posted by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jaeleslie at 02:37pm on 25/06/2003
jaeleslie at 02:37pm on 25/06/20031) At times, I have been somewhat intimidated by your writing. Usually, I've been fascinated, but with some pieces, I found myself lost at the knowledge you were bringing to your words, and the depth of the analysis you were pursuing, and I wasn't sure what to do about it. Furthermore, you have a fine dry wit that I've occasionally misjudged. The question: what would you do, if anything, to assuage the misgivings of an audience going through that intimidation?
2) What three people would you actively choose to have in what you consider your permanent family, were they willing?
3) What sorts of art would you pursue if you lived in the desert?
4) To what extent do you think on-line personality tests are beneficial or detrimental?
5) In 100 words or less, tell us what you would say to George W. Bush were you to meet him in person and have his undivided attention.
How delightful to have such questions! even if they are kind of hard. No, I will not pretend to pout, but just get on with it, to the best of my ability. Preen preen. How fine it is to be praised. At least I think it is praise. You've gone to some trouble to put this first one in a friendly way. Because you know how it is. Many people in fandom, in the U.S. anyway, know exactly how it is to have been accused over and over of being too smart -- or at least of acting too smart -- with the message coming through loud and clear that braininess is not a good thing. I am horribly bitter about this, about the culture of the schools, the general anti-intellectual bias of American society, and about being a female in a place and time where my value has been set more by my personal appearance and social skills than by the mental capacity that might otherwise have been my strong suit. I learned to hide it. Damnation.
what would you do, if anything, to assuage the misgivings of an audience going through that intimidation? Take off my clothes? figuratively anyhow. Clown around a bit. It's just me in here, another human. I'm not sure how much use it is to explicitly state: being smart or stupid does not make one a more or less valuable soul. Sojourner Truth said something like, if that man says he has a full measure, and I've only a half-pint, isn't he mean not to let me use my little bit? Let us all use our talents to the best of our abilities. But the intellectual masks of literary writing, and of academic office-seeking, never got me anywhere, and don't seem to go anywhere I want to be. Fandom has become a home for me purely because of the freedom it gives me to be as smart as I can be. It is the only place I have found friends who really are entertained by what I can do on a good day. This is my brain! this is my brain on toast! this is my brain with swiss and a side of cole slaw! Enjoy!
Number 2 is too hard! Whine! What three people would you actively choose to have in what you consider your permanent family, were they willing? I guess that leaves out John Lennon, who is past willing anything. Most of the people I have been able to think of are already in the quasi-family of fandom. That is already permanent. And I have struggled most of my life with the intractability of other people's desires to live in other places, and in other households, than mine. There are plenty of people on one coast or the other, or in Britain, that I would quite happily transport to Madison to live in a big castle-like mansion on the lake in utopian harmony. But then it would get cold, and some would be bored without their jobs, or miss their mates, and you'd want to move back to Austin, and the dishes would pile up... believe me. Maybe by now my desires are too well controlled to imagine that far from this best of all possible worlds.
3) What sorts of art would you pursue if you lived in the desert? Same ones I do now! except I hear that watercolors are an even quicker matter when the rate of evaporation is faster. Maybe not papermaking -- it requires lots of water, but at the scale I work, no more than usual household uses. But what would take me to the desert? I wonder, except the rheumatism, which will drive me eventually to forms demanding less fine-motor control anyhow -- like papermaking. But what life path would have already taken me there? I used to live in San Diego you know, definitely desert country, and long before that Oklahoma, the Great American Desert, and I can't imagine how I would have arrived at the assortment of techniques I work on now without the particular friends and teachers I have encountered. But writing, and watercolors, in some form, I would have found my way toward anyhow. They are that widespread, and that essential to me.
4) To what extent do you think on-line personality tests are beneficial or detrimental? I think they are a thing to do. For people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing that they like. I suppose if you wasted the rent money on them, that would be bad. No clue whether they are more accurate, or influential, than horoscopes -- and I have cast my share of horoscopes.
