(no subject)

[fajrdrako]

I took this from angevin2, intrigued by the notion:

Reply to this entry with your name and post these instructions in your own journal. I will go poke around your list of interests on your profile and ask you one question about one of them. You wax rhapsodic on the subject of your interest for the edification of all and we'll learn something keen about you.

Or in simple terms:

Reply to this meme, I'll pick one of your interests, and you tell me a whole bunch of stuff about it and we all learn a bit more.

Comments

[monsieureden.livejournal.com]

Meme love.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

When I look at your list of interests I laugh because they are so like my interests. Yes, seriously. (Not that this surprises you.) It might be fun but it would be superfluous to talk about what we love about the Dunnett novels or "Pirates of the Caribbean".

But we haven't (as far as I recall) talked about classical music, which I love too. So what types of classical music and what composers do you like? How did you get into it in the first place? Do you have good CDs of favourite music?

I realize that the instructions say I will ask one question. I am aware that this is more than one question. Answer as many as you wish.

[monsieureden.livejournal.com]

Was this reply to me? It didn't reply to me...

Classical music! I got into it because I played violin since I was 11. Orchestra was an integral part of my life growing up. I pretty much lived it from elementary to graduation from high school.

I had a conductor who thought we were the DSO and made us play all kinds of professional pieces. It was stressful because... we were high schoolers, not professionals, but it was challenging and turned out great concerts and we got some training from the DSO so it turned into a self-esteem boasting experience!

I also met most of my friends that way.

I like pretty much anything classical. Favorite composers are probably Mozart and Saint-Saens and Tchaikovsky. :D

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was a reply to you, and I don't know why it didn't register as such.

Violin - ! Wow. I am impressed. I have an eleven-year-old friend who plays the violin and I'm impressed by her, too.

I also like Mozart and Saint-Saens and Tchailovsky. I'm still not sure about Wagner. Love Bach.

[monsieureden.livejournal.com]

I choose violin because all my friends were going into orchestra, not band. I initially wanted to play drums.

Part of me wishes I had learned cello. So in Eden, I made him the violinist but made his mother a cellist. I can live vicariously through her then.

One of my favorite pieces of music is by Vaughn-Williams, called Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. I played it at a memorial concert and it still rips my heart out with its beauty. I recommend it.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Though I don't play anything now, I did, briefly, take harp lessons, because I own a harp. I love it, too. I also enjoyed dabbling in piano.... But I'm not really musical enough to make much of it, I just like it.

I will look for your Vaughn-Williams piece.

[limmenel.livejournal.com]

Sure, go for it. I can ramble for hours on any subject, especially when I have this much sugar in my veins.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Okay. You list philosophy as an interest. Tell me about your relationship with philosophy: why it interests, how you came to be interested in it, what aspects (or what philosophies) particuarly interest you, and what you do about it.

[limmenel.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay, hm. I love philosophy, as long as I don't need to study it in a classroom. But I love the concept, the logic of going from one thought to another. I'm a bigger fan of the more mordern philosophy (as opposed to the ancient works, like Plato and Aristotle). Truthfully, though, I don't know why it's on my Interests list, because it's not one of those things that I go out of my way to study... I enjoy the challenge of reading through philosophical texts, but it's not something I do for fun.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I love the idea of philosophy, but haven't studied it much, and often find the truths of it difficult to follow. (The danger of approaching it as an amateur!) I too like modern philosophies - the Jungian springs to mind. I'm sure there are others I'd find fascinating too, though I don't know enough about them to know what they are.

[brashley46.livejournal.com]

Yo.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Oh, you've a good set of interests. Meaty! Now, I don't need to hear about the Toronto Argonauts particularly, and certain items on your list like Tolkien and Babylon 5 and Wonder Wart-Hog go without saying - not to mention LMB and Girl Genius. So! And Granny Weatherax is, of course, one of my own role models.

But you have some items that mightily intrigue me and some I don't know what they are. And I can only ask about one thing, right? (This doesn't mean I won't store up other questions for later!) Okay, tell me about your interest in Marxism, and what it means to you.

[brashley46.livejournal.com]

Okay ... I grew up in North Florida. At an early age I decided that segregation and racism offended me; Christianity of the varieties I was surrounded by had no answers for it.

Once I got off on my own, at University, I looked around for like-minded students, and discovered SDS. Through my activities with this student group I developed an interest in socialism. I read fairly widely, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, the IWW writers like Big Bill Haywood, the anarchosyndicalists, and then took a class from Associate Professor Ken Megill, on the philosophy of Marxism ... we read Marx and Engels, Karl Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, Stalin, and Trotsky.

The point that Marx and his followers agreed on was that real egalitarianism could only happen if the material basis of society, the development of the means of production, was sufficiently advanced to support it. Only with the industrialisation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has that happened. And at the same time, that industrialisation has produced an economic class capable of absorbing all other classes into itself - the working class.

When I came to Canada in 1968 to avoid the draft, I looked around for a political group I could agree with. I fell in with Bob S. and Ross F., joined the Labor Action Committee, and then the New Democratic Party.

For me, Marxism is the historical analysis of the politicoeconomic history of humanity, a way to understand the world, but that is only its starting point. "The philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it." My own point of view is that the single most important focus of political action for a Marxist in the twenty-first century is the struggle for the political independence of the working class. I'm in the NDP to fight to keep that independence. My closest political friends in the US are involved in the struggle to build an independent Labor Party. My old comrades in Europe are organising against the European Union, the World Social Forum, and other capitalist initiatives, for a "Europe of the workers," with all the working-class social gains of the last 150 years preserved, not eroded away.

My Marxism is political analysis, political action. "The point, however, is to change it."

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Another friend of Auntie Rosa!

[brashley46.livejournal.com]

Well, a quarrelsome friend. ;^) I'd love to have sat in on a round-robin between her, Lev Davidovich and Vladimir Ilyitch on the national question.

I must admit, however, that my ex-wife resembles her more than a little.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Funny thing about Rosa Luxemburg.

Today, at random, I went to an entry in my LJ from two years ago, and what did I find? A quote from Rosa Luxemburg.

It was downright disorienting.

http://fajrdrako.livejournal.com/2003/12/11/

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Tee-hee...

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Well, once again, many of your interests re the same as my own, so I see no need to ask about Conrad of Montferrat, the Third Crusade, or Raymond III of Tripoli.

So tell me about Nikolai Ge.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge (1831-94)

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

19C Ukrainian artist - painter of portraits, historical and religious scenes, and friend and protegé of both Aleksandr Herzen and Lev Tolstoi, both of whom he painted.
His father was descended from French emigrés - the name was probably Gué originally.
He studied art in Kiev, then went to the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, where he began to establish himself as a painter of Classical subjects. Then he won a scholarship to Italy, and his career took off. He became a good friend of Herzen, the exiled philosopher. He started reading about the historical Jesus, and studying Italian art. Caravaggio became an influence, and in 1863 he exhibited a superbly moody Last Supper (http://center.rusmuseum.ru/InetBookNew/images/ge_taina.jpg). The same year, he became supportive of the young artists who were wanting to break with the Academy of Arts. In 1871, he exhibited with the new Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions, which had evolved out of the secession from the academy. Making use of the new railways, they exhibited in major provincial cities and attracted the patronage of the nouveau-riche industrialists and merchants (much as the Pre-Raphaelites did in the UK). The painting he exhibited in the 1871 exhibition is one of my all-time favourites:

Peter I interrogates Tsarevich Aleksei Petrovich at Peterhof. It caused a sensation, as only in recent years had historians been able to write more honestly about the abuse and judicial murder of Aleksei by his father: before 1854, officially, he "died of a stroke" while imprisoned in the Peter & Paul Fortress on treason charges; in reality, he had died of over 40 strokes of the knout (when already dying of tuberculosis), with Daddy going to watch... There was a massive controversy over whose side Ge was on. A clue is that the composition was influenced by Honthorst's Christ before Caiaphas.
Ge later became a close friend of Tolstoi (http://imagesource.art.com/images/-/--B11721158.jpeg), sharing his philosophical ideas, and as a result painted some magnificent religious works, including Golgotha (http://www.ku.edu/~russcult/culture/visual_index/peredvizhniki/39ge_golgotha_1893.jpg) and 2 versions of the Crucifixion (http://www-relg-studies.scu.edu/facstaff/murphy/courses/images/coursepics/chr-011.jpg). However, the most memorable is "What is Truth?" - Christ and Pilate (http://artrussia.ru/pic_g/g075_400.jpg), which not only harks back to the confrontation between smug tyranny and battered humanity in Peter and Aleksei, but almost certainly influenced the portrayal of its 2 characters in a novel by his fellow Ukrainian, Mikhail Bulgakov: in The Master & Margarita, Yeshua and Pilate are described pretty much as Ge depicts them.

Re: Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge (1831-94)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Well - I'm glad I asked! Fascinating, and I am quite unfamiliar with Ge. I wonder why I never encountered him before: I like his style - Caragaggio is one of my favourites, and it was a particular joy to see two of his paintings in Malta last year. But his work still comes through with a 19th century style that I also loge. Of course I tend to like artists who focus on historical and illustrative subjects.

Re: Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge (1831-94)

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

I wonder why I never encountered him before

Apart from the 2 Crucifixions (one in Paris, one in Geneva), his best work is in Russia and Ukraine. I saw quite a bit of it in Moscow and P'burg. I did a chapter on the Peter and Aleksei painting in my doctoral thesis, but no-one wanted to publish it... (And yes, poor Alyoshen'ka - with his bad nerves, which made him drink, and his bad lungs that made him use cherry-coloured silk handkerchiefs, is one of 'my boys', although at 28 he's more in the "honorary adoptive child" category. Too pretty and delicate to be flogged to death.)

[lmondegreen.livejournal.com]

*waves*

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Well, you do have interesting choices! Okay, tell me about "The Three Investigators". Who are they and why do you like them?

[lmondegreen.livejournal.com]

Pretty much everybody, as a child, seems to have followed some series of books or other. When I was a kid, I tried the Hardy Boys, I tried Nancy Drew, etc. and nothing really took my fancy. A classmate of mine at the time, Jean MacGillivray, was reading a mystery series I'd never heard of, the Three Investigator books, and lent me one. The Secret of Skeleton Island. I read it avidly, and was completely hooked. Luckily, I lived a block away from Carlingwood Library at the time, and they stocked most of the series; I went through it like wildfire.

The Three Investigator are boys (their ages are never stated, but somewhere between 12 and 14 or so) who live in a small town just outside Los Angeles. One summer they form a detective agency, and have all sorts of interesting adventures solving intriguing mysteries.

I think what I like most about the characters is that they're all somewhat social misfits. The leader, Jupiter Jones, is described as 'stocky' by his friends and 'fat' by not-so-friendly folks. He's brilliant but overly serious. He's an orphan who lives with his aunt and uncle (who own a junk yard, and where the boys have created a secret headquarters hidden among the junk). The 'muscle' is Pete Crenshaw, jockish and not always bright but with a heart of gold. And Bob Andrews is the bookish one with a part-time job at the library, so he does any research they need.

It's a child's series, so it can get rather formulaic, and it's somewhat dated now, since the books were written in the sixties-seventies, but I had loads of fun reading them (and still own the series - all but two of the books, which I haven't been able to find yet. I re-read my favourites from time to time).

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

That does sound like fun! I never heard of them, but I think I would have liked them if they'd existed when I was a kid, too. I did read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but my favourite books of that type were the Enid Blyton "Adventure" series - The Island of Adventure, the Castle of Adventure, and so on.