Tagged again, this time by Alon, and one I haven't done before (I think). The gist:
list five things about myself that most people don’t know, of which one isn’t true.
Ah. Erm. Uh. Okay.
1. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a paleontologist...for, like, about five minutes. (we had had a field trip that i enjoyed, i guess). It was a change from "fairy princess" and "ballerina," I suppose.
2. I used to figure skate, and even entered a regional competition once. (I came in dead last).
3. My middle name is "Elena."
4. I dislike ketchup to the point of loathing.
5. I own a pair of PVC thigh high fetish boots, but rarely wear them, alas.
(Are people supposed to guess which one is untrue?)
I tag...hmm.
kh, who really needs to get a damn blog of her own but can do this meme right here in the meantime; sbmontana; Aunt B.; everyone who's posted in the last three comment threads; and anyone else who has a mind to.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
(Are people supposed to guess which one is untrue?)
Yeah... it's easier to see that in action on blogs that get more traffic than mine.
I'm guessing #5 is false.
I don’t want to get too cocky about this. It may be that I’m the only one who doesn’t know what’s up with myself; in a way it’d be reassuring.
1. When I was in elementary school, I also had a fugitive interest in paleontology (spec., paleoanthropology) for about 5 minutes (after seeing a film about Louis Leakey). My more lasting idea was to be an architect, but even that was mostly just to have an answer when people asked me what I wanted to do. Fundamentally the whole idea of occupational ambition, of there being something to want to be, was & is genuinely absent in me. In its place, I’ve got a kind of Bouvard et Pécuchet thing going on.
2. I read Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, & Utopia shortly after it appeared, & was briefly persuaded. I was young, & now regard this as my biggest mistake ever.
3. I was a heroin addict for 10 years.
4. Many people, & not just stupid ones, get the sense that I’m emotionally cold. This is untrue. One spring day in college, many years ago, while sitting in the math library (in Robert Lee Moore Hall) doing little exercises for a point-set topology class, I looked out the window & was overcome by the most intense feeling of pleasure. There are other examples.
5. I don’t believe in free will.
Again, one of these is false, right? And do I name someone(s)? Do they have to be online?
belledame - I bet you like ketchup just fine.
and I bet you wear those boots ALL THE TIME, especially while eating things with ketchup.
you can't fool me. ;)
Can I play this game too?
1. When I was a teenager I was very keen on the music of Neil Diamond.
2. I prefer to eat pre-prepared meals out of the tinfoil tray rather than off a plate.
3. I shower regularly, but prefer my girlfriends not to.
4. I am a fan of early seventies British horror movies, especially those Amicus "portmanteau" affairs.
5. Some time this year, as I was reading a book out in the middle of nowhere, I was surprised by a passing echidna. It was nearly two feet long, and moved like no other animal I have ever seen.
Another fact, this one true, comes to mind. Although I lack for religious beliefs, an odd number of my favorite films treat of them. Today the National Gallery showed the 1st half of Jacques Rivette’s 1994 Joan the Maid, his 2-part, almost 6-hour life of Jeanne d’Arc, &, although I can’t help but see it, to its disadvantage, in comparison to Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc – one of the best films ever made, I think –, still, I liked it very much.
Joan is played by Sandrine Bonnaire, who’s a celebrity in France but known here, if at all, mostly for Agnès Varda’s 1985 Vagabond; I’m sort of fond of her. (She also was in a later Rivette film, Secret défense, a couple of good Claude Chabrol films, La Cérémonie of 1995 (which also co-stars Isabelle Huppert) & Au coeur du mensonge [The Color of Lies] 4 yrs later, & Patrice Leconte’s bad Monsieur Hire in 1989.) As in most of her roles, Bonnaire is appropriately opaque, with the requisite duality of a commanding, even rigid, self-certainty interspersed with fleeting moments of ordinariness, girlish playfulness (‘girlish’ although she was about twice as old as Joan when the film was made), & shock & fear at the realities of war (she comes completely, disconcertingly undone when she’s slightly wounded at Orléans). We see her conviction that there is an objective task, set by God, for her to perform, & that saints have visited her, & she prays, but none of that is what sets her off from her milieu, which also is pervaded by strong religion. Everybody else is as God-intoxicated as she is; she’s distinguished mostly by her will.
If the gender norms that made it unlikely that a woman, or rather an illiterate teenaged peasant girl, should be given command of an army, were inseparably entangled with religious ideology – the only people who question her masculine dress are a committee of Doctors of the Faith convened to vet her before she’s given command – it’s also only because of shared religious ideas that she ever was able, briefly, to transcend her station. It’s only because they share her belief that she’s serving a God-given purpose that the powerful men around her not only grant her an audience & then restrain, & feel guilty for, their aggressive sexual impulses toward her, but put their fate in her hands.
When the English enemy taunt her by calling her a whore, she responds with naïve, indignant fury (she also reacts with ineffectual pious violence whenever her soldiers curse), which is played semi-comedically, half like a scene from Monty Python & the Holy Grail. Rivette’s treatment of all this has a grating magical realist aspect, but things may turn out differently in part 2.
Anyway, another good movie on a religious theme: Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). I’d also count some of Lars von Trier’s films, e.g., Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark, etc., as religious after a fashion.
Oh lemme post mine here too.
1. I’m related to former corrupt, mob-tied mayor of Philadelphia Frank Rizzo.
2. I’m also related to Generoso Campos Marquetti, who was the first Black elected official in Cuba, and also was involved in the Cuban Race War of 1912
3. My vision is so bad I’m legally blind.
4. As an atheist, I hate Christmas.
5. Despite having brown-eyed parents, my daughter has blue eyes.
Post a Comment