The Cool Kids are doing it

LJ Interests meme results

1. brooklyn:
   Places where you spend your childhood exercise a preternatural hold thereafter. My grandfather's house was in Brooklyn: 79 Lefforts Avenue. Close to Prospect Park, the Botanical Gardens (& the parrot who lived in the greenhouse), the magnificent public library at Grand Army Plaza. A train ride away from Coney Island and the strange toxic beaches.
   
   In the Botanical Gardens there's a metal strip, the demarkation between between two colonial settlements. As a small child, I remember being quite fascinated by this strip: you could put a foot on one side, another on the other, and be in two different places at the same time! Though really you were only in one place. How could that be? Could you do the same thing some place else? (Probably not...)



2. deep springs:
   Deep Springs is the cowboy college on the edge of the California/Nevada border. The novelist William Vollman went there. Also, Paul Wolfowitz , evil architect of Bush's misguided Iraq policy. My oldest kid goes there now.



3. e. nesbit:
   E. Nesbit is my favorite children's book author. Children's books are my favorite literature.
   
   Nesbit was one of the Fabians, a band of utopian socialists around the turn of the twentieth century who also included H.G.Wells and (if memory serves me right) the prescient social historian Rebecca West. She started out as a serious poet but had a ne'er do well husband and a passel of kids, so turned to writing children's books as a means of supporting them all. She didn't like children particularly, and I think that's one of the reasons why she wrote about them so well and unsentimentally. They were always a tribe of neglected children who stumble across some sort of magic: in The Five Children and It, it's a prehistoric creature that grants wishes; in The Amulet -- early precursor to Stargate -- it's a piece of Egyptian jewelry.
   
   My own particular fave is not one of her best: The Enchanted Castle which I like because it extends that Jungian metaphor of an endless house and hidden rooms as the manifestation of the Psyche. I envision the Hall of Granted Wishes -- like dioramas in Museum of Natural History! -- at least once a day.



4. exile on coldharbour lane:
   A3's terrific, terrific album. You know at least one song off it already: the Sopranos' theme, Woke Up One Morning



5. jazz:
   Miles Davis. John Coltrane.



6. maine:
   Long before Stephen King started mining the daily details of his life for spooky resonance, Maine was a weird place -- one of those places on the junction between reality and the quotes that should always be around that word. I spent a lot of time there as a kid. Stunningly beautiful. Favorite writer who writes about Maine: Elizabeth Hand.



7. national enquirer:
   Put the Gray Lady in the Alzheimer's home! This is the real pulse beat of the culture.



8. otters:
   I should have qualified sea otters: nearly extinct but numerous hereabouts. I have a story plot that's been percolating in my head for years now about a weird tribe of wer-otters in a small fishing community. Might make a good Young Adult book. If I could figure out a way to give up sleep, I might have time to write it.



9. science fiction:
   Only two literary forms actualize their metaphors: poetry and science fiction. I prefer short stories to novels -- the novels invariably get clunky. Faves are still Left Hand of Darkness and -- gulp! -- Stranger In a Strange Land ('cause you gotta love the utopian Libertarian vision)



10. small business:
    because -- hey! -- I own one.

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