers of humanity and the way it interacts with technology. Her first novel was a minor hit and the rest have not been. She has a blog here which is rather prosaic and mostly about family matters. I love her strange relationship with plot. The books have arcs, but they are unusual arcs. It feels like we are spying on these lives for a while and then we have our peephole taken away abruptly.

Sadness – Hmm, complicated. I can easily distract myself from my emotions and spend a lot of time in a state of mild panic rather than in anything real and grounded. I sort of value times when I'm genuinely sad and I can be fully present for the experience. Also, I love movies and books that take me into a characters' experience of sadness. I think it is one of the most underrated emotions and a great source of wisdom.

Tikun Olam – This is a great instance of where I am inspired by Judaism and at odds with the way traditional Jewish thought works. Tikun Olam means fixing or perfecting the world. The Orthodox say this is done through the performance of God's commandments. Y'know, just pray like you should and leave that pork alone and the world will get better. I think of Tikun Olam as the basic responsibility that should underlie all our actions. For instance, those who try to "protect" their children by putting them in an SUV are forgetting that there is a higher level responsibility involved. Is the work of my life contributing to Tikun Olam? Are my everyday interactions? It is not usually about profound impact but the small and incremental.

Comments

[halogencycle.livejournal.com]

And I thought "Finder" just meant you were a Mac person.