1 post tagged “old irish”

... a meme, because it looked interesting on maswala 's livejournal.

How this game works: Just comment on this post saying you'd like to play. Then I will choose seven interests from your profile, and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post these instructions along with your answers in your own LiveJournal so that others can play along, too.

maswala  picked the following interests for me:

1. Alice Liddell
2. Coraline
3. Fate
4. Miyazaki
5. Nick Cave
6. Tear in your hand
7. And since Old Irish isn't there (bad girl!), you can take languages in general.

1. Alice Liddell - As you probably know I love Alice in Wonderland. Alice Liddell is the girl who inspired Mr. Lewis Caroll to write Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Last year I received The Annotated Alice in Wonderland for Christmas, and I realized I quite enjoyed reading all those notes and thoughts about the books, so I decided to add Alice Liddell to my interests. Actually, to me, Alice Liddell stands for 'background information' - gaining general knowledge about books in general and the time they were written in or the time they are placed in. If that makes any sense.

2. Coraline - Neil Gaiman's novel Coraline is often described an alternative Alice in Wonderland. Having recently moved into a new apartment with her loving but very distracted and preoccupied parents, Coraline finds herself bored one rainy day and, upon her father's suggestion, decides to explore the flat. She finds a locked door which her mother opens and explains once led to the flat next door but was bricked up when they separated the building into apartments. During the night Coraline sees a small black shadow slip into the room where the locked door is. The next day Coraline opens the door again and it suddenly leads to a dark corridor, down the corridor she finds another apartment seemingly a twisted copy of their own apartment. She also finds her 'Other Mother' and 'Other Father' there, two duplicates of her parents except with buttons sewn over their eyes. Once there, her Other Mother traps Coraline in the other world by kidnapping her parents, wanting her to live there forever. Coraline learns that her Other Mother captured three other children before her and turned them into ghosts, stealing their souls. Desperate to escape, Coraline makes a bet with her Other Mother: If she can find the three children's souls and her parents, then they can all go home...

Probably my favourite quote from the book (it shows exactly why I love the writing of Mr. Gaiman so much):

There was also a well.On the first day Coraline's family moved in, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the well was, and they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly.

3. Fate - To me the term 'fate' is connected with the Old Norse mythology, when I hear 'fate' I think about the Norns. It also always reminds me of my BA thesis, which I really enjoyed writing because it combines so many of my interests and I could really put my heart into it.
My thesis finally brings me to the term 'fate' meaning 'an inevitable course of events' which can be said of my decision to start studying Scandinavian Languages and Cultures - and specifically choosing Scandinavian Languages and Cultures instead of any other subject - before starting Celtic languages...

4. Miyazaki - And then specifically Hayao Miyazaki, the director of many wonderful animated films. Disney from Japan, if you like, but it goes far, far beyond Disney, both in quality and in themes. Spirited Away is one of his most famous films, and Princess Mononoke. Recently he adapted Dianne Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle. I particularly like his movie My Neighbour Totoro about two girls who have an adventure with forest spirits. My Neighbour Totoro also contains one of my favourite characters: the Catbus, it is a large creature, depicted as a grinning cat with a hollow body that serves as a bus, complete with windows and seats coated with fur, and a large bushy tail -he reminds me of the Cheshire Cat.

5. Nick Cave - I love his voice. Need I say more?

6. Tear in your hand - probably my favourite Tori Amos song. It means an awful lot to me although I couldn't explain why. The entire Little Earthquakes album is an album that I always enjoy listening to, I listened to it a lot as a teenager and somehow it became a part of me.

7. Languages - I admit, Old Irish should have been in my interests. But Languages in general is something I've always been interested in, specifically (and there it is!) Old Irish, Welsh, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic. I love studying languages, acquiring them and being able to communicate with them, even if it is only translating from one language to another. I love writing, reading, playing with words. It's something I miss in my current job. My next goal is to learn Old Norse and Icelandic - after I've dusted and cleaned my Norwegian ;)

Besides thinking about my interests I had a lovely time reading this about 'writing blunders'.