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memeness
Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. (Please note: If you simply wish to comment on something I've said but don't want to participate in the meme, that is fine. I will only give you five words if you specifically comment you with 'Words!')
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pogrebin gave me these:
LINGUISTICS -- It's true, given another lifetime in which to study not-medicine, I would indulge my blinding and passionate love of language. I would actually become fluent in French and then I'd go and learn a pile of other languages, so that I could compare the truths & natures of verbal expression, al l the ways in which people can take something that grew from the need to say WATCH OUT, MAMMOTH BEHIND YOU into Shakespeare, and Dylan Thomas, and all the wordsmiths and storytellers of every century and every country. I love words; fuck you, Alan Bennett, I love words. I love testing their flexibility and admiring their strength. I love learning the rules and then flaunting them. I love creating aesthetics and rhythm from a series of arbitrary sounds, and using them to share images and emotions with other people.
PRECISE -- This is the adjective that I am always, always overjoyed to see in a comment on any of my fics. I have great admiration for writers whose prose I consider to be precise, and I strive to achieve precision in my own writing. The absolute best thing that anyone has ever said about my writing was something along the lines of 'like a knife -- sharp and precise'.
DOUBLE-HELIX -- Yes, all right, we all know I can't keep science -- increasingly, biomedical science -- out of my writing. But I've made my peace with that, and I enjoy being known for it. This was actually a sneakily perfect word to pick, because in my head the double helix of DNA symbolises the aesthetics and symmetry that exist in nature, the things that existed long before we discovered them but were, in a strange way, WAITING for us to discover them. There's an elegance to the helix and the way it allows all the information that makes up a human being's starting materials (not all of a human being, certainly not; but the raw materials from which a person can start to be formed) to be expressed in the form of paired molecules. Learning molecular genetics is mind-blowing in its logic, its simple beauty, its ability to explain how things succeed and how they can go wrong and how we can start to fix them.
EPIPHANY -- I've been looking thoughtfully at this word for a while; what DOES it mean to me? And I've realised that epiphanies are one of my favourite things to write. They don't have to be large or even important, but I adore those moments when something changes irrevocably in a person's conception of themselves/another person/the world. The moments when everything clicks into place and the universe is slightly different. I love epiphanies both emotional and rational, and best of all I love those that combine elements of both. And I enjoy epiphanies that have nothing to do with the characters themselves, but are those designed to strike the reader -- Chuck Palahniuk does these phenomenally well, and without pulling punches. I'm also going to state right now that her ability to handle epiphanies is one of the things I've always admired the most aboutpogrebin's fics (also her precision! FUNNY THAT); those that spring to mind immediately are those in Figures of Eight and A Lever and a Place to Stand (her Padma = amazing).
ILLUMINATION -- What. What! How did she do this! She actually managed to pick words that I'd have chosen for myself if I'd thought about it carefully for an hour, and she did it entirely off-the-cuff. I guess you can never know yourself as well as other people know you. I'll go with the literal meaning of the word, that involving light & shadow: I place great value on aesthetics (can I use that word more often? LET'S SEE) and I have always loved the aesthetics of light most of all. Light in all its colours, forms, sources and intensities; the absence of light, and how a thing can be defined by shadow and outline as well as by what light illuminates in its form. You can find hundreds of references to light and shadow in my attempts at description, because in any mental image that I have, the way that light works within it will always be very clear. There's also a great potential for physics when it comes to the discussion of illumination; electromagnetic spectrums, reflection and refraction and transmission, waves moving through mediums and vacuums; light as both particle and wave. e=mc squared; light created from matter. The speed of light. One of my favourite lyrics ever written sums it up:
even scientists say
everything is just light
not created, destroyed
but eternally bright
Those words (and the aesthetics/deeper meanings of light) took on the most importance when I was writing & RPing Lucifer, also called the Lightbringer, a character who taught me more about myself and about writing than any other ever had or has. Light -- and the destruction of matter to create light -- was hugely, centrally important to Lucifer's backstory and self-conception, and there were certain key aspects of him that I always described in terms of light or darkness.
~
Life in Qland continues lazy and delightful. Claira and I have an idea for a fic. WATCH THIS SPACE.
pogrebin gave me these:LINGUISTICS -- It's true, given another lifetime in which to study not-medicine, I would indulge my blinding and passionate love of language. I would actually become fluent in French and then I'd go and learn a pile of other languages, so that I could compare the truths & natures of verbal expression, al l the ways in which people can take something that grew from the need to say WATCH OUT, MAMMOTH BEHIND YOU into Shakespeare, and Dylan Thomas, and all the wordsmiths and storytellers of every century and every country. I love words; fuck you, Alan Bennett, I love words. I love testing their flexibility and admiring their strength. I love learning the rules and then flaunting them. I love creating aesthetics and rhythm from a series of arbitrary sounds, and using them to share images and emotions with other people.
