Interview Meme

If you want to play, here're the rules: comment with either a request for 5 questions from me for you to answer, or with 5 questions for me to answer. Answers ought to be posted as separate LJ posts so that everyone can play to getting-to-know-you game.

These questions from my darling prosicated:

1. What will the student reviews of your teaching praise you for next year?
I look forward to teaching as a theatrical exercise, and like any actor, I hope my audience will enjoy the show - ideally, they should be dazzled by my intellect, as well as engaged by charm, and learn to admire great writing as one of the most important things in the world. Good luck with that last one, right? Since I'm teaching writing, I also want to communicate what I think is the fundamental point of composition: being specific as well as essential. Like for example, subway poetry. Those poems are always so vague, their similes always sound vaguely 'poetic', like if you typed a query into a poetry generator, and got something to the effect of "In the hourglass of silent souls/the days fall hushed inside the case/and bury once resilient goals/left dormant in their resting place." - What does it mean??? If there are days falling through the hourglass, why are there also silent souls? If the goals are now dormant, what does that have to do with their once being resilient? And also, why the hell are you writing about hourglasses and days in the first place - what are you really saying? Why on earth should I care? Every word should count, because you can only have so many before your work sinks under the weight of it. Words are the best weapons, but there's no sense in excess rust. They should be pure, rigorously refined to be a crystal-clear reflection of your ideas, whatever they are. Specificity is all. If there's one thing my students learn from me, I hope it's that.

2. What are your 5 goals for this week?
That's easy, since I am currently in the midst of finals:
1) Finish my paper on Jane Austen as an anticipator of the Decadent Movement (i.e. Oscar Wilde etc.)
2) Finish my multi-media edition of Madeleine L'Engle's The Small Rain (Musical CD + Introduction + Typesetting)
3)Take my final classics exam
4) Think about my paper on Allegorical Imaginary Worlds, and what they have to do with the Renaissance humanist agenda, as illustrated by in utramque partem.
5)Try not to die from exhaustion, before I make it out to California next Wednesday.

3. Tell me about the strangest stranger who ever struck up a conversation with you on public transit.
Unlike many of my friends, who seem to magnetically invite the oddest of conversational gambits from all and sundry on the subway, I'm not really approached much by the public transit freaks. I think I give off the "Don't talk to me or I will eviscerate you" vibe. They talk around me though. Last time I was on a bus in Seattle, various insane people struck up a conversation/altercation, complete with showing of knives, about the number of heart-attacks they had, relative to each other. Or the other day, someone came up to me and rm in the subway and said, "I would commit suicide just to touch you." But it wasn't directed at me.

4. How would you sum up or explain your college life to a friend from elementary school and high school who didn't keep in touch well?
I went to a very good school, but the ultimate sadness was that I couldn't find the freaks: for the first two years, I made no friends, I never went to class, I failed a number of classes, cited a waterfall in a paper, which I handed in, became very depressed, at one point never leaving my room for about three weeks, and subsisting entirely on diet coke, and hershey's kisses, and became very ill, had a crazy roommate who used my toothbrush without telling me, slept cuddled up with a hammer, and demagnetized my harddrive by inserting a pencil sharpener under the cover & called me a slut, after which I got meningitis, left school for a year, worked in a toy shop, and in a theater company, learnt stage management, lived in California, moved in with my boyfriend, moved back to New York, worked at Barnes & Noble, realised I didn't want to work a register for the rest of my life, went back to the same college, fell in love with the Renaissance, found an advisor, got straight A's, imported my boyfriend from the West Coast and attempted to negotiate a long term relationship, paid my way with work as a dramaturg, stage manager & assistant director, with one gig as an actor, wrote a thesis on Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and finally graduated, with honors. I just got my diploma yesterday though. They just didn't want to let me go, I guess...

5. If you could only keep one great work of art with you for the next year (poem, novel, essay, painting, sculpture, etc.), what would you choose, and why?
Aieee. Very difficult. I suppose, in terms of great works of art, it would have to be some sort of text, because it is the form which speaks to me most, and it'd have to last me a year, so it would need to sustain re-reading: which it would be, changes from day to day. I'm torn between Austen's Pride & Prejudice, which is in my opinion the greatest novel ever written, Milton's Paradise Lost, with the original villain who you just have to love, Pamela Dean's modern novel Tam Lin - which combines ballads, Shakespeare, fairies, academia, and English Literature. I can't believe I even narrowed it down to three, and left out Shakespeare's sonnets, and Kit Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, and then there's all the stuff that I don't know if I'd call "great works of art" - but I could never never give up - like all my high fantasy, and my Georgette Heyer romances, and Neil Gaiman's stuff, and Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, and all my kidlit books like L.M Montgomery, and Alcott, and E. Nesbit, and Edward Eager, and Madeleine L'Engle, and Andersen's fairy tales, and Myths, and the list goes on and on and on. I've been called an imaginary-world fetishist, and I think I've come to terms with the fact that it's completely true.