Hey y’all, ask me some questions in the comments section of this post.
I would like everyone who reads this to ask me 3 questions, no more, no less. Ask me anything you want. Ask anything.Then I want you to go to your journal, copy and paste this allowing your friends to ask you anything.
As I tell my students, I’ll answer almost any question.
Copied from Stephanie’s LJ.
1. In retrospect, is there anything you didn’t take with you to Clarion West that you wish you had taken?
2. What new music have you purchased lately?
3. What’s your favorite meal?
1. Hmmm. There are a number of things I wish I hadn’t brought, but did bring. I wish I could have tracked down a 7-prong S-video cable, though, as I could have inflicted a Korean film on people one night but only via my computer which has the right DVD codes on it. Everywhere I go, people say it doesn’t exist, but on my PC, there’s a 7-prong plug that says S-video, so, uh…
That’ll be my answer, since of course one cannot bring along one’s girlfriend. :)
2. Well, I wouldn’t call it new, but my most recent music purchases were a 3-CD set of early Duke Ellington’s big band recordings and some Jelly Roll Morton from a used CD shop in Seattle, the former of which especially contributed to my final story (novella) at Clarion West. Oh yeah, and I also got Miles Davis’ _Aura_, which I don’t recommend. It hasn’t aged well, in my opinion.
3. I always answer this question two ways:
(a) in Korea, my favorite meal is dalk dori tang.
(b) outside Korea, I guess my favorite meal would be a nice plate of Lebanese vegetarian, or maybe a shish taouk plate if they give lots of the veggie stuff with it.
Gord, looks like your favorite Korean dish is the same as mine. My wife makes it at least once a month and that is my favorite day. Mmm.. damn good.
I closed my blog recently but will ask you questions anyhow – feel free to not answer since I can’t follow up in the spirit of the post.
1: What is the most important experience you had as a child before age 13?
2: When putting on your pants, left leg first or right leg first?
3: you’re teaching a class, in the middle of somehting important and you can’t leave the classroom and unfortunately you’ve got terrible gas and you know that it is not only going to be noisy but incredibly stinky as well, what do you do?
1: What is the most important experience you had as a child before age 13?
I think it was moving from Nova Scotia, where kids who didn’t like me just teased me, to Northern Saskatchewan, where kids who didn’t like me beat the crap out of me. No change in my appearance or demeanour; total change in environment. This was when I was going into 2nd or 3rd grade.
I learned a lot about racism (I was a slow white kid, they were strong native kids), about violence (I began to carry sticks everywhere I went, as a psychological tic), about the complexity of power structures (they were the poor underclass), and about how goddamned unfair the world can be up in the streets of Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan.
2: When putting on your pants, left leg first or right leg first?
I don’t think I have a specific routine for this. Whichever is more opportune, perhaps?
3: You’re teaching a class, in the middle of somehting important and you can’t leave the classroom and unfortunately you’ve got terrible gas and you know that it is not only going to be noisy but incredibly stinky as well, what do you do?
Nothing is so important that I cannot leave the classroom. I’d just, preferably after getting someone to come and watch the students (if, say, there’s a test on) or excusing myself (if, say, it’s just an important lesson).
1. Tell me about the very first sci-fi story you wrote.
2. What books are you reading now?
3. Name a person whose ideas you disagree with, yet respect because they’ve sharpened your own thinking.
1. Tell me about the very first sci-fi story you wrote.
Well, I assume we’re discounting the scribblings I did as a kid, otherwise I’d be telling you about the Adventures of Jontor Moogna Zintor in the Land of the Half-Ogres, or childish Ghostbusters fan-fiction from fifth grade. But then, that’s not really SF, it’s fantasy and horror.
Okay, let’s see. First SF story I wrote. That would be… oh, man. Okay, I just read through it. The date is August 1996, so it’s actually from ten years ago. Title: “The Love of a Mother”. It’s an odd thing. The frame story is about a band of stone-age humans wandering around pillaging other stone-age human groups’ resources and stealing their women; the main story is about a young guy who leads a violent environmentalist protest in Washington; they storm the Congress only to find there’s nobody there, nothing but armed robots. (It’s not explained whether a shadow government is running things from elsewhere, but it is stated that all the known politicians are actually just talking head animations.) The young man is arrested, flown away on a chopper (along with a few other survivors), and dumped in exile outside of the city, in the nasty collapsing-environmental-disaster outside the urban zones. He sleeps in trash for a night or two, and then starts orating to a band of fellow exiles, lighting a fire of revolution in their hearts. Next thing you know, we’re back in the frame story, and the stone age people are looking at the wrecked spires of an ancient city… surprise (not)! They’re our descendants.
Rather, well, iffy story. But it was sort of funny, reading it. When it wasn’t just painful.
Next question.
2. What books are you reading now?
Right now, I’m reading Maureen F. McHugh’s Nekropolis and the odd short story from an Australian SF & Fantasy Year’s Best anthology loaned to me by my classmate Ian, whom I’ll be seeing next week. I’m also feeling the itch to read something nonfictional at the moment, and if it builds, I’ll probably dig into A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon. Then, I think, a lot of short-story reading and the Korean novel Three Generations by Yom Sang-Seob, of course that’s in the newish English translation, and some of the revision-related texts I’ve got here, brought from Seattle and/or nabbed at the library.
3. Name a person whose ideas you disagree with, yet respect because they’ve sharpened your own thinking.
Well, there are lots of such people, and it’s probably unfair that I’m not selecting one of the people I used to debate with on the old Brin-L mailing list, since really, it was in all those debates that I learned how to have an argument, make a point, and learn how to think critically by pulling apart others arguments.
Still, I’d say the one individual that comes to mind first is C.S. Lewis. Reading his books is almost — almost — enough to bring on a transmogrification. Almost. I read his books and choke on the logical flaws and snuck-in assumptions. And yet I do feel the man meant well, and perhaps even couldn’t see his own logical flaws. And some of what he wrote was so beautuful. I haven’t read much of his fiction, Screwtape Letters aside, so bear in mind I’m not discussing Narnia, but in Mere Christianity and The Great Divorce and A Grief Observed the man did some outstanding writing. I disagree with a lot of his arguments and conclusions, but I learned a lot reading him and it certainly helped hone my thinking.
Now, Cuccu, are ya gonna post an “Ask Away” on your blog? Hee…
Yes. Now’s your opportunity.