PRECISE -- This is the adjective that I am always, always overjoyed to see in a comment on any of my fics. I have great admiration for writers whose prose I consider to be precise, and I strive to achieve precision in my own writing. The absolute best thing that anyone has ever said about my writing was something along the lines of 'like a knife -- sharp and precise'.
DOUBLE-HELIX -- Yes, all right, we all know I can't keep science -- increasingly, biomedical science -- out of my writing. But I've made my peace with that, and I enjoy being known for it. This was actually a sneakily perfect word to pick, because in my head the double helix of DNA symbolises the aesthetics and symmetry that exist in nature, the things that existed long before we discovered them but were, in a strange way, WAITING for us to discover them. There's an elegance to the helix and the way it allows all the information that makes up a human being's starting materials (not all of a human being, certainly not; but the raw materials from which a person can start to be formed) to be expressed in the form of paired molecules. Learning molecular genetics is mind-blowing in its logic, its simple beauty, its ability to explain how things succeed and how they can go wrong and how we can start to fix them.
EPIPHANY -- I've been looking thoughtfully at this word for a while; what DOES it mean to me? And I've realised that epiphanies are one of my favourite things to write. They don't have to be large or even important, but I adore those moments when something changes irrevocably in a person's conception of themselves/another person/the world. The moments when everything clicks into place and the universe is slightly different. I love epiphanies both emotional and rational, and best of all I love those that combine elements of both. And I enjoy epiphanies that have nothing to do with the characters themselves, but are those designed to strike the reader -- Chuck Palahniuk does these phenomenally well, and without pulling punches. I'm also going to state right now that her ability to handle epiphanies is one of the things I've always admired the most about
pogrebin's fics (also her precision! FUNNY THAT); those that spring to mind immediately are those in Figures of Eight and A Lever and a Place to Stand (her Padma = amazing).ILLUMINATION -- What. What! How did she do this! She actually managed to pick words that I'd have chosen for myself if I'd thought about it carefully for an hour, and she did it entirely off-the-cuff. I guess you can never know yourself as well as other people know you. I'll go with the literal meaning of the word, that involving light & shadow: I place great value on aesthetics (can I use that word more often? LET'S SEE) and I have always loved the aesthetics of light most of all. Light in all its colours, forms, sources and intensities; the absence of light, and how a thing can be defined by shadow and outline as well as by what light illuminates in its form. You can find hundreds of references to light and shadow in my attempts at description, because in any mental image that I have, the way that light works within it will always be very clear. There's also a great potential for physics when it comes to the discussion of illumination; electromagnetic spectrums, reflection and refraction and transmission, waves moving through mediums and vacuums; light as both particle and wave. e=mc squared; light created from matter. The speed of light. One of my favourite lyrics ever written sums it up:
even scientists say
everything is just light
not created, destroyed
but eternally bright
Those words (and the aesthetics/deeper meanings of light) took on the most importance when I was writing & RPing Lucifer, also called the Lightbringer, a character who taught me more about myself and about writing than any other ever had or has. Light -- and the destruction of matter to create light -- was hugely, centrally important to Lucifer's backstory and self-conception, and there were certain key aspects of him that I always described in terms of light or darkness.
~
Life in Qland continues lazy and delightful. Claira and I have an idea for a fic. WATCH THIS SPACE.
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- blue
- hair!
- sci-fi
- bargains
- comics
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Words me?
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- grit
- San Francisco
- red
- transformative
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eta: the drugs made me miss the important part: WORDS!
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- forensics
- catwalk
- scarves
- handbag
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no subject
- Tokyo
- voice
- orange
- deliberation
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- teaching
- pink
- Katie
- PILOTS
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What song are the lyrics from? (I will be so embarrassed if I know the song already.)
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Woooooooords for you:
- lyrics
- roads
- autumn
- X!
- Tori
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- Fuuma :D
- centred
- visibility
- porn
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- boat
- theatre
- Boston
- dreaming
- Narnia
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- curls
- Chaucer
- Narnia
- chocolate
- bounce
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- Subaru
- dynamics
- gender
- crack
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You know, your thoughts about illumination made me think about one of my favourite bits of poetry. It's Leonard Cohen, weirdly enough:
There's a crack in everything, / That's how the light gets in
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- sunshine
- Latin
- roadtrip
- space
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- Obama (naturally)
- kayak
- rockface
- technology
- balance
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Words please. :) I don't think I can come up with better ones for you... but I might try to come up with supplementary ones.
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- revolution
- chartreuse
- California
- ink
- ambiguity
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- myths
- realism
- passion
- literature
(BTW, Imry, did you ever GET the pxmas present I sent you? I am very worried it got swallowed by the postal system.)
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- bright
- romance
- melodic
- emergence
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- silver
- London
- angel
- fire
- monument
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- variety
- skirts
- legend
- hummingbird
ooh! pick me! pick me!
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WORDS!
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- history
- energy
- dye
- unshaken