Interview meme from Agatha S. - comment and I will interview you (if I can think of questions

[fpb]

1. What is the most beautiful place in the world you've visited?
Venice. Beyond comparison, expectation, or belief. And then there is Villa d'Este in Tivoli.
2. Which magical object, spell or potion from the Harry Potter books do you wish existed in real life?
Goodness! The Time-Turner, probably.
3. Which languages that you don't know yet would you most like to learn?
Pahlavi, Persian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Accadian, ancient Egyptian. And among those I know a little, I would greatly like to improve my Classical Greek, Icelandic, Sanskrit, Old English, Welsh, and Old Irish. And why not a few Slavonic languages while I'm at it?
4. What would be more difficult for you to bear: living on a deserted island, or living in a permanently crowded place?
Desert island, unless it had cable and internet. I have always lived in big cities - Milan, Rome, London. I did my National Service in a small Italian town, L'Aquila, and nearly went crazy.
5. Which character traits do you see as most important in a friend?
I am not quite sure, because I am not sure why people become friends - why you choose one person out of dozens of people with excellent qualities to confide in and support and help and argue with and share experiences with. But once you are a friend, the most important virtue without any doubt is loyalty.

Comments

[tashmania.livejournal.com]

This seems interesting... interview me, please?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

1 - If I understood correctly, your family is of Indian origin - which part of India exactly?
2 - Do you speak any Indian languages, and any other languages than English - learned at school, at home, whatever?
3 - Tell me about your boyfriend. At as much length as you like.
4 - What do you see doing in the future?
5 - What fictional world would you like to live in?

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

You speak Icelandic? How did you learn it?
And while I'm not surprised about the loyalty rating, I'm a little curious. You wrote a while ago about the difference between loyalty to institutions in ancient Rome and personal loyalty. I see that you have a heavy share of both kinds, and I'm wondering if you ever were in a situation that tested that loyalty? (Where a dysfunctional person you cared for was hurting an institution, or the other way around.) If there was, how did you work it out?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I said I speak a little of those languages. In fact, I have forgotten what Sanskrit I knew, though I think I would recover it fast if I tried. Icelandic is an important language for people who study early Indo-European traditions, since by far the largest body of Germanic folk-lore is in it - not to mention a splendid range of fictional literature (the sagas). I ought to know a lot more languages than I do, but I am a very poor linguist.

1 - tell me about yourself - age, married/single, kids, job,
2 - have you written fanfic? If so, where can I read it?
3 - Are you athletic?
4 - What are the most beautiful things - places, artworks, people - you have ever seen in your life?
5 - If I remember correctly, you live in Boston - have you alwys lived there?

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

1 - tell me about yourself - age, married/single, kids, job,
I just missed the Baby Boom, married, 2 fantastic little girls, and I crunch numbers at an insurance company.

2 - have you written fanfic? If so, where can I read it?
I've created enough MS/GS's to populate a small country, and have stolen from all my favorite movies and books to put words in their mouths. I'm working on a Dorcas Meadowes/Fabian Prewett fic now. It's terrible, full of manufactured tragedy and plot holes, but I'll let you know when I post it. Before July, anyway. I'd ask you to beta, but I like you too much.

3 - Are you athletic?
Not for 20 years, but my husband works out every other day and my daughters are following his good example.

4 - What are the most beautiful things - places, artworks, people - you have ever seen in your life?
Iceland, the mountains across the bay from Armadale, Block Island, Glasgow City Hall, Cupid and Psyche at the Louvre, A Velasquez at the Prado I can't remember the name of to save my life, and the west hall of the National Gallery in DC, almost every baby I've ever laid eyes on.

5 - If I remember correctly, you live in Boston - have you always lived there?
No, my mother's family is from the area, but I've lived in Washington, DC for years, and Vermont and Maine for short times.

I still want to know if your loyalty has ever been pulled in two different directions, and if you could resolve it with reason, nonemotionally.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I do not tink I have ever found myself in the sort of problem you outline. The institutions to which I am most loyal would include the Catholic Church, the Italian Republic, and to a lesser extent things like the University of Oxford and the United Kingdom. I have not found myself in any situation that demanded me to choose between a friend and an institution (which, at any rate, would ultimately always involve having to choose one person over another, since institutions are always represented by persons), although I have a few times experienced the horror of betrayal by a close friend. But that is a separate matter.

Besides, it depends what you mean. By being loyal to the Church or to my country, I do not mean that I have to put up with every action that its representatives, or even its leaders, take. Sometimes loyalty means protesting to their faces. On one occasion, I have protested in writing to Pope John Paul himself.

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you never were stuck in that situation. I was thinking of war protesters with friends in the military, where personally you care deeply for the soldiers, practically you vehemently disagree with what they're doing, to the point where you'd be happy if they went AWOL, (which would not be in their best long-term interest) - that kind of dillema. Getting angry at family (and I consider churches family structures), is too standard to be a problem for me. But I'm fortunate to have no issues with the way my family fights its little battles.

[curia-regis.livejournal.com]

Interview me?

I would honestly choose the desert island. It sounds lovely right about now.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

1 - If someone ordered you not to write any more darkfics, what would you do?
2 - Tell me about a book you really hated and why.
3 - Tell me about another book you really hated...
4 - Tell me about another...
5 - Tell me about another...
(if you cannot think of four really hateful books, you can use movies, TV shows, etc. Just not songs, because it is very difficult to articulate why one hates a particular song.)

[agatha-s.livejournal.com]

Interview me -- I feel like doing this again.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

1 - What languages do you speak?
2 - How do you feel about your country?
3 - Are you going to write any more fanfics?
(and if not, why deprive us of the pleasure?)
4 - If you have read translations of Harry Potter or other popular fantasy novels (e.g. LOTR) in Serbo-Croat, what mistranslations and ignorant mistakes really stand out? Or is Croatia a lucky country with no idiot translators?
5 - Tell me about yourself (age, married/single, children, family, education, job).

[gunderpants.livejournal.com]

Ooh, ooh, pick me! I was here first!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that you are so pleasant and unaggressive that I have a few problems thinking up questions. OK,
1 - Why do you think that nice people like you are so much in the minority among fan writers?
2 - Are you looking forward to the next HP novel with excitement, or do you rather dread that Mrs.Rowling might drop the ball at last?
3 - Are you into other fandoms besides HP?
4 - Can you work in other artforms besides writing?
5 - Why on Earth do you not follow Buffy?

[gunderpants.livejournal.com]

1 - Why do you think that nice people like you are so much in the minority among fan writers?
Ah, your naivety, Fabio: if you look through the majority of my LJ it's precisely about me being not nice at all: how many young authors have I ripped the shit out of for their awful fic? How many lives do I ruin every time I click, with glee, that glorious little 'deny' button on the fics at VTM? Probably not a lot, but that's beside the point. I think that by 'nice' you mean 'moderate' and 'not easily offended enough to say OMG FUK U'. That said, probably because many people can't put political alignment behind them, and words like 'conservative' and 'liberal' are demonised so equally that people expect conservatives to be wife beating killers of baby seals, and the opposite camp expects liberals to be, to quote Gore Vidal, 'communists who are paedophiles'. People don't seem to like to see the other side.

2 - Are you looking forward to the next HP novel with excitement, or do you rather dread that Mrs.Rowling might drop the ball at last?
Oh, I'm literally throwing a party on the day. All my friends are lining up at six in the morning for our copy of HBP before we hightail it to my place to read it. I probably wouldn't care too much what JKR does in it, because no matter if she strings up Lupin by his ankles and makes Draco to be the demonised altruist of awful fandom, I'd still probably love it.

3 - Are you into other fandoms besides HP?
Not really. I don't watch enough TV to get into fandom too strongly. I am a member of the Frenz of the Enz fanclub, however, but you can't really write fanfic about them.

4 - Can you work in other artforms besides writing?
I was a film student before I deferred university, and if education or theology don't lure me away it will probably be what I return to next year. I also dabble in the odd bit of song writing, and I'm considering taking on an advanced diploma in film and television acting on the side of university.

5 - Why on Earth do you not follow Buffy?
It seems strange: I think Whedon is a pretty great writer, and it seems like the sort of show I'd like. My boyfriend was a huge Buffy fan, and he always tries to pull it into conversation, only to be met with blank stares by me. I suppose it's the same reason as Q3: I never really had the time to get into it.

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

You will ask me questions and then I should repost them at my own L_J, did I get it right? Why not, not bad for the first entry, I'm curious what will you think about to ask.

And now for something completely different: running in circles - why do I keep finding the same people, like my betas or other good fanfic authors? Do they all know each other or do I hang on with such intelligent community? Two hops from your L_J and I'm back at the people I know... Is this the same for you? (delete the part if it's too OT)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

1 - age, job, married/single, any children?
2 - When you write a fic, do you have any kind of artistic goal or ideal in mind?
3 - What are the most beautiful things you have ever seen?
4 - How do you feel about your country?
5 - Are you Catholic?

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

And so I started my L_J with the meme from you. Shall I repost it here?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

About the circle of friends and acquaintances: yes, it is kind of weird. Even including people I defriended, one tends to meet a lot of people one has met before. And yet there are something like 5000 fanfic writers in FA alone, a lot of them quite good and very intelligent and endowed with LiveJournals. Personally, I only managed a break-out when I looked for new friends who had, among their interests, "pro-life movement". I did meet four or five folks that way whom I had never heard of before and might probably never have encountered otherwise. Perhaps that is what you should do.

[becomethesea.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with your Time-Turner answer. There are a lot of (little) things I wish I had done differently...not to mention, going back in time to have more time to finish things like papers, etc. :)