The interview meme - from Purple Mirie
May. 24th, 2005 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbThis meme says: comment if you want to be interviewed. (For obvious reasons, this post is closed to anonymous posters.)
1. What is it about history that fascinates you so?
It is very hard for me to say. I really think that my mind is just made in a particular way. I find reading texts of history, including specialist history (social history, history of science, of music, of postage stamp collecting) easier and more satisfying than any other kind of reading, not excluding my other area of skill - comic books - and great literature and poetry. That is, having the choice of reading one of the truly great novels, a comic by Alan Moore or Jack Kirby or Hayao Miyazaki, or a book of history, I would read the book of history. Why that is, I do not quite know; perhaps because it engages more that part of my mind that interprets and draws conclusions.
2. Which fictional character do you most relate to and why?
"Relate to" as opposed to "identify with". I identify with no fictional character - though as an adolescent I had a certain attraction to Hanno Buddenbrook from Thomas Mann's novel. I relate very strongly to female characters who are gentle and unaggressive but very strong and hard-working, and practically all the protagonists I create are heroines in that mold. A current favourite is Buffy.
3. Given the chance to do some time travelling, to which time and place would you go to and why?
All of them. But I would favour those on the edge of our knowledge, where discoveries can be made that extend our existing knowledge of the past - e.g. archaic Greece, dark-age Britain, etc.
4. What's the one thing (a habit, a thing, or anything at all) that annoys you the most?
I cannot single one thing out. I am quite an irritable person, I admit. I do tend to get sudden moments when I remember and cringe at some moment when I made a more than usually big fool of myself in public. So you could say that the thing that annoys me the most is when I say or do something stupid.
And because I really want to know your thoughts on this one,
5. What are your thoughts on liberation theology?
Pretty much the Church's. I think that liberation theology is built on the confusion of secular and religious categories and the abuse of emotionally loaded words, beginning with "liberation" itself. It is rhetoric, not thought - and theology should always be thought. Christianity offers liberation from sin; liberation theology seems more concerned with liberation from the landlord. It does not matter whether or not that is "real" liberation and the other just "pie in the sky when you die"; the one is a Christian concern, the other at best a political goal. You may denounce the Christian idea of the liberty of a believer as meaningless, but not make it a mere feature of "economic" liberation; to do so would be, in C.S.Lewis' expressive image, to use the Stairway to Heaven as a short-cut to the nearest grocer.
1. What is it about history that fascinates you so?
It is very hard for me to say. I really think that my mind is just made in a particular way. I find reading texts of history, including specialist history (social history, history of science, of music, of postage stamp collecting) easier and more satisfying than any other kind of reading, not excluding my other area of skill - comic books - and great literature and poetry. That is, having the choice of reading one of the truly great novels, a comic by Alan Moore or Jack Kirby or Hayao Miyazaki, or a book of history, I would read the book of history. Why that is, I do not quite know; perhaps because it engages more that part of my mind that interprets and draws conclusions.
2. Which fictional character do you most relate to and why?
"Relate to" as opposed to "identify with". I identify with no fictional character - though as an adolescent I had a certain attraction to Hanno Buddenbrook from Thomas Mann's novel. I relate very strongly to female characters who are gentle and unaggressive but very strong and hard-working, and practically all the protagonists I create are heroines in that mold. A current favourite is Buffy.
3. Given the chance to do some time travelling, to which time and place would you go to and why?
All of them. But I would favour those on the edge of our knowledge, where discoveries can be made that extend our existing knowledge of the past - e.g. archaic Greece, dark-age Britain, etc.
4. What's the one thing (a habit, a thing, or anything at all) that annoys you the most?
I cannot single one thing out. I am quite an irritable person, I admit. I do tend to get sudden moments when I remember and cringe at some moment when I made a more than usually big fool of myself in public. So you could say that the thing that annoys me the most is when I say or do something stupid.
And because I really want to know your thoughts on this one,
5. What are your thoughts on liberation theology?
Pretty much the Church's. I think that liberation theology is built on the confusion of secular and religious categories and the abuse of emotionally loaded words, beginning with "liberation" itself. It is rhetoric, not thought - and theology should always be thought. Christianity offers liberation from sin; liberation theology seems more concerned with liberation from the landlord. It does not matter whether or not that is "real" liberation and the other just "pie in the sky when you die"; the one is a Christian concern, the other at best a political goal. You may denounce the Christian idea of the liberty of a believer as meaningless, but not make it a mere feature of "economic" liberation; to do so would be, in C.S.Lewis' expressive image, to use the Stairway to Heaven as a short-cut to the nearest grocer.