Not sure I have 100 words for the Resident. How's this: "Straighten up! Be nice! Mean people suck!" But I suppose his mother has already been over that territory with him -- with what luck we all can observe.
2) What three people would you actively choose to have in what you consider your permanent family, were they willing?
3) What sorts of art would you pursue if you lived in the desert?
4) To what extent do you think on-line personality tests are beneficial or detrimental?
5) In 100 words or less, tell us what you would say to George W. Bush were you to meet him in person and have his undivided attention.
How delightful to have such questions! even if they are kind of hard. No, I will not pretend to pout, but just get on with it, to the best of my ability. Preen preen. How fine it is to be praised. At least I think it is praise. You've gone to some trouble to put this first one in a friendly way. Because you know how it is. Many people in fandom, in the U.S. anyway, know exactly how it is to have been accused over and over of being too smart -- or at least of acting too smart -- with the message coming through loud and clear that braininess is not a good thing. I am horribly bitter about this, about the culture of the schools, the general anti-intellectual bias of American society, and about being a female in a place and time where my value has been set more by my personal appearance and social skills than by the mental capacity that might otherwise have been my strong suit. I learned to hide it. Damnation.
what would you do, if anything, to assuage the misgivings of an audience going through that intimidation? Take off my clothes? figuratively anyhow. Clown around a bit. It's just me in here, another human. I'm not sure how much use it is to explicitly state: being smart or stupid does not make one a more or less valuable soul. Sojourner Truth said something like, if that man says he has a full measure, and I've only a half-pint, isn't he mean not to let me use my little bit? Let us all use our talents to the best of our abilities. But the intellectual masks of literary writing, and of academic office-seeking, never got me anywhere, and don't seem to go anywhere I want to be. Fandom has become a home for me purely because of the freedom it gives me to be as smart as I can be. It is the only place I have found friends who really are entertained by what I can do on a good day. This is my brain! this is my brain on toast! this is my brain with swiss and a side of cole slaw! Enjoy!
Number 2 is too hard! Whine! What three people would you actively choose to have in what you consider your permanent family, were they willing? I guess that leaves out John Lennon, who is past willing anything. Most of the people I have been able to think of are already in the quasi-family of fandom. That is already permanent. And I have struggled most of my life with the intractability of other people's desires to live in other places, and in other households, than mine. There are plenty of people on one coast or the other, or in Britain, that I would quite happily transport to Madison to live in a big castle-like mansion on the lake in utopian harmony. But then it would get cold, and some would be bored without their jobs, or miss their mates, and you'd want to move back to Austin, and the dishes would pile up... believe me. Maybe by now my desires are too well controlled to imagine that far from this best of all possible worlds.
3) What sorts of art would you pursue if you lived in the desert? Same ones I do now! except I hear that watercolors are an even quicker matter when the rate of evaporation is faster. Maybe not papermaking -- it requires lots of water, but at the scale I work, no more than usual household uses. But what would take me to the desert? I wonder, except the rheumatism, which will drive me eventually to forms demanding less fine-motor control anyhow -- like papermaking. But what life path would have already taken me there? I used to live in San Diego you know, definitely desert country, and long before that Oklahoma, the Great American Desert, and I can't imagine how I would have arrived at the assortment of techniques I work on now without the particular friends and teachers I have encountered. But writing, and watercolors, in some form, I would have found my way toward anyhow. They are that widespread, and that essential to me.
4) To what extent do you think on-line personality tests are beneficial or detrimental? I think they are a thing to do. For people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing that they like. I suppose if you wasted the rent money on them, that would be bad. No clue whether they are more accurate, or influential, than horoscopes -- and I have cast my share of horoscopes.
Not sure I have 100 words for the Resident. How's this: "Straighten up! Be nice! Mean people suck!" But I suppose his mother has already been over that territory with him -- with what luck we all can observe